As part of an ongoing plan to transform an underutilized science and engineering library into a lively incubator for student-faculty collaboration and innovation, staff at the University of Nevada, Reno decided to launch a bold initiative: build a 3D scanning and printing “makerspace” and make it available to the entire campus. The service has been wildly successful with 3D printers running 24 hours a day. Furthermore, positioning the library as a place that facilitates knowledge creation beyond text based tools and resources has been a game changer. Students are highly motivated to learn new skills in order to take advantage of new technologies (Lynda.com gets heavy use); they experiment and iterate quickly to perfect their designs. Even better, students from engineering are now rubbing elbows with people from fields such as biology, computer science, geology, and even art. Like the printing press and the personal computer, 3-D printers have been hailed as a revolutionary device that will ultimately transform the way the world operates.

 Presentation

Michele Kimpton
Chief Executive Officer
DuraSpace

Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust) is a consortium of academic institutions committed to the creation and management of academic and research content for multiple institutions. As a member of APTrust, the University of Virginia in partnership with DuraSpace is implementing a cloud based repository service to aggregate curated content from consortium institutions upon which rich access services may be built. The implementation will further provide long term preservation for selected content through the implementation of a repository within the Digital Preservation Network (DPN).

The aggregate repository is being implemented to collect many forms of content, offer utility to support administrative and simple access, augment individual institution preservation strategies as well as provide a firm foundation for exploring future access services. Consortium members believe they can achieve these goals more fully together than they can alone.

http://academicpreservationtrust.org/
Presentation

This presentation summarizes the lessons learned from trial audits of a several production distributed digital preservation networks. These audits were conducted using the open source SafeArchive system, which enables automated auditing of a selection of TRAC criteria related to replication and storage. An analysis of the trial audits demonstrates both the complexities of auditing modern replicated storage networks, and reveals common gaps between archival policy and practice. Recommendations for closing these gaps are discussed, as are extensions that have been added to the SafeArchive system to mitigate risks in distributed digital preservation (DDP).

Presentation Slides

http://www.safearchive.org

Brian Tingle
Technical Lead
California Digital Library

Clifford Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information

This session will feature two related archival identity management projects: Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) and Building a National Archival Authorities Infrastructure. SNAC (2010-2014), a project to create a test bed of archival authority records and demonstrate their potential for user discovery, comprises a three-part process. First, personal, corporate, and family names (and related historical data) are extracted from finding aids (descriptions of archival records). Next, these names and data are assembled into contextual authority records, which are compared against each other, and against authority and historical data from other sources (e.g. VIAF and DBpedia). The resulting set of authority records serves as the basis of a prototype interface that provides integrated access (through the names and descriptions of people) to related but distributed primary and secondary resources. By virtue of the connections displayed between authority records and related sources, the prototype also provides a visualization of the historical social networks in which the people depicted lived and worked.

Among the primary objectives of the Building a National Archival Authorities Infrastructure (2011-2013) project is to transform the groundwork completed by SNAC into a sustainable national archival authorities cooperative program that is similar to, but distinct from, the Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO). The project has convened a series of meetings comprising archivists, librarians, scholars, and allied professionals, with the goal of developing a blueprint for the cooperative. The emerging consensus from these meetings is that the National Archives and Records Administration will host the cooperative, collaborating with the archival and allied communities in its governance, development, and maintenance.

 http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/
http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/xtf/search
http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/NAAC_index.html

Helen Agüera
Senior Program Officer
National Endowment for the Humanities National Endowment for the Humanities

Brenda Gunn
Associate Director for Research and Collections, Briscoe Center for American History
University of Texas at Austin

Mark Phillips
Assistant Dean for Digital Libraries
University of North Texas

More than 200 libraries, museums, archives, and scholarly research centers collaborated to create the statewide Portal to Texas History over a 10 year period. This rich resource now contains millions of files comprising more than 220,000 titles, many of which are extensive back-runs of historic state newspapers. The Portal is now used millions of times per year by both academic and public researchers. This panel will discuss the Portal to Texas History as a case study in large-scale collaboration to develop networked information content. Issues that will be discussed by panel participants include the national context of digitization efforts, scholarly guidance in content selection, community engagement, standards-based technology for content aggregation at scale, assessment of usage and impacts, and strategies for long-term sustainability.

http://texashistory.unt.edu/

Carly Strasser
Data Curation Specialist
California Digital Library

There is a large gap between the data management skills needed by modern researchers and their current abilities, and there is not yet a clear way to bridge this gap. In an effort to address this lack of skills, several institutions collaborated to create the DMPTool. Collaborators included the California Digital Library, DataONE, the Digital Curation Centre, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of California at Los Angeles Library, the University of California at San Diego Libraries, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library and Office of Cyberinfrastructure, and the University of Virginia Library. The result is a freely available web service with two principal goals: 1) allow researchers to quickly and easily produce a quality data management plan, and 2) inform researchers of relevant resources and support services across the community and within their institution. The tool clearly identifies what funders want grant applicants to address, and it allows users to edit, save, share, print and download their data management plans.

