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MIT Initiatives: Post-Plenary Discussion

April 17, 2002

Hal Abelson
Class of 1922 Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Vijay Kumar
Assistant Provost & Director of Academic Computing
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ann Wolpert
Director of Libraries
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has launched two interrelated and ambitious institutional programs that have the potential to transform higher education on a number of dimensions. The Open Courseware Initiative (OCW) seeks to make MIT course materials available world-wide, without charge, via the Internet. The Dspace Initiative is a project to build a multidisciplinary, durable digital repository that will persistently store and disseminate faculty educational and research material. These are transformative efforts from many perspectives. They speak to the way that the institution and its faculty think about their teaching and research materials, about the way this relates to publication and intellectual property, the relationship between the institution and the world (including developing nations), and what characterizes the unique value of a particular educational institution. This session will enable attendees to follow up with questions and discussion following the plenary presentation.

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2002 Project Briefings, Repositories, Teaching & Learning
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Media Cloisters, Vassar College

April 17, 2002

Virginia Jones
Educational Technology Specialist
Vassar College

Rain Breaw
Multimedia Consultant
Vassar College

Kathleen Kurosman
Educational Technology Librarian
Vassar College

The result of a Mellon Foundation grant for “Librarianship and Teaching with New Media,” the Media Cloisters at Vassar College, is a state-of-the-art multimedia center located in the Vassar College Library. In keeping with the Vassar tradition of teaching by the seminar method and nurturing a community of scholars, the Cloisters provides a place where faculty, students, librarians, and instructional technology specialists can come together to work on curricular projects that utilize a wide range of technologies. The Cloisters also provides a setting for discussion of pedagogical issues related to the use of technology in teaching.

One key to the success of the Cloisters, and also one of its challenges, is its use of a model of collaborative management. The Cloisters is run by three co-curators — an educational technologist, a multimedia consultant, and a librarian — and a faculty director. In addition, a cadre of students with technical and graphic design expertise help faculty with the technical aspects of developing instructional resources. This session will describe both the vision and mission of the Cloisters and some of the experiences we have had in implementing that vision.

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2002 Project Briefings, Learning Spaces (includes Information/Learning Commons), Teaching & Learning, User Services
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Mellon Digital Archives Project

April 17, 2002

Donald Waters
Program Officer, Scholarly Communications
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, seven institutions (Cornell, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the New York Public Library, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, and Yale University) have engaged in a project to create digital archives of electronically published journals. The planning phase of this initiative has raised a number of key issues that must be addressed, including: the types of e-journal archives and their interaction, the economic models for sustaining such archives, the collaborative agreements needed with publishers, the forms of access that archives will provide users, and the technical architecture of the archives. This session will summarize the key findings of the Mellon-funded projects and outline the directions that the Foundation is contemplating to address these issues.

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2002 Project Briefings, Digital Preservation
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Metadata Harvesting: Reports from Three Projects Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

April 17, 2002

Kat Hagedorn
OAIster Librarian, Digital Library Production Service
University of Michigan

Beth Sandore
Associate University Librarian for Information Technology Planning & Policy
University of Illinois

Martin D. Harbert
Director, Library Systems
Emory University

The Libraries of the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Emory University have received support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to implement a suite of OAI-based metadata harvesting services, search services, and tools designed to facilitate discovery and retrieval of scholarly information. Two distinct metadata search services are being developed utilizing shared infrastructure components and software tools that will be made available under an Open Source Initiative license.

The University of Michigan search service, called OAIster (http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/), is under development by the Digital Library Production Service (http://www.umdl.umich.edu/.) It is intended to be global in scope, providing cross-repository searching of metadata describing publicly available digital objects. The Michigan service is relatively “lightweight” (e.g., without duplication or thesauri) and is being designed to answer the pressing need for opening the “hidden web” information resources of the scholarly community. The University of Illinois has developed a vertical, domain-specific portal designed to search metadata describing manuscript archives and digital cultural heritage information resources (http://oai.grainger.uiuc.edu/) Metadata describing non-digital resources and resources of restricted availability is included along with metadata describing publicly available digital objects. At Emory University, two grant projects — AmericaSouth.org and MetaArchive.org — have been collaboratively conjoined and are being carried forward in cooperation with partner institutions SOLINET and ASERL.

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2002 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval, Metadata
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National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program: Long Term Preservation of Digital Content

April 17, 2002

Laura E. Campbell
Associate Librarian, Office of Strategic Initiatives
Library of Congress

In December 2000, Congress passed legislation establishing the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) in the Library of Congress (LC). The legislation calls for LC to lead a national planning effort for the long-term preservation of digital content and to work collaboratively with representatives of other federal, research, library and business organizations. Over the last 15 months, LC has conducted an extensive planning process, intended to identify the concerns of the various stakeholder communities, outline a research program in collaboration with the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other concerned agencies, and sketch a conceptual framework within which technical, organizing and legal issues might be addressed. In addition, the Library is holding a series of scenario planning workshops this spring, which are designed to identify possible future scenarios and implementation strategies for the long term preservation of digital content. A plan will be submitted to Congress later this year.

