Fedora Commons is a new non-profit organization established to provide a robust, open-source technology platform to enable revolutionary change in the ways scientists, scholars, and educators produce and share the intellectual outputs of their work, while simultaneously ensuring the durability and longevity of the record of knowledge resulting from this work.

This project briefing will discuss how Fedora Commons will evolve the Fedora repository framework and build a new model of community participation to meet the challenges emerging in several key areas: open-access publishing, e-science, new models for scholarly communication, and collaborative, semantic digital libraries. The Fedora Commons mission is initially supported by a $4.9 million 4-year grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

http://www.fedora-commons.org

The role of format is central to effective preservation of digitally encoded assets. While it is possible for bits to be preserved indefinitely without consideration of format, it is only through the careful management of format that the meaning of those bits remains accessible over time. To respond to the rapid rate of technological change inherent to the digital environment, it is important for formats themselves to become the objects of preservation control. The Global Digital Format Registry (GDFR), being developed jointly by the Harvard University Library and OCLC with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will provide sustainable services to manage, discover, and deliver significant technical and administration information about digital formats. The GDFR is a distributed network of independent, but cooperating registries that synchronize their holdings through periodic mirroring operations. This presentation will provide an update on the GDFR project, its overall goals, the technical progress to date, and efforts to develop a sustainable business and governance model that will ensure the continual existence of the GDFR as a key piece of common good preservation infrastructure.

http://www.formatregistry.org/

Handout (MS Word)

PowerPoint Presentation

This session will address the idea of “convergence” among information literacy, technology fluency, and media literacy. Conversations among librarians, computing professionals, and others reveal the convergences among these “literacies,” with much potential for collaborative program planning and development, and facilities planning, focused on student learning. Expanding the range of stakeholders in these converging literacies in an experimental environment offers even greater potential for positioning these abilities throughout the formal curriculum and in the co-curriculum as well.

This session will discuss a practical experimental environment showcasing “convergence.” The Division of Information Technology at George Mason University, along with the University Libraries, University Life, the Center for Teaching Excellence, and the Technology Across the Curriculum (TAC) Program, are redesigning space previously occupied by a media production center (Mason Media Lab) to create a collaborative research and development test bed that will address the University’s priorities for infusing information and technology literacy in the learning process.

The Center for Digital Fluency will:

• Enhance students’ engagement with technology by providing flexible access to collaborative learning spaces and tools
• Enable testing of new technologies and learning environments for faculty who want to improve students’ learning experiences
• Provide space for cohorts of faculty and students to work together to explore collaborative projects using instructional technologies
• Facilitate collaboration among instructional designers, faculty development professionals, information technology staff, and instruction and e-learning librarians focused on infusing research information and technology-enhanced information literacy into Mason’s curriculum
• Enrich conversations across the institution about the value of technology and research skills to support learning

Handout (MS Word)

PowerPoint Presentation

In the fast-changing electronic journals marketplace, publishers face questions about how best to distribute their content and librarians face questions about what content to acquire and under what terms. Ultimately, value is determined by the impact on scholarship and teaching. Usage statistics have been analyzed extensively in an effort to establish that e-journals bring with them higher value than print versions, although these usage data may reflect a massive increase in undergraduate journal use. The effect of digitization on scholarship, a critical value for many institutions, remains less well examined, notwithstanding its importance both for libraries and publishers as they navigate the transition to new models.

To fill this gap, a research project has been designed to address the question, when a journal issue is digitized, what effect is there on subsequent citations to its articles? After a brief discussion of the methodology and extensive data collection, most of the presentation will be devoted to a review of the findings and a discussion of their implications. Findings in three specific disciplines will be covered (history, economics/business, and biology) to explore how digitization may have a differential effect on scholarship by discipline. We will also examine how variables such as the age of content and the channels through which it is available may determine the effect of digitization. The findings should be of interest to librarians and content providers alike.

