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The New ISO Standard for Digital Repositories: What it Will Mean for Libraries

December 7, 2011

Marie-Elise Waltz
Special Projects Librarian
Center for Research Libraries

The International Standards Organization (ISO) recently approved a new standard against which to assess repositories of important digital data and content.  The standard, ISO 16363, is based largely on the 2007 Trusted Repositories Audit and Certification checklist (TRAC). ISO 16363 and TRAC are potentially useful tools for planning and evaluating data management services.  This session, organized by CRL, will explore the potential benefits of these developments for libraries and archives.

 

 

http://goo.gl/8R28A

http://goo.gl/cTBBY

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2011 Project Briefings
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New Roles for New Times: Emerging Library Roles for Supporting and Curating Digital Scholarship

December 7, 2011

Tyler Walters
Dean, University Libraries
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Martin Halbert
Dean of Libraries
University of North Texas

Katherine Skinner
Program Manager
MetaArchive Cooperative

Using the recently published Association of Research Libraries report, “New Roles for New Times: Digital Curation for Preservation” (March 2011) as context, this briefing will highlight and discuss the implications of new trends in digital scholarship support within the research library community.

The digital scholarship arena is rapidly evolving, and its new modes of inquiry are yielding new knowledge and new means of publishing and sharing that knowledge.  As universities begin to embrace these media-rich investigations and resources, they need support apparatus that can manage the content in a dependable and long-term manner. To date, few campuses have built the foundation for this capacity. Most have instead invested heavily in building digital scholarship expertise and technical capacity in silos with a lack of mutual knowledge or synergistic collaboration. The next generation of digital, academic scholarship needs a coherent structure, one that transcends disciplinary and other boundaries.

Research libraries have the opportunity to reposition themselves as the center of this activity by acting as vibrant knowledge branches that reach throughout their campuses to provide curatorial guidance and expertise for digital content, wherever it may be created and maintained. This briefing will consider why libraries can no longer expect that researchers and scholars will come to them for advice and assistance, but must instead find new ways to reach them wherever they may be. The session will also include discussion of how the library must adjust its service offerings to this new landscape in order to remain viable as an institutional form in the future, as well as highlighting the ramifications of ignoring these opportunities, including by outsourcing services that research libraries have historically provided for their campuses.

To illustrate some of the promising work that is happening in select libraries, several case studies that document important, emerging roles that libraries are cultivating in the digital scholarship and data curation arenas will be presented.

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2011 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, Scholarly Communication, User Services
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Olive: A Digital Archive for Executable Content

December 7, 2011

Gloriana St. Clair
Dean of University Libraries
Carnegie Mellon University

Dan Ryan
Graduate Student
Carnegie Mellon University

Increasingly, executable content pervades research and industry. Traditionally, libraries have been responsible for the preservation of historical content in its original forms, and recently in born-digital forms as well.  This practice has enabled the accumulation of knowledge while reducing reinvention.  Libraries have failed, however, to meet their preservation obligations in the area of executable content.

Using virtual machines for curation, Olive, an Internet-based infrastructure for archiving and preserving deprecated hardware, will enable libraries to fulfill their responsibility to those segments of the community that produce dynamic, interactive, and executable content.  Including this content among the responsibilities of the academic library will foster progress for engineers, scientists, historians, sociologists, and others.  Use cases to be explored preferentially will include educational software, games, and scholarly articles that include executables.

Contributors to this project include Gloriana St. Clair, Dan Ryan, Mahadev Satyanarayanan, Vasanth Bala, and Erika Linke.

 

Handout (PDF)

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2011 Project Briefings, Digital Preservation
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Online Video Creation by Undergraduates: Consequences for Media Literacy

December 7, 2011

Anu Vedantham
Director, Weigle Information Commons
University of Pennsylvania

Renee Hobbs
Founder of the Media Education Lab
and Professor of Communication
Temple University

Creation of online videos is a newly popular activity for today’s college students. New research reveals complexities in how students use video creation technology such as cell phones, video cameras and editing software. This session will discuss changing definitions of new literacies (visual, media, news, information, digital, etc.) and demonstrates how everyday video creation projects cross disciplinary boundaries. It will include a review of results from data collected in September 2010 from first-year students at a highly selective research university and provide recommendations for practitioners who are seeking to support student online video creation. This briefing will help educators and librarians to offer educational technology support and instruction.