Given the very wide range of content areas affected by this mandate, LC is initially focusing on digital formats in which its collections are strong or where the digital materials, which exist exclusively or primarily in digital form, are aligned with LC¹s traditional mission: Web sites, electronic journals, electronic books, digitally recorded sound, digital television and digital moving images (e.g., “film”). To date, the planning process has proved most instructive. Meetings with representatives from many of the content and entertainment industries, non-profit foundations and professional associations, major research libraries, cultural heritage institutions, and individual scholars have raised important issues and pointed to several areas of shared concern on where cooperative arrangements might be forged.

This session will discuss LC’s progress to date.

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2002 Project Briefings, Digital Preservation
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The National Gallery of the Spoken Word

April 17, 2002

Mark Kornbluh
Executive Director, H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences OnLine
Michigan State University

Jerry Goldman
Professor
Northwestern University

Funded under DLI2 as a collaborative research project to explore the full range of issues involved in making spoken word resources available and useful over the web, the National Gallery of the Spoken Word (NGSW) has made substantial progress on a number of fronts. This session will discuss implementation of OAIS and adaptation of METS in designing a large-scale interoperable open-source multimedia digital archive. Strategies for searching audio resources will be updated and tools for linking audio to text and interfaces for effective delivery of aural resources will be demonstrated.

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2002 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Information Access & Retrieval, Metadata
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NDLTD and OAI: A Case Study of a Worldwide Community Sharing (Multilingual, Multimedia) Electronic Theses & Dissertations through the Open Archives Initiative

April 17, 2002

Edward A. Fox
Director, Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University

The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) has developed services around the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) to support the community activities of more than 130 members in sharing multilingual, multimedia electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). This involved several years of discussion leading to ETD-MS, a metadata standard built upon the Dublin Core, with crosswalks with MARC. Virginia Tech hosts a union metadata catalog that involves ETD-MS from contributing universities around the world. VTLS supports searching and browsing using Virtua, while Virginia Tech also provides services using experimental systems such as MARIAN and the component digital library scheme ODL (Open Digital Library). This session will provide an overview of these efforts and explore how universities can participate, and will consider broader questions about the Open Archives Initiative and how it can support community sharing efforts.

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2002 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Electronic Theses & Dissertations (ETDs), Metadata
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NSF Middleware Initiative Update

April 17, 2002

Michael Gettes
Principal Technologist
Georgetown University

Middleware is a layer of software services that manages electronic personal identity, security, access, and information exchange. Internet2, EDUCAUSE, and the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) entered a three-year Cooperative Agreement with the National Science Foundation and the GRIDS Center under the NSF Middleware Initiative. As the Enterprise and Desktop Integration Technologies (EDIT) Consortium, the partners are working towards integrating middleware into campus enterprise environments for the purpose of advancing productivity for educators and researchers. This session will discuss the status of the project to date and future plans of the Initiative.

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2002 Project Briefings, Identity Management, Intellectual Property
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The Online Publishing Use and Costs Evaluation Program

April 17, 2002

Kate Wittenberg
Director, Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia
Columbia University

Christina Norman
Research Director, Online Use & Costs Evaluation Project
EPIC

David Millman
Director, Research & Development, Academic Information Systems
Columbia University

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC) a cost and usage evaluation grant aimed at gaining a better understanding of how electronic resources affect scholarly communication. In particular, we are interested in how electronic resources are affecting academic presses, administrators, information technology personnel, librarians, faculty, and students. In order to address these questions EPIC is conducting both qualitative and quantitative research including one-on-one interviews, focus groups, web-log analysis, and surveys of the involved parties. This session will discuss the overall goals of this evaluation project, the research methodologies used, and findings to date from librarians, faculty and students.
handout (in PDF format) 131K file size
handout (in PPT format) 787K file size

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2002 Project Briefings, Publishing, Scholarly Communication
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Open Archives Initiative Update

April 17, 2002

Clifford Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information

Daniel Greenstein
Director
Digital Library Federation

Herbert Van de Sompel
Digital Library Research & Prototyping
Los Alamos National Laboratory – Research Library

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The OAI has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. Continued support of this work remains a cornerstone of the OAI program. The fundamental technological framework and standards that are developing to support this work are, however, independent of both the type of content and the economic mechanisms surrounding that content, and promise to have much broader relevance in opening up access to a range of digital materials.

Under the auspices of CNI and the Digital Library Federation participants in the OAI have been defining and experimenting with an interoperability architecture based on metadata harvesting. The goal is to provide an easy way for data providers to expose their metadata and for service providers to access that metadata and use it as input to value-added services. As the current phase of the project approaches completion, this session will provide an update — including information about Version 2 of the metadata harvesting protocol.

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2002 Project Briefings, Metadata, Scholarly Communication, Standards
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