Digital Library Center Blog | UF

News: JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance and Ithaka S+R release final report on their Case Studies in Sustainability, revealing how different business models fared during the economic downturn

6 October New York, NY and London, UK–Ithaka S+R, with funding from the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance, released today “Revenue, Recession, Reliance: Revisiting the SCA/Ithaka S+R Case Studies in Sustainability,” a report that reviews the impact of tumultuous times on the business models of 12 digital projects first profiled by S+R in 2009.

Some of the projects profiled include the UK’s National Archives’ Licensed Internet Associates programme, which has shown major revenue growth in recent years despite budget cuts felt by the entire institution; Cornell University’s eBird, which has experimented with partnerships to develop new revenue generating offerings for users; and the University of Southampton’s Library Digitisation Unit, which has made strategic choices to better align its mission with that of the university.

Nearly all of the projects profiled live under the umbrella of larger institutions.  One of the key findings to emerge is that many of these projects are relying on their host institutions for support to an even greater extent than two years ago. Whether this is a good arrangement and what this means for their future remains to be seen.

“While some project leaders have pursued an aggressive awareness-building strategy within their host institutions as a way of ensuring ongoing support, others have preferred to fly under the radar,” commented co-author and Ithaka S+R program manager, Nancy Maron. “Either way, where host support is a major part of the sustainability plan, aligning project goals with the host’s mission is especially important.”

The report notes that difficult economic times have called for deep across-the-board spending cuts at many organizations, which can deny digital resource projects the capital investment they need just as they are beginning to grow. Many of the projects studied had the intention of contributing revenue to their host, but only some were successful in doing so, and even those were unable to fully support their ongoing costs.

“This research concentrates on organizations coming to terms with the long term liabilities incurred in digital projects and post grant funding,” stated Stuart Dempster, Director of the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance.  “It’s not just the actions the project teams have taken but the reasoning behind those choices that will help others start to determine which strategies, or parts of them, might serve as models for their own projects.”

The projects that had the most success did not follow one particular business model but rather spent a tremendous time understanding all of their stakeholders–from their users to university administrators and volunteers.

“There is no single path to sustainability,” stated Kevin Guthrie, president of ITHAKA. “Successful projects understand the value they offer to their most important constituents and are able to adjust their approaches to meet new challenges and changing conditions.”

The cases covered include scholar-led initiatives (Electronic Enlightenment, eBird, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, the National Science Digital Library MSP2: Middle School Math and Science Pathway, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae), library and museum projects (The National Archives, L’Institut national de l’audiovisuel, the University of Southampton Library Digitisation Unit, V&A Images), and publishing projects (Hindawi, DigiZeitschriften) with a diverse range of revenue models (e.g., subscription-based projects, endowment-funded resources, and open access digital libraries).

These case studies form part of a long term commitment by the Strategic Content Alliance to provide empirically-based evidence freely to education, research and cultural bodies in the development of digital content. This research is ongoing with the development of a new digital entrepreneurship syllabus due for delivery in summer 2012.

About Ithaka S+R
Ithaka S+R is a not-for-profit strategic consulting and research service that focuses on the transformation of scholarship and teaching in an online environment, with the goal of identifying the critical issues facing our community and acting as a catalyst for change.  Ithaka S+R is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization that helps the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.
About the Strategic Content Alliance
The JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance is a unique collaboration initiative funded by public sector organisations, all different, but all deeply involved in the creation, management and exploitation of digital content for the common good. These are: JISC, British Library, BBC, Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), and the Wellcome Library. The Alliance aims to maximise financial and intellectual investment in digital content through a more systematic approach to pooling and co-ordinating activity.

About JISC
JISC is the UK’s technology consortium for higher and further education–supporting UK research, teaching and learning to ensure it remains world class.

Due to enthusiastic response to our 2011 HASTAC Conference CFP, and due to conflicts with summer travels and holidays, HASTAC has decided to reschedule the deadline to September 15, 2011.

The University of Michigan will be hosting the 2011 annual HASTAC Conference face-to-face on its Ann Arbor campus December 2 and 3. We invite proposals for presentations on the general theme of Digital Scholarly Communication.

