The Archaeology of Reading (AOR) aims to enable innovative and systematic research of historical reading practices through the creation of a digital research environment that contains two select corpora of books annotated by Gabriel Harvey and John Dee. Through the annotation and physical manipulation of their books, both readers created a web of relationships between annotations and between (constituent parts of) these books. In addition to these compelling humanities dimensions, AOR informs the development of an extensible data infrastructure that supports a range of data and services. At the 2016 Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) spring membership meeting, the AOR team discussed the novel methods by which scholars, librarians and technologists have worked as equal partners to develop this infrastructure. At the 2016 CNI fall membership meeting, the AOR team demonstrated the use of common infrastructure to support multiple data models related to digitized content from manuscripts and early printed books. For this presentation, the AOR team will explain the use of linked data models and protocols to connect the various data and to study the scholars' and annotators' pathways through both physical and digital content. Our approach supports the breadth of diverse humanities data without sacrificing the inherent richness from the underlying different data models. This systematic progression of supporting increasingly complex scholarly use cases and of extending the technological capabilities represents an important exemplar for levering extensible, common infrastructure across a diverse range of humanities data.
D.C. policy analysts provide a quick overview of policy and organizational developments in the Trump Administration and 115th Congress. Then they will transition to a deeper exploration of selected issues of particular interest to the community. The specific issues will depend on developments up to the time of the Coalition for Networked Information membership meeting, but may well include copyright, net neutrality, federal funding, data refuge/access to government information, immigration, and privacy. The conclusion will include ARL and ALA policy initiatives and plans, leading into the Q&A period.
As universities strive to create opportunities for students to engage in meaningful research projects, the library can serve as not only the source of research materials, but also the subject of research. Through the Fondren Fellows program, created in 2016, Rice University undergraduates and graduate students work on projects related to a research question around improving and extending Fondren Library’s programs and services. Fellows are mentored by a library staff member, present their results to relevant stakeholders inside and outside the library, and receive up to $3000 for one semester of work. This presentation will provide an overview of the Fondren Fellows program and present case studies of two Fellows’ projects: Know Your (Author) Rights and Mapping Civil War Narratives. For the former project, an anthropology graduate student conducted interviews with faculty across Rice’s seven tenure-granting Schools to better understand how they approach the issue of rights retention in connection with their published work. For the latter project, a history graduate student used Esri ArcGIS and Story Maps to visualize the library’s Civil War–era archival collections. Both projects allowed these students to gain critical professional skills, while creating new points of access for library materials and laying the groundwork for expanded scholarly communication services. More broadly, the Fellows program has allowed Fondren Library to tap into new sources of expertise and energy as it promotes an organizational culture of research-based practice.
Information seeking, retrieval, analysis, and resultant decision-making are often discussed as human activities; however, increasingly humans rely on automation, technology surrogates, and artificial intelligence for these activities. Bots and conversational user interfaces are beginning to emerge as service surrogates in libraries. Legal and sales professions are increasingly relying on virtual research assistants and technology assisted review and decision-making. As these trends grow and additional capacities emerge through machine learning and artificial intelligence, libraries and information providers will face emerging questions that will change practices while potentially expanding opportunities for services and contributing value to research, learning, and other information-intensive activities. This issue-oriented session will explore implications of these emerging technologies and their applications for libraries and information providers. Questions include: In what circumstances can bot deployment enhance services to users? How should we design content and interfaces when the "reader" of the content might not be a human, but rather a computer or bot that is processing that information on behalf of a person? How will information literacy programs help users develop fluency with conversational (and often voice-based) search and retrieval? What are the ethical and legal implications of deploying these technologies? How do we ensure accessibility for people with disabilities to these tools? After an initial discussion among the panelists, attendees will be encouraged to share their perspectives and raise additional questions in this issue-oriented session.
