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Administering and Assessing Four E-Textbook Pilots

Dean Hendrix
Assistant Director for University Libraries
State University of New York at Buffalo

Electronic textbooks (or e-textbooks) and their business models are evolving quickly and represent a singular opportunity for the higher education community to serve students more efficiently both academically and financially. Motivated by the desire to enhance student learning outcomes, reduce student expenditures on course materials and influence the terms of sustainable business models, the University at Buffalo Libraries has administered four different e-textbook pilots serving over 2000 students over the last nine months. These include:
- a course-based pilot facilitated by Internet2/ EDUCAUSE (CourseLoad)
- a site license targeted to introductory biology courses (Nature Publishing Group)
- a multi-campus State University of New York pilot (CourseSmart)
- a student-based pilot facilitated by Internet2/ EDUCAUSE (CourseSmart)

This project briefing will discuss the common and unique administrative challenges and opportunities of the pilots, including engagement of teaching faculty, identity management issues, necessary partnerships, and license negotiations. The briefing will also focus on student and faculty attitudinal survey data and usage statistics that address learning outcomes, e-textbook features and functionality, format preferences, and cost considerations.

 

 http://library.buffalo.edu/findlibrarymaterials/e-textbooks/

 

 

And After You’ve Built It? Next Steps in Repository and Research Data Support

 

Philip Konomos
Associate University Librarian
Arizona State University

For over a decade research universities have focused on building repositories and additional cyberinfrastructure to enhance and support new forms of 21st century research. With digital repositories in place, the time has come to address the next set of challenges: building content, assuring sustainability, and fostering new uses for existing repository content.

The Arizona State University Libraries has begun a set of initiatives working with faculty, research staff, and administrators in new and innovative ways. Efforts include targeting new (first and second year) tenure-track faculty to promote use of our repository services for research data; targeting senior, Baby-Boom generation faculty to help capture their legacy research data before they retire; building a catalog of learning objects to leverage existing repository content; and doing systematic outreach to colleges, schools, and research centers to embed library staff in grant-funded projects as early as possible (preferably at the grant writing stage).

http://lib.asu.edu/data
http://repository.asu.edu

 

The Avalon Media System: An Open Source Audio/Video System for Libraries and Archives

Jon W. Dunn
Interim Assistant Dean for Library Technologies
Indiana University Bloomington

Claire Stewart
Head, Digital Collections and Scholarly Communication Services
Northwestern University

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has funded a three-year project from 2011-2014, led by the libraries at Indiana University Bloomington and Northwestern University in collaboration with ten other institutional partners, to develop an open source system that will enable libraries and archives to easily curate, distribute, and provide online access to their audio and video collections. This project, known as the Avalon Media System, follows from extensive prior investigation into the needs of academic libraries for ingest, management, and access to digital audio and video collections to support teaching, learning, and research. Version 1.0 of Avalon will be released in Spring 2013. This presentation will include discussion of: 1) motivations for the development of Avalon; 2) current and planned system functionality; 3) collaboration with other open source software communities (including the Hydra Project and Opencast Matterhorn); 4) issues of community building for ongoing sustainability; and 5) how Avalon fits into the larger landscape of media content management in higher education. Time for general discussion of issues related to media content management and open source software sustainability will follow.

 http://www.avalonmediasystem.org/

 

 

Bibliographic Framework Initiative: Process and Expectations

Roberta Shaffer
Associate Librarian of Congress for Library Services
Library of Congress

Listen to this Presentation

The Library of Congress (LC) has kicked off a process called the Bibliographic Framework Initiative (BIBFRAME) to develop a new communications vehicle for bibliographic data, a cornerstone of libraries. The library and cultural heritage institution environment has and is changing, with the Web and the Internet becoming central factors for sharing both bibliographic data and resources themselves. The result page number on Google is a statistic of concern as it means visibility for the resources that libraries can supply to the community. While MARC has served well beyond the original expectations, there are aspects of the current community that could function better and enable libraries to be more central and relevant if the bibliographic description exchange tools were “retooled.” This presentation will describe the BIBFRAME steps taken thus far and the current expectations for this development with an aim of stimulating interest and concerns from attendees.

http://bibframe.org
http://www.loc.gov/marc/transition

 

Chinese Canadian Stories: Uncommon Histories from a Common Past

 

Allan Bell
Director, Library Digital Initiatives
University of British Columbia

Chinese Canadian Stories (CCS) uses technology to bring the past to life and preserve digital objects for the future. In doing so, it has fostered innovative research that connects students with elders, developed educational materials for Grade 5-7 students across the country and helped an array of Canadian community groups tell their fascinating yet often overlooked legacies. Highlights of the CCS project, led by the University of British Columbia Library and Simon Fraser University Library, include interactive kiosks that present visually powerful narratives in three languages (English, French, Chinese); a searchable Chinese Head Tax Register of 97,000 digitized records, along with interactive modules that visualize the data for users; an educational video game entitled Gold Mountain Quest; and more. This cutting-edge project presents history for the digital age in a way that truly engages students and communities.

