Loading
 

Data Conservancy Update

April 1, 2011

Sayeed Choudhury
Associate Dean for Library Digital Programs
John Hopkins University

Elliot Metsger
Infrastructure Research & Development Team Learder
John Hopkins University

The Data Conservancy (DC) has completed its first 18 months of prototyping. Working from a modular, service-oriented architecture, DC has prepared content for preservation, ingested content into the archive, analyzed different storage options, and developed pilots that exercise DC APIs and proofs of concepts that highlight more advanced scientific capabilities. This prototyping has led to a “meta analysis” of urban vulnerability to climate change that highlights new forms of science that may be possible using DC. This presentation will include an overview of DC’s technical infrastructure, pilots, and proofs of concepts.

DC also has completed a financial sustainability analysis and planning effort that includes four capstone projects with Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School, development of an initial services stack, and the first version of a sustainability plan. This sustainability process and plan has been tested at Johns Hopkins as part of an effort to support principal investigators with the National Science Foundation data management plan requirement. As a result of this effort, DC has developed a data management plan template available on its Web site that will be discussed during this presentation.

http://dataconservancy.org

Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2011 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, Digital Preservation
Tagged With: ,

Data Management Plans Online

April 1, 2011

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

Patricia Cruse
Director, University of California Curation Center
California Digital Library

In January the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that a data management plan must accompany all grant submissions. This major requirement by the NSF will undoubtedly be taken up by other funding agencies. While the requirement is new for researchers in the United States, the practice has been standard procedure in the European Union for some time. In response to the NSF demand, a group of US libraries and research institutions have formed a partnership with the UK’s Digital Curation Center (DCC) to adapt its Data Management Plans (DMP) Online tool for use in the US. The DMP Online tool draws upon an analysis of funders’ requirements to assist project teams in producing data management plans.

The DMP will be tailored to the requirements of US research funding agencies, as well as to the policies of the institutions they fund. This tool will be freely available, allowing researchers at all institutions to initiate a data management plan quickly and to provide answers to various data management questions relating to their research. The goal is move research data management forward at the national and international levels, ultimately facilitating information exchange at the data level. The partnership of libraries and research institutions includes the University of California at Los Angeles Library, the UC3 from the California Digital Library, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Virginia Library, the University of California at San Diego Library, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (library and Chief Information Officer), DataONE, and the DCC.

http://www.cdlib.org/uc3/datamanagement/dmpo.html

Presentation Slides

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2011 Project Briefings, Digital Curation
Tagged With: ,

Digital Humanities: A Natural Future for Academic Libraries

April 1, 2011

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

Librarians and humanists have a long history of affinity, and both library resources and research in the humanities have evolved. While working with “collections” remains relevant to both, the nature of working with them has changed, and the need for collaboration has increased. This natural affinity and the need for bringing together people with an array of skill sets led the University of Alabama to create the Alabama Digital Humanities Center, a collaboration of faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences, the Libraries, and the Office for Information Technology. This presentation will illustrate the process of engaging faculty, building a space (physical and intellectual), equipping it with relevant technology, and growing a community.

 

http://www.lib.ua.edu/digitalhumanities

Presentation (PDF)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2011 Project Briefings, Digital Humanities
Tagged With: ,

DiSC: Developing a Digital Scholarship Commons

April 1, 2011

Joan A. Smith
Chief Technology Strategist
Emory University

Rick Luce
Director of Libraries
Emory University

With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a team from Emory University’s Woodruff Library spent the past year planning the development of a Digital Scholarship Commons. The ultimate goal is the creation of a transdisciplinary, collaborative digital scholarship center that is truly of the library, not simply in the library. Numerous existing models of digital scholarship centers were explored, the relevant literature was reviewed, an advisory board composed of experts in digital scholarship was convened, and extensive conversations with faculty members, graduate students, and librarians were conducted. The goal was to discover what makes a digital humanities program vibrant, interdisciplinary, and financially sustainable; to determine how scholars from all disciplines can be brought into the library; to explore a hybrid organizational model for sustaining DiSC; to explore new ways of leveraging the library’s collections; and to devise a plan to build librarians’ skills so that they keep pace with the evolving research needs of the twenty-first century scholar.

