Merrilee Proffitt
Senior Program Officer
OCLC Research
Sara Snyder
Webmaster
Smithsonian Institution
Absolute Relevance? Ranking in the Scholarly Domain
March 30, 2012
| Tamar Sadeh Director of Marketing Ex Libris Group |
The greatest challenge for discovery systems is how to provide users with the most relevant search results, given the immense landscape of available content. In a manner that is similar to human interaction between two parties, in which each person adjusts to the other in tone, language, and subject matter, discovery systems would ideally be sophisticated and flexible enough to adjust their algorithms to individual users and each user’s information needs. When evaluating the relevance of an item to a specific user in a specific context, relevance-ranking algorithms need to take into account, in addition to the degree to which the item matches the query, information that is not embodied in the item itself.
Such information, which includes the item’s scholarly value, the type of search that the user is conducting (e.g., an exploratory search or a known-item search), and other factors, enables a discovery system to fulfill user expectations that have been shaped by experience with Web search engines. This session will focus on the challenges of developing and evaluating relevance-ranking algorithms for the scholarly domain. Examples will be drawn mainly from the relevance-ranking technology deployed by the Ex Libris Primo discovery solution.
Presentation (PDF)
Advances in Discovery: An EBSCO Service
March 30, 2012
| Michael Gorrell Executive Vice President, CIO EBSCO Publishing |
Discovery Services have emerged to become a key element of libraries’ efforts to allow their patrons to satisfy their research needs. Harvesting and indexing millions of scholarly journal articles, books, biographies, reviews, and a vast array of other content types from thousands of sources, allowing users to find the best matches for their needs and presenting this information in a clear and understandable way is a tall order. Challenges include determining relevance for search results, providing users with ways to understand the depth and breadth of the collection being searched, and overall site usability. EBSCO has taken a data driven approach to solving these problems by testing various aspects of its Discovery Service, and using other data mining techniques. This session will describe the various methodologies that have been used and describe ways in which the service has evolved based on these efforts.
Handout (PDF)
Archiving Large Swaths of User-Contributed Digital Content: Lessons from Archiving the Occupy Movement
March 30, 2012
Howard Besser
Director, Moving Image Archiving & Preservation MA Program
New York University
David Millman
Director, Digital Library Technology Services
New York University
Sharon M. Leon
Director of Public Projects, Center for History & New Media
George Mason University
Archiving born-digital content from the “Occupy” movement can serve as a prototype for archiving all kinds of user-contributed content. In this presentation, several organizations will discuss the tools and methods they have developed for ingesting, preserving, and offering discovery services to large numbers of digital works where they cannot really rely on the contributors to follow standards and metadata assignment. Topics covered will range from automatic extraction of time-stamp and location metadata (and an empirical analysis of which upload services strip these out), to app development for uploading content along with permission forms, to maintaining lists of frequently-changing URL nodes for web-crawling, to issues in educating content creators in best practices. Speakers will also discuss issues in trying to document a social movement while it is happening.
