A lack of organized data archiving may be just as serious a problem for scholarship and research as the outright disappearance of data. Perhaps the most significant contribution the library can make to the persistent discovery of scholarly information is to fix what we might call the “first mile” problem: the adequate identification and description of information before it is discovered by search engines and disseminated across the Web. Addressing this issue by forging richer relationships between information resources and related content will help improve the precision of searching and provide more useful context on retrieval. This briefing discusses some options for solving this first mile problem by exploring the issues surrounding a new type of collaboration between scientists and research library staff. The presenters will focus first on their National Science Foundation Small Grant for Exploratory Research and the activities related to the preservation, discovery, and sharing of primary linguistic and ecological research data. They will then show how concepts and standards from the Semantic Web community are being applied to categorize and connect related data elements about people and their research drawn from central IT data warehouses, department data marts, and direct faculty input as a service to promote the discovery of faculty and their research activities.

http://vivo.cornell.edu
http://metadata.mannlib.cornell.edu/lilac

Handout (PDF)

Presentation (PDF)

These two projects illustrate different approaches to assessing faculty needs. The University of Washington (UW) project focused on the bioscience community needs and used several qualitative methods for collecting data, as well as mining some quantitative data. The results were rich in content and proved helpful for understanding the changing needs of this community. At the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), an online survey was used to assess general faculty needs regarding collections, space and services. The survey was partly driven by campus space planning efforts to review new uses for Library space.

UCSF Faculty Survey on Library Space, Services, and Resources

As part of the UCSF library’s strategic planning effort, in July 2006 the Library asked faculty at all sites to complete a survey to help us determine what resources to acquire, what new services to develop, and how to reconfigure Library space to meet current and future needs of faculty and students. Space needs was a key aspect of the survey because of ongoing discussions to repurpose Library space for other campus purposes. Of 2,028 faculty invited to complete the survey, 620, or 31%, responded. Almost 300 narrative comments were also provided to supplement the multiple-choice answers, indicating a high level of interest in these topics.

The survey results provided useful input to space planning efforts. A similar survey of students the previous year focused on space needs and the faculty perspective complemented that data. Responses included some concrete needs for collections and services that we were able to address and thereby demonstrate the Library’s commitment to responding to faculty needs.

Limitations of the survey were also evident from the data, e.g. lack of clarity in some questions and potentially “leading” questions.

Specifically, the survey addressed these issues:
• Adequacy of online journals and resources
• Off-site storage of print materials
• Place-based library services
• Temporary workspace for faculty based off campus

Responses were tabulated by school (dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy) and by primarily role (educator, researcher, clinician). In most cases, significant alignment based on these groupings was not observed, but there were a few questions where it played a role. For example, educators and clinicians were more interested than researchers in assistance in managing images and multimedia for teaching.

Handout UCSF (MS Word)

PowerPoint Presentation UCSF

UW: Bioscience Information Needs and Use of Libraries

Suspecting a lack of congruence between the bioscience community’s needs and the Libraries’ services and resources, the University of Washington Libraries charged a task force to examine the information needs and behavior of this user community, how the Libraries responds to those needs, and make recommendations. The work of the Task Force took place throughout 2006.

What we did: The Task Force used multiple methods to collect and analyze information for this review. New information came primarily from qualitative efforts such as key informant interviews, focus groups, and an open-ended questionnaire for peer libraries. Other information mined from existing data sources included UW Libraries surveys, and library and institutional data. The qualitative results corroborated the existing quantitative data.

What we learned:
• Bioscience is becoming a networked and data-driven science
• Bioscience accounts for more than 80% of externally funded research at the UW and more than half of all faculty
• Faculty see the provision of e-journals as the Libraries’ most valuable contribution to their research
• The network of branch libraries is now viewed as a barrier to interdisciplinary research
• There is an expressed need for personal information management tools.
• Libraries’ connection to the bioscience enterprise needs strengthening
• There is a pervasive lack of awareness of Libraries’ services and resources

The data gathered has significant implications for the UW Libraries. The task force drew conclusions regarding the Library as place, organizational structure, and marketing activities. In addition, the results clarified our objectives for information discovery and delivery and ways to better support increasing interdisciplinarity. These findings, and the mandate to move forward with them, are now being incorporated as priorities in the Libraries’ 3-year strategic planning process.

http://tinyurl.com/gu2up
http://www.library.ucsf.edu/planning/survey2006/

Handout Univ of Wash (MS Word)

PowerPoint Presentation Univ of Wash

Video, computer, and Internet games are transforming our culture, from socializing and sports to medicine and economics. The level of engagement today’s students show with video games has become a digital holy grail for many educators looking to create newer and more active learning environments that will hold the attention of the Millennial generation. This generation has grown up with a different set of games than any before it – and it plays these games in different ways. Games tell stories, comment on and inform popular culture, provide challenges, create new social networks, encourage new kinds of learning, foster creativity, and let us play. Unlike many other forms of media, games are inherently malleable. Once seen as a passing form of amusement, games are joining literature and film and becoming a new type of literacy and platform for learning. The field of digital Game Studies incorporates these interdisciplinary aspects as scholars today examine both the impact of games themselves on individuals and society, as well as the mechanics and utilitarian applications of gaming technology for teaching, learning, and communicating concepts and ideas.

