Videos from selected sessions will be available beginning in early January.

  Trevor Owens
Community Lead
Library of Congress Priscilla Caplan
Assistant Director
for Digital Library Services
University of Florida  Kris Carpenter
Director, Web Group
Internet Archive Rachel Frick
Director, Digital Library Federation Program
Council on Library and Information Resource

Community Briefing on the Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation (ANADP) Conference (Halbert)

The Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation (ANADP) conference was held in the capital of Estonia in May 2011 as a forum for national digital preservation programs to meet and exchange information with each other for the purpose of building strategic international collaborations to support the preservation of collective digital memory.  While there have been other events that support and encourage information exchange across national boundaries, no effort has previously attempted to accomplish the aims of this conference, namely to set a strategic direction for international collaboration across a wide range of topics related to digital preservation.  The ANADP Conference provided a participatory forum for information exchange and focused work, and led to a monograph encapsulating the recommendations from the conference that is now in process of being edited.
This briefing will present highlights of the conference and its outcomes.  Examples of the organizations which participated in the conference include: the US Library of Congress, the Joint Information Systems Committee of the UK, the Open Planets Foundation, the Alliance for Permanent Access to the Records of Science, the Netherlands Coalition for Digital Preservation, the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale, the Digital Curation Centre in the UK, the National Library of Estonia, the National Library of the Czech Republic, the National Library of Sweden, and the Coalition for Networked Information.

http://www.educopia.org/events/ANADP

Presentation

New Dynamics Create New Ideas: The First Year of Action by the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (Anderson, et al)

The digital preservation landscape continues to be complex and challenging. Ninety-five National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) member organizations representing all segments of a potentially powerful global digital preservation community have convened to address long-term care for digital information. NDSA members are passionate about the idea that preservation of our digital heritage can only be achieved as a community spanning institutions, organizations, government, private industry and national boundaries.

Current innovative initiatives include a neighborhood watch for repository audits; a survey of the US Web domain; an inside view of digital content storage from repository managers; a Wikipedia of digital preservation standards; and new tools for outreach. This panel of five lightning talks will highlight the work of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance in 2011 accomplished through five working groups: content, infrastructure, standards, innovation and outreach. There will be discussion of collaborative digital preservation experiences and creative approaches to community stewardship. The NDSA is an initiative of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress and extends its digital preservation partnerships.

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov

Handout (MS Word)

Raul Guerra
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Maryland

Museums and libraries have growing collections of digital images of their art works. Traditionally to enable access, experts create authoritative metadata for these images.  About five years ago, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded steve.museum project explored the use of social tagging by non-experts to create image labels.  At about the same time, the Computational Linguistics for Metadata Building (CLiMB) project, funded by the Mellon Foundation, explored ways to extract terms from text on those images. The results of steve.museum along with CLiMB enabled researchers at the University of Maryland, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Susan Chun, consultant, to consider how to combine these valuable sources for access.

This session will include a presentation of the results of this IMLS-funded research, the Text, Tags and Trust (T3) Project. The presentation will focus on two fundamental issues in using user-created metadata. The computational linguistic processing, morphological and semantic analysis techniques used to process and analyze the large steve.museum tagset will be discussed first. Tags and terms will be compared to show how each covers different types of issues and vocabularies. While tagging tends to be by the non-expert, terms from text may be more authoritative, but the volume of irrelevant phrases impacts overall usefulness. The computational techniques used in this project enabled the examination of tags and phrases of importance for browsing, and discriminate useful multi-word phrases with high descriptive value.

Results of a comparison of social tagging patterns in two languages will also be presented, and exploitable strengths for providing multilingual support in digital libraries and museums will be explored.  Additional text metadata could be leveraged for effective image browsing, e.g. by reducing noise, filtering of results, suggesting terms, recommending images, and clustering of these images for browsing.

Project contributors include Judith Klavans, Jen Golbeck, Susan Chun, Rob Stein, Ed Bachta, Irene Eleta, Raul Guerra, and Rebecca LaPlante.

http://umiacs.umd.edu/research/t3/

Handout (PDF)

Presentation

Mary Ellen K. Davis
ACRL Executive Director
Association of College and Research Libraries

Kara J. Malenfant
ACRL Scholarly Communications and Government Relations Specialist
Association of College and Research Libraries

Librarians are increasingly called upon to document and articulate the value of academic and research libraries and their contribution to institutional mission and goals. The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) responds to these demands and positions academic librarians as contributors to campus efforts in several ways. This session will include discussion about recent developments with ACRL’s Value of Academic Libraries Initiative, a multiyear project designed to aid academic librarians in demonstrating library value.  As one of its recommendations, the ACRL publication “The Value of Academic Libraries: A Comprehensive Research Review and Report,” released in fall 2010, called on the association to create a professional development program to build the profession’s capacity to document, demonstrate, and communicate library value in advancing the mission and goals of their colleges and universities.

