Plenary Sessions

OPENING PLENARY

Thursday — 1:15 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.

From the Version of Record to a Version of the Record Herbert Van de Sompel Information Scientist Los Alamos National Laboratory

In the past two decades, scholarly communication has evolved significantly to become mainly digital and network-based. This transition has brought along changes in the nature of the assets that are being communicated. The atomic and static PDF files of the early ejournals days are rapidly being replaced by bundles of dynamic and interdependent resources that are distributed across the Web. These changes present technical challenges regarding information interoperability and long-term preservation, but they also yield broader challenges related to stewardship, access, the delineation of the scholarly record, and the very notion of the version of record. In the same time frame, both the Web and our understanding of its architecture have evolved, which has motivated recent information interoperability efforts – OAI Object Reuse and Exchange, Memento, and ResourceSync – to look at technical challenges from a Web-centric, instead of a repository-centric, perspective, possibly marking a trend to fully embrace the Web as infrastructure for scholarly communication.

Presentation Slides

About the speaker:
Herbert Van de Sompel is an Information Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and for over 10 years has led the Digital Library Research & Prototyping Team. The Team does research regarding various aspects of scholarly communication in the digital age, including information infrastructure, interoperability, digital preservation and indicators for the assessment of the quality of units of scholarly communication. Herbert has played a major role in creating the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse & Exchange specifications (OAI-ORE), the OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services, the SFX linking server, the bX scholarly recommender service, and info URI. Currently, he works with his team on the Memento, Open Annotation, and ResourceSync projects. He graduated in Mathematics and Computer Science at Ghent University, Belgium, and holds a Ph.D. in Communication Science (2000) from the same university.

CLOSING PLENARY

Friday — 2:15 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.

The Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey US 2012:
First Release of Key Findings

Ithaka S+R’s Faculty Survey has tracked attitudes and behaviors of faculty members in US higher education institutions in response to technological and environmental change on a triennial basis since 2000. Its Faculty Survey has helped the community understand changing faculty member needs on key issues such as discovery processes, collecting and collections, the value of the library, and publishing needs.

In this plenary session, Ithaka S+R’s Deanna Marcum and Roger Schonfeld will share key findings from the Faculty Survey 2012 US for the first time. For the 2012 survey cycle, working with an advisory board of librarians, publishers, and a scholarly society executive, Ithaka S+R has updated the questionnaire to include topics of current and emerging interest, including support service needs associated with changing research methods, data preservation, research dissemination, and undergraduate instruction, as well as the role of the ebook, in addition to continuing to track issues of ongoing interest. These findings will be of interest to libraries and campus IT organizations, publishers, scholarly societies, and others who support faculty members in the research, teaching, and authorship roles.

Judy Russell, dean of libraries at the University of Florida and a member of the project advisory board, will present reactions to the findings of the Faculty Survey from the perspective of a campus leader and library director. She will also discuss her experience to date in piloting a localized version of the survey among UF faculty members.

http://www.sr.ithaka.org/research-publications/us-faculty-survey-2012
Presentation Slides (PDF)

About the speakers:

Roger C. Schonfeld is Program Director for Libraries, Users, and Scholarly Practices at Ithaka S+R. In this role, he leads studies of academics’ and students’ attitudes, practices, and needs, as well research on the changing role of the academic library and scholarly society. He also consults with libraries and library consortia, digital humanities projects, distinctive collections and centers of excellence, and scholarly publishers. Roger has served on the NSF Blue Ribbon Task Force for Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access and NISO’s Open Discovery Initiative.

As Ithaka S+R managing director, Deanna Marcum leads the research and consulting services that assist universities and colleges, libraries, publishers, and cultural institutions as they make the transition to the digital environment. She heads a growing staff of program directors and analysts with wide-ranging expertise. She has served as associate librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress, and as president of the Council on Library Resources (CLIR). In 2011, she received the Melvil Dewey Medal, the highest award conferred by the American Library Association.

Judith Coffey Russell has been Dean of University Libraries at the University of Florida since 2007. Russell is president of the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL), as well as a member of the board of directors of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS). She was formerly the Managing Director, Information Dissemination and Superintendent of Documents at the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO), the first woman and second librarian to hold that position.