Building on the report by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) on the Authentication and Authorization Survey conducted in 2016, the STM Association and NISO have been convening conversations focused on how to improve the user experience and provide a more seamless access experience to patrons, while also providing greater control and analytics over network activity. Community conversations commencing with the CNI fall meeting shared potential alternatives to IP-authentication and sought to build momentum toward testing alternatives among publisher, system vendors, and library partners. This session will include information on several emerging pilots that will explore different approaches to key aspects, such as improving the "Where Are You From (WAYF)" user experience or defining user attributes to support more granular usage reporting while still preserving user privacy. Participants in these pilots include publishers, technology providers, corporate subscribers (e.g. pharmaceutical companies) and academic institutions.
The presentation will be followed by an interactive audience discussion of the opportunity, institutional readiness, and potential next steps.
Talk to me about RA21!
Advancing technologies, standards, and networked information offer new opportunities for institutions to steward and disseminate the scholarly outputs of its researchers. In this project briefing we will discuss how research information management (RIM) is emerging as a part of scholarly communications practice in many US university libraries, in close collaboration with other campus stakeholders. RIM intersects many aspects of traditional library services in discovery, acquisition dissemination and analysis of scholarly activities, but does so at the convergence of institutional data systems, faculty/research processes, and institutional partners. It also can serve as the basis for a growing shift in emphasis in research libraries--from focusing primarily on providing local access to research produced elsewhere, toward a greater focus on providing global access to research produced by the institution's community. The integration of open access repositories with RIM programs provides an opportunity to strengthen participation with and impact of both. The University of Arizona, with leadership from the University Libraries, has converted a decentralized, antiquated paper-based faculty activity review (FAR) process into a cloud-based system, integrating faculty inputs and aggregating information from multiple data systems creating a complete authoritative record of faculty activities and outputs to support institutional analysis and expert discovery services. Duke University libraries support a faculty-initiated open access policy by simplifying processes for self-archiving and aggregating research outputs into public profiles to support both individual researchers' incentives and institutional needs. This presentation will also outline a growing program of research on emerging library support for RIM, led by OCLC Research in collaboration with OCLC Research Library Partnership member institutions.
Learning data is being generated at an exponential rate by students, faculty, and staff. This presents unprecedented opportunities to influence student academic success and learning behavior, assist support staff with the planning of individual or group academic interventions, inform pedagogies and curriculum offerings, and effectively address recruitment, retention, marketing, and institutional effectiveness. While there are challenges in harnessing, governing, and using learning data, along with clarifying why it is collected, colleges and universities have an opportunity to collaborate and provide their collective guidance on decisions that need to be made. This is why several members of IMS Global Learning Consortium came together to outline guiding principles for institutional leaders, administrators, and other stakeholders, who are participating in ongoing dialogues specific to the gathering and usage of data. As part of an evolving playbook of resources being developed by IMS Global institutional members, this draft is designed to help academic leaders, IT directors, and practitioners reflect upon, discuss, and shape institutional and global discussions around learning data. This resource document is open for public review and comment. Led by institutional representatives who were instrumental in the articulation of these principles, this session will be an open discussion and debate about the principles and the rationale behind them. We will also explore the collaborative process used to develop these principles to inspire others to get involved and contribute to these types of collaborative efforts and share examples of other efforts in this area.
Responsible for the strategic direction of academic computing at UC Berkeley and for services that support classroom technologies and video capture and production, faculty instructional technology support, the campus LMS and student portal, and student computing.
While collaborative multi-modal presentations of scholarly output have become more common, much of the routine operations of scholarship remain anchored in print-centric regimens. Scholars - particularly in the humanities - continue to work within the familiar hierarchical and single author print tradition. In this model librarians are essential to the process; however, they are involved in the pre-work and not the development of the final product. One of the aims of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded Greenhouse Studios at the University of Connecticut (UConn) is to draw together faculty and librarian staff, along with other non-academic staff to flatten the vestiges of a print-only tradition. It will do so by implementing and honing a design-based, inquiry-driven, collaboration-first model of scholarly production based on continuous, close, equitable communication among equal partners. There are specific questions the library in particular is seeking answers to in this inquiry. For example, librarians may participate in creating these scholarly products because of skills and knowledge not related to their library degree. How can we set up library staff for success in this environment? Are our current librarians equipped, both in training and organizationally, for a non-transactional relationship with faculty and other staff? How do we evaluate their contribution and feeling of integration, authorship, etc.? This project briefing will focus on the UConn Library's motivations, expectations, and early impressions of the roles, benefits, and administrative barriers and as we begin this three year collaboration with a diverse set of UConn partners.
