Codex Sinaiticus – Home

• Codex Sinaiticus – Home

  This ancient biblical manuscript is an excellent example of collaboration between institutions and how digital collections are invaluable to scholars. These four manuscripts could not be combined into a whole without their digital surrogates.

  tags: bible, religion, history, christianity, digital, collections, bethel, manuscripts

North Carolina Digital Collections Collaboratory » User-friendly CONTENTdm interface design?

This will really help to circumvent the unattractive interface of CONTENTdm. 

• North Carolina Digital Collections Collaboratory » User-friendly CONTENTdm interface design?

  Code created by UNLV to improve CONTENTdm’s interface and enabling Web 2.0 features.

  tags: contentdm, digital collections, usability, web design

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

How Can Institutional Repositories Improve and Succeed?

Institutional Repositories: Thinking Beyond the Box – 3/1/2009 – Library Journal

Current state of IR’s is poor writes Andrew Richard Albanese. Begins with Harvard’s open access mandate and details what went wrong overall with repositories. Mentions some things that IR’s need to do to be successful such as enticing faculty to contribute by providing services.

Some interesting quotes from the article followed by my comments:

“IRs have failed to catch on for a multitude of reasons, Salo explains, not the least of which is that the first generation was hopelessly passive about their collection activities.”

• Librarians must better understand faculty motivations, including tenure and reputation, and build services around that desire. – post by kgerber

“In his opening keynote at the 2008 SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting in Baltimore, John Wilbanks, director of Science Commons, spoke about what would move IRs forward: incentives. ‘My experience is that faculty don’t like to be hit with sticks,’ Wilbanks said. ‘They prefer carrots.’”

• What carrots can we provide? Some ideas:

• Offer assistance in submitting to discipline-specific repositories or organizations
• Provide personal Web space
• Repository submissions recognized in tenure process – post by kgerber

World Digital Library released with much fanfare

Many news organizations trumpeted the release of the World Digital Library on April 21st.  John Billington, from the Library of Congress, with the help of UNESCO and other funders, succeeded in putting up an interesting interface that provides access to over 1,000 of the world’s precious documents of cultural history.  Included are items from all continents, except Antarctica, which are old, beautiful, and high quality.  You can zoom in on an ancient map or manuscript to get a good look and can experience it in seven languages.

It is an excellent example of what a digital library can do by providing access to items that some would never be able to see.  This site will not substitute for a visit to the actual holders of the items but is a wonderful opportunity for those who can’t.

Next Generation Library Catalogs

PRESENTER:
Eric Lease Morgan, Head of Digital Access and Information Architecture Department at the University Libraries of Notre Dame            

This is a link to an outline of his idea for next generation library catalogs on the ND library website originally composed in 2006 and updated in 2007. A more recent and shorter version is available on his website, Infomotions.

He asked about what people want to learn and addressed whether he will be able to do that.

Initial Questions

• What is the Catalog?
• What does it Contain?
• What functionality do you expect from it
• What problem is it expected to solve?

What is the Catalog?

Concept of Index

• list of words as a pointer
• he advocates that catalog is type of index
• index is finding tool, database is organization of information
  • Google is index, URL’s are the pointers

1995 collecting eletronic journals

• created an 856 subfield u and people said you can’t do that.
• expanded from ownership to licensed material, and where to find other items.

• Catalog more of a finding aid.

Using CONTENTdm in a Consortium

PRESENTER:
Ann Kenne, Head of Special Collections, University of St. Thomas; Denise Tyburski, Media Services Librarian, and Chris Schommer, Digital and Special Projects, Macalester College    

SESSION DESCRIPTION:
In this session, staff from CLIC will discuss the decision process to purchase ContentDM for our digital collections and how the consortia agreed to divide costs and collections.  We will also discuss customization of the site and give examples of how workflow is set up at some institutions.
Project Timeline

• CLIC Consortium started the digital projects search in January 2005
• September 2005 – Created community of interest in Digitization
• Fall 2005 – spring 2007 – Study of various software options

Why Contentdm was chosen

• others already using it – St Kates, MN dl, U of M, Carleton, St Olaf
• flexible pricing structure
• good out of box but allows customizatoin
• training from MINITEX
• good documentation

Drawbacks

• Not good with Macs – interface
• Lack of presentation tools

Implementation

• June 2007 Level 1 license – 10000 digital objects
• Oct 2007 Upgraded license to Lvl 2 – 40000 objects  from Mac funds
• June 2008  Upgrade to unlimited license (with all of CLIC)

Minnesota Digital Library

PRESENTERS:
Marian Rengel, Outreach Coordinator, and Eric Celeste, Consultant, Minnesota Digital Library

 SESSION DESCRIPTION:
The Minnesota Digital Library continues to work with organizations to digitize their collections and is now working with organizations to research providing a state-wide search mechanism. We are continuing our social networking project and anticipating a year of research and development in 2009-10. Marian Rengel will provide an update on the developments in the Minnesota Digital Library. She will also seek ideas from participants for future work of this organization.

Asked what people know about MDL in the audience. Some contributors present.

Get funding from MINITEX and mostly run by volunteers. Has a new grant to develop Minnesota Learning Commons

Help institutions to digitize on condition that they allow access through MDL.

Actuall three sites

• Minnesota Reflections is main resource of compilations.
• Minnesota Digital Library
• Minnesota Finder

Technology Trends and Libraries – Eric Lease Morgan

Eric Lease Morgan is Head of the Digital Access and Information Architecture Department at the University Libraries of Notre Dame.  He was previously at North Carolina State University from 1991-2001 where he created the MyLibrary feature.

