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Learning from the Commons: Experiments in Collaboration and Transformation

December 1, 2004

Crit Stuart
Associate Director for Public Services
Georgia Institute of Technology

Julia Zimmerman
Dean of Universities Libraries
Ohio University

Although library commons are designed to enhance student learning, there are significant opportunities for information professionals to push beyond the early visions of these installations. Commons have become the principal driver for reprogramming spaces in libraries to sustain student learning outside the classroom. As students engage in various styles of productivity in our midst, we begin to recognize new opportunities for supporting a community of learners by creating an informed suite of technologies, critical assistance and collaborative initiatives to improve student success. Zimmerman and Stuart peel back their commons environments to share experiences and reveal experiments to engineer dynamic and supportive learning environments.

PowerPoint Presentation
Handout (PDF)

http://www.library.ohiou.edu/libinfo/lc/index.htm
http://www.lwc.gatech.edu/

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2004 Project Briefings, Learning Spaces (includes Information/Learning Commons)
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Learning Spaces: Collaborations and Opportunities

December 1, 2004

Joan K. Lippincott
Associate Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information

Many higher education institutions are developing technology-rich learning spaces such as information commons, multi-media studios, student unions, computer labs, and classrooms. The need for access to digital information, media production tools, and classroom presentation tools as well as the expectations of Net Gen students all drive the development of new or renovated spaces. This session will highlight projects that involve collaboration between units on campus, e.g. library and IT, and provide an update on trends. In addition, a summary of the recent CNI Executive Roundtable on Learning Spaces will be presented.

PowerPoint Presentation

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~collab/

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2004 Project Briefings, Learning Spaces (includes Information/Learning Commons), Net Generation (includes Millennials)
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Managing the Rhizome: METS for Web-Archiving

December 1, 2004

Leslie Myrick
Digital Library Programmer/Analyst
New York University

With its quirks of definition and structure, its panoply of associated MIMETypes, and the volatility and ephemerality of its content, a website is arguably one of the most complex (and perhaps exciting) digital objects to capture, describe, manage and preserve. The recently formed International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) is building on groundbreaking work done in the last decade by National Deposit Libraries in Australia, Sweden, France and elsewhere to do just this. A number of the recently announced NDIIPP grants involve a web archiving component – another clear reflection of the perceived urgency to create systems to undertake the archival preservation of the proliferation of important web-based materials. This briefing will examine work undertaken in the Political Communications Web Archive Project sponsored by the Center for Research Libraries in formulating a model for encapsulating a website object in METS as a SIP or as a DIP that can be navigated using an XSLT viewer application. It will also take a preliminary look forward to how knowledge gained will be used to build tools and infrastructure under the auspices of NDIIPP to produce website-level METS that can easily, sustainably and efficiently be ingested into a preservation environment.

PowerPoint Presentation
Handout (Word document)

http://library.nyu.edu/diglib/
http://www.crl.edu/content/PolitWeb.htm

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2004 Project Briefings, Digital Preservation, Metadata
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The MetaArchive of Southern Digital Culture: Building a Collaborative Digital Preservation Network

December 1, 2004

Robert H. McDonald
Assistant Director of Libraries
Florida State University

Martin Halbert
Director for Library Systems
Emory University

Lizabeth Nicol
Information Technology Specialist,
Digital Projects
Auburn University

Victoria Reich
Director of LOCKSS Program
Stanford University

Tyler O. Walters
Associate Director of Libraries
Georgia Institute of Technology

This presentation will feature members of the steering committee of the MetaArchive of Southern Digital Culture. They will discuss plans for their collaborative digital preservation network funded as a partnership by the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. This partnership, headed by Emory University, is a test-bed implementation of a collaborative digital preservation network by six different academic institutions (Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Virginia Tech, Florida State University, University of Louisville, Auburn University) and the Library of Congress. The program will feature highlights from the early planning stages of this project, including timelines and deliverables, as well as ideas for future activities that will be generated from work on this exciting collaborative model.

MetaArchive: Building a Collaborative Digital Preservation Network
(Acrobat document)

http://www.metaarchive.org/

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2004 Project Briefings, Digital Preservation
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Metadata for Digital Preservation: A Status Report on PREMIS

December 1, 2004

Priscilla Caplan
Assistant Director for Digital Library Services
State University System of Florida

Nancy J. Hoebelheinrich
Metadata Coordinator
Stanford University

In 2003 OCLC and RLG established PREMIS (Preservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies), an international working group charged with developing an implementable core set of metadata elements for digital preservation. The group was also asked to evaluate alternative strategies for the encoding, storage, and management of preservation metadata, as well as for the exchange of preservation metadata between systems. As the PREMIS work winds up at the end of 2004, this session will present key results and findings.

These include:

• A Data Model which defines intellectual entities, agents, events, rights, several types of objects, and relationships among these

• A Data Dictionary which defines semantic units pertaining primarily to events, objects and relationships

• An implementation survey which provides some information about preservation repositories and their metadata practices.

In addition, a comparative analysis of sample agreements between repositories and depositors yielded some interesting trends about how agreements are being used to document the expectations between repository and content producers. Discussion of these results will be augmented by use case scenarios that have been gathered from various preservation repositories.