Digital Libraries, Digital repositories, Scholarly Communications Design.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) released an Institute-wide Task Force on the Future of Libraries Preliminary Report on October 24, 2016. The overarching theme of the report is that the MIT Libraries must become a global library for a global university. In our vision of the future, libraries operate as open, trusted, durable, interdisciplinary, interoperable content platforms that provide a foundation for the entire life cycle of information for collaborative global research and education. The MIT Task Force envisions research libraries as a networked set of global platforms replete with content, data, metadata, images, audio files, laboratory notebooks, course materials, and more. We imagine a repository of knowledge and data that can be exploited and analyzed by humans, machines, and algorithms. Fully realizing this vision will require collaboration among libraries, archives, publishers and a variety of other players in the scholarly communications sector. The goal of this presentation is to inspire productive discussions on how our communities might collaboratively contribute to building the tools, models, infrastructures and connections to drive progress towards this vision for the global academic library community.
Since the creation of institutional repositories in the early 2000s, users have debated both their role and their success, or lack thereof. How do the primary goals of a repository affect its sustainability and relevance on campus? Drawing from a diverse community of over 500 institutions, we find that schools with thriving institutional repository programs tend to be the ones that eschew disrupting the academic publishing model and instead prioritize existing institutional goals. Rather than persuade campus groups to come to them, these libraries proactively build their repository services around the campus's most pressing needs. In this project briefing, we discuss what it means to integrate the institutional repository into the core goals and activities of an institution. We present possible frameworks for assessing the level of campus-wide adoption, from technical measurements like linking, embedding, and uploading to nontechnical expressions of support, including funding. We share our findings about the types of repository content that universities value most. Finally, we will discuss how this research has inspired bepress's development direction toward more flexible and seamless embedding of researcher profiles, custom expertise directories, and readership and impact analytics. Attendees will come away with concrete ideas for how to engage various campus groups in ways that lead to sustainable, university-wide programs far beyond the scope of the traditional institutional repository.
Over the past years, scholars have started using a wide variety of online portals to conduct aspects of their research and to convey research results. These portals exist outside of the established scholarly publishing system and can be dedicated to scholarly use, such as experiment.org, or general purpose, such as SlideShare. The combination of productivity features and global exposure offered by these portals attracts researchers and they happily deposit scholarly artifacts there. But history has shown that even popular web platforms can disappear without a trace. Also, they rarely provide any explicit archival guarantees; many times quite the opposite. Whereas initiatives such as LOCKSS and Portico have emerged to make sure that the output of the established scholarly publishing system gets archived, no comparable efforts exist for scholarly artifacts deposited in these online platforms. A recently started Andrew W. Mellon funded project, explores how these scholarly orphans could be archived. Because of the scale of the problem - the number of platforms and artifacts involved - the project starts from a web-centric archival paradigm inspired by web archiving. Because the artifacts are often times created by researchers affiliated with an institution, the project focuses on tools for institutions to identify and archive these artifacts. This project briefing will introduce the problem domain. It will provide an insight into the approach that is explored for discovering artifacts that were deposited in portals, capturing them, and ingesting them into an institutional archive. The wide range of research challenges involved in conducting these tasks will be detailed and early results will be shared.
The title of this session, "But We Don't Do Research Like That Anymore," is a quotation from an associate dean (research) in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Calgary. His comment was elicited in the fall of 2015 in our discussion of the Library's principal means of supporting faculty research. Soon thereafter, we conducted a series of workshops sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to identify the new forms of support for multidisciplinary research needed by scholars in 15 different disciplines. We reported on our findings at the spring 2016 Coalition for Networked Information meeting. In this presentation, I will describe the next steps being taken to transform our research support environment based on new Library roles and relationships within the University. While driven by the impact of new technologies and research techniques, this model is about shared platforms, service constellations and partnerships, ranging from the performing arts to medicine, and incubating a suite of faculty-led projects, all serving to reposition libraries within the academic research enterprise.
