ACLS History E-Book Project
Nancy Lin
Electronic Publishing Manager
New York University Press
The ACLS History E-Book Project, with a $3 million grant from The Andrew Mellon Foundation, is planning to launch its first collection of e-books in Summer 2001. During the course of its first five years (1999-2004), the Project will publish a series of 85 new electronic books in history from ten university presses “University of California, Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, University of Michigan, New York University, University of North Carolina, Oxford, and Rutgers” and launch a series of 500 related backlist titles along with their major reviews. Five affiliated learned societies are participating in this project: the American Historical Association, the Middle Eastern Studies Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Society for the History of Technology. This session will provide a brief project overview, including technology, subscription, and publishing issues. <http://www.historyebook.org/>
handout (in PDF format) 7K file size
AMICO: Does It Work? Reflections on Sustainability After Two Years of Subscriptions
Jennifer Trant
Executive Director
AMICO
David Bearman
Director Strategy & Research
AMICO
In July 1999, the not-for-profit Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) offered educational institutional subscriptions to a digital library of art documentation compiled from member museums as a means of supporting the ongoing construction of a digital cultural resource. Now less than two years later, over 900,000 students at colleges and universities in North America have access to the growing AMICO Library; all UK Higher Education institutions also have the opportunity to acquire access through a contract with the JISC.
Collaboration has also been beneficial for AMICO Members. To help in the creation and distribution of The AMICO Library, we negotiated worldwide distribution rights with the Artist Rights Society, have put in place a collaboration with Antenna Audio, and are developing agreements for several new distribution channels to reach public libraries, K-12 schools and small colleges.
How did AMICO Members create a significant digital resource without major outside funding when numerous dot.coms with huge capitalization have failed to produce products at all? Is the AMICO model of a collaboratively created and user-supported subscription resource viable? Under what kinds of circumstances might it work elsewhere? What are the major challenges to long-term sustainability as seen by AMICO today?
handout (in PDF format) 13K file size
Applying Metadata Protocols and Standards at the Institutional Level: The University of Arizona Experience
Stuart Glogoff
Assistant Dean, Library Information Systems
University of Arizona, Office of Distributed Learning
Garry Forger
Academic Metadata Specialist
University of Arizona, Office of Distributed Learning
Consistent with CNI’s program theme of “Building Technology, Standards and Infrastructure,” the University of Arizona is applying metadata protocols and standards to its networked information environment. Two members of the U of A’s Office of Distributed Learning will discuss how they are creating Web accessible resources of instructional material suitable for a variety of grade levels. The metadata initiatives that have been consulted include the Dublin Core set, CIMI, recommendations from the Digital Imaging Group (DIG), and standards for the creation of education-oriented resources from Ariadne, IMS, and IEEE. The initiative includes digital objects created by the library, a highly recognized instructional module in the College of Science, and efforts in the College of Agriculture to manage a disparate array of instructional and research objects. The presenters will address the levels of institutional commitment needed to sustain the initiative, how the Dublin Core and IMS recommendations are being adopted to create the basic metadata structure for campus learning object repositories, and participation in national/international projects.
handout (in PDF format) 6K file size
The ARK Persistent Identifier and NLM Permanence Ratings
Margaret M. Byrnes
Head, Preservation and Collection Management Section
National Library of Medicine
John A. Kunze
Medical Informatics Consultant
University of California, San Francisco/National Library of Medicine
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has developed a framework for assigning permanence ratings to our Web resources. The purpose of the ratings is to indicate to users and other libraries whether the location, availability, or content of specific resources are subject to change and to communicate NLM’s commitment to archive resources that have been rated “permanently available.” The second half of the briefing will introduce a proposal for a new persistent identifier known as the ARK (Archival Resource Key). The ARK design holds that persistence is purely about service and not about syntax, and that a truly persistent name needs to bind together an object, its metadata, and a provider’s commitment promise.
For more information see:
Report of the Working Group on Permanence of NLM Electronic Publications (in pdf format) <http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/reports/permanence.pdf>
Margaret M. Byrnes, “Defining NLM’s Commitment to the Permanence of Electronic Information” <http://www.arl.org/newsltr/212/nlm.html>
Margaret M. Byrnes, “Assigning Permanence Levels to NLM’s Electronic Publications” <http://www.rlg.org/events/pres-2000/byrnes.html>
handout (in PDF format) 4K file size
The ARL E-Metrics Project: Developing Indicators of Institutional Outcomes
Charles R. McClure
Francis Eppes Professor and Director
Florida State University
Sterrie Schmidt
Dean of University Libraries
Arizona State University
Bruce T. Fraser
Assistant Director, Information Use Management and Policy Institute
Florida State University
This session will provide a brief update on the field testing and development of a set of statistics and measures to describe electronic information services and resources for ARL libraries. The session will concentrate, primarily, on the work done to date in developing a model and possible indicators to link ARL library activities to larger institutional outcomes. The model and possible indicators will be presented. Attendees will have an opportunity to discuss and assess the usefulness of the model and the possible indicators. Members of the study team are especially interested in potential indicators of institutional outcomes used in other academic settings. Next steps for project activities will also be presented.
