SPARC

Comparing Notes on Digital Repository Management

In April 2009, Alvin Hutchinson visited the Li Ka Shing library at Singapore Management University (SMU) to exchange ideas with the digital repository staff there. Alvin has visited Singapore several times and he frequently makes time to meet with research librarians.

The Li Ka Shing library opened its doors in 2005 and is naturally a state-of-the-art building including spacious and comfortable reading and study areas. Although the library print collect includes just 30,000 volumes, its users have access to over 30,000 electronic journal subscriptions and 23,000 e-book titles. The Li Ka Shing Library serves SMU’s six schools covering the disciplines of business, accountancy, economics, social sciences and information systems. These schools have established research centers in collaboration with such well-known names in the business world as the Wharton School and BNP Paribas.

The SMU repository (http://ir.library.smu.edu.sg/) uses a software platform by well-known library vendor, Innovative Interfaces, Inc. which also provides the library's integrated management system and public catalog. The SMU digital repository team consists of a full-time repository manager (Paolina Martin) and a metadata librarian (Ryun Lee) who devotes approximately half of his time to the repository. Repository staff expressed remarkably similar circumstances to the Smithsonian Digital Repository including recognition of the likelihood that library staff will ultimately be responsible for collecting and uploading content created by researchers at the University. The SMU staff also indicated that they may be called upon in the near future to assume the role of the University's bibliographer. This is a service that the SIL currently provides and complements the Smithsonian Digital Repository. The conversation was lively and quite informative.

Alvin left the meeting with a sense of reassurance that there is at least one other organization operating successfully with such a small staff yet accomplishing so much.

Twittering at Computers in Libraries

I had a remarkable experience using the now-very-popular online social networking tool Twitter at the Computers in Libraries (CIL) conference in Crystal City, March 30 to April 1.  Lugging my trusty Macbook laptop, my intention was to efficiently write entries on what I saw and heard to share with others.  At last year’s conference, I posted to the SPARC blog, and I found it was rather labor-intensive and exhausting to copy my notes and write a coherent blog entry by day’s end. This year with Twitter, I just wrote quick lines within the brief 140 character line limit, and sent the “tweets” online (90% of the time when the wi-fi was working).  There was no need to re-edit and post notes, and interested people could see them nearly in real time if they searched Twitter for the “hashtag” silcil.

The very cool thing was that by using the free Twitter client, TweetDeck, I could have my entries in one column while following other conference attendees’ tweets at the same time.  During talks, it was almost like passing notes in the back of the classroom.  This proved very helpful at the 2nd day’s keynote.  I was sitting at a place in the cavernous conference hall where the acoustics were terrible and the speaker had a Dutch accent.  With my hearing loss, it was especially difficult to understand what was said.  By following other CIL conference tweets, it functioned almost as closed-captioning for me, and everything was understood.

So, folks, I don’t think Twitter is yet “… another ephemeral, noninformative tech plaything” (per an article by conference speaker Greg Notess).   At least in the context of a conference, this librarian found it to be extremely useful.

A log of CIL Twitter entries by SIL attendees.

Gil Taylor

@giltay

Digital Curation Curriculum Symposium Notes

The DigCCurr (Digital Curation Curriculum) Symposium held in Chapel Hill, NC provides a place for the exchange of ideas and methods in collection and preservation of digital content. An increasing volume of publications are released both online and (sometimes in place of) print but little has been done to ensure that the publications are usable in the long term. Because libraries have preserved paper content for centuries and many feel that they must also contribute to the evolving field of digital curation/preservation. However, the meeting drew archivists, and IT specialists as well as librarians.

At the 2^nd annual event (April 1-3, 2009), several presentations focused on training programs for digital curators sponsored by organizations in the U.S. and abroad. In 2006, the IMLS provided funding to three library schools (UNC, Univ. of Illinois and U. of Arizona) to begin programs in the management of digital content. Representatives from each were at the DigCCurr symposium and presented preliminary results from this still-experimental field of study. Representatives from Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. were also on hand to discuss courses, workshops and other programs in their home countries.

There were also presentations regarding personal digital assets and their explosive growth. Many people (not just scholars) create documents, web content, photos and other electronic artifacts that are largely ignored after creation. Of course it may be that most of this material can be discarded, but inevitably there will be one or two items that deserve long-term preservation. Additionally, archivists who have to manage a burgeoning amount of electronic records, emails and other administrative data were there in force talking about the challenges—often legally mandated—which they face.

