Andrea Martin
Director, Enterprise Systems and Applications
Rice University

Diane Butler
Manager, Enterprise Systems and Applications
Rice University

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded a collaborative project with the Survivors of the Shoah Foundation, Rice University, Yale University, and the University of Southern California, to integrate video testimonies of Holocaust survivors into the undergraduate curriculum. This briefing explores the technical and logistical challenges of the project to date, as well as the enhancements the technology has brought to the curriculum, and new course assignments and methods of research evidenced by the students.

Web Link:
http://www.vhf.org/vhfmain-2.htm

Presentation:
180 Terabytes of Visual History (PPT)

Mladen Maljkovic
Product Manager
WebCT

The IMS Resource List Interoperability Specification details how structured metadata can be exchanged between content repositories that store and expose content that scholars wish to use for the purposes of creating a specific kind of digital learning object – a Resource List – and those systems that gather and organize such lists for educational or training purposes, such as course or learning management systems. Because course or learning related Resource Lists may be created and maintained in different systems, such as library e-reserve modules managed within an integrated library system or course management systems, each having their own metadata, processing and managing requirements, it has been very difficult to exchange and consolidate the Resource Lists between systems. The RLI specification begins to address these integration issues by enabling the easy exchange of structured metadata between e-learning tools and various related applications including Library Online Public Access Catalogs, reserves modules or other third party tools. The public draft of the RLI specification will be released within the month of April for public comment and prototype implementations. This briefing will provide details about the specification and plans for implementations.

http://www.imsglobal.org/workinprogress.cfm

In Australia, the federal government has funded four projects aimed at assisting universities in establishing a robust environment for managing their research information. The development of “institutional repositories” is seen as a key strategy for achieving this goal. The funded projects will (a) test and evaluate particular software solutions for institutional research repositories, (b) develop a national discovery service for the content of the research repositories, (c) develop a national service to assist institutions with the curation and sustainability of these collections, and (d) develop a national infrastructure for authentication and authorization services which manage access to the collections.

The National Library of Australia is a partner in three of the funded projects, and this project briefing will describe the projects from the Library’s perspective. The Library will assist the projects by contributing its expertise and recent experience with the development of its own digital services architecture, including its experience with digital collection management systems, digital preservation, persistent identifiers, and the operation of national resource discovery services. The Library will also contribute its expertise in standards relating to authentication and authorization, and in particular, its experience with standards for descriptions of access policies. These projects provide an opportunity for Australia to take a highly collaborative, national approach to the development both of institutional repositories and of the support services that are needed for their effective deployment.

Web Links:
http://www.dest.gov.au/Ministers/Media/McGauran/2003/10/mcg002221003.asp
http://www.dest.gov.au/highered/research/sys_research.htm
http://www.arrow.edu.au/
http://sts.anu.edu.au/drs/repositories/
http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/2003/cathro1.html

Handout:
The National Library’s Role in the Australian Research Information Infrastructure Projects

Presentation:
Australian Research Information Infrastructure Projects (PPT)

The University of Miami’s Richter Library is actively involved in faculty collaborations to develop digital resources for the study of Caribbean literature. The Caribbean Writers Video Archive, consisting of more than 400 streaming videos, is an effort to capture discourse about Caribbean literature through digital media. In this archive one can view and listen to notable Caribbean writers reading their works and discussing their craft.

“Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal” is a new, open access, peer-reviewed, electronic journal that publishes creative writing and articles about all aspects of Caribbean life and culture. This briefing will examine the challenges in creating these digital resources and outline future developments to integrate these resources into even more engaging learning experiences for understanding Caribbean literature through digital media.

Web Links:
http://scholar.library.miami.edu/anthurium/index.html
http://www.as.miami.edu/english/cls/CWSIMainPage.htm

Presentation:
Capturing Caribbean Life and Culture (PPT)

Julia Blixrud
Director of Information Services
Association of Research Libraries/SPARC

John Vaughn
Executive Vice President
Association of American Universities

An international group of stakeholders – including authors, publishers, librarians, and universities – have been meeting and working over the past four years with the objective “to achieve maximum access to scholarship without compromising quality or academic freedom and without denying aspects of costs and rewards involved.” New technologies have forced universities to rethink their strategic role in scholarly publications. Electronic publishing makes it possible to alter and strengthen their position in the process of creating and disseminating academic scholarship. How can faculty achieve maximum access to scholarly information? How can universities raise awareness and educate academic authors and administrators? How do we manage the allocation of rights among the key stakeholders: authors, publishers, universities, and the public?

This briefing will discuss the Zwolle Principles, published in 2002 under the title, “Balancing Stakeholder Interests in Scholarship Friendly Copyright Practices.” The Zwolle group has also collected and reviewed agreements between authors and publishers, institutional copyright ownership policies, and is creating a “copyright toolkit” that will help inform publication agreements and university policies.