In 2012, the Bibliometrics Working Group at the University of Waterloo, composed of the Library, the Office of Research, Institutional Analysis and Planning (IAP) and faculty representatives, began its work. In 2015, a new campus position was created, Bibliometrics and Research Impact Librarian, and the white paper "Measuring Research Outputs through Bibliometrics" was released. This specialist librarian also supports the Ranking Working Group and the Research Impact Working Group and is responsible for bibliometrics education across campus for our students and faculty. This Librarian has also been working to create a North American community of practice for bibliometrics work. This project briefing will highlight this campus partnership, lessons learned so far, and questions for future directions and infrastructure requirements for support. Additionally, we will explore possible connections between bibliometrics work, citation analysis and evidence-based collection development practices for a research-intensive University.
Affordability is a core value of The Ohio State University and the Affordable Learning Exchange (ALX). Living by that value transforms individuals and the work they do through relationship building and partnership development. ALX is comprised of the Office of Distance Education and eLearning (ODEE), University Libraries (OSUL), the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching (UCAT) and Undergraduate Student Government (USG). We are two years old and just welcomed the second cohort of faculty grant recipients resulting in savings to students of nearly $1 million by the end of 2017, and that is not the most exciting part of our work. The transformations happening in the classroom and to the organization through the deep partnerships developed among the ALX members are truly amazing. This presentation will discuss a few of the faculty grant projects, review how the initiative is being assessed, highlight key factors in the relationship building, and discuss the impact those relationships are having on the organization.
Using the Claremont Colleges Library (CCL) as a case study, this presentation will offer ideas and suggestions about how to build capacity within the library and the broader campus community to support and advance digital humanities projects and digital scholarship, more broadly. The CCL has taken a “learn by doing” approach, offering a five-week short course in DH, encouraging library staff to work on their own digital humanities projects, and providing dedicated time for these exploratory endeavors. In the short course that launched the digital scholarship professional development series, participants examined a variety of digital research methods, including data visualization, spatial and temporal visualizations, network analysis, and topic modeling. Each week, this seminar-style course asked librarians and staff to consider how scholars in various fields might employ these approaches and how each method may be used within the context of librarianship. The professional development series will be presented, along with commentary about what has worked well so far and lessons learned. This presentation will be useful for administrators at institutions that already offer a suite of services to support digital scholarship. It will be especially applicable for those at institutions that are interested but unsure how to begin, particularly when there are few, if any, positions dedicated to digital scholarship.
On March 17, 2016, the Chinese University of Hong Kong Library launched its first Digital Scholarship Lab at the Library as one of the key components of the Library's Digital Scholarship Service. Digital scholarship research is not very active at the University, and the Library sees a niche to offer support in this arena. The Lab is to provide a cutting-edge space for researchers in all disciplines to gather and immerse in digital scholarship research and other collaborative research work. It is also intended to create opportunities to engage faculty and researchers to foster collaborations in digital scholarship projects. A range of services is also offered to promote digital scholarship research; both research-related and teaching-related activities are held in the lab. After one year of operation, there have been both successes and challenges. This presentation will discuss how the library tackled the challenges encountered in building the lab, how the lab is equipped to facilitate flexibility and collaboration, the services offered, the journey to experiment different modes of operation (including staffing), the efforts made to engage scholars and researchers, the successes that have been achieved, and the lessons learned. Use cases and data will be presented to show how research support services and the roles of librarians in supporting digital scholarship research have been transformed.
At many institutions, repository initiatives provide access, preservation and services for multiple programs - at-risk digital special collections, digitized materials, and the outputs of research, including publications and data. No single software stack, platform, service portfolio, or even library program can support all of these areas. Given this diffusion of stakeholders, needs, and processes, is there a unifying aspect for the institutional repository? If not, then what do we mean by "institutional repository?" In a time where both the needs of researchers and repository technologies are rapidly evolving, what strategies should libraries employ for developing technology, staffing, services, and policies to provide access and preservation for a wide range of institutional assets? In this panel discussion, repository leaders from the University of North Carolina and Duke University will start a conversation by describing their approaches, what they have learned, and how they think these services should evolve. They will pose some provocative questions for discussion with all attendees, and hope to stimulate a better understanding of cohesive approaches for repository programs.
