Community Stories

The Texas Conference on Digital Libraries, held May 7-8, in Austin, TX, covered a variety of issues pertaining to digital repositories. Digital preservation, research data management and Digital Humanities were widely discussed.

Nancy McGovern, Head of Curation and Preservation Services, MIT Libraries, said the library community must create sustainable programs that will continue from one technological generation to the next; however, the organizational piece is often more challenging than the technological piece. Michele Kimpton, CEO, DuraSpace, stressed the importance of digital preservation to preserve our cultural heritage at a time when digital content, especially web pages, change frequently. As an example of the importance of digital preservation, she cited the recent 20th anniversary of the first web page, which was created on April 13, 1993. Because no one had backed up the site, it had to be manually recreated. “How do we ensure the digital content today will be there for future generations?” she asked. “Digital content needs to be actively managed and monitored over time or you risk that it will not be there when you try to access it.”

The Digital Preservation Network (DPN) was explained by Chris Jordan, UT-Austin, where UTA’s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) is one of 57 organizational members who are cooperatively investing in long-term scalable digital preservation. DPN will establish a network of heterogeneous, interoperable, trustworthy, preservation repositories or nodes. TACC and the Texas Digital Library have established a partnership, in which TACC will provide storage for TDL via one of five initial nodes in DPN. TACC will also be heavily utilized by researchers, he said, because they are now required to have data management plans for federally funded research. TACC’s DPN network, which will be a dark archive for digital preservation and long-term storage, can be used by other institutions, as well, for a fee.

Michele Reilly, University of Houston Libraries, highlighted her organization’s creation of an online metadata generator for research data, which will be especially useful in light of federal funding agencies’ requirement for data sharing. “Researchers need to concentrate on their research, not on metadata, so we need to make the tool simple for them,” she said. Working with the technology department, the library has developed a simple scheme with five to ten fields that are based on what researchers typically use in their spreadsheets for that discipline, which are then mapped to Dublin Core. “It’s their taxonomy and they see what they expect to see. They don’t need to see Dublin Core or MODS. That is done later.” Researchers will be able to export their metadata files in web, PDF, XML, MODs, Dublin Core, and Web-based formats, which they then can then upload into repositories. The prototype tool will be ready by the end of summer with metadata schema for five disciplines.

Erin Hawkins, Library of Congress, discussed the World Digital Library (WDL), an international project led by the Library of Congress and supported by the Carnegie Foundation. The WDL provides free access to primary sources that document the histories and cultural achievements of all countries, available in seven languages. The WDL is comprised of 168 partners in 78 countries who sign the WDL charter, select content, send objects and metadata to the WDL team at Library of Congress, and participate on WDL committees and working groups. She noted that no Texas partners are involved in the project, which they would like to see. WDL works with translators to translate metadata and the web site into seven different languages. WDL provides the software platform and uploads the images and metadata into its repository. Currently, the site is most popular with Spanish-speaking users, who comprise 47 percent of all usage.

Eric Ames, Curator of Digital Collections, Baylor University Libraries, wanted to “go deeper with digital collections content” and, as a result, created a partnership with Baylor’s Museum Studies graduate program. He created and taught the MST 5327: Technology and Outreach in Museums seminar to 15 graduate students, who worked on a project to curate, digitize, describe, and promote materials relating to World War I. The final results were three digital exhibits with 79 items, fully digitized, cataloged and contextualized, as well as marketing plans. “This was our first entry into integrating projects into academia,” he said, which gave the Riley Digitization Center a higher profile with faculty on campus. Students — three of whom were on the panel — responded enthusiastically. They confirmed that the course helped them quell their fear of technology and enhance their job prospects.

Geneva Henry, Executive Director, Center for Digital Scholarship, described Rice University’s proactive efforts to Digital Humanities at Rice. She outlined a number of projects her unit has completed since 2000, thanks in part to two IMLS grants. More recently, the Center for Digital Scholarship ran a Digital Humanities boot camp, which was so popular they plan to offer a full Digital Humanities course in the fall. Feedback from post docs has been overwhelmingly positive. They say that the Digital Humanities training and boot camp gives them a clear advantage when applying for jobs. The faculty is receptive, said Henry, especially the Dean of Humanities. “Collaboration between the faculty and library is a win-win for everyone.”

Cindy Boeke, Digital Collections Developer
Central University Libraries, Southern Methodist University

I recently won a DLF/CLIR Cross-Pollinator Travel Award to attend the Electronic Resources & Libraries conference. This was a productive and exhausting experience for me. The reasons for attempting to get to the conference were primarily selfish. I was knackered from a year of worry. I was knackered from a year of making sure the Code4lib Conference was successful. In many ways I needed a tonic. I needed to remind myself that my primary job as a mostly Systems Administrator in a library matters tremendously but that there’s lots more to what makes a library tick. It turns out after this conference there’s lots more.

To this end the opportunity to be a cross-pollinator scholarship was something I felt was written for me. In many ways this is the sort of conference that on first glance I would have nothing to do with. Lest you think me uncaring, unprofessional – or even if you do – this is the way we carve up my organization and I don’t think we are very different from large Academic Libraries. I do know a little bit of what the other departments in my organization do largely because in many ways they have to depend on me and my cadre of students offering them support. The kind of knowledge I have is extremely shallow however. We have to make sure their software works. Since we are heavily dependent on technology this type of “knowledge” tends to be misleading.

