Loading
 

Update on NISO’s Open Discovery Initiative

March 18, 2013

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/

Presentation

 

 

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval, Project Briefing Pages
Tagged With: ,

Using the Amazon Cloud to Host Digital Scholarship Projects

March 18, 2013

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.

Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Project Briefing Pages, Scholarly Communication
Tagged With: , ,

ZSRx: An Information Literacy MOOC

March 18, 2013

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.

Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Project Briefing Pages, Teaching & Learning
Tagged With: ,

MOOCs, Mobility, and Changing Scholarly Practice

December 15, 2012

Clifford A. Lynch, MOOCs, Mobility, and Changing Scholarly Practice: CNI’s Perspective on 2012 and 2013, December 10, 2012. Opening plenary session of the Fall 2012 CNI Membership Meeting (www.cni.org/mm/fall-2012).
Watch the video

Filed Under: E-Books, Mobile Technologies, Scholarly Communication, Talks and Interviews, Teaching & Learning
Tagged With: , , ,

Academic Library as Makerspace: 3D Printing and Knowledge Creation

December 7, 2012

Kathlin Ray
Dean, University Libraries and Teaching & Learning Technologies
University of Nevada, Reno

As part of an ongoing plan to transform an underutilized science and engineering library into a lively incubator for student-faculty collaboration and innovation, staff at the University of Nevada, Reno decided to launch a bold initiative: build a 3D scanning and printing “makerspace” and make it available to the entire campus. The service has been wildly successful with 3D printers running 24 hours a day. Furthermore, positioning the library as a place that facilitates knowledge creation beyond text based tools and resources has been a game changer. Students are highly motivated to learn new skills in order to take advantage of new technologies (Lynda.com gets heavy use); they experiment and iterate quickly to perfect their designs. Even better, students from engineering are now rubbing elbows with people from fields such as biology, computer science, geology, and even art. Like the printing press and the personal computer, 3-D printers have been hailed as a revolutionary device that will ultimately transform the way the world operates.

 Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2012 Project Briefings, Project Briefing Pages, Teaching & Learning, User Services
Tagged With: ,

Academic Preservation Trust

December 7, 2012

Robin Ruggaber
Director, Online Library Environment
University of Virginia

Michele Kimpton
Chief Executive Officer
DuraSpace

Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust) is a consortium of academic institutions committed to the creation and management of academic and research content for multiple institutions. As a member of APTrust, the University of Virginia in partnership with DuraSpace is implementing a cloud based repository service to aggregate curated content from consortium institutions upon which rich access services may be built. The implementation will further provide long term preservation for selected content through the implementation of a repository within the Digital Preservation Network (DPN).

The aggregate repository is being implemented to collect many forms of content, offer utility to support administrative and simple access, augment individual institution preservation strategies as well as provide a firm foundation for exploring future access services. Consortium members believe they can achieve these goals more fully together than they can alone.

 

http://academicpreservationtrust.org/
Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, Digital Preservation, Project Briefing Pages
Tagged With: ,

Auditing Distributed Preservation Networks

December 7, 2012

Micah Altman
Director of Research, Libraries
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This presentation summarizes the lessons learned from trial audits of a several production distributed digital preservation networks. These audits were conducted using the open source SafeArchive system, which enables automated auditing of a selection of TRAC criteria related to replication and storage. An analysis of the trial audits demonstrates both the complexities of auditing modern replicated storage networks, and reveals common gaps between archival policy and practice. Recommendations for closing these gaps are discussed, as are extensions that have been added to the SafeArchive system to mitigate risks in distributed digital preservation (DDP).