Because the SIL is not only collecting but creating digital material, we will need to make some effort at maintaining these online resources for the future.  SIL’s Digital Services Division is currently considering hosting an intern from the pool of students at the University of Illinois to provide some guidance on the issues we will need to address.

 

More information about the presentations at the latest DigCCurr are at: http://www.ils.unc.edu/digccurr2009/abstracts

Reinventing Science Librarianship: Models for the Future Pt. II

     In the closing session entitled "Education for New Roles," there was discussion of requirements for librarians who will serve researchers in the future. The major goal of open access faces several challenges including the variety of data formats. Librarians must link to the institutional mission as SIL does so well, serve on disciplinary research teams, and lastly, measure, assess and revise information in many formats, thus providing "value-added services." By matching people and skills, more specialized data librarians will bring diverse communities together in the digital age. Skills required here will include the abilities to read data and interpret it and the ability think about data like a researcher within a discipline. Experimentation with librarians teaching researchers to enter research results directly onto the web is occurring in universities and other institutions throughout the country and abroad. In such efforts, researchers will continue to need librarians to develop reliable management, preservation, and use standards. Skilled library staff, providing "added value" can help researchers discover more data than the researchers know exists. For example, in regard to some Life Sciences data (health information created by healthcare providers), some major questions we face will be "What data should we save?" and "Who will pay for it?" In preserving long-term research data, for the year 2007, the data exceeded the available storage! The financial considerations of data storage require economically sound and sustainable digital preservation.

Librarians of the future will do many of the same things, perhaps in more advanced ways, that they do now – including acquiring data directly from the researchers and collectively identifying more resources. Partnerships of this kind are and will continue to be essential.

(Submitted by Angela Haggins, 11/10/2008)

Reinventing Science Librarianship: Models for the Future, Pt. I

This Fall Forum sponsored by ARL and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) was held in Arlington, VA on October 16th -17th with over two-hundred attendees. The agenda included an Opening Program entitled "E-Science: Trends, Transformation & Responses," presentations by twenty-four speakers from as many institutions, and more than a dozen poster sessions by universities as close as Johns Hopkins to as far away as the University of Guelph (Canada). Both education and policy trends were the foci of the sessions. The reinvention of science librarianship requires the commitment of institutions, a well-defined user community and the right library skills. Sessions on Data Curation, Supporting Virtual Organizations, and Lessons & New Roles were each followed by a Reactor Panel which "asked questions for the speakers and audience to discuss and to highlight examples" of strategies and services in support of e-science.

Several of the posters were of special interest to me as librarian at SERC Branch Library. SERC has an education department that offers learning experiences for both teachers and students K-12. UNC, Chapel Hill science librarians offered a poster session on the effort to encourage and prepare science majors to become teachers. Because SIL offers such excellent e-resources to our users, foot traffic, at least at SERC, has dwindled over the years. Brown University librarians presented a poster on their innovative "Librarians in the Lobby: Engaging Engineering and Physics Faculty in Their Space." This effort, aimed at increasing interactions between the library staff and their users, successfully included the physical relocation of the physics and engineering librarians to the heavily-traveled lobbies of the buildings that house their users.

(submitted by Angela Haggins 11/10/2008)

Vielka at the 22 World Reading Conference

22 World Reading Congress:
Reading in a Diverse World
San José, Costa Rica
28-31 July 2008

Organizers: International Reading Association & Costa Rican Reading Association

 The Congress was composed of a lively crowd of 1,300 persons, from all over the world, but because of its location, delegates mainly came from Latin America. Any given day was packed with keynote speakers, symposia, workshops, professional development activities, posters, and much to say about the speakers, their topics and how children are learning and acquiring a language, over coffee and lunches. 

I participated in the Congress because it is part of my professional development program and because
Panama has developed a National Reading Program, spear headed by the Panamanian Reading Association that will be presented to the Ministry of Education. If this program is to be successful, many of us, not only teachers, should be involved. In fact, any person who is interested in augmenting readership, education, and contributing to social change, should participate. That is why 125 Panamanian teachers, psychologists and librarians decided to be part of the congress.

 It was interesting to observe the different on-going country programs like Learning to Learn. Costa Rica’s ADA (Amigos del Aprendizaje-Friends of Learning) Program with its mother-teacher modality, is very successful and it reminded me that this concept has been in use in the San Miguelito area since the 1970’s, in Panama. 

