Recent Stories

Session Type: Research Update

Session Description:
In 2012, the Missouri Botanical Garden received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities entitled “The Art of Life: Data Mining and Crowdsourcing the Identification and Description of Natural History Illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL)”. This project aims to develop software tools and a metadata schema for visual resources contained within the scanned literature made available through BHL digitization activities. The tools and schema will support automated identification and crowdsourced description of this corpus.

Initially, software tools will help discover visual resources (illustrations, maps, and other works of art) in BHL’s corpus, and basic metadata will be recorded. These resources will then be shared on multiple image delivery systems, including Flickr and the Wikimedia Commons, where citizen scientists will be able to add further annotations. Because of the wide diversity of information that a citizen scientist can add to any image, a comprehensive yet manageable schema is needed to help standardize inputs and enable synchronization and seamless import back into the BHL databases.

This schema therefore needs to support three objectives:
(1) to enable the discovery, description and use of the identified images by artists, biologists, humanities scholars, and educators;
(2) to make BHL’s metadata and images available to other platforms; and
(3) to import crowdsourced metadata generated in other platforms back into BHL.

The speakers will talk about the process of identifying existing schema that meet the needs of the project, instead of developing yet another schema from scratch, and integrating a solution that combines the best in biodiversity informatics and image curation standards and best practices. We will present our preliminary schema to the DLF community, explain how we addressed metadata challenges specific to biodiversity data, and obtain feedback on improving our schema further.

We welcome your feedback on the schema!

For more info: http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Life

Session Leaders:
Robert Guralnick, University of Colorado
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
William Ulate, Missouri Botanical Garden
Gaurav Vaidya, University of Colorado Boulder

Session Notes:
View the community reporting Google doc for this session!

Session Slides:

Session Type: Presentation/Panel

Session Description:
HathiTrust integrates existing content, processes and workflows from a variety of extant systems and an ever-increasing number of partners. This federation of institutions and systems necessitates a different organizing principle than that for most single-institution systems, at the administrative and data levels. Michigan has played a significant role in shaping the principles and guidelines for content placed into HathiTrust. Michigan staff will share their own experience of working with their library’s materials in HathiTrust, information that may be useful to any institution looking at integration or long-term preservation of digital projects in any repository.

The integration of material in HathiTrust makes the differences in institutional practice more apparent, and decisions preferring one among a variety of different policies are difficult to make. Even within standard formats like MARC, there are many different ways of describing the same item. For older materials without standard identifiers such as ISBNs or even LCCNs, how can you identify, let alone normalize, this variation? But without normalization, how can you ensure your volumes are included with others from the same set? And as individually-created projects are ingested, differences in practice can be magnified, and a lack of the type of administrative metadata available for more recent digitization processes increases uncertainty about variation that is meaningful and intentional and that which is incidental and unintentional.

In short, HathiTrust faces a series of interesting challenges as content, processes, and workflows from multiple partners and extant systems are integrated. We will discuss these challenges, and provide relevant examples, for:
- managing updates to information maintained in separate systems
- recognizing and managing normalization across the variation (cataloging, quality, collections) inherent in a large system
- organizing administrative and data levels to utilize principles of organization for metadata and data with a long term perspective that assumes federation.

Session Leaders:
Kat Hagedorn, University of Michigan
Christina Powell, University of Michigan
John Weise, University of Michigan

Session Notes:
View the community reporting Google doc for this session!

Session Slides:

Session Type: Presentation/Panel

Session Description:
As the practice of Digital Humanities becomes more widespread in the academy, libraries are finding new opportunities to collaborate with scholars in their DH work. At NYU, interest in DH is burgeoning and scholars are looking to the Libraries for information, training, guidance, and partnership to explore the possibilities of DH for research and teaching. With the NYU English Department and the NYU Humanities Initiative, we are currently developing a Fall 2012 “Introduction to DH” workshop series for graduate students and faculty. After reviewing a variety of “Intro” courses at other institutions and assessing English department graduate student needs, we developed a semester-long curriculum that will frame each session within a topical DH debate, repackage some existing Libraries and Information Technology Services workshops on enterprise academic technologies, and also introduce other appropriate tools.