Deadline for submission is September 15, 2011. Proposals can be submitted here: http://tinyurl.com/HASTAC2011-Proposal

They seek topics which may range over but need not be restricted to, the role of digital technologies in:

• Reformulating scholarly projects and products. (This might include questions of narration and argumentation, evidence and epistemology, interactivity, and/or text/visual presentation.)
• Re-mapping the routes through which scholarly products circulate.
• Expanding the digital arts to include the humanities and vice versa.
• Reshaping the global system of knowledge production in the humanities in terms of access, circulation, exchange and equity within the global north and between the global north and south.
• Generating new kinds of research and teaching partnerships.

Topics may also include:

• Copyright challenges and strategies for digital scholarly communication.
• Web design and digitization of archives for multiple and different constituencies (local communities, global peers).
• New forms of research, digitally based, in the humanities.

The middle part of the day on both December 2 and 3 will be given over to concurrent sessions. People may present in any of three formats:

• An individual five-minute “lightening” talk or ten-minute lecture-style presentation, with or without technology (e.g., PPT, Prezi)
• A panel on a common theme with short presentations to allow for discussion time, with or without technology
• A poster project or demo for conversation in a digital display area (e.g., YouTube or other presentation format uploaded to conference website; laptop-based video on a continuous loop, slidecast, interactive website; print poster board)

Presenters will have the option of pre-circulating materials on the website before and during the conference. Information on an Unconference event for December 1 forthcoming).

Deadline for submission is September 15, 2011. Proposals can be submitted here: http://tinyurl.com/HASTAC2011-Proposal

News:

Caribbean Region of the International Resource Network presents “Preserving Our Stories – Caribbean LGBT Histories & Activism” Launch & Discussion The Digital Archive Collection of the Jamaica Gay Freedom Movement 21 June, 2011 at 6PM (USA Eastern Standard Time)

Panelists include: Larry Chang (co-founder of the Jamaica Gay Freedom Movement and Jamaica Forum of Lesbians, All-Sexuals & Gays – JFLAG) & Thomas Glave (award-winning author and co-founder of JFLAG); along with co-chairs of the Caribbean IRN Board: Angelique V. Nixon (scholar, writer, community worker) & Rosamond S. King (writer, scholar, artist)

Also featuring the short documentary “Sisters without Misters” by Cynthia Cheeseman http://bandwagonist.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/sisters-without-misters/

The digital archive is hosted by the Digital Library of the Caribbean at: http://dloc.com/icirngfm.

The event will be based at Brooklyn College,Woody Tanger Auditorium in the Library, 2900 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, New York 11210.

Questions can be posed by emailing to caribbeanirn@gmail.com

The Caribbean IRN Board is looking forward to this important digital launch and discussion of the Jamaica Gay Freedom Movement Archive! Help us spread the word to folks in the region especially and/or anyone you know who is interested in these histories and activism. The Caribbean IRN is a resource for people and organizations inside and outside the region whose work focuses on issues related to diverse genders and sexualities in the Caribbean.

Please visit our website for more information about our work: http://www.irnweb.org/ en/about/region/caribbean. The International Resource Network is supported by the Ford Foundation and housed at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York.

The digitization of this archive was made possible through a City University of New York Diversity Grant.

Special thanks to Stephanie Harvey, who organized and digitized the archive, to Marianne LaBatto, and the entire Brooklyn College Division of Archives & Special Collections. This event was made possible through a City University of New York Diversity Grant, with additional support from the Brooklyn College Department of Africana Studies and the Brooklyn College Division of Academic Information Technologies.

Please note: this event has already taken place, but I will update with comments (or others, please do) if I find the video of the event online. Despite my tardiness in posting, I still wanted to share this to promote the important work being done.

?The first version of the Archives Portal Europe is now online: www.archivesportaleurope.eu

Archives Portal Europe allows users to search across the:

• the holdings of 47 institutions
• 7.794.952 descriptive units
• 725.406 digital archival objects

The site is still in beta, but it already looks great and more great things are sure to come based on the site’s excellent documentation.