There were two keynote speakers which mostly caught my attention, first there was Emilia Ferreira. She has a profoundly philosophical style and made us go through an exercise of analytical reading. Then there was Yetta Goodman… practical and down to earth, who made reading fun and lively, and used her life experiences as the centerpiece of her books.

These two women, in their 70’s, who received standing ovations, caught the undivided attention of the audience, and made us think that it was certainly worthwhile to dedicate your life to a great cause…reading, learning, exploring, creating, remembering…all in one life time.

 

RLG Programs 2008 Annual Partners Meeting: Overview

SIL staff Nancy Gwinn, Mary Augusta Thomas, Marcia Adams, and myself were joined by Anne Van Camp (SI Archives) and Kathy Spiess (OCIO) at the RLG Programs 2008 Annual Partners Meeting held in Philadelphia, June 2-4, 2008.

Over 150 staff members from libraries around the world met to discuss topics related to the following topics:

• The future of collections
• New services (and co-development opportunities)
• New modes of scholarship
• Renovating description and practice

Attendees met in plenary sessions as well as break-out groups to discuss thiese topics and find ways in which libraries can work together and with OCLC/RLG Programs.

The third day session, "Digitization and the Humanities: Impact on Libraries and Special Collections Symposium" will take place at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, hosted by former SIL staffer Ron Brashear.

Read more about the meetings.

(picture above: SIL, SIA, and OCIO at RLG)

ARL Symposium, New York, April 25, 2008

If the first picture makes you think of the Strawberry Statement--this post is for you.

 

Tribute to Duane Webster.

 Many of us have not been in the library profession for longer than 38 years so it’s hard to image how many changes have taken place since 1970. On Friday April 25, the Association of Research Library Tribute to Duane Webster, its retiring executive director, served as a history and status report of major issues for academic libraries. As one of fifteen speakers summed it up--the three "p’s" of that afternoon were persistence, pragmatism and partnership. Duane and ARL have been steadfast in protecting intellectual freedom through legal action and education; they tackle the same issues annually: censorship, high costs of information (SIL uses the ARL charts on the impact of serials inflation as it bible) and the need to constantly recruit diverse, talented individuals for an entire profession.

 The talks were rich in acronyms—CNI, SPARC, GRP, SPEC, SERI, LCA, ( the ARL site has more on each project:  www.arl.org  ) ARL has a foundational role in each. SIL is a partner in many of these important initiatives through its membership in ARL which has provided  us with training, the preservation survey, policy guidance, statistics and measurement, LibQual, and of course, MRAP!

Over 140 library directors, staff members, ARL staff and retirees including Elaine Sloane former director at Columbia and former SIL librarian took part.  ARL’s new executive director, Charles Lowry, Dean, UMd Library, will begin in July. The papers for the symposium will be published in a special issue of pORTAL: Libraries and the Academy, later this year.

 

FLICC Seminar on Wikis - "Not all wikis are encyclopedias"

NOT ALL WIKIS ARE ENCYCLOPEDIAS

I recently attend a FLICC seminar at the Library of Congress entitled “Not all wikis are encyclopedias: other types of wikis and how your library could use one”. Leslie O’Flahavan, an E-WRITE partner, hosted the seminar. Here are some notes that Leslie provided on the following topics:

• What is a wiki and how they work
• How to identify different types of wikis
• Why wikis are such a popular way to publish content online
• How a wiki could help your organization
• How to recognize potential liabilities for wiki publishers

What is a wiki?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

“A wiki is a website that allows visitors to add, remove, edit and change content, typically without the need for registration. It also allows for linking among any number of pages. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. The term wiki can also refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a site, or to certain specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (the original wiki) WikiWikiWeb and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.”

What types of wikis are available?

• Federal, state, and local
• Content classification wikis and content creation wikis
• Encyclopedia wikis vs. project or task wikis, which can be used for:
  • Project communication
  • Application support
  • Research
  • Product planning
  • Customer service

Why are wikis so popular?