handout (in PDF format) 30K file size
BECites+
Carolyn Larson
Business Reference Section
Library of Congress
BECites+ is a pilot project of the Library of Congress Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT). An outgrowth of another continuing BEAT Project, the Digital Table of Contents project in which the catalog records of selected monographs are enhanced with links to their scanned tables of contents, the BECites+ project is designed to test the feasibility of enhancing staff-produced bibliographies by not only placing them on the Web in electronic form, but also by adding links to scanned files of their tables of contents, indexes, and back-of-book bibliographies. In addition, reciprocal links are made between all of these data elements and to and from the online catalog record for each title in the bibliography as well as to the online guide in which the title is cited.
This cross-linkage results in enhanced information retrieval, as each of the links connects a searcher to other related resources and to an electronic bibliography on the same or similar theme. Further, this enhanced content information is available both to researchers who first encounter the citation through the bibliography on the Web as well as to those who come across the catalog record for one of the works cited in the “webliography” during a traditional search of the Library’s OPAC. Finally, links to pertinent online journal indexes, other related Web resources, and to applicable subject headings in the Library’s OPAC are also included. In addition, the project is experimenting in its business history guide with creating a master company name index that will direct researchers to those titles within a bibliography which contain information on a particular company.
Biblioteca Universalis: A Global Digital Library Project
Alix Chevallier
Director of International Relations
Bibliotheque Nationale de France
Winston Tabb
Associate Librarian for Library Services
Library of Congress
“Biblioteca Universalis” is an outgrowth of one of the initiatives begun by leaders of the G-7 countries in 1994 to develop the Information Society. The project comprises national libraries from 13 nations who have committed to work collaboratively to (1) create a free digital library with coherent content (choosing as its first theme “exchanges between people”), and (2) facilitate access by developing interoperability protocols.
BYTES
Ann Okerson
Associtate University Librarian
Yale University
The BYTES (Books You Teach Every Semester) Project, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and managed at Yale University Library on behalf of the NorthEast Research Libraries Consortium (NERL), is being completed. The pilot project seeks to answer a series of fundamental, policy-shaping questions related to the potential digitization of books, journals, and other reading materials that support study and teaching of history and literature in the English language. The participating institutions include Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, New York University, Syracuse University, University of Connecticut, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Yale University. One of the project managers will conduct a briefing on the goals of the project, the data gathering methodologies and analysis framework, the principal findings, and the most salient implications for research institutions and e-book content providers.
handout (in PDF format) 15K file size
Collaboration Among Institutional and Disciplinary Open Archives Projects
Rick Johnson
SPARC Enterprise Director
SPARC
Paul Gherman
University Librarian
Vanderbilt University
Rick Luce
Research Library Director
Library without Walls Project Leader
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Ann Wolpert
Director of Libraries
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Eric Van de Velde
Director of Library Information Technology
California Institute of Technology
John Ober
Director, Education and Strategic Innovation
California Digital Library
This session explores whether there is a need for organized collaboration among institutional and disciplinary Open Archives projects. This would aim to complement, support, and leverage the efforts of the Open Archives Initiative by encouraging more institutions to join the effort.
Course Management Systems: Implementation and Policy Issues
Serge J. Goldstein
CIT Academic Services
Princeton University
Charles F. Leonhardt
Associate Director for Information Access
Georgetown University
This session will highlight lessons learned from implementations of Blackboard 4 at Princeton and Blackboard 5 at Georgetown. Software features, technical limitations, challenges, and future enhancements will be discussed. Requirements for learning management systems of the future will be reviewed. We will also examine a host of non-technical issues that arise out of running a course management system, such as: who owns courses, when does a course start, when does it end, and even, what is a course?
Digital Preservation of Electronic Publications
Donald J. Waters
Program Officer, Scholarly Communication
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Dale Flecker
Associate Director for Planning and Systems in the Harvard University Library
Harvard University
Neil Beagrie
Assistant Director, JISC Digital Preservation Focus
Joint Information Systems Committee Office
Increasingly scholarly journals are published electronically. What will it take to keep them accessible electronically in perpetuity? Can the property rights of publishers, the access responsibilities of libraries, and the reliability assurances that scholars need be reconciled in agreements to create archives of electronic journals? What institutional and collaborative models will be needed to ensure the preservation of globally published and networked electronic information? Papers in this session examine issues arising from digital preservation initiatives being undertaken in the US and the UK. Don Waters (The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) and Dale Flecker (Harvard University) will introduce issues arising from a process that is now underway to plan the development of e-journal repositories and involving seven major libraries including the New York Public Library and the university libraries of Cornell, Harvard, MIT, Pennsylvania, Stanford, and Yale. Neil Beagrie (Joint Information Systems Committee UK) will discuss current and future preservation programmes in the UK and its national initiatives for licensing and archiving of electronic journals.
