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Preservation Status of e-Resources: A Potential Crisis in Electronic Journal Preservation

December 7, 2011

Oya Y. Rieger
Associate University Librarian
Digital Scholarship Services
Cornell University

Robert Wolven
Associate University Librarian
Bibliographic Services
and Collection Development
Columbia University

E-journals have replaced the majority of titles formerly produced in paper format. Academic libraries are increasingly dependent on commercially produced, born-digital content that is purchased or licensed. The purpose of this presentation is to share the findings of a 2CUL study that assesses the role of LOCKSS and PORTICO in preserving each institution’s e-journal collections. The 2CUL initiative is a collaboration between Columbia University Library (CUL) and Cornell University Library (CUL) to join forces in providing content, expertise, and services that are impossible to accomplish acting alone.

Although LOCKSS is considered a successful digital preservation initiative, neither of the CULs felt that they fully understood the potential of the system for their own settings and collections. In support of this goal, a joint team was established in November 2010 to investigate various questions to assess how LOCKSS is being deployed and the implications of local practices for both CUL’s preservation frameworks. This study was seen as a high-level investigation to characterize the general landscape and identify further research questions. One of the practical outcomes was a comparative analysis of Portico and LOCKSS preservation coverage for Columbia and Cornell’s serial holdings.  A key finding was that only 15-20% of the e-journal titles in the libraries’ collections are currently preserved by these two initiatives. Further analysis suggests the remaining titles fall into roughly 10 categories, with a variety of strategies needed to ensure their preservation.


http://2cul.org/

Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2011 Project Briefings, Digital Preservation, E-Journals
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Progress in Access Technologies

December 7, 2011
Edward Luczak
Systems Architect (Contractor)
US National Library of Medicine, NIH		 Jennifer L. Marill
Chief, Technical Services Division
US National Library of Medicine, NIH
Paul Joseph
Systems Librarian
University of British Columbia		 Bronwen Sprout
Digital Initiatives Coordinator
University of British Columbia

NLM Video Search: A New Open-source Software Tool to Enhance Free Public Access to Historical Medical and Public Health Films (Luczak, Marill)

National Library of Medicine (NLM) Video Search is a new, unique software tool that offers rapid retrieval of Section 508-compliant historical medical and public health films created by the US government and in the public domain. NLM Video Search solves the challenging task of accurately searching digital videos with transcripts.  In addition to offering a full-text search of a film’s transcript, the tool graphically displays where a search word or phrase occurs within the timeline of a film. Clicking the timeline results takes the user immediately to the appropriate portion of the film where the result appears. Digitized and coded using the H.264 standard to produce quality video in a small file, the video files are delivered progressively over HTTP, allowing rapid browsing within the film without latency. The initial group of historical films made accessible via NLM Video Search reveal how the potential of the film medium was studied and harnessed at critical times in American history. NLM Video Search software was recently named one of six winners by US Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in Round 3 of the latest HHSinnovates contest.

http://collections.nlm.nih.gov/videoplayer.html
http://goo.gl/OKod3

Presentation

Leveraging the CONTENTdm API to Build a Dynamic Digital Collections Interface
(Joseph, Sprout)

The University of British Columbia Library has developed a PHP and JavaScript-based interface for presenting simple and compound digital objects managed in OCLC’s CONTENTdm to users in a new and dynamic manner. The interface was developed in response to a donor-funded project to digitize and provide access to 24 historical newspapers. The project coincided with the development of a new Digital Initiatives unit in the Library; colleagues from Digital Initiatives and Library Systems and Information Technology took the opportunity to work together to look at new ways of presenting CONTENTdm collections. The resulting discovery and presentation layer provides an interface to several collections of digitized historical newspapers, including metadata, image files, and optical character recognition text. This presentation layer extends the work of Simon Fraser University Library’s dmWebServices for CONTENTdm, and leverages native CONTENTdm image manipulation capabilities. The user interface provides full-text and date search, browsing by calendar, and a jQuery-based dynamic image viewer featuring paging, zooming, panning, search term highlighting, and a full-screen mode.

http://historicalnewspapers.library.ubc.ca/

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2011 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Information Access & Retrieval, Special Collections
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The SciVerse APIs: An Infrastructure for Machine-readable Scholarly Information

December 7, 2011

Ale de Vries
Senior Product Manager
Elsevier, Inc.

