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Managing Large-Scale Library Digitization Projects Via the Cloud

March 18, 2013

 

Timothy Logan
Associate Vice President, Electronic Library
Baylor University

Darryl Stuhr
Assistant Director for Digital Projects, Electronic Library
Baylor University

The Riley Digitization Center at Baylor University manages many projects throughout the year, digitizing thousands of items and hundreds of thousands of pages ranging from medieval manuscripts, hand-written correspondence and journals, historical maps, 19th century sheet music, rare gospel music recordings, and more. This presentation will focus on the use of rigorous standards and data formats in a structured project management environment to ensure that all data and metadata are created and stored in a sustainable, replicable, interoperable, and extensible system. The management of numerous parallel projects at the individual item level with an infrastructure built to handle quality control, data flow, multi-format processing and preservation, with staff ranging from interns, graduate and undergraduate students, project-specific temporary workers, and a few full-time positions, requires the use of robust project management tools available for reporting and data entry at all digitization and processing workstations.

To handle high-volume throughput, track project status, manage source materials, and ensure a high level of quality, the Digital Projects Group developed and maintains a distributed project infrastructure that supports extensive and complex workflows. Unable to identify a single tool that met all of the needs and requirements, the Riley Center utilizes a collection of tools, many of them free, such as Google Docs (Spreadsheets and Documents), Linux utilities, BaseCamp, Evernote, and DropBox. This presentation will address Baylor’s implementation of the variety of tools and procedures used to manage digitization projects at the Riley Digitization Center, including lessons learned and opportunities for growth, to help others build a framework of inexpensive tools to organize and manage digitization projects large and small.

http://digitalcollections.baylor.edu
http://blogs.baylor.edu/digitalcollections/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/baylordigitalcollections
https://www.facebook.com/BaylorDigitalCollections
http://www.baylor.edu/lib/digitization/

Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Project Briefing Pages
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Mapping Data Curation for New Scholars and Scientists: Expanding the Curriculum for the Council on Library and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

March 18, 2013

 

Katherine Akers
Council on Library and Information Resources Fellow
Emory University

Lori Jahnke
Anthropology Librarian and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Emory University

Elliott Shore
Executive Director
Association of Research Libraries

Rachel Frick
Director, Digital Library Federation Program
Council on Library and Information Resources

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is in its ninth year, and with the coming cohort, CLIR and more recently the Digital Library Federation (DLF) have helped to prepare more than 90 fellows who have worked at various intersections of the academic world. In recent years, more and more of the fellows’ work concerns data curation, spurred on by support from the Sloan and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations. The Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is now using the deep subject preparation of scholars and scientists from across the disciplines in order to help rethink how academia will approach this issue. This session will sketch out the ways in which the program is changing its approach to the curriculum for the fellows and engage the attendees in a conversation about how that can be most successful.

http://www.clir.org/fellowships/postdoc
http://www.clir.org/fellowships/postdoc/applicants/dc-science

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Digital Preservation, Project Briefing Pages, Research Data Management
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The Move Towards Open Standards: Enabling Next Generation Digital Learning

March 18, 2013

Sandra DeCastro
Vice President, Community Programs
IMS Global Learning Consortium

The emergence of digital devices, learning platforms, and applications promises easier access to a variety of content, increased productivity, and realization of personalized learning. Unfortunately, the reality is that it is a major challenge to make productive use of digital resources to meet the diverse learning needs of students without involving time-consuming and costly custom integrations. This session will share how leading institutions are collaborating with leading technology providers to establish an open foundation in an age of cloud-based computing that is revolutionizing how digital content, mobile devices, learning platforms and student systems come together to enable personalized learning and student success.

Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Project Briefing Pages, Standards, Teaching & Learning
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Moving from an Institutional Repository to a Current Research Information System: The Why & How

March 18, 2013

David T. Palmer
Associate University Librarian & Digital Strategist
University of Hong Kong

Institutional repositories (IRs) collect, manage and display publications and their metadata. However, an institution’s research, expertise and capacity is described by more than publications. The University of Hong Kong (HKU) Scholars Hub, hosted in DSpace, began as the HKU IR in 2005. Asking for voluntary deposit of publications from HKU academics, it received little notice, and more importantly, little support from University senior management. In 2009 a new HKU initiative, Knowledge Exchange (KE), adopted the Hub as a key vehicle to share knowledge and skill with the community outside HKU. With funding support from the Office of KE, the data model of DSpace was extended to include relational tables on non-publication objects, including people, grants, and patents, holding attributes of these objects, such as co-investigators, co-inventors, co-prize winners, research interests, languages spoken, supervision of postgraduate theses, etc.

The DSpace user interface now delivers an integrated search and display on these objects and attributes, as well as on ones newly derived, such as authority work on name disambiguation and synonymy in Roman and Hanzi, visualizations of networks of co-authors, co-investigators, etc., metrics extracted from external sources such as Scopus, WoS, PubMed, Google Scholar Citations, internal alt-metrics of view and download counts, and more. Beyond the functions of an IR, the Hub now performs as a system for reputation management, impact management, and research networking and profiling, all of which are concepts included in the broad term “Current Research Information System” (CRIS). These new objects and attributes curated from several trusted sources, and integrated into the present mashup, contextualize and highlight HKU research, and attract more hits, than an IR with only publications.

The HKU Office of Knowledge Exchange has now funded the modularization of these new HKU features of DSpace. Together with its partner, CINECA of Italy, this work is being made available in open source for the DSpace community.

Presentation

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Project Briefing Pages, Repositories, Research Data Management
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Not Your Grandfather’s Web Any More

March 18, 2013

Kris Carpenter Negulescu
Director, Web Group
Internet Archive

David Rosenthal
LOCKSS Program
Stanford University


CNI: Not Your Grandfather’s Web Any More from CNI Video Channel on Vimeo.
 

Although parts of the Web, such as e-journals and e-books, largely retain the Web’s original document model, the newer parts of the Web, including social media, scientific workflows and Web services, have evolved into a programming environment, whose primary language is Javascript. This briefing will report on the results of a workshop held at the Library of Congress under the auspices of the International Internet Preservation Consortium. There, practitioners of Web archiving reviewed the practical and theoretical problems posed by this evolution of the Web. The practical problems include the need to execute the collected content, rather than simply record it, and then re-execute the preserved content in a way that recapitulates the original. The theoretical problems include the fact that every reader’s every visit to most Web pages is now a different experience. What does “the original” mean in this context?

 http://netpreserve.org/resources/iipc-future-web-workshop-%E2%80%93-introduction-overview
http://blog.dshr.org/2013/04/talk-at-spring-2013-cni.html

Presentation (Rosenthal)
Presentation (Negulescu)

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Digital Preservation, Project Briefing Pages
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Not Another Cross-Search Tool: The Digital Commons Network

March 18, 2013

Jean-Gabriel Bankier
President & Chief Executive Officer
bepress

In November 2012, bepress launched the Digital Commons Network to bring together scholarship from hundreds of universities and colleges using the Digital Commons platform. The integration of individual repositories and the emphasis on the browsing experience makes this collection of institutional repositories unlike anything that has been attempted by the community. This session will include a presentation of the results that suggest the network is already having an impact. A tour of collections in the Digital Commons Network will be used to describe how a connected network is increasing the value of the institutional repository investment for all stakeholders. Finally, there may be a path for extending the Network to include institutions that are using open source platforms.

 http://network.bepress.com/

Presentation

 

 

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval, Project Briefing Pages, Repositories, Scholarly Communication
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Personal Archiving and Scholarly Workflow: An Exploratory Study of Pennsylvania State University Faculty

March 18, 2013

Ellysa Stern Cahoy
Education & Behavioral Sciences Librarian
Pennsylvania State University

This project briefing presents preliminary findings of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project currently underway at Pennsylvania (Penn) State University, University Park, exploring personal archiving and the digital scholarly workflow of Penn State faculty across disciplines encompassing the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. The project aims to create a set of design principles for sustained easy integration of archival practices into the online scholarly workflow, as well as identification of critical digital literacies for faculty management of personal information collections, and a set of recommendations for liaison librarians on best practices for supporting faculty in further developing these critical literacies.

