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Update on NISO’s Open Discovery Initiative

Nettie Lagace
Associate Director for Programs
National Information Standards Organization (NISO)

David Lindahl
Director of Strategic Initiatives and Planning, Libraries
University of Missouri-Kansas City

Roger Schonfeld
Program Director
Ithaka S+R

Oren Beit-Arie
Chief Strategy Officer
Ex Libris Group

The Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) is a National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Working Group formed to develop a recommended practice in the area of index-based library discovery services. These single search services, ever-more relied upon as a primary basis for accessing a library’s collections, have improved the research experience immensely, but they remain firmly seated in a heterogeneous ecosystem consisting of diverse players with individual interests. With the intent of streamlining communications and processes in order to better serve library end users, ODI is investigating the stakeholder landscape in the following areas: data format and data transfer; communication of libraries’ rights to specific content; level of indexing performed for content; definition of fair linking to published content; exchange of usage data between discovery providers and information providers. This session will report on the progress of the group’s research work, including interviews and surveys of stakeholders, and preview the Draft ODI Recommended Practice, expected to be released for public comment soon after the Coalition for Networked Information spring 2013 membership meeting.

 

 http://www.niso.org/workrooms/odi/

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Using the Amazon Cloud to Host Digital Scholarship Projects

Stewart Varner
Digital Scholarship Coordinator
Emory University

Jay Varner
Digital Scholarship Solutions Analyst
Emory University

As scholars are increasingly attracted to the possibilities of creating online resources, the question of hosting becomes more pressing. There are clear advantages to keeping projects in one place – whether that be a box in an on-site server room or a virtual environment – but often institution-based solutions are too restrictive for experimental projects. Private web hosting companies such as Godaddy offer some advantages but can be similarly inflexible. To answer this challenge, Emory’s Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC) uses Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to develop, host and back-up web-based digital projects that are small in scale and experimental in nature. Since the fall of 2012, DiSC has deployed nine websites and two scripts using EC2 in accordance with its mission to to assist researchers incorporate technology into their research. Drawing on our experience with EC2, this project briefing will report on the following:

1. Why EC2 was chosen over both University IT hosting and corporate vendors;
2. How the system works;
3. How we are charged;
4. What advantages we have found with the system;
5. What challenges have emerged.

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ZSRx: An Information Literacy MOOC

Kyle Denlinger
eLearning Librarian
Wake Forest University

The recent explosion in popularity of massive, open, online courses (MOOCs) caused the librarians at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University to think about how to use this new way of teaching to sell the concept of librarians as experts. To do this, ZSRx was created; it is a free, four-week, open, online course for Wake Forest parents and alumni, designed to help them use the Web more effectively while having fun, connecting with others, and learning about new tools. This session will outline the process and challenges of planning, designing, building, and ultimately facilitating the course, using a plethora of Google tools.

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