CNI: Coalition for Networked Information

Addressing the 20th Century Gap: Controlled Digital Lending by Libraries

Chris Freeland
Director of Open Libraries
Internet Archive

Kyle K. Courtney
Copyright Advisor and Program Manager
Harvard University

Terry Ehling
Director for Strategic Initiatives
MIT Press

David Hansen
Associate University Librarian for Research, Collections & Scholarly Communications
Duke University

Book scanning projects have made tremendous strides in bringing public domain literature online for the world’s scholars and enthusiasts. Materials published after 1923, however, are still not widely available due to US copyright restrictions. The recently published “Position Statement on Controlled Digital Lending” describes a method for addressing this research gap. Through controlled digital lending, libraries can make twentieth-century scholarship available that is largely absent from their digital holdings in a way that respects the rights of authors and publishers. Publishers, too, can participate in controlled digital lending; projects between the Internet Archive, MIT Press, and other university presses are digitizing backlist and out-of-print books and making them available for controlled digital lending. This panel will bring together co-authors of both a related white paper and the position statement to provide an overview of controlled digital lending, as well as the perspective of the publishing community.

https://controlleddigitallending.org/
https://archive.org/details/inlibrary

Analyzing Faculty Activity Reporting at the University of Arizona: What Does the Data Tell Us?

Maliaca Oxnam
Associate Librarian, Office of Digital Innovation and Stewardship
University of Arizona

Five years after launching a new online faculty activity reporting and annual evaluation system at the University of Arizona, what does examination of the benchmark data tell us? Is the data captured in the system useful? The system uses faculty self-report of activity data, including scholarly contributions, combined with integrations of core campus data systems. How does the record of faculty scholarly achievements compare to other licensed tools and services? Is the self-report of faculty activities effective? The system captures information about our faculty not previously recorded. What has the system taught us? How can we creatively employ this data, coupled with existing data sources to create new analytical discovery tools? As we continue to assess and analyze data from the system, we’d like to share our experiences and findings to date.

UA Vitae is a shared effort from the Office of the Provost, University Libraries, University Analytics and Information Research, Office of Research, Discovery and Innovation and University Information and Technology Services. This session will be useful for anybody interested in research information management, faculty activity reporting, profile and/or institutional reporting systems.

https://uavitae.arizona.edu

Are Digital Humanities Projects Sustainable? A Proposed Service Model for a DH Infrastructure

Christine Madsen
Chief Innovation Officer
Athenaeum21

Megan Hurst
Chief Experience Officer
Athenaeum21

The University of Oxford, like many universities, is facing difficult choices about how to sustain, preserve, and/or archive its hundreds of digital humanities (DH) projects that have reached the conclusion of their funding or support. Our in-depth analysis of the functional requirements of DH projects included extensive interviews with the creators of more than 30 projects. We have uncovered a more robust and detailed picture of how both active and retired DH projects differ from the most common research data management and preservation models, and of their unique technical sustainability and preservation issues. This presentation will describe our findings of the unique characteristics of DH projects that make them more challenging to preserve and sustain, as well as our proposed layered service model for a more sustainable digital humanities infrastructure.

Assessing for Digital Library Reuse: Findings from the Measuring Reuse Project

Santi Thompson
Head, Digital Research Services
University of Houston

Genya O’Gara
Associate Director
Virtual Library of Virginia

Caroline Muglia
Co-Associate Dean for Collections & Technical Services
University of Southern California

Content reuse, defined as how often and in what ways digital library materials are utilized and repurposed, is a key indicator of the impact and value of a digital collection. Traditional library analytics focus almost entirely on simple access statistics, which do not show how users transform and remix materials found in digital collections. This lack of distinction, combined with a lack of standardized assessment approaches, makes it difficult to develop user-responsive collections or highlight the value of these materials. Developing a Framework for Measuring Reuse of Digital Objects, an IMLS-funded project (LG-73-17-0002-17) by the Digital Library Federation Assessment Interest Group (DLF-AIG), conducted a needs assessment of the digital library community to determine features of a future assessment toolkit that goes beyond use and traditional library metrics and focuses on transformation. This presentation will provide an overview of the mixed-methods approach used to generate data, share the results of this project, and discuss the next steps for implementation.

Co-Authors (in addition to presenters)

Elizabeth Joan Kelly
Digital Programs Coordinator
ejkelly@loyno.edu
Loyola University New Orleans

Ayla Stein Kenfield
Metadata Librarian
astein@illinois.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Liz Woolcott
Head of Cataloging and Metadata Services
liz.woolcott@usu.edu
Utah State University

https://reuse.diglib.org/

Blockchain Can Not Be Used To Verify Replayed Archived Web Pages

Michael L. Nelson
Professor of Computer Science
Old Dominion University

As the number of public web archives grows, so does our interest in verifying the integrity of archived web pages replayed from the archive. When web archives disagree when replaying a web page, we are unsure how to resolve the discrepancy. Adopting Segal’s law to web archives: “The person with an archive knows what the page looked like. The person with two archives is never sure.” At first glance, a distributed public ledger such as blockchain would seem like a good solution to detect damage or tampering of web pages: web pages could be replayed by third parties and their cryptographic hash and time stamps stored in the blockchain. However, we have found over the course of one year through continuously replaying over 17,000 web pages sampled from 20 different public web archives that approximately 75% of the replayed web pages have undergone some kind of change that would cause them to not hash to the same value. Some changes are significant, impacting the semantics of the page itself, but most changes would not be noticed by regular users. Nonetheless, if blockchain or other hash-based values techniques were used to detect tampering, the number of false positives generated by the normal operation of web archives would make detecting actual tampering almost impossible. We review the different kinds of changes with examples drawn from each of the 20 public web archives.

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