Digital Library Center Blog | UF

This is another news release. Normally I don’t like to re-post news since it’s already handled by RSS feeds. However,  at the start of the University of Florida’s fall semester, there’s so much news with so many new people that it’s good to share to help get the word out through the clamor. The newness of the fall semester should start to quiet down in the next few weeks though.

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The Library Virtual Worlds Group at the University of Florida Libraries will be hosting a virtual lecture by Paul Fishwick, Professor of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida, on Friday, September 12, 11am-12pm. Prof.
Fishwick will be leading a discussion on the role of libraries in virtual worlds as well as providing a tour of his recent work in Second China. Pre-lecture questions posed by Prof. Fishwick will be posted on the Virtual Worlds Group wiki by September 8.

Prof. Fishwick received his B.S. in Mathematics from the Pennsylvania State University, M.S. in Applied Science from the College of William and Mary, and Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986. He is a Fellow of the Society for Computer Simulation (SCS) and a Senior Member of the IEEE. He has also had much experience working with games and simulations for learning and cognition.

Come join us in Second Life at (Cybrary City, 97 x 15 x 24; slurl), or come join us in West 212 for a live simulcast. Questions about the event may be directed to Laura Jordan.
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I’ve been hoping to see something like this built from Stanford’s copyright database and all of the copyright records and research so many of us have done and it’s great to see it in beta!

http://www.worldcat.org/copyrightevidence

While it isn’t as much as I want for the first full release, it’s in beta so it’s nice that they’ve opened it early for us to contribute. In the first full release, I’d like to see it auto-ingest records from Stanford’s copyright database along with any other databases it can (Gutenberg, BMI, the copyright office, anyone) and to then list those records, including what they pull from, with the full record information including status. Then, I’d like to see an easier interface with a “based on all available information” next to a “best current guess” copyright status indicator (and one that could be like the Creative Commons icons), with a link to the available information and the copyright rules that are being applied. This way, people could see how  the rules are used, what rules apply to each text, and what information is and isn’t available. Adding all of this is a ton more work, but it would make the copyright evidence immediately useful for evaluating copyright and for teaching people how to evaluate copyright. Then, I’d also like an official sign on process (and one that uses OpenID) to allow “copyright experts” who are vetted to enter in the definitive information. Google’s Knol is focusing on the value of authoritative, attributed information and every database can benefit from the same.

The service was only announced last month so it’s clearly in the early stages and this isn’t a critique–it’s just that the need is so great that anything that can be automated and established to be interoperable with other data sources and/or with people contributing more effectively is always better.  Eventually, most copyright checks should be easy. To get to that point will take a great deal of work given the issues (different rules for material type, publication status/place, non-standard copyright record formatting), but this should get us another step closer!

The First Executive Director of the Open Content Alliance has been appointed and CIDE (Data Intensive Cyber Environments group) has joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science. These are two recent news releases that show the expanding happenings and possibilities for digital libraries, collections, and collaboration!

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Maura Marx Named First Executive Director of the Open Content Alliance

The Internet Archive and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced today the appointment of Maura Marx as the first Executive Director of the Open Content Alliance (OCA). A search committee representing OCA member institutions made the appointment after an intensive search process. Ms. Marx will move to the OCA from the Boston Public Library, where she most recently founded the Digital Library Program and was instrumental in evolving the Library’s philosophy toward Open Content principles.

The Open Content Alliance is an international alliance of leading academic and cultural heritage institutions working to build joint digital collections for free public access.  Ms. Marx has been appointed to the new position of Executive Director in order to expand its activities as the preeminent center in the world for promoting the creation and open sharing of digital content.

“Maura’s background in working both inside and outside the library system will help her communicate with a broad public audience the shape of the new public library services in this digital age.” said Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive.  “Her dynamic style, deep-seated commitment to open principles, and demonstrated success at implementing partnerships and initiatives in the digital space will be a powerful combination in taking the OCA to the next level.”

“We are delighted that Maura will take on this leadership role at such an important juncture for the organization.  The Open Content Alliance represents the largest group of libraries, universities and cultural heritage institutions in the world supporting a universal digital library that is truly open, non-profit, and non-exclusive” said Doron Weber, Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “Maura will help to turn the OCA into a stand-alone membership organization that will play a leadership role on the national and global stage. ”

“Over the past three years members of the OCA have made incredibly important strides toward building a truly open digital information commons and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to lead the organization to new levels of growth and collaboration.” Marx said.

Among Ms. Marx’s first actions will be incorporation of the OCA in the State of Massachusetts and creation of a Board of Directors. She will focus on building collaborations across institutional boundaries, expanding the OCA community and becoming involved in public policy advocacy efforts.

