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Revisiting Institutional Repositories

April 1, 2009

Clifford A. Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information

The value and purpose of institutional repositories (IRs) has sparked again some controversy in recent months. In 2003, I proposed the following definition of institutional repositories: “A university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.” I still believe that this definition is fundamentally reasonable, but it is very broad, and many issues have arisen in identifying, prioritizing, and ingesting the classes of digital materials to be managed in the repository framework. In this session, which is part of the Coalition for Networked Information’s (CNI’s) effort to re-examine the roles and strategies for institutional repositories, I want to discuss and test my thinking about content strategies and priorities, and also about the increasingly complex interconnections between IRs and other parts of the campus and national information infrastructures. One objective is to identify an agenda of issues for further inquiry and analysis within the CNI community.

http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br226/br226ir.shtml

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6639327.html?industryid=47109

 

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2009 Project Briefings, Repositories
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Social Networking for Graduate Students: GradShare

April 1, 2009

Jeff Lang
Market Manager for Graduate Research
ProQuest

Major social networking communities like Facebook and MySpace fill a social need to build your online identity and connect with friends, but online communities are evolving to meet other information needs. The same social model can support communities of shared interest, and these niche communities complement the larger social sites. GradShare is an example of a focused online community where research-oriented graduate students can ask questions and get answers about the challenges they face while pursuing their degrees. The presentation will include lessons learned and discuss the strategy for including university administrators in the community. GradShare was developed in close collaboration with the Council of Graduate Schools and incorporates feedback from the nine beta school participants, including over 600 graduate students.

http://www.gradshare.com

Handout (MS Word)

Presentation (PDF)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2009 Project Briefings, Scholarly Communication, Social Media, Teaching & Learning
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Space Collaboration: Positioning the Library at the Center of Teaching, Learning, and Research

April 1, 2009

Thomas C. Wilson
Associate Dean for Library Technology
University of Alabama

Starting in late 2007, the University of Alabama Libraries, with a growing instruction program, indentified a need for a more intimate setting for smaller groups of faculty and graduate students. At the same time, the University’s Faculty Resource Center needed additional space for its program, particularly in a central campus location. Thus, a marriage of convenience was born. In the midst of planning and repurposing space in the Gorgas Library, a new vice president-chief information officer arrived with a vision to expand the services available in this space. Needing a similarly sized space to institute an AccessGrid node on campus, he recommended that we build out the room appropriately to add this capacity. This presentation will focus on the planning, specifications, implementation, and collaboration pay-off in other similar projects underway.

Presentation (PDF)

 

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2009 Project Briefings, Learning Spaces (includes Information/Learning Commons), Teaching & Learning
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System Design for Collecting, Managing, and Distributing Media Assets for University Teaching and Learning

April 1, 2009

Jonathan Smith
Software Architect
Northwestern University

Robert D. Davis
Associate Director, Academic and Research Technologies
Northwestern University

As electronic media have increased in importance in teaching and learning, universities have entered the business of processing and distributing video, audio, and written course content both to registered students and to the larger educational community. The systems used for this purpose need to be designed around the idea that teaching and learning content can be a reusable and potentially valuable asset if it can be managed by instructors and redistributed via multiple channels (such as iTunesU, YouTube, and class sites in the course management system). This presentation will include discussion on how these concerns are reflected in the design of Media Space, Northwestern University Academic and Research Technologies’ system for collecting, managing, and distributing media assets.

http://www.opencastproject.org/content/media-space

Handout (PDF)

Handout 2 (PDF)

Presentation (PDF)

 

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2009 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, Teaching & Learning
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Text Linking in the Humanities: Citing Canonical Works Using OpenURL

April 1, 2009

David Ruddy
Director, E-Publishing Technologies
Cornell University Library

Eric Rebillard
Professor, Classics and History
Cornell University

This project briefing reports on a joint effort by faculty and librarians at Cornell University to explore the possibilities and challenges of using OpenURL to provide system independent linking between citations of Classical literature and an increasing array of available online resources and services in Classics. Such linking, which can be extended to other domains, will allow seamless movement from scholarly resources to original texts and translations, improving digital services in the humanities. This project has been supported by a recent planning grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the American Philological Society. To date, project work has focused on the creation of a canonical citation metadata format, a strategy to address implementation challenges, and a prototype of a Classical literature knowledge base and linking system. By design, the metadata format, implementation scheme, and knowledge base structure are independent of Classics and can be deployed in other domains that frequently cite texts independent of particular editions or translations. The project also demonstrates how knowledge bases may be chained together to provide enhanced services to users, a model which may have wider application within the OpenURL community.

http://www.cwkb.org

Handout (PDF)

PowerPoint Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2009 Project Briefings, Digital Humanities, Standards
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Trident Project: Managing an Extensible Digital Repository

April 1, 2009

David Kennedy
Systems Programmer
Duke University

Duke University Libraries’ Digital Collections currently boast more than 30 distinct collections of digital content. The collections represent a variety of subject areas, contain different media types, and they are delivered through a discovery layer which allows users to find and interact with the content. Duke has made the management of these collections a priority. To that end, staff has been making organizational and technical infrastructure changes in order to streamline the digitization and description workflows as well as lower the cost of ownership and management of a fully featured digital repository.

