InterestGroups Stories

Laura Campbell, CIO of the Library of Congress, delivered the keynote address at the 2011 SemTech Conference in San Francisco, CA. Her talk focused on “how linked data is helping us to do more with less” while managing the Library’s existing collections; maintaining its role as a leader in the distribution of canonical information; and following its mission to collect, preserve, and provide access to a born digital collection.

During her talk, Campbell said she hoped the takeaway would be that ”We need to get very clever about new methods of doing our mission, new methods of executing both getting the material and managing it and providing access to it.”

David Weinberger, senior researcher at the Berkman Center, filmed these interviews at the LOD-LAM Summit in San Francisco on June 2-3, 2011.

Want to join the conversation? Respond to the W3C Linked Library Data Incubator Group‘s call for public comment on the draft of their report. Feedback can sent as comments to individual sections posted on their dedicated blog or by email to an archived public mailing list at public-lld@w3.org using descriptive subject lines such as ‘[COMMENTS] “Benefits” section.’

http://youtu.be/swQYX4oqfB4

http://youtu.be/cY-aEuFLryo

Videos via the Harvard Library Innovation Laboratory Blog.

Via The Signal, LC’s compulsively readable blog on digital preservation:

“We have a vast amount of information on the internet, but we are missing the relationships needed to reach, discover and use this information to its fullest potential. Cultural heritage institutions and gatekeepers of knowledge are looking to provide open, linked data and help to build a better internet. Ed Summers, an Information Technology Specialist for the Office of Strategic Initiatives here at the Library maintains, ‘Linking makes the provenance of the items explicit, which will continue to be important to researchers on the Web. But perhaps more importantly it gives institutions a reason to participate in the project as a whole.’”

Read the full post here.

The W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group has been chartered from May 2010 through August 2011 to prepare a series of reports on the existing and potential use of Linked Data technology for publishing library data. The group is currently preparing:

• A report which consists of, Benefits, Vocabularies and Datasets, Relevant Technologies, Implementation challenges, and Recommendations
• Use Cases: a survey report describing existing projects
• Vocabularies and Datasets: a survey report

We (LLD XG) invite comments from interested members of the public.

Feedback can sent as comments to individual sections posted on our dedicated blog or by email to an archived public mailing list at public-lld@w3.org using descriptive subject lines such as ‘[COMMENTS] “Benefits” section.’

Comments will be especially welcome through 22 July.

Reviewers should note that as with Wikipedia, the text may be revised and corrected by its editors in response to comments at any time, but that earlier versions of a document may be viewed by clicking on the History tab.

It is anticipated that the three reports will be published in final form by 31 August.

From a concept eleven years ago to practice in 2005, the DLF/OCLC Registry of Digital Masters (RDM) was developed jointly project by the Digital Library Federation (DLF) and OCLC for two main reasons: To provide the coordination and organization of the digitizing of print materials between institutions and to prevent the unnecessary duplication when digitizing those materials.The Registry of Digital Masters has now matured into a functional registry with 4.5 million records.

DLF and OCLC are reviewing the RDM service  to determine the success of the Registry and if changes need to be made to meet the needs of the current and future users.We are examining who uses the Registry, how it is used, what users need and desire from the Registry, and what potential future uses and needs the RDM must meet.

We are asking DLF community members to please participate in a brief survey.

Your comments can help us to determine the future development of the RDM.

If you are interested in the RDM and want to learn more, or contribute to assessment efforts, go to the RDM Interest Group page.

DLF has awarded $50,000 to fund research on business cases for new service development in research libraries.

The project will develop guidance for academic libraries seeking to support innovative services such as publishing and data management activities on their campuses.

Librarians from four universities and OCLC will investigate business-planning literature and study established publishing and data curation services. The project will result in a series of publications, to be published between fall 2011 and August 2012, that will suggest a model for the business planning of new ventures and services. The model will help libraries determine whether a new service is feasible and, if so, how to make a persuasive case for the resources required.

“Libraries have vast expertise in structuring and managing data, and knowledge about how readers connect to published products,” said Mike Furlough of Penn State University.

“As scholarly publishing and scientific research evolve, we have seen new directives from the NIH and other government agencies requiring that researchers give considered thought to the future life of research products of many types,” said Furlough. “We see important roles for libraries in support of our researchers, but only if our community can build and sustain these types of programs.”

