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Discovery Turned Inside Out: Using schema.org and Google Site Search with Library Digital Collections

March 18, 2013

Will Sexton
Digital Collections Coordinator, Libraries
Duke University

Sean Aery
Digital Projects Developer, Libraries
Duke University

 

Duke University Libraries has begun embedding structured metadata within the source code of the Web pages that display the Libraries’ digital collections. This practice follows the recommendations of the schema.org initiative, an effort by commercial search engine developers to use structured data to enrich the user’s experience. The initiative has led, for example, to Google’s display of contact information for retail outlets in search results, or its enhanced options for filtering recipe searches. Duke’s objectives in adopting schema.org relate both to the ways that an exterior service like Google might represent the institution’s materials, and how the organization will offer services to researchers. Usage analysis suggests that systems outside of Duke’s library, largely consisting of the commercial search tools, drive traffic to University collections, and the institution wants to increase its own systems’ interoperability with them.

Duke is also piloting a local instance of Google, via its Site Search API, with the potential to enhance and replace the discovery services offered to users. Generally speaking, the library sees embedded structured data as a way to extend the impact of the time and resources spent on discovery tools for the content that we manage. This presentation will show how Duke Libraries is using schema.org, it will include a demonstration of a localized Google experience, and it will include discussion of how this new emphasis on structured data changes how Duke Libraries envisions the future of discovery.

 http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/

Presentation (Sexton)
Presentation (Avery)

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval, Metadata, Project Briefing Pages
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DuraCloud for Research: A Project Status Report

March 18, 2013

 

Jonathan Markow
Chief Community Strategist
DuraSpace

Last year DuraSpace reported on the early status of DuraCloud for Research (DfR), a project funded by the Alfred. P. Sloan Foundation to provide enhanced cloud storage for research data. DfR combines local monitoring and backup of project data from all local sources (including DropBox and other Web services) into DuraCloud. Metadata extracted during the upload process is stored in a cloud-hosted Fedora repository. DfR utilizes a data management and visualization tool developed by Discovery Garden for the Smithsonian Institution to provide the researcher and curation staff with a platform to organize the data and further enrich associated metadata. In this session, DuraSpace will offer a post-grant summary of progress and discuss next steps.

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, Project Briefing Pages, Research Data Management
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Economical Big Local Storage

March 18, 2013

Tom Klingler
Assistant Dean, University Libraries
Kent State University

Kent State University Libraries has developed a local digital storage system that provides high-volume, medium-term storage of digital items. The system uses very inexpensive hardware and locally-developed (soon to be open source) software. Technically not a DAM nor a dark archive, this system provides for the distributed redundant storage of three validated (fixity checked) copies of digital files, some of which could then move to DAM or dark archive based on retention schedule and/or significance. The system supports upload via batch, zip, and drag and drop, and it supports a wide array of standard file types. Items are assigned an expiration date based on a retention period, which is based, in turn, on an assigned retention group. System-assigned and user-supplied metadata support a search mechanism. Stored content is organized by Workgroup, Project, and Item. Three servers (pods) distributed throughout campus each support 36TB of storage. The servers synchronize all files daily and nightly between themselves when all checksums are valid. The system runs on CentOS, and uses RAID6. There is no strict 7/24/365 up-time expectation; the primary concern is data preservation.

End-users, staff in various campus divisions, contribute their own data for storage, and the data in question includes data that is the responsibility of University Libraries, Special Collections, and University Archives. The system stores master files like tiffs; there is no need to store derivative files, which can be easily regenerated on the fly. At the current capacity of 36TB per each pod, the total cost is $ 0.58 per GB. The current hardware configuration can support up to 108TB per pod, at a total cost of $0.30 per GB. This system is envisioned as a middle-layer storage system that can provide massive storage at very low cost, and it can provide a central workspace where data can be stored before it is moved to other systems like a DAM system, a dark archive, an institutional repository, a public digital gallery, etc., or before it is disposed of based on a retention schedule. This session will offer more detail on the system’s hardware and software functionality.

http://www.backblaze.com/
http://www.protocase.com/products/index.php?e=Backblaze

Presentation

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Digital Preservation, Project Briefing Pages, Research Data Management
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EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) Student Technology Study

March 18, 2013

Pam Arroway
Senior Statistician
EDUCAUSE

In 2012, the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) collaborated with 195 institutions to collect responses from more than 100,000 students about their technology experiences. Technology is a critical part of students’ learning environments for both traditional brick-and-mortar classrooms as well as e-learning settings. This annual study explores technology ownership, use patterns, and perceptions of technology among higher education undergraduate students. Key findings for 2012 are organized around four broad thematic messages:
(1) Blended-learning environments are the norm; students say that these environments best support how they learn.
(2) Students want to access academic progress information and course material via their mobile devices, and institutions deliver.
(3) Technology training and skill development for students is more important than new, more, or “better” technology.
(4) Students use social networks for interacting with friends more than for academic communication.