Presentation Slides

http://www.safearchive.org

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, Digital Preservation, Project Briefing Pages
Tagged With: ,

Building an Archival Identity Management Network: Transforming Archival Practice and Historical Research

December 7, 2012

Daniel Pitti
Associate Director, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
University of Virginia

Brian Tingle
Technical Lead
California Digital Library

Clifford Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information

 

This session will feature two related archival identity management projects: Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) and Building a National Archival Authorities Infrastructure. SNAC (2010-2014), a project to create a test bed of archival authority records and demonstrate their potential for user discovery, comprises a three-part process. First, personal, corporate, and family names (and related historical data) are extracted from finding aids (descriptions of archival records). Next, these names and data are assembled into contextual authority records, which are compared against each other, and against authority and historical data from other sources (e.g. VIAF and DBpedia). The resulting set of authority records serves as the basis of a prototype interface that provides integrated access (through the names and descriptions of people) to related but distributed primary and secondary resources. By virtue of the connections displayed between authority records and related sources, the prototype also provides a visualization of the historical social networks in which the people depicted lived and worked.

Among the primary objectives of the Building a National Archival Authorities Infrastructure (2011-2013) project is to transform the groundwork completed by SNAC into a sustainable national archival authorities cooperative program that is similar to, but distinct from, the Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO). The project has convened a series of meetings comprising archivists, librarians, scholars, and allied professionals, with the goal of developing a blueprint for the cooperative. The emerging consensus from these meetings is that the National Archives and Records Administration will host the cooperative, collaborating with the archival and allied communities in its governance, development, and maintenance.

 http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/
http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/xtf/search
http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/NAAC_index.html

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Identity Management, Information Access & Retrieval, Metadata, Project Briefing Pages
Tagged With: ,

Collaborative Statewide Networked Information Content: Case Study in the Development and Operation of the Portal to Texas History

December 7, 2012

Martin Halbert
Dean of Libraries
University of North Texas

Helen Agüera
Senior Program Officer
National Endowment for the Humanities National Endowment for the Humanities

Brenda Gunn
Associate Director for Research and Collections, Briscoe Center for American History
University of Texas at Austin

Mark Phillips
Assistant Dean for Digital Libraries
University of North Texas

 

More than 200 libraries, museums, archives, and scholarly research centers collaborated to create the statewide Portal to Texas History over a 10 year period. This rich resource now contains millions of files comprising more than 220,000 titles, many of which are extensive back-runs of historic state newspapers. The Portal is now used millions of times per year by both academic and public researchers. This panel will discuss the Portal to Texas History as a case study in large-scale collaboration to develop networked information content. Issues that will be discussed by panel participants include the national context of digitization efforts, scholarly guidance in content selection, community engagement, standards-based technology for content aggregation at scale, assessment of usage and impacts, and strategies for long-term sustainability.

 

http://texashistory.unt.edu/

Filed Under: Assessment, CNI Fall 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Information Access & Retrieval, Project Briefing Pages
Tagged With: ,

Data Management Planning Made Easy: The DMPTool

December 7, 2012

Andrew Sallans
Head of Strategic Data Initiatives, Library; Co-Lead on DMPTool Project
University of Virginia

Carly Strasser
Data Curation Specialist
California Digital Library

There is a large gap between the data management skills needed by modern researchers and their current abilities, and there is not yet a clear way to bridge this gap. In an effort to address this lack of skills, several institutions collaborated to create the DMPTool. Collaborators included the California Digital Library, DataONE, the Digital Curation Centre, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of California at Los Angeles Library, the University of California at San Diego Libraries, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library and Office of Cyberinfrastructure, and the University of Virginia Library. The result is a freely available web service with two principal goals: 1) allow researchers to quickly and easily produce a quality data management plan, and 2) inform researchers of relevant resources and support services across the community and within their institution. The tool clearly identifies what funders want grant applicants to address, and it allows users to edit, save, share, print and download their data management plans.

Following on prior Coalition for Networked Information briefings, this presentation will begin with an overview of data management planning for newcomers, with emphasis on the DMPTool. The session will include an update on current data management policies and, and it will also include discussion of the present landscape of data management planning. The history of the project will be described (a collaborative effort of eight institutions), its uptake and success, and plans for new functionality, grant funding, and governance. A brief demonstration of the DMPTool will be provided to seed a facilitated discussion on the future of the DMPTool, what services it could and should provide, and how these services and materials will better enable good data stewardship practices among researchers.

 http://dmp.cdlib.org/

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2012 Project Briefings, Cyberinfrastructure, E-Science, Project Briefing Pages, Research Data Management, User Services
Tagged With: ,