I’m always looking for other project examples of digital humanities and digital library collaborations. I’m especially interested in small and mid-scale examples, where researchers have data sets of digital files of their primary research materials. In some cases, these may be statistical data sets and in others these may be sets of files representing textual documents, image documents, artifacts, and others. Good examples of these data sets  can be used to show how much primary resource documentation and digitization researchers conduct, how these resources are part of and inform the scholarly process, and how sharing these resources can enrich the final research publications and entire fields of research. Simpler examples of digital humanities’ needs are particularly useful because they show how researchers can do what they’re already doing, and how they and their field can benefit from collaborating with digital libraries to share their primary resources.

I recently learned about a great example of a collaborative digital library and digital humanities project at The Florida State University (FSU). The project has been completed and an article was published on it in 2008 (article: Plato L. Smith II, (2008) “Where IR you?: Using “open access” to extend the reach and richness of faculty research within a university”, OCLC Systems & Services, Vol. 24 Iss: 3, pp.174 – 184). The project was a collaboration between the FSU Libraries and an FSU anthropology faculty member, Cheryl Ward. Ward had 800+ artifact images of the Sadana Island Shipwreck Excavation of 1995-1998 in Egypt. The digital files for these were stored in an office on disc and had no metadata. Thus, accessibility and the supports for preservation were concerns. The collaboration for this project created a digital archive for the digital images of the Sadana Island artifacts, including creating metadata, and the digital files were archived within the FSU Institutional Repository (IR). The metadata for the images is here and the image view is here. Ward’s research includes many publications and news stories, as well as a wonderfully illustrated document entitled “Chinese Porcelain for the Ottoman Court: Sadana Island, Egypt.”

While this project is a relatively simple example, with a single set of images that could all be grouped together, it’s also a great example. It’s great because it clearly illustrates how easily digital humanities and digital libraries can collaborate together to create new, organized resources that support the collaborating researcher’s needs and scholarly work more broadly through access to primary materials with a specific research context to support the primary materials.

Selected References

• Sadana Island artifacts, in FSU’s Institutional Repository
• Plato L. Smith II, (2008) “Where IR you?: Using “open access” to extend the reach and richness of faculty research within a university”, OCLC Systems & Services, Vol. 24 Iss: 3, pp.174 – 184

News posting from here.

Berkman Center Announces Digital Public Library Planning Initiative
December 13, 2010 – The Berkman Center for Internet and Society today announced that it will host a research and planning initiative for a “Digital Public Library of America.” With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Berkman will convene a large and diverse group of stakeholders in a planning program to define the scope, architecture, costs and administration for a proposed Digital Public Library of America.

“We’re grateful to Berkman for coordinating this historic effort to create a Digital Public Library of America and to fulfill the vision of an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that draws on the nation’s living heritage to educate, inform and empower everyone in this and future generations,” said Doron Weber, Vice President at the Sloan Foundation. “The Berkman Center’s impressive depth of research on the Internet makes it an ideal leader for the planning program. We hope to emerge with a concrete workplan and a governance structure that represents the consensus of the country’s libraries, universities, archives and museums for moving forward together with a shared vision.”

Planning activities will be guided by a Steering Committee of library and foundation leaders, which promises to announce a full slate of activities in early 2011.  The Committee plans to bring together representatives from the educational community, public and research libraries, cultural organizations, state and local government, publishers, authors, and private industry in a series of meetings and workshops to examine strategies for improving public access to comprehensive online resources.

One meeting is already in the works: David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States of America, has offered to host a plenary meeting that will assemble stakeholders in early summer 2011.  Ferriero said, “It is exciting to contemplate a future where the cultural heritage of our country is available at your fingertips.  It is, therefore, important to bring together all interested parties to create a vision of that future.“ Three major federal cultural institutions — Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian Institution — are already discussing a collaborative effort to build and make accessible a digital collection of materials from their collections.

In addition to the plenary meeting, an intensive slate of workshops will be held, running in five parallel tracks — legal, content, technical, financial and governance — to build consensus for next steps in each area.