Ms. Marx began her career in Europe in development for the arts with organizations including the Guggenheim Museum (Salzburg) and Warner Brothers.  She then worked as an executive in the U.S. technology sector before coming to the library world.  Her accomplishments have included strategic planning, fundraising, technology planning and public relations for organizations at varying stages of growth. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Digital Commonwealth, the Massachusetts statewide digital library, and holds degrees from the University of Notre Dame, Middlebury College and Simmons College.

About the Open Content Alliance

The Open Content Alliance is an association of approximately 100 cultural and academic institutions, working to engage in activities that support the open sharing of information, including building joint online collections. It was founded by Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive in 2005 with 12 initial member institutions, and has grown to over 100 today.  The OCA and has collectively provided over 400,000 books for digitization and contributed them to the Internet Archive’s shared public collections. Information on member institutions and open content principles can be found on the OCA web site.

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UNC News Release

For immediate use: Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2008

Carolina attracts world-renowned large-scale data research team; DICE group joins School of Information and Library Science

CHAPEL HILL - The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is now home to the world-renowned Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) group (formerly known as Data Intensive Computing Environments group), long of the University of California, San Diego’s  Supercomputer Center.

The research team will hold appointments in Carolina’s nationally recognized School of Information and Library Science with research space in Chapel Hill’s Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). The award-winning research group brings expertise in development of digital data technologies, including open source software that enables sharing of data in collaborative research, publication of data in digital libraries, and preservation of data in persistent archives for use by future generations, along with a research portfolio exceeding $10 million.

“The opportunity to recruit an entire group of active researchers with an international reputation for vision, innovation and accomplishment is rare, perhaps even unprecedented in information and library science,” said Chancellor Holden Thorp. “Their work is closely aligned with the school’s efforts in the areas of digital libraries and archives, databases,
institutional repositories, information retrieval and information management. Our students and many others across campus will have an extraordinary opportunity to learn from and collaborate with this world-class research team.”

Research team leaders Reagan Moore, Ph.D.; Richard Marciano, Ph.D.; and Arcot Rajasekar, Ph.D.; are in the process of being appointed as full professors in the School of Information and Library Science (SILS), recognized by U.S. News and World Report magazine as the top school of its kind in the nation. Other members of the DICE group will move to Carolina in the next few months.

“The DICE group will function as a magnet for students and collaborators,” said José-Marie Griffiths, school dean. “The group will help us further extend the research computing infrastructure at UNC that will benefit us all, improve our capacity and capability to conduct larger-scale research projects, while inspiring new generations of students to understand that considerable attention and deliberate effort are needed to ensure both effective and long-term access to information.”

Group members will interact with colleagues in the school and other campus units on academic digital library and preservation research efforts, initially focusing on current collaborations such as the National Archives and Records Administration Transcontinental Persistent Archive Prototype and the National Science Foundation Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure project, along with others such as the Library of Congress Video Archiving project.

“A major challenge for the next several decades will be managing the enormous amount of digital data we create in science and research,” said Alan Blatecky, RENCI’s interim director. “The DICE group has years of experience and an international reputation for developing innovative systems for managing distributed digital data. This will be a huge
advantage for Carolina as the wave of new data rapidly becomes a tsunami. We will have the opportunity to extend our leadership nationally and internationally in managing, sharing, publishing and archiving research data.”

Other potential areas for collaboration include biomedical and health data management, grid computing and cyberinfrastructure with Carolina’s Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute and its recently announced National Institute of Health Clinical and Translational Science Award, visualization of large-scale data sets with the College of Arts and Sciences’ department of computer science and with RENCI, as well as shared institutional repositories and digital library systems with RENCI and the Triangle Research Libraries Network. Additional collaborations in the sciences, social sciences and humanities are expected.

“The DICE group, in collaboration with SILS, will pursue development of undergraduate, master’s and doctoral level courses on data grids and preservation environments,” Moore said. “The opportunity to teach academic courses strongly influenced the decision to move to SILS and UNC. We are also interested in pursuing collaborations for the creation of campus cyberinfrastructure and participating on data management projects in support of education, patient medical records and emergency preparedness.”

For more than 10 years the group’s Storage Research Broker (SRB) data grid has been used by research teams worldwide to automate all aspects of manipulation of large, distributed data files, including discovery, access, retrieval, management, replication, archiving and analysis. DICE most recently developed iRODS, the open source Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System, which introduced user-settable rules that automate complex
management policies, helping users tame today’s mushrooming collections of digital data.

The team has worked on national and international projects, providing data management systems for major grid and distributed research projects, including the Southern California Earthquake Center, the TeraGrid, the Worldwide University Network, California Digital Library-Digital Preservation Repository, the Laboratory for the Ocean Observatory Knowledge Integration Grid, the Biomedical Informatics Research Network and the
Geoscience network.

On Thursday (Aug. 29), the DICE group will receive the 2008 J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award from the Society of American Archivists during the group’s annual meeting in San Francisco. A society news release said the award honors “an individual, institution or organization that promotes greater public awareness, appreciation or support of archives. The DICE group was selected for its long-time support of and involvement in the archives profession’s work to address the challenges of managing, preserving, and providing access to electronic records.”

