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Exhibit 2.0: The Latest from MIT’s Simile Project

December 5, 2010

MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Eric Miller
President
Zepheira

In November, MIT began work on Exhibit 2.0, a new project funded by the Library of Congress and collaborating with Zepheira LLC to redevelop the popular Exhibit tool from the MIT Simile Project. Exhibit 2.0 will fix many shortcomings of Exhibit, making it far more scalable, modular, and feature rich than the original tool, and the work is being done as broadly inclusive open source software development. This briefing session will briefly demonstrate the current tool, discuss the new architecture and features, and get input from the audience on how to build interest and involvement from the community in this work.

http://simile.mit.edu/

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2010 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval, Metadata
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Laboratory for Digital Cultural Heritage in the Research Commons at UCLA

December 5, 2010

Gary E. Strong
University Librarian
Univeristy of California, Los Angeles

Todd Grappone
Associate University Librarian for Digital Initiatives & Information Technology
University of California, Los Angeles

A major feature of transformed space in the renovation of the Research Library will be a Research Commons for digital scholarship. Partnering with the Center for Digital Humanities, the Library will be installing a laboratory for digital cultural heritage with high-end technology to accommodate interactive and creative use of technology and digital collections of the Library. This presentation will include discussion of the philosophy behind the partnership, and plans for the space in relation to the whole research library. Specific projects to be undertaken will encompass active digital research projects that are underway in conjunction with campus faculty and faculty from other institutions. The commons and laboratory will allow for broad interaction with students and the creation of new scholarship which can be stored by the digital library and shared more broadly through the media distribution system that is planned for the building.

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2010 Project Briefings, Digital Preservation
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Linked Open Data: The Promises and the Pitfalls… Where Are We and Why Isn’t There Broader Adoption?

December 5, 2010
Kris Carpenter Negulescu
Director, Web Archive
Internet Archive		 Martin Kalfatovic
Assistant Director
Smithsonian Institution
MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology		 Dean Krafft
Director of Information Technology
and Chief Technology Strategist
Cornell University

Linked Open Data (LOD) has begun to dramatically increase the amount of structured data available on the World Wide Web, which, in turn is proving to offer incredible potential to share and access data across libraries, archives, and museums. Despite the possibilities, only a few institutions in the US have begun to embrace the use of LOD. Adoption globally is broader but is still limited.

This panel will introduce and discuss the barriers to adoption, describe some ongoing and emerging use cases in the humanities and sciences, and pose several questions:

  • Why is LOD important/relevant?
  • Can it really revolutionize the ways in which data is integrated and applied?
  • If so, what is needed to make LOD a practical reality?

 

Handout (PDF) (PDF)

Presentation (Negulescu)
Presentation (Kalfatovic)
Presentation (Krafft)

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2010 Project Briefings, Cyberinfrastructure, Information Access & Retrieval, Metadata, Repositories
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National Digital Preservation Program Initiatives for 2011

December 5, 2010

National Digital Preservation Program Initiatives for 2011

 

Martha Anderson
Director, National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program Management
Library of Congress

Laura Campbell
Associate Librarian, Office of Strategic Initiatives
Library of Congress

The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) is launching a collaborative national alliance to support long-term access to digital content. Building upon the experiences of 10 years of NDIIPP partner projects, the new initiative will leverage the best practices and relationships for expanding the stewardship of digital collections to a wider community. The update will include an overview of current technical initiatives and community efforts.

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2010 Project Briefings, Digital Preservation
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National Hosting and Interoperability: The LuKII Project in Germany

December 5, 2010

National Hosting and Interoperability:
The LuKII Project in Germany

Michael Seadle
PI and Dean
Humboldt University of Berlin

David S. H. Rosenthal
Chief Scientist, LOCKSS
Stanford University

Interoperability gives digital archiving the chance to combine successful features of existing systems. The requirements for digital archiving have evolved differently in different regions. The last decade has seen multiple vendors offering their own proprietary solutions, often using commercial software, and often resulting in a lack of transparency about key technical aspects. Interoperation is easiest to establish between open source systems.

