CNI: Coalition for Networked Information

AMP: An Audiovisual Metadata Platform to Support Mass Description

Jon W. Dunn
Assistant Dean for Library Technologies
Indiana University

Chris Lacinak
President
AVP

In recent years, concern over the longevity of physical audio and video (AV) formats due to media degradation and obsolescence, combined with decreasing cost of digital storage, have led libraries and archives to embark on projects to digitize recordings for purposes of long-term preservation and improved access. Beyond digitization, in order to facilitate discovery and research use, AV materials must also be described, but many items and collections lack sufficient metadata. In 2015, with the support of consulting firm AVP, the Indiana University Libraries conducted a planning project to research, analyze, and report on technologies, workflows, staffing, timeline and budgets to address the challenge of quickly and efficiently creating large quantities of metadata for mass-digitized AV collections. One of the outcomes of this planning project was identification of a need for a technology platform to support the incremental application of both automated and human-based processes to create and augment metadata. With support from a Mellon Foundation planning grant, Indiana University has partnered with experts from the University of Texas at Austin School of Information and AVP to explore the design of a software platform to support the incremental application of automated and human-based processes to create and augment metadata at large scales for AV collections. In this session, we will describe the proposed technical architecture for this system, dubbed the Audiovisual Metadata Platform (or AMP), discuss the use cases and technical considerations that informed its design, and discuss next steps toward implementation and pilot testing.

Presentation

Assessing the Impact of the Library in the Research Ecosystem

Christine Madsen
Chief Innovation Officer
Athenaeum21

Sue Baughman
Deputy Executive Director
Association of Research Libraries

Megan Hurst
Chief Experience Officer
Athenaeum21

Libraries play an increasingly comprehensive role in the research lifecycle, yet metrics and measures (both qualitative and quantitative) that illustrate the fundamental role and impact of the library in research still need to be developed. Research libraries need first to define the values by which they want to be measured, rather than trying to manifest those values from the data that they have traditionally collected. To this end, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) underwent a visioning process for its assessment program between February and October 2017. The goal of this project was to develop a forward-looking program that advances the organizational outcomes of the 21st century research library. One result of the visioning process was a clearly elaborated need for research libraries to demonstrate their function in advancing and collaborating in the research enterprise. Rather than trying to define “impact” and “value” independently, the new ARL assessment program will set the context for understanding and communicating the stories of the research library to external stakeholders and provide the tools for members to tell this story locally. At the heart of this work is a framework that aims to draw a map of the landscape of services and functions provided across all research libraries. The comprehensive framework, and proposed new data points, will help research libraries translate their values into measures. The presenters will demonstrate how this collaboratively developed (and evolving) framework paints a map of the research library assessment landscape and how it will be used to understand and measure the role of the library in supporting institutional missions.

Presentation

Avalon Media System Update: Piloting Avalon in the Cloud

Evviva Weinraub
Associate University Librarian for Digital Strategies
Northwestern University

John Herbert
Director of Digital Programs
Lyrasis

Carl Grant
Associate Dean, Knowledge Services & Chief Technology Officer
University of Oklahoma

Avalon Media System is an open source system, based on Fedora and Hydra repository technologies, that enables libraries and archives to more easily provide online access to digitized and born-digital audio and video collections for purposes of teaching, learning, and research. Now in its sixth major release, Avalon has been co-developed by the libraries at Indiana University Bloomington and Northwestern University, with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. One of the deliverables of the recent Mellon grant was to make it possible to run Avalon as a subscription software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. As part of our most recent IMLS grant, we were able to partner with LYRASIS to run a pilot project with nine partner institutions that spanned a diverse range of use cases and institution types. The partner organizations included in the pilot were: Emerson College, Oberlin College, the University of Houston, the University of Oklahoma, the University of the Arts, DC Public Library, Houston Public Library, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Tennessee Chattanooga. In addition, Northwestern University has been running its local instances of Avalon on Amazon Web Services since August 2017. This panel discussion will explore various aspects of the pilot, including an overview of pilot partner use cases, what went well and challenges encountered with pilot testing, and what is needed to make Avalon work for institutions interested in purchasing Avalon as a SaaS going forward. Additionally, the panel will discuss the lessons learned from the teams who have deployed the software both locally and in the cloud, share thoughts on how to organize the management of Avalon in the SaaS space, and summarize the real costs of running Avalon locally and in several cloud-based hosted environments.

Presentation

Battening Down the Hatches: Securing the Institutional Repository

Nicole Johnson
Product Manager, Digital Commons
bepress

IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg
Senior Vice President, Research Integrity
Elsevier

Software providers and repository administrators alike understand the need for data privacy and security. The bepress product team is meeting new and evolving needs by ensuring that the platform complies with the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); employing Transport Layer Security (TSL); and mitigating the security risk posed by Spectre and Meltdown, two major security flaws that may grant hackers access to sensitive information. This briefing will provide an overview of these security developments. It will then share a more in-depth view of how the bepress team is leveraging Elsevier’s company-wide endeavors to ensure Digital Commons and the Expert Gallery Suite’s compliance with upcoming GDPR legislation, designed to protect the personal data privacy of citizens of the European Union. Through the process, bepress is expanding that level of privacy and protection to its customers and end users worldwide.

Building Digital Coherence Through Collective Action: Creating DURAble Trust and DPNing Scholarship by Moving Together

Maurice York
Associate University Librarian for Library Information Technology
University of Michigan

Debra Hanken Kurtz
Chief Executive Officer
DuraSpace

Mary Molinaro
Executive Director
Digital Preservation Network

Chip German
Program Director
APTrust

The University of Michigan Library is in the midst of a once-in-a-generation shift in all of its major digital collections, preservation, bibliographic, and information discovery platforms. Over the last two decades, the repositories and systems we have built have achieved surprising scale; across our web presence, we serve over 4 million users a year and provide an annual download stream of over 70 terabytes of data that supports research, teaching, and scholarship around the globe. While our tactics and choices over those two decades have proven successful, it is questionable how much further we can scale on a rather loose confederation of dozens of systems and hundreds of interfaces. A core part of our strategy for creating a coherent, adaptable, and scalable platform to serve the next 20 years is to shift significant resources (content, applications, dollars, hours, training, and intellectual effort) into building, supporting, and extending community infrastructure. In this presentation, we will outline Michigan’s strategy and bring together leaders of our foundational communities–which, combined, are hundreds of institutions strong–to hold a panel discussion about coherent action and collective direction.

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