Gives handouts to help him process what is in his head and creates a structure for himself to see what is going on in libraries.

Can talk about trends but really wants to focus on opportunities. Focus on the How rather than the What.

Loves libraries. Makes his own books, archives his personal items.

Look at higher level trends

• Not iPhone – mobile computing

• Not Prius – green technology

Small bits of information are trend.  Not whole books, facts within them.

Web-enabled mobile devices – ubiquitous computing

Semantic Web

Information for computers to read because of  linked data

Computer finding various relationships that others have created from many different perspectives.

Graph these relationships

Walden example

Name, dates, people who have cited it.

Common relationships and rare relationships will show up.

Middle relationships will be true

Rare will be questionable

Examples of linked data (using RDF’s)

Infomotions – RDF File

About Walden – originally from Freebase.com – made by MIT

rdf.freebase.com/ns/en.walden

Shows URI that refers to thoreau.

Libraries have created some really cool technologies but are now superceded.

MARC record was created in the 60’s, predated SGML, HTML

first five characters tell how long the record is. There is an ASCII character that indicated the end.

Shared office with Frank Kilgour

Said MARC was really stupid!

MARC has been taken over by XML.

Z39.50 was good then, but OpenSearch is better now for the current information environment.

MARC8 was good then, but now Unicode is a better fit.  Especially for international, and even has Klingon!

People don’t want to browse, they want to search

There is too much to look at now.

Point of browse is to find “more like this”

Search is not meant to retrieve comprehensive results, just want a couple good ones.

Relevancy Ranking

Wisdom of Crowds

Internet was designed to withstand Nuclear attack (from DARPA – military)

distributed, no central authority

If a lot of people agree than it is probably true.

How to deal with this environment

See the big picture

We are straddling two worlds which is a challenges

Build collections for historical records

organize it into more manageable chuncks

Preserve them

very challenging becaues they must foresee changes

Provide access

Competitors in this environment – fashionable to be into information

enables democracy – now many places to get information

not able to assume that we are exclusviely ”public good”

What can we do?

Save the user time

Play and innovate

Items are free for the taking

Find ways to harness items on the Web to help your community.

Cannot be exclusively about books

Collect and organize

doesn’t recommend we use MARC, use what everyone else does XML

Controlled Vocabularies

not as important as they used to be

can use wisdom of crowds, full text computer data mining also

Use Indexers

Databases are good at creating and maintaining

but user must know structure of each – search commands

Index is about finding

Search words

Use them together for best result.

Go beyond just giving them the “thing” they want

Add value, everyone else can find and give

Provide people with tools to use the content

Once I get the book help them:

Read it, cite it, compare, summarize, trace idea through it

Not just books, other items

datasets – create graphs, tables, charts

 Other services

steer and recommend items to people

http://infomotions.com/musings/xml-in-library/user

Dirctory of Open Access Journals

He created a program to harness information from the Open Archives Initiative (OAI)

While Google Books is good for UMich, not for everyone because Michigan gets a scanned copy everyone else is at the mercy of Google

Internet Archive is truly free. 

Has been working with Univeristy of Toronto

His own library of books – Alex

21000 public domain and open access documents from American/English Literature as well as Western Philosophy.

Can provide services against the Index – limit by subject, author, type of item (article, book), repositories (Internet Archive, DOAJ)

Demo of collection of various files of the same text from Internet Archive.

Can search within PDF’s in Internet Archive (because of dirty OCR’s), not Google Books.

He uses Perl. Files ending in .pl

Concordance in a general sense, counts words and gives context.  Perl command make-concordance.pl – Creates an index.

All these examples, what do you envision all librarians doing with this?

He envisions people who go and do this for specific topics.

 Raw text that he harvested can provide services against it.

Look up word in Dictionary, Look up in Catalog, Translate

Concordance of title, can see top 10, 50, 100 terms. then locate those terms where they appear.

Core skills necessary to do this.

Library collection, organization, dissemination,

Computer Skills

Relational Databases,

XML

Indexing

Programming

 

 

 

 

What Digital Scholarship Models Are Scholars Using?

In November 2008, a report written by Ithaka and commissioned by the Association of Research Libraries, entitled Current  Models of Digital Scholarly Communication, examined how faculty members use exclusively-digital, non-traditional scholarly resources. It identified 206 resources used by faculty that fit ARL’s category of “original and scholarly”. Those sources are aggregated in an ARL searchable database.

To be clear, “Original” means that the content was “born-digital” and appears in the chosen resource first. “Scholarly” refers to the author’s identity as a scholar and includes both peer-reviewed resources and informal sources like blogs and discussion forums.

Within the 206 resources, eight categories emerged:

1. E-journals
2. Reviews
3. Preprints and Working Papers
4. Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, and Annotated Content
5. Data
6. Blogs
7. Discussion Forums
8. Professional and Scholarly Hubs (Mixture of these categories)

Some interesting points:

• Top reason for use of these resources across disciplines was to access most current research
• Academic discipline influences which formats are considered important
  • E-journals among top choice across disciplines
  • Humanities highly value informal exchanges (blogs, discussion) more than other disciplines
  • Social Sciences highest rated – professional hubs, preprints (Social Science Research Network)
  • Science, Technical and Medical (STM) rated data sources the highest
• Some preprint sources like SSRN and arXiv (STM) have been around for a while and are established but many others are new and still must gain respect from the broader community.
• These resources have created new forms of scholarly contributions.  Are they being acknowledged by tenure committees?  Christine Borgman is interviewed about this in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Bringing Tenure into the Digital Age.

This report provides a good foundation for integrating and encouraging the use of these resources for faculty.  It also gives more insight into the influence that a discipline has on their workflow.