FOLIO is a community of librarians, designers, developers, service providers, and vendors working to develop an open source library services platform. FOLIO began in early 2016, and includes partners at EBSCO, Index Data, and the OLE Partnership. Over the last year, teams from these collaborators have worked towards the first code release in August of 2016, with continuous releases since. The OLE Partners have been active in FOLIO from the beginning and have restructured their effort to fully support FOLIO. OLE has worked with EBSCO and Index Data to set up community infrastructure for large scale and distributed design and development work. Part of that infrastructure is the Open Library Foundation, a new not-for-profit organization chartered to support open source community efforts. The Foundation seeks to enable, support and sustain efforts like FOLIO by creating an open forum for discussion about library management issues, and action to develop solutions. In this session, principals from the OLE Partners, Open Library Foundation, and FOLIO communities will provide updates and chart shared future directions. Learn about how open source communities restructure and evolve for innovation and inclusiveness. And learn how librarians, designers, software developers, and commercial vendors can collaborate to advance the scope of library technologies.
Why should librarians and info/data specialists care about data science? The interdisciplinary field of data science will be a significant and growing area of focus for our field, arguably redefining the future of librarianship and information science. It is rare for research libraries to acquire a data analytics program and serve as the umbrella entity for big data and data science at an academic institution. This panel will discuss how the University of Rhode Island (specifically libraries) was involved in acquiring the state's longitudinal and integrated data system Dataspark, and how the Big Data Collaborative that includes participation of students, staff and scholar educators from multiple colleges is going to be positioned within the library and beyond.
This briefing will explore how librarians are discovering opportunities to provide new forms of support to students and researchers engaged in computational research. Examples include librarians teaching and consulting on basic programming skills, data visualization, database management and reproducible research practices. I'll explore some possible explanations of this trend and how librarians can take advantage of emerging programs like Library Carpentry to develop proficiency and build communities of practice in these areas.
This program highlights one new way that University of North Carolina Libraries services are enabling pedagogical and curricular change: by training Library student employees to provide substantial digital scholarship support. Historically, the Libraries have helped drive pedagogical change in four ways: 1.) Working directly with instructors on courses, assignments, and in curricular groups, 2.) Partnering with campus support organizations (e.g., teaching & learning center) to deliver programming, 3.) Introducing students to new skills and technologies through direct consultation and instruction, and 4.) Providing and integrating technology-enabled spaces into research and instruction. Recently, we have identified a fifth method: training and mentoring student employees in the delivery of digital scholarship research assistance. Training students to provide significant digital scholarship support gives them a hands-on work experience, engages them in new types of research, and develops their skills with emerging tools and practices. It also allows the Library's many digital scholarship services to scale more readily, providing librarians with more time to engage with researchers on larger, complex projects and questions. In this session, we discuss the kind of work our students engage in, the growth of our training programs, and the curriculum that is beginning to emerge through our experience. We will draw from three examples: o Graduate students in the Science Library's Makerspace providing 3D printing and 3D scanning consultations and instruction to faculty and students. o Graduate students in the Undergraduate Library developing tutorials and teaching workshops on digital media creation, including social media graphics and infographics.
o Graduate and undergraduate students in the Davis Library Research Hub providing consultations and project support on a range of tools, from Tableau to Python.
Academic libraries and museums are increasingly collaborating on digitization, metadata aggregation, and data management to offer access to objects that rarely see the light of day in many small museums. The University of Wyoming Libraries and the UW Geological Museum have been working together to make physical objects (largely vertebrate fossils) available in 3D formats to anyone with an internet connection. Despite an incredible lack of standards and best practices, we have learned not only how to digitize fossil objects (large and small) in 3D, but also how to offer online access to these objects as well as how to archive them for future use.
