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Discovery Turned Inside Out: Using schema.org and Google Site Search with Library Digital Collections

March 18, 2013

Will Sexton
Digital Collections Coordinator, Libraries
Duke University

Sean Aery
Digital Projects Developer, Libraries
Duke University

 

Duke University Libraries has begun embedding structured metadata within the source code of the Web pages that display the Libraries’ digital collections. This practice follows the recommendations of the schema.org initiative, an effort by commercial search engine developers to use structured data to enrich the user’s experience. The initiative has led, for example, to Google’s display of contact information for retail outlets in search results, or its enhanced options for filtering recipe searches. Duke’s objectives in adopting schema.org relate both to the ways that an exterior service like Google might represent the institution’s materials, and how the organization will offer services to researchers. Usage analysis suggests that systems outside of Duke’s library, largely consisting of the commercial search tools, drive traffic to University collections, and the institution wants to increase its own systems’ interoperability with them.

Duke is also piloting a local instance of Google, via its Site Search API, with the potential to enhance and replace the discovery services offered to users. Generally speaking, the library sees embedded structured data as a way to extend the impact of the time and resources spent on discovery tools for the content that we manage. This presentation will show how Duke Libraries is using schema.org, it will include a demonstration of a localized Google experience, and it will include discussion of how this new emphasis on structured data changes how Duke Libraries envisions the future of discovery.

 http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/

Presentation (Sexton)
Presentation (Avery)

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval, Metadata, Project Briefing Pages
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IT@Cornell: Is It What We Imagined?

March 18, 2013

Dean B. Krafft
Director of Library IT
Cornell University

 

In the fall of 2010, Cornell University began implementing a “reimagined” model for delivering information technology (IT) services on campus, based on a set of recommendations developed with significant input from Bain & Co., a global consulting firm. Cornell is now three years into the process of creating a much more integrated and collaborative IT organization, and the university is starting to reap some major benefits from doing things very differently.

This talk will describe the significant changes that have taken place in IT service delivery, IT governance, and providing IT software solutions at Cornell, from the perspective of both the Cornell University Library and the campus as a whole. In some cases, Cornell adopted the recommendations of Bain and the original re-imagining process, and in other cases, it deliberately chose different approaches. The presentation will include an analysis of the organizational, cultural, and operational changes that have taken place in IT over the past three years, outlining both the successes and the remaining challenges. Finally, the talk will include a brief look at Cornell’s recently completed IT Strategic Plan, which seeks to “guide prudent reallocation of our IT investments from utilities to academic differentiators” while providing stable and efficient utility IT services. The IT@Cornell model of “intentional interdependence” within the university and seeking the best services and collaborations available from the outside world should be of significant interest to many educational institutions facing similar IT challenges.

http://www.cni.org/topics/user-services/reimagining-it-at-cornell-university/
http://www.cornell.edu/reimagining/it-review.cfm
http://www.it.cornell.edu/cio/index.cfm

 

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Economic Models, Project Briefing Pages, User Services
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The Library Building as Research Platform

March 18, 2013

Kristin Antelman
Associate Director for the Digital Library
North Carolina State University

Maurice York
Head of Information Technology
North Carolina State University

This briefing will introduce the technology vision behind the James B. Hunt Jr. Library, a new, 200,000 square foot building that opened in January 2013 at North Carolina State University. The Hunt Library was designed to meet the challenge of re-envisioning library spaces as a platform for research. The library’s goal is to engage researchers across disciplines by deploying broadly applicable technologies such as large-scale visualization, high resolution and 3D imagery, and interactive computing. These core technologies are expressed in physical spaces such as Immersion Theater, Game Lab, Media Production Studios, Teaching & Visualization Lab, and Creativity Studio. Through an inherent ability to reconfigure, re-purpose, and interchange components and infrastructure, the building’s technology itself is designed to be an object of research, a sandbox for emerging technologies and a showcase for cutting edge applications. New segments of the faculty are engaging in deeper ways than ever before, including the launch of several research projects based around Hunt.

