The ubiquity of online networked social spaces presents librarians with an opportunity to become members of user communities and thereby integrate library resources and services at point-of-need and for point-of-discovery in ways previous models of librarian outreach could not obtain. Participating in networked social spaces such as MySpace is particularly valuable for connecting with undergraduate students for whom the library is unfortunately often an alien and mystifying entity. This project briefing will offer an introduction to a variety of projects underway at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to explore the possibilities of social spaces for libraries. Specific examples include:

* MySpace and Facebook sites
* Facebook fliers for advertising the Library
* I-Go: The Library Toolbar
* IM buddy names on all major networks
* SecondLife exploration
* Librarian Office Hours
* Integration in campus courseware communities

Online social spaces are complemented by new attention to social and collaboration spaces in the Library’s physical facilities, particularly in the Undergraduate Library. Examples of enhancements to physical spaces include:

* Re-configuration of computer workstation distribution to facilitate group use of computers
* Laptop, DVD player, MP3 player, and hard drive check out
* iMac computers for multimedia production and development
* Furniture layout that encourages student reconfiguration for different group sizes

Information about successful and not-so-successful projects will be shared.

http://www.library.uiuc.edu/ugl
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/liblabs
http://www.myspace.com/undergradlibrary

Handout (MS Word)

Three solutions currently provided for preserving journal publishers’ content are being widely adopted by many institutions, yet confusion about each is apparent when you talk with the librarians signing on to support them. Rice University and Indiana University are participating in each of these initiatives and will offer an objective review of LOCKSS, CLOCKSS and Portico. We will provide a “member’s” perspective of the differences between these initiatives, hoping to demystify the library community’s understanding of them and to communicate our expectations of any preservation solution. Included in the presentation will be a peek inside of the archives to see what the content looks like for an end-user who is presented with an archival copy of a journal article compared to the article as delivered by the publisher’s site.

Powerpoint Presentation

The availability of simple-search interfaces such as Google, has added urgency to fulfill user expectations for seamless access across large libraries of digital content regardless of source, local or proprietary. While intellectual property constraints continue to challenge content providers’ efforts to provide this ease of access, several strategies are being explored to optimize access across collections. Many organizations are seeking solutions for accessing local and proprietary content through a single search and discovery interface. Harvard’s VIA initiative seeks to bring together diverse image resources from across the campus with a unified data schema and repository. ARTstor and others are exploring a number of strategies to facilitate user access to a broad range of content – both local resources and those assets that are served by remote providers. One collaboration that seeks to tie together these resources in a dynamic way is the ARTstor Harvard VIA Hosting Pilot whereby 140,000 digital images from the Harvard University VIA collection are made available to Harvard constituents through the ARTstor Institutional Collections Pilot Program. This session will describe the project, its challenges, technical processes for data and asset exchange and demonstrate the integration of Harvard and ARTstor content in a single search result. Ongoing development between ARTstor and Harvard is exploring dynamic data exchange of assets and metadata using OAI harvesting protocols.

http://www.artstor.org

Handout (MS Word)

This session will describe innovative publishing initiatives at three universities:

• Using the open-source e-publishing platform Connexions, Rice University Press is returning from a decade-long hiatus to explore models of peer-reviewed scholarship for the 21st century. The technology offers authors a way to use multimedia — audio files, live hyperlinks or moving images — to craft dynamic scholarly arguments, and to publish on-demand original works in fields of study that are increasingly constrained by print publishing.
• The Pennsylvania State University Libraries and the Penn State University Press are partnering in new modes of scholarly communications and publishing.  They jointly administer the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing, established in the spring of 2005, and are looking at various new ways to leverage their efforts. The Libraries is building a technical infrastructure that can be shared with the Press; and the Libraries, the Press, and Cornell University Libraries, with funding from the Mellon Foundation, are developing DPubS, digital publishing software that is an open source alternative for scholarly publishing. The Libraries and the Press are also looking at various business models for the future.
• The Georgetown University Digital Library, a partnership among all of Georgetown’s libraries and a collaboration with University Information Services and the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, supports the advancement of education and scholarship at Georgetown and contributes to the expansion of research initiatives, both nationally and internationally. By providing the infrastructure, resources, and services, the Georgetown University Digital Library sustains the evolution from the traditional research models of today to the enriched scholarly communication environment of tomorrow, and it provides context and leadership in developing collaborative opportunities with partners across the campus, such as Georgetown University Press, and around the world.

