In fall 2005 a consortium of four libraries conducted field studies and held workshops to gather information on how the needs of the core users are fulfilled by research libraries. The investigation was meant to reveal how the users utilize these resources today, and, on the basis of the qualitative data, suggest how the hybrid research library of the future can improve its services. The investigation focused on three key aspects of the hybrid library:
1. How the library’s web interface can be improved
2. What role the library’s employees will have in the future
3. What role the physical library should play

The work resulted in the construction of three personas representing the archetypal usage patterns which were observed in the course of the investigation. It is easy to imagine that an actual user can incorporate traits of all the personas, or can, over time, evolve from one kind of user to another.

The field studies provided input to subsequent workshops where ideas were tested. An idea of presenting the library staff as part of a search result was well received whereas ideas about establishing chat sessions were turned down.

The talk will provide an overview of the methods used, experiences, and results.

http://www.statsbiblioteket.dk/publ/fieldstudies.pdf

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has launched a new digital humanities initiative aimed at supporting projects that utilize or study the impact of digital technology. Digital technologies offer humanists new methods of conducting research, conceptualizing relationships, and presenting scholarship. NEH is interested in fostering the growth of digital humanities and lending support to a wide variety of projects, including those that deploy digital technologies and methods to enhance our understanding of a topic or issue; those that study the impact of digital technology on the humanities — exploring the ways in which it changes how we read, write, think, and learn; and those that digitize important materials thereby increasing the public’s ability to search and access humanities information. At CNI, NEH staff members will provide an overview of our new digital humanities grant programs.

http://www.neh.gov/grants/digitalhumanities.html

Handout (PDF)

Handout (MS word)

New Maps of the Library: Building Better Tools for Discovery Using Library of Congress Subject Headings(Ockerbloom)

Libraries invest significant time and effort in detailed subject cataloging of their collections. They have built up a rich, complex ontology for such cataloging in the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). Some now question whether these investments are worthwhile, or whether such complex ontologies should be abandoned in favor of cheaper, more automated schemes such as are used in popular search engines and portals. Contributing to these doubts has been the poor support of subject-based searching and browsing in most online public access catalogs (OPACs). Even the recent facet-based OPACs do not take full advantage of known relationships among subjects and resources.

In this presentation, I describe and demonstrate tools in development at the University of Pennsylvania to generate and display interactive “concept maps” of library collections. Based on LCSH, these maps are automatically built from existing authority records, a collection’s bibliographic records, and optional local “tweaks” for local interests and search patterns. Users can explore these maps via ordinary text-based web browsing, and browse clusters of related research resources. We now provide these maps for small collections like The Online Books Page, and are experimenting with maps for the entire Penn Library catalog. We hope to enable users to take full advantage of the rich conceptual relationships in LCSH-based library collections, and more effectively browse increasingly diverse and dispersed library collections.

http://labs.library.upenn.edu/subjectmaps

Handout (MS Word)

Powerpoint Presentation

Lessons Learned in Creating a Community-Based and -Driven Digital Library (Graham)

For the past three years, the University of Washington Libraries, in partnership with a variety of community organizations and individuals on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, have been digitizing materials intended to showcase aspects of the rich history and culture of the region. The Olympic Community Museum project is made possible by a National Leadership Grant for Library and Museum Collaboration from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). This work resulted in an online “virtual museum,” available to all web users, and served through CONTENTdm. Over 12,000 digital items were assembled, including multimedia. Materials are organized as a series of exhibits, each representing a different aspect of the culture and history of the region. Community Museum online exhibits include: Makah and Quileute tribal cultures; timber history; the lives of early pioneers; and the growing local Hispanic population’s culture. Curriculum materials were also created for use by teachers of grades 9 and beyond. A community-based approach was used to collect images and curate them. This session will explore the successes and problems which were overcome in the process of identifying, digitizing, and organizing over 12,000 items and the lessons learned, which may in turn be useful to others involved in community-based digital projects. Lessons regarding permission procurement, especially permissions from the three tribal entities involved, will be presented. Other concerns to such a project, such as publicity, management approaches, training, and curating will also be described.

http://www.communitymuseum.org

Handout (MS Word)

This presentation will discuss rights and preservation metadata, in the Rutgers RUcore institutional repository, using the Jazz Oral History Project collection to illustrate. The presentation will present a simple rights schema that provides unambiguous rights information for collection managers and end users, as well as preservation information for the complete work, from analog source object to digital master. RUcore’s use of PREMIS, including issues with its implementation, will be discussed as well as the preservation services that Rutgers is developing collaboratively with the Fedora repository community.