http://www.ithaka.org/research
http://www.ithaka.org/research/citation-analysis/

PowerPoint Presentation

Northwestern University recently completed a two-year project near Xi’an (China), digitizing at very high resolution the free-standing Shuilu (“Water and Land”) Buddhist temple, in partnership with experts from the Xi’an Center for Conservation and Restoration and with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This briefing describes the technical scope of the international Imag(n)ing Shuilu’an project in China, 2005-2007; it includes a tour of the comprehensive visual archive of the temple that was created for preservation purposes, and it presents the experimental interface that was developed as an investigation into scholarly technologies that enable collaborative study of massive 2D and 3D datasets from cultural heritage sites such as Shuilu’an. This scholars’ interface includes a Web-based annotation system that allowed the Xi’an team to assign conservation and descriptive metadata to arbitrary regions of the photographic textures, as the post-production team worked in Evanston. The experimental interface exploits 3D spatial/structural metadata to unify and navigate the presentation, description, and digital provenance of the massive visual dataset that we now have in hand.

The briefing will also include a look at possible paths forward: next steps that build upon the work that was completed six months ago with our partners in China; extending this work into other cultural heritage domains; and the development of digital tools that have been identified by conservationists, archaeologists and scholars as important to new work. Future work by the Northwestern team will apply metadata standards in Fedora content models in order to better address management and preservation goals. We will also describe the benefits of the integration of presentation tools with Fedora to support scholarly access, annotation, and commentary for integrated 3D archives.

http://conference.archimuse.com/biblio/imag_n_ing_shuiluan

Handout (PDF)

Creating Interactive Course Assignment Pages: The OSU Libraries ICA Creation Tool (Griggs, et al.)

In 2005, Oregon State University (OSU) Libraries conducted a needs assessment to determine the best approach for connecting students with the wealth of information available to them through the library. The needs assessment revealed that undergraduates are assignment driven and focused on particular courses. To address these needs, OSU Libraries developed Interactive Course Assignment (ICA) pages. ICA pages help students quickly target research tools and information to successfully complete their assignments.

OSU Libraries developed a tool to easily create, manage, and publish ICA web pages. The tool was built on Ruby on Rails, a lightweight, yet powerful open-source framework for web development. The ICA creation tool enables librarians with minimal technical expertise to create dynamic web pages that integrate Web 2.0 features, chat and RSS feeds, etc. with traditional library content, such as catalogs and article databases.

In this session we will discuss the benefits of course-specific web pages and the need for the ICA creation tool. We will focus on requirements, design, implementation and use of the tool, including lessons learned and a live demo.

http://ica.library.oregonstate.edu/about.html

Handout (Oregon)
PowerPoint Presentation(Oregon)

Handout(Syracuse)
PowerPoint Presentation(Syracuse)

Disaggregating the Library: Embedding Library Resources in a Management School Website (Buss & Ramnarine-Rieks)

The Syracuse University Library is collaborating with the Whitman School of Management to incorporate a variety of library business and management resources within the Whitman Web environment. The goal of the project is to make available the most desired and most frequently used library resources without requiring users to navigate the Library’s website. This project was initiated by students who requested easier and faster access to the Library’s resources. Management faculty/graduate students, undergraduates, and staff members have separate, customized web portals, and the project team is identifying specific resources that will be accessed through a federated search box. The portal pages and federated search box are launched directly from the Whitman School of Management’s Blackboard homepage.

The session will describe the user analysis that was done prior to the project development as well as usability testing utilized to refine the requirements. Future plans are to assess statistics on database usage pre- and post-implementation for use in further revisions. The project’s objectives, the planning process, and the major project outcomes will also be addressed.

International Internet Preservation Consortium Update(Barnum & Grotke)

The International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), organized in 2003 by 11 national libraries and the Internet Archive, expanded its membership to 26 in 2007, including libraries, government agencies, and commercial organizations. Along with this expansion of membership, the consortium has expanded its program of work.