Handout

Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2011 Project Briefings, Net Generation (includes Millennials), Teaching & Learning
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Open Folklore: A Collaboration

December 7, 2011
Brenda Johnson
Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries
Indiana University 		 Timothy Lloyd
Executive Director
American Folklore Society
Julie Bobay
Associate Dean for Collection Development
and Scholarly Communication
Indiana University

Open Folklore, unveiled October 2010, is an award-winning partnership between the American Folklore Society and the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries, with support from the Indiana University Digital Library Program. More than a Web site, a repository, or a new technology, Open Folklore is an experiment in re-imagining the work of scholarly publishing, scholarly societies, and academic libraries by leveraging the potential of existing technologies and resources. In its full form, the partners intend for Open Folklore to be a multifaceted project that combines digitization and digital preservation of data, publications, educational materials, and scholarship in folklore; promotes open access to these materials; nurtures deep connections across the scholarly communication ecosystem, and provides an online search tool to enhance discoverability of relevant, reliable, and open resources for folklore studies.

This project briefing will include a description of the partnership, demonstration of the Web site, and observations and lessons learned after its first year.

http://openfolklore.org

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2011 Project Briefings, Digital Humanities, Digital Preservation, Publishing, Scholarly Communication
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The Open Geoportal

December 7, 2011
Patrick Florance
Manager Geospatial Technology Services
Tufts University 		 David Siegel
Geospatial Data and Information Software Engineer
Harvard University
Tom Cramer
Chief Technology Strategist and Associate Director
Stanford University		 Chris Barnett
Developer
Tufts University

Many organizations and institutions are developing large spatial data repositories. Discovering and accessing these data sets pose many challenges. As a result, Tufts University and Harvard University are collaboratively developing an open source, federated Web application to discover, preview, and retrieve geospatial data. The Open Geoportal combines an intuitive, map-based search interface along with traditional text-based metadata search tools for rapid data discovery and for use in teaching, learning, and research. It is comprised of several universities and organizations and makes thousands of geospatial data layers available through a single, open source interface; partners include Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Geographic Information System, Princeton University, Columbia University, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Los Angeles, Yale University, and the University of Connecticut.

Built on open source technology, The Open Geoportal provides organizations the opportunity to share geospatial data, maps, metadata, and development resources through a single common interface. Key open source components include Geoserver, Open Layers, Solr/Lucene, GeoWebCache, jQuery, etc. Panelists from Harvard, Tufts, and Stanford will discuss areas such as open-source application development, spatial data infrastructure, Web-based open source geospatial tools, open data, federated metadata harvesting, Web services, governance models, partnerships, etc.

 http://opengeoportal.org/

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2011 Project Briefings, E-Science, Information Access & Retrieval, Metadata
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Oral History, METS and Fedora: Building a Standards-Compliant Audio Preservation Infrastructure

December 7, 2011

Janet Gertz
Director, Preservation and Digital Conversion
Columbia University

Stephen Paul Davis
Director, Libraries Digital Program
Columbia University

From 2008 to 2010 Columbia University Libraries preserved 1,200 hours of seriously endangered, high value, analog oral history recordings, in a project generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  Challenges in the project included:

  • Working with older reel-to-reel and cassette recordings that were not well-inventoried or preserved
  • Reassembling longitudinal, multipart, not-necessarily-contiguous audio content
  • Working with an outside audio preservation vendor to develop effective workflows and standards-compliant metadata (including METS, MODS, and AES-X098B-draft)
  • Ingesting the digital files and metadata into our Fedora repository for asset management, preservation and access

The successful outcomes of this project have provided a standard, replicable approach to digitizing historic audio collections that other institutions can also use.

https://www1.columbia.edu/sec/cu/libraries/bts/mellon_audio/index.html

Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2011 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, Digital Preservation, Special Collections, Standards
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ORCID Update

