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Curation Practices for Born-Digital and Digitized Newspaper Collections

March 30, 2012
Martin Halbert
Dean of Libraries
University of North Texas

 

 Katherine Skinner
Executive Director
Educopia Institute

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

This briefing will highlight and discuss the early findings of a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded project hosted by the Educopia Institute that is documenting and modeling the use of data preparation techniques and distributed digital preservation frameworks to collaboratively preserve digitized and born-digital newspaper collections. US libraries and archives have been digitizing newspapers since the mid-1990s using a highly diverse and ever-evolving set of encoding practices, metadata schemas, formats, and file structures. Increasingly, they are also acquiring born-digital newspapers in an array of non-standardized formats, including websites, production masters, and e-prints. This content genre is of great value to scholars and researchers in the humanities, and it is in critical need of preservation attention.

This project is exploring how existing standards (including the National Digital Newspaper Program’s digitization standards) may be elaborated upon and applied to foster the preservation readiness of collections from the last two decades that were digitized according to evolving standards, as well as the born-digital content that institutions are steadily acquiring. This project is also documenting how curators can effectively exchange their preservation-ready content across repository systems, focusing on the use of distributed digital preservation (DDP), a collaborative approach in which content is exchanged and replicated across multiple sites, and actively monitored using various network-driven technologies (e.g., LOCKSS, iRODS, CODA).

This briefing will share initial project results, including the following:
1. A “state of the field” report (based on surveys conducted by the researchers) regarding the challenging collections with which academic libraries are contending, including legacy content from more than two decades of digitization and a wide range of born digital content; and
2. Preliminary recommendations regarding what type and level of preservation preparation for these diverse newspaper collections might be considered essential, and what type and level might be considered optimal.

 

http://www.metaarchive.org/neh

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, Digital Preservation
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Developing a Portal for Geospatial Resources

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

21 university libraries in the Ontario Council of University Libraries have collaborated to develop a portal for delivering numeric and geospatial resources to students and scholars across the province. Using the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) for numeric data markup and the ISO 19115 metadata standard for geographic information system (GIS) resources, the portal allows users to discover, preview, select, and download data from key government and commercial publishers. The features of the current portal will be presented along with a description of the collaborative model employed for design and development.

 

http://geo.scholarsportal.info

Presentation (PowerPoint)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, E-Science
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The Digital Public Library of America Platform

March 30, 2012
David Weinberger
Co-Director, Harvard Library Innovation Lab
Harvard University		 Paul Deschner
 Developer, Harvard Library Innovation Lab
Harvard University

The platform for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is being built to make maximally available what libraries and other curatorial institutions know about works, ideas, relationships, usage patterns, and more. This description is broad and general because the DPLA is a loose federation of major institutions (as well as smaller ones) that has not yet come to full agreement about what specifically it wants to present to end users. The group’s charge is to build a metadata server with open APIs that will enable and encourage developers to create applications that cannot be anticipated. The metadata may eventually include records for millions of items and many thousands of collections, all of which do not adhere to established standards. The service becomes more valuable as it is able to present developers with richer and deeper responses that make sense of the jumble of content at which the server points. The problems are large and knotty in every direction.

 

http://dp.la/dev
http://dp.la/dev/wiki
http://dp.la/dev/blog

Handout (MS Word)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Information Access & Retrieval, Metadata
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DMPTool: Phase 2

March 30, 2012
Andrew Sallans
Head of Strategic Data Initiatives
University of Virginia		 Todd Grappone
Associate University Librarian for Digital Initiatives and IT
University of California, Los Angeles

In January 2011, the National Science Foundation (NSF) began to require data management plans for all grant submissions. This major requirement by the NSF was a leading step, now being followed by other funding bodies. In response to these emerging requirements, a group of US libraries and research institutions have formed a partnership to develop a web-based solution called the DMPTool. The partnership’s two primary goals are: 1) assisting researchers in development of high-quality and realistic data management plans for proposals, and 2) matching researchers with support resources and personnel at their respective institutions. In the first three months of public use, the tool has had over 1,200 unique users across the US, over 250 institutions represented, and nearly 40 institutions contributing localized resource guidance.

This session will discuss where the project team is now working to advance the tool with further functionality, addition of more rich content and guidance, expansion of the user community, and development of a sustainable governance and business model. The DMPTool project includes the University of California, Los Aangeles Library, the UC3 from the California Digital Library, the Smithsonian, University of Virginia Libraries, the University of California, San Diego Library, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (library and chief information officer), DataONE, and the Data Curation Centre.

 

https://dmp.cdlib.org/

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, E-Science, User Services
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A Feasibility Study of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Open-Access Repository

March 30, 2012
Sayeed Choudhury
Associate Dean for Research Data Management
Johns Hopkins University		 Mark Cyzyk
Scholarly Communications Architect
Johns Hopkins University

The Johns Hopkins University (JHU), in partnership with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the University of Michigan (UM), has conducted a study of the feasibility of building an open access repository to collect, store, manage, preserve, and make broadly available the reports of research funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), should NSF choose to implement such a repository. The study examined the technical, policy, and business dimensions of such an undertaking through, first, a series of workshops that convened a diverse range of interested parties and potential stakeholders, including libraries, publishers and professional societies. The analysis team, secondly, considered four categories of approaches that might be taken in the construction of an open access repository of NSF materials:

Category 1 – Locally installed system(s)
Category 2 – Large-scale hosted systems
Category 3 – A federation of systems
Category 4 – A custom solution

The protocol for evaluation was based upon a framework developed previously through a JHU-led analysis of open-source electronic publishing systems. This presentation will focus on the results of the analysis and recommendations for NSF.