After a considerable planning and development effort, the Digital Preservation Network (DPN) officially began accepting content submissions in 2016. The journey into production operation required that many hurdles, both technical and administrative, be overcome and that the procedures surrounding long-term distributed digital preservation be defined. This talk will provide an update on some of the critical choices that were made, what content has been submitted to date, and the process needed to make those submissions possible. We will also explore lessons learned by DPN and DuraCloud Vault, one of the DPN nodes, in this first year in production.
Dave is the Chief Technology Officer for the Digital Preservation Network. He is responsible for defining technical strategy and development, and implementation of technical and operational services for DPN.
Open Collections is a discovery and delivery service developed by University of British Columbia (UBC) Library as an innovative approach to providing access to the Library's managed and curated digital objects. Open Collections was born out of an idea to provide unified indexing, discovery and access to the Library's digital objects, regardless of the repository the objects are managed in. The Library currently utilizes CONTENTdm, DSpace, AtoM and Dataverse for managing its digital objects. Rather than embarking on a project to consolidate repositories to a new framework like Hydra or Islandora, the Library chose to develop a service that improves discovery and delivery of both metadata and the digital objects to researchers and the general public. This presentation will cover the genesis of Open Collections, the development of the aggregated metadata model and unified Elasticsearch index, the suite of discovery and delivery services via the Open Collections API, and the next steps for Open Collections and UBC Library.
Over the past year the University of New Mexico (UNM) Libraries instituted a new digital preservation initiative that was literally built from the ground up. Initially conceived as a means to preserve the libraries' digital collections, the project involved developing program structure, improving tools and working with vendors. As the project developed, the digital preservation needs of a broader community than originally planned became vividly apparent, and it evolved into a much larger endeavor that includes preservation of research data, university archives and digital cultural heritage collections from partner institutions around the state. The presenters will discuss their experiences implementing digital preservation at UNM, and talk about how the initiative is starting to encompass the preservation needs of partner organizations.
The Dartmouth College Library has been working with digital objects in its collections for several years and currently maintains a variety of vended, open source, and locally developed solutions to manage and deliver these objects to the local and global online research community. In 2011, following the creation of "The Dartmouth Digital Library Program Plan" and with work underway on the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded project to create a Scholarly Digital Edition of the papers of Samson Occom, the Library began to coalesce its development strategy around a stack of predominantly open source software already being used to manage XML documents since the early 2000s, rather than to pursue the emerging Hydra technology stack. The result is XCDAS (XML Collections and Digital Archive Storage), an ever-evolving set of tools to manage TEI text collections, e-books, maps, posters, and manuscripts. The current system is managing over 200,000 bagged objects, over 200,000 derivative files, and 1500 XML documents. This presentation gives an overview of the technical infrastructure and of the system itself, which includes tools for working with master file packages, generating derivative files, performing archive validation and consistency checking, converting simplified markup to TEI, and for publishing web sites via XSL transformations.
Citation to persistent sources is fundamental to all academic work. Libraries have traditionally collected, organized and preserved those cited sources. Citations today, however, increasingly refer to web pages, not just print sources. Because web pages change their content and disappear all the time, citations to them are ineffective at best and, at times, misleading. This problem, known as "link rot" or "reference rot," means that much of our citation-dependent scholarship is being written on sand. Perma.cc is one solution to combat link rot. Unlike other web archiving services, such as ArchiveIt, Perma.cc relies on the creator of the work to do the archiving at the time of citation. Authors take snapshots of web pages they cite and deposit them in the Perma.cc service. Once deposited, Perma.cc assigns the web page a unique Perma URL (e.g. https://perma.cc/F37P-2E4V) that authors can add to the original URL in their citations. Should the original link later rot or be changed, readers can follow the Perma.cc URL to view the original source. Perma.cc was originally developed for use by the legal community but has received a National Digital Platform grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to broaden its use beyond the legal community. The service is now free to all colleges and universities. Libraries serve as the registrars for the Perma.cc service and provide support for their institutions' users. This presentation will provide an overview of the service, the role the library plays, and instructions for signing up.
