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New Directions at Ithaka, Aluka, and JSTOR

April 1, 2009

Kevin M. Guthrie
President
Ithaka

We are operating in a time of radical transition. Transformative change seems to be coming more rapidly to the commercial networked world than to the academy. What are some of the reasons for this difference? What impact might the economic downturn have on the rate of change? The speaker will discuss the forces that led to the decision to merge JSTOR and Ithaka early this year and will highlight the mission and objectives of the combined enterprise and how it aims to serve the scholarly community in the future.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.ithaka.org

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2009 Project Briefings, Economic Models
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The Next Wave of Federated Stuff and the Role of Libraries in the Stuffing Recipe

April 1, 2009

Kenneth J. Klingenstein
Director, Middleware and Security
Internet2 and University of Colorado, Boulder

Federation continues to evolve, spreading in scope, growing rapidly in membership, being applied to layers from networked devices to scholarly repositories, enabling more effective collaborations and collaboration tools, evolving in services offered and steady in its introduction of new issues that libraries could have a hand in addressing. This session will begin by providing an update on activities in InCommon, including the active discussions on its future interactions, as well as state, system and international federations. It will also describe the application of federation to government interactions, to new networking approaches, and to collaborations. The discussion will then move to the numerous issues emerging for which the skills and roles of academic librarians would be welcome participants. Topics in this space include the role of libraries in training users on privacy management, the role of libraries in setting institutional attribute release policies, sources of authority for data, sources of authority for metadata, and defining attribute schema in the public interest for user access controls.

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2009 Project Briefings, Identity Management, Information Access & Retrieval
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The OLE Project: An Update on Developing a Community-Sourced Service Oriented Architecture Compliant Library Information Environment

April 1, 2009

Beth Forrest Warner
Officer for Grants, Research Support, and Library Assessment
University of Kansas, Libraries

Robert H. McDonald
Associate Dean for Library Technologies
Indiana University

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 (SOA) and open source technologies. In this session, the speakers will present an update on project activities, design directions, and potential next steps in order to gain feedback from attendees. The audience will be encouraged to participate in the discussion, which will focus, in part, on design directions, impact on interactions with institutional information technology and administrative operations, and feasibility of the next stage of building the software.

http://oleproject.org

Handout (MS Word)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2009 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval, User Services
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Open Annotation Collaboration: Enabling Interoperable Annotation of Scholarly Digital Resources

April 1, 2009

Timothy W. Cole
Assistant Engineering Librarian for Information Services
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

This collaborative project (5 institutions), just now getting underway, seeks to engender a Web and Resource-centric interoperable annotation environment that will allow scholars to leverage annotations of digital resources across the boundaries of annotation clients, annotation servers, and content collections. To this end, a shared annotation data model and interoperability specification will be devised. These will be designed to facilitate the implementation of advanced end-user annotation services targeted at scholars and capable of operating across a broad range of both scholarly and general collections. Data model and specification will be developed so as to allow customization of annotation services for specific scholarly communities without reducing interoperability. The proposed work also will enable more robust machine-to-machine interactions and automated analysis, aggregation and reasoning over distributed annotations and annotated resources.

Promulgating data models and specifications alone is not enough and should not happen in isolation from current practice and real-world implementation. By grounding the work in a thorough understanding of Web-centric interoperability and embedded models implemented by existing digital annotation tools and services, an interoperable annotation environment can be created that will allow scholars and tool-builders to leverage prior tool development work and traditional models of scholarly annotation, while simultaneously enabling the evolution of these models and tools to make the most of the potential offered by the Web environment. To help insure and seed broad adoption, an outside panel of experts will serve as project advisory committee that will create a baseline reference implementation of the data model and specification, and they will work closely from the outset with established application developers (e.g., Zotero) and general and specialized repositories of scholarly content (e.g., JSTOR and MONK). In subsequent phases of work a selection of prototype and production tools will be implemented that address real scholarly needs. These will demonstrate functionality and value-added services enabled by the specification in settings characterized by a variety of annotation client/server environments, content collections, and scholarly use cases. Project timeline calls for public release of data model and specifications by the middle of 2010.