Handout (Word document)

http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/pmwg/

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2004 Project Briefings, Digital Preservation, Metadata
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New Developments in Digital Libraries

December 1, 2004

Carol Hixson
Head, Metadata and Digital Library Services
University of Oregon

Kenning Arlitsch
Head of Information Technology
University of Utah

Eileen M. Llona
International Studies Computer Services Librarian
University of Washington

Western Waters Digital Library: Building a Multi-State Consortial
Digital Collection Using CONTENTdm (Hixson & Arlitsch)

The Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) is a consortium of 30 research libraries located in the greater Midwest & Western U. S. with common interests in programs related to scholarly communication, interlibrary loan, shared electronic resources, cooperative collection development, digital libraries, staff development and continuing education. Eleven of the GWLA libraries have been collaborating for the past year in building a digital collection of textual, image, cartographic, video, and other format materials related to the waters of the Western United States. Unprecedented drought colliding with continued population growth in the West has prompted great interest in this project. The project briefing will discuss the challenges of building a consortial collection of this nature from both the policy and technical standpoints. Special attention will be given to discussing the technical challenges and opportunities presented by the use of the CONTENTdm digital content management system.

PowerPoint Presentation
Handout (Word document)
http://westernwaters.org/

Using Geographic Information Systems for Displaying Information:
The Central Eurasian Interactive Atlas (Llona)

The Central Eurasian Interactive Atlas is a web-based geographic information system (GIS) for accessing socioeconomic information from the Russian Federation and the former Soviet Union. It originated at the University of Washington in the late 1990s as part of an effort to assemble large, coordinated sets of demographic, socioeconomic and political spatial data for the Russian Federation and thus facilitate more programmatic quantitative social science research of contemporary Russia and the former Soviet Union. This briefing will include a demonstration of the current version of the Atlas, a report on usability studies conducted during Spring 2004, and a discussion about the design, staffing, and infrastructure requirements identified during the development of the resource.

Handout (Word document)
http://green.lib.washington.edu/website/ceir/

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2004 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries
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Sakai Update

December 1, 2004

Suzanne Thorin
Dean of University Libraries
Indiana University

James L. Hilton
Associate Provost for Academic
University of Michigan

In its first eleven months, the Sakai Project has delivered a 1.0 production quality Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE), will release 1.5 in December, has built a Partner’s Program with over 50 distinguished colleges and universities, and has multiple companies providing commercial support for the community source software. This open source collaboration among the University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, and Stanford is demonstrating a promising model for pooling institutional investment to develop community source software. A number of related projects including SAMigo, OSPI’s ePortfolio, Twin Peaks, Grade Book, Community Portals for Sciences, National Middleware Initiatives, and others are building around the Sakai architecture.

This briefing will provide a project update on the production deployment at the University of Michigan and the pilot rollout at Indiana University. The session will address the project roadmap for the 1.5 (December 2004) and 2.0 (May 2005) software releases and progress in bringing digital library resources into the Sakai environment. Sakai’s “open-open” licensing using the Educational Community License is developing a thriving community for extensible software in education. The Sakai Project has received considerable support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

PowerPoint Presentation

http://sakaiproject.org/

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2004 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Teaching & Learning
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Status of Volume Book Scanning

December 1, 2004

Brewster Kahle
President
Internet Archive

Last spring, Brewster Kahle received the Paul Evan Peters award on behalf of the work of the Internet Archive. In his speech he outlined an approach that might be used to digitize a 300 page book for $10. This fall, the University of Toronto took Brewster Kahle up on his experiment to digitize a large volume of books. Working in partnership, the University and the Internet Archive have created a pilot scanning project using Kirtas’ APT 1200 book digitizing robot. The research project’s objectives (to be completed this fall) are to determine if the Kirtas robot’s bitonal system could be converted to produce color images, what the challenges were to setting up a scanning production environment, and how to process a high volume of books and get them online in a readable manner. In addition, the pilot project would determine if the $10/300 page book number in Brewster’s award talk was an accurate assessment of robotic high volume scanning. We will bring the resulting scans and some bound books printed from those scans, so that people can see the current quality level.

http://www.archive.org/

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2004 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, E-Books
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Unimpeded Discovery of Digital Content

December 1, 2004

Günter Waibel
Program Officer
RLG, Inc.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas
Chief Technology Officer
Sand Codex, LLC

In systems that support discovery of digital objects, we typically find that it can be difficult to understand and navigate large results, and cumbersome to move between very low and very high resolution representations. RLG is exploring new technologies that address these issues in its Cultural Materials system.

One such technology is Voss, developed by Sand Codex LLC. Voss is a client/server platform designed to deliver text, images, vector graphics, hyperlinks, applets – any web-deliverable content – in a continuous, seamless and responsive environment. This briefing will provide an opportunity to see Voss in action and discuss the implications of this important technological advance. You must see this new technology in action to fully appreciate its potential.

PowerPoint Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2004 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval
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Unlocking Literary Texts with the NITLE Semantic Engine

December 1, 2004

Maciej Ceglowski
Lead Developer
National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education

The NITLE Semantic Engine (NSE) is an ambitious effort to make advanced search technologies available and useful to the academic community as open-source software. In this presentation, we will demonstrate how NSE technologies can enhance an open-source web-based application for reading and annotating literary texts. Information on character interactions, plot dynamics, thematic elements, and geographical location is automatically mined from Gutenberg Project texts and used to create novel visualization and navigation tools. The result is a new way of interacting with and annotating literature unique to the web, and a potentially powerful tool for building knowledge communities around texts.

http://www.nitle.org/tr_ast.php

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2004 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval
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