An update on the 2013 survey will be included in this session, as will information on how to participate in the 2014 survey.

 http://www.educause.edu/ecar/about-ecar/ecar-annual-study-students-and-it

 

 

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Project Briefing Pages, Teaching & Learning
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Enabling Institutional Action for Research Data Management: The DCC Experience

March 18, 2013

Kevin Ashley
Director, Digital Curation Centre
University of Edinburgh

In the past two years, the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) has engaged in an intensive program of working with individual universities to increase their capacity and capability to plan and deliver research data management (RDM) services. This work is carried out against a background of increasing funder requirements on researchers and institutions, and developing national and international infrastructure. This presentation will include a description of what has worked well, what has not worked very well, the changes that have been observed, and the outlook for the future, as well as discussion of how the DCC’s work can be transferred and replicated outside the United Kingdom.

http://www.dcc.ac.uk
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/community/institutional-engagements

 

 

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, Project Briefing Pages, Research Data Management
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Hypothes.is: Annotating the World’s Knowledge

March 18, 2013

Peter Brantley
Director Scholarly Communications
Hypothes.is

 

For the first several decades of the Web’s existence, human communication and interaction has been re-engineered for new online forms. On the precipice of understanding how to present human knowledge using distributed networked technologies, open standards and tools are being drafted that permit commentary and discourse across different kinds of media and representations, whether text, image, audio, or PDF. Leveraging new identity systems, Web standards, and distributed storage, Vannevar Bush’s future can be glimpsed. Hypothes.is, a not-for-profit start-up, is building a reference implementation for open annotation, and will demonstrate its new tools.

 http://hypothes.is

 

 

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Project Briefing Pages, Scholarly Communication
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IT@Cornell: Is It What We Imagined?

March 18, 2013

Dean B. Krafft
Director of Library IT
Cornell University

 

In the fall of 2010, Cornell University began implementing a “reimagined” model for delivering information technology (IT) services on campus, based on a set of recommendations developed with significant input from Bain & Co., a global consulting firm. Cornell is now three years into the process of creating a much more integrated and collaborative IT organization, and the university is starting to reap some major benefits from doing things very differently.

This talk will describe the significant changes that have taken place in IT service delivery, IT governance, and providing IT software solutions at Cornell, from the perspective of both the Cornell University Library and the campus as a whole. In some cases, Cornell adopted the recommendations of Bain and the original re-imagining process, and in other cases, it deliberately chose different approaches. The presentation will include an analysis of the organizational, cultural, and operational changes that have taken place in IT over the past three years, outlining both the successes and the remaining challenges. Finally, the talk will include a brief look at Cornell’s recently completed IT Strategic Plan, which seeks to “guide prudent reallocation of our IT investments from utilities to academic differentiators” while providing stable and efficient utility IT services. The IT@Cornell model of “intentional interdependence” within the university and seeking the best services and collaborations available from the outside world should be of significant interest to many educational institutions facing similar IT challenges.

http://www.cni.org/topics/user-services/reimagining-it-at-cornell-university/
http://www.cornell.edu/reimagining/it-review.cfm
http://www.it.cornell.edu/cio/index.cfm

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Economic Models, Project Briefing Pages, User Services
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Leveraging Traditional, Digital, and Crowd-Sourced Resources to Create “Database of the Smokies”

March 18, 2013

Anne Bridges
Associate Professor
University of Tennessee

Mark Baggett
Assistant Professor
University of Tennessee

Ken Wise
Associate Professor
University of Tennessee

The Database of the Smokies (DOTS) is an open access database developed by a team of subject specialists, systems librarians, and information science students at the University of Tennessee Libraries. The database, constructed on the open-source Drupal platform, is designed as a successor to the scholarly print monograph and to capitalize on the wealth of both digital and traditional content specific to the Great Smoky Mountains region from 1935 to the present. It is a complement to “Terra Incognita: An Annotated Bibliography of the Great Smoky Mountains, 1544–1934,” due to be published by the University of Tennessee Press later this year.