This back-to-back session provides an opportunity to learn about and compare current initiatives in the UK and the US, discuss future directions, and consider how to address the challenges of digital preservation of electronic publications.
handout (in PDF format) 8K file size
The Digital South Asia Library: Design and Implementation of a Digital Library Project
Rebecca Moore
Project Manager
Center for Research Libraries
Digital South Asia Library
James Green
CEO and Vice President
Center for Research Libraries
David Magier
Director of Area Studies/South Asia Librarian
Columbia University
This session will offer an introduction to the Digital South Asia Library (DSAL), a project sponsored by the Center for Research Libraries, the University of Chicago and Columbia University. DSAL is an international effort to bring rare and important resources to the international community of South Asian scholars by exploiting Internet technologies. This talk will focus on some of the issues that have occurred within the arenas of resource selection, digitization and delivery as well as discussing the use of standards, both stable and emerging, to facilitate access for a globally diverse group. DSAL is used, in this case, as a microcosm for investigating many of the issues that arise when creating a digital library.
handout (in PDF format) 69K file size
Directions in Bibliographic Data — CIP and ONIX
Sandra K. Paul
Book Industry Study Group
SKP Associates
John Celli
Chief, Cataloging in Publication Division
Library of Congress
Sally McCallum
Network Development and MARC Standards Office
Library of Congress
The New Books Project of the Library of Congress will add functionality for both readers and publishers to the Cataloging In Publication (CIP) program. Publishers will be able to submit additional elements to CIP, such as the image of the book jacket, author information, and book jacket blurb. LC will automatically create a New Books record from the information provided and post it on the New Books website along with a link to the catalog record and a link to enable readers to request a copy of the book at their local library. Simultaneously, the publisher would receive CIP data or a Library of Congress control number.
ONIX International is a new standard for describing books and other publications under development by EDItEUR, Book Industry Communication and the Book Industry Study Group. In addition to bibliographic and trade information, ONIX also contains elements for promotional and evaluative information, such as book jacket blurbs, author biographies, reviews, and graphics. Though originally intended as a mechanism for distributing electronic information about books from publishers to booksellers, ONIX has potential uses for libraries as well, such as supplying data for provisional (acquisitions level) records, enriching catalog records, and feeding into the CIP stream. ONIX for serials is currently under development.
John P. Celli handout (in PDF format) 4K file size
Sandra K. Paul handout (in PDF format) 97K file size
Sandra K. Paul handout (in PPT format) 96K file size
DLXS: An Open Source Production Digital Library Access System
John Price Wilkin
Humanities Text Initiative Librarian
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan Library has been developing production-quality digital library access systems for a number of years, focusing primarily on structured data and associated image resources. With introduction of its Digital Library eXtension Service, Michigan has intensified its development efforts and given increased attention to generalization and extensibility. Through DLXS, Michigan distributes and supports an inexpensive commercial search engine. It also offers at no cost through Open Source licensing several “class” based suites of middleware. Each provides a high level of functionality for image-based and text-based digital library collections. John Price Wilkin will provide an overview of DLXS offerings and functionality, along with a discussion of future directions for DLXS.
handout (in PDF format) 12K file size
handout (in PDF format) 499K file size
handout (in PPT format) 3,096K file size
Electronic Theses and Dissertations: National and International Status Report
Gail McMillan
Director, Scholarly Communications Project
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
102 institutions throughout the world have committed to electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) by joining the NDLTD (Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations). Virginia Tech began requiring all graduate students to submit ETDs in 1997 and now has over 3000. West Virginia University, University of Texas at Austin, and others also require ETDs. Hear about activities at the NDLTD member institutions and a report from the 4th international ETD conference held at Cal Tech March 22-24. Share your questions, concerns, and comments at this information session.
IMLS Agenda: Grants, Technology & Digitization Survey, Trends
Joyce Ray
Director, Office of Library Services
Institute of Museum and Library Services
Christine Henry
Program Officer, Office of Museum Services
Institute of Museum and Library Services
Barbara Smith
Technology Officer, Office of Research & Technology
Institute of Museum and Library Services
In this update session, IMLS will discuss:
- National Leadership Grant (NLG) projects of particular interest to CNI members
- Trends in both museum and library NLG applications for the next series of awards
- The 2001 Technology & Digitization Survey, which includes museums and libraries
- IMLS’s legislative reauthorization, in progress
- IMLS’s agenda: where the agency is going, how it intersects with CNI’s constituents, and technology trends and research the agency is involved in
handout (in PDF format) 19K file size
Internet2 and Libraries: Connections for Content and Services
Sarah Michalak
Director of the Marriott Library
University of Utah
An increasing number of campuses have joined the Internet2 project and the environment is ripe for partnerships between high performance networking providers and content providers. This session will focus on a discussion of strategies for libraries to become more involved with Internet2 projects and for developing campus partnerships between information technology units and the library. The recommendations of the ARL Internet2 committee will be discussed, and input solicited for additional means to promote library content and services as part of Internet2 projects.
Internet2 Health Sciences
Mary Kratz
Chair, Internet2 Health Science Workshop
Internet2
The Internet2 Health Science initiative includes clinical practice, medical and related biological research, education and health awareness in the public. To this end, the following areas will be emphasized:
- Facilitate and coordinate the creation and enhancement of health applications whose development and deployment have been hampered or prevented by the traditional Internet technology.
- Facilitate and coordinate the development of general application tools to take advantage of Internet2 advanced network services. These tools are most likely to arise in the process of developing specific applications across a range of application areas, but their ultimate value will be to seed the long-term distributed development of applications to support healthcare and the life sciences.
- Under the auspices of the Internet2 Applications Group, collaborate with other professional associations in the health sciences and Internet community to develop guidelines for safe and effective use of the Internet.
- Leverage and influence Internet2 resources to apply solutions to the medical domain.
- Inform the health science community of these developments through collaborative application demonstrations at the regional, national, and international level.
For more information, see: http://www.internet2.edu/health/
Internet2 Middleware Activities Progess
Renee Woodten Frost
Internet2 Midleware Initiatives
University of Michigan/Internet2
Significant progress has been made on the various Internet2 middleware activities. This session will provide updates on the release of eduPerson v 1.0, on the policy and technology efforts focused on PKI for higher education including work with the federal government, and on progress made on the Directories of Directories and Shibboleth projects. <http://middleware.internet2.edu/>
Internet2 Project Update
Ted Hanss
Applications Lead
Internet2 Project
Since last year’s Spring Task Force meeting, the Internet2 community has launched several new programs. This presentation will introduce CNI attendees to the End-to-End Performance Initiative (www.internet2.edu/e2e/), which is addressing the gap between the potential and reality of delivering advanced networking to faculty desktops; the Arts & Humanities Initiative (http://apps.internet2.edu/html/arts.html), which is facilitating awareness and use of Internet2 networks in new and very interesting domains; the Internet2 Commons, which is promoting development and use of collaboration technologies; and Internet2’s extended outreach activities, which are expanding access to the Abilene network beyond the core group of research universities to include K-20 schools, libraries, and museums (http://www.ucaid.edu/abilene/html/faq-sponsored.html). Also included are updates on other efforts, including providing live and archived C-SPAN content across Internet2 networks (http://cspan.icair.org/), the initiation of new content-based projects, and recent discussions by those interested in exploiting Internet2 capabilities for teaching and learning.
Internet2 PKI Labs
Robert J. Brentrup
Associate Director of Technical Services
Dartmouth College
Sean W. Smith
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College, in collaboration with Internet 2, has formed a PKI Lab to advance the state of the art in network services for authentication and authorization. The lab is investigating a variety of topics including interoperability and manageability, trust and delegation models, and scaling in the technical and human dimensions of PKI. Research at the Lab is exploring the interaction of two major aspects of the emerging distributed information world: trust and heterogeneity. For effective distributed information services, entities need to make trust judgments about other entities, in the context of massive variation in users, roles, computers, organizations, administrative domains, and application contexts. Public key cryptography is a uniquely appropriate tool for these issues, because it enables robust expression of non-trivial, compound statements and beliefs, among entities that share no common secrets. This session will provide some background on the structure and uses of Public Key Infrastructure in networked applications, identify some significant current problems and discuss research efforts underway to develop practical solutions to them. Some more background info can be seen @ <http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~pkilab/>.