• Anyone can write or edit one
• They’re outside the normal permission and approval process for web content
• They encourage interaction
• They’re easy to learn
• They have a user-defined lifespan

Wikis vs. websites

Wikis - Shared traits - Websites –
Authored collaboratively relevant require permission to publish
Little or no graphic design useful mediated by experts
Foster communication correct transactional
Socially mediated alive governed by workflow
Content author in charge of updated regularly graphic design conveys content
read organization staffed by designers, developers and content types

Edit-before-publish vs. Edit-after-publish –

Wikis, unlike webpages, are intended to be “quick and dirty” communications. They can be edited after publication if necessary. However, writing guidelines are useful.

“Something that’s 80% accurate, on time, and shareable is better than something that is too much, perfectly formatted, too late, and over-classified.” – Chris Rasmussen, Knowledge Management Officer, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense.

Why are wiki writing guidelines needed?

• Organic growth of content can cause communication problems
• Producing valuable content of any type requires reviewing and editing
• Wiki users search vs. navigate, thus putting extra pressure on words

What should wiki writing guidelines cover?

• How to organize content
• How to make content easy to read
• How to write as a wiki citizen

Guidelines on writing to organize:

• Use concrete descriptive words, use the most commonly searched terms
• Strive for names and terms that can be used in a sentence, following natural word order
• Provide guidance on caps, numbers, special characters
• Find a name that will last over time
• Avoid initial articles
• Develop naming guidelines for different types of pages and articles

Guidelines on writing readable wiki content:

• Use headings
• Use vertical lists
• Use links (no click here)
• Use conciseness
• Use an appropriate tone for the intended audience
• Use mechanical correctness
  • Spelling
  • Punctuation
  • Grammar
  • Abbreviations
  • Dates

Guidelines on writing as a responsible wiki citizen:

• Use your real name
• Write objectively
• Comment considerately
• Contribute original content
• Avoid slang
• Explain edits in “Comments” section

Wiki software options:

• MediaWiki – www.mediawiki.org
• Tikiwiki – www.tikiwiki.org
• PBwiki – http://pbwiki.com/
• Wikipedia’s article “Comparison of wiki software” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software

Wiki writing guidelines:

• ColabWiki: Wiki Style Guide
• IBM’s Redwiki Writing Guidelines and Etiquette
• wikiHow’s Writer’s Guide
• BattleMaster wiki: Style Guide
• LinuxQuestions.org’s LQWiki: Manual of Style
• MuppetWiki: Building a successful wiki community

Wiki resources:

• Wiki homepage at COLAB: “Hosted by GSA Intergovernmental Solutions”
• “Which wiki is right for you?” in School Library Journal, May 1, 2007.

Contact information:

Leslie O'Flahavan, E-Write

Leslie@ewriteonline.com

Tel: 301-989-9853

www.ewriteonline.com

 

NISO Conference: Next Generation Discovery Tools: New Tools, Aging Standards

On March 27-28, 2008 NISO sponsored a conference on Next Generation Discovery Tools: New Tools, Aging Standards. See the complete list of speakers.

Todd Carpenter, Managing Director of NISO, kicked off the conference and set the stage for speakers to discuss new and emerging discovery tools we might expect in the next few years, and where the standards are- and are not – keeping pace. The development of knowledge bases, web systems, repositories and other sources for information brings the need for effective discovery tools to the forefront. With new technologies we are seeing new ways to find and share resources, from search tools to social networking and browsing tools, and tools that combine different means of discovery into an integrated process. He asked how NISO can help with the development of new systems and ensure that standards will be in place where needed as development continues?

 Some highlights of day one:.

 Richard Akerman, Technology Architect at the National Research Council, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC CISTI), Canada's National Science Library and Publisher, gave the opening keynote: Building SkyNet for Science: Discovering New Frontiers Using Embedded Knowledge. Some of his main points were

• Discovery in the digital environment is mediated primarily by machines. We need to produce information in formats that machines can understand, in parallel with formats that are human-readable.
• Keep it to a limited number of formats, keep them simple and enable easy interchange of information.
• Need to disambiguate names, institutions, text content, data so that machines don’t have to do a lot of work. Need to develop unique identifiers.
• Users can add value to our content, but we need to find ways to standardize this presentation to users. Standard APIs needed.

