Marianne Stowell Bracke Agricultural Sciences Information Specialist, Associate Professor of Library Science Purdue University	Christopher C. Miller Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Specialist, Assistant Professor of Library Science Purdue University

Digitization projects that scan and abandon – that simply generate static, digital copies of analog pages and then move on – might be missing out on some of the more relevant capabilities of the Semantic Web, with its creeping xml veins and mashed-up interfaces. Purdue University Libraries is resurrecting a 1906 Soil Survey and mashing it with itself in order to add value, access, and interaction beyond the more traditional scan/describe/store model of collection recovery. It is an attempt to leverage the evolving technologies of librarianship (description, yes, but also text markup, web application-building, and geographic information systems [GIS]) toward the benefit of our users’ maturing needs and expectations. Soil surveys document soil types and locations via prose and maps, typically published as a single document. Modern soil surveys are born digital and used largely in electronic contexts (including GIS) but there are decades of rich comparative data being left to atrophy in the undigitized copies of aging paper surveys. This project digitizes both components of the 1906 survey – the text and map – and extracts both into useable, modern data formats. In addition to OCR’d, fully indexed, fully searchable full text, the soil zone data from the map will also be extracted into a useable, queryable, studyable GIS dataset. Search and query will be available for each component of the original document and each will be able to link and query the other, allowing the user to jump seamlessly between text and map and back based on common semantic elements. The session will update the status of the project, demonstrate a working draft of the map and document interface, and discuss the more macro implications of librarians recognizing new expectations for usability by applying new technologies to their collections.

Presentation (PDF)

 

Deanna Cooke Director of Research, Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching and Service Georgetown University	Joan Cheverie Head, Digital Library Services Georgetown University

At Georgetown University many students are engaged in collaborative research with community organizations that support social change. However, there is little interaction between students and faculty from different disciplines, and these researchers rarely have opportunities to document and share their work. Through support from the Provost’s Undergraduate Learning Initiative grant that supports teaching and learning, the Center for Social Justice and the University Library are collaborating to develop an online CBR community.

• The online CBR learning community seeks to augment the community-based research being conducted by allowing students to do the following:
  Share research strategies and support each other’s projects. For example, psychology students can provide interviewing skills to chemists who want to assess residents’ attitudes about their research project on the polluted Anacostia River in Washington, DC.
• Share resources across disciplines. For example, students who work with high school biology classes can learn about the housing community in which their students live from a sociology student working on affordable housing research.
• Publicize their work through online research posters that give details about both the challenges and successes they face in their work.
• Publish findings through the development of an online, peer reviewed CBR journal.

In this session, the principal investigators will describe the components of the online CBR learning community, the model they have developed that illustrates their vision for integrating scholarship, collaborative learning, and publication into the undergraduate research experience, and they will share their observations gained from the initial cohort.

Handout (MS Word)

 

Bonnie Szirtes Business Architect, Research and Business Intelligence Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN)

Canadian museums, more than ever before, are responding to the challenges of adapting to an ever-changing environment to remain relevant to their communities, stakeholders and funders. They are responsible for engaging new audiences, dealing with repatriation issues, looking for new funding opportunities, competing with other venues for visitors and visitor dollars, and creating experiences for these visitors. New and emerging technology opportunities can help museums transform their business practices to adapt to this new environment. This session will examine what business transformation is and why it is important to museums. The results from two research studies commissioned by CHIN will be presented: 1) Transformational Technology Opportunities in the Next Decade and 2) Competitive Environment Scan.

 

David S.H. Rosenthal Chief Scientist, LOCKSS Program Stanford University	Victoria Reich Director, LOCKSS Program Stanford University

A single replica of a large database, such as the petabyte scale protein database, may cost millions of dollars. Minimizing the number of replicas needed to assure adequate preservation becomes the dominant design goal. As preserving large scientific datasets becomes a focus of the National Science Foundation’s cyber-infrastructure program, how well prepared are we to take rational investment decisions about systems in this area?

Drawing on research by the LOCKSS research team and others, this session surveys the state of engineering knowledge and points out the gaps that need to be filled by digital preservation research. These gaps include needs for better specification and characterization of media performance (recent papers show that everything you know about disk reliability is wrong), better models of the threats (the most frequent cause of data loss at large sites is operator error), better models of fault tolerance (recent papers show that both RAID and Byzantine Fault Tolerance are inappropriate models) and better ways of formulating the relationship between a preservation service and its customers (disclaiming all responsibility for the preserved data is not a suitable service level agreement).