IP Issues in the Cultural-Educational Community:
NINCH’s Copyright Town Meetings & Action Agenda
David Green
Executive Director
NINCH
Christine Sundt
Visual Resources Curator
University of Oregon
Since the end of the Conference on Fair Use (CONFU), NINCH has organized, with its member organizations, “copyright & fair use” town meetings around the nation. These events inform mixed audiences (faculty, curators, librarians, archivists, students, artists, administrators and others) on the basics of copyright law and its implementation, assist with practical solutions to current problems, and explore new strategies in using and managing intellectual property. Complementing these continuing town meetings, NINCH is now preparing a conference to create an “Action Agenda” of non-legislative issues where the community can achieve practical results. This panel will report on the highlights of two series of town meetings, outline plans for the Action Agenda conferences and solicit input on the agenda for the conferences. For more information, see http://www.ninch.org
LibQUAL+
Fred Heath
Dean and Director
Texas A&M University
Julia Blixrud
Director of Information Services
Association of Research Libraries
Marth Kyrillidou
Senior Program Officer for Statistics and Measurement
Association of Research Libraries
With support from the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education, U.S. Department of Education, the Association of Research Libraries and Texas A&M University are conducting a large-scale user based assessment effort trying to define and measure library service quality across multiple academic and research libraries. The project, LibQUAL+, is measuring library users’ perceptions of their libraries’ service quality and identifying gaps between desired, perceived, and minimum-acceptable levels of service. The LibQUAL+ survey instrument is adapted from an instrument called SERVQUAL, which is grounded in the “GAP Theory of Service Quality” and was developed by the marketing research team of A. Parasuraman, V.A. Zeithaml, and L.L. Berry.
New technology and the use of the Internet make it possible for project participants to survey their users with minimal local effort. LibQUAL+ uses a scaleable Web interface and protocol for reaching library users and asking them about their service expectations. Issues of user self-reliance and its relation to service quality are being explored with implications in assessing digital and virtual library services. Forty-five institutions are participating in the spring 2001 phase, and results from the data analysis will help individual libraries identify where service needs improvement in the eyes of their users. They will also be able to compare their service quality with that of peer institutions in an effort to develop an understanding of best practices in the area of managing user perceptions and expectations. One of the goals of the project is for ARL to establish a service quality assessment program, and it is expected that the methodology and protocols used in this study can be extended to other assessment activities. For more information, see <www.arl.org/libqual/> .
handout (in PDF format) 8K file size
Libraries Meet the World Wide Web
Diane Nester Kresh
Director, Public Service Collections
Library of Congress
The Collaborative Digital Reference Service (CDRS) provides professional reference service to researchers any time, anywhere, through an international, digital network of libraries and related institutions. CDRS uses new technologies to provide the best answers in the best context, by taking advantage not only of the millions of Internet resources, but also of the many more millions of resources that are not online and that are held by libraries. CDRS supports libraries by providing them additional choices for the services they offer their end users. Libraries can assist their users by connecting to the CDRS to send questions that are best answered by the expert staff and collections of CDRS member institutions from around the world. Local, regional, national, and global: the library tradition of value-added service is the CDRS hallmark.
CDRS was launched by the Library of Congress in June 2000, and now includes more than 70 libraries world wide. All types of libraries – academic, public, special and national – are currently members. By networking libraries to obtain information and reference services on behalf of library users (e.g., teachers, students, life-long learners, researchers), CDRS combines the power of local collections and staff strengths with the diversity and availability of libraries and librarians everywhere, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Through CDRS there is always a librarian available to provide to users the experience of trained professionals in providing access to collections and resources both analog and digital. For further information see: <http://www.loc.gov/rr/digiref/>
“Licensing” vs. “Buying” Information: Legal and Policy Implications
David Arsenault
Manager of Software Licensing
Office of Information Technology
Maryland University
Rodney Petersen
Director of Policy and Planning
Office of Information Technology
Maryland University
Mary Case
Director of Scholarly Communication
Association of Research Libraries
Do you “own” that CD or eBook? What are your rights to “fair use” or to share that item under the doctrine of “first sale”? Can you interlibrary loan licensed materials? While it is clear that you don’t own the property rights known as “copyright” for electronic resources that you do not author, it is increasingly the case that the transaction is deemed a “license” and not a “sale”; therefore, what you are “buying” is a license to use the electronic resource according to the license terms. The consequences for libraries and educational institutions of this apparent distinction is enormous. IT professionals who negotiate site licenses and librarians responsible for acquisitions of electronic resources are keenly aware of this shifting paradigm and the business model being advanced by the publisher and vendor community. Users who click “I Accept” or “I Agree” to “shrinkwrap” or “clickthrough” license agreements are less aware – and seemingly less concerned – of the legal implications of their transaction.
