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Applying Technology to Humanities Resources and Communication: The Cases of IATH and STG

December 2, 2003

Elli Mylonas
Associate Director, STG, Computing and Information Services
Brown University

Daniel Pitti
Interim Co-Director, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
University of Virginia

The Scholarly Technology Group (STG) is part of Computing and Information Services at Brown University founded in 1994. In the last two years STG has developed a greater emphasis on advanced consulting within Brown University, working with faculty who want to learn about and use technology in their research and publication. STG relies on an annual grants program to determine how it will apportion the majority of its time and efforts among the faculty. Successful applicants receive project management, consulting and implementation from STG staff. One of our chief challenges is designing projects that are portable and can be maintained over the long term. Our other significant challenge as STG’s structure evolves is the question of how to sustain our own research into humanities computing methodologies so that we can provide cutting-edge consulting to faculty for whom this is not their area of specialization.

The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia (IATH) has become an international leader in the innovative application of advanced technologies to humanities research and publication. Annually, the Institute awards a two-year fellowship to a humanities scholar at the University of Virginia to work collaboratively with Institute faculty and staff in designing and developing projects that facilitate computer-assisted research and analysis of the human record, and the publication and dissemination of findings and results. In its second decade, IATH looks forward to expanding its mission to include national and perhaps international fellowships in arts and humanities research and scholarly communication.

This briefing will explain how IATH and STG are structured, what we have learned about supporting successful humanities research projects, and what directions we see for groups like these in the future.

http://www.stg.brown.edu
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2003 Project Briefings, Digital Humanities
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ARTstor: A Project Update

December 1, 2003

Max Marmor
Director of Collection Development, ARTstor
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

ARTstor is a digital library initiative launched by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Its mission is to use digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching and learning in the arts and associated fields. As part of a community-wide effort to further this goal, ARTstor will build, continually develop, and distribute a library of digital images and related information to serve the needs of researchers, teachers, and students. ARTstor will work closely with both providers and users of content from educational and cultural institutions around the world to construct a not-for-profit, public utility. This project briefing will provide an update on the development of ARTstor, the “testing” process, and eventual rollout.

http://www.artstor.org

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2003 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries
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Chandler: A Collaborative Open Source Initiative for Higher Education

December 1, 2003

Jack McCredie
Associate Vice Chancellor, Information Systems & Technology
University of California, Berkeley

Oren Sreebny
Assistant Director, Computing & Communications
University of Washington

Pieter Hartsook
Marketing Specialist
Open Source Applications Foundation

Chandler is an open source personal information manager being developed by the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) to enable users to manage their e-mail, calendars, contacts, tasks, and free-form items for easy sharing and collaboration. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the 25 member universities of the Common Solutions Group are working with OSAF to extend the capabilities of Chandler so that it will be of significant value to higher education.

Web Pages:
http://www.osafoundation.org/OSAF_Our_Vision.htm
http://www.osafoundation.org/Chandler_in_higher_ed_TOC_3002_05_13.htm

Presentation:
Pieter Hartsook, Chandler (PowerPoint)
Oren Sreebny, Chandler: What’s In It for My University (PowerPoint)

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2003 Project Briefings
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Collaborative Filtering: Possibilities for Digital Libraries

December 1, 2003

Janet Webster
Associate Professor, Head Librarian-Guin Library
Oregon State University

Jon Herlocker
Assistant Professor
Oregon State University

Seikyung Jung
Doctoral candidate
Oregon State University

At Oregon State University (OSU), the OSU Libraries and the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science are collaborating on a project to improve the effectiveness and accessibility of digital collections and Web information portals. The project goal is to make digital resources more accessible through an innovative search interface that incorporates collaborative filtering (CF).

