Digital media success stories in undergraduate classrooms at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) that have emerged from the first year of the Weigle Information Commons at the Penn Libraries will be showcased in this session, focusing on the creation, organization and results of the 2007 Mashup Contest. Building on the common freshman reading of Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture, the contest brought together several entities around campus. Students created original video and mashups of commercial video to parody well-known movies. Award-winning entries will be shown, and there will be a discussion of interesting classroom assignments that have emerged from the project.

Student-created video is an interesting undergraduate assignment option at Penn, in some cases as an alternative to traditional research papers. Creative video assignments can engage students in high-level critical thinking, writing, planning, scripting and group collaboration tasks. Creative use of space, technology and collaborative assignments can engage students in new ways of acquiring knowledge.

http://wic.library.upenn.edu/workshops/mashup.html

Handout (PDF)

Monash University is the largest university in Australia (over 55,000 students and 10,000 staff) while also being international (campuses in three different countries) and research intensive. This briefing will examine a range of issues relating to data management and institutional repositories through the lens of a particular interaction between a group of data-intensive researchers and three related national projects that Monash is leading.

DART was established to develop solutions for many of the challenges inherent in a complete lifecycle approach to e-research. ARCHER is an extension of DART, taking concepts from DART and developing them as production services within the Australian national e-research environment. ARROW is building solutions for the management of institutional research outputs, as well as supporting communities of institutional repository practice.

The briefing will outline the institutional context and the background of the three projects, particularly the whole-of-institution, centralized approach that has been adopted. It will then cover the various stages in the engagement with the researchers, using this as a structure to discuss researcher information management, institutional data management planning, sustainable provision of storage for large data volumes, the data curation continuum, and the use of a publication repository to support research datasets. The briefing will conclude by discussing some of the latest significant Australian national developments in data management.

http://arrow.edu.au/
http://dart.edu.au/
http://archer.edu.au/

Handout (PDF)

PowerPoint Presentation

In recent years, innovations in Internet communication combined with greater bandwidth capacity have vastly increased the popularity of Internet video and voice calling services such as Skype, GTalk, and Windows Live Messenger. While past library experiments in video calling required significant investment in equipment and training, recent advances in online telephony present accessible, inexpensive opportunities to interact virtually and visually with patrons. From stationary video kiosks to face-to-face calling with distance users, numerous library applications of the technology are possible that carry significant implications for scholarly communication. Using the Ohio University Libraries’ Skype reference pilot as a case study, this session will explore the trials, tribulations, and technical issues involved in enhancing library communication using video and voice over IP.

http://www.library.ohiou.edu/ask/skype.html
http://www.slide.com/r/fCzFPSwMzD-4I1-GSndG5CGADhdgoWPB?previous_view=lt_embedded_url
http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/librarianinblack/2007/09/future-of-lib-3.html

Presentation (PDF)

Adding Shibboleth to an Existing Library Services Access Control Infrastructure (Kennedy)

Campus libraries use a patchwork of approaches to enforce access control to licensed resources; the list usually includes IP-based access control, proxies for access from off-campus, VPN, userids and passwords, REFERER_URL, etc. Each of these approaches is problematic and creates confusion for users. The standards-based Shibboleth federating and single sign-on software was developed to address the shortcomings of these methods while maintaining the privacy of the patron.

Adoption of Shibboleth as a higher education standard across much of western Europe has encouraged major information vendors to support it in production. Libraries are now asking about the potential policy, business practice and value, technology, and user experience issues that would have to be addressed if they were to add Shibboleth to their existing access control framework. This session will present the findings of librarians and information technology staff from five campuses (Cornell University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Chicago, and the University of California at San Diego) who have been working together to explore these questions.