Other project participants include Herbert Van de Sompel (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Daniel Cohen (George Mason University), Brian Kenney (Library Journal), Jane Hunter (University of Queensland), and Robert Sanderson (University of Queensland).

Handout (PDF)

Presentation (PDF)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2009 Project Briefings, Cyberinfrastructure, Scholarly Communication, Standards
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Open Source Software Sustainability: A Case Study of Indiana University’s Variations Software

April 1, 2009

Jon W. Dunn
Assistant Director for Technology
Digital Library Program
Indiana University

Robert H. McDonald
Associate Dean for Library Technologies
Indiana University

Philip Ponella
Director, William and Gayle Cook Music Library
Director, Music Information Technology Services
Indiana University

The Variations digital music library system offers online access for Indiana University (IU) students and faculty to sound recordings and scores digitized from the collection of IU’s Cook Music Library. Originally developed in 1996 in partnership with IBM, the system was re-architected in 2005 to support a new metadata and discovery system tailored to music and to add desktop-based tools for annotation and pedagogical use of music content, as part of a five-year, $3 million National Science Foundation/National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Libraries Initiative grant. Under a current grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), IU is working with four other institutions as Variations test sites to explore means of sustaining the ongoing development and enhancement of Variations and extending its use beyond IU. As part of this grant, Variations was recently released as open source software under a Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD)-style license and options for providing fee-based support or offering Variations under a partially- or fully-hosted software as a service (SaaS) model are being explored. Also under consideration are partnerships with content providers to make their content available through the Variations platform; migration of the system to a Web services-based architecture is currently underway.

During this presentation, the audience will be engaged in a discussion of the current models for open-source software project sustainability, and lessons learned within the Variations program will be demonstrated. Larger issues involved in this discussion are the implications for the sustainability of discipline-specific digital library and instructional technology software systems.

 

http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/variations3/

http://variations.sourceforge.net/

Handout (PDF)

PowerPoint Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2009 Project Briefings, Digital Humanities, Economic Models, Repositories, Special Collections
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People of the Founding Era: Mining the Data of the Founders Projects

April 1, 2009

Sue Perdue
Director
Documents Compass/Virginia Foundation for the Humanities

Susan Severtson
Director, Communications
Virginia Foundation for the Humanities

Documents Compass was established in January 2008 as an intermediary resource for publishers and scholar/editors. Created to help plan and develop documentary editions, the service locates, develops, and employs the tools best suited to each project’s needs, and facilitates transcribing, proof reading, tagging, and copy editing.

 

Its first grant, awarded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, provides funds to explore the feasibility of creating People of the Founding Era (PFE), a biographical data source that will be the first electronic prosopography of the modern era. Unlike biography, which examines the life of a single person, prosopography is the study of groups of people, with special attention given to the group’s common characteristics and patterns of activity.

 

Documents Compass will develop a database that includes native-born and naturalized Americans born between 1713 and 1815 as well as their children and grandchildren. By enabling scholars to study individuals and groups, the PFE will be an especially versatile research tool for better understanding the United States of America in the decades before, during, and immediately after its founding.

 

Especially important is the fact that the project will make use of data mining techniques to draw information from existing digitized material. The Founding Fathers documentary editing projects, which have been in place for decades, have been consistently verifying and tracking biographical information relating to the people of the founding era. The PFE project will not only use this data as a base, it will produce an interoperable source of biographical information which will inform the ongoing work of the editing projects.

 

This presentation will include a description of the project’s concept, and the progress made in the start-up phase, showing the data source, the data mining results, the techniques being used to edit and expand the data, and the expectations for the results of this feasibility study, as well as implications for ongoing data compilation.

http://www.DocumentsCompass.org

Handout (PDF)

 

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2009 Project Briefings, Digital Humanities, Information Access & Retrieval
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A Prototype for Including Archeological Excavation Data in a Digital Library

April 1, 2009

Thornton L. Staples
Director, Community Strategy and Alliances
Fedora Commons, Inc.