http://ccs.library.ubc.ca
http://ccs.library.ubc.ca/en/videos/ccs_trailer.html
http://ccs.library.ubc.ca/en/GMQ/trailer.html
http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/project.php?id=1049

 

Collaboration to Innovation

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

Annette Bailey
Assistant Director for Electronic Resources and Emerging Technology Services
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

The LibX project was launched in Fall 2006 to provide libraries worldwide with the ability to integrate librarians and their services into users’ webflow, providing help with information seeking and discovery at the point of need. In early 2013, the leading faculty on the LibX project developed a real time visualization of user activity in Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University’s discovery system. This presentation will discuss how disruptive organizational change at the University Libraries and strategic collaboration across the University has lead to rapid, successful technology innovation that benefits the development and adoption of new services in libraries.

 http://libx.org/

The DataShare Project: Collaboration Yields Promising Tool

Angela Rizk-Jackson
Biomedical Informatics Project Manager
University of California, San Francisco

Julia Kochi
Director, Collections and User Services
University of California, San Francisco

Perry Willett
Digital Preservation Services Manager
California Digital Library

The goal of the DataShare project is to achieve widespread voluntary sharing of scientific data. In an effort to reach this goal, DataShare has created a data sharing website that enables investigators at the University of California (UC) to publish all of their research outputs (e.g., tabular data, images, and software). Currently, data sharing is not widespread across all disciplines; scientific advancement and society as a whole would benefit if more research data were widely shared and easily discoverable. The DataShare website serves as a portal for (1) finding data, via browsing or searching by metadata fields; and (2) depositing data and accompanying DataCite metadata with customized data use agreements. The DataShare project is a collaboration between the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), the UCSF Library, and the UC Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library.

This project briefing will include discussion of the impetus for the DataShare project, the collaborators’ roles, the methods used to work towards the project goals, and a demonstration of the current DataShare website. Additionally, discussion of the role of projects such as DataShare in the larger landscape of data management and archiving tools will be included.

 http://datashare.ucsf.edu

Presentation

 

 

 

Developments in Scholarly Identity Management

Clifford Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information

David Millman
Director, Digital Library Technology Services
New York University

Laurel L. Haak
Executive Director
ORCID

Neil Jacobs
Programme Director, Digital Infrastructure
Jisc

Dean B. Krafft
Director of Library Information Technology
Cornell University

This panel will provide an update on several developments in scholarly identity management, with particular emphasis on places where national or international programs connect with campus-based activities. Cliff Lynch will provide an overview of some of the developments, and will also offer a brief look at key issues that emerged from the invitational Executive Roundtables on Scholarly Identity held earlier in the spring meeting and then moderate the rest of the session. Panelists will offer comments on developments in the UK (Neil Jacobs), the ORCID system (Laurel Haak), VIVO (Dean Krafft), and the implications for institutional systems (David Millman), and they will respond to questions from the moderator and the audience.

 

Digital Humanities Revisited: Continuing Debates and Work on the Ground

Thomas C. Wilson
Associate Dean, Branch Libraries and Digital Student Services
University of Alabama

Drawing from recent publications on digital humanities centers, professional debates, research on innovation, and experiences at the Alabama Digital Humanities Center (ADHC), this presentation will raise challenging issues related to library involvement in digital humanities (DH) work and DH approaches and illustrate with lessons learned from the development and growth of the ADHC. The discussion will attempt to decouple specific DH issues from humanities challenges in general, recast the DH reach to humanities more generally (as opposed to discipline specific), and highlight the roles that libraries and librarians can play in creating DH infrastructure within the larger organization.

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

 

 

 

The Digital Preservation Network: A Report and Discussion on DPN’s Emerging Architecture, System Protocol & Service Model

Tom Cramer
Chief Technology Strategist
Stanford University

James Simon
System Architect
Stanford University

The Digital Preservation Network (DPN) is a nationwide initiative to create a preservation backbone for digital information of interest to the academy. DPN comprises a handful of large-scale preservation repositories, which together form a heterogeneous network of secure, trustworthy digital archives, each operated under diverse geographical, organizational, financial, and technical regimes. Robust (bit) auditing and repair functions ensure the integrity and security of content over time. Intellectual property agreements among depositors, repositories and the university members of the Network ensure succession of rights to use content in the event of the dissolution of the original depositor or archive. Since late 2012, a technical team from the five initial nodes has been working on an initial implementation of the network. This presentation will present that group’s work, which includes basic design principles, functional requirements and system specifications; the Network’s high level architecture and protocols for content replication and auditing; and framing of detailed service and policy questions that will drive the Network’s overall design and operation. DPN members and digital preservation experts are especially encouraged to attend and participate in this interactive session.

http://www.dpn.org

Presentation