Handout (MS Word)

PowerPoint Presentation

Shibboleth: Enabling Collaboration Across Institutions (Mattingly & Phillips)

The mission of the Texas Digital Library (TDL) is to provide infrastructure to enable new forms of scholarly communication and collaboration in higher education in Texas. TDL supports this mission through an array of services such as institutional repositories, a peer-reviewed journaling system, and blogs. The Shibboleth authentication framework allows for secure collaboration among the various universities. TDL created the infrastructure to support a multi-institution Shibboleth federation because no such state-wide federation existed in Texas. Presently, five schools spanning separate university systems are active in the federation, and others are in the process of joining it.

http://www.tdl.org/shibboleth

Handout (PDF)

Digital Preservation has been described as a challenge so large and complex that it requires many institutions working cooperatively to accomplish meaningful programmatic advances. Distributed digital preservation especially has come to be seen as a key strategy for successful multi-institutional collaboration on cyberinfrastructure, but there are few organizational and technical examples of truly distributed approaches to preserving locally digitized content. This session will describe recent developments in these areas by MetaArchive (a National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation program) and a new nonprofit corporation called Educopia that has been created to organize and operate such shared cyberinfrastructure programs.

The MetaArchive Cooperative began in 2004 as a collaborative venture of Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Louisville, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Auburn University, Florida State University, and the Library of Congress. The MetaArchive Cooperative has operated a distributed preservation network infrastructure for several years that is based on the LOCKSS software, and has now transformed into an independent, multi-state membership association hosted by the Educopia Institute and based in Atlanta, Georgia.

The Educopia Institute is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving scholarly communication in socially responsible ways, and especially through the creation of shared cyberinfrastructure between cultural heritage institutions. Such cyberinfrastructure encompasses many new networked technologies and systems that are still poorly understood in comparison to the traditional scholarly infrastructure of libraries and archives. The Institute is a host entity that will act as a catalyst to assist and advise academic and cultural institutions in the creation of new digital means of communicating and preserving the cultural record.

http://www.MetaArchive.org
http://www.educopia.org
http://www.lockss.org

Handout (MetaArchive MS Word)

Handout (Educopia MS Word)

Based in the Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Print Media, the Open Publishing Lab (OPL) is a cross-disciplinary center that focuses on researching new methods of content creation and developing innovative applications to publish across various media.

Wikis are multiuser, database driven, Web content management systems. Countless knowledge repositories across the web and within company intranets are powered by wiki software. Currently there is no efficient solution to convert sections of wiki content into portable documents. The OPL has developed a prototype application for converting select wiki content into documents that could be driven to a wide range of output devices. With this application users are able to output individually selected content from a wiki repository and produce a finished PDF for publication across multiple channels.

http://opl.cias.rit.edu

The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is an ongoing collaboration between academics, librarians, publishers, editors, and software developers, working together to build alternatives in scholarly publishing. It operates through a partnership among the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, the Simon Fraser University Library, the School of Education at Stanford University, and the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University.

The project has developed an open source software suite that significantly reduces the time and expense required for producing academic journals and conferences, and facilitates making research results freely available through open access. The PKP’s suite of software includes four separate but inter-related applications, including the Open Journal Systems (OJS), the Open Conference Systems (OCS), the PKP Metadata Harvester, and Lemon8-XML. In the summer of 2007, PKP identified over 1000 journals using OJS, more than 100 conferences using OCS, at least 10 organizations using the Harvester, and 827 members on the support forum.

The project briefing will include a brief history of the PKP, an overview of the software modules, development plans and collaborations.

http://pkp.sfu.ca/

Handout (MS Word)

The recommender service BibTip is a value-added service which extends the functionality of libary online public access catalogs (OPAC) with automatically generated recommendations based on the statistical analysis of observed user behavior. For the users of a scientific library the service recommends books (or any object in the library) which are closely related to the books/objects the user is currently inspecting in the OPAC. These recommendations often are of high value to users, especially in very narrow and specialized domains. The service complements and helps reference librarians when consulting with students or researchers. In addition, because it is behavior-based, the service is completely language-independent and it works for digital objects of arbitrary media type. The service has been operating 24 hours a day and 7 days a week at the library of the Universität Karlsruhe (TH) since 2001. In ongoing evaluations, it consistently ranked between 4 and 5 with more than 900 students, researchers and librarians at Karlsruhe on a 5 point scale with 5 denoting the best ranking.

