Sayeed Choudhury
Associate Dean, Library Digital Programs
Hodson Director, Digital Research and Curation Center
Johns Hopkins University

Patricia Cruse
Director, Digital Preservation
University of California

David S.H. Rosenthal
Stanford University

Results of the study include:

• student preferences for study space characteristics

• variations in the ways students seek curricular support based on class year

• faculty-identified desires for and concerns about curricular support

• an inventory of curricular support

http://go.carleton.edu/cuvm

Handout (PowerPoint)

Presentation (PDF)

bX is a new initiative at Ex Libris that aims at leveraging the usage information gathered by link resolvers (such as the Ex Libris SFX® link resolver) to provide services that assist users in discovering items of potential interest from a growing information universe. Because link resolvers record article usage patterns across multiple resources of a digital library, the resolvers’ logs are highly representative of the activities and preferences of the population served by the link resolver. The federation of usage logs across multiple institutions represents a larger and more global user community, and enables the generation of a range of interesting services. The bX recommender service for scholarly articles, based on research by Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is one such service. The initial bX research was presented at the Fall 2005 Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) meeting by Van de Sompel and Oren Beit-Arie. This project briefing will provide an update on bX and will discuss the closed beta test with 17 research libraries around the world that have also contributed large volumes of usage data. The session will include feedback gathered from these sites, all of which share the desire to enhance the discovery experiences for their users.

Handout (MS Word)

On January 16, 2008, the Library of Congress launched a pilot project on Flickr as part of a new collaboration that inspired The Commons, where cultural heritage institutions could share selections from their photo archives and invite the public to contribute information within this specially designated Flickr space. The Library has received an enormous amount of positive feedback on this project from within Flickr, from the traditional press, and from the Web 2.0 community at large. The Library’s objectives and desired outcomes were met as the project increased awareness of the Library and its collections, sparked creative interaction with collections, provided LC staff with experience with social tagging and Web 2.0 community input, and allowed the Library to provide leadership to cultural heritage and government communities. The presentation will include information on the background of the project, what was learned along the way (including the pleasant surprises), the measurable impact of the project, and recommendations for the future.

http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_pilot.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/Library_of_Congress/

http://www.flickr.com/commons/

Handout (Web)

PowerPoint Presentation

Collaborating successfully to address common problems and to pool resources for innovation becomes increasingly important as organizations face budget constraints. As the Digital Library Federation Aquifer initiative comes to a close, the lessons learned during the collaboration process are being reflected upon. This presentation will suggest best practices for organizing volunteer effort, clarifying common goals, and creating communities to work together effectively.

http://wiki.dlib.indiana.edu/confluence/display/DLFAquifer/American+Social+History+Online

http://www.dlfaquifer.org/

PowerPoint Presentation

The JPEG 2000 image format has attracted considerable attention due to its rich feature set defined in a multi-part open ISO standard, and its potential use as a holy-grail preservation format providing both lossless compression and rich service format features. A number of factors, however, still prevent the widespread adoption of JPEG 2000 in the library and archive communities:

• lack of a clearly recognizable technology champion

• lack of clear guidelines for general and content-specific compression settings

• lack of an implementation agnostic (e.g., Kakadu, Aware, etc.) application programming interface (API) for JPEG 2000 compression and extraction

• lack of an open-source service framework, upon which rich Web 2.0-style applications can be developed

The development of aDORe djatoka, an open-source JPEG 2000 image server and dissemination framework, was recently undertaken to help address some of these issues. The djatoka image server is geared towards Web 2.0-style reuse through URI-addressability of all image disseminations including regions, rotations, and format transformations. Djatoka also provides a JPEG 2000 compression / extraction API that serves as an abstraction layer from the underlying JPEG 2000 library (e.g., Kakadu, Aware, etc). Although a significant contribution, djatoka only helps to address half the adoption issues described above. In order to address the first two issues, a working group of established players in the digital preservation arena should be established to provide case studies illustrating the benefits of JPEG 2000 for both preservation and access, and to provide compression setting guidance and prescribe a set of default compression settings for particular types of content.

The project briefing will outline the goals and recent developments of the project, as well as provide a demonstration of the djatoka image server and available client implementations. The presenter will solicit interest and possibilities for the creation of a working group to aid the adoption of JPEG 2000.

http://african.lanl.gov/aDORe/projects/djatoka/

Handout (MS Word)

PowerPoint Presentation

Sandy Payette
Executive Director, Fedora Commons
Fedora Commons Inc.

The DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons are investigating the feasibility and interest of a new service named DuraSpace to serve academic libraries, universities, and other organizations in providing perpetual access to digital content. DuraSpace can be understood as a Web-based service that makes stored digital content more durable, manageable, accessible, and easier to share. A key design feature of DuraSpace is to leave the basics of pure storage those who do it best (storage providers) and to overlay storage solutions with additional functionality that is essential to ensuring long-term access and ease of use. The service provides baseline functionality that begins with the ability to replicate and distribute content across multiple cloud providers. It adds value over and above storage by enabling the deployment of services to support access, preservation, re-use, and sharing of content stored in the cloud.

Both organizations are currently in the planning and prototyping phase of the project, made possible through a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with the intention of launching a pilot in summer 2009. This presentation will include the latest details on DuraSpace software development, cloud partners, and pilot projects. Other aspects of the DSpace/Fedora collaboration will also be discussed.

Handout (MS Word)

Powerpoint Presentation