So what does this mean? I am partly sure it was a reminder that I’m good at one thing but I am a rubbish librarian in the large scheme of things.

To attempt to fix this I made sure every talk I attended while at ER&L would be something that would be completely new to me. If the wording of the talk was something I could actually make sense of I crossed it out. I was pleasantly surprised at the number of talks that were still left available after the exercise. I went out of my way to make sure every person I spoke with wouldn’t be someone who does the same kind of work as I do, or even someone from my department.

I expected this to work out. Most of the talks I ended up going to seemed to be a different side of the same coin (yes I am grossly oversimplifying but allow me). I dealt with similar problems but my concerns generally leaned towards stability of the product. My concerns generally when it involved software were markedly different when evaluating products. Most of the people at the conference are generous with their time (this wasn’t a surprise). Most can go on at length about

problems that on the surface appear trivial but are (needlessly?) complex. Most of the people care deeply to find the solutions to them. It truly was strange to be an outsider amongst my own people. Sure there were inside jokes I didn’t *get fully* but I think if I attend another conference like this I would probably be able to be “one of the cool kids”. Okay perhaps not.

For that I thank DLF/CLIR for the chance and opportunity to remind myself why I should care. My take away is that as organizations we need to do internal Cross Pollination within our organizations.

-Francis Kayiwa

The Digital Library Federation (DLF) is pleased to support a travel grant for the Electronic Resources and Libraries Conference in Austin, March 17-20. The award will go to a cross-pollinator -a library professional who can provide unique perspectives to our work and share a vision of the library world from their perspective. The application deadline is Friday, 2/22. Learn more here.

Falling fast on the heels of the DLF Forum in Denver, is the first DPLA Appfest. The Appfest is an informal, open call for both ideas and functional examples of creative and engaging ways to use the content and metadata in the DPLA back-end platform. The first Appfest will take place on November 8-9, 2012, at the Chattanooga Public Library.

For this first event, DLF is providing a limited amount of travel support for up to 3 community members to attend as DLF community delegates.

If you are interested in attending as a DLF community delegate, please send your name, contact information, and a brief statement of interest to Jena Winberry.

Delegates will be chosen based on interest and participation in the DPLA and willingness to serve as a bridge between DLF and DPLA communities.

Delegates will be asked to report back to the DLF community about the event via blog post or similar narrative.

Delegates will be notified of travel support by October 26th.

This piece inaugurates an occasional series by or about linked data practitioners that will be cross-posted on the DLF site and  LOD-LAM.net. The first post in the series is a personal reflection on the linked data landscape written by Jerry Persons, technology analyst at Knowledge Motifs, Chief Information Architect emeritus at Stanford, and author of the CLIR-commissioned Literature survey in support of Stanford Linked Data Workshop.

The ecosystem in which both library-generated metadata and vendor-generated search environments are players has changed radically with unprecedented swiftness:

• search engines continue to morph, witness Bing, WolframAlpha, Siri
• Google surfaces its things not strings work as Knowledge Graph
• schema.org announces a W3C vehicle to extend its core vocabulary
• Microsoft’s Academic Search provides glimpses of new ways to find connections
• Nature Publishing Group initiates linked-data access to some of its metadata
• the BNB and Harvard’s cataloging come out of the closet as CC0 data
• many national libraries release CC0 bibliographic and authority data
• Europeana continues to expand open access to cultural heritage metadata
• OCLC moves toward ODC-BY for VIAF and other of its data environments
• W3C Library linked data incubator group issues its final report
• Library of Congress announces [linked data] modeling initiative

Richard Wallis (late of Talis, now OCLC) recently summarized these trends in terms of web-wide factors in his post A data 7th wave approaching:

With the advent of many data associated advances, variously labelled Big Data, Social Networking, Open Data, Cloud Services, Linked Data, Microformats, Microdata, Semantic Web, Enterprise Data, it is now venturing beyond those closed systems into the wider world.

Well this is nothing new, you might say, these trends have been around for a while – why does this constitute the seventh wave of which you foretell?

and

It is precisely because these trends have been around for a while, and are starting to mature and influence each other, that they are building to form something really significant ….

