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)

Emergency preparedness is a topic that every institution is addressing, including how to continue classes if students cannot physically come to campus or if the campus is shut down for an extended period of time. Past experience indicates that undergraduates taking general education (GE) courses are most affected. The shear numbers of enrollments in GE courses also negatively affects the institution if it has to refund tuition because there is a disruption in its ability to operate.

This project briefing will describe an idea of how to engage students where they are, while waiting out a disaster. Faculty will be able to assign a cathartic activity that directly relates to the GE topic and, at the same time, respond to the crisis at hand. This solution requires that information technology professionals and librarians work together with faculty to provide students with a suite of “literacy skills” and access to quality content related to their GE topic. Students would then chronicle their experiences through a traditional paper/presentation or as a digital storyteller, citizen journalist, or service learner. This solution is not institution specific; every higher education institution in the country (and world) should develop a plan to continue learning under duress.

This project briefing will bring attendees together to further explore these activities and look for ways to build the governance, infrastructure, and learning components to pilot this idea.

An RLG Programs initiative investigating library, archive and museum collaboration in campus (and campus-like) environments held workshops at five institutions, and culminated in the report “Beyond the Silos of the LAMs.” The findings of the report provide the backdrop for a discussion of recent developments at Princeton and the Smithsonian, which seek to better serve their diverse audiences through a more integrated view of their collections, and reap economic benefits of scale along the way. Princeton has recently created a Digital Repository Architect position in the Office of Information Technology, and has begun to investigate consolidation of storage and management for digital assets. A high-functioning federated search engine for digital images and methods for incorporating social tagging functionality into digital repository services are also among the envisioned new services. In September, the Smithsonian’s new Secretary publicly announced his aspiration of making the collections in its two dozen collecting units available online. Towards this end, the Smithsonian has established a Central Digitization Office to spearhead the development of a pan-Institutional digitization strategic plan, and is focusing on building the pre-requisite organizational and technical infrastructures, policies and processes needed to make a digital Smithsonian a reality when resources become available.

http://www.oclc.org/programs/publications/reports/2008-05.pdf

Users of today’s digital libraries are confronted with information spaces that are rapidly growing in quantity, heterogeneity, relationality and dimensionality. Therefore, more effective tools are required to facilitate the exploration and search in these information spaces. MedioVis is a flexible application for the visual exploration of such data that is especially designed for users without prior professional experience in search, retrieval or visualization.

To provide users with a satisfying search experience, different views of the data space are available, and the system supports analytical and browsing oriented exploration strategies through the use of multiple coordinated visualizations and a consistent and supportive interaction design. Furthermore, visualizations based on well-known and straightforward concepts (e.g. tables or scatter plots) were intentionally used and combined. These visualizations provide visual filtering mechanisms (e.g. table filters or zooming into a region of a scatter plot) to support a natural method for query formulation and refinement. To avoid information overload, detail information can be accessed by continuous semantic zooming (e.g. into a table cell).

The project was launched four years ago and still undergoes iterative development and evaluation cycles. To gain continuous end-user feedback and insights in to real interaction behavior, MedioVis has been running for over three years in the media library of the Library of the University of Konstanz. It allows users an alternative approach, alongside the standard online catalog system, to search through more than 70,000 multimedia objects such as movies or documentaries. A particular challenge was the seamless integration of services, both catalog and Web services such as library accounting or GoogleMaps. By directly interlinking these with the catalog objects, the Mashup and Web 2.0 concepts are addressed from a whole new direction. Furthermore the information space is enriched with additional, heterogeneous data from the Web such as images or video trailers. To allow access to these objects, the interaction design was revised by comprehensively integrating zoomable user-interface concepts.

http://hci.uni-konstanz.de/MedioVis
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mediovis/

Handout (PDF)

Presentation (PDF)

As our students and researchers become increasingly dependent on mobile devices, what types of content and services might they want to access related to their academic work? Scientists in the field may want access to digital image collections, perhaps those residing in institutional repositories. Health sciences students and faculty may want access to standard reference sources on their handhelds when they are in clinical settings. Archaeologists might benefit from access to images and reference works when working at a site. Libraries are beginning to think about offering content that is tailored for access on mobile platforms. In addition, they are implementing services for users “on the go” such as information literacy podcasts, updates on availability of computers in the library, and access to patron records. This session will provide an overview of leading edge services libraries are developing for mobile users and will describe a planning process for instituting services and content for mobile devices. Participants will be asked to contribute examples from programs at their own institutions.

