Digitization projects that scan and abandon – that simply generate static, digital copies of analog pages and then move on – might be missing out on some of the more relevant capabilities of the Semantic Web, with its creeping xml veins and mashed-up interfaces. Purdue University Libraries is resurrecting a 1906 Soil Survey and mashing it with itself in order to add value, access, and interaction beyond the more traditional scan/describe/store model of collection recovery. It is an attempt to leverage the evolving technologies of librarianship (description, yes, but also text markup, web application-building, and geographic information systems [GIS]) toward the benefit of our users’ maturing needs and expectations. Soil surveys document soil types and locations via prose and maps, typically published as a single document. Modern soil surveys are born digital and used largely in electronic contexts (including GIS) but there are decades of rich comparative data being left to atrophy in the undigitized copies of aging paper surveys. This project digitizes both components of the 1906 survey – the text and map – and extracts both into useable, modern data formats. In addition to OCR’d, fully indexed, fully searchable full text, the soil zone data from the map will also be extracted into a useable, queryable, studyable GIS dataset. Search and query will be available for each component of the original document and each will be able to link and query the other, allowing the user to jump seamlessly between text and map and back based on common semantic elements. The session will update the status of the project, demonstrate a working draft of the map and document interface, and discuss the more macro implications of librarians recognizing new expectations for usability by applying new technologies to their collections.

Presentation (PDF)

At Georgetown University many students are engaged in collaborative research with community organizations that support social change. However, there is little interaction between students and faculty from different disciplines, and these researchers rarely have opportunities to document and share their work. Through support from the Provost’s Undergraduate Learning Initiative grant that supports teaching and learning, the Center for Social Justice and the University Library are collaborating to develop an online CBR community.

• The online CBR learning community seeks to augment the community-based research being conducted by allowing students to do the following:
  Share research strategies and support each other’s projects. For example, psychology students can provide interviewing skills to chemists who want to assess residents’ attitudes about their research project on the polluted Anacostia River in Washington, DC.
• Share resources across disciplines. For example, students who work with high school biology classes can learn about the housing community in which their students live from a sociology student working on affordable housing research.
• Publicize their work through online research posters that give details about both the challenges and successes they face in their work.
• Publish findings through the development of an online, peer reviewed CBR journal.

In this session, the principal investigators will describe the components of the online CBR learning community, the model they have developed that illustrates their vision for integrating scholarship, collaborative learning, and publication into the undergraduate research experience, and they will share their observations gained from the initial cohort.

Handout (MS Word)

Canadian museums, more than ever before, are responding to the challenges of adapting to an ever-changing environment to remain relevant to their communities, stakeholders and funders. They are responsible for engaging new audiences, dealing with repatriation issues, looking for new funding opportunities, competing with other venues for visitors and visitor dollars, and creating experiences for these visitors. New and emerging technology opportunities can help museums transform their business practices to adapt to this new environment. This session will examine what business transformation is and why it is important to museums. The results from two research studies commissioned by CHIN will be presented: 1) Transformational Technology Opportunities in the Next Decade and 2) Competitive Environment Scan.

A single replica of a large database, such as the petabyte scale protein database, may cost millions of dollars. Minimizing the number of replicas needed to assure adequate preservation becomes the dominant design goal. As preserving large scientific datasets becomes a focus of the National Science Foundation’s cyber-infrastructure program, how well prepared are we to take rational investment decisions about systems in this area?

Drawing on research by the LOCKSS research team and others, this session surveys the state of engineering knowledge and points out the gaps that need to be filled by digital preservation research. These gaps include needs for better specification and characterization of media performance (recent papers show that everything you know about disk reliability is wrong), better models of the threats (the most frequent cause of data loss at large sites is operator error), better models of fault tolerance (recent papers show that both RAID and Byzantine Fault Tolerance are inappropriate models) and better ways of formulating the relationship between a preservation service and its customers (disclaiming all responsibility for the preserved data is not a suitable service level agreement).

PowerPoint Presentation (PDF)

Digital Case is an electronic repository that archives, stores, disseminates, and preserves faculty research in digital formats (both “born digital” and materials of historic interest that have been digitized). Organizing and maintaining published materials has long been the domain of research libraries. With the Digital Case project, the Kelvin Smith Library assumes a more active role in the scholarly communication process, providing expertise in the form of a set of services (metadata tagging, authority control, secure environment, preservation over time) for access and distribution of Case’s collective intellectual product.

There are several unique aspects of the Digital Case project:

1. Exploring the potential for combining commercial software with open source software: Digital Case uses a commercial content management system (Ektron) as the administrative interface. Since neither Ektron nor Fedora were designed to communicate with each other, it took some creativity to integrate the two systems. Discussing the design process as well as demonstrating the live implementation should spark some creative thinking about building a complete, functioning digital library.

2. Designing a digital library / institutional repository from the customer perspective: It would seem that most organizations take the approach of starting with what they are given (i.e. Fedora, DSpace) and attempt to turn that into a complete system. With the help of a local professional design firm (Optiem), the Case Western team started the process by asking users how they would envision a digital library. By starting with no limits or preconceived notions, the team feels Digital Case breaks new ground, in particular because institutional repositories are technical in nature and technical staff typically drive the process. This project approaches the process from a different angle.

http://library.case.edu/digitalcase

Handout (PDF)

PowerPoint Presentation

Community and open source software is sparking interest with promises of new choices for enterprise applications and a higher education-focused approach, while simultaneously raising questions for administrators about when and whether to adopt or devote resources to software development projects. Case studies of community and open source decisions by UCLA and Stanford demonstrate approaches for considering this emerging area of technology development, including product and architectural evaluations, campus engagement, understanding institutional priorities and campus readiness, interoperability with IT infrastructure and library systems, sustainability, and fit with the IT culture and environment.

http://www.oit.ucla.edu/ccle/default.htm
http://coursework-pilot.stanford.edu

Handout (MS Word)

PowerPoint Presentation

Social software sites like Flickr and YouTube demonstrate the significant appetite among the community at large to engage in collective efforts, as well as the transformative potential of the web in terms of linking people and ideas. Flickr alone has over 1 billion photos, with an estimated 11,547 images “served” per second on busy days.

Yet despite these broader trends toward sharing on the open Internet, educational institutions often are hesitant to engage in online sharing of content because of the fears and uncertainty of infringing third party copyrights. Frequently this means that educational institutions try to build their own resources, replicating efforts undertaken at other institutions and creating redundant content, rather than sharing that content with other educational users. This has also meant that some unique materials that would be of value to the broader educational community are inaccessible because of the uncertainties surrounding copyright.

Through this project briefing, we will explore how the educational community might take a more collaborative approach to sharing content (and in particular visual images) for teaching and study. The session will include a discussion of how the broader copyright disputes in the commercial context are creating norms and laws that are being applied to the educational community, and how the laws – and the educational community – are failing to distinguish between teaching and study, on the one hand, and commercial uses, on the other. The session will also include a discussion of the current unwillingness among educational institutions to rely on the copyright doctrine of fair use in sharing their content with other educational institutions, and how some of those concerns might be addressed collectively. The final part of the project briefing will be a collaborative discussion with attendees exploring specific next steps.

Handout (MS Word)