Indeed, for those in pursuit of a broader-than-library take on what’s going on in the web-wide world of structured data, one should take advantage of Richard’s experience including a deep understanding of libraries as a member the Talis library systems group and spanning the company’s evolution toward its present-day provision of Kasabi, “a startup business spun out from and backed by Talis. Our aim is to unlock the value in the World’s data by enabling new business models for producers and consumers of structured data at all scales.”  Among his posts and presentations worth close review are those that can be had at his Data Liberate site, for example:

• Create data not records
• Libraries through the linked data telescope
• Who will be mostly right – Wikidata, Schema.org

My own views on the potential benefits to be had from a rapidly evolving web that is increasingly dominated by well-structured and well-curated data were shaped in large part by exposure to the vision, concepts, and people involved in a set of antecedents to the current flurry of activity and developments.  The thread leads from a turn of the century piece written by Danny Hillis, through his Applied Minds and Metaweb companies, leading to Freebase and John Giannandrea, and onward from there to the recent Wall Street Journal interview with Amit Singhal and the subsequent discussions surrounding Knowledge Graph and things not strings:

Hillis: With the knowledge web, humanity’s accumulated store of information will become more accessible, more manageable, and more useful. Anyone who wants to learn will be able to find the best and the most meaningful explanations of what they want to know. Anyone with something to teach will have a way to reach those who want to learn. Teachers will move beyond their present role as dispensers of information and become guides, mentors, facilitators, and authors. The knowledge web will make us all smarter. The knowledge web is an idea whose time has come.  Hillis, W. Daniel. “Aristotle”: (The knowledge web), 2000, published in The Edge (138) in 2004.

 Freebase:  A new company founded by a longtime technologist is setting out to create a vast public database intended to be read by computers rather than people, paving the way for a more automated Internet in which machines will routinely share information.  Markoff, John. Start-up aims for database to automate web searching. NYT (9 March 2007).

Giannandrea:  Freebase is an open database of the world’s information, built by a global community and free for anyone to query, contribute to, and build applications on. … Part of what makes this open database unique is that it spans domains, but requires that a particular topic exist only once in Freebase. Thus freebase is an identity database with a user contributed schema which spans multiple domains. For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger may appear in a movie database as an actor, a political database as a governor, and in a bodybuilder database as Mr. Universe. In Freebase, however, there is only one topic for Arnold Schwarzenegger that brings all these facets together. The unified topic is a single reconciled identity, which makes it easier to find and contribute information about the linked world we live in. Giannandrea, John. Freebase: an open, writable database of the world’s information (a one-hour lecture delivered in October 2008).

 [Amit Singhal] said in a recent interview that the search engine [Google] will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of “entities”—people, places and things—which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years. Semantic search can help associate different words with one another.  Efrati, Mair.  Google gives search a refresh. WSJ (15 March 2012).

Knowledge Graph: [W]e’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.  Britt, Phil.  Google unveils knowledge graph. (24 May 2012).

Taken together, these and other suggestive developments in the linked-data ecosystem represent a confluence of tools, data, and methodologies of sufficient potential to warrant efforts that pursue:

new opportunities for addressing the traditional and prevailing problems of too many silos of content, too many disparate modes of search and access, and too little precision and too much ambiguity in search results in the extreme environments of academic information resources intended to support and report on the research and teaching in large research enterprises. Keller, Michael A. Linked data: a way out of the information chaos and toward the semantic web. EDUCAUSE Review 42 (4): July/August 2011.

Such opportunities are inextricably bound up with linked-data’s potential for (1) reshaping the infrastructure that supports web-wide management of information, knowledge, and data, and for (2) fueling unprecedented improvements in the efficiency and efficacy of navigation and discovery capabilities.  It’s long past being a matter of if, now it’s about when—the game that’s afoot is about finding roles that libraries can play in aiding and abetting the creation of an increasingly dense tapestry of facts and links woven together from the flows of intellectual resources that the global academic community consumes and produces in the course of its research, teaching, and learning.

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.

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has received a $679,827 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to help launch a new CLIR/DLF Data Curation Fellowship Program. The program, an expansion of CLIR’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in Academic Libraries, will provide recent Ph.Ds with professional development, education, and training opportunities in data curation for the natural and social sciences.

For the program’s first cohort, CLIR is now recruiting six data curation fellows in cooperation with its partner institutions: Indiana University, Lehigh University, McMaster University, Purdue University, the University of California Los Angeles, and the University of Michigan.

Information about the program and position descriptions are available at http://www.clir.org/fellowships/datacuration. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis until all positions are filled, but no later than June 30, 2012.

The new DLF Advisory Subcommittee will include current CLIR Board members as well as two or three non-Board representatives from the broader DLF community. The subcommittee will advise the DLF director on matters relating to program activities, initiatives, partnerships, and strategy. The At-Large members will not only contribute to the success of the DLF program, but will also gain a better understanding of CLIR’s governance and operations. Members will serve two-year terms.

We have compiled a list of all nominations for DLF community representatives and ask the DLF community to vote on who they would like to serve in this governance role. You may select up to three candidates. The top 5 names will be put forward to CLIR’s Executive Board, which will make the final selection of the DLF Advisory Subcommittee.

The poll will be open until Friday, March 16th. Vote now!

Project Bamboo recently announced the release of its quarterly newsletter Bamboo News. Read the rest of this entry »

DLF has been working to coordinate and co-chair the Content & Scope Workstream for the Digital Public Library of America since mid-October. Part of this process involves lengthy discussion of key issues and goals with the workstream conveners and public members via listserv. The DPLA blog will now be posting listserv recaps at least once a month for all six of the workstreams: Audience & Participation, Content & Scope, Financial/Business Models, Governance, Legal Issues, and Technical Aspects. To read the December 2011 recaps, see the DPLA blog post. If you are interested in adding to the Content & Scope Workstream discussion, please join our listserv.