Basic programming and data management skills have become invaluable for creating reproducible research; however, this training is rarely included in graduate curriculum. Major grant-funded projects may be able to hire someone to provide these services, but the majority cannot. Recognizing this need, the University of Oklahoma Libraries has partnered with Software Carpentry, a non-profit foundation that offers two-day, hands-on workshops on basic programming skills designed to help researchers automate and track their research processes. The University Libraries has offered 12 local workshops since 2014 with over 300 faculty, graduate students, and staff from over 30 departments and research groups participating. We offer the workshops multiple times each semester -- one before the semester starts, one during the middle of the semester, and one at the end of the semester. We have found that offering the mid-semester workshop during the week of Thanksgiving or Spring Break increases attendance since participants are more likely to be able to have two full days available. Each workshop is taught by library staff including experts in data management, informatics, and digital scholarship. By having library staff teach and attend the workshops, our team has gained a better understanding of our local researchers’ needs. The sessions also allow researchers to connect and develop relationships with specialists in the library, who can guide them through more advanced data and programming issues. Developing these relationships has helped to position the University Libraries as a nucleus for research on campus. During this briefing, attendees will learn best practices that have resulted from our experiences in planning and implementing such a program.
This presentation will highlight the most effective strategies to encourage faculty to adopt OER (open educational resources) while protecting academic freedom, how to write an effective plan to increase OER use, and what key benefits to students and faculty to focus on while discussing OER with your administrators, faculty and students. The session will also include discussion of the journey of Rice University's successful OER project, OpenStax, and especially the lessons Rice University learned along the way that are applicable to any college or university developing an OER initiative.
Recent news reports of large segments of the population falling for fake news stories came as no surprise to academic librarians who have spent years watching students struggle with the challenges of discovering, internalizing, evaluating, and applying credible information. After all, making sense of information has always been hard, and people today are confronted with the most complex and crowded information landscape in human history. This hot-button presentation focuses on what the role of academic libraries should be in helping individuals make sense of a world bursting at the seams with information—some of it completely unreliable. Reflecting on our history of promoting information literacy, librarians and other information professionals need to ask ourselves which instructional approaches we should keep, which we need to change, and how we might use technology to improve our success in helping students become information-literate scholars and citizens.
With the combination of Wireless, Proxy, and ILS data, libraries today have a 360 degree, highly granular view of researcher activity. These data are valuable for operational decisions, however they have immense privacy implications. We will examine these data, their beneficial uses, and the necessary steps needed to protect researchers.
This presentation will be most relevant for libraries with: centralized wireless; centralized authentication; e.g. CAS, LDAP, Shibboleth; EZProxy or other web proxy to electronic resources, and designated patron type (faculty, undergraduate, etc.) information either in the ILS or in the CAS/LDAP/Shibboleth.
Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) began as a research and development project in 2010, and in 2015 began to transition to an ongoing cooperative program. This project update will focus on the technological and social changes required to make the transition successful. The transition has required that the underlying technology platform be completely transformed, transitioning from the aggregation of data from multiple sources using a multi-step batch process to a platform supporting both batch ingest of new data and ongoing human curation of the data. Given that the data will be cooperatively maintained to benefit the members and end-users, a major focus of the social transition has been on governance: editorial policy and standards; technology requirements; communication; and training. The project update will focus on the current status of the transition and future plans for continuing and completing the transition. SNAC has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The University of Wyoming Libraries have partnered with UW's Advanced Research Computing Center (ARCC) to provide a campus research data repository. Coupling the Libraries' experience with Islandora and Fedora along with ARCC's expertise in high performance computing and storage, we successfully launched the UW Data Repository in September 2016. We now offer all campus researchers single sign-on authentication for dataset and metadata submission, simultaneous DOI assignment and DataCite metadata deposit via the EZID API, as well as unlimited file size storage capacity (something not achievable using Islandora version 7 alone). Using an "endowment" business model to fund storage costs, we have made this service free to all campus users who wish to share their data. Like all solutions, we've encountered numerous problems along the way, our implementation has its drawbacks, and we certainly have more work to do.