With this new venture, we’re taking an iterative, learn-as-we-go approach. Discussion and laptop hands-on sessions will be held in a new, flexible teaching and learning venue within the Library, allowing us to introduce and test the usability of the space. Designated session observers will relay what is and is not working so we can adjust mid-course. Session participants will receive questionnaires to provide feedback and help us judge the effectiveness of the presentations, demonstrations, additional resources, and readings.

Our presentation will provide an overview of what other institutions–especially libraries–are doing in this “Introduction to DH” space, explain how we chose the topics for our workshop curriculum, and describe our developing partnerships with NYU faculty and programs. Three of our “Intro” sessions will have occurred before the DLF Forum, so we will also provide a midstream review of our series to date. Finally, we will lead a discussion to hear how others are addressing DH training and support, and to consider emerging library roles and partnerships in this domain.

Session Leaders:
Monica McCormick, New York University
Annette Smith, New York University
Jennifer Vinopal, New York University

Session Notes:
View the community reporting Google doc for this session!

Session Resources:
Link for slides plus speaker notes.

ORCID has two positions open: Lead Developer and Technical Support Specialist.

ORCID is an international, interdisciplinary, open and not-for-profit organization. We are working with the research community to address the name ambiguity problem. Our goal is to create a registry of persistent unique researcher identifiers, and using an open and transparent mechanism to automate the linkage to other ID schemes and research objects such as publications, grants and patents. If you like the excitement of a start-up and the public service orientation of a non-profit, come join us as we gear up for the launch of the ORCID registry. Read the rest of this entry »

California Digital Library – University of California
Oakland, California

Digitization & Services Coordinator

To apply: jobs.ucop.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=55524
Read the rest of this entry »

The Digital Library Federation, together with LITA’s Linked Library Data Interest Group, is pleased to announce an open Zotero group for LOD-LAM tools and resources. The LOD-LAM Zotero group is intended to serve as a space both for practitioners seeking an entry point into the world of cultural heritage linked data and for practitioners seeking to share the tools and resources they have come to rely upon.

Members of LITA’s Linked Library Data Interest Group and other contributors have added many resources to the LOD-LAM Zotero group to date. In order to increase the usefulness of the group, we are asking for community involvement in two ways:

• As you come across new tools and resources—either from conferences or in the course of your professional reading—please add them to the LOD-LAM Zotero group.
• As you use the LOD-LAM Zotero group—either as a contributor or as a browser—please send us any feedback you may have.

Through collective effort, we hope the LOD-LAM Zotero group will become the “go to” place for information about linked data and its particular uses by libraries, archives, and museums.

Items added to the LOD-LAM Zotero group can be viewed in the group’s library. Alternatively, you may view the group’s library or collections within the group’s library through your feed reader. Click “Subscribe to this Feed” on the page of the library or collection that you wish to follow via RSS.

A Zotero account is not required for “read” access to the group’s library, but it is required for “write” access. To contribute, simply create a Zotero account, download either the Zotero browser plugin or standalone client, and begin adding items. More information about getting started and tips for contributing resources can be found in the README document in the group’s library.

We hope the LOD-LAM Zotero group will create more opportunities for DLF and LOD-LAM community members to learn from one another. We especially encourage community members interested in playing in the linked data sandbox to browse the collection titled LOD 101: Primers, Tutorials, etc. In addition, we encourage contributors to use the “Notes” field to share information about tools from their experience when adding new resources to the group’s library.

Management of the LOD-LAM Zotero group is shared by the DLF and LITA’s Linked Library Data Interest Group. For more information, or to send feedback, please email lodlamzotgrp -at- yahoogroups -dot- com.