In late fall 2011, ACRL joined with three partners (the Association for Institutional Research, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and the Council of Independent Colleges) to convene two national summits. In the first, a wide range of participants from the higher education sector discussed the data campus administrators would like libraries to provide and what collaborative assistance is available through institutional research offices. In the second, librarian participants addressed strategies to prepare the library community to document and communicate the library’s value.

These summits are the basis of the project “Building Capacity for Demonstrating the Value of Academic Libraries,” made possible by a National Leadership Collaborative Planning Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.  This project briefing will report on the advice given by those attending the summits: college and university chief academic officers, senior institutional researchers, representatives from accreditation commissions and higher education organizations, and academic librarians from a broad spectrum of institutions.

http://www.acrl.ala.org/value/

Handout (PDF)

Presentation

Barbara Pralle
Head, Entrepreneurial Library Program
Johns Hopkins University

Research data is extremely valuable for other researchers to discover and use but inherently difficult to describe.  In common with other primary source materials, research data rarely includes adequate and robust descriptions, to identify the title, the subject matter, etc.  Research data tends to be produced via a complex, collaborative process making creation and ownership of the data difficult to determine.  Context and relationship are also critical for research data. It is important to know the instruments used to capture and analyze the data and to associate ancillary materials, such as lab notes or codebooks, with the appropriate data.  It is also critical to know where, in the context of a larger project, the data has been captured, for example in the third trial of the second experiment.

The Rutgers University Libraries have developed and codified a metadata object description schema (MODS) application profile that is usable by any repository with a full MODS implementation, that documents the content, major life-cycle events and rights associated with the data.  The application profile (AP) includes critical genre information useful for organizing data in a repository or filtering searches.  This presentation will describe the AP and provide a link to its registry for review and reuse by interested colleagues.

http://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/research/

Current cost model studies in the field (both in the United States and in Europe) are helpful case studies in providing libraries and cultural institutions with an understanding of the cost implications for digitizing book collections. Because these projects are far-reaching and comprehensive, however, they offer up only a broad generalization of what cost variables to consider. To contribute to the dialogue of digitizing library book collections, the George Washington University Libraries will share their cost model with the community, which is based on the current production workflow setup at the Gelman Library using robotic arm technology, and is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and donor contributions.

This presentation will include a description of the current production workflow setup at Gelman; how metrics have been collected to determine cost per page (i.e., data logs, infrastructure and staffing costs, digital preservation, etc.); and a discussion about the forecasting model being developed. The forecasting cost model will provide users with the ability to explore specific cost variables and build a project that would be customized for their budgetary needs. This tool will help institutions determine an approximate cost per page and total project costs. There will be categories (small, medium, large budget) to choose from so different institutions with varying budgets can use the tool. Feedback from participants is encouraged; they will help to improve the cost model to better support the user community of libraries who are preparing for digitization and is encouraged.

Presentation

Recent activity has flattened somewhat, raising issues regarding the public’s appetite for these projects. More importantly, the menus project raised hard questions about the quality of the crowd sourced content, the longevity of the data, and the disposition of the data (e.g. What is it? Is it good enough for our purposes? Should we keep it? If yes, where does it belong?).

This presentation will discuss these issues and propose some alternative views on metadata, user-generated content, and the intersection of the two.

http://menus.nypl.org/

Towards a Virtual Environment for Supporting Research Activities at the Smithsonian (Staples)

The Smithsonian Institution supports research activities in all aspects of science and cultural heritage in both research institute and museum settings. This presentation will describe a conceptual framework and information architecture for the prototype repository-enabled virtual research environment that is under construction. The goal of the project is to support the researchers to get their information into a trusted repository as the first stage in the information life-cycle, then to be able to manage, analyze and disseminate the information in a linked-data world, retaining ownership and control until they are ready for it to pass to an institution to be curated for the long term. The Fedora/Islandora prototype will be demonstrated.

The Northwest Knowledge Network (NKN):  A Regional Approach to Research Data Life-cycle Management (Kenyon, Godfrey)

To address the data management needs of researchers, advance multi-institutional collaboration, and meet the mandates of funding agencies, the University of Idaho is leading the development and deployment of the Northwest Knowledge Network (NKN). NKN will be a regional data aggregator working closely with academic institutions, state and federal agencies, and aligned partner organizations to provide a regional distributed network of services and tools for data life cycle management. Initial focus is on earth and environmental sciences data.

NKN is aligned with the National Science Foundation-funded Data Observational Network for Earth (DataONE). DataONE provides a national and international framework for access to NKN’s regionally produced data products. An unprecedented degree of regional coordination is necessary in order to support collaborative research involving multiple disciplines and institutions. This means institutions coordinating cyberinfrastructure investments and developing policies and architecture that deconstruct silos and favor both open and limited data access. This presentation will include a discussion of the goals, vision and current progress of the three mission areas of NKN: the data services center, cyberinfrastructure research, and the data-sharing cooperative. These interdependent parts help address the technological, institutional, and fiscal challenges of establishing new distributed cyberinfrastructure serving an international audience and leveraging existing regional institutional investments.

http://goo.gl/6tvLA

Handout (PDF)