Consideration of the research impact and organizational value of institutional repositories (IR) highlights the utility of defining and evolving innovative IR service models. As a particular example, the integration of OAI-PMH utilities and custom application programming interfaces (API) within widely adopted IR platforms including Digital Commons and DSpace enable repository managers to develop and promote unique services around IR as content stores for external research systems. In this project briefing, librarians from the University of New Mexico will describe the development of a spatially enabled discovery service that interacts dynamically with a Digital Commons-hosted collection of documents pertaining to Native American Water Rights Settlements (NAWRS). By extending Digital Commons' OAI-PMH metadata schema to incorporate point and polygon representations of the areas referenced within NAWRS documents, librarians were able to build transparent, dynamic linkages between the IR and the externally hosted spatial discovery portal. The resulting service adds value to both endpoints. This project briefing will include a description of the metadata enrichment and OAI-PMH harvest workflows, together with an overview of how the harvested metadata and documents are incorporated within the discovery portal architecture to best leverage the complementary capabilities of Elasticsearch, AngularJS, and the OpenLayers web mapping framework.
Sustainability of open-source software is a continual challenge in the relatively small world of cultural heritage institutions. The challenge is amplified due to the critical preservation implications tied to institutional commitments; cultural heritage institutions are expected to preserve and provide access to repository-held data into the foreseeable future, and yet our models for shared software governance are relatively immature, and commitments to software sustainability ebb and flow over time. The cultural, financial, and philosophical dimensions of the community surrounding the software play as much, if not more, of a role in a project's sustainability as the technology itself. With a collective thirty years of experience grappling with these challenges, the speakers will offer varied perspectives on approaches to ensuring the software that supports the long-term preservation and accessibility of our digital heritage will still exist tomorrow. This session will dive deeper into the specific challenges faced by a few open-source repository software communities, outlining what the Islandora, Hydra, and Fedora communities have done to address sustainability in their projects, past and present, and how well these measures have succeeded. Specific tactics for engaging in these projects will be offered as a call to action.
The Task Force on Technical Approaches to Email, formed in September 2016 and sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Digital Preservation Coalition, is charged with (a) reexamining and assessing current efforts to preserve email; (b) articulating a conceptual and technical framework in which these efforts can operate not as competing solutions, but as elements of an interoperable toolkit to be applied as needed; and (c) constructing a working agenda for the community to refine this technical framework, adjust existing tools to work within this framework, and begin to fill in missing elements. The Task Force will prepare a report of its findings. The report will include recommendations concerning the specific actions that those interested in email archiving can take to demonstrate within 2-5 years that archives can safely accession and preserve records of human expression in the form of email. In this project briefing, Task Force co-chairs Chris Prom and Kate Murray will report on the Task Force's work to date and will solicit feedback and input. This input is critical in helping Task Force members shape the final report and recommendations, which will be issued in late 2017.
Chris Prom is Assistant University Archivist and Andrew S. G. Turyn Professor at the Univeristy of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as co-chair of the Task Force on Technical Approaches to Email Archives.
High technology collaborative spaces in academic libraries have evolved in a variety of interesting ways over the past two decades. In this session, we will explore developments in facilities termed information or learning commons, digital scholarship centers, makerspaces, media studios, and others. We will review the results of a recent survey on information commons and an associated trends monograph under development. We will explore variations in implementation of newly configured and technology-enabled library spaces, and present our views of the successes and perceived missed opportunities of such facilities as they have developed over the past two decades. The presenters will invite observations from the audience regarding these trends.
Academic libraries are taking on more active roles in support of research dissemination. Does a diminished role for university presses necessarily follow? It does not. I’ll discuss the distinctive and increasingly urgent functions of the university press, and the challenge of balancing the imperatives of sustainability and openness. How do we meet the differing requirements of professional, text, and trade authors? How do we fulfill our mission to make our publications available, discoverable, and searchable in digital form now, and in perpetuity? I will also cover strategies to promote productive partnerships, and the significant benefits of closer coordination among presses, libraries, and the academic departments within their institutions.