The LuKII (LOCKSS und kopal: Intrastruktur und Interoperabilität) project is building a network in Germany using LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), which is 100% open source, and the open source elements of kopal are found in its koLibRI software. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) funded this project in order to:

  1. establish a cost-effective Private LOCKSS Network (PLN) within Germany
  2. implement interoperation with koLibRI (especially its metadata features)
  3. test it using open access materials from German institutional repositories

Shortly after LuKII began, Germany embarked on a study about potential national hosting solutions for scholarly data. A substantial study by Charles Beagrie Ltd helped to focus the choice between LOCKSS (LuKII) and Portico. The DFG explicitly involved the LuKII team in providing expert information about the German PLN that is being build as part of the project. A paper discussing technical questions posed within subcommittee (“Archiving in the Networked World: LOCKSS and National Hosting”) is available in Library Hi Tech. The requirements for a national hosting solution continue to evolve, but important elements are emerging from the discussion, including the ability to host all materials within Germany to simplify possible copyright issues involving Germany’s national licensing scheme. The ability to deliver usable content on the fly if originals become unavailable has also grown in importance, as has the awareness that bitstream maintenance is complex and matters at least as much as migration for the future use of digital content.

This presentation will discuss the policy and technical issues involved in this interoperability project and its implications for Germany’s national hosting decision.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.allianzinitiative.de/fileadmin/hosting_studie_e.pdf
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?issn=0737-8831&volume=28&issue=4&articleid=1886769&show=abstract
PROJECT WEBSITE

Handout (MS Word)

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2010 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, Digital Preservation, Information Access & Retrieval, Repositories
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New Tools for Search and Discovery

December 5, 2010

New Tools for Search and Discovery

Jason Vaughan
Director, Library Technology
University of Nevada Las Vegas

Bill Clayton
Assistant University Librarian for Systems
University of Georgia

Web Scale Discovery Services: An Introduction and Evaluative Model (Vaughan)

This discussion will frame the topic of Web scale discovery, and provide a roadmap/recipe for other libraries contemplating investigations of their own. A majority of Web scale discovery tools create and utilize a pre-aggregated central index down to the item and/or article level, for local and remote content. Such content often includes a library’s bibliographic records, digital collections, open access repositories, and licensed content (e.g. full text journal articles). Such tools promise to offer a relevancy-ranked, Google-like experience using common Web interface design and functionality elements, and hold the potential to serve as fundamental discovery platforms to a vast majority of content. The session will focus on the thorough internal and external steps carried out by the University of Nevada Las Vegas Libraries in evaluating five Web scale discovery services. Some general findings will be shared, including some observed similarities and differences amongst the services. Jason Vaughan is Director of Library Technologies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of the upcoming January 2011 Library Technology Reports on web scale discovery services.

Handout (MS Word)

Testing and Evaluation of a Central Index Discovery Tool (Clayton)

For nearly a decade, the University of Georgia Libraries has been looking for an effective way for our users to search a significant number of our licensed databases simultaneously. Federated or cross-database searching provided results from multiple databases, but it had too many limitations to be a good solution. It is clear that our undergraduate and less experienced graduate students have great difficulty identifying where to search among our more than 300 online databases. Along with many other research libraries, Georgia’s goal has been to enable users to do one search that gets results from the library’s catalog, its article databases, and its online full-text resources.

The University of Georgia Libraries have been participating in a trial of the EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) central index discovery tool. EDS is one of several central index discovery tools that have recently become available from or are under development by library software/service vendors. While there is not yet much user data, encouraging information has been learned about the capabilities and limitations of these tools.

This presentation will cover tool strengths and challenges, campus reaction to the concept, the central index models, the beta partnership process, and our future plans. A demonstration of the discovery tool will be provided.