Through its traditional roles of collecting, preserving, and developing services for scholars and learners and applied in this rapidly developing area of innovation, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library is seeking to play a central role in ensuring that scholars and learners have access to games from the past, present, and future for their research and study. Library faculty have become engaged in the rich gaming culture that exists on today’s UIUC campus, with interests ranging from research to teaching to game-playing. The Library’s instructional programs are pursuing games as ways to teach students about library research. Gaming tournaments with guest faculty speakers take place in the Undergraduate Library as an outreach service to students who may not be familiar with library resources. Games are available for checkout from the Library’s media center and an archival strategy for including games developed at UIUC in the institutional repository will be developed in the coming years. A faculty request to place a game “on reserve” for his students this semester has catalyzed the development of a gaming research/learning location within the Undergraduate Library.

http://www.library.uiuc.edu/gaming

Handout (MS Word)

An important issue in planning, managing, and funding the broad range of information services on campuses is how to get departmental, campus, system-wide, and external organizations to work well together. Often they do not, and sometimes they actively compete.

The EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR), the Common Solutions Group, CNI, the UC Berkeley campus, and many other organizations have been working on developing collaborative models that provide better service and that save money.

This session will provide a forum for discussing these important governance issues.

http://www.educause.edu/ResearchBulletins/1007
http://technology.berkeley.edu/planning/strategic/pdf/IT_Report.pdf

Handout (MS Word)

Institutional repositories (IR’s) have existed for several years, and expertise is building as these efforts continue. What are we learning about the institutional policy and administrative issues surrounding the ongoing management and development of IR’s? CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch will moderate this panel discussion, in which we will hear from three institutions with significant expertise in developing and offering institutional repositories.

http://dspace.mit.edu/
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/resndev/repository.html

The Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) has a broad portfolio of system development and educational activities to support online collections. The priority areas of activity for 2007 include:
• Tools, services, and infrastructure for digital collections
• Repository interoperability
• E-research facilitation
• Research reporting

This project briefing will report on the progress of a wide range of activities in these areas including:
• The Fez+Fedora digital repository system
• The APSR Repository Interoperability Framework
• The FieldHelper software for enriching the metadata of field work data
• The Automated Obsolescence Notification System (AONS)
• The Australian e-Research Sustainability Survey (AERES)

The initialization of some new projects in 2007 will also be flagged, such as the Online Research Collections Australia (ORCA) Registry and Support Network, and the Benchmark Statistics (BEST) project.

http://www.apsr.edu.au

Handout (PDF)

IRSAW is a semantically based question-answering framework being developed within the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)-funded project of the same name. IRSAW integrates modules for different tasks such as a deep natural language analysis producing semantic network representations of questions and documents (based on the knowledge representation paradigm MultiNet), the combination of different data streams containing answer candidates, logical answer validation, and natural language generation.

The project will result in two software components accessible via the Internet: the question-answering (QA) system IRSAW and a web service for the semantic annotation of texts. The QA system processes user questions in three phases accessing three different kinds of resources: two information retrieval (IR) phases in which web search engines and local databases are accessed, and a QA phase, in which a semantic network knowledge base is accessed. During the first phase, the user question is transformed into an IR query, which is delivered to dedicated web search engines and web portals. Results obtained from the web typically consist of pages with lists of URLs. The web documents referenced by these URLs are retrieved and converted into text. In the second phase, the text passages from the web are segmented and indexed in local databases, which provide access to units of textual information of certain types (chapters, paragraphs, sentences, or phrases). In the third phase, different modules are employed to create answer streams: Question Answering by Pattern (QAP) matching, Modified Information Retrieval Approach (MIRA), and, most prominently, the InSicht system. The latter uses a linguistic parser to analyze the text segments and return the representation of the meaning of a text as a semantic network. Finding answers with InSicht is based on logical inferences and textual entailments on the annotation of questions and documents with semantic networks.

In contrast to other QA systems, IRSAW aims to:
a) Provide a full semantic interpretation of questions and documents on which logical inferences are based
b) Treat linguistic phenomena in questions and document (e.g. idioms, metonymy, and temporal and spatial aspects)
c) Generate natural language answers (instead of extracting answers from the text)

The first prototype of IRSAW was evaluated in 2006 at the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (combining the answer streams produced by QAP and InSicht), achieving one of the best results in the monolingual German question-answering track. Future work will include further evaluations and realizing the web service for semantic annotation of web pages.

Handout (PDF)

Presentation (PDF)

The MONK project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims at creating an environment that allows non-technical users to perform sophisticated text analysis and text mining procedures across a large collection of English texts written between the late fifteenth and the early twentieth century. One way to think of it is as a Book of English or a cultural genome in which readers can complement traditional practices of ‘close’ reading with new practices of ‘distant’ or ‘macro’ reading, digital and more powerful ways of ‘skimming,’ ‘thumbing through,’ ‘eye-balling’ or otherwise ‘not-reading’ the many books that one cannot read but must learn enough about to identify what will be closely considered in the end. Grouping and sorting as well as visualization techniques will be an important component of the interface.

http://www.monkproject.org/

Over the past two years, the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) project has built an organizational and technological framework to support the collaborative creation of content and context centered on the high quality resources in the library. This briefing will describe how NSDL has evolved and present the new organizational structure and technical platform. It will also describe how NSDL is leveraging open-source social networking and collaboration tools to build active, subject-focused communities of library contributors, while still preserving the best characteristics of traditional digital libraries.

http://nsdl.org

PowerPoint Presentation