The briefing will report on IIPC projects to date, including developments in large-scale web crawling and the use of the Heretrix open-source crawler, and the packaging of harvested content. An update on the program of work will be presented, as well as a report on the 2007-2008 IIPC Working Groups on Harvesting, Access, Preservation, and Standards.

http://www.netpreserve.org/about/index.php

Handout (PDF)

PowerPoint Presentation

Presentation and Discussion of an International Roadmap for Digital Preservation Research (Ross & Christensen-Dalsgaard)

DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE), an initiative funded under the European Commission’s Sixth Framework Programme, aims to improve coordination, cooperation and consistency in European activities to secure effective preservation of digital materials. To stimulate funding for and innovation in digital preservation/curation research, the DPE team analyzed the research agendas produced and the research activities undertaken over the last twenty years, and offered experts a chance through an online Delphi process and interviews to contribute their ideas about what preservation research needs to be done. Building on these investigations and contributions, DPE has released a draft Research Roadmap identifying ten core domains for preservation research.

Following a short introduction to the ten research domains, participants will be engaged in active discussion to identify five concrete research questions for each of the 10 research domains identified in the roadmap. An effort will be made in the discussion to contextualize these questions within different research communities: library and information science, computing science, and operational research. The outputs of the workshop should lead to ideas that could be converted into applications for research funding under the 7th Framework Programme in Europe and national research programs elsewhere.

http://www.digitalpreservationeurope.eu/publications

Handout (MS Word)

In August 2007, Indiana University (IU) entered into a strategic alliance with ChaCha, an Indiana company specializing in Internet search for research, development and services of next generation Internet search tools and practices. The alliance will incorporate the collective expertise of the University into ChaCha’s search architecture, which combines a sophisticated machine-based search with skilled human guides to quickly bring focus and precision to an info-seeker’s on-line query.

This alliance aims to provide:

• Ready access to university experts
• Assistance to info-seeker in finding relevant information and eliminate unwanted links
• A research structure for IU and ChaCha to develop a better understanding of how guided search can best serve the complex needs of students, faculty, and academic researchers

Work began on the project in the fall, with the initial offering of accredited results provided by the University’s libraries and information technology staff. The next stage has been the development of a trained corps of guides, providing live assistance to info-seekers and working behind the scenes to ensure that only the most relevant, current results are presented to the info-seeker. As deployment and development continues, future deliverables will likely include integration with academic research disciplines, administrative offices, student guiding, and mobile research.

The project briefing will describe the ChaCha system, the strategy for applying it at IU, and the progress of the project to date.

http://it.iu.edu
http://uits.iu.edu/scripts/ose.cgi?avrp.ose.help

Presentation (PPT)

Web 2.0 theorists argue that Internet technologies now allow us to harness the “Wisdom of the Crowd” in unprecedented ways. “Folksonomies,” which use the judgment of the crowd to organize documents, have worked extremely well on popular Web 2.0 sites such as Flickr, del.icio.ous, and LibraryThing. By collecting and analyzing the private descriptions — the tags — that users add to their own photos, URLs, and books, these sites generate valuable metadata about public documents and resources.

Although libraries have intelligent and dedicated patrons, traditional library online public access catalogs (OPACs) lack mechanisms for collecting the knowledge of library patrons. Library systems vendors have tried to develop ways of adding user-generated content to the catalog, but the user-base of any one library is too small to generate critical mass. However, by using the folksonomy created by LibraryThing users to add tags and recommendations to the catalog, libraries can overcome this obstacle. This project demonstrates that collective intelligence can add value to library records and illustrates how new technologies such as AJAX give us powerful means of combining library records with metadata created by other organizations.

http://opac.sfsu.edu/search/tinfotopia
http://online.sfsu.edu/~jwenzler/research/LTFL.pdf

Handout (PDF)

With the remarkable bloom of collaboration tools, including many of the Web 2.0 applications as well as the staples of email lists, wikis, etc., has come the pain of managing the tools and partnerships. Out of the challenges of managing collaboration have come some national and international efforts to provide new platforms to support sustainable collaboration. The platforms are developing rapidly and bringing many tools into a more manageable framework. However, helping users to manage the collaborations, to control their privacy, and to add new collaboration tools into these platforms requires some institutional support. This session will discuss the rush of collaboration tools, emergence of the management platforms, and the roles that librarians could play in helping the campus community to more effectively collaborate, both locally and globally.

http://middleware.internet2.edu/co/