Jim DeRoest
Director, Streaming Media Technologies, ResearchChannel
University of Washington

The ability to receive high quality audio and video in classrooms, labs, and the home opens up new opportunities for learning and research in genres requring high resolution media such as animation arts, musicology, and life sciences. Building upon foundation work in high resolution media streaming, the University of Washingtonís Research Channel is developing a tera-scale on-demand media management and distribution service called ìDigitalWell.î This service will broaden access to multi-discipline photo, audio, and video collections enabling the development of new teaching and learning tools for mining and manipulating content.

This session will include an overview of DigitalWell, discussion of deployment for broadcast and campus environments, and NSF NSDL directory metadata development for the Library of Congress/AMIA Moving Image Collections grant.

Michael Buckland
Co-Director, Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative
University of California, Berkeley

The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI) is an effort to transform scholarship and education, mainly in the humanities and social sciences, through enhanced attention to time and place. A center on the University of California, Berkeley campus supports an informal worldwide collaboration of libraries, museums, scholars, and educators. The shared goals are:

• to theorize the role of time and place in culture and history;
• to encourage (and develop, if need be) improved infrastructure, notably: clearinghouses of Web-accessible resources; improved gazetteer standards; map visualization software to combine data downloaded as needed from diverse sources, and to show change through time;
• to encourage and develop conferences and training workshops.

  Examples of recent and current projects will illustrate these activities.
  

  
  Web Link:
  http://ecai.org/

  Handout:
  The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (MS Word)

Raymond Yee
Technology Architect, Interactive University Project
University of California, Berkeley

Lack of interoperability among software systems and repositories from different domains is a major barrier to the exchange of digital content. The UC Berkeley Interactive University Project (IU) has been exploring how semantic interoperability in the following four domains can be enhanced through the use of XSLT-based crosswalks between key XML specifications: 1) digital libraries and repositories (METS); 2) educational technologies (SCORM, IMS specifications); 3) Web syndication and portal technologies (RSS); and 4) desktop applications and structured content authoring tools. (e.g., Microsoft Office 11). The outcome of this work includes crosswalks among METS, SCORM/IMS-CP, and RSS and an exploratory architecture and software prototypes for the deployment of crosswalks. The IU will relate the crosswalks to other approaches to semantic interoperability.

Judith Klavans
Deputy Vice Presdient
Columbia University

Stephen Paul Davis
Director of Library Systems
Columbia University

Angela Giral
Columbia University

The newly-initiated Computational Linguistics for Metadata Building (CLiMB) project at Columbia University aims to explore the use of natural language processing to automatically assist in the idenfication and extraction of meaningful descriptive metadata from texts associated with image collections. The collections we are using are architectural drawings from the Greene & Greene brothers, a set of lithographs of Chinese Gods on paper, and images from the Digital South Asia Library collection (dsal). This is a newly initiated project, and is experimental in nature.

We will present the techniques we are exploring, our goals, and progress.

Andrew Stricker
Associate Provost
Vanderbilt University

Donald A. Cox
Assistant to the Associate Provost
Vanderbilt University

The presentation will highlight the first year of activities associated with a transinstitutional initiative involving faculty from Vanderbilt University, Northwestern University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Pennsylvania State University, Rice University, the University of Texas, Austin, Texas A&M University, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The Faculty Innovations Profile Project (FIPP) initiative consists of design studio events, research teams, and a community-of-practice Web site. Initiative members have engaged in the design and development of a community oriented Web site supporting the use of knowledge networking tools involving informatics-based algorithms for indexing innovations supporting meaningful connections between learning and research. The tools are being designed to support multi-definitional coding of innovations, with associated resources, in affinity relationship structures for retrieval and use by networked communities of faculty. Initiative members, from across the institutions meet monthly via IP videoconferencing and conduct on-site design studio events to expand, share, and assess promising innovations among faculty.

Thornton Staples
Director of Research and Development
University of Virginia Library

Sandy Payette
Researcher
Cornell University

The challenge in building digital repositories lies beyond storage and dissemination of digital content. Rather, there is increasing demand for repository architectures that allow aggregation of diverse and distributed content and the transformation of that content to meet the needs of varied audiences. For example in the increasingly popular area of educational digital libraries, “active learning objects” tie together primary sources from the Web, teacher created content, and mechanisms for presentation and interaction. Alongside this requirement there is the need for the repository architecture to accommodate library needs for uniform management of these diverse and complex digital resources. The Fedora Project, a Mellon-funded cooperative project between University of Virginia and Cornell University, has developed and made available open source software that meets these architectural challenges.

This session will briefly review the Fedora architecture and the functionality of the software, and will demonstrate its use in several testbeds.

Charles Henry
Vice President and Chief Information Officer
Rice University

David L. Green
Executive Director
National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage

Humanities scholars, computer and information scientists, engineers, museum administrators, librarians, and publishers gathered at the National Academies in January 2003 for “Transforming Disciplines: Computer Science and the Humanities.” The conference explored pioneering models of scholarship and the revolutionary potential of cooperative working relationships among humanists, computer scientists, and engineers.

This session will review the progress made at the meeting and discuss plans to continue the Computer Science and Humanities initiative, which is supported by CNI, ACLS, NINCH, the National Academies, Princeton and Rice Universities, with generous funding from the Carnegie Corporation.

Pat Harris
Executive Director
National Information Standards

Stephen Levenson
Judiciary Records Officer
U.S. Department of Justice

William LeFurgy
Digital Initiatives Program Manager
Library of Congress

Since its introduction in June 1993 Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) has become the de facto open standard for electronic document distribution worldwide. It is now widely used by government, business, and education communities; Google lists over 8 million PDF files. PDF has had a tremendous impact on libraries; increasingly the electronic journals and digital resources acquired by libraries and archives are published in PDF format. The long-term archival capacity of PDF continues to be a nagging concern for all users.

This session will report on the formal standards project NISO is now engaged in to develop a PDF-Archival format and explore the reasons behind this new standard and the problems it will solve. The presenters will also describe how the standard is shaping-up (the issues that have been resolved and those points that are still under consideration), and discuss how this work is expected to evolve.

Martha Crawley
Senior Program Officer
Institute of Museum and Library Services

Barbara G. Smith
Technology Officer
Institute of Museum and Library Services

Dan Lukash
Senior Program Officer
Institute of Museum and Library Services

This session will provide an update on the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), addresing the following topics:

• The new IMLS program on librarian recruitment and education
• The IMLS Framework of Guidance on Building Good Digital Collections
• New funding initiatives within the National Leadership Grant series
• Trends in the current National Leadership Grant
• The third annual Web Wise Conference
• IMLSís legislative reauthorization, in progress
• The New Web tutorial on NLG Project Planning
• A Pilot of online application for some NLG programs
• A Report of a study on user needs assessment in IMLS-funded digitization projects.
  Web Links:
  http://www.imls.gov

  PowerPoint Presentation:
  IMLS Update

Clifford Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information

IMS Global Learning Consortium and CNI recently launched a working alliance to explore the development of common architectural and functional models leading to joint specifications and improved technical interoperability in the rapidly evolving areas of digital libraries and learning object repositories. While the initial focus of the alliance will be specifically on the requirements of higher education institutions around the world, the group aims to provide technical advice and specifications for all education and training communities wishing to develop and use interoperable digital library and learning object repositories.

This session will review progress on a joint white paper developed collaboratively by IMS and CNI with assistance from Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC and David Seaman of the Digital Library Federation.