PowerPoint Presentation (PDF)

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Ben Bykowski Senior Interactive Developer Optiem, LLC	Nicholas Fischio Development Manager Case Western Reserve University

Digital Case is an electronic repository that archives, stores, disseminates, and preserves faculty research in digital formats (both “born digital” and materials of historic interest that have been digitized). Organizing and maintaining published materials has long been the domain of research libraries. With the Digital Case project, the Kelvin Smith Library assumes a more active role in the scholarly communication process, providing expertise in the form of a set of services (metadata tagging, authority control, secure environment, preservation over time) for access and distribution of Case’s collective intellectual product.

There are several unique aspects of the Digital Case project:

1. Exploring the potential for combining commercial software with open source software: Digital Case uses a commercial content management system (Ektron) as the administrative interface. Since neither Ektron nor Fedora were designed to communicate with each other, it took some creativity to integrate the two systems. Discussing the design process as well as demonstrating the live implementation should spark some creative thinking about building a complete, functioning digital library.

2. Designing a digital library / institutional repository from the customer perspective: It would seem that most organizations take the approach of starting with what they are given (i.e. Fedora, DSpace) and attempt to turn that into a complete system. With the help of a local professional design firm (Optiem), the Case Western team started the process by asking users how they would envision a digital library. By starting with no limits or preconceived notions, the team feels Digital Case breaks new ground, in particular because institutional repositories are technical in nature and technical staff typically drive the process. This project approaches the process from a different angle.

http://library.case.edu/digitalcase

Handout (PDF)

PowerPoint Presentation

 

Marianne Stowell Bracke, Purdue University
Christopher C. Miller, Purdue University

Deanna Cooke, Georgetown University
Joan Cheverie, Georgetown University

Bonnie Szirtes, Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN)

David S.H. Rosenthal, Stanford University
Victoria Reich, Stanford University

Ben Bykowski, Optiem, LLC
Nicholas Fischio, Case Western Reserve University

Lois Brooks, Stanford University
Terry Ryan, University of California, Los Angeles

Gretchen Wagner, ARTstor
Maureen Whalen, J. Paul Getty Trust

Peter Brantley, Digital Library Federation

John Mark Ockerbloom, University of Pennsylvania
Ann J. Wolpert, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Kevin Kiernan, University of Kentucky
Ionut Emil Iacob, University of Kentucky

Janet McCue, Cornell University
Jon Corson-Rikert, Cornell University

Gail Persily, University of California, San Francisco
Neil Rambo, University of Washington

Lisa Hinchliffe, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Karen Schmidt, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
David Ward, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Jack McCredie, University of California, Berkeley

Ann J. Wolpert, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Rea Devakos, University of Toronto
Martha Sites, University of Virginia
Clifford A. Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information

Adrian Burton, Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR)

Johannes Leveling, University of Hagen

Barbara Taranto, New York Public Library

Martin Mueller, Northwestern University

Dean B. Krafft, Cornell University

Garland Elmore, Indiana University
Elizabeth Ann Van Gordon, Indiana University
Bob R. Price, Duke University

Howard Besser, New York University
James Bullen, New York University
Kara Van Malssen, New York University

Glen Newton, Canada Institute for Scientific & Technical Information (CISTI)

Kenneth Klingenstein, Internet2 and University of Colorado, Boulder

Myron Gutmann, University of Michigan
Joan Cheverie, Georgetown University

Tom Cramer, Stanford University
Rachel Gollub, Stanford University

Susan Gibbons, University of Rochester

David W. Lewis, Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis

Pamela Snelson, Franklin & Marshall College and Association of College & Research Libraries
Mary Ellen Davis, Association of College & Research Libraries

Joan K. Lippincott, Coalition for Networked Information

Nancy R. John, University of Illinois at Chicago
Edward J. Valauskas, First Monday

Todd Grappone, University of Southern California
R. Wayne Shoaf, University of Southern California

Paul N. Courant, University of Michigan

Carl Lagoze, Cornell University
Michael Lloyd Nelson, Old Dominion University
Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Ann M. Lally, University of Washington Libraries
Carolyn E. Dunford, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Roger C. Schonfeld, Ithaka
Kevin Guthrie, Ithaka

Alan Levine, The New Media Consortium (NMC)
Bryan Alexander, National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE)
Cyprien Lomas, University of British Columbia and EDUCAUSE