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Sharing Learning and Teaching Materials: Some JISC-Funded Collaborative Projects

April 2, 2006

Susan Eales
Programme Manager
Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)

This presentation will provide information on three areas of activity funded by the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), exploring issues around and building infrastructure for sharing learning materials. These are the Exchange for Learning Programme, consisting of 30 projects that are repurposing learning objects; Jorum, a national learning materials repository service-in-development; and the joint JISC/NSF Digital Libraries in the Classroom Programme, consisting of 4 large US/UK collaborative projects.

Web Sites:
http://www.jorum.ac.uk
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/programme_x4l.html
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/programme_dlitc.html

Handout (MS Word)

PowerPoint Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2006 Project Briefings, Cyberinfrastructure, Teaching & Learning
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Shibboleth for Real

April 2, 2006

Thomas C. Wilson
Director, Information Technology
University of Maryland

David Kennedy
Programmer
University of Maryland

Oren Beit-Arie
Chief Strategy Officer
Ex Libris Group

James Mouw
Assistant Director for Technical and Electronic Services
University of Chicago

For over two years the University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions (USMAI) libraries have been investigating an implementation of Shibboleth as a means to address a variety of issues (e.g., single sign-on, distributed ID management, remote access authentication/authorization). In 2005, we began installing the code and playing with a local implementation. The work has focused primarily in four areas: (1) making the business case for Shibboleth, (2) integrating multiple services into the model, (3) delivering transparent services in a hybrid world, and (4) collaborating with our ILS vendor (Ex Libris) to create an integrated, deliverable, Shibbol-ized product with documentation. In early 2006, this collaboration generated a production-level implementation that will serve the USMAI Libraries and other Ex Libris product users.

The University of Chicago has been planning its implementation of Shibboleth for several years. Planning resumed in earnest this past year and we have been testing with information partners. This has been a joint effort between the library and the campus information technology group.  The Librarians’ perspective of the planning experience will be shared during this session.

Web Site:
http://usmai.umd.edu/auth/

PowerPoint Presentation (Wilson)

PowerPoint Presentation (Kennedy)

PowerPoint Presentation (Beit-Arie)

PowerPoint Presentation (Mouw)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2006 Project Briefings, Economic Models, Intellectual Property
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The Solution to the Orphan Works Problem: Safe Legal Adoption or Risky Foster Parenting?

April 2, 2006

Denise Troll Covey
Principal Librarian for Special Projects
Carnegie Mellon University

In 2005 the U.S. Copyright Office issued a Notice of Inquiry to determine “whether orphaned works are being needlessly removed from public access and their dissemination inhibited.” Over 800 responses were submitted to the inquiry, and two public hearings were held to discuss the issues, trade-offs, and proposed solutions. This session will provide an analysis of the debate, focusing on the affiliations of those engaged in the debate and the assumptions and implications of their proposed definitions of an orphan work and proposed solutions to the orphan works problem. The debate appears to devolve into two contentious camps, one of which proposes a solution that would be relatively cheap and easy to implement and enable safe legal adoption of orphan works, the other which proposes a solution that would be prohibitively expensive and difficult to implement and yield only risky foster parenting for orphan works. The ultimate outcome of the debate will reveal to what extent Congress values balancing private interest with public good and the preservation and use of our cultural and intellectual heritage.

Web Site:
http://www.library.cmu.edu/People/troll/TrollCovey_OrphanWorks.pdf

Handout (MS Word)

PowerPoint Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2006 Project Briefings, Intellectual Property
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Standardized Licence Expression: Clarity, Control and Fair Use

April 2, 2006

Sharon Farb
Director Digital Collection Management and Licensing
University of California, Los Angeles

Daviess Menefee
Director of Library Relations
Elsevier

Christopher McKenzie
Vice President, Sales, North and South America
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Alicia Wise
Chief Executive
Publishers Licensing Society

Some of the most difficult issues related to the management of electronic resources revolve around licensing. To help ease the pain, many are calling for a new set of industry standards to express license terms more clearly and simply. While all segments of the library market and supply chain have a stake in these developments, their goals and requirements may sometimes seem to be in conflict with one another.

The National Information Standards Organization, Digital Library Federation (DLF), EDItEUR, and Publishers Licensing Society (PLS) have formed a License Expression Working Group to develop a single standard for the exchange of license information between publishers and libraries.

Members of the working group include librarians, licensing experts, publishers, standards experts, and system vendors. The working group has as its initial charge to:
1. Monitor and make recommendations regarding the further development of standards relating to electronic resources and license expression, including but not limited to the ERMI and EDItEUR work.
2. Actively engage in the development of the ONIX license messaging specification.