Steering Committee members include:

Paul Courant, Harold T. Shapiro Professor of Public Policy and Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan
Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the Harvard University Library
Charles Henry, President of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)
Brewster Kahle, Founder of the Internet Archive
Michael A. Keller, Ida M. Green University Librarian, Director of Academic Information Resources at Stanford University
Carl Malamud, President, Public.Resource.Org
Deanna Marcum, Associate Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress
Maura Marx, Berkman Center Fellow and Executive Director, Knowledge Commons
Jerome McGann, John Stewart Bryan University Professor at the University of Virginia
Donald Waters, Program Officer for Scholarly Communications and Information Technology at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Doron Weber, Vice President, Programs at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
John Palfrey, Faculty Co-Director at the Berkman Center; Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean of Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School, will lead the Steering Committee.

Palfrey commented, “There is great promise in the digital future for libraries, but we need to work in coordinated fashion across many institutions to shape it in a way that is in the public interest. We are excited about creating a big tent in which many leaders can work together to create the design for a Digital Public Library of America.”

About the Berkman Center for Internet & Society
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. Founded in 1997, through a generous gift from Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman, the Center is home to an ever-growing community of faculty, fellows, staff, and affiliates working on projects that span the broad range of intersections between cyberspace, technology, and society. More information can be found at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu.

About the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, founded in 1934, makes grants for research and education in science, technology and economic performance. A major goal of Sloan’s program in digital information technology and the dissemination of knowledge is to foster public access to information and knowledge for the benefit of all. More information can be found at http://sloan.org

Contact
Amar Ashar
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu

The report won’t be out until after the meeting this May, but Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections should be exciting and timely reading for everyone involved in supporting cultural heritage collections.

News Release: Flagler receives prestigious ‘Save America’s Treasures’ grant (December 17, 2009)

St. Augustine, Fla. — Flagler College recently received a prestigious grant to help preserve drawings from the architects of the treasured National Historic Landmark Hotel Ponce de Leon.

Flagler College President William T. Abare Jr., Ed.D., announced receipt of the prestigious “Save America’s Treasures” (SAT) grant administered through the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Saving St. Augustine’s Architectural Treasures project, a partnership with the University of Florida Libraries, will conserve and digitally preserve an irreplaceable collection of the earliest architectural drawings of John Carrère (1858-1911) and Thomas Hastings (1860-1929), the designers of Henry Flagler’s famed Hotel Ponce de Leon.

Carrère and Hastings were two of the most significant American architects of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Their firm designed more than 600 buildings, including the New York Public Library (1902-11) and the House and Senate office buildings in Washington, D.C. (1908-09). According to Charles D. Warren, co-author of “Carrère & Hastings Architects,” they were “innovators in both technology and aesthetics.”

Regrettably, as Janet Parks, Curator of Drawings & Archives, Columbia University, said: “Most of the archive of [their] office was destroyed in the 1920’s.” The St. Augustine collection offers significant potential to yield unique information with enduring value.

Comprised of 267 original, fragile drawings on cloth, silk and paper, as well as blueprints and copies, the collection is the largest known archives documenting the firm’s earliest work. Among these fragile drawings are the blueprints for their first commission, the Hotel Ponce de Leon, which launched their careers.

This is Flagler College’s second largest award at $49,562 and was one of only five conservation projects funded nationwide. The funds will assist with the preservation of these recently rediscovered records and make them accessible to researchers.

Additional conservation projects include Friendly Association Papers, Haverford, Penn.; Paley Center for Media, New York; “This I Believe” Collection, Medford, Mass.; and William Still Collection, Philadelphia.

Original news release on Flagler College’s website.

The UF Digital Collections (UFDC) now have fully functioning online metadata editing!

It’s only been a few weeks since the UFDC self-submittal tool for  faculty to use to load materials to the Institutional Repository and for UFDC partners to use to load materials to their collections went live and now we’ve already added  full online metadata editing.  Mark Sullivan, the programmer who created the internal metadata editor originally as a desktop tool and who has now made the online tool with the same and even enhanced functionality over the desktop tool, released the online metadata editing earlier this week. We’ve been keeping the release quiet for a few days to check for bugs and problems internally before sharing the good news with everyone.We haven’t found any bugs and we’ve found a whole lot to love, so we’re pleased to be able to share the news of the online metadata editing tool with everyone!

