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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
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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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Jisc/CNI Conference – Clifford Lynch

July 12, 2012

Clifford A. Lynch, JISC Inform, Issue 35, Winter 2012. Interview from Jisc/CNI workshop 2012 (www.jisc.ac.uk/inform/inform35/CNIandJisc.html).
Watch the video

Filed Under: Scholarly Communication, Talks and Interviews
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Interactions between libraries and technology over the past 30 years: An interview with Clifford Lynch

June 23, 2012

Clifford A. Lynch, Elke Greifeneder, Michael Seadle, (2012) “Interactions between libraries and technology over the past 30 years: An interview with Clifford Lynch 23.06.2012″, Library Hi Tech, Vol. 30 Iss: 4, p. 565-578.

Filed Under: Talks and Interviews
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Archiving Large Swaths of User-Contributed Digital Content: Lessons from Archiving the Occupy Movement

March 30, 2012

Howard Besser
Director, Moving Image Archiving & Preservation MA Program
New York University

David Millman
Director, Digital Library Technology Services
New York University

Sharon M. Leon
Director of Public Projects, Center for History & New Media
George Mason University

Archiving born-digital content from the “Occupy” movement can serve as a prototype for archiving all kinds of user-contributed content. In this presentation, several organizations will discuss the tools and methods they have developed for ingesting, preserving, and offering discovery services to large numbers of digital works where they cannot really rely on the contributors to follow standards and metadata assignment. Topics covered will range from automatic extraction of time-stamp and location metadata (and an empirical analysis of which upload services strip these out), to app development for uploading content along with permission forms, to maintaining lists of frequently-changing URL nodes for web-crawling, to issues in educating content creators in best practices. Speakers will also discuss issues in trying to document a social movement while it is happening.

 

http://activist-archivists.org/
 http://www.archive.org/details/occupywallstreet
http://occupyarchive.org/

Presentation (Besser PPT)
Presentation (Millman PPT)
Presentation (Leon PDF)
Presentation (Hanna PPTX)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, Digital Libraries, Digital Preservation
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National Status of Data Management: Current Research in Policy and Education

March 30, 2012
Martin Halbert
Dean of Libraries
University of North Texas		 William Moen
Associate Dean of Research
University of North Texas
Rachel Frick
Director, Digital Library Federation
Council on library and Information Resources		 Spencer D. C. Keralis
Postdoctoral Research Associate
University of North Texas

The demands of big data pose significant challenges for research institutions and academic libraries. This panel features project updates from three interrelated projects examining the data management ecosystem to determine requirements and emerging best practices in policy, graduate education, and professional enrichment. The University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries’ DataRes project, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), is examining the policy landscape at top research institutions across the nation. It is conducting a comprehensive investigation of the concerns of key stakeholders in the research lifecycle (including researchers, administrative officials, librarians, funding agency officials, research equipment vendors, and others) with regard to data management plan mandates from funding agencies, the long-term management of research data generated in universities, and the role of information professionals in such efforts.

The UNT College of Information’s iCAMP project, also funded by the IMLS, is developing a four course, competency-based, online graduate academic certificate program in data curation and data management for a hybrid audience of information professionals and disciplinary researchers and scholars. The Council on Library and Information Resources’ (CLIR) Sloan Foundation-funded research on scholarly practitioners in data curation has conducted an environmental scan of the state of data curation education in and out of the academy, and an anthropological study of the development needs of research professionals thrust into data curation roles. This project builds upon an existing successful program that brings scholars into libraries, the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship in Academic Libraries, to develop a rigorous training program in data curation for individuals with domain expertise, and to propose back to Sloan next steps in the implementation of a sound data management curriculum to extend the CLIR postdoctoral program into the area of data curation. Together these three projects offer both a snapshot of the current landscape of data management policy and education, and offer prescriptive insights on best practices for this rapidly evolving field.


http://txcdk-v22.unt.edu/icamp/content/icamp-project
http://datamanagement.unt.edu/
 http://www.clir.org/initiatives-partnerships/data-curation
http://research.library.unt.edu/datares/

Presentation (iCamp PPTX)
Presentation (DataRes PPTX)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, E-Science, Research Data Management
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