This presentation will demonstrate the first prototype for including archeological excavation data from two major sites in Greece into a broader digital library for the American School for Classical Studies in Athens. The system is designed to be a network of information objects among which a variety of formal semantic relationships may be asserted. The backbone of the network is a set of XML files that are digital surrogates for the contexts that are excavated, the finds which are revealed and the features which are postulated from the evidence. Both the descriptive and the relationship information is extracted and expressed as Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples in two Mulgara (an open-source RDF engine) indexes. Though the prototype does not use a formal repository system, the approach taken is designed to be easily moved into one such as Fedora to ensure long-term durability of the digital information while maintaining flexibility of access. This approach demonstrates that all of this archaeological data can be managed as flat files that can be sustained in the long term without any dependence upon specific software, while allowing for rich semantic networks to be accessed through purpose-built indexes. It also shows that multiple versions of any representation, to provide different states of interpretation, can be handled with ease.

 

http://www3.ascsa.edu.gr/

 

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2009 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries
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Publication and Citation of Scientific Primary Data

April 1, 2009

Jan Brase
Research Coordinator
German National Library of Science and Technology

In 2004, the German Research Foundation (DFG) initiated the project “Publication and Citation of Scientific Primary Data” to increase the accessibility of scientific research data, beginning with the field of earth science. The German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) is now established as a non-commercial digital object identifier (DOI) registration agency for scientific research data. So far over 600,000 research data sets have received a DOI name in order to facilitate access and citability.

 

http://www.tib-hannover.de/en/the-tib/doi-registration-agency/

http://www.tib-hannover.de/en/special-collections/research-data/

http://www.std-doi.de

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2009 Project Briefings, E-Science, Publishing
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ResearcherID: First Year Update

April 1, 2009

Reynold Guida
Director, Product Development
Thomson Reuters

At the 2008 Coalition for Networked Information Spring Task Force Meeting, the ResearcherID development team introduced an initial set of tools that address issues with individual identity management and attribution of one’s scholarly works. This presentation is an update to last year’s presentation.

 

The ResearcherID system has been freely available for a year and has been well received by the international research community. ResearcherID allows a researcher to create a unique, persistent identity and profile that links to his research output. Over the course of this year, a diverse set of researchers have started to create community around ResearcherID’s many features. This presentation will include overview demographics of first year members, a demonstration of existing and new interface features, and a discussion of new Web services that allow access to the registry by academic institutions and partner organizations.

 

 

http://scientific.thomsonreuters.com

http://www.researcherid.com

Handout (Web)

Handout (Web)

Presentation (PDF)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2009 Project Briefings, Identity Management
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Rethinking Assumptions with the Our Americas Archive Partnership Project

April 1, 2009

Geneva Henry
Executive Director, Center for Digital Scholarship
Rice University

The Our Americas Archive Partnership project (OAAP) is an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded effort led by Rice University in partnership with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. Conceived as a means of serving scholars in the emerging, multidisciplinary field of American studies, this project is bringing together distributed digital archives of works that will support research into understanding the Americas from a hemispheric perspective rather than that of individual nation states. Now in the second year of a three-year grant, the planned approach for detailed descriptions of the items and assumptions that new partnering archives will host their own digital repositories are raising questions about whether or not the approach will meet the needs of the scholarly community OAAP seeks to serve.

 

While conforming to best practices in providing standards-based item-level metadata and Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) markup of texts has generally been embraced by digital projects, it is unclear that this focus on detail will support discovery of new knowledge revealed through new patterns that emerge across aggregated content. Additionally, partnering with Latin American archives may require hosting their content in digital repositories outside the contributing institution, changing assumptions about how unique the descriptions might be. This presentation will describe the OAAP project and explore the challenges it is facing in meeting the American Studies scholars’ needs. Issues that merit reconsideration when doing digital projects such as detailed item-level metadata vs. minimal processing and institution-based repositories vs. hosted repositories will be explored and discussed openly with the audience.

http://oaap.rice.edu/

PowerPoint Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2009 Project Briefings, Cyberinfrastructure, Digital Humanities, Repositories
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