Community Stories

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.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded CLIR/DLF a $46,000 planning grant to develop a prototype for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The prototype will be submitted to the DPLA “beta sprint,” which seeks “ideas, models, prototypes, technical tools, [or] user interfaces . . . that demonstrate how the DPLA might index and provide access to a wide range of broadly distributed content.”

Rachel Frick, director of the DLF program, will manage the project and serve as co-principal investigator with Carole Palmer, professor and director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

Palmer will lead UIUC staff in developing the prototype, which will demonstrate how the IMLS Digital Collections and Content Registry (DCC) and its research and development activities can serve the DPLA as a critical mass of base content, as well as an aggregation model. A functional prototype will be produced in combination with a set of static wireframes and demonstrations, showing how DCC’s advances in content, metadata, user experience, and infrastructure can be leveraged for the DPLA.

Palmer and Frick will work closely with Geneva Henry, executive director of the Center for Digital Scholarship at Rice University, who will produce a report that reviews current literature pertaining to the technical aspects of large-scale collection aggregations and federations. The report will review and compare the system architectures, content types, and scale of content of the DCC, Europeana, the National Science Digital Library, and other aggregations to shed light on how and why large-scale aggregation projects succeed or fail. The report will also identify potential content providers for the DPLA, and will estimate the time, effort, and other costs required to ingest these resources into the prototype.

“This is an important strategic grant,” said CLIR President Chuck Henry. “The DPLA can and should become a fundamental asset for the nation—a genuine common good that can benefit students, researchers, and citizens at large, to grow over time to become a new and essential environment for teaching and learning. The prototype will be developed with this larger mission in mind: building a digital public library that responds to our curiosity and our myriad intellectual interests, and that reflects the complexity and power of our cultural heritage.”

“The DPLA Steering Committee is delighted that the Mellon Foundation is supporting CLIR in its work as part of the beta sprint,” said John Palfrey, chair of the DPLA’s Steering Committee. “CLIR has been a leader in thinking about and building the future of libraries. Its participation in the DPLA to date has been crucial and we look forward to seeing what they come up with as part of the beta sprint process.”

The Digital Public Library of America initiative was launched in December 2010 to explore strategies for developing an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that would draw on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform and empower everyone in the current and future generations.

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.

The Digital Library Federation program today announced its formal alliance with centerNet. Established in 2007, centerNet is an international network of digital humanities centers formed for cooperative and collaborative action that benefits the digital humanities and allied fields in general, and has special resources in the domain of cyberinfrastructure to offer humanities centers in particular.The affiliation will focus on areas where digital libraries and digital humanities converge and need further exploration and understanding of each community’s roles and responsibilities. More information can be found here.

Save the date for CURATECamp 2011 – August 15 and 16. This summer’s camp will be at Stanford University. DLF is excited to provide support towards this dynamic effort. More information will be posted soon on the CURATECamp website.

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.