School of Information and Library Science Web site: http://sils.unc.edu/
RENCI Web site: http://www.renci.org/
DICE Web site: http://diceresearch.org
iRODS Web site: http://www.irods.org

The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) now include a “Map It” feature! With the “Map It” option, all items with geographic information are now displayed on a map using the Google Maps API. For instance, users can now see this photo of Gainesville mapped by clicking on the “Map It” tab, which shows a Google Map view of the photo’s location with a placemark.

See the Citadelle Henri Christophe in Haiti, and then see the satellite imagery map for it, which still clearly shows the structure, along with the surrounding area!

In case the maps aren’t exciting enough, UFDC also allows displays Flash files now so that items like this Beaded Coronet can be seen quickly with all of its thumbnails, in zoomable high definition, and in motion!

These improvements build from UFDC’s strong infrastructure with defined metadata for each item, to make research more fun, playful, and easier to understand. Instead of having to puzzle through the structured citation information for location, users can see the item along with the location. Only a small portion of the information already available in UFDC is really being utilized so far, so there’s much work to be done and many benefits to be gained!

Check out the maps, the objects in motion, and keep a lookout for much more to come!

In looking at our scheduling for the past few months–with many people out for training, illness, and vacation and a much smaller student workforce due to summer schedules and budget cuts–I was worried that we’d fall far behind our optimum production level. Instead, we’re producing even more. We hit 2 million pages on July 9, and had already loaded another 100,000 pages to reach 2.1 million pages by July 28, and now we show 2,235,174 pages online, and we have more loading right now.

This higher production level with lower staffing is only possible because we have so much that’s already partially done, with scanning and other steps completed, and with less constantly coming in, we’re more able to move through some of the older items from the backlog.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean everything in the backlog because much of it needs special handling. Fortunately, though, it does mean that more is going up and that will help us process more efficiently later on when we do have more people and it means there’s a lot more online that wasn’t there before.

With so many new items, our improved processing also means we’re searchable by Google and other search engines through the static UFDC2 pages, and the Cataloging and Metadata department has been working hard to help our materials show in the library catalog. This is an interoperability nightmare because our items are item-level listings and library catalogs aren’t designed or normally used to see every picture in a collection. Cataloging is doing great work to sort through the different types of materials and different workflows necessary for each to make sure the most materials can be represented in the most useful ways.  This will be continue to be an ongoing process, but it’s already showing progress with the individual Digital Collections being added to the catalog.

We’re moving along rapidly on many fronts, but there’s so much left to do. It would be absolutely overwhelming if it weren’t so wonderful to see so many rare items not available anywhere suddenly available for everyone online!

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a posting on Bolivia’s plans to open three universities teaching indigenous languages, including Aymara, Quechua, and Guarani.

MJ Hardman from the University of Florida has been researching Aymara, Jaqaru, and Kawki for decades. Her extensive research and teaching materials will help support this and other efforts to protect endangered languages, and many of her earlier materials are even in the process of being digitized for the Jaqi Collection within the University of Florida Digital Collections. It’s always wonderful to hear about how newly digitized materials have been or will be used!

Last week, UC Santa Barbara announced that they received a massive collection of aerial photography, valued at $14.3 Million, from Pacific Western Aerial Surveys of Santa Barbara. The collection includes more than 500,000 aerial images of 65 major metropolitan areas in the United States at the turn of the 21st Century (1999-2002). This is really amazing, especially so because UCSB Map & Imagery Library is home to the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL), so these materials will be preserved and accessible in the future.

The photos above are of our Digital Library Sign, and they’re now online in UFDC (which is harvestable by robots as UFDC2) and online in our Flickr account. These pictures are particularly nice because they include so many of the other images we’ve worked on over the years. It’s also nice to show off some of our office, most of which doesn’t show as well as our work, as shown through the boxes in the photo above, but our messy daily work leads to gorgeously finished materials available online.

UF students, faculty, and staff are invited to the Library Tech Expo, hosted by the InfoCommons @ West, which will take place on Wednesday, August 27, from 10-2 in the InfoCommons @ West (3rd floor of LW).  We will be showcasing various tech trends offered by our libraries, including Bioactive (a library video game), InfoZombies and other library YouTube videos, RefWorks, Ask-a-Librarian, and much more!  We will also be offering Guitar Hero during this time for students to play while they view our new tech trends.  Snacks will be provided.

The Official Google Blog notes that over 1 million students will be going back to school using Google Apps, including students at the University of Florida. Hopefully this means students will have an easier time accessing their files (no more lost homework on floppies or crashed drives!) and hopefully more time to work on designing the University of Florida campus in SketchUp and contributing to other projects across campus and across the world!