Following on prior Coalition for Networked Information briefings, this presentation will begin with an overview of data management planning for newcomers, with emphasis on the DMPTool. The session will include an update on current data management policies and, and it will also include discussion of the present landscape of data management planning. The history of the project will be described (a collaborative effort of eight institutions), its uptake and success, and plans for new functionality, grant funding, and governance. A brief demonstration of the DMPTool will be provided to seed a facilitated discussion on the future of the DMPTool, what services it could and should provide, and how these services and materials will better enable good data stewardship practices among researchers.

 http://dmp.cdlib.org/

Katherine Skinner,
Executive Director
Educopia Institute, MetaArchive Cooperative

Matt Schultz
Program Manager
Educopia Institute, MetaArchive Cooperative

Gail McMillan
Director, Digital Library and Archives
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Providing the ETDs of Today for the Researchers of Tomorrow (Halbert, Skinner, Schultz)

This briefing will highlight and discuss the early findings from an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded project hosted by the University of North Texas that is researching and documenting a range of life cycle curation and preservation practices for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). An accompanying workshop is planned for summer 2013 in conjunction with United States Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association (USetdA) 2013 conference. This project briefing will solicit advice on proper delivery formats. The briefing will also discuss developments toward a series of micro services that will assist ETD programs with enhancing the curation of their ETDs; implementation use cases will be discussed. Partners on this project include Educopia Institute, the Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations, and the university libraries of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), Pennsylvania State University, Boston College, Indiana State University, Rice University, and the University of Arizona.

http://metaarchive.org/imls

Do Open Access ETDs Effect Publishing Opportunities in the Sciences? Findings from the 2012 Survey of Academic Journal Editors (McMillan)

Although open public access to electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) has been widely implemented in higher education, some faculty advisors and graduate student authors are still concerned that unfiltered access to their ETDs could diminish future publishing opportunities. This presentation will discuss a survey of academic journal editors about their attitudes towards ETDs that was conducted under the auspices of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. At the fall 2011 Coalition for Networked Information meeting, results of a survey of social science and humanities editors and university press directors were reported. This presentation will share the latest survey findings regarding the policies of science journals in light of open access ETDs. It will also compare the results from the social science and humanities survey and the science survey as well as the 2012 and 1999 surveys of science editors’ attitudes towards ETDs.

Survey authors: Gail McMillan, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Marisa L. Ramirez, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo; Joan Dalton, University of Windsor; Ann Hanlon, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Heather Smith, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo; Chelsea Kern, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Teresa Walker
Head Integrated User Services, Library
University of Tennessee

Martha Kyrillidou
Senior Director
Association of Research Libraries

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

Kara J. Malenfant
Senior Strategist for Special Initiatives
Association of College and Research Libraries

How Libraries Contribute to Student Success: Findings from LibValue
(Fleming-May, Kyrillidou, Walker)

What do we know about the ways libraries contribute to student success? The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) LibValue grant is a three-year effort testing different methodologies articulating the value of the library and return on investment. One of the areas of investigation is the contribution of the library to student success. This session will highlight two areas that relate to student success: the physical space of the library and teaching/learning environmental interventions. The results of two perspectives will be discussed, one from the commons surveys and the second from the surveys of instructors and students. Both perspectives highlight the importance of a positive environment that inspires studying and the articulation by students of positive outcomes.

Presentation (Walker)

Assessment in Action: ACRL’s Newest IMLS Grant-Funded Project (Davis, Malenfant)

The Association of College and Research Library’s (ACRL) Value of Academic Libraries initiative has ambitious plans for the next few years. This briefing will provide an overview of the new Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded project “Assessment in Action: Academic Libraries and Student Success” (AiA). The grant funding will support ACRL, in partnership with the Association for Institutional Research and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and build on their IMLS 2011 Collaborative Planning Grant, which convened two invitational summits. In the first year of this three-year project, 75 campus-wide teams from all types of institutions will be selected to develop and implement action-learning projects that examine the impact of the library on student success. Each participating institution will identify a team consisting of a librarian and at least two additional team members as determined by the campus. The librarian team leaders will participate in a one-year professional development program that includes team-based activities carried out on their campuses. A blended learning environment and peer-to-peer network will support the librarian team leaders. As part of AiA, they will document and share their work so that others in the wider academic library and higher education communities can benefit.

http://libvalue.cci.utk.edu/
http://www.ala.org/acrl/AiA
Presentation (Malenfant)

Sean Quimby
Senior Director, Special Collections Research Center
Syracuse University

Jeremy Morgan
Information Technology Analyst
Syracuse University

As Syracuse University Library reported at the spring 2011 Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) meeting, it planned to develop a custom PHP/MySQL database driven application as part of its National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Marcel Breuer Digital Archive project. The application generates METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) encoded objects and EAC (Encoded Archival Context) authority records that are, in turn, indexed by the open source eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) platform developed by the California Digital Library.

In spring 2012, Syracuse University Library launched the Breuer web portal, which unites more than 35,000 digital objects from nine institutions located in three different countries relating to the influential Bauhaus-trained modernist architect. The project was a model of institutional collaboration, particularly in the realm of copyright policy. Now, Syracuse is extending both the copyright policy and the technological infrastructure developed for the Breuer project to all of its digital collections, migrating them from CONTENTdm to the new custom application. In the process, it will make much of its “dark” archive (content digitized at the request of individual patrons) publicly available for the first time.

This presentation will include an overview of the University’s custom database application, a demonstration of the completed Breuer portal, and a detailed description of the process for migrating the library’s digital objects and metadata from a proprietary system to an open source repository that allows faceted browsing and, eventually, dynamic interoperability with encoded archival description (EAD)-encoded archival finding aids.

http://breuer.syr.edu/
http://plastics.syr.edu

Handout
Presentation

Steven Morales
Program Director
Digital Preservation Network

This session will address the progress that has been made in the six months since the Digital Preservation Network (DPN) was announced. With almost 60 institutional members, DPN builds upon the higher education community’s current preservation efforts by creating a federated preservation network, owned by and for the academy, which will provide secure digital archiving of the scholarly and cultural record. At the heart of DPN is a commitment to replicate the data and metadata of research and scholarship across diverse software architectures, organizational structures, geographic regions, and political environments. Replication diversity, combined with succession rights management, will ensure that future generations have access to today’s discoveries and insights.

http://www.dpn.org/