The project team also includes Theodore Fons, OCLC; Carol Hunter, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Elizabeth Kirk, Dartmouth College; and Michele Reid, North Dakota State University. The team formed out of the 2010 Senior Fellows Program at University of California, Los Angeles, a professional development program for senior level academic librarians sponsored by the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and led by Beverly Lynch.

Judy Luther, president of Informed Strategies, will advise the project and facilitate discussions as the team analyzes the relevant literature, develops a model, selects case study candidates, digests outcomes, and shapes a final report.

The team hopes that the lessons learned will be applicable to other library service areas. “In today’s economic and information environment, we must be able to analyze and justify every service we offer and become more comfortable with evaluating potential new service areas,” said Hunter. “This method and our conclusions will provide a model for doing that.”

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) $117,567 for research on how to build capacity for data curation within disciplines. The project will be managed by the Digital Library Federation (DLF). The project will consist of three interrelated activities. The first will be an environmental scan of professional development needs, and of education and training opportunities for digital curation in the academy. The second will be an anthropological study of five sites where digital curation activities are under way. The third will be a report that analyzes the results of the two research efforts and includes a proposal, informed by the findings, for amending the curriculum for CLIR’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in Academic Libraries program.

More information can be found here.

The Digital Library Federation is pleased to offer a special registration rate for the 2011 DH conference, being held at Stanford University, June 19-22, 2011.

In partnership with CenterNet, DLF is working to create opportunities that bring together digital library and digital humanities communities in order to explore where we converge and to better understand our roles and responsibilities. As part of this effort, DLF is offering its members, who are first time DH conference attendees, a $100 conference registration discount.

This is a first come, first serve offer, open to all DLF community members who have NEVER attended the DH conference. Some restrictions apply*.

To take advantage of this special offer please send your name, contact information and organizational affiliation to the DLF mail box. Eligible DLF members will receive a special registration URL in order to activate this special discount. Do not register for the event until you have received your discount code.

For more information about the DH conference go to their website.

For more information about DLF Digital Humanities activities, go to the DH interest group page.

*Restrictions: not open to Stanford University (a special Stanford Employee rate is being offered separately).

“First time attendee” is defined as anyone who has not attended DH in the last 5 years.

This is a first come, first served offer, and is limited to the first 20 respondents. Offer expires April 30th, or when we receive 20 request, whichever comes first. Please send contacts and inquiries to DLF Info.

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has received a $49,500 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to conduct an in-depth survey of publications, projects, tools, and environments pertaining to semantic web, linked data, and RDF triples technologies. Simultaneously, Stanford University Libraries has received a parallel grant of $50,000 to conduct an invitational workshop intended to incorporate the results of the CLIR survey into a design for a scalable prototype system.

Linked data offers libraries, universities, and scholarly projects improved ability to cross-search and discover digital information. The survey will provide background for participants in a workshop to be held at Stanford University Libraries in summer 2011 that aims to develop specifications, requirements, and a basic technical design for a multinational, multi-institutional prototype demonstrating the viability and efficacy of a linked data environment for improving discovery and navigation. CLIR will publish the survey report following the workshop. The documents emerging from the workshop will also be published online.

“This is a significant grant for CLIR/DLF, as it builds upon our history of rigorous research and analysis of issues that are fundamentally important to our constituencies, as well as marking a new direction,” said CLIR President Chuck Henry. “Linked data has the potential to align and federate digital resources across thousands of institutions. It is thus an aspect of large-scale solutions that CLIR has placed at the core of its strategic mission.”

“We are at a point where the need is for leading libraries to get real about this technology,” commented Stanford University Librarian Mike Keller. “Using the CLIR study as a baseline for the state of the art, we intend to come out of the workshop with concrete, actionable plans for collaborative, distributed development of metadata conversion tools, as well as for access and visualization tools.”

Round two of the Digging into Data Challenge, a grant competition designed to spur cutting edge research in the humanities and social sciences, was announced on March 16, 2011.  This year, 8 funders are participating enabling this competition to have a world-wide reach into many different scholarly and scientific domains.

For round two, the Digging into Data Challenge is encouraging digital library participants, not only as grant applicants, participating on research teams, but also as content providers, making their collections available to research teams. A list of current data providers is located here.

Final applications will be due June 16, 2011.

Further information about the competition and the application process can be found at www.diggingintodata.org.

The Digging into Data Challenge is being administered by the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities.