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National Status of Data Management: Current Research in Policy and Education

March 30, 2012
Martin Halbert
Dean of Libraries
University of North Texas		 William Moen
Associate Dean of Research
University of North Texas
Rachel Frick
Director, Digital Library Federation
Council on library and Information Resources		 Spencer D. C. Keralis
Postdoctoral Research Associate
University of North Texas

The demands of big data pose significant challenges for research institutions and academic libraries. This panel features project updates from three interrelated projects examining the data management ecosystem to determine requirements and emerging best practices in policy, graduate education, and professional enrichment. The University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries’ DataRes project, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), is examining the policy landscape at top research institutions across the nation. It is conducting a comprehensive investigation of the concerns of key stakeholders in the research lifecycle (including researchers, administrative officials, librarians, funding agency officials, research equipment vendors, and others) with regard to data management plan mandates from funding agencies, the long-term management of research data generated in universities, and the role of information professionals in such efforts.

The UNT College of Information’s iCAMP project, also funded by the IMLS, is developing a four course, competency-based, online graduate academic certificate program in data curation and data management for a hybrid audience of information professionals and disciplinary researchers and scholars. The Council on Library and Information Resources’ (CLIR) Sloan Foundation-funded research on scholarly practitioners in data curation has conducted an environmental scan of the state of data curation education in and out of the academy, and an anthropological study of the development needs of research professionals thrust into data curation roles. This project builds upon an existing successful program that brings scholars into libraries, the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship in Academic Libraries, to develop a rigorous training program in data curation for individuals with domain expertise, and to propose back to Sloan next steps in the implementation of a sound data management curriculum to extend the CLIR postdoctoral program into the area of data curation. Together these three projects offer both a snapshot of the current landscape of data management policy and education, and offer prescriptive insights on best practices for this rapidly evolving field.


http://txcdk-v22.unt.edu/icamp/content/icamp-project
http://datamanagement.unt.edu/
 http://www.clir.org/initiatives-partnerships/data-curation
http://research.library.unt.edu/datares/

Presentation (iCamp PPTX)
Presentation (DataRes PPTX)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, E-Science, Research Data Management
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Networks and the Paradox of the Active Learner

March 30, 2012
Gardner Campbell
Director, Professional Development & Innovative Initiatives
Associate Professor, English
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Experimentation for the last three years has been conducted with versions of a course called “From Memex to YouTube” with varying populations but roughly the same syllabus and objectives. The course aims to help participants thrive and innovate within the rapid pace of change in information and communications technology (in other words, a fundamental human-computer interface) by introducing them to the powerful visions and conceptual frameworks underlying the development of networked interactive computing.

The primary text used in the course is The New Media Reader (MIT, 2003), beginning with Vannevar Bush and ending with Tim Berners-Lee. The populations have been undergraduates at the University of Mary Washington, first-year students at Baylor University, faculty (interdisciplinary) and staff (IT and library) at Baylor and at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, honors program undergraduates at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and this semester (in a cross-listed course) honors undergraduate and graduate students at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. In addition, for three semesters, the faculty-staff development seminar has been networked among colleges and universities including Rice University, Baylor University, Houston Community College, Benedictine University, the University of California at Berkeley, St. Lawrence University, Whitman College, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Tulane, the University of South Carolina Upstate, and a group in Second Life including educators across the US as well as in Aruba and Belgium.

This session provides an overview of the seminar design, a description of outcomes and lessons learned over the three years, and a consideration of pedagogical vs. andragogical strategies, with particular attention to difficulties and opportunities outlined in Carroll & Rosen’s classic human-computer interaction essay, “Paradox of the Active User.”

 

http://blogs.lt.vt.edu/vtclis12
http://blogs.lt.vt.edu/vtnmfss12/
http://blogs.lt.vt.edu/vtnmsf11/
 http://www.gardnercampbell.net/hrc-grand
http://courseblogs.atlhub.net/baylor_nms_f10/
 http://courseblogs.atlhub.net/baylor_nmfs_f10/
 http://gardnercampbell.wetpaint.com/ (syllabi from the last several iterations)
http://www.newmediareader.com/

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Teaching & Learning
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New York University’s Implementation of Sakai Open Academic Environment (OAE)

March 30, 2012
Jennifer Stringer
Director of Academic Technology Services
New York University

The Sakai Open Academic Environment (OAE) project continues to look more broadly than standard learning management system functionality to engage and connect learners around their academic activities, enhancing the contexts for content authoring, sharing, and discovery, and emphasizing authentic assessment. With broad support for the creation and sharing of templates, offering a Widget Standard Development Kit (SDK) and Widget Marketplace, and supporting IMS Learning Tools Interoperability standards, OAE continues to push the boundaries for ways for anyone to straightforwardly contribute new capabilities.

This presentation will discuss New York University’s current pilot implementation of the Sakai OAE. It will also detail the roadmap for development of the Sakai OAE as well as give background information on the bodies of community representatives developing it, the OAE Steering Group, the OAE Technical Reference Group (TRG), and the OAE User Reference Group (URG).