Large digital collections and federated portals such as the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) bring enormous quantities of diverse information to users via the Web. New approaches to search interfaces are needed to make the wealth of online content more accessible and useful. We utilize CF–a process whereby each user of the information benefits from the experience of previous users. Users queries are matched against previous questions asked by other users. Then, the system recommends documents, pages, or resources that these other users found useful. The portal ‘learns’ what resources are valuable for which questions by observing the users’ behavior and recording the recommendations. This powerful approach, developed and implemented in entertainment (e.g., MovieLens.org) and commercial settings (e.g., Amazon.com), incorporates the results of human analysis of content on a massive scale. We are testing a search and recommendation interface for the OSU Libraries’ extensive Web site in a way that enlists users to recommend pages and/or databases and e-journals to others asking similar questions of the site.

This briefing will examine the challenges of developing and testing the merits of a recommendation system in this diverse setting, including resolving issues of integration with existing library systems and library tradition; dealing with noisy and untrustworthy data; computation, display and explanation of recommendations; and inferring recommendations from user behavior.

Web Site:
http://dl.nacse.org/osu (test site)

Presentation:
Collaborative Filtering: Possibilities for Digital Libraries (PPT)

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2003 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval
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Cornell’s DCAPS: A New Model for Delivery and Support of Digital Services

December 1, 2003

H. Thomas Hickerson
Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies and Special Collections
Cornell University

Digital Consulting and Production Services (DCAPS) at Cornell University provides a unified framework for developing and managing a suite of services necessary to support the life cycle of digital information. Now nearing a year in operation, DCAPS incorporates a growing array of services to provide clients with a single integrated solution to the needs of libraries, faculty, publishers, and others. Presently including digitization, metadata, technology support, electronic publishing, and copyright services, DCAPS is innovative in its managerial, operational, and marketing approaches and in its economic model. While challenging conventional patterns of library organization and financing, the model is being developed to enable further partnerships with other campus service providers.

Web Page:
http://www.library.cornell.edu/dcaps/

Presentation:
Cornell’s DCAPS (PowerPoint–large file)

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2003 Project Briefings, Metadata, Publishing
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Digital Library Architecture based on MPEG-21 DIDL, the OAI-PMH, and the OpenURL

December 1, 2003

Herbert Van de Sompel
Technical Staff Member, Research Library
Los Alamos National Laboratory

For the past year, the Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team of the Los Alamos National Laboratory has architectured and created an initial implementation of a repository infrastructure aimed at ingesting, storing, and disseminating a vast collection of locally held digital scholarly materials. In the architecture, complex digital objects are represented using an XML wrapper structure that is compliant with a profile of the MPEG-21 Digital Item Description Language. Each batch of ingested digital objects is stored as an individual OAI-PMH repository. An OAI-PMH Federator is introduced as a single point of access to the multitude of OAI-PMH repositories. Downstream applications can access the OAI-PMH Federator to obtain feeds of DIDL objects, and use those, for example, to build discovery services based on contained items. The OAI-PMH Federator disseminates DIDL objects either as stored or with transformations applied to them. For the dissemination of an individual item contained in a DIDL object, the architecture builds on the extended expressivness offered by the upcoming NISO OpenURL Framework Standard. Through an OpenURL Resolver, an individual item contained in a DIDL object, or a transformation thereof, can be requested. Dissemination of the item can be handled in a context-sensitive manner, e.g. different requesters can receive different disseminations of the same item.
Although the architecture has been defined for deployement within the context of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, its core properties seem to offer some potential for the creation of a context-sensitive infrastructure to access items stored in distributed digital libraries.

Web Page:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november03/bekaert/11bekaert.html

Presentation:
Using MPEG-21 DIDL, the OAI-PMH, and the OpenURL as building blocks for storing and disseminating complex digital objects

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2003 Project Briefings, Cyberinfrastructure, Information Access & Retrieval, Repositories
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Digital Preservation and Library Periodicals Expenses: Variance between Non-Subscription Costs for Print and Electronic Formats on a Life-Cycle Basis