The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) is a proposed model state law that affirms this new business model and creates a new legal framework for e-commerce and transactions in computer information – including software, electronic books and journals, and networked databases. Is this the right business model for nonprofit libraries and educational institutions? Does information really need to be “licensed”? What does UCITA or existing copyright and contract law have to say about the differences between licensing and buying information? What are policy implications for colleges and universities? This panel will describe the law with respect to acquisition of networked information, emerging business models, and other policy issues.
handout (in PDF format) 10K file size
Localizing DOI Linking
Dale Flecker
Associate Director for Planning and Systems in the Harvard University Library
Harvard University
Larry Lannom
Director of Information Management Technology
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
Richard E. Luce
Research Library Director
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Bill Mischo
Engineering Librarian & Professor of Library Administration
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ed Pentz
Exective Director
CrossRef
Oren Beit-Arie
Vice-President of Research and Development and ISO
Ex Libris
The inter-linking of distributed electronic resources is one of the hallmarks of the Web. An area of linking now receiving a lot of attention is e-journals; the ability to link to e-journal articles from databases and from references in other e-journal articles is being implemented in many systems today. The most important development in this sphere is the Digital Object Identifier (DOI): an identifier that is also a “hot” link. Sixty-eight publishers of electronic journals have already joined the CrossRef organization, the DOI agency for e-journals. One difficulty (usually known as the “appropriate copy problem”) with the DOI is that it currently only leads to a single copy of an article, usually the one in the publisher’s own site. If an institution has arranged for access to the article through another source (an aggregator service, local loading, etc.), these alternate sources will not be found in the linking process. To address this issue, an experiment involving the International DOI Foundation, CrossRef, CNRI, Ex Libris, OhioLink, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Ohio State University, and the University of Illinois is underway to test a proposed model to allow the “localization” of the DOI link. The model integrates the DOI/CrossRef linking system and the OpenURL framework for open context-sensitive linking.
LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe);
A Digital Preservation System
Vicky Reich
Assistant Director of the HighWire Press
Stanford University
David Rosenthal
Distinguished Engineer
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) is a digital preservation system designed to preserve access to immutable web published content. LOCKSS allows individual libraries to safeguard their communities’ access to HTTP delivered content. The system ensures that hyperlinks continue to resolve and appropriate content is delivered, even when in the Internet the links don’t work and the content is no longer available from the publisher’s web site. Libraries running LOCKSS cooperate to detect and repair preservation failures. LOCKSS will be distributed free; it is open source software. It is designed to run on very cheap hardware and to require almost no technical administration. LOCKSS is funded by the Mellon Foundation, NSF, Stanford University, and Sun Microsystems, Inc.
handout (in PDF format) 18K file size
Making MITH a Reality: The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, Year Two
Charles B. Lowry
Dean of Libraries
University of Maryland
Martha Nell Smith
Director, MITH
University of Maryland
Katie King
MITH Fellow Spring 2000
University of Maryland
In December 1998, the University of Maryland (UM)’s College of Arts and Humanities, Libraries, and Office of Information Technology were awarded a $410,000 matching grant from the United States National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to develop MITH (the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities) in order to foster faculty development and coordination of advanced technological resources and humanities applications of technology beyond early adopters into the university mainstream and out to the wider educational community. This briefing will begin with Charles Lowry (Dean of the Libraries) who will discuss the Libraries’ role in the MITH partnership; Martha Nell Smith (MITH’s Director) will focus on shaping MITH in the first two years, specifically on the diversity of fellows’ projects and MITH’s fostering the unique projects of the individual fellows; and Katie King (MITH Fellow Spring 2000, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies, UM) will discuss her experiences and project as a resident fellow.
MITH provides an umbrella organization for the conception, production, maintenance, and enhancement of electronic resources indispensable for realizing UM’s twenty-first century teaching, research, and outreach missions. As a laboratory for the humanities, MITH offers a center for sharing information, tools (hardware and software), and opportunities for synergistic development, creating a dynamic field for diffusion of innovation in humanities technology available to the world-wide community as ideas and projects of individual scholars influence one another in the production of new knowledge. The goals, then, of MITH are threefold: (1) to generate and foster the development of innovative projects that respond to the traditional interests of the humanities while nurturing emerging modes of scholarship and learning; (2) to guarantee aggressive outreach of these new technological approaches not only to the faculty members and students of UM, but also to the state educational community in grades K-16; and (3) in support of goals one and two, to provide advanced technological resources for the creation, deployment, and dissemination of technology-based scholarship and instruction.