 

https://oae-community.sakaiproject.org/
http://chartingatlas.blogspot.com/
https://oae-community.sakaiproject.org/content#l=page1&p=ker9TYL5aa

Filed Under: Assessment, CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Standards, Teaching & Learning
Tagged With: ,

Opportunities and Challenges for the 21st Century Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP)

March 30, 2012
James Jacobs
Government Information Librarian
Stanford University

 

 Suzanne Sears
Assistant Dean for Public Services
University of North Texas
David Walls
Preservation Librarian
United States Government Printing Office

The vast majority of all US Government documents published today are “born digital,” published electronically and available through the Internet, and will never be printed by the federal government. The lack of a systematic process for capturing, preserving, and disseminating born-digital government information challenges the ability of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) in being able to provide permanent and equal access to online-only government information to all citizens. However, the Government Printing Office (GPO) and the FDLP community have begun to make strides on this most critical issue.

This project briefing will describe several exciting initiatives currently underway to capture, preserve, and provide access to born-digital government information, including GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys) and web harvesting initiatives, and the agency’s partnerships with federal agencies; the CyberCemetery, the Congressional Research Service Reports archive, and robust digitization program and digital repository of the University of North Texas; and the LOCKSS-USDOCS collaborative program.

These projects offer examples of how the FDLP community, in partnership and under formal agreements with GPO, can work collaboratively to assure the long-term preservation of born-digital government information to “keep America informed.”

 

http://fdlp.gov
http://lockss-usdocs.stanford.edu
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/
http://digital.library.unt.edu/
 http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/
 http://digital.library.unt.edu/explore/collections/CRSR/

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Repositories
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Pay Once, Preservation Forever: A “Paid Up” Cost Model for Long-Term Preservation

March 30, 2012
Stephen Abrams
Associate Director, University of California Curation Center
California Digital Library

Digital preservation and curation are rapidly maturing disciplines, able to draw on an increasingly rich set of community best practices, tools, and service providers to ensure the long-term viability and value of the digital assets that thoroughly pervade all aspects of contemporary culture, commerce, science, education, and entertainment. In many ways, however, the most significant risk to that long-term viability is financial, rather than technical. Unlike the conservation of analog materials, the effective preservation of digital resources necessitates ongoing and proactive intervention, and any interruption in these activities could result in irretrievable data loss. In an era of severe budgetary constraints, however, many institutions are finding it difficult to identity and dedicate ongoing funding streams in support of long-term preservation efforts.

To address this concern, the University of California Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library (CDL) has developed a comprehensive cost model for long-term preservation, known as the “Total Cost of Preservation” or TCP model, that can be applied on either a “pay as you go” (PAYG) or a “paid-up” or “pay once, preserve-forever” (POPF) basis. The latter is particularly useful for data produced as research outputs of grant-funded projects. In the absence of a paid-up option, the status of project outputs often becomes problematic when project funding ceases. The TCP model is capable of representing the full economic costs of long-term preservation, but it can be easily customized to consider only specific subsets of those costs as determined by local policy. The POPF option was derived using a standard economic forecasting technique, discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis.

This briefing will review prior work on preservation cost modeling (including the CMDP, DataSpace, KRDS, and LIFE projects), define the conceptual model underlying the UC3 analysis, summarize the derivation of the relevant cost equations, address some specific shortcomings introduced by the reliance on the DCF technique, and illustrate the application of the model in its PAYG and POPF forms.

Handout (PDF)
Presentation (PowerPoint)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, Digital Preservation, Economic Models
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ResourceSync: Towards a Web-Based Approach for Resource Synchronization

March 30, 2012
Herbert Van de Sompel
Staff Scientist
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Web applications frequently leverage resources made available by remote Web servers. As resources are created, updated, deleted, or moved, these applications face challenges to remain in lockstep with the server’s change dynamics. Several approaches exist to help meet this challenge for use cases where “good enough” synchronization is acceptable. But when strict resource coverage or low synchronization latency is required, commonly accepted Web-based solutions remain elusive.

Motivated by the need to synchronize resources for applications in the realm of cultural heritage and research communication, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) have recently launched the ResourceSync project that aims at designing an approach for resource synchronization that is aligned with the web architecture and that has a fair chance of adoption by different communities.

This project briefing will discuss some motivating use cases and will provide a perspective on the resource synchronization problem that results from initial discussions. It will also give an overview of an experiment in which a synchronization approach was explored to sync with rapidly evolving linked data, and that is based on a server pushing notifications out when its resources change, and recipients of those notifications pulling the changed resources.