Power Point Presentation

Over the past two years the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), in a project called Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE), has gathered international experts from the publishing, web, library, repository, and eScience communities to develop standards for the identification and description of aggregations of Web resources. These standards provide the foundation for applications and services that can visualize, preserve, transfer, summarize, and improve access to the aggregations that people use in their daily Web interaction: including multiple page Web documents, multiple format documents in institutional repositories, scholarly data sets, and online photo and music collections. The OAI-ORE standards leverage the core Web architecture and concepts emerging from related efforts including the semantic web, linked data, and Atom syndication. As a result, they integrate both with the emerging machine-readable Web, Web 2.0, and the future evolution of networked information. This presentation provides an overview of the ORE solution to handle aggregations of Web resources, and provides an insight to emerging developments based on ORE.

http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/toc

Handout (PDF)

The Open Library Environment (OLE) Project is planning a community-designed, open-source alternative to the traditional integrated library system. With funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a multinational group of libraries is convening the library community to develop a design for a next-generation library system using Service Oriented Architecture and open source technologies. Representatives from several participating libraries will discuss OLE Project activities to date, solicit feedback from attendees and describe ways that others interested in the project can get involved.

http://oleproject.org/

Handout (MS Word)

Power Point Presentation

Does the culture of librarians, expressed in their work tools and behaviors, hinder their connection with the changing learning and research practices of faculty and students? The Patterns of Culture project used ethnographic methodologies to explore these potential disconnects at the Newhouse School of Public Communications and the Library at Syracuse University. Building on the Rochester example for user research, open-ended interviews with faculty, students and librarians focused on actual work practice to elicit the different needs and barriers each group experiences in their work. Atlas.ti software was used to analyze sixty-one interviews. Differences by group were seen in the experience of barriers related to:

• accessing online resources and finding information
• technologies for communicating and staying current
• engagement with students and instructional pedagogy

This presentation and discussion will center on how the method was realized, the insights it brought to bear on the data, and the usefulness of the approach for both illuminating user needs and fostering library organizational re-alignment. This project has been supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Power Point Presentation

Does the culture of librarians, expressed in their work tools and behaviors, hinder their connection with the changing learning and research practices of faculty and students? The Patterns of Culture project used ethnographic methodologies to explore these potential disconnects at the Newhouse School of Public Communications and the Library at Syracuse University. Building on the Rochester example for user research, open-ended interviews with faculty, students and librarians focused on actual work practice to elicit the different needs and barriers each group experiences in their work. Atlas.ti software was used to analyze sixty-one interviews. Differences by group were seen in the experience of barriers related to:

• accessing online resources and finding information
• technologies for communicating and staying current
• engagement with students and instructional pedagogy

This presentation and discussion will center on how the method was realized, the insights it brought to bear on the data, and the usefulness of the approach for both illuminating user needs and fostering library organizational re-alignment. This project has been supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Power Point Presentation

Plazi is a Swiss-based international non-profit organization focused on finding innovative ways to provide access to the very rich literature of biological diversity. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, Plazi is commited to developing new and open publishing of a rapidly increasing amount of new knowledge.

Plazi has three primary areas of activity:

• Questions of copyright, studying what actually constitutes a Work in this field, and thus falls under copyright legislation. The organization asserts that, under Swiss copyright law, taxonomic treatments, as quasi-legal documents and statements of fact, are not copyrightable.
• Development of tools to assist in the creation, enhancement, and sharing of information within the literature of biological systematics. All of Plazi’s development initiatives focus on opening up publications in order to expose the rich amounts of data inside for linking, retrieval, and analysis. To that end, Plazi has developed an XML schema (taxonX) for retrospective markup of taxonomic treatments, tools for semi-automatic markup (GoldenGate), storage and retrieval systems using existing or developing XML and RDF based transfer protocols, and new models for publishing born digital taxon descriptions through development of a module of the NLM/NCBI Journal Publishing DTD and investigation of use of complex digital object description standards (METS/OAI-ORE).
• For both experimentation and demonstration, Plazi develops and maintains an open digital repository of taxonomic descriptions currently containing over 5000 publications from the taxonomic literature of ants, with over 6000 individual descriptions encoded in TaxonX XML.

http://plazi.org