Copyright balancing has become a critical issue in the academy as digital practices increasingly have challenged creaky policies and practices. Scholars, academic administrators, librarians, intellectuals, and their students and mentees, need reasonable access to copyrighted culture to research and produce new knowledge. They and their distributors, whether journal publishers or YouTube, need to be able to share work that references and quotes copyrighted material without going through clearance processes never designed for this sector.

Academics have begun to explore their rights under copyright law to quote copyrighted culture, especially under the doctrine of fair use. They have powerful examples: since 2005, several creator groups, including documentary filmmakers, re-mixers, and media literacy teachers, have developed codes of best practices in fair use. These codes are having a powerful, even game-changing effect in practice. In this session, the presenters will discuss their collaboration to facilitate the creation of these codes, and discuss how this model might apply to the academic environment.

http://centerforsocialmedia.org
http://www.wcl.american.edu/pijip/

Researchers in United Kingdom higher education institutions are creating vast quantities of data; however, few institutions have formal strategies in place for curating these research outputs. Moreover, there appears to be a lack of awareness in many institutions as to what data are held and whether they are being managed. If institutions are to realize the full potential value of their data through its reuse they must be able to establish, quickly and easily, an overview of holdings and the policies and practices in place to manage them.

The Data Audit Framework (DAF) provides organizations with the means to identify, locate, describe and assess how they are managing their research data assets. DAF combines a set of methods with an online tool to enable data auditors to gather this information.

http://www.data-audit.eu/

Handout (PDF)

Power Point Presentation

The Digital Bridges Initiative, formed by the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) in 2007, is dedicated to connecting classroom study to curated digital collections. Working in partnership with faculty, librarians, media repositories, and museums, this initiative supports learning through the active manipulation of curated, persistent, and high-quality source materials, and treats the strongest student analysis of such material as itself worthy of collection. This session will chart the Digital Bridges model in educational projects at Columbia University across several different subject areas. Emphasis will be placed on ways in which the initiative draws on the traditional strengths of the research library, and influences planning for new library services and collection development.

http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/digitalbridges/

Handout (PDF)

The Digital Bridges Initiative, formed by the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) in 2007, is dedicated to connecting classroom study to curated digital collections. Working in partnership with faculty, librarians, media repositories, and museums, this initiative supports learning through the active manipulation of curated, persistent, and high-quality source materials, and treats the strongest student analysis of such material as itself worthy of collection. This session will chart the Digital Bridges model in educational projects at Columbia University across several different subject areas. Emphasis will be placed on ways in which the initiative draws on the traditional strengths of the research library, and influences planning for new library services and collection development.

http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/digitalbridges/

Handout (PDF)

Over the past few years, the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries have embarked on a diverse set of digital library initiatives to improve access to library services and collections beyond the library Website. Some of these projects have focused on non-library Web environments such as learning management systems and personal information management sites such as iGoogle. Other projects have focused on delivery of digital content in the physical library space through the use of electronic display boards. NCSU was also a pioneer in providing access to library services for mobile devices. This presentation will describe the motivation for these projects, provide a visual tour of the work to date, and discuss promising directions for future work.

http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/dli/projects/courseviews/
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/dli/projects/catalogwsapps/
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/dli/projects/mobilib/

The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, dedicated to the intelligent use of information technology for teaching and learning, is kick-starting a community-wide effort to surface and synthesize the biggest “challenges” in teaching and learning with IT. More than a mere brainstorming exercise, the project focuses on identifying issues and then building community solutions and resources around them. Attendees are invited to share ideas during this interactive project briefing and to learn, debate, and join the community process while getting the inside story on this community project

Handout (PDF)

Knowledge is being transformed from something that is primarily conveyed in paper formats into something else: a computable graph in which the knowledge is written in formats that computers can understand and interconnect, based on the same technologies that underlie the Internet and the Web. Paper technology simply contains expressions of ideas, but the very technology of paper makes the “integration” of ideas very difficult, if not impossible.

Graphs allow ideas to “snap” together into larger and larger networks, which can, in turn, allow computers to help us interrogate the knowledge more effectively. There are competing technologies to achieve this, but the idea of “paper” as the core container for knowledge is dying, and technology will be the killer. This transformation is happening first, like the transformation of documents to the Web, in the sciences. The move to a computable graph as a knowledge storage technology holds enormous promise for e-research. But this is “uncommon knowledge” – knowledge has never been dealt with in this manner, and it shows. New systems and infrastructures are needed to deal with this uncommon knowledge and to fulfill the promise of e-research.

This briefing will lay out the experiences gained in the creation of a large, open-source “graph” that integrates primary data sources in the life sciences: technical challenges, legal challenges, and social challenges. It will also explore the infrastructure created in order to achieve this goal, and relay the preliminary experiences resulting from distributing and supporting such a research product.

http://sciencecommons.org
http://neurocommons.org
http://creativecommons.org

The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) has been established to ensure that Australian research data is well managed, made available for access, and discoverable so that:

• researchers can find and access any relevant data in the Australian ‘research data commons’
• Australian researchers are able to discover, exchange, reuse and combine data from other researchers and other domains within their own research in new ways
• Australia is able to share data easily and seamlessly to support international and nationally distributed multidisciplinary research teams.

ANDS is being funded until mid-2011 as one of the Platforms for Collaboration under the Australian National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. This briefing will present the underlying assumptions for ANDS, cover progress to date, provide an overview of what ANDS is planning to achieve, and discuss how the ANDS approach differs from the National Science Foundation DataNet and UK Research Data Service approaches. It should be of interest to anyone working in the data management space.

http://ands.org.au/

Handout (PDF)

Two new projects will be discussed: “Voting America” and the “History Engine.” Both projects experiment with what the future of teaching and research might be in the digital age. “Voting America” employs visualizations and cinematic techniques to make a massive amount of data–the 1.6 billion votes that have been cast in presidential elections during the last 164 years–more accessible to students of history and politics. The “History Engine” captures the research of undergraduate students and aggregates their work to produce a very detailed, very large resource about the American past, one that is valuable both to students within the classroom and to a larger public. Both projects are designed to model how colleges and universities might seize new opportunities and meet the challenges presented by digitized resources and digital techniques.

http://americanpast.richmond.edu/voting/
http://historyengine.richmond.edu

Handout (MS Word)

Although interactive publications account for only approximately 2% of the published journal articles currently indexed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), it is expected that this number could grow dramatically in the years ahead. This growth will entail new technical challenges for NLM and other libraries in providing effective storage and accessibility, while improving the potential for journal article readers to experience and benefit from enhanced learning and understanding. Publishers are also concerned with the need to innovate and improve the way scientific information is communicated and used. NLM is presently pursuing three complementary initiatives that provide platforms and tools for experimenting with interactive technology and assessing its impact on users. They differ in strategy by initially emphasizing, variously, the perspective of the end-user (Collaborative Experiment with Elsevier and the Student National Medical Association); the author/editor/reviewer (Collaborative Experiment with the Optical Society of America); and the perspective of the engineer (Lister Hill Center R&D).

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/

Presentation (PDF)