A Model Digital Library for 3D Pottery Data
Jeremy Rowe
Head, Media Development
Arizona State University
This presentation describes development of a model integrated storage, archival, and sketch-based query and retrieval system for 3D objects developed under an NSF KDI grant at Arizona State University. The initial focus has been 3D scans of Native American ceramic vessels, which have been defined as a set of three-dimensional triangulated meshes composed of points and triangles. This system models the data with parametric surfaces, extracts features of the vessel, and provides vessel measurements more accurately than possible using traditional tools of anthropology. The project uses a class-based XML schema to catalog and organize the 2D and 3D vessel data. A Web-accessible visual query process developed for the project permits users to search the databases of vessel data through sketches of sample vessel profiles in their browser window, or by selecting sample vessel shapes from the provided menus, in addition to traditional text and metric search criteria. The interface provides access to original and modeled data, and interactive 2D and 3D models. The ASU KDI project will be addressing additional data sets with different modeling requirements including lithic tools, condyle surfaces of bones, cellular DNA structures, 3D ultrasound data, and diatom shapes. The goal is to create an extendable model for a digital library of 3D data that captures, models, catalogs, searches, retrieves and permits interactive analysis of the data.
handout (in PDF format) 93K file size
Open Archives Initiative
Clifford Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information
Daniel Greenstein
Director
Digital Library Federation
Carl Lagoze
Project Leader, Digital Library Research Group
Cornell University
The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The Open Archives Initiative has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. Continued support of this work remains a cornerstone of the Open Archives program. The fundamental technological framework and standards that are developing to support this work are, however, independent of the both the type of content offered and the economic mechanisms surrounding that content, and promise to have much broader relevance in opening up access to a range of digital materials.
During the past year, participants in the OAI have been defining and experimenting with an interoperability architecture based on metadata harvesting. The goal of this architecture is to provide an easy way for data providers to expose their metadata and for service providers to access that metadata and use it as input to value-added services. This briefing will provide a brief overview of that interoperability architecture, an update on the status of implementations, and plans for the future.
A Portfolio of Distributed National Electronic Resources
Alicia Wise
Assistant DNER Director
Joint Information Systems Committee
In the UK, the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) is a managed environment for accessing a portfolio of quality assured information resources on the Internet, which are available from many sources. These resources include scholarly journals, monographs, textbooks, abstracts, manuscripts, maps, music scores, still images, geospatial images and other kinds of vector and numeric data, as well as moving picture and sound collections. These collections and services are designed to meet the varied needs of more than 500 institutions in the UK’s community college and university sectors. Local, regional, and national energy is harnessed to provide end users with a high quality service environment informed by leading-edge technical developments. For more information, please visit http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub99/dner_vision.html.
Progress towards the Core Integrating Functions for the NSF National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library Program
Lee Zia
Lead Program Director
National Science Foundation
William Arms
Professor, Computer Science
Cornell University
Su-Shing Chen
Professor
University of Missouri
Alice Agogino
Professor
University of California, Berkeley
Dave Fulker
Unidata Program Director
University Corp for Atmospheric Research
David Millman
Manager, Research & Development
Academic Information Systems
Columbia University
The Core Integration track of the NSF National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL) Program is developing the key integrating, organizational, and management infrastructure for the national digital library for SMET education. In the first year of the program six pilot projects have been collaborating on this effort. This session will feature a presentation and discussion of various components of this work.
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Promoting Instructional Innovation through a Faculty Incentive Program at the University of Arizona
Sally Jackson
Vice-Provost for Faculty Development and Educational Technology
University of Arizona
Stuart Glogoff
Assistant Dean, Library Information Systems
Office of Distributed Learning, University of Arizona
Several years ago the University of Arizona began addressing the myriad issues affecting higher education. Issues such as moving from being “faculty centered” to “learner centered,” implementing educational technologies into a new general education curriculum, greatly expanding online instructional modules and online courses, and developing productivity tools, strategies for spreading innovation, and “on-ramps” for faculty new to using technology were among the most important. One program instituted in 1997 was the New Learning Environments/Instructional Computing Grants Program, which has been funded yearly at $500,000 or more. The New Learning Environments Grants support innovative uses of technology in teaching and new priorities are announced each fall. The briefing will review the program’s mechanics, successes, and impact on transforming instruction and faculty participation in innovative teaching and learning at the University of Arizona.
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PubMed Central
Ed Sequeira
National Center for Biotechnology Information
National Library of Medicine
PubMed Central (PMC) provides free full-text articles of life sciences research and supporting research data. This presentation will review how PMC has developed in the year since it went live, and the approach PMC is taking to long term archiving of journal literature. For more information see: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/
The Research Library and Cooperative Economies for Scholarly Publishing
Paul M. Gherman
University Librarian
Vanderbilt University
John Willinsky
Pacific Press Professor of Literacy and Technology
University of British Columbia
Libraries need to take an active role in defining the global structure of collections of digital information and to develop new economic models for the long-term support of these collections. We need to step back from seeing information as a commodity and explore altruistic economic models akin to interlibrary loan to support new modes of scholarly communication. A “circle of gifts” is one such altruistic funding concept to be explored in this session. This cooperative publishing model calls for libraries to sponsor, through their existing serials budgets, the distributed archiving and access of scholarly knowledge and resources in a system of free exchange. The goal is to increase the scholarly and public quality of research through integrative, open standards with global and equitable access. Examples of prototypes will be drawn from the work of Electronic Tools for Ancient Near Eastern Archives (ETANA) and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), while the potential for further research library – scholarly association collaborations will be discussed with participants. For details on the “knowledge exchange” model, see http://cie.ed.asu.edu/volume3/number6/.