 

Platform-independent tools and interfaces have been in development for managing the digitization, description and publishing workflows of digital collections. In order for the tools to be sustainable, they should appeal to the broader library community and be extensible to meet diverse needs. A range of metadata schemes, content models, business practices, workflows and repository implementations are planned. The goal is to eventually release the tools to the community as an open source project.

 

This presentation will focus on the design process, how user-centered design techniques have been incorporated into all aspects of design. It will include discussion of the modular system architecture, the creation of a generalized Web services application programming interface (API), and the use of Fedora, SOLR, and Django framework, as well as how metadata profile definitions drive the metadata creation and repository business logic. It will also include discussion of how the tools are extensible to meet digital library needs.

 

http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/

PowerPoint Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2009 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval, Metadata, Repositories
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Using Network Effects to Produce More Useful Results: ARTstor Collaborative Filtering

April 1, 2009

James Shulman
President
ARTstor

William W. Ying
Chief Information Officer
ARTstor

Finding useful search results is an ongoing challenge to users of large-scale digital libraries where a typical keyword search result can return thousands of records. Resource providers can help users to sift through Web-delivered content and build better result sets by drawing upon the collective preferences of other users. ARTstor recently released its Associated Images feature, which anonymously mines user preference data via collaborative filtering. As users at over 1,100 institutions make image groups for their own purposes, they are also revealing preferences with each image that they include. Just as Amazon “recommends” other books that are often purchased by the same people who purchased a given book, the collective choices of scholars who have compiled ARTstor image groups are now shared with other users across the ARTstor network.

 

There are many ways to enhance search, ranging from the difficult work of metadata enhancement to personalization to filtering results by various criteria. The session will report on the choices made in the preparation and release of this feature and is intended to provoke discussion about other methods that can also be employed to provide users with particularly meaningful results as they navigate large complex datasets.

http://www.artstor.org/news/n-html/an-090205-tip.shtml

Handout (PDF)

 

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2009 Project Briefings, Digital Humanities, Information Access & Retrieval, Repositories
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Web-based Workflow Software to Support Book Digitization and Dissemination

April 1, 2009

Claire Stewart
Head, Digital Collections
Northwestern University

Steve DiDomenico
Repository Architect
Northwestern University

The Northwestern University Library undertook a software development project to create an automated workflow to enable files from its Kirtas book scanner to be both linked to the online public access catalog (OPAC) with a page viewer application, and ingested into its Fedora repository as archivally sustainable and reusable digital objects. The Web-based Book Workflow Interface (BWI) software utilizes jBPM for management and Web services for key creation components. It also features an AJAX interface to support drag-and-drop creation and editing of METS-based book structures. The BWI system ingests locally scanned texts as well as texts digitized by external partners or vendors.

 

Shifting from a simple book reformatting operation to a dynamic program that makes any multipage text object fully accessible online, this system dramatically improves Northwestern’s ability to share its unique library and archival collections. The workflow system can be expanded over time to support new functions in the book publishing process, and it can be redeployed in support of digitization processes for other types of media. The project was fully supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Book Workflow Interface and public book viewing software will both be released as open source in spring 2009.

http://books.northwestern.edu

Presentation (PDF)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2009 Project Briefings, E-Books, Repositories
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What To Do While Your Building Project Is on Hold

April 1, 2009

Many campuses will be postponing or curtailing new building projects and renovations due to the current economic climate, but the pressing need for newly configured, technology-enabled spaces has not gone away. This session will describe a number of low or no-cost strategies for moving institutions towards their overall goals for new learning spaces, particularly in libraries and computing centers, while waiting for the actual construction or renovation. In the process, these strategies may assist campuses in clarifying what they hope the new spaces will accomplish, may assist units in being able to implement new, user-driven services as soon as the new spaces are occupied, and may help forge new campus partnerships. Participants will be asked to describe the status of their building projects and to contribute ideas for leveraging the availability of additional time prior to project completion.

 

http://www.educause.edu/LearningSpace/5521

http://wikis.ala.org/acrl/index.php/ACRL/LAMA_Guide_for_Architects

PowerPoint Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2009 Project Briefings, Learning Spaces (includes Information/Learning Commons)
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