Distributed digital preservation networks have been growing in popularity among institutions that wish to collect and preserve materials of high importance to specific communities. This project briefing will include discussion of a multi-institutional project to develop an open-source platform for distributed multi-institutional asymmetric replication of archival content. The goal of the project is to support policy-driven replication of large collections of research data, where the partners in the replication network differ significantly in the size of their collections and in the resource commitments they are able to contribute to the network. We have built a prototype system by using a core of Private LOCKSS Networks (PLN) technology, developing a schema to encapsulate inter-archival replication commitments, building an automated schema-driven service that audits PLN’s, and by adapting Open Archives Initiative (OAI) harvesting clients to harvest data collections from the Dataverse Network (DVN) and other repositories using the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) schema. This work is conducted by Data-PASS, a partnership of five major archives, and it is supported by the Library of Congress (National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation) NDIIPP program.

Handout (PDF)

This session will provide an overview of the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) prediction markets, a Web game for understanding emerging trends in teaching with technology. The presentation will include information about the project’s structure and development, from pilot to public beta, including lessons learned about emerging technologies via the wisdom of crowds, and tracking the market results against user expectation and concurrent events. The contours of participation of hundreds of international users across dozens of institutions will be outlined. General and campus-specific instances of the markets will be explored, with a conclusion covering emerging trends through 2009 concerning gaming, sustainability, informed strategic decision-making, and distributed intelligence.

http://markets.nitle.org/

Handout (MS Word)

The Sheridan Libraries of the Johns Hopkins University recently launched the Roman de la Rose Digital Library to provide scholars a platform for exploring one of the most important Medieval French allegories. Building on the success of the previous Roman de la Rose Website, the new Library offers an unprecedented opportunity to interact with these rich treasures with additional content, a new design, and enhanced functionality. More importantly, it represents a major shift from viewing digitized manuscripts as surrogates toward a data-centric view. This project briefing will highlight the importance of the Library to scholars in multiple disciplines and it will include a discussion of some of the implications of the technological decisions.

http://romandelarose.org

PowerPoint Presentation

The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) has received funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a dynamic online visual resources library for scholars in the fields of architectural history, landscape and cultural landscape studies, historic preservation and other fields related to the built environment. Named the SAH Architectural Resources Archive (SAHARA), the project is a collaborative effort among SAH, scholars of architectural history, librarians and libraries (initially Brown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Virginia), and ARTstor to develop an online library of hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of still and dynamic images of architecture for research and teaching.

SAHARA will substantially change and improve the way the history, the present and future of the built environment are taught and understood. Instead of developing separate, independent collections of architectural images for each institution, librarians will contribute images and metadata to SAHARA, a shared resource that will be widely available. The images will come from scholars’ own collections that have been taken for research and pedagogical purposes. The metadata will be provided by scholars in consultation with librarians and visual resources experts. The expectation for developing SAHARA is that scholars, librarians, and institutional leadership will join together to create a shared online resource that will both enrich the field of architectural history and create a new collaborative work model for scholars and visual resources and art/architecture libraries.

CNI meeting participants are encouraged to share their expertise in collaborative initiatives and thoughts on processes for the engagement of scholars and librarians in transformative change.

http://www.sah.org
http://www.sah.org/index.php?src=gendocs&ref=AVRN&category=Main

Handout (MS WORD)

The University of Rochester is completing the two-year Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant “Enhancing Repositories for the Next Generation of Academics,” which focuses on the work practices of graduate students researching and writing their dissertations. An understanding of the work practices of graduate students enabled the team to design a set of authoring tools to meet graduate student needs for individual and collaborative writing and to make it easy for them to move completed documents from the authoring system into the repository. IR+ will enter an alpha release stage in January 2009, as an open source repository software. The key features of the software include authoring and collaboration tools, file versioning, researcher pages, faceted searching, and a new administration interface for greater flexibility in collection management. This presentation will highlight some of the findings of the graduate student work practices research, and it will include a demonstration of the functionality of the IR+ system.

Handout (PDF)

Long-term stewardship of digital information resources is a poorly understood activity relative to its physical information resource analog. Unfortunately, fear of the unknown encourages anxiety, and anxiety encourages dramatic perceptions: presumably, “digital preservation” is much more complex, costly, and/or unpredictable than “traditional preservation.” Yet digital information resources are just a subset of information resources in general, and we have significant experience stewarding information resources over time. Precisely discerning the unique characteristics of digital information resources (from those common to all information resources) helps simplify and demystify approaches for their long-term stewardship—and leads to some potentially surprising recommendations for stewards. For instance, distributing responsibility for and control over resource maintenance may be more effective than centralizing most responsibility and exerting broad control; using a file system metaphor for resource transfer may be more effective than using an archival package metaphor; and focusing on maintaining low-fidelity, agile, and lightweight access to digital resources for centralized services may be more effective than focusing on maintaining “significant properties” in high-fidelity. This talk presents a simple model isolating the unique characteristics of digital information resources, placing them in the information resource lifecycle and economy, and suggesting prioritization strategies for long-term stewardship services.

Handout (PDF)