Realizing the vision required converging physical and virtual spaces. Unlike library spaces that support undergraduate study, research-focused physical spaces require complementary virtual spaces. Thus, infrastructure is a core enabler. The building’s data center design, IP and AV fiber networks, HPC and high-performance storage (integrated with campus infrastructure), are all designed to support extensible use of spaces and to minimize operational staff support. As the most technologically advanced building on campus, Hunt has quickly become the test bed for new technologies on campus. As the physical infrastructure settles into operation, new service areas are emerging. A core service offering will be “project cloud” space, which will enable students and researchers to easily “check out” computing power and transfer large projects in and out of the library’s environment. Technology staff have been retrained and redeployed to support the new capabilities, and an academic technologist added to consult with researchers and match their needs with the building’s capabilities. Since all library services must be scalable, technology staff effort is focused on identifying good pilot projects that can serve as prototypes to be converted into templates for future projects.

http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/huntlibrary
http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/12/18/2553438/ncsus-hyper-modern-new-james-b.html

Presentation Slides (PDF)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2013 Project Briefings, Learning Spaces (includes Information/Learning Commons), Project Briefing Pages, Scholarly Communication, User Services
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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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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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Summing Up IDCC 2013

January 12, 2013

Clifford A. Lynch, Summing Up. Presentation at the 8th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC): “Infrastructure, Intelligence, Innovation: Driving the Data Science Agenda,” January 14-17, 2013 (www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc13).
Watch the video.

Filed Under: Digital Curation, E-Science, Talks and Interviews
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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
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Extending Access to Scholarly Resources: JSTOR’s Alumni Program

December 7, 2012

Bruce Heterick
Vice President, Outreach & Participation Services
JSTOR

Susan Gibbons
University Librarian
Yale University

Damon Jaggars
Associate University Librarian for Collections and Services
Columbia University

Molly Tamarkin
Associate University Librarian for Information Technology
Duke University

In 2009, JSTOR began partnering with institutions in a pilot program to provide access to their alumni. A range of participants was selected for the pilot, including public and private institutions, universities in the US and abroad, and theological seminaries. After nearly three years of collecting quantitative and qualitative feedback on the efficacy of the pilot, and based on an enthusiastic response from pilot partners, the Alumni Access program is being made accessible to all JSTOR participating institutions.

In this discussion, librarians who participated in the pilot will discuss how this tool was used for engaging with alumni, and what was learned about the level of interest in access to scholarly resources after graduation.

Next steps for the Alumni Access program, and how this fits within JSTOR’s larger aims of extending access to scholarship, will also be discussed.

http://about.jstor.org/service/access-alumni
Presentation (Tamarkin)

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, E-Journals, Project Briefing Pages, User Services
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Force 11: The Future of Research Communications and E-Scholarship

December 7, 2012

Maryann Martone
Co-Director, National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research
University of California, San Diego

Force11 is a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that has arisen organically to help facilitate the change toward improved knowledge creation and sharing. Individually and collectively, we aim to bring about a change in modern scholarly communications through the effective use of information technology, which will also broaden to include, for example, the publication of software tools, research communication via social media channels, and sharing data and workflows in innovative ways. Force11 can be seen as a starting point for a community that will, hopefully, grow and be augmented by individual and collective efforts by the participants and others. This talk will include discussion of the background, goals, and plans for Force11.

Presentation Slides

 http://force11.org

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2012 Project Briefings, Project Briefing Pages, Scholarly Communication
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Wikipedia and Libraries: What’s the Connection?

December 4, 2012

Merrilee Proffitt
Senior Program Officer
OCLC Research

Sara Snyder
Webmaster
Smithsonian Institution

It used to be that if you wanted information or answers to questions, you went to a library. In an era of increased reliance on major network hubs, information seekers increasingly turn to the web for answers. Therefore it is vital that libraries and archives ensure that their collections, or information about their collections, are easily discoverable on the open web. As the 6th most accessed website globally, Wikipedia is a natural place for cultural heritage institutions to expose their collections. Wikipedia articles receive a lot of web love: they are highly ranked by search engines; snippets from pages are incorporated into Google’s Knowledge Graph, and are pulled in by services like Facebook, filling in missing content. How can libraries and archives mesh with Wikipedia? This session will detail how OCLC Research, Smithsonian Institution, and others are connecting researchers to unique materials through Wikipedia, put a spotlight on the special role library data can play in Wikipedia, examine how Wikipedia data may be useful to libraries and scholarly institutions, introduce Wikipedia’s GLAM-Wiki initiative, and talk about ways that information professionals can work collaboratively with the World’s Largest Free Encyclopedia.

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Project Briefing Pages, Repositories, Social Media, User Services
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