DOTS includes citations to published items, digital photographs, websites, and manuscripts with links to scanned surrogates (where copyright permits). The database is an outgrowth of the Great Smoky Mountains Regional Project, a fifteen-year effort by the University of Tennessee Libraries to promote research and collections about the Smokies region. As well as providing access to written material, it will also provide links to the thousands of images that form a part of the University of Tennessee’s digital collections of Smokies photographs. Value resides in access to the rare, obscure, and difficult-to-locate Smoky Mountain material and in the comprehensiveness of the database content. Comprehensiveness is reinforced by the DOTS project’s implementation of a “crowd-sourcing” mechanism as a means for gleaning content from an established clientele of sophisticated users accessing the bibliography as a research tool. Crowd-sourcing assimilates the knowledge and expertise of a diversity of users and thereby generates an independent outside prestige for the database itself.

This presentation will focus on the model of database creation that allows a library to leverage subject and technology expertise along with student labor to create a product useful to both a general and specialized clientele.

 http://dots.lib.utk.edu

 

 

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Project Briefing Pages
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The Library Building as Research Platform

March 18, 2013

Kristin Antelman
Associate Director for the Digital Library
North Carolina State University

Maurice York
Head of Information Technology
North Carolina State University

This briefing will introduce the technology vision behind the James B. Hunt Jr. Library, a new, 200,000 square foot building that opened in January 2013 at North Carolina State University. The Hunt Library was designed to meet the challenge of re-envisioning library spaces as a platform for research. The library’s goal is to engage researchers across disciplines by deploying broadly applicable technologies such as large-scale visualization, high resolution and 3D imagery, and interactive computing. These core technologies are expressed in physical spaces such as Immersion Theater, Game Lab, Media Production Studios, Teaching & Visualization Lab, and Creativity Studio. Through an inherent ability to reconfigure, re-purpose, and interchange components and infrastructure, the building’s technology itself is designed to be an object of research, a sandbox for emerging technologies and a showcase for cutting edge applications. New segments of the faculty are engaging in deeper ways than ever before, including the launch of several research projects based around Hunt.

Realizing the vision required converging physical and virtual spaces. Unlike library spaces that support undergraduate study, research-focused physical spaces require complementary virtual spaces. Thus, infrastructure is a core enabler. The building’s data center design, IP and AV fiber networks, HPC and high-performance storage (integrated with campus infrastructure), are all designed to support extensible use of spaces and to minimize operational staff support. As the most technologically advanced building on campus, Hunt has quickly become the test bed for new technologies on campus. As the physical infrastructure settles into operation, new service areas are emerging. A core service offering will be “project cloud” space, which will enable students and researchers to easily “check out” computing power and transfer large projects in and out of the library’s environment. Technology staff have been retrained and redeployed to support the new capabilities, and an academic technologist added to consult with researchers and match their needs with the building’s capabilities. Since all library services must be scalable, technology staff effort is focused on identifying good pilot projects that can serve as prototypes to be converted into templates for future projects.

http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/huntlibrary
http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/12/18/2553438/ncsus-hyper-modern-new-james-b.html

Presentation Slides (PDF)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Learning Spaces (includes Information/Learning Commons), Project Briefing Pages, Scholarly Communication, User Services
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Linked Data and Archival Description: The LiAM Planning Project

March 18, 2013

Anne Sauer
Director, Digital Collections and Archives
Tufts University

LiAM (Linked Archival Metadata) is an Institute of Museum and Library Services-funded planning project focused on facilitating the application of linked data approaches to archival description. Despite the standardization and automation of archival description since the 1990s, primarily through the development and wide adoption of Encoded Archival Description (EAD), archivists still struggle with the challenge of describing complex archival collections. In particular, archival finding aids are not well suited for describing either records produced by complex organizations or composites of organizations, or electronic records and digital objects managed in digital environments such as databases and social network sites.

The distributed and dynamic nature of contemporary archival materials mirrors the evolving network of documents that is the World Wide Web. The architecture of the Web, in particular the approach described by linked data, a rich, semantically related data environment built into the Web’s architecture, provides a powerful set of tools for modeling complex relationships and providing dynamic and flexible access to information.

Most finding aids, archival collection descriptions often encoded in EAD, are hierarchical and linear narrative documents that take a top-down approach to archival description. The linear flow of the traditional finding aid closely mirrors the physical arrangement of the documents in hand, serving both as a description of the collection and as a map to where records are physically located on the actual shelves or within the actual boxes and folders.

LiAM envisions a different approach by leveraging the powerful reliance on linking inherent in the architecture of the World Wide Web itself. The approach of linked data uses the technology of the Web to define relationships between myriad resources. The LiAM Planning Project got underway in October 2012 and has laid a roadmap that is focused on identifying a graduated approach for archives at all levels to begin to expose their descriptions using linked data. The purpose of this session will be to present the outline of LiAM’s deliverables, share progress to date, and seek feedback.

 http://go.tufts.edu/liam

 

 

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval, Project Briefing Pages, Research Data Management
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