Project Briefings

Annotating Scholarly Resources: An Update from the Open Annotation Collaboration

Robert Sanderson
Scientist
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Herbert Van de Sompel
Digital Library Researcher
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Tim Cole
Assistant Engineering Librarian for Information Services
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

The Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) has published the final version of its Phase 1 data model guidelines, promoting an interoperable annotation environment for scholarly artifacts and online resources. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, OAC is the joint effort of five institutions towards unlocking annotations on scholarly collections through applying the principles of the Web architecture and concepts from the Linked Data effort. It is believed that the lack of interoperable tools and best-practices for the annotation of digital content is a critical stumbling block that must be overcome.

This presentation will focus on the most recent data model published by OAC and the differences from the version presented previously at CNI meetings. Improvements have been made in the model in response to valued feedback from the community and to better harmonize with outcomes of other initiatives, such as the Annotation Ontology modeling work that was also released this year. Further use cases have been identified and this has furthered thinking about the requirements for the data model. The goal remains a model for annotation interoperability that is rich enough to support a broad range of scholarly needs, while still being flexible enough and easy enough to adopt and use for even simple annotation scenarios.

This session will also include a report on the expected future efforts of OAC in 2011. If successful in obtaining further funding, the data model will continue to be refined based on experimental results from a range of additional international partners, including Stanford University, AustLit, Alexander Street Press, and Herzog August Bibliothek. Four further experiments will be funded, and a Using OAC Workshop will be held in spring.

Handout (PDF)

ARL’s 2030 Scenarios Look at the Future of Research

Karla Strieb
Assistant Executive Director
Association of Research Libraries

In 2010 the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) embarked on a scenario visioning project looking at the future environment for research. Based on input from leaders in the research library community, a set of four scenarios for 2030 were developed to answer the question, “How do we transform our organization(s) to create differential value for future users (individuals, institutions, and beyond), given the external dynamics redefining the research environment over the next 20 years?” Released in October, the “ARL 2030 Scenario Set” does not describe libraries, but rather the research environment in which research libraries will function. Because the scenarios function as a set to highlight critical uncertainties, i.e. unknowns, they are potentially useful to a wide range of service providers that seek to thrive by enabling research programs and researchers in an evolving research enterprise.

Scenario planning is widely used within industry and government but has been relatively rarely used in higher education settings. Scenario planning focuses on selecting the most critical uncertainties implicit in the focus question and exploring their implications. This engagement with the unknown makes it a powerful complement to more familiar strategies oriented to prediction that may over-emphasize assumptions and past trends. This session will briefly introduce basic concepts of scenario planning, describe the ARL project and the scenario creation process, provide an overview of the scenario set, and suggest several ways in which the scenario set could be used to enhance planning for research support.

http://www.arl.org/rtl/plan/scenarios/
http://www.arl.org/rtl/plan/scenarios/usersguide/

Handout (PDF)

Assessing Cyberinfrastructure Impact

Sally Jackson
Chief Information Officer
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Campus cyberinfrastructure is mostly unplanned, driven by faculty interest and success in attracting grant funding for specific projects. Cyberinfrastructure impact analysis is a methodical procedure for anticipating how any project will affect the rest of the complicated research ecosystem. One way to implement this form of analysis is through use of a rubric that guides an analyst in identifying and evaluating a project’s effects on the campus. This presentation will focus on the rationale for cyberinfrastructure impact analysis and some possible tools for conducting efficient analysis of research proposals.

Presentation (PPT)

Bamboo Technology Project: Building Research Environments for the Digital Humanities

David Greenbaum
Director, Bamboo Technology Project; Director, IST-Data Services, UC Berkeley
Univeristy of California, Berkeley

James D. Muehlenberg
Assistant Director, DoIT Academic Technology
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Tim Cole
Assistant Engineering Librarian for Information Services
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In September 2010, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a $1.3 million grant to an international partnership of 10 universities to carry out the first 18-month build phase of a proposed multi-phase Bamboo Technology Project (BTP). The partners in the project have pledged an equivalent amount of cost-share to the project, creating one of the larger collective investments in shared humanities e-research development in the last several years. BTP ‘12 builds from the Bamboo Planning Project – a process that engaged approximately 600 faculty, librarians, and technologists from 115 institutions to address the question: “How can we advance the arts and humanities through the development of shared technology services?”

In Bamboo Technology Project 2012, we will build and design e-research environments for humanities scholars. In our first 18-month phase of work, Bamboo will deliver three things. First, we will create easy-to-use, scalable environments for digital scholarship that can be run by institutions to support many arts and humanities scholars. These virtual research environments will include core tools for content management, collaboration, and the connection to distributed collections and web services. Second, we will define design options for how e-research environments can evolve to support increasingly complex and large-scale forms of corpora scholarship across disciplines. This design process will inform our proposed, second 18-month phase of build work. Third, we will develop frameworks and shared services – underlying infrastructure – that higher education institutions can use collectively to sustain and connect e-research environments and collections.

In this presentation we will provide an overview of the four major areas of work that teams of scholars, technologists, and librarians from the ten partner institutions are carrying out in BTP ’12. These areas of work are: (1) the development of Scholarly Work Spaces, (2) the design of future Corpora Space environments, (3) the modeling of scholarly analytic functions as web services, and (4) the adoption and definition of Collections Interoperability standards and services.

https://wiki.projectbamboo.org/display/BTECH/Technology+Wiki+-+Home

The bX Recommender: Search Informing Discovery

Nettie Lagace
Product Manager
Ex Libris

Carl Grant
Chief Librarian
Ex Libris

Jeff Huestis
Associate Dean for Technology
Washington University

Marvin Pollard
Manager of Systemwide Digital Library Services
California State University, Office of the Chancellor

bX, the scholarly recommender service from Ex Libris, based on the research of Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is an example of how discovery processes in online libraries and, indeed, librarianship can be substantively extended in the future. As the richness of patron-to-librarian reference interviews have all but disappeared in many environments, bX shows how these types of one-on-one searching activities can be used to collect pattern and user behavior information (potentially including clickstreams, items utilization & actions taken), then augment these large-scale collections of usage data with algorithmic computation, data mining, and statistical analysis to form the basis of automated, social user services that will support a more scalable version of librarianship — deployable across the Web with proven benefits for end users. This session will examine some specific examples showing how some of the concepts employed in bX could be extended and used to create and support this new vision of librarianship and how new measurements for end-user satisfaction and success can be found.

http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/bXOverview

Presentation (MS Word)

Assessing Cyberinfrastructure Impact

Project Briefings Presented at the CNI Fall 2010 Membership Meeting December 13-14, 2010 Arlington, VA

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Project Briefings Presented at the
CNI Fall 2010 Membership Meeting
December 13-14, 2010
Arlington, VA