http://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/

IMLS staff will present information on recent grant awards, transition to Grants.gov application process, Early Career Development Research awards, new priorities for disaster recovery, the agency’s new RSS feed, and news about the Institute’s programs. Speakers will discuss “Advancing Knowledge: The IMLS/NEH Digital Partnership,” a new initiative that will bring together museum, library, archives, and IT professionals with humanities scholars to spur innovative projects.

http://www.imls.gov

Handout (MS Word)

The Center for History and New Media has just released Zotero 1.0, a next-generation scholarly research tool that runs in the Firefox web browser. On a very basic level, Zotero stores references and notes (like EndNote or other citation managers). But since it lives in the browser and is web-aware, Zotero is able to provide a number of innovative features, such as the ability to sense, record, and share scholarly metadata on the web. For instance, when you are viewing the web page for a book (e.g., on a library’s website or at Amazon.com) Zotero understands that you are looking at a book and can offer to save its full citation information. Zotero has native support for promising new web technologies, including OpenURL, embedded microformats, RDF, and a variety of XML data-exchange formats. In addition, Zotero has “smart folder” and “smart search” technology and other advanced features such as tagging. The 1.0 release of Zotero is just the beginning of what we believe will be a powerful, open, extensible platform for scholarly research. We plan to provide features to greatly enhance collaboration and autodiscovery — such as the ability to share and collaboratively construct bibliographies and notes, and find new books and articles that might be of interest based on what you’ve already saved to your library (using a server-based recommendation system). And like Firefox itself, other researchers and software developers will be able to expand Zotero with digital tools for visualization, text analysis, document classification, and translation (to name just a few possibilities). We will provide a demonstration and technical overview of the software, and we will explain how various pieces of the Zotero — such as its robust tagging and search capabilities — can be combined with other software (on both the client- and server-side) to create novel forms of research, interpretation, and communication.

http://www.zotero.org

Handout (PDF)

In 2005 and 2006, the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) conducted an extensive and multifaceted study of the engagement of IT in research in higher education. In particular, ECAR studied the state of high performance computing, fast networking, and the management and storage of research data. To a lesser extent, ECAR studied e-collaboration. The session will review key findings from this research as well as from collateral research on “what researchers want [from IT].”

http://www.educause.edu/ecar

After 18 months, the Knowledge Exchange initiative, a European collaboration on e-infrastructure by four national organizations of the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, has finished its incubation phase. The four partners recognize the benefits of sharing information in a structured manner and have established new networks that allow for parallel and cross fertilizing activities. The presentation will give an insight in the working processes that have been developed and highlight the progress made in collaborative policy making and network activities: these include Institutional Repositories, National Licenses, Sustainability and Strategic policy alignment in the EU. Potential new areas for further cooperation, such as the international e-Framework and Trust Federations across access management systems, will be explored next, as well as promising links to US developments in relevant areas.

http://www.knowledge-exchange.info

Powerpoint Presentation (JISC)

In early 2006 Portico began to operate its not-for-profit electronic archiving service. Our mission is to provide a permanent archive of scholarly literature published in electronic form, beginning with journals. In our discussions with a broad range of publishers and libraries that have chosen to include participation in Portico as an important component of their archiving strategy, and in our earliest months of operating the service, several interesting themes have emerged. Publishers are now developing explicit and often multi-layered archiving strategies and are seeking the needed partners or tools to execute them. Libraries are also increasingly developing multi-faceted preservation strategies which may include tools such as LOCKSS, third-party arrangements, such as Portico, and institutional or regional repositories. Strategies vary with institution size and resources, and are at various stages of development and implementation. From our early work to receive published content, convert it to an archival format, ingest it into the Portico archive, and make it available for audit and verification purposes, we are discovering how publisher and library preservation strategies may benefit from coordination. Experience with the content is also highlighting ways in which the complexities of the e-journal content must shape the practices and policies of digital repositories — whether those repositories are operated by third parties such as Portico or by individual academic institutions. Preliminary conclusions about how these themes and lessons illuminate other aspects of electronic preservation will be shared as will an update on the status of the Portico archive, including publisher and library participation and a demo of archived content.

http://www.portico.org

Handout (MS Word)

During the summer of 2006, with support from JSTOR and other affiliates, Ithaka commissioned a survey of librarians at colleges and universities in the United States to learn about their attitudes and preferences related to electronic research and teaching resources. More than 370 library directors and collection development directors from the smallest to the largest academic libraries participated, affording an up-to-the-minute perspective on how they view the present environment and the changes they foresee in the coming years. Some of the topics that will be discussed in this session include: views on the library and how its role is changing; the place of new electronic resources; levels of concern with archiving of both print and electronic resources; and institutional repositories and their purpose. Breakdowns by size of academic institution will be a key feature of this presentation.

http://www.ithaka.org/research

Powerpoint Presentation