Web Link:
http://www.surf.nl/copyright

Handout:
Principles: Balancing Stakeholder Interests in Scholarship-Friendly Copyright Practices

Presentation:
Copyright Management for Scholarship (PPT)

Joyce Ray
Director, Office of Library Services
Institute of Museum and Library Services

This session will examine various trends in digital libraries and virtual museums over the past ten years, including the hybridization of the concepts “museum” and “library,” the convergence of media (enabling repurposing and delivery across multiple platforms), new ways digital and physical spaces are being used, the potential to reach new users, and the increased engagement of users. Additionally, future directions will be discussed, such as gaining a better understanding of users and uses of digital content, an increase in the number of tools enabling users to participate in “creative communities,” the use of business models and services enabling libraries and museums of all sizes to create value for their users, and the availability of funding programs to support this work.

http://www.chin.gc.ca/English/Digital_Content/Dccf_Workshop/index.html
http://www.imls.gov/pubs/pdf/digitalopp.pdf

Leslie Johnston
Director, Digital Services, Library
University of Virginia

David Greenbaum
Director, Interactive University Project
University of California, Berkeley

The past decade has seen the simultaneous growth of large-scale digital library collections and of widely deployed course management systems (CMS). CMS provide a potentially powerful delivery environment for digital collections, but the issues of interoperation between the two application domains are just beginning to be examined. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, an ad hoc group of experts in CMS, digital libraries, and electronic publishing has been looking at some aspects of interoperation. A key observation is that there are today significant practical impediments to instructors making use of digital library content in course systems.

This briefing will review the work of the group, focusing on two key topics: 1) what repository owners can do to encourage the use of their content in instructional systems and 2) the need for tools that help instructors gather together relevant materials from across highly heterogeneous and distributed content repositories.

Presentation:
Flecker (PPT)
Johnston (PPT)

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

Susan Gibbons
Director, Digital Library Initiatives
University of Rochester

The open source DSpace digital repository project initially developed by MIT and HP has reached the one-year mark. The project recently achieved a major milestone in hosting the first ever DSpace Federation user group meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this past March.

This briefing will report on the outcomes of the Federation meeting related to the development of institutional repositories and the DSpace platform world-wide, and will report on the progress and experiences of two institutions that are early adopters of DSpace – Cornell University and the University of Rochester – as they complete their first year of implementation.

Web Link:
http://dspace.org/

Presentations:
Smith (PPT)
Gibbons (PPT)
Hickerson (PPT)

Kate Wittenberg
Director, Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia
Columbia University

With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC) has undertaken an evaluation project aimed at gaining a better understanding of how electronic resources affect scholarly communication. In particular, we have explored how electronic resources are affecting the work and economics of academic presses, information technology organizations, academic libraries, faculty, and students. Over the last three years, we have investigated these questions using interviews, focus groups, and surveys. As the project moves into its final phase, we will discuss the overarching findings, their implications, and provide thoughts on the future of scholarly electronic resources and possible directions for future research.

Web Link:
http://www.epic.columbia.edu/eval/evalframe.html

Presentation:
EPIC’s Online Use and Costs Evaluation Program (PPT)

OAI-PMH compliant Institutional Repository software exposes Dublin Core metadata about stored content, allowing service providers to create discovery services across repositories by recurrent metadata harvesting. Next generation service providers will also be interested in collecting the actual content stored in those repositories, because that would facilitate the creation of more elaborate and attractive services. The OAI-PMH could still function as the framework through which such service providers would remain in sync with the evolving collections stored in the repositories, provided that those repositories can expose a more complex “metadata format”. In order to be transportable through the OAI-PMH, such a complex “metadata format” needs to be an XML-based representation of a complex document model. A variety of such formats exist, and the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has focused its attention on the MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration Language. As LANL also operates a DSpace server, research has been conducted aimed at exposing this format through the DSpace OAI-PMH interface. Exposed records wrap the DSpace Dublin Core metadata for an item and its associated content (bundles) in a single XML document that can be harvested from a DSpace Repository through the OAI-PMH. Related research has resulted in the creation of an OAI-PMH Federator that makes OAI-PMH harvesting of these documents from a distributed federation of institutional repositories straightforward by providing a single point of access.

This briefing will describe and demonstrate a prototype DSpace plug-in that allows harvesting of complex objects compliant with the MPEG-21 DIDL specification from a DSpace repository. It will also touch upon the problems faced in mapping the DSpace data model to the complex object format. Furthermore, the presentation will describe and demonstrate the OAI-PMH Federator that allows harvesters to collect complex objects from a federation of institutional repositories through a single point of access, and that provides the capability to crosswalk between various complex object formats.

Web Link:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february04/bekaert/02bekaert.html

Presentation:
Federations of Institutional Repositories and OAI-PMH Harvesting (PDF)