Peer-reviewed scholarly publications, in the form of journals, conference proceedings, monographs and reference works, are nearly universally available through the World Wide Web. The design of the interfaces to this material, the structure of the underlying data, and the architecture of the systems that serve them have traditionally been driven primarily by what is useful for a human reader. However, technological developments in the fields of machine-readable data and of automated text-based analysis, combined with market trends towards greater data openness and organizations partnering with each other for the development and application of technology, provide both an opportunity and a need to create machine-readable interfaces to scholarly data that support powerful machine-level access and interoperability while remaining user-friendly.

In this session, Elsevier will show the machine-readable interfaces that it has developed for scholarly content and bibliometrics, with an explanation of how it chose to implement them as RESTful APIs that leverage standard metadata vocabularies and response formats, and linked-data principles for URI/URL design and content negotiation.

 

http://developers.sciverse.com/api


Filed Under: CNI Fall 2011 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval
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A Tangled Web: Structural Problems in Game Preservation

December 7, 2011

Jerome McDonough
Associate Professor
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois

The Preserving Virtual Worlds (PVW) project is an on-going investigation into the preservation of computer games and interactive fiction, being conducted by the University of Illinois, Rochester Institute of Technology, Stanford University and the University of Maryland.  With funding provided by the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), the PVW project team conducted a socio-technical examination of how computer games differ from other digital objects with respect to preservation, and the extent to which existing digital preservation standards and technologies adequately support the long-term preservation of these complex artifacts.  A significant outcome of this research was the development of a Web Ontology Language (OWL) incorporating concepts from both the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model and Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), which can be employed with packaging standards such as Bagit, OAI-ORE and METS for the creation of Archival Information Packages for games.

The Preserving Virtual Worlds project has now entered a second phase with additional funding provided by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.  This second phase will focus on the identification of significant properties of computer games and attempt to develop a framework for determining appropriate preservation strategies based on a particular game’s significant properties.  This briefing will provide an overview of the research conducted to date, including a detailed description of the Preserving Virtual Worlds’ ontology, and discuss some preliminary findings from our research on games’ significant properties.

http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw2/

Handout (PDF)

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2011 Project Briefings, Digital Preservation, Metadata, Standards
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Trends in Publishing

December 7, 2011

Julie Speer
Head, Scholarly Communication and Digital Services
Georgia Institute of Technology

Allyson Mower
Scholarly Communications
and Copyright Librarian
University of Utah

Sylvia K. Miller
Project Director
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success (Speer, Mower)

In 2007, 65% of ARL members were reported to be either offering or developing publishing services (Hahn, 2008). A new survey, conducted by Purdue University, Georgia Tech, and University of Utah Libraries, as part of a research project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, suggests that 78% of ARL members are now offering publishing services and that this is also an active area of interest in Oberlin Group (liberal arts college) and medium-sized institutions. It also provides a richer picture of an increasingly mature area of academic library service provision, well aligned with issues of emerging roles and new models of scholarly communication.

This session reports on this important year long research project surveying the state of “library publishing services” in 2011 and provides case studies of different strategies being adopted, from collaboration between libraries and existing university presses, through organic single institutional library services, to the creation of multi-institutional consortial publishers. As many larger university presses move even further away from alignment with their parent institutions and wrestle with business models, the new “university press” may well be based in the library. This presentation will provide information about opportunities to become involved in providing publishing services from within the library, practical tips on growing existing programs from librarians active in this space, and some assessment of the challenges institutions involved in this area of new entrepreneurship have faced and how they have overcome them.

