As the use of federated identity grows, new technologies, new businesses and new collaborations continue to blossom. This session will highlight a number of the most recent activities, including international inter-federation activities, new European Union privacy requirements, emergent privacy managers, integration of collaboration tools, engagement with federal research activities, and the hints of harmony now beginning in the open source application space. The session will end with the traditional impassioned speech for librarians to bring their expertise to help on the critical issues emerging in human interface, privacy management, and metadata.

Power Point Presentation

Funded by The Andrew W. Mellon foundation, Project Bamboo is an 18-month arts and humanities cyberinfrastructure planning project that aims to explore how shared technology services can enhance research, learning, and scholarship. The first series of workshops engaged over 350 people from nearly 100 institutions and organizations worldwide in exploring and detailing contemporary scholarly practice. The second workshop in mid-October built upon the previous work and defined and refined the direction of Bamboo. This briefing will bring CNI members up-to-date with the latest information regarding the project including findings to date and the evolving directions for Bamboo.

http://projectbamboo.org

Presentation (PDF)

The HathiTrust is a newly formed collaborative digital repository for research libraries. Its initial aspirations are nothing less than building the universal library, beginning with bringing together the content created through large-scale digitization efforts. By the end of this calendar year, the repository will provide at least some level of access to more than 2 million volumes of digitized content, and this number will grow by millions of volumes each year. The HathiTrust effort embeds all of the principles of long-term, secure archiving in a framework devoted to the needs of large research libraries and the institutions of which they are a part.

This briefing will discuss the developments of the HathiTrust to date, as well as the short- and long-term objectives of the HathiTrust. The presenters will discuss the current organizational structure of the enterprise and will attempt to convey a vision of where they hope the HathiTrust will be in five years. Time permitting, this presentation will demonstrate some of the basic access technology of the HathiTrust while discussing functions under development (e.g., services for users with disabilities) and the future enhancement of access strategies (e.g., large-scale full text search).

http://www.HathiTrust.org

Handout

Power Point Presentation

Formed in January 2008, the Research Data Strategy (RDS) Working Group is a collaborative effort to address the challenges surrounding the access and preservation of data in Canada. The RDS Working Group includes representatives from Canadian universities, government and non-governmental research institutes, university and national libraries, granting agencies, and individual researchers. This session will include a report on outcomes to date and plans for the next year.

http://data-donnees.gc.ca/eng/index.html

Handout (MS Word)

Power Point Presentation

A collaborative digital library, tentatively named “Crisis, Tragedy and Recovery” (CTR) is in the early stages of development. This digital library will capture and store information for spontaneous events so users can access, search, analyze, and study the collections and learn from events and tragedies that happen around the world. Digital material relating to the campus shootings at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), shootings in Finland, the tragedy at Northern Illinois University, and the flooding in Iowa has already been collected and archived. Additionally, the Internet Archive has previously worked with curators to archive events such as Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 Tsunami and the recent Russia/Georgia conflict.

This panel will discuss the need for this digital library and its objectives, as well as some of the challenges faced while documenting and learning from these fast changing events and the ongoing recovery processes that follow. Educational strategies to train future librarians will be discussed (building on an NSF funded digital library curriculum project) to exploit opportunities for designing and implementing digital libraries that serve special populations and assist in disaster recovery.

The archived data will be hosted and accessible through the Internet Archive Data Center in San Francisco, with cooperative services at Virginia Tech. The hope is that data will be distributed further as well, with partners storing a copy of their data onsite at their institution, as well as applying and extending digital library and preservation tools like DSpace, Fedora, and LOCKSS. Plans to support studies by social and behavioral scientists, scholars, and policy makers, as well as the general public are in place. Feedback and interest in participating and contributing is welcome.

Handout (PDF)

What happens when librarians/archivists at an academic library partner with public policy experts at a nonprofit organization to build a permanent digital repository? Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) and the Center for Governmental Studies (CGS) in Los Angeles are building a comprehensive, searchable open access, online archive of public policy research. Each partner brings unique strengths to the project, creating a cross-organizational team that has successfully launched a DSpace/Manakin repository holding almost 5,000 policy-related documents. This session will focus on the first year experiences leading up to launch and its continued development. Internally, a workable collaboration has developed between the partners dealing with such issues as legal agreements, workflow pacing and process, end product appearance and searchability, and general consensus on product development. Externally, relationships with the content providers (think tanks, foundations, research centers, and universities) have developed to acquire the documents. Issues include general buy-in to the concept and to open access, and an understanding of rights and responsibilities, especially non-exclusive distribution rights.

https://www.policyarchive.org/

Power Point Presentation

The Library of Congress, the California Digital Library (CDL), the University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries, the Internet Archive (IA), and the U.S. Government Printing Office have joined together for a collaborative project to preserve public United States government Web sites at the end of the current presidential administration, ending January 19, 2009. This harvest is intended to document federal agencies’ presence on the World Wide Web during the transition of presidential administrations and to enhance the existing collections of the five partner institutions.