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, E-Science, Publishing, Repositories
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Federated Identity with a Side of Scholar

March 30, 2012
Renee Shuey
IT Manager, Principal Lead of Identity
and Access Management
Information Technology Services
Pennsylvania State University		 Kenneth Klingenstein
Senior Director
Internet2

This session will provide updates on the continued rapid growth of federated identity, including assurance profiles, integration with social identity, federal government activities, research and scholarship attribute bundles, and interfederation. It will also include coverage of some emerging discussions on integrating scholarly identity into the mix, including author identities, scholarly publishing records, trusted citations, and access controls on research databases, as well as some anticipated developments in the next year that might result in tighter integration of these efforts.

 

http://www.incommon.org

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Identity Management
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Fembot: Reinventing Scholarly Production and Communication

March 30, 2012
Karen Estlund
Head, Digital Library Services
University of Oregon		 Carol Stabile
Professor, English Department
University of Oregon

The Fembot Collective is a collaborative of faculty, graduate students and librarians engaged in research on gender, new media and technology and a platform for communication about related issues. The collective includes faculty and graduate students from North America, the UK, Australia, and Asia and encourages interdisciplinary and international participation. Fembot aims to seize the means of scholarly production. One of its strategies for doing so is the creation of an open access journal, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, with a re-envisioned model of peer review and tools for multi-modal publication, community and promotion. Not content with creating traditional scholarship that will appear online, Fembot is redefining what scholarly communication means in a digital environment by transforming the concept of the “article” and embracing multi-modal technologies for production and distribution. Fembot is in its initial phase of development with its first issue of Ada in progress. The University of Oregon (UO) Libraries is partnering with the Fembot collective to provide support and consultation on digital preservation, presentation, and bibliometrics. Rather than act as a publisher for the content, the Libraries is functioning as a true partner with the expert scholars to transform scholarly publishing, with a librarian serving as a permanent member of the collective’s advisory board.

http://fembotcollective.org

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Publishing, Scholarly Communication
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Interoperating Requirements for a Media-Specific Repository

March 30, 2012
James Shulman
President
ARTstor

 

 Randy Stern
Manager of Systems Development
Harvard University
David Germano
Associate professor
University of Virginia		 William Ying
Chief Information Officer
ARTstor

Shared Shelf, a cloud-based cataloging and image management repository built by ARTstor (in partnership with eight universities and colleges and the Society of Architectural Historians) provides a real world test of how a media-specific repository needs to fit in with the campus ecosystem of library and instructional technology services. Images that are produced locally on a campus need to be cataloged, stored, searched, and used in a variety of ways and in a variety of services on a campus. Institutions have a range of approaches to digital preservation, so a “use repository” like Shared Shelf needs to complement archival preservation processes on the back-end. At the same time, because images are used in so many ways, the repository in which they are stored needs to fit in with the other software utilities that discover and draw upon the content in flexible ways.

This presentation will include a report of the progress on interoperation efforts between Shared Shelf and Harvard’s Digital Repository Service, and a discussion of the University of Virgina’s needs for APIs to search into and get metadata/data from Shared Shelf. It will also include a discussion of the opportunities and challenges associated with the full range of Shared Shelf’s interoperating aims, including the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF).

 

http://www.artstor.org
http://www.sharedshelf.org
http://www.uvatibetcenter.org
http://www.shanti.virginia.edu

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval, Repositories
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JSTOR: Exploring New Economic Models and Markets for Scholarly Content

March 30, 2012
Heidi McGregor
Vice President, Marketing & Comminications
Ithaka

People around the world are finding scholarly content online every day, but often do not have ready access. JSTOR, the online home for more than 1,400 academic journals and other content, turns away more than 100 million attempted accesses each year. We are undertaking new access experiments to better understand and quantify the interest in scholarly content globally, and to find new, sustainable economic models for providing access to more people. This presentation will include discussion of the strategy behind new initiatives, including the JSTOR Register & Read BETA, and early lessons and results from these activities.

 

http://about.jstor.org/individuals
http://about.jstor.org/rr

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Economic Models
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Linked Data for Libraries: Why Should We Care? Where Should We Start?

March 30, 2012
Jennifer Bowen
Assistant Dean, Information Management Services
University of Rochester		 Philip E. Schreur
Head, Metadata Department
Stanford University


Linked data has the potential to transform every aspect of how we create, acquire, and discover information. By creating simple assertions in Resource Description Framework (RDF) and linking them together, a semantic web of data is created. Current library metadata encoded in Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) is an ideal place to begin this transformation. Its consistency and quality will immediately enrich the Semantic Web and position our data where people are now searching for it.

Linked data is poised to replace MARC as the basis for the new library bibliographic framework. For libraries to fully benefit from linked data, they must learn about it, experiment with it, demonstrate its usefulness, and take a leadership role in its deployment. The eXtensible Catalog Organization (XCO) facilitates these activities by providing open-source software for libraries that is “linked-data-ready”. XC software prepares MARC and Dublin Core metadata for exposure to the Semantic Web using a platform based upon the OAI-PMH protocol, incorporating registered vocabularies for Resource Description and Access (RDA) elements and roles, and enabling the creation of linked data that represents Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) Group 1 entities. XC can play a key role in transitioning libraries from their current record-based system infrastructure to linked data by facilitating the repurposing of metadata, without disrupting existing business processes.

This presentation will include a software demonstration, proposed software architecture for creation and management of linked data, a vision for how libraries can migrate from their current metadata environment to linked data, and an update on XCO progress toward linked data goals.

 

http://www.eXtensibleCatalog.org

Handout (PDF)

Presentation (Schreur PPTX)
Presentation (Schreur MS Word)
Presentation (Bowen PPTX)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval, Metadata
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