The LCRM Project (Miller)

Funded since 2008 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, the “Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement” collaboration (the “LCRM project”) challenges UNC Press, the UNC Library, and the Southern Oral History Program at the Center for the Study of the American South to expand the boundaries of civil rights scholarship and to explore new modes of scholarly publishing. Developed under the grant and hosted by the Library, the LCRM Online Publishing Pilot collected 87 full-text monographs, journal articles, conference papers, and reports online. Components of the system were designed to support ingest of structured content, registration/access, searching, and user commenting at the paragraph level. The pilot’s test period ran 15 months, April 15, 2010-July 18, 2011.

The pilot tested a new online relationship between published humanities scholarship and the primary sources that inform it:  the historian’s “data set.” It suggested a new role for archivists in the scholarly publishing process, and it tested the possibility that a press-library publishing collaboration could guide archival digitization projects. Scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers, and students were invited to contribute annotations at the paragraph level and links to online multimedia primary sources. In addition, the pilot featured multiple outbound linking strategies (OpenURL, DOIs, and WorldCat links) to enable seamless discoverability and linking of related published scholarship online and in print.

The project team will report on usage statistics, user behavior, and lessons learned, and will share plans for a future implementation of the pilot as a library subscription product, as well as plans to publish spinoff enhanced e-books with outbound linking (“portal books”).

https://lcrm.lib.unc.edu/blog
https://lcrm.lib.unc.edu/blog/index.php/works/

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2011 Project Briefings, Digital Humanities, Digital Libraries, Publishing, Social Media
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Understanding Use of Networked Information Content: MINES for Libraries® Implementations at Scholars Portal

December 7, 2011
Dana Thomas
Scholars Portal Evaluation
and Assessment Librarian
Ontario Council of University Libraries 		 Alan Darnell
Manager, Scholars Portal Projects
Ontario Council of University Libraries
Terry Plum
Assistant Dean
Graduate School of Library
and Information Science
Simmons College		 Martha Kyrillidou
Senior Director of Statistics
and Service Quality Programs
Association of Research Libraries

What is known about the impact and use of networked information content by faculty, graduate students and undergraduates?  The Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), in collaboration with the Association of Research Libraries, has been engaged in assessing the impact of networked electronic resources available to the academic libraries in Ontario with the implementation of MINES for Libraries®, a protocol that collects data from users at the point of use of electronic resources.

Data collection activities from the Scholars Portal in 2004-2005 and in 2010-2011 document the increasing value of networked electronic resources offered by Scholars Portal and provide key insights on the shifting trends of the use of electronic resources.  Analysis of a random sample of more than 35,000 representative uses of faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students across 21 higher education institutions in Ontario, Canada, will be discussed in relation to issues including:

•    Shared technology infrastructure and resources at Scholars Portal
•    Assessment infrastructure needed to study digital library use, i.e. what kinds of management decisions need to be informed by what types of data
•    Originality and value of use of SFX (an OpenURL link resolver) as the instrument for intercept surveys in the digital environment
•    Possible research designs, sampling plans, and implementations for point-of-use or intercept surveys

http://www.minesforlibraries.org
http://www.statsqual.org
http://www.minesforlibraries.org/home

Presentation

Filed Under: Assessment, CNI Fall 2011 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries
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WissKI: An Architecture for a Transdisciplinary Virtual Research Environment

December 7, 2011

Guenther Goerz
Professor, Computer Science Department
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg

Siegfried Krause
Head, Department for Cultural and Museum Informatics
Germanic National Museum, Nuremberg

Research projects in cultural heritage institutions produce extensive quantities of high quality digital data.  The methods used for storage and management of the digital objects and data produced by the projects, however, make it difficult, if not impossible, to reuse the information for other purposes.

Existing software solutions to build digital knowledge repositories like Fedora, DSpace, or Greenstone are seldom used because they are not known, or they do not meet the specific requirements of a project, or they require too much technical knowledge and manpower to be installed, used, and maintained. Instead, simple systems like Word files, Excel spreadsheets, or simple databases are created and adjusted to the needs of the project. In other words, techniques that are intended for use on an individual desktop computer are adopted, leading to systems that do not allow networking with other researchers, possibly in a format that could be difficult to access years later. Furthermore, without documentation, it can be very hard to reconstruct the original meaning and purpose of the data.