Investigators were led to five noted centers of digital scholarship in the United States: Duke University’s Visual Studies Initiative (VSI); the University of Maryland’s Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH); the Scholar’s Lab (VSI) at the University of Virginia; George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM); and the University of Nebraska’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH). These institutions gave the team an opportunity to see digital scholarship in action, to get a “feel” for the impact of physical space on similar projects, and to better understand the issues that face these institutions once the realities of long-term budget and management arise.

The result of this preliminary phase is the creation of a new physical space called the Digital Scholarship Commons and nicknamed the DiSC. Housed in the main University Library building, it is shared conceptually and operationally with faculty, researchers, and Emory at large. The new DiSC space is being designed to facilitate scholarly collaboration, to take advantage of the resources and expertise available in the library, and to attract scholars from across the disciplines. Hopefully it will provide insight for other institutions seeking to build their own transdisciplinary, library-based centers for digital scholarship.

Handout (PDF)

Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2011 Project Briefings, Scholarly Communication, User Services
Tagged With: ,

Discipline-based Digital Centers at Columbia: Assessing Needs and Outcomes

April 1, 2011

Robert Cartolano
Director, Library Information Technology Office
Columbia University

Columbia University Libraries is building three Information Commons facilities, focusing on the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Called “Digital Centers,” these facilities will provide support for research and learning in the sciences and humanities in high-end, collaborative, technology-rich environments. The Digital Social Science Center was completed in January 2009, the Digital Science Center was completed in January 2011, and the Digital Humanities Center is slated for completion in Fall 2011. This project briefing will provide an overview of the Digital Center effort, including the assessment, planning, implementation and iterative approach in building the centers, along with lessons learned to date.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/dssc
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/dsc

Presentation (PDF)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2011 Project Briefings, Learning Spaces (includes Information/Learning Commons)
Tagged With: ,

E-Book Wars: Ten Years Later

April 1, 2011

Clifford Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information

In 2001 I wrote an essay titled “The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World” (First Monday, 6:6, June 2001). It’s taken much longer than I would have thought, but developments in the e-book world seem to be reaching critical points in several areas. In this session, I’ll look back at what I got right and what I got wrong ten years ago, and, more importantly, unexpected developments and the current state of play in both scholarly and mass-market publishing.

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2011 Project Briefings, E-Books
Tagged With: , ,

The Espresso Book Machine in the Library: Case Studies from Two University Libraries

April 1, 2011

Ian Godfrey
ILS and Operations Administrator
University of Utah

Terri Geitgey
Manager, Library Print Services
University of Michigan

 

Most installations of the Espresso Book Machine (EBM) are at bookstores, but libraries have an even broader mandate to meet the demands of students and scholars with new technologies and approaches. As the only two academic libraries in the United States with EBMs, the University of Utah and the University of Michigan will report on the number and types of uses, collaborations that have developed, what has been learned, and future directions and goals for the use of the EBM as an integral part of a library’s mission and goals.

The purchase of an EBM by the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah was driven by a vision of exploiting new ways of creating and disseminating new knowledge by the library, the University of Utah Press, and by a vibrant local community of scholars, genealogists and family historians, as well as book artists. The goal was to provide users with multiple avenues to accessing and using published knowledge; to capitalize on the large investment in digitization by the University Library and by others; to expand support and increase opportunities for the University Press; and to increase experimentation to continue to transform the library for 21st century roles and expectations.

Similarly, interest in the machine at the University of Michigan about its potential and a willingness to experiment with new technologies that could provide valuable services to the University community and beyond prompted the purchase. As a complement to the Library’s well-established reprint program and the University Press’s galley program for early reviews (including providing tenure committee copies prior to official publication), on site book-making technology could provide the perfect tool to both unlock the reprint potential inherent in the vast repositories of digitized public domain content that reside within the Library and beyond, and to provide an agile and cost-effective means to distribute the University Press’s galley copies. The Library believed that access to quality, low-cost, fast printing of book-like material would encourage the creation of new content, innovative uses of existing content, and new collaborations within the University and local communities.