This session will allow attendees to learn about emerging standards in this area, and to join the debate on how such standards should be developed and deployed.

Web Site:
 http://www.niso.org/committees/License_Expression/LicenseEx_comm.html

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2006 Project Briefings
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Two Years of the ARROW Project: A Progress Report on Where We Are, and How We Got Here

April 2, 2006

Neil Dickson
ARROW Research Content Manager
Monash University

David Groenewegen
ARROW Project Manager
Monash University

The Australian Government’s Department of Education Science and Training took the view of institutional repositories as a mission-critical infrastructure component to supporting scholarship, facilitating stewardship, and advancing the global recognition of Australian universities as among the world’s finest in academia. To that end, the ARROW project commenced work in February 2004 with the objective of developing best of breed solutions for open access institutional repositories and electronic publishing in Australian universities over three years. The ARROW consortium consists of Monash University as the lead institution, Swinburne University of Technology, the University of New South Wales and the National Library of Australia. ARROW decided to have the main modules built on top of Fedora and written by VTLS (http://www.vtls.com) using VITAL. ARROW licensed VITAL and has been working with VTLS to extend the functionality of Fedora by commissioning a series of Open-Source Web Services. This has been a true partnership, with significant transfers of intellectual property in both directions. ARROW is also trialling the Open Journal Systems software (http://www.pkp.ubc.ca). This briefing will present an overview of the progress of the ARROW project, which has been developed within the following three stage framework:

1. conceptualizing and developing an ARROW institutional repository solution comprising software, policy frameworks and implementation strategies,
2. implementing the ARROW repository within the project’s partner institutions, and
3. offering the ARROW repository solution to other Australian universities.

We will discuss the decisions the ARROW project made at the outset and provide a review of those decisions after two years of operation. We will also look forward at ARROW’s plans for 2006 and ongoing development work.

Web Site:
http://www.arrow.edu.au/

Handout (PDF)

Handout (PDF)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2006 Project Briefings, Publishing, Repositories, Scholarly Communication
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The UK National Centre for Text Mining: Activities and Plans

April 1, 2006

Robert Sanderson
Lecturer in Computer Science
University of Liverpool

The UK National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) is the first publicly funded text mining center in the world. Its objective is to provide text mining services in response to the requirements of the UK academic community. NaCTeM’s initial focus is on bioscience and biomedical texts as there is an increasing need for bio-text mining and automated methods to search, access, extract, integrate and manage textual information from large-scale bio-resources. The Centre’s remit is also to make significant contributions to the text mining research community, both nationally and internationally. As part of previous and ongoing collaboration, NaCTeM involves, as self-funded partners, world-leading groups at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), the University of Geneva and the University of Tokyo. This talk will focus on NaCTeM’s current activities and future plans.

Web Site:
http://www.nactem.ac.uk

PowerPoint Presentation


Filed Under: CNI Spring 2006 Project Briefings, E-Science, Information Access & Retrieval
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A Very Large Scale Library for the History of the Web

April 1, 2006

William Y. Arms
Professor of Computer Science
Cornell University

As digital libraries become ubiquitous, scholarship is changing. We can foresee a day when humanities and social science scholars carry out library research with computer programs that act as their agents. This briefing describes the implementation of the Cornell Web Library, which has been designed for this new style of social science research. The library is currently loading some 10 billion Web pages, about 240 Terabytes. They are drawn from the historical collections of the Internet Archive. The briefing will discuss the tools needed to carry out research on such a large corpus; it will also discuss the capabilities and limitations of today’s high performance computing for very large-scale digital libraries.

Web Site:
 http://www.infosci.cornell.edu/SIN/WebLib/

Handout (MS Word)

PowerPoint Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2006 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries
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Work of the Section 108 Study Group

April 1, 2006

Laura N. Gasaway
Co-Chair Section 108 Study Group
Director of the Law Library and Professor of Law
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

The Section 108 Study Group was created to conduct a reexamination of the exceptions and limitations applicable to libraries and archives under the Copyright Act, specifically in light of the changes wrought by digital media. The work of the Group has focused on preservation issues to date, and public roundtables are scheduled to occur before the CNI meeting. The presenter will discuss the basics of the work of the Study Group and report on the roundtables. The report and recommendations of the Study Group are scheduled for completion by the end of 2006.

Web Site:
http://www.loc.gov/section108/

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2006 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Intellectual Property
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