Community Stories

A group of major research institutions is partnering to develop a flexible online tool to help researchers generate data management plans. This effort is in response to demands from funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), that researchers plan for managing their research data.

The partners in this project include the University of California Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library, the UCLA Library , the UCSD Libraries, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Virginia Library , the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , DataONE, and the United Kingdom’s Digital Curation Centre (DCC).

By joining forces the partners expect to consolidate expertise and reduce costs in addressing data management needs. The primary goal of the partnership is to simplify the process of creating plans while increasing the quality of decisions made by funders to pre-define policies and infrastructures that support research activities. CDL Executive Director Laine Farley stated, “This tool will streamline UC faculty’s ability to produce a credible and high-quality plan for managing data.  An important consequence of that is the general raising of awareness about the services that libraries provide in data curation.”

More information can be found here.

California Digital Library , the UCLA Library , the UCSD Libraries , the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, the University of Virginia Library , and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are DLF community members.

CLIR/DLF is collaborating with the Association of Research libraries in the development and implementation of the E-Science Institute.

The ARL/DLF E-Science Institute will be a set of designed learning experiences that take small teams of individuals chosen by research libraries though a process that strengthens and advances their e-science support role. The experiences begin mid-year in 2011 with assignments each team will work on at their institution (coordinated through the program) and culminate in a capstone, face-to-face, 2.5 day event where the teams produce strategic agendas for e-science/e-research support for their institutions.

For more information about the E-Science Institute is located here.

A short project update at DLF Fall Forum 2010 highlighted new collaborative efforts building upon the work of DLF’s original ILS Discovery Interface Task Group. Convened in 2007, the Task Group was charged with recommending standard interfaces for the ILS to integrate with new discovery tools and systems. While the final recommendation released in December 2008 was applauded by the library technology community, it did not result in a generic solution as DLF did not have the resources to create complete schema requirements, develop open source toolkits, or monitor vendor compliance.

This project has experienced re-vitalized interest and attention from a group of interested parties convened at Code4Lib 2010. The goal of this completely open collaborative effort is to achieve actual code implementations of ILS-DI recommendations across all ILSs by bringing together those who have written ILS-DI (or related) code with those who want standardized ILS adapters, including representatives from open source discovery projects (such as VuFind and eXtensible Catalog) as well as from discovery interface vendors (such as OCLC and Serials Solutions).

A survey of the community indicated that first efforts should focus on re-usable services for item availability and patron functionality. As these priorities mesh closely with the goals of the eXtensible Catalog (XC) project’s NCIP toolkit, this existing tool has been recommended as a platform for achieving a re-usable set of services across a variety of ILSs. In addition to the core NCIP toolkit code, XC project partners had also created a number of individual ILS connectors. Empowered by a code and effort donation from OCLC, work is currently ongoing to create an NCIP 2.0 version of the XC NCIP toolkit (replacing the current NCIP 1.0 version) and institutions are being recruited to create or update pre-existing ILS connectors.

You can contribute to this project in several meaningful ways:

Join the conversation at:

Rachel L. Frick

Thank you for your feedback and ideas about the 2010 DLF Forum and the future of the Forum you provided through various online surveys, tweets, and emails. Your participation was greatly appreciated and is helping prioritize and shape DLF activities for 2011.

Overwhelmingly, the community was supportive of a once-a-year DLF Forum event with additional DLF sponsored events and activities held at various conferences throughout the rest of the year. The community strongly supported a fall meeting, with spring a distant second, and summer receiving very little support. It was suggested that the Forums run slightly longer to allow for more activities.

Keeping all of these recommendations in mind, we have confirmed the 2011 DLF Forum location and dates and have begun planning additional events for the 2011 DLF Community Calendar.

The 2011 DLF Forum: October 31-November 2, 2011. The conference will take place in Baltimore, Maryland at the Hyatt Regency (http://baltimore.hyatt.com/hyatt/hotels/), with 2 1/2 days devoted to the DLF Forum program.

Because the fall season is always so busy, are now exploring sites and dates for 2012 to find a suitable location on dates that do not conflict with other major conferences, holidays, and important civic duties.

Additional events for 2011 include support for the 2011 Code4Lib and ER&L conferences.

DLF is very excited to be sponsoring the CURATE Camp Hackfest preconference event at the 2011 Code4Libr conference. (http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/2011_Preconference_Proposals#CURATEcamp_Hackfest).

DLF is also providing conference support for the 2011 ER & L conference being held in Austin, Texas, February 28-March 2. Amy Sample Ward and Amanda French are the keynote speakers. If you are interested in e-resources, assessment, and their associated services/technologies, this is a great conference to attend. Conference info can be found here: http://www.electroniclibrarian.com/conference-info/program-speakers.

Plans are in the works for other 2011 conference events. Please do not hesitate to send me your suggestions or ideas.

So how will you know where DLF is going to show up, or how you can plan to be a part of these events? For now, we will post these events on the DLF-Announce list and other communication tools like Twitter (@CLIRDLF) and the DLF LinkedIn group (http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=3387265). The ultimate goal is to have an interactive community calendar on the DLF web site, where all DLF hosted and sponsored events will be posted.

This brings me to the DLF web site. The old web site at www.diglib.org ceased to be maintained in 2010; all current DLF community information is located at http://www.clir.org/dlf.html . Working with Brian Leney of CLIR and Eric Celeste, we have begun the process of creating a new DLF web site.

The new DLF web site is under construction and we are seeking volunteers to help out with some beta testing and user feedback. Please email Brian Leney (bleney (at) CLIR (dot) org) if you are interested in helping us out. Testing begins at the end of January, with a public launch of the site scheduled no later than the end of February. We envision an active dynamic site that helps our community connect and collaborate.

2011 is shaping up to be a very energetic and exciting year for the Digital Library Federation Community.

I look forward to working with you to make it one of our best.

Happy New Year!

Rachel L. Frick
January 12, 2011

DLF Sponsored CurateCamp HackFest at Code4Lib 2011

CurateCamp HackFest will be held as a pre-conference at Code4Lib 2011 in Bloomington, IN at the Indiana University Memorial Union on Feb 7, 2011. This event is free and open to the first 50 people who register for the event.

***Registration for the event opens Dec 13, 2011 at 12 pm eastern.***

The HackFest event is made possible through the generous support of the CLIR Digital Library Federation program.

Please check the Code4Lib 2011 site for more information on registration.