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Shibboleth: Inter-realm Authentication and Authorization
Kenneth J. Klingenstein
Project Manager, Internet2 Middleware Initiative, Chief Technologist
University of Colorado, Boulder
Come and learn about the plans for and progress on the Internet2 Shibboleth Project The project team, working closely with IBM, is defining an architecture for a standards based web access control infrastructure that will span institutional boundaries. Information will be provided on project goals and timelines, the architectural model that Shibboleth is using, issues for campuses, the relationship to portals, the relationship to commercial products, and suggestions on how sites can begin to prepare for Shibboleth. http://middleware.internet2.edu/shibboleth/
Student Learning Outcomes: Implications for Librarians in New Middle States Standards for Accreditation
Oswald Ratteray
Assistant Director for Constituent Services and Special Programs
Middle States Commission on Higher Education
Middle States, in the context of a larger interregional emphasis on student learning, is revising its standards for accreditation to emphasize student learning outcomes in curricula and in assessment. Information literacy is one of several outcomes specified in the new standards, having a central position in discussions about all educational programs. These standards specify “fundamental” elements which demonstrate that institutions have met the standards, and they also suggest “supplemental” evidence that institutions might consider (but which are not required). To implement the standards, a new level of collaboration between faculty and librarians may be necessary, and there are at least nine questions for faculty and librarians to consider. Meanwhile, based on six planning meetings held throughout the region and a survey of chief academic officers, the Commission is preparing several initiatives to support the efforts of each institution to promote campus-wide dialogues on learning outcomes.
What Do Faculty Think of Electronic Resources?
Kevin Guthrie
President
JSTOR
During the fall of 2000, with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, JSTOR retained a professional research firm to conduct an anonymous survey of faculty at institutions of higher education in the United States. More than 4,000 faculty completed and returned the survey, which included questions about a wide range of issues related to electronic resources and information technology. The speaker will summarize the initial findings from this survey and discuss faculty’s responses to questions pertaining to the importance of electronic resources and how they are used, the role of the library today and in the future, and the importance of archiving. The speaker will also address some of the ways in which these responses differed based on the academic field and age of the respondent.
XML and Protocols
Ray Denenberg
Senior Networking Engineer
Library of Congress
Patricia Ann Stevens
Manager, Product Planning and Special Projects
OCLC, Inc.
Poul Henrik Jørgensen
Project Coordinator
Danish Bibliographic Centre
The principal use of the web today is human-access to documents and applications. Within a few years though, the web will need to support program-to-program communication, employing a variety of messaging protocols to support a broad range of applications — from simple RPC requests, like “Get Stock Quote”, or “Validate Credit Card”, to complex session-oriented transactions, like search and retrieval. A common architecture or foundation will be necessary, to support these communicating applications; various approaches are being considered. There is a general assumption that the applications to be supported by this infrastructure will be based on XML protocols (that is, protocols whose message formats are described by XML and which use XML encoding). Some protocols that are described by other syntaxes may need to convert to XML to avail themselves of this infrastructure; an example is Z39.50. Conversely, some existing XML protocols are currently engineered to run over HTTP (not SOAP or XP). This session will examine this XML Protocol infrastructure, including SOAP and the emerging W3C XP protocol, and look at three protocols in particular: CIP, OAI, and Z39.50.
Z39.50 Interoperability: Profiles and Testbeds
William E. Moen
Assistant Professor
University of North Texas
Chair, National Information Standards Organization Standards Committee AV
Networked information retrieval via Z39.50 offers strategic opportunities for improved access to information. Numerous initiatives base their Virtual Catalogs and Virtual Libraries on Z39.50. Interoperability problems continue to constrain effective cross-catalog searching. This briefing session discusses recent efforts within the international and national Z39.50 communities to respond to interoperability challenges through the development of various Z39.50 profiles. The Bath Profile provides international Z39.50 specifications for library applications and resource discovery. A NISO standards effort will result in a companion national Z39.50 profile. In addition, the session reports on a research and demonstration project funded by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services to establish a Z39.50 interoperability testbed. Developing a rigorous interoperability assessment methodology and associated metrics will allow vendors and consumers alike to demonstrate and assess Z39.50 interoperability. The goal of this project is to improve Z39.50 interoperability for library applications.