Recently, the system has been improved in its scalability and robustness. Because of its minimal interface, it can be easily integrated as a service in Web-OPACs. Since spring 2007, the service has been successfully integrated in meta-library catalogs (e.g. the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog (KVK), OPACs of library networks (e.g. SWB) and of larger libraries (e.g. Badische Landesbibliothek), but also in small departmental libraries (e.g. at the Institute of Information Engineering and Management of the Universität Karlsruhe [TH]). A rollout to more than 10 major libraries in Germany is in progress until the end of 2007.

A survey of the project including the system architecture, the statistical models and their scientific roots, and the service integration into Web OPACs will be given in the presentation. The development of a global service infrastructure and service organization will be sketched and its implementability will be discussed.

http://www.em.uni-karlsruhe.de/research/projects/reckvk/index.php?id=Participate!
http://www.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/hylib/suchmaske.html
http://www.bibtip.org/

Handout (MS Word)

The systems supporting scholarly communication are rapidly evolving. Academic libraries and their parent institutions are adopting strategies, making plans, and taking action to respond to the changing environment and to influence its development. Believing that meaningful research can inform and assist the entire academic community in influencing and managing this evolution, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) convened an invitational meeting in July, 2007, to collectively brainstorm about the evidence needed and the research gaps to inform strategic planning and action for scholarly communication programs. Principals from ACRL, the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), Ithaka, and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) participated.

A report presents the synthesized results of the meeting — a framework for a research agenda that ranges from deeper understanding of cyberinfrastructure to the interaction between public policy and scholarly publishing. This briefing session will present the framework and, as the report itself does, invite those engaged in creating, supporting, and distributing scholarship to refine and extend the issues and possible research initiatives. Without substantive comment from librarians and their partners, the goal of outlining a community research agenda cannot be considered complete.

http://www.acrl.ala.org/scresearchagenda/index.php?title=Main_Page

Handout (MS Word)

PowerPoint Presentation

In Library as Place: Rethinking Roles. Rethinking Space, Geoffrey A. Freeman wrote that the “library is the only centralized location where new and emerging information technologies can be combined with traditional knowledge resources in a user-focused, service-rich environment that supports today’s social and educational patterns of learning, teaching, and research.” Creation of the Research Commons in the East Tower of the Herman B. Wells Library at Indiana University-Bloomington will offer support in one central campus location to faculty and graduate students at any point in the complex research process. By assembling groups and expertise now distributed throughout the campus, the Research Commons will blend technology with traditional resources to serve as a center for a wide range of scholarly activities that will transform traditional research library space.

This presentation will focus on the development of the Research Commons concept and vision that will leverage three established strengths of the libraries:

• Expertise: Perhaps the greatest promise of the Research Commons will be its ability to draw together many layers of expertise in one location. As a place for community-building, the Research Commons will address the need for scholars to interrelate, both within and across the conventional boundaries of their disciplines.
• Infrastructure: The Herman B. Wells Library offers essential space in a prime campus location. The entire East Tower of the Wells Library, with floor space greater than 11 football fields, will be dedicated to the Research Commons. Technology will be an essential and conspicuous component of the Research Commons, with equipment necessary to support a wide range of scholarly activity.
• Information Resources: A research library “the traditional locus for scholars to interact among the collections they value” can offer similar opportunities in a digital age. The rich collections of the IUB Libraries will be a central feature of the Research Commons.

The presenters will discuss the planning process, engaging campus partners, faculty and librarians, and how the Research Commons fits into the campus master planning process.

PowerPoint Presentation