Project team: Todd Carpenter (NISO), Berhard Haslhofer, (Cornell University), Martin Klein (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Nettie Lagace (NISO), Carl Lagoze (Cornell University), Peter Murray (NISO), Michael L. Nelson (Old Dominion University), Robert Sanderson (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Herbert Van de Sompel (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Simeon Warner (Cornell University)

 

http://live.dbpedia.org

Handout (PDF)
Presentation (PDF)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval
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retroReveal.org: An Open-Source Process for the Discovery and Recovery of Lost or Obscured Content

March 30, 2012
Joyce L. Ogburn
Dean and University Librarian
University of Utah

 

 Kenning Arlitsch
Associate Dean for IT
University of Utah
Harold M. Erickson
Research Associate
University of Utah

New technologies are making it possible to recover content that has been lost or obscured due to human or natural causes. A team at the University of Utah has developed a process that reveals hidden information in various media, including print, microfilm, and photographs. This presentation is a public pre-launch of retroReveal.org, a project supported and hosted by the J. Willard Marriott Library. The process provides automated, forensic-style enhancement of digital images of varying quality from cameras and scanners, uploaded by anyone. Using different algorithms, dozens of surrogate versions are rendered automatically. Users can then select and annotate the version that best reveals hidden aspects of the image. After processing, users may move images to the public upload gallery, copy to another location, or delete them. In addition, retroReveal.org is a community-oriented site that facilitates scholarly collaboration on interpretation of results.

The beauty of this process is the ability to upload and process any digital format. It is an accessible, inexpensive, and highly effective approach to the problem of revealing hidden information. Though originally targeted at archivists, curators, and conservators, during the alpha phase, the retroReveal algorithms have proven useful in archaeological and other scholarly applications. Examples include recovering content from greatly overexposed microfilms of objects that can no longer be accessed; reading through endpapers to a vellum letter used as a book’s sewing support; recovering a composer’s water-damaged instructions to a publisher concerning musical details of a score; enhancing a poor-quality, low-light aerial photograph that revealed a major archaeo-astronomical complex; visualizing weathered pictographs/petroglyphs; and reading exposure-faded Oregon Trail axle-grease messages on stone. The process also has shown the potential of improving optical character recognition (OCR) to create machine-readable text from image files.

This presentation will include a demonstration of the process as well as discussion of future directions in developing a community of users and contributors.

 

http://retroreveal.org/

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries
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A Study in SCARLET

March 30, 2012
Matt Ramirez
Senior Augmented Reality Developer
University of Manchester

The SCARLET project is pioneering augmented reality (AR) using mobile devices to enhance students’ use of special collections (SC) in libraries; bringing SCs into the age of the app. AR enables students to simultaneously experience the magic of primary materials while enhancing the learning experience by “surrounding” the object with digitized content. Learning and teaching is embedded at the heart of this innovative project, ensuring the focus remains on the student experience and not the technology. The session will describe current work to evaluate AR’s effectiveness in different student groups and suggest other subject areas where this methodology may benefit learning.

 

Presentation (PowerPoint)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Mobile Technologies, Special Collections, Teaching & Learning
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Sustaining Open Source Projects: An Update from DuraSpace

March 30, 2012
Michele Kimpton
Chief Executive Officer
DuraSpace		 Jonathan Markow
Chief Security Officer
DuarSpace

DuraSpace, a not for profit organization, was formed nearly three years ago with the goal of providing a home for open source projects DSpace and Fedora, and with a mission of creating a sustainable model to allow for continued growth and development of the projects. Within this model, DuraSpace also needed to figure out how to transition the organization from a completely grant-based funded operation to an organization that would have a diversified and sustainable business strategy.

Over the years, the organization has made significant progress in developing robust communities for both the DSpace and Fedora repository solutions. Today, there are over 1500 identified installations of DSpace and Fedora platforms globally. The organization has put in place a business strategy that brings in a revenue stream in the form of sponsorship from existing users of DSpace and Fedora, service revenue from its DuraCloud technology, and grant-funded projects for exploratory work and development. DuraSpace also placed several new initiatives on the roadmap for 2012 and 2013 in order to expand services and programs offered to the community. These revenues support the operation, and provide a path to sustainability that does not rely on grant funding.

This presentation will describe the path followed for building a robust open source community, and the strategy put in place for sustaining the not for profit organization; the latter will also cover new services and initiatives on the roadmap.

 

http://Duraspace.org

Presentation (PDF)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Economic Models, Repositories
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Taking Ownership of Electronic Journals and Books

March 30, 2012
Alan Darnell
Director, Scholars Portal
University of Toronto

While many libraries are moving to subscription or leasing models for electronic journals and books, the 21 libraries of the Ontario Council of University Libraries have collaborated to build shared facilities and services for housing and managing large collections of licensed content. The Books and Journals service of Scholars Portal contain over 25M digital articles and close to 400,000 electronic books, including digitized print books and born digital commercial ebooks. This session will describe the rationale behind this commitment to physical ownership of digital content and the maturing of the service from providing simple aggregation to supporting long-term digital preservation.

 

http://journals.scholarsportal.info
http://books.scholarsportal.info

Presentation (PowerPoint)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, E-Books, E-Journals, Economic Models
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