Other things he touched on:

• OpenURL and COinS. Context Objects in Spans http://www.ocoins.info/
• OCLC/Openly OpenURL Referrer (http://www.openly.com/openurlref/)
• LibX (http://www.libx.org/), Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/)
• WebOPAC is not a discovery interface, and people are building a discovery layer over the catalog metadata.  VuFind (http://www.vufind.org/ on top of web catalog. Akerman says we need to go way beyond this to open the catalog data and connect it to all our other data, like licensed content and journal articles, preprints in repositories, and content from everything and everywhere else. Enriching search results.
• OAI-ORE (http://www.openarchives.org/ore/) Object Reuse and Exchange (linking between objects in repositories in a more advanced way)
• MIT’s SIMILE (http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/SIMILE:About)

Robert J. Sandusky, Assistant University Librarian for Information Technology, University of Illinois at Chicago,talked about Deep Indexing and Discovery of Tables and Figures. Most abstracting and indexing systems provide access to article-level metadata (journal article title, authors’ names, text abstracts, descriptors, etc. Deep indexing refers to the capability of discovering information at the figure or table level. Systems are available that extract, index and support search of figures, tables, maps, and graphs.

 Sandusky discussed tools such as:

• DeLIver (SGML tagging of serial articles. Disappeared)
• CSA Illustrata (now ProQuest) http://www.proquest.com/promos/product/csaillustrata.shtml. Search results bring back thumbnails that represent tables, figures.
• TableSeer (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1255175.1255193). Addressing technical issues, not interface. Developing metadata specification, metadata extractor for tables
• Biotext Search Engine (http://biosearch.berkeley.edu/) Search results bring back thumbnails that represent tables, figures, such as Illustrata, but seeking to represent table information in a ‘standard’ way.

Sandusky urged developers to think about metadata standards for datasets (figures, maps, photographs, digitized specimens). Users want to get the dataset after they see the table.

 
Mike Teets, VP, OCLC Global Product Architecture, OCLC, gave an overview of data driven services available from OCLC that try to improve users understanding of search results. “It’s all about the data and how the data relates to other data.” OCLC is leveraging large datasets to provide web services at machine level for better delivery services.

· xISBN (http://www.worldcat.org/affiliate/webservices/xisbn/app.jsp) This Web service supplies ISBNs and other information associated with an individual work that is represented in WorldCat. Submit an ISBN to this service, and it returns a list of related ISBNs and selected metadata.” Uses FRBR algorithms.

· xISSN. (http://xissn.worldcat.org/xissnadmin/index.htm) associates different editions of same serial (such as print and online editions) and historical relationships such as title changes, mergers, splits.

· WorldCat Identities: http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/ This initiative mines WorldCat for individual identities and creates a page for each...

• OCLC/Openly OpenURL Referrer (http://www.openly.com/openurlref/ On March 12, 2006, OCLC added COinS to its Open WorldCat web pages. COinS is an acronym that stands for Context Objects in Spans, which represent a standardized way to embed citation metadata into a web page. COinS are actually included in the HTML code on the web page using OpenURLs. This allows other processors and web browsers to find the citation metadata and generate links to other resources that are accessible via OpenURLs.

Highlights of day two:

Peter Murray, Assistant Director, New Services Development, OhioLINK discussed the evolution of the end-user interface to library catalogs.

Murray is also a blogger known as the Disruptive Library Technology Jester. 

Murray mentioned Marshall Breeding’s article Next Generation Library Catalogs in July/August 2007 Library Technology Reports (http://www.techsource.ala.org/ltr/next-generation-library-catalogs.html and features of these catalogs including:

· Persistent links/Permalinks

· Faceted browsing

· Post search limiting

· Syndicated service (RSS) What’s new using this search?

· Machine-generated saved searches

· User-supplied comments

· Social networking tools

OPAC replacements include::

· AquaBrowser from Medialab Solutions at Queens Library in NY http://aqua.queenslibrary.org/

· Encore from Innovative Interfaces, Inc. at University of Kentucky  http://ukty-mt.iii.com/iii/encore/app

· Primo from ExLibris at University of Minnesota Libraries  http://prime2.oit.umn.edu:1701/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=TWINCITIES

· WorldCat Local at Ohio State http://osu.worldcat.org/

Open Source projects include:

· Blacklight at University of Virginia  http://blacklight.betech.virginia.edu/ (Solr and Ruby on Rails)

· fac-back-opac at Paul Smith’s College http://library.paulsmiths.edu/catalog

· Scriblio http://about.scriblio.net/ at  Plymouth State University
http://library.plymouth.edu/

· VuFind http://vufind.org/ Demo site at http://vufind.org/demo/