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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

The inaugural winter 2012 issue, “From Planning to Implementation”, describes what Bamboo has been developing since fall 2010, in response to the needs described by scholars, librarians and IT professionals during the 2008-2010 Bamboo Planning Process. Future issues will continue to center around a theme, whether targeted at the digital humanities, collections, the citizen scholar or newly released tools.

Please email comments, inquiries, or requests to be added to the mailing list (electronic or print copy) to Emma Millon, Community Lead at feedback [at] lists [dot] projectbamboo [dot] org.

For further information on Project Bamboo visit https://sites.google.com/site/projectbambooarchive/.

Position Responsibilities:
The Research Assistant’s primary responsibilities will be to support the DPLA Secretariat, which includes working with Berkman staff members to conduct research related to digital library users, content, governance, funding, and related issues; staying abreast of developments in the digital library field (including news related to e-publishing, copyright, linked open data, and other areas); blogging regularly on these issues; and contributing to the DPLA wiki and website. The RAs will also assist with preparations for the DPLA plenary meeting in April 2012 and occasional workshops, including opportunities to create related multimedia. This position represents an ideal opportunity for those interested in digital humanities, intellectual property issues, and access to knowledge and information.

Required education, experience, and skills:
* Advanced writing and editing skills, with the ability to quickly draft and contextualize written materials within the suite of the project outputs;
* Excellent critical reading comprehension, with the ability to absorb material quickly;
* Attention to detail;
* Familiarity with common social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube;
* Prior wiki and HTML editing experience or a willingness to learn.

Additional skills/interests helpful for this position:
* Expertise in fields such as digital humanities, library and information science, law, or journalism;
* Media production, including experience recording and/or editing audio and/or video;
* Prior blogging experience;
* Familiarity with WordPress.

The Research Assistant will have the opportunity to:
* Boost his or her research credentials;
* Creatively bridge research and practice;
* Become a key member of the Digital Public Library of America team;
* Participate in the greater Berkman Center community and engage in ongoing dynamic conversations at the forefront of thought on technology and society.

Time Commitment & Payment:
RAs work approximately 8-12 hours per week. Compensation is the standard Harvard RA/intern rate of $11.50/hour. No other benefits are provided. This position is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and remote participation is not possible for this opportunity. The start date is January 2nd, 2012, or as soon as possible.

To apply:
Please send your current CV or resume and a cover letter summarizing your interest and experience to Rebekah Heacock at rheacock at cyber.law.harvard.edu with “Application for DPLA RA” in the subject line.

To view the original post for this position, please visit: http://dp.la/get-involved/intern/

“It’s something of a dream for many: to digitize and make accessible the vast number of books, documents, artifacts, photos, videos, and other materials housed at thousands of different institutions across the country. The Digital Public Library of America is working on making it a reality. We explore a collaboration between libraries, museums, and archives – including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian – that aims to put it all online.”

To listen to the recording, visit http://thekojonnamdishow.org/ and click “listen” under Digital Public Library of America. Visit the segment page to view related videos and links.