In this collaboration, the partners will structure and execute a comprehensive harvest of the federal government .gov domain. The IA will crawl broadly across the entire .gov domain. UNT and CDL will supplement and extend the broad comprehensive crawl with focused, in-depth crawls based on prioritized lists of URLs. This dual-edged approach seeks to capture a comprehensive snapshot of the federal government on the Web at the close of the current administration.

The project will call upon government information specialists—including librarians, political and social science researchers, and academics—to assist in the selection and prioritization of Web sites to be included in the collection, as well as to identify the frequency and depth of the act of collecting. A tool has been designed by the project team and developed by UNT to facilitate the collaborative work of these specialists, and was made available to participants in August 2008. The briefing will report on the development of the nomination tool, progress of the nomination and prioritization process, and the progress on initial crawls.

Handout (MS Word)

Power Point Presentation

A number of organizations and institutions are working to harvest Web content before it disappears, but the real challenge behind that objective includes the development of coherent, holistic models for incorporating Web content into research library collections. Such models must go beyond the undertaking of harvesting and archiving Web pages– they must include establishing selection policies, integrating access with related published and archival collections, and creating sustainable workflows within the library’s broader collecting program. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a grant to Columbia University Libraries and the University of Maryland Libraries in support of a collaborative project with three interrelated objectives:

• to identify actions needed to incorporate freely available Web content in the libraries’ collection-building processes
• to estimate the scale of institutional investment needed to pursue such a program, retrospectively and on an ongoing basis
• to suggest means by which such local investment, as well as the benefits of the resulting collections, can be shared across and among the larger research library community.

To test these questions and develop models applicable to a range of content, Columbia and Maryland are each focusing on a subject area in which it has strong existing collections and a strong research interest: Columbia on human rights and Maryland on historic preservation (saving historic places and revitalizing communities in the U.S.). For both of these subject areas, a significant body of content is generated by non-commercial organizations, with a growing amount in digital form only and with uncertain prospects for long-term availability.

The principle investigators from Columbia University and the University of Maryland will summarize their progress and issues encountered in this investigation and invite discussion and advice from participants attending this briefing.

In November 2008 the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) released the findings of a study commissioned from Ithaka’s Strategic Services Group exploring the wealth of digital scholarship being produced today outside of traditional publishing channels. The research process for this study involved two phases: the creation of an international field team of librarians to interview faculty, and a close examination of the more than 200 examples of new kinds of scholarly works that faculty named as resources they use to support their scholarship. A database documenting the study collection has also been made freely available.

In the first phase of work, ARL and Ithaka created a field team of volunteers from 46 institutions in the US and Canada. Working closely with a small pilot group to refine the process, ARL gathered over 300 volunteers to participate in this project by seeking out on-campus professors to initiate guided conversations about the digital resources they use.

The hundreds of digital resources reported by faculty to the field team covered a broad disciplinary range and fell into eight basic categories: e-only journals; reviews; preprints and working papers; encyclopedias, dictionaries, and annotated content; blogs; discussion lists; and academic or professional hubs. Beyond genre, information on additional characteristics such as peer review and quality control practices were collected. Indicators of how faculty who reported examples of new works of scholarship are using them were gathered as well. Collectively, the study data provide a unique view of current communicative practices and how they may vary between disciplines. Distinctive patterns and indicators of emerging trends provide some surprises with regard to what many might consider conventional wisdom.

The richness of the study collection and the scope of its analysis allow a fresh picture of the contemporary landscape of scholars’ use of new kinds of digital works to emerge. By creating this librarian field team and having the members collect examples directly from faculty, this study not only yielded rich information on the resources faculty use, but also set a valuable precedent for further collaborations between librarians and their faculty colleagues.

http://www.arl.org/sc/models/model-pubs/pubstudy/
http://www.arl.org/sc/models/model-pubs/search-form.shtml
http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/current-models-report.pdf

Handout (PDF)

Handout  (PDF)

Power Point Presentation