CNI: Coalition for Networked Information

Building a Vast Library of Life: The Biodiversity Heritage Library Looks to the Future

Martin R. Kalfatovic
Program Director, Biodiversity Heritage Library
Smithsonian Institution

Nancy E. Gwinn
Chair, Biodiversity Heritage Library
Smithsonian Institution

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is an international consortium of natural history museums, botanical gardens, agricultural, university, biological research libraries, and like organizations and institutions (“BHL Member Institutions”) whose purpose is to improve research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community. As the BHL approaches its tenth anniversary, it has transformed its partner organizations, built a robust technology infrastructure and community, and developed an organizational framework for sustainability. This session will provide a brief look back on the BHL’s past and focus on key strategies and challenges as BHL looks towards its second decade in a dramatically changed networked environment.

http://biodiversitylibrary.org/

Presentation

Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective

Vivian Lewis
University Librarian
McMaster University

Lisa Spiro
Executive Director, Digital Scholarship Services
Rice University

Xuemao Wang
Dean and University Librarian
University of Cincinnati

Jon E. Cawthorne
Dean of Libraries
West Virginia University

What skills, knowledge, competencies and mindsets are important to the practice of digital scholarship? How is this expertise best developed? Does the shape of this expertise vary around the world? This presentation will present key results from our pilot global benchmarking study on digital scholarship expertise, a planning grant funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. We visited leading digital humanities and digital social science organizations in the United Kingdom, Germany, China, India, Taiwan, Mexico, the United States and Canada, conducting interviews with research staff, faculty, graduate students, and administrators in order to understand the core skills required for digital scholarship and the characteristics of organizations that cultivate these skills. Our study demonstrated the importance of collaborative competencies and learning mindsets as well as technical skills, domain knowledge, methodological competencies, and management skills. In addition, we observed that most digital scholars–particularly more senior ones–acquired their expertise through self-education, but that they also benefit from belonging to lively communities of practice. While our study did not include enough sites to allow us to generalize about the similarities and differences between digital scholarship organizations around the world, we did note the significance of factors such as funding, history, and career structures in informing the shape of digital scholarship expertise in local contexts.

http://libapps.libraries.uc.edu/blogs/dsgrant/

Challenges Presented by Institutional Identifiers

Karen Smith-Yoshimura
Program Officer
OCLC Research

Institutions wish to enhance and promote their reputation to attract funders and faculty and to increase their ranking. Since universities change their official names as part of branding activities, academic departments change their names to reflect new curricular emphasis, and schools merge with or separate from parent institutions, institutional identifiers are crucial to accurately represent scholars’ affiliations both on their output and on grant applications. Institutions may not realize they already have such an institutional identifier, ISNI, and that this identifier has already been disseminated, used by ORCID and included in VIAF and Wikidata. This project briefing summarizes the current work of an OCLC Research task force on use cases and challenges of representing organizations in the ISNI database.

http://www.isni.org/content/oclc-research-partners-task-force-representing-organizations-isni

Presentation

Collaborating to Develop and Test Research Data Preservation Workflows

Geoff Harder
Associate University Librarian
University of Alberta

Leanne Trimble
Data and Geospatial Librarian
Scholars Portal

Dugan O’Neil
Chief Science Officer
Compute Canada

Brian Owen
Associate University Librarian
Simon Fraser University

Martha Whitehead
Vice-Provost and University Librarian
Queen’s University

In recent years, research data management services have been emerging in academic libraries across Canada, but with uneven availability and fledgling infrastructure. In 2014, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) launched a project to develop a national research data management network that would be a collaborative undertaking by academic libraries and national cyberinfrastructure providers. This initiative, now named Portage, looked at leveraging existing open source tools and local/regional initiatives already underway with a view to scaling them to the national level. During the pilot year the groundwork was laid for a preservation and discovery network that addresses the full lifecycle for research data. It has demonstrated it is feasible to connect commonly used data management systems and virtual research environments such as Dataverse and Islandora with digital preservation systems such as Archivematica, and deposit the resulting archival information packets on storage systems such as the Ontario Library Research Cloud and the national high performance computing network provided by Compute Canada. With support from Research Data Canada and CANARIE, the Portage team and Compute Canada worked together to build this model. Compute Canada also tested a new data publication service offered by Globus, a service that already supports high-speed data replication across Compute Canada nodes. In this session, three different data workflows will be discussed: Islandora-Archivematica, Dataverse-Archivematica and Globus. Other key elements of Portage will also be outlined, including the development of a network of expertise that will provide free access to research data management tools and resources and manage the Portage Data Management Plan Builder.

Presentation

Digital Preservation Network Progress Report

Evviva Weinraub Lajoie
Services Manager
Digital Preservation Network

David Pcolar
Technical Manager
Digital Preservation Network

The Digital Preservation Network (DPN) has made significant progress in technical, legal, and service definition since our last update. A status update and overview of development needed for a ‘soft launch’ release later in 2015 will be presented by the DPN Services and Technical managers. Our initial pilot, completed in the fall of 2014, provided an exercise of the technical infrastructure and several non-technical objectives. Reflecting on that experience, DPN is moving forward with refinement of the deposit process, drafting of legal and service level agreements, preparation of materials and application of metadata, and other work needed to ensure long-term preservation. We will also discuss breakthrough concepts related to Succession Rights language for deposit agreements to ensure future access to preserved content.

http://www.dpn.org

Presentation

 

Contact Us

21 Dupont Circle
Suite 800
Washington, DC, 20036
202.296.5098

Contact us
Copyright © 2021 CNI

Keeping up with CNI

CNI-ANNOUNCE is a low-volume electronic forum used for information about the activities and programs of CNI, and events and documents of interest to the CNI community.
Sign up

Follow CNI

A joint project