CNI: Coalition for Networked Information

Academic Museums and Libraries: Strong Partners for Stewardship and Engagement

Jill Deupi
Beaux Arts Director and Chief Curator, Lowe Art Museum
University of Miami

Chuck Eckman
Dean of Libraries and University Librarian
University of Miami

The University of Miami hosted the inaugural “The Academic Art Museum and Library Summit” in January 2016. This event brought together 14 pairs of library and museum directors from a representative cross-section of North American colleges and universities. Working together, these teams spent two days immersed in interactive, participatory programming designed to inspire expansive thinking and facilitate the mining of rich collaborative opportunities among this academic subset of the broader sector of institutions described as Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMs). Invitees submitted proposed topics for discussion, as well as at least one idea for a collaborative project on their home campuses, in advance of the Summit. The former helped to shape the convening’s three plenary sessions, while the latter ensured that each pair of attendees had engaged in meaningful dialogue regarding the challenges of and possibilities for deep collaboration well in advance of the Summit. This project brief will provide a high-level review of the Summit’s findings as documented in a recently published white paper. The latter focused on the potential for developing shared library-museum approaches to collection development, exhibition, curricular engagement, discovery, digitization, and preservation.

http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/con_events_aamls2016/

Presentation

After the Harvest: Preservation, Access, and Research Services for the 2016 End of Term Web Archive

Jefferson Bailey
Director, Web Archiving Programs
Internet Archive

Abbie Grotke
Lead Information Technology Specialist, Web Archiving Team
Library of Congress

Mark Phillips
Associate Dean for Digital Libraries
University of North Texas

In the fall of 2016 a group of institutions organized to preserve a snapshot of the federal government web. This is the third time this End of Term (EOT) group has organized with the goals of identifying, harvesting, preserving and providing access to a snapshot of the federal government web presence both as a way of documenting the changes caused by the transition of elected officials in the executive branch of the government and to provide a broad snapshot of the federal domain once every four years that is replicated among a number of organizations for long-term preservation. Presenters from three lead institutions on the project will discuss its methods for identifying and selecting in-scope content (including using registries, indices, and crowdsourcing URL nominations [“seeds”] through a web application called the URL Nomination Tool), new strategies for capturing web content (including crawling, browser rendering, and social media tools), access models including both an online portal as well as research datasets for use in computational analysis, and preservation data replication between partners using new export APIs and experimental tools developed as part of the IMLS-funded WASAPI project. Presenters will also speak to how the project illuminates the challenges and opportunities of large-scale, distributed, multi-institutional, born-digital collecting and preservation efforts, how the project aligns with participant institutions collection mandates, the project’s importance for archiving historically-valuable but highly-ephemeral web content without a clear steward, and how the breadth and size of the End of Term Web Archive informs both new methods of collaboration and new models for data-driven access and analysis by researchers.

http://eotarchive.cdlib.org/
http://digital2.library.unt.edu/nomination/eth2016/

Altmetrics Going Mainstream: Moving Recommendations into Practice and Beyond

Todd Carpenter
Executive Director
National Information Standards Organization

Nettie Lagace
Associate Director for Programs
National Information Standards Organization

Earlier this fall, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) published “Outputs of the NISO Alternative Assessment Project,” a recommended practice document on altmetrics, an expansion of tools available for measuring the scholarly impact of research in the knowledge environment. The document represents the discussions and analysis of three working groups: one responsible for compiling definitions for altmetrics and describing use cases covering multiple stakeholder parties; one who assembled registries of alternative outputs and persistent identifiers in scholarly communication, and wrote general recommendations for the application of data metrics; and one who created a “code of conduct” for data providers to ensure data quality in this environment. The overall project, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, began over three years ago while study and development of altmetrics was still in a nascent state; it built on NISO’s strength as a consensus-seeking organization to bring multiple perspectives, nuances, and needs into one set of recommendations for the various players in the scholarly community. NISO is anticipating that its Altmetrics Standing Committee will work to promote and support the recommended practice and continue as an active network of stakeholders to determine next steps for agreement and potential standardization in this area of work which is helping not only to transform how scholars in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities are assessed, but to examine and expand value for all kinds of scholarly output.

http://www.niso.org/topics/tl/altmetrics_initiative/

Presentation

arXiv@25: Exploring Future Directions and Strategies

Oya Y. Rieger
Associate University Librarian & arXiv Program Director
Cornell University

Martin Lessmeister
arXiv IT Lead
Cornell University

Sandy Payette
Chief Technology Officer, arXiv
Cornell University

arXiv.org is acknowledged as one of the most successful open-access preprint repositories; it has transformed scholarly communication in multiple fields of physics and plays an increasingly prominent role in mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, and statistics. Using the 25th anniversary of arXiv as an important milestone, during the last year, the arXiv team at the Cornell University Library (CUL) has engaged in a series of vision-setting activities to assess the service from various perspectives. The process involved gathering feedback from the arXiv’s advisory boards, conducting a user survey to seek opinions, and convening a technical infrastructure (IT) workshop. Inspired and equipped by the input gathered, and with generous grant funding from the Sloan Foundation, the arXiv team is preparing to embark on a three-year initiative to take a fresh view of how the Next Generation arXiv (arXiv-NG) can be re-architected for long-term durability and for improving the overall user experience for the scientific community. The goal of the presentation is to highlight the key findings of the review process, especially the user study, and discuss the implications for the arXiv-NG planning process. The team aims to create a comprehensive plan that factors in a range of issues extending from architectural choices to sustainability requirements, and from policy issues to governance matters. An integral part of this initiative will be networking with other related initiatives and striving to serve the broader scientific community. The ultimate goal is ensuring that arXiv continues to serve its essential role in facilitating science based on the needs of the user community, as well as responding to evolving scholarly communication practices.

http://www.arxiv.org

Presentation

Assessing Institutional Repositories

Elisabeth Kaplan
Associate University Librarian
George Washington University

Philip Herold
Research & Learning Director for Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Sciences
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Kenning Arlitsch
Dean
Montana State University

On Assessing Institutional Repository (IR) Efficacy Over Time: A Case Study in Context (Kaplan, Herold)

Recent calls for a critical re-examination of IR services have sparked conversations focused on the efficacy of IR as support for open access to scholarly publications. In fact IRs are far more diverse than the conversation has thus far reflected, and measures of their effectiveness need to take this into consideration. In particular, IRs that are well-integrated with institutional goals tend to be more successful. In this session, two former IR managers look back on the initial rationale for establishing an IR at the University of Minnesota, and assess how well that has played out over the past 10 years. We suggest that IRs have and will serve increasingly important functions, particularly for public universities with a mandate for transparency and accountability, and that delivering value to the institution is paramount to any definition of success.

Undercounting File Downloads from IRs (Arlitsch)

A primary impact metric for IRs is the number of file downloads, which are commonly measured through third-party web analytics software. Google Analytics, a free service used by most academic libraries, relies on HTML page tagging to log visitor activity on Google’s servers. However, web aggregators such as Google Scholar link directly to high value content (usually PDF files), bypassing the HTML page and failing to register these direct access events. Conversely, overwhelming and ever-evolving robot traffic renders log file analytics software very difficult to use and usually results in over counting.

This presentation presents evidence of a study of four institutions demonstrating that nearly 60% of IR human-generated activity is not counted by page tagging web analytics software, and proposes a practical solution for significantly improving the reporting relevancy and accuracy of IR performance metrics using Google Analytics.

http://conservancy.umn.edu
http://scholarworks.montana.edu/xmlui/handle/1/9943

Presentation (Arlitsch)

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