The first research phase of the project concluded in fall 2012 and included surveying over 300 Penn State faculty across a variety of disciplines with regard to their common information management practices, as well as about scholars’ general experiences in using digital research tools and resources. Ethnographic interviews with approximately 25 faculty members were conducted as follow-up to the initial survey results, and were designed to dig deeper into faculty needs with regard to the scholarly workflow, including user challenges and critical literacies surrounding self-archiving and curation of personal information collections. The broad results of the survey data and interviews will be shared as part of the project briefing, as well as the planned future trajectory of the project.

 http://scholarlyworkflow.org

Presentation

 

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Project Briefing Pages, Scholarly Communication
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Providing Library Course Reserves Solely in the Context of Blackboard While Leveraging the Summon API

March 18, 2013

 

Paul Joseph
Systems Librarian
University of British Columbia

The University of British Columbia (UBC) Library, in partnership with UBC’s Information Technology Services and Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, has implemented a collaborative campus-wide course reserves service solely in the context of Blackboard, integrating with several key campus systems. The service is currently managed using the Ares application by Atlas Systems, and receives course and enrollment data in real-time via an enterprise message bus and restricts access to reserves in all courses and sections based on enrollment. This presentation will begin with background on the teaching and learning context at UBC: changes to the university’s copyright environment, the decision to implement Blackboard, and the need for UBC Library to provide an electronic course reserves service. It will then touch on the decision to select Ares as a starting point and to provide access to it solely in the context of Blackboard. The session will then focus on the implementation of the system, focusing on utilization of the Summon API to search the Library’s print and electronic collections for materials in support of a course. The API results are used to populate fields in the existing Ares reserves request forms, which greatly reduces manual data entry. The API is also used to store persistent and EZproxied Summon URLs, rather than those supplied by publishers and vendors, which ensures more stable access to the Library’s e-resources. The presentation will end with a demonstration of the service, providing details on the integration of the different systems as well as insights into the development process, challenges, complexities and concomitant benefits.

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Project Briefing Pages, Teaching & Learning
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Publication and Research Roles for Libraries Using Spectral Imaging Data

March 18, 2013

Todd Grappone
Associate University Librarian for Digital Initiatives and Information Technology
University of California, Los Angeles

Stephen Davison
Head, UCLA Digital Library Program
University of California, Los Angeles

This presentation will discuss the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Library’s role in the David Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project and partnership with the Early Manuscript Electronic Library (EMEL) to support spectral imaging of palimpsests at the St. Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula. Spectral imaging projects require complex international collaboration between technicians, scholars and librarians to uncover erased or deteriorated texts. Once initial spectral imaging is complete, a combination of manual and automated processing, drawing on the knowledge of both technicians and scholars to inform a feedback loop of processing and reprocessing of images is necessary to build an archive of spectral images and metadata that will meet a variety of needs, including scholarly work (e.g. creating editions of texts, paleographic and codicological description), public access (e.g. generating images decipherable and viewable by students and the general public), and preservation. UCLA is working with partners from both the Livingstone and St. Catherine’s projects to define workflow and standards for the spectral data archives produced by these projects, including intellectual property rights, metadata standards and controlled vocabularies, and structuring spectral image data archives for both access and preservation. Future activities include the development of tools for the dynamic generation of derivative views from spectral images, and the extension of these techniques to other hidden or deteriorating texts.

http://livingstone.library.ucla.edu
http://livingstone.library.ucla.edu/livingstone_archive/

Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Project Briefing Pages, Publishing
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RDF: Resource Description Failures and Linked Data Letdowns

March 18, 2013

Robert Sanderson
Scientist
Los Alamos National Laboratory

 

Thinking about modeling your data using Resource Description Framework (RDF)? As with any choice of technology, there are benefits and downsides, appropriate situations for Linked Data and use cases that would be fulfilled more effectively by other frameworks. This presentation will focus on the pitfalls to avoid and the challenges of using graphs that are swept under the rug by some RDF advocates, and contrast them with the benefits in order to facilitate informed decision.

Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Project Briefing Pages
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