December 1, 2003

Eileen Gifford Fenton
Executive Director, Electronic-Archiving Initiative
JSTOR

Roger Schonfeld
Research Associate
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Recently there has been discussion on LibLicense and other e-mail lists about the economics of archiving electronic scholarly resources. Several criteria have been identified as necessary for a trusted archive, but there remains significant concern and uncertainty about how the community can fund a robust archiving solution that includes an appropriate level of redundancy. Developing such a solution is a matter of increasing urgency, as most academic libraries are undergoing a transition in their choice of format for the scholarly journals to which they subscribe. Libraries are in increasing numbers licensing electronic versions. To better understand the economic context, JSTOR’s Electronic-Archiving Initiative launched a study to examine whether non-subscription expenditures for periodicals are higher or lower in the electronic format. (Non-subscription expenditures include everything from collection development and subscription processing to cataloging, storage, and ongoing access). We collected new data on these expenditures from eleven U.S. academic libraries and utilized a life-cycle analysis to study the longer-term cost implications. This briefing reviews our methodology and findings and considers the implications for developing a sustainable solution for the archiving of electronic scholarly resources.

Presentation:
Digital Preservation and Library Periodicals Expenses

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2003 Project Briefings, Digital Preservation, Economic Models
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Documenting Text Encoding Practices for Academics: The Women Writers Project’s TEI Encoding Guide

December 1, 2003

Julia Flanders
Associate Director, Textbase Development
Scholarly Technology Group
Brown University

The Women Writers Project (WWP) at Brown University is a text encoding research project whose publication, Women Writers Online, is a scholarly digital resource focusing on early women’s writing in English. The WWP is also one of the few small scholarly projects that has achieved financial success through digital publication. An early adopter of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines, the WWP has spent over a decade researching and documenting methods of intensive text encoding to support scholarly textual research.

While most digital library projects create very lightly-encoded collections to support basic retrieval, as digital research tools and their users become more sophisticated it is becoming clear that higher-quality text encoding is essential to support the digital scholarship of the future. With substantial grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the WWP is now engaged in a two-year project to publish its documentation and methods in the form of an encoding guide for scholars and scholarly projects, to complement the TEI Guidelines and assist scholarly projects in developing encoding practices that match their own needs. This briefing will review the WWP’s progress to date and examine scholarly research needs as they affect the design of digital resources.

Web Page:
http://www.wwp.brown.edu

Presentation:
Documenting Text Encoding Practices for Academics (PowerPoint)

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2003 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Information Access & Retrieval, Metadata
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Images from the Past: The InscriptiFAct Project of the University of Southern California’s West Semitic Research Project

December 1, 2003

Bruce Zuckerman
Project Director and Associate Professor
West Semitic Research and InscriptiFact Projects and University of Southern California

Marilyn Lundberg
Associate Director
West Semitic Research Project

Leta Hunt
Associate Director and Curator of Map Collection
InscriptiFact Project and University of Southern California

The InscriptiFact Project is a database designed to allow access via the Internet to high-resolution images of ancient inscriptions from the Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds. It is intended to benefit students, philologists, archaeologists, linguists, and other scholars interested in these areas of study as well as serving as an educational resource for the general public. The InscriptiFact Internet Database Prototype is now available as a platform independent application and database with a test set of 840 images. An additional 5000 images will be available by the end of 2003, with funding for 20,000 images by 2006.

http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/wsrp

http://www.inscriptifact.com

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2003 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries
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Implementation of the Scholar’s Portal Project

December 1, 2003

Scott Herrington
Head, Library Instruction/Systems/Technology (LIST)
Arizona State University

Krisellen Maloney
Team Leader,
Digital Library & Information Systems Team
University of Arizona

The Scholars Portal Project is a collaborative effort that brings together seven ARL Libraries (University of Arizona, Arizona State University, University of California San Diego, Dartmouth College, Iowa State University, University of Southern California,and University of Utah) and Fretwell-Downing to begin the process of defining a suite of Web-based services that will connect the higher education community as directly as possible with appropriate, vetted information resources. The Project’s initial focus is on the meta search “discovery” and direct linking “delivery” tools that provide the foundation for the Scholars Portal. This briefing will provide an update on the project, including an overview of technical and organizational issues that we have addressed, the current progress of implementation and plans for the future.

http://www.arl.org/access/scholarsportal/SPupdate1103.htm

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2003 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval, Teaching & Learning
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