http://activist-archivists.org/
http://www.archive.org/details/occupywallstreet
http://occupyarchive.org/
Presentation (Besser PPT)
Presentation (Millman PPT)
Presentation (Leon PDF)
Presentation (Hanna PPTX)
The California Digital Library and the Public Knowledge Project Partnership: A New Model of Collaborative Institutional Repository Publishing Services Development
March 30, 2012
| Lisa Schiff Technical Lead, Access & Publishing Services California Digital Library |
Brian Owen Associate University Librarian Simon Fraser University |
| Catherine Mitchell Director, Access & Publishing Services California Digital Library |
The California Digital Library (CDL) and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) have recently joined forces, with the CDL signing on as a major PKP development partner. This relationship has grown out of CDL’s recent work to incorporate a customized version of PKP’s Open Journal System (OJS) into the back-end submission and publishing system for eScholarship, the University of California’s open access institutional repository and publishing platform. This development work marks an important step toward fully integrated, open-source institutional repository and journal publication services, and the CDL and PKP have ambitious plans for extending this work to the larger PKP community. This panel will describe:
• How OJS was customized to meet the needs of eScholarship journals (including user interface modifications, the extension of a single OJS instance to support almost 50 independent journals, PDF generation, and more)
• Which of these and other features may be available in a future release of OJS as a result of this new partnership
• How the PKP development partnership program is shaping the direction of OJS and other PKP scholarly communication services
• How the relationship with PKP is likely to affect future development and service directions for eScholarship
• How this work fits into the larger effort of both of these organizations to refine their services in support of new practices and opportunities within the scholarly publishing environment
http://www.escholarship.org
http://pkp.sfu.ca/
Presentation (PowerPoint)
Changing for Excellence: Libraries and IT Experience with Campus Consultants
March 30, 2012
| Deborah Ludwig Assistant Dean University of Kansas |
Paul Farran Chief of Staff, Information Technology University of Kansas |
In 2011, the University of Kansas hired the consulting firm HURON to undertake an intensive review of how the University conducts business, and to help the institution identify ways to increase its effectiveness. This effort, “Changing for Excellence” (CFE), encompassed campuses in Lawrence, Kansas City, and Wichita and was divided into phases in which Information Technology (IT) and the Libraries have been involved: Assessment and Analysis, Business Case Development, and Implementation.
This presentation will include descriptions of the business cases developed in both the IT and in the Libraries, work with the consultants and campus stakeholders, movement forward into implementation, and the connections between CFE, the University’s strategic planning effort (Bold Aspirations), and possible organizational transformation.
Competing Priorities: Sustainability, Growth, and Innovation in Digital Collections
March 30, 2012
| Jennifer Riley Head, Carolina Digital Library and Archives University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
Academic libraries with digital collections programs are faced with a difficult task in simultaneously growing capacity, promoting sustainability, allowing room for innovation, ensuring success within an environment that has limited and, in many cases, shrinking resources, and giving staff the tools they need to be effective contributors to technology initiatives. The University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is embarking upon a number of efforts designed to support the transition of digital library work from project to program, a transition that will allow the Library to better address these competing needs.
This presentation will introduce two major aspects of the work in this area. First, in early 2012, a new process was implemented for the allocation of library technology resources and the selection of projects requiring technology support. Through careful design and ongoing assessment, this process should significantly improve the Library’s efforts to promote a culture of solid planning and accountability, reduce uncertainty that has historically caused inaction and missed opportunities, clearly determine and communicate ongoing support models, and reinforce the Library’s confidence in its ability to live up to the commitments it makes. A key part of this new proposal, review, and approval process is staff from the Library’s Carolina Digital Library and Archives (CDLA) department acting as project facilitators, and offering planning and coordination services where necessary to help technology proposals have their best chance of success.
The second area of work to be presented in this session involves the early planning stages of a new technical infrastructure that will provide coordinated and shared support for digital collections, digital humanities, and institutional repository work. The plan is to prioritize digital library initiatives that help build out and implement this technical infrastructure, reduce ‘siloization’ and promote reuse of content in multiple environments, increase efficiency and sustainability of curated digital collections, and provide tiered access and preservation services. This shift has the potential to re-frame the development work on the Carolina Digital Repository to occupy a more centralized role in the University’s digital library efforts.
Presentation (PowerPoint)
Creating the Digital Preservation Network
March 30, 2012
| James Hilton Vice President and CIO University of Virginia |
The Digital Preservation Network (DPN) will address risk to the very long-term preservation of the scholarly record by creating a federated approach to preservation of academic content. The DPN ecosystem ensures reliable, long-term digital preservation through a federated network of diverse, non-overlapping preservation strategies sustained by committed institutions of higher education, which mitigates the threat of a single point of failure — organizational, technical, physical, or political — jeopardizing centuries of scholarship. This presentation will discuss progress toward the launch of DPN and opportunities to engage in the effort.