http://ricepress.rice.edu/
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/digital/scholarlycomm/
http://digital.georgetown.edu/gurt/

Powerpoint Presentation (Georgetown Univ)

Repository federation efforts such as aDORe, CORDRA, the Chinese DSpace Federation, DARE, and Pathways (NSF IIS-0430906) demonstrate that a shared interoperability layer allows the re-use of scholarly digital objects. This cross-repository interoperability provides the fabric for leveraging objects beyond the borders of the hosting repository. Interest in developing such a fabric led to an April 2006 “Augmenting Interoperability” meeting, which was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Microsoft, the Coalition for Networked Information, the Digital Library Federation and the Joint Information Systems Committee. It is now appropriate to move beyond prototypes and to support an effort to formally specify this next level of interoperability across repositories. Through the support of the Mellon Foundation, a two-year international initiative to define this interoperability fabric began in October 2006. The effort is conducted under the umbrella of the OAI (Open Archives Initiative), is aptly named ORE (Object Re-Use & Exchange), and is coordinated by Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel. The project briefing will outline the goals and work plan of the project, and will discuss activities conducted so far.

http://www.openarchives.org/ore
http://msc.mellon.org/Meetings/Interop

Handout (PDF)

Presentation (PDF)

In July 2006, two major library cooperatives, RLG and OCLC, representing the combined interests of thousands of cultural heritage institutions world-wide, joined forces to create a new organization designed to support research institutions in shaping their collective future.  A strategic alliance of RLG’s community-based programs and OCLC’s research expertise emerged as the new OCLC Programs and Research Division. An early version of the RLG Programs prospectus was published immediately following the RLG – OCLC combination. Further refinement of the high-level work agenda has produced a core set of program areas in which measurable achievements are expected in the near term. The CNI briefing will summarize work in three program areas that focus on the collaborative methods libraries, archives and museums are deploying to introduce system-wide efficiencies in the networked environment:  (1) managing the collective collection; (2) renovating descriptive practices; and (3) modeling new service infrastructures.

This briefing will provide an inside look at the collaborative work agenda of this new partnership and an opportunity for community input and discussion.

http://www.oclc.org/news/releases/oclcrlgfaq.htm

Powerpoint Presentation

Using data provided by almost 300,000 library users who completed the LibQUAL+™ survey in 2003, 2004, and 2005, the panelists will discuss the findings from on-premises library vs. Google™-like information gateway usage patterns and perceptions across time and cultures and engage participants in understanding the challenges and opportunities libraries face. In particular, panel presenters will discuss differences in the use by undergraduates, graduate students/postgraduates, and faculty of on-premise versus non-library information gateways across time and across international regions. They will also identify what differences, if any, there are in perceptions of library service quality across user types reflecting different on-premise and Internet gateway usage frequencies. This panel will shed light on information use trends and patterns around the world using the extensive LibQUAL+™ database. LibQUAL+™ is a total market survey designed to help librarians understand user perceptions, and thereby improve service quality and better meet user information needs. It has been used to collect data from more than 600,000 users at more than 800 institutions. It has been used across the world in the United States, Canada, Australia, England, France, Ireland, Scotland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and South Africa.

Recent debates over the role of Google™ and other search engines have captured the imagination of the press, librarians and information providers in general. This panel is moving beyond impressions by relying on real data from hundreds of thousands of users that identify differences across user groups on how library premises and search engines are used. The goal is to inspire discussion and engage the participants in thinking about what these trends mean for future library service delivery.