 

http://tinyurl.com/yesncq5
http://www.lib.umich.edu/espresso-book-machine

Handout(MS WORD)

Presentation (Godfrey)
Presentation (Geitgey)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2011 Project Briefings, User Services
Tagged With: ,

Finding a Way: Moving from Open Access Principle to Practice

April 1, 2011

Lisa Hinchliffe
President, Association of College & Research Libraries
University of Illinois at Urbana-Chamaign

Mary Ellen Davis
Executive Director, Association of College & Research Libraries
Association of College & Research Libraries

Janice Welburn
Budget and Finance Committee Chair
Association of College & Research Libraries
Marquette University

 

Societies and associations that have relied on revenue from journal publications to fund programs and other activities have been striving to find a way to move to an open access (OA) model. Librarians who wish to live their principles have expressed loudly their desire to move professional publications to OA. This session presents a case study of the Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) journal, College and Research Libraries, and its transition to OA from member benefit/subscription-only through online pre-prints to full OA, which will begin in April 2011. The panelists will discuss ACRL’s commitment to OA principles and the challenges of making those principles a reality in practice including philosophical tensions, sensitivity to the concept of “member benefit,” the business model, and the question of whether to still have print. The case is offered not as a model of what other publications should do, but rather as an example of the kinds of considerations and decisions with which publishers must grapple.

 

http://crl.acrl.org

Handout (MS WORD)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2011 Project Briefings, E-Journals, Economic Models
Tagged With: ,

A Framework for Applying the Open Archival Information System Reference Model to Distributed Digital Preservation

April 1, 2011

Martin Halbert
Dean of Libraries and Associate Professor
University of North Texas

Matt Schultz
Collaborative Services Librarian
Educopia Institute

Members of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance and the Educopia Institute are developing a framework for implementing the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model and the Trustworthy Repository Auditing Certification (TRAC) metrics in a distributed digital preservation (DDP) environment. This work will conclude with a submission to the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) for review and approval similar to the Producer Archive Interface Methodology Abstract Standard (PAIMAS).

Our aims are as follows:
1. Describe the roles and responsibilities at institutions which are working to replicate and preserve digital information in a geographically distributed environment;
2. Provide a common vocabulary and set of recommendations for trustworthy interoperable systems development; and
3. Inform administrative and technical practices between groups that seek to collaboratively preserve digital information using distributed mechanisms.

This presentation will include a description of the workplan for this project and the findings from initial white paper gap analysis work on OAIS Section 6: Archive Interoperability and various DDP use cases. Wider participation in this effort by other groups is also being sought.

 

Handout (PDF)

Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2011 Project Briefings, Digital Preservation, Repositories
Tagged With: ,

Kuali OLE: From Startup to Software

April 1, 2011

Robert H. McDonald
Executive Director, Kuali OLE
Indiana University

Michael Winkler
Kuali OLE Functional Council Chair
University of Pennsylvania

Bradley Skiles
Project manager, Kuali OLE
Indiana University

Richard Slabach
Quality Assurance Manager, Kuali OLE
Indiana University

In July 2010, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a $2.38 million dollar grant to a national partnership of nine university libraries to carry out the build and implementation phase of the Kuali OLE (pronounced Oh-LAY) Project. The partners in the project have pledged an equivalent amount of cost-share to the project, creating one of the largest library-funded community-source software projects in modern history. Kuali OLE builds from the Mellon-funded OLE Planning Grant led by Duke University Libraries, a process that engaged hundreds of libraries and librarians at international scale in the feasibility of a community sourced software solution for academic library management work flow.

In phase one of the build project, July 2010-July 2011, Kuali OLE has several deliverables that will be demonstrated to the library and enterprise academic software community. This phase will:
• demonstrate ingest of library vendor records from a major library approval plan vendor
• demonstrate the feasibility of using Kuali RICE middleware for creating and routing this as a library requisition workflow
• demonstrate the functionality of the embedded Kuali Finance System Software components for generating purchase orders and managing library funds

This project briefing, a follow-on to briefings at CNI in Fall 2008 and Spring 2009, will include a demonstration of code and re-use of Kuali software components from the build phase as of mid-March 2011. The Kuali OLE Reference Model Implementation, that is expected to be available as a target for use by both Kuali OLE Partners as well as for those interested in Kuali OLE implementation, will also be discussed. This will include both the OLE core software as well as a demonstration public discovery layer. Upcoming previews of the first Kuali OLE Conference Track that will be held at Kuali Days 2011 in November in Indianapolis will also be presented.

 

http://ole.kuali.org

Presentation Slides

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2011 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval, User Services
Tagged With: , ,