December 7, 2011

Geoff Bilder
Interim Technical Director, ORCID
ORCID and CrossRef

Amy Brand
Assistant Provost for Faculty Appointments
Harvard University

The name ambiguity problem in attribution of scholarship is one that can only be solved collaboratively, when all stakeholders agree on a standard identification scheme. The ORCID initiative was launched in 2010 to address this problem by bringing together universities, publishers, funding bodies, and other organizations in the scholarly communications space to create a global, open registry of unique, persistent identifiers for individual researchers, and a transparent linking mechanism between ORCID and other author identifier schemes. ORCIDs linked to publications and other artifacts of scholarship promise to enhance the research discovery process, streamline management of grants and researcher profile data, and simplify mechanisms for output and impact tracking. This project briefing will cover recent ORCID developments, including the Phase 1 system launch scheduled for early 2012, the National Science Foundation EAGER award to fund research at the University of Chicago and Harvard University to examine ORCID’s role in advancing the science of science policy, and ORCID’s planned membership and sustainability models.

http://orcid.org

Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2011 Project Briefings, Identity Management
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An Overview of the National Science Foundation DataNet Funded Sustainable Environments-Actionable Data Project

December 7, 2011

Margaret Hedstrom
Professor of Information
University of Michigan

Robert H. McDonald
Associate Director Data to Insight Center and Associate Dean of Libraries
Indiana University

This panel will feature partners from the University of Michigan (U-M) based Sustainable Environments-Actionable Data (SEAD) Project, a National Science Foundation (NSF) Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partnership (DataNet, NSF 2009). This presentation will focus on SEAD and its partnership (U-M, Indiana University, University of Illinois, the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), and the mission of working with sustainable scientific data and the long-tail data of science.

Following a brief overview of NSF’s DataNet vision and goals, the SEAD partnership will be described, including information on how it is working to deliver data curation and preservation cyberinfrastructure that will integrate personnel and expertise from library and archival sciences, cyberinfrastructure, computer and information sciences, and domain science expertise to:

  • Provide reliable digital preservation, access, integration, and analysis capabilities for science and/or engineering data over a decades-long timeline
  • Continuously anticipate and adapt to changes in technologies and in user needs and expectations
  • Engage at the frontiers of computer and information science and cyberinfrastructure with research and development to drive the leading edge forward
  • Serve as component elements of an interoperable data preservation and access network

http://www.sead-data.net
Twitter: @SEADdatanet

Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2011 Project Briefings, Cyberinfrastructure, Digital Curation, Digital Preservation, E-Science
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Paying for Long-Term Storage

December 7, 2011

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

 

 

 

At the CNI Fall 2010 membership meeting, Serge Goldstein described Princeton’s POSE (Pay Once, Store Endlessly) service in which, based on the history of exponential decrease in storage costs, data is endowed with a capital sum to fund its storage indefinitely. Discussions sparked by this presentation, research at the Storage Systems Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and work for the Library of Congress on cloud storage for LOCKSS boxes, have all encountered questions whose answers require a more sophisticated approach to modeling the costs of long-term storage. Among these are:

  • How can the cost of local storage, which has both capital and running costs, be compared with cloud storage, which has only running costs?
  • Can solid-state storage, which is more expensive to buy but cheaper to run, be cost-effective for archival use?
  • How vulnerable is the endowed data model to changes in the rate of decrease of storage costs?

Based on recent research into accounting for long-term costs, both practical from the Bank of England and theoretical from the Santa Fe Institute and Yale University, initial work supported by the Library of Congress is in progress to develop a Monte Carlo model of long-term storage costs. It consists of a framework into which models including interest rates and technology evolution, and policies including technology deployment and replication, can be plugged. The model can be used to explore a wide range of “what-if” scenarios.

The session will describe the model, present initial results and discuss future directions.

 

http://blog.dshr.org/2011/02/paying-for-long-term-storage.html

http://blog.dshr.org/2011/09/modeling-economics-of-long-term-storage.html

Handout (PDF)

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2011 Project Briefings, Digital Preservation, Economic Models, Research Data Management
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