The WissKI project was conceived to work on these digital data persistence issues. WissKI is a German acronym for Wissenschaftliche KommunikationsInfrastruktur, which can be translated as Scientific Communication Infrastructure. The name WissKI also highlights the fact that the concept of “Wikis” is very important for the project. The wiki-way to deal with information and collaboration was one of the ideas behind creating an easy-to-use system that is also easy for cultural heritage organizations to maintain.

http://wiss-ki.eu/

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2011 Project Briefings, E-Science, Scholarly Communication
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Nov 28, 2011: Open Data, Publishing Innovations, Assessment

November 28, 2011

20111128-CNI-Conversations
[31 min.]

Nov. 28, 2011

Updates on issues ranging from open data to innovations in publishing to assessment were topics covered in the latest report from CNI.  Clifford Lynch discusses the U.S. Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) Calls for Comment on open data (http://federalregister.gov/a/2011-28621) and open publications (http://federalregister.gov/a/2011-28623), notes a European Knowledge Exchange paper on an action program for research data (http://www.cni.org/news/4-nation-action-program-for-research-data-a/), and describes issues related to new forms of publication and author identity discussed at the Innovation in Science Publishing conference.  At the McCusker lecture at Dominican University, Lynch addressed the relationship between bibliography and biography.

Joan Lippincott summarized the recent Berlin 9 meeting (http://www.berlin9.org/), an international conference held for the first time in the US, focusing on all aspects of open access.  She also provided some comments on the current emphasis on assessment in higher education and previewed a project briefing on that topic at the December CNI membership meeting. She will be joined in that session by Malcolm Brown of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and Jeanne Narum of the Learning Spaces Collaboratory (LSC).

Cliff wrapped up by highlighting some upcoming meetings, including the upcoming CENDI meeting on repositories, which will focus on emerging developments in federal agency repositories, the International Digital Curation Conference (IDDC, http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc11) for which CNI is a co-sponsor, and a talk he will give at the National Library of Medicine/NIH on December 16.  He reminded listeners about the CNI meeting on December 12-13 in Arlington, VA (http://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2011/).

We hope you enjoy this program and we welcome your feedback.  For questions or comments related to CNI Conversations, please contact CNI Associate Executive Director Joan Lippincott at joan@cni.org.

Filed Under: Assessment, CNI Conversations, Digital Curation, E-Science, Identity Management, Publishing, Repositories, Research Data Management, Scholarly Communication, Teaching & Learning
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CNI Fall Mtg Line-up – Plenaries & Project Briefings

November 17, 2011

CNI’s fall membership meeting will be held Dec. 12-13 in Arlington, VA.  CNI Director Clifford Lynch will provide an overview of the 2011-12 CNI Program Plan during the meeting’s opening session, and William Michener, Director of e-Science Initiatives for University Libraries at the University of New Mexico, will present the closing plenary address Five New Paradigms for Science and Academia and an Introduction to DataONE.

More information about the plenary sessions, as well as a preliminary list of project briefings to be presented at the meeting is now available:

http://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2011/

Check back frequently as we will be adding project briefing abstracts, handouts, and a finalized scheduled shortly.

Looking forward to seeing you all in December!
-Diane

Filed Under: CNI News
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Preview CNI’s Fall Mtg Program

November 8, 2011

In the latest CNI Conversations podcast (http://www.cni.org/conversations/) CNI Director Clifford Lynch provides a preview of the CNI Fall 2011 Membership Meeting, including brief discussions of general meeting themes, and descriptions of plenary sessions and selected project briefings.

CNI’s fall membership meeting will be held in Arlington, VA on Dec. 12-13, 2011 – registration deadline is THIS FRIDAY, Nov. 11. Visit http://www.cni.org/events/mm/fall-2011/ for more information.

Filed Under: CNI News
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