February 2011 Archives

CLIR/DLF announce a new publication series, Ruminations.

The series will feature short research papers and essays that bring a new perspective to issues relevant to planning for and managing organizational and institutional change in the evolving digital environment for scholarship and teaching.

We inaugurate the new series with a report by John P. Wilkin that posits the scope of works in the public domain and probable extent of orphan works in our research library collections, based on an analysis of the HathiTrust book corpus.

Wilkin is executive director of HathiTrust and is associate university librarian for library information technology for the University of Michigan. HathiTrust, a collaborative of more than 50 research libraries worldwide, is devoted to ensuring preservation of and access to the published cultural record.

Let us know what you think!

Give us your feedback in the comment space following the report.

There are three open positions at the University of Virginia Library’s center for digital humanities and social science research: the Scholars’ Lab.

The Scholars’ Lab seeks a Web Applications Specialist, a Humanities Design Architect, and (newly posted) a Head of Outreach and Consulting.

The Scholars’ Lab engages in intellectual programming and innovative R&D, sponsors a vibrant program for Graduate Fellows in Digital Humanities, administers beautiful public spaces for collaborative scholarship, partners with faculty and librarians on new interfaces to digital collections, and offers classes and builds community in the following areas: geospatial research, textual scholarship, statistical analysis, and Web and software development for the digital humanities. We pride ourselves on fostering meaningful, collaborative partnerships with UVa scholars. In addition, all of our faculty and staff are granted 20% of their time to pursue professional development or self-initiated R&D projects.

Learn more about us here.

The Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins is the lead organization for Data Conservancy, one of the two current awards through NSF’s DataNet program. They have developed a template based on their experience through Data Conservancy and initial engagements with Johns Hopkins faculty PIs of NSF proposals. As indicated on the Data Conservancy website, it’s important to understand the caveats and context for this template but it is intended that it will prove useful to other organizations and individuals who are also dealing with this still relatively new requirement from NSF.

Further information is at their website.

A group of major research institutions is partnering to develop a flexible online tool to help researchers generate data management plans. This effort is in response to demands from funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), that researchers plan for managing their research data.

The partners in this project include the University of California Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library, the UCLA Library , the UCSD Libraries, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Virginia Library , the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , DataONE, and the United Kingdom’s Digital Curation Centre (DCC).

By joining forces the partners expect to consolidate expertise and reduce costs in addressing data management needs. The primary goal of the partnership is to simplify the process of creating plans while increasing the quality of decisions made by funders to pre-define policies and infrastructures that support research activities. CDL Executive Director Laine Farley stated, “This tool will streamline UC faculty’s ability to produce a credible and high-quality plan for managing data.  An important consequence of that is the general raising of awareness about the services that libraries provide in data curation.”

More information can be found here.

California Digital Library , the UCLA Library , the UCSD Libraries , the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, the University of Virginia Library , and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are DLF community members.

For more job openings in the digital library field, consult the Jobs list on the Code4Lib Wiki.

Where would you like the DLF Forum to be held in 2012? We would love your input to inform the decision process for future forum dates and location. We have narrowed the selection down to 3 venues and dates:

• Atlanta,Georgia, Loews Atlanta Hotel, Monday-Thursday, October 15-18. The Loews Atlanta is the newest Midtown Atlanta hotel – open just about a year at this time. This neighborhood, just north of downtown is the most up and coming area in Atlanta.
• Houston, Texas, Hyatt Regency Hotel, Monday-Thursday, October 15-18 or 22-25. The Hyatt Regency Houston is located directly downtown giving guests access to all that the city offers.
• Denver, Colorado, The Westin Tabor Center, Saturday-Tuesday, November 3-6. This date will dovetail Educause, scheduled for Denver November 6-9. Located in renowned Lower Downtown Denver, the Westin is only a stroll away from the 16th Street pedestrian mall, Denver Center for Performing Arts, Convention Center, museums and entertainment.

The survey is now open and will be active until Tuesday, February 22, 2011. Thanks for your help!

CLIR/DLF is collaborating with the Association of Research libraries in the development and implementation of the E-Science Institute.

The ARL/DLF E-Science Institute will be a set of designed learning experiences that take small teams of individuals chosen by research libraries though a process that strengthens and advances their e-science support role. The experiences begin mid-year in 2011 with assignments each team will work on at their institution (coordinated through the program) and culminate in a capstone, face-to-face, 2.5 day event where the teams produce strategic agendas for e-science/e-research support for their institutions.

For more information about the E-Science Institute is located here.

The Special Media Preservation Division at NARA has a current opening for an IT Specialist. The general duties are:

• Providing network services including LAN administration, server administration, internet connectivity and support, and desktop support.
• Administering user accounts, network permissions and workstation configurations.
• Monitoring system and network performance, data capacity and system security. Performing data backup and data recovery.
• Providing technical support and guidance to others.
• Ensuring compatibility of operating systems, hardware and application software.
• Planning upgrades to existing hardware and software. Planning and designing specifications for the acquisition and implementation of new hardware and software.
• Preparing reports

The closing date is Thursday, February 24, 2011.

For more details and application instructions go here.

Mark Matienzo‘s presentation “fiwalk With Me: Building Emergent Pre-Ingest Workflows for Digital Archival Records using Open Source Forensic Software ” featured a recent CLIR report, Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections.

For more information about the presentations at the 2011 Code4Lib conference, visit the conference website.

DLF is providing conference support for the 2011 Electronic Resources & Libraries conference being held in Austin, Texas, February 28–March 2.

The goal of the ER&L Conference is to bring together information professionals from libraries and related industries to improve the way we collect, manage, maintain, and make accessible electronic resources in an ever-changing online environment. We do this once a year at an in-person conference. In addition, sessions are recorded and made available online. ER&L allows for cross-pollination of ideas across fields of librarianship not often brought together in traditional public services or technical services conferences.

DLF is excited to be sponsoring keynote speaker, Amanda French. Dr. Amanda French is currently THATCamp Coordinator at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, where she helps people all around the world organize interdisciplinary and interprofessional “unconferences” on humanities and technology (THATCamp stands for The Humanities And Technology Camp). One of her primary professional interests is in helping humanities scholars learn from librarians and archivists, and in helping humanities scholars, librarians, and archivists address technology issues and projects together. She has drawn on her experience as a Council on Library and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellow to develop courses in digital methods and issues for graduate students in English at NCSU and for graduate students in the Archives and Public History Program at NYU. She recently contributed to two collections of essays: Hacking the Academy and #alt-ac: Alternative Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars.

Amanda will be presenting “Toward the Digital Public Library of America”.
Below is a brief description.

In December of 2010, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society announced a planning initiative toward a Digital Public Library of America. Countries such as Norway, France, and China have already built or begun building national digital libraries, and indeed we even have a World Digital Library (which, with less than 200 items, is not as impressive as it sounds). Despite its name, the Digital Public Library of America is the brainchild of research librarians, with stakeholders on the Steering Committee from the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Smithsonian, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the Mellon Foundation, and Harvard. What challenges will this key planning initiative face, and how can research libraries help? What benefits might the creation of such a national digital library have for research libraries?