Handout (MS Word)

Powerpoint Presentation

LibraryFind: Providing Better Discovery Through Innovation (Frumkin)

Oregon State University (OSU), through a grant provided by the State Library of Oregon, has developed and implemented a new discovery tool called LibraryFind. LibraryFind is OSU’s first tool towards building a suite of web services which supports the entire scholarly workflow process. This presentation will detail why OSU chose to develop a new product rather than purchase a currently existing tool, the technical approach taken with LibraryFind, results of a formal usability study, and future directions for the service. Information will be provided on how to acquire the open source LibraryFind software for your institution.

http://dllab.library.oregonstate.edu

http://digitallibrarian.org/2006/12/4/cni-presentation-on-libraryfind

The eXtensible Catalog: Revealing Library Collections Through Collaborative Open-source Technology (Bowen, et al)

Currently funded through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Rochester River Campus Libraries (UR) is developing a plan for an open-source system to provide libraries with an alternative way to reveal their collections to users. The system, called the eXtensible Catalog (XC), will provide easy access to all resources (both digital and physical collections) across a variety of databases, metadata schemas and standards. XC’s platform and user application will store digital content and metadata in multiple formats and function alongside a library’s current Integrated Library System to provide more intuitive access to resources, a customizable interface, and seamless connections to other applications. The UR libraries are now recruiting partner institutions to collaborate in the building of XC during the next phase of the project. This project briefing will include both an overview of the XC project and a brief demonstration of an XC prototype.

http://www.extensiblecatalog.info

Handout (MS Word)

Presentation Slides (demo)

Powerpoint Presentation

During the past year, the Digital Library Federation (DLF) Services Framework Working Group (SFG) has worked through a number of issues in trying to define a basis for developing a services framework for libraries and digital libraries. Throughout this process, it became clear to the working group members that the framework must capture the business logic of what people do in libraries and how users interact with libraries. There is currently a lack of documentation in this area, but it is critical to understand if we are going to consider developing systems that are nimble and can easily adapt to the changing library environments in which we live. Borrowing from principles that have been developed in Business Process Modeling (BPM) and in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), the group has developed a light-weight approach for beginning to capture the business processes of the library and structuring them in a format that allows discrete business functions to be identified. These functions, emerging from various business areas of the library, are key to identifying activities that occur in multiple areas. Using a service oriented approach, it is then possible to look at a new way to develop systems to meet library needs. As stand-alone units of functionality take shape and can be translated to software components, these components can be developed once and reused many times, creating a plug-and-play architecture where new or better software components can be introduced without significant disruption.

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july06/lavoie/07lavoie.html

There is a critical need at the national and international level for more effective models of inter-institutional cooperation to preserve digital collections. While many projects have developed technologies and standards for isolated preservation efforts at individual institutions, there have been far fewer projects that mobilized ongoing efforts and consolidated costs across diffuse cultural heritage institutions. Six southeastern universities (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Florida State University, Auburn, and the University of Louisville, under the leadership of Emory University) have created a distributed digital preservation network for critical and at-risk content called the MetaArchive of Southern Digital Culture. We will present work towards “a national focus on policy, standards and technical components necessary to preserve digital content” in an inter-institutional model which is the charge as part of our partnership with the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. We will describe our progress at the one-and-a-half year mark including the development of the distributed preservation network infrastructure based on the modified LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) open-source software, cost and specifications for creating a preservation network, metadata issues for digital preservation, specific modifications conducted within the MetaArchive network for caching digital works that do not fit the standard model within the current LOCKSS journal format infrastructure, as well as our progress towards formalizing a collaborative agreement framework for ongoing distributed digital preservation.

http://www.metaarchive.org

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov

Handout (PDF)

Powerpoint Presentation