Handout (PDF)

EBSCO Discovery Service
Vendor Website: http://www.ebscohost.com/

Ex Libris Primo Central
Vendor Website: http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/

Innovative Interfaces Encore Synergy
Vendor Website: http://encoreforlibraries.com/products

OCLC WorldCat Local
Vendor Website: http://www.oclc.org/worldcatlocal/default.htm

Serials Solutions Summon
Vendor Website: http://www.serialssolutions.com/summon/

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2010 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval
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Next Generation Multimedia Analysis: Introducing MediaThread

December 5, 2010

Mark Phillipson
Senior Program Specialist, Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL)
Columbia University

William Ying
Chief Information Officer
ARTstor

This session will introduce MediaThread, an innovative analysis platform recently launched by Columbia University’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. MediaThread, an open-source project, significantly advances multimedia annotation, editing, organization, and collaboration. Liberated from the constraints of any one collection or format, students are able to import images, audio, and video from a variety of sources into a course-based MediaThread site through the use of a simple bookmarklet. Items can then be tagged, annotated, clipped, and embedded into individual and group projects, as well as discussion threads. MediaThread’s lightweight bookmarking makes it compatible with a number of licensed databases such as ARTstor; collections in content management systems such as Drupal and Omeka; and resources openly available on the Web on sites such as YouTube, Flickr, OpenVault, and Wikimedia Commons. This session will highlight early uses of MediaThread at Columbia, with emphasis on its capacity to drive and extend use of academic digital resources.

http://mediathread.ccnmtl.columbia.edu

Handout (PDF)

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2010 Project Briefings, User Services
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NSF Data Management Plan Requirements: Institutional Initiatives

December 5, 2010

Serge J. Goldstein
Associate CIO & Director of Academic Services
Princeton University

Scott Brandt
Associate Dean for Research
Purdue University

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has issued guidelines for inclusion of data management plans as a part of grant proposals, and many institutions are beginning to examine strategies for meeting these requirements. Units within organizations are also exploring ways to support those needs. This session will examine some of the strategies already being considered or implemented, and representatives from Princeton and Purdue will discuss their campus’s programs.

 


http://dspace.princeton.edu/jspui/handle/88435/dsp01w6634361k

Handout (PDF)
Handout 2 (PDF)

Presentation (Goldstein)
Presentation (Brandt)

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2010 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, Economic Models
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OCLC Research Survey of Special Collections and Archives

December 5, 2010

The OCLC Research Survey of
Special Collections and Archives

Jackie Dooley
Program Officer
OCLC Research

The report “Taking Our Pulse: The OCLC Research Survey of Special Collections and Archives” reveals a variety of problems in the technology realm across the target population. The report summarizes the findings from OCLC’s survey of 275 academic and research libraries across the U.S. and Canada. Executed as a follow up to a similar 1998 Association of Research Libraries survey that proved catalytic, this work has determined norms across the community, and the data will support decision-making and priority setting across the community. Findings include:

  • management of born-digital archival records is in its infancy across this population
  • digitization is a major challenge, both due to the need for better technology skills in special collections and because the demand for content is insatiable
  • software solutions for archival work are inadequate
  • far too many rare and unique materials remain undiscoverable, possibly due to insufficient adoption of sustainable methodologies for cataloging and archival processing.

 

http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/hiddencollections/default.htm
http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-11.pdf

Handout (MS Word)

Presentation (PowerPoint)

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2010 Project Briefings, Special Collections
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Preserving Social Science Research Data Using Fedora

December 5, 2010

Preserving Social Science Research
Data Using Fedora

Bryan Beecher
Technology Director, ICPSR
University of Michigan

This project focuses on developing a proof of concept that will help to facilitate the creation and sustainability of standards-based digital object repositories for social science data. The activities to bring about this transformative outcome entail development of potential technology services and shareable tools to transform metadata from the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) standards for social science into forms that can be ingested into a FEDORA-like repository. The products developed will demonstrate at the institutional level how the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model can be deployed using social science contexts.

The innovative nature of this effort will be in actual demonstration of end-to-end performance of integrated capabilities that address future needs anticipated for data curation, preservation, and access. The latter are of particular interest throughout the focus of social disciplines at the community, national and international levels of information exchange and discourse. International partners in the United Kingdom and Australia will participate in the testing and evaluation of this proof of concept to ensure broader participation and to extend global partnerships.

http://techaticpsr.blogspot.com/

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2010 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, Digital Preservation, E-Science, Metadata, Repositories, Standards
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