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Support and Access Issues for Large Scale Collections: The Shoah Visual History Foundation Testimonies

April 1, 2005

John Silvester
Vice Provost for Scholarly Technology
University of Southern California

Sam Gustman
Director of Technology
Shoah Foundation

Judith A. Truelson
Associate Professor of Librarianship
University of Southern California

Mike Pearce
Deputy CIO
University of Southern California

Since 1994, the Shoah Foundation (http://www.vhf.org) has recorded on videotape the personal memories of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. The mission of the Shoah Foundation is to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry – and the suffering they cause – through the educational use of the Foundation’s visual history testimonies. The Foundation pursues this mission by forging partnerships to support its strategic goals of developing educational products and programs and enabling access to the archive. As part of a Mellon grant project, USC’s Information Services Division (ISD) has provided access to the Shoah Visual History Foundation testimonies remotely taking advantage of advanced networks such as Internet2. USC has explored the scholarly uses of the archive in research and instructional programs and studied the impact on pedagogy and the impact on structures of library and information services support.

Large-scale archives like these testimonies present many technical challenges for the institutions hosting them, including mass storage design, collection architecture and metadata design, access control and authentication. In this session, three presenters will present an introduction to the testimonies, the information services challenges and opportunities, and the technical challenges of this important collection.


http://www.vhf.org

PowerPoint Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2005 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, Metadata, Special Collections
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A System-Wide View of Library Collections

April 1, 2005

Roger C. Schonfeld
Coordinator of Research
Ithaka

Brian Lavoie
Senior Research Scientist
Online Computer Library Center (OCLC)

To understand, evaluate, and act on many recent developments in the library community, members of the CNI community increasingly require a broad system-wide perspective. Google’s recently-announced partnerships with academic libraries constitute further evidence that the era of mass digitization of library collections may be imminently at hand; will all holdings become readily available across the system? The first repositories of the print versions of digitized materials are coming into existence; how might individual paper repositories be crafted into a system that offers reasonable levels of assurance and efficiency? And heretofore unimaginable scenarios about the effects of “losing” a given major research library due to disaster are being considered; does our existing distributed system have sufficient redundancy to cope with such a loss? These are but some of the issues facing the library community today that push us to think somewhat less about individual collections but instead about the system as a whole. To help, we need a bridge between the institutional perspective based in the day-to-day reality of local collections and holdings and the system-wide perspective that is driving many current initiatives.

Navigating the rapidly changing environment at the institutional level will require innovative policymaking, which can be effective only if it is well-informed about the nature of the broader system of library collections and holdings. Using data from OCLC’s WorldCat, we have begun to analyze library holdings from a system-wide perspective. Our presentation will cover some preliminary findings from this research study, which we hope will provide further context about the shape of the system. How many individual book titles are held across the library system? How are they distributed, in terms of rareness and overlap? How do the holdings of some of the largest research libraries relate to one another? We hope that our preliminary findings will be of interest to attendees, and we hope that the discussion will reveal future directions for such research into a system-wide analysis of library collections that would be valuable to the CNI community.

PowerPoint Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2005 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Repositories
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A Technology Analysis of Repositories and Services

April 1, 2005

Jim Martino
Digital Pedagogy Specialist, Digital Knowledge Center
Johns Hopkins University

The concept of the institutional repository has gained traction within the digital library community. While this idea provides a useful description that may facilitate institutional adoption, it may also oversimplify the complete picture associated with digital library architecture. Institutions may now be finding that there will be multiple repositories and applications in the same environment. Developing individual interfaces for each application/repository pair presents scaling difficulties as the numbers of applications and repositories rise. At Johns Hopkins, we are promoting the idea that applications should access repositories through an abstract, repository agnostic layer, rather than through custom application to repository integrations. With funding from the Mellon Foundation, Johns Hopkins University will evaluate repository software and a range of services. The result of this evaluation will be a set of best practices, recommendations, and functional requirements for repositories and applications. This project reflects our belief that content should reside in multiple repositories external to applications, so that the same content can be used by several systems and support multiple services. This concept will be tested with content that is moved through repositories into applications as defined against a set of use cases that reflect various services. While our project will evaluate uses for digital preservation (e.g., LC Archive Ingest Handling Test), e-learning (e.g., Sakai), and e-publishing (e.g., Project Muse), this briefing will focus primarily on application to learning management systems.

Web Links:
http://ldp.library.jhu.edu/projects/repository

Annotated Presentation Writeup (PDF)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2005 Project Briefings, Digital Humanities, Digital Preservation, Repositories
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Trove.net™ and Other Ways to Get Images Out of the Database and Into the Classroom

April 1, 2005

Ricky Erway
Digital Resources Manager
Research Libraries Group (RLG)

How can digital images from licensed resources best find their way into the classroom? The RLG Advisory Group on Instructional Technology investigated this issue by reviewing current practice in the community and interviewing faculty who teach with digital images. The findings of the Advisory Group should be applicable to any image database supporting teaching and learning. RLG will be drawing upon these recommendations as we continue to develop our Cultural Materials service. The findings of the working group shaped our plans for image and metadata export and our plans for increased interoperability. They also reinforced our decision to expose the treasures in Cultural Materials through our free and widely indexed Trove.net™ site. Trove.net™ makes Cultural Materials content discoverable via Google and other internet search engines — often the first stop for faculty who are searching for classroom content.

http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=406
http://trove.net/

Handout (MS Word)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2005 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Intellectual Property, Net Generation (includes Millennials)
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UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC): One Year On

April 1, 2005

Liz Lyon
Director, UKOLN
University of Bath

Chris Rusbridge
Director, Digital Curation Centre
Edinburgh University

This briefing will present an overview of the UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC), which was established to provide a national focus for research into curation issues and to promote expertise and good practice, both national and international, for the management of all research outputs in digital format. The background and context to the setting up of the DCC will be covered, together with a description of the Centre and its activity strands: Research, Development, Services and Outreach/Community Support. Work in progress in each area will be described and future activities summarized.

http://www.dcc.ac.uk

Handout (RTF)

PowerPoint Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2005 Project Briefings, Digital Curation
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UThink: Blogs at the University of Minnesota Libraries

April 1, 2005

Shane Nackerud
Web Services Coordinator
University of Minnesota

Eric F. Celeste
Associate University Librarian
University of Minnesota

The UThink project at the University of Minnesota Libraries provides personal, class related, and departmental blogs to the students, staff, and faculty of the University of Minnesota. Anyone with a U of M Internet ID and password can create a library hosted blog. So far, over 1,000 blogs have been created, with over 14,500 individual entries, and over 1,900 individual users making UThink the largest academic blogging site in North America. This presentation will focus on how we got to this point and where we’d like to take the project next. We will discuss why we created UThink, and the goals we have for the project. We will also discuss the backend architecture of the system, policy decisions necessary to host blogs, integration with other library and campus systems, and we will give a demonstration of the system itself.

http://blog.lib.umn.edu

Handout (PDF)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2005 Project Briefings, Social Media, User Services
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