See the screenshots below to see how it works (annotations coming soon), or UF faculty, UF researchers, and UFDC partners can sign up for  myUFDC accounts to begin loading and editing.

Online Metadata Editing (some of the preview views run across in my Firefox for the screenshots, but it looks great in use)

The Pennsylvania State University Libraries seeks a Digital Collections Curator to play a key role in the further development of our electronic content stewardship and publishing programs. These programs will be developed through a strategic and dynamic partnership between the Penn State Libraries and Information Technology Services (ITS). The Digital Collections Curator will lead the Libraries’ efforts to develop and plan user focused services that enable the effective creation, sharing, discovery, and use of digital content in support of research, teaching and learning. The Digital Collections Curator collaborates extensively with colleagues throughout the Libraries and ITS to achieve his or her objectives. The Curator will report to the Assistant Dean for Scholarly Communications who also oversees Digitization and Preservation, Scholarly Communications Services, and the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing. This is a tenure track appointment.

Responsibilities will include:

• Lead development of an inclusive, user-focused agenda for digital scholarly content stewardship.
• Investigate, recommend, and develop plans for user-focused and repository- based services to effectively manage the sustainable creation, collection and distribution of high-value digital scholarly content.
• Manage a broad set of existing digital collections and repository content, including: reformatted materials (images, books, newspapers, manuscripts, etc), publication related content (journals, conference proceedings, monographs, hybrid formats, post & pre-prints, working papers, etc), as well as the potential and emerging needs for data collections in a wide array of disciplines.
• Research and develop in-depth knowledge of new and emerging technologies, relevant national standards, and best practices, in order to assess and promote their integration into local operations as appropriate.
• Serve on standing working groups and committees related to web functionality and digital content creation and management.
• Communicate effectively with internal stakeholders in the areas of collections & public services, technical services, information technologies, and scholarly communications.
• Promote and report on Penn State’s activities through conference and workshop presentations, written publications
• Represent Penn State in relevant professional contexts and engage with national and consortial peers to identify and/or carry out mutually beneficial partnerships.

Requirements:

• Master’s degree in library and/or information science, or advanced degree in relevant academic field.
• Should have 3 years work related to the creation, management, and provision of electronic data resources in a higher education environment.
• Should demonstrate strong organizational and/or process management abilities.
• Should demonstrate familiarity with developing trends in higher education information management, including, but not limited to: Cyberinfrastructure development, data curation and preservation, electronic publishing, digital scholarship and non-traditional scholarly communications
• Ability to lead and work collaboratively in an evolving and decentralized environment.
• Commitment to user focused design, development, and service provision.
• Communication skills that will support work with both technology experts and novices.
• Facility with common standards and practices in contemporary digital library management. Experience with XSLT, Perl or other scripting languages, and/or experience with major repository platforms is desirable.

Environment:

As an outcome of joint strategic planning, the Penn State Libraries and Information Technology Services (ITS) are collaborating in the development of this Content Stewardship program to meet extant and emerging digital content and asset management needs in areas such as digital library collections, scholarly communications, electronic record archiving, and e-science/e-research. Building on existing services and infrastructure, this program will put in place a cohesive and extensible suite of data access, management, and preservation services that will support the creation and distribution of digital scholarship. Additionally, the Penn State Press and the Libraries jointly operate the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing to explore and incubate publishing services that support the Penn State community.

Penn State, a land-grant institution, is a member of the CIC (Big 10) academic consortium. The Penn State University Libraries currently rank 8th in North America among private and public research universities, based on Association for Research Libraries Investment Index. The Libraries hold membership in ARL, OCLC, CRL and the Digital Library Federation. Collections exceed 6.5 million volumes, including more than 68,000 current serial subscriptions.

The University Libraries are located at University Park and 23 other campuses throughout Pennsylvania, with approximately 6,000 faculty and 42,000 students at University Park, and more than 82,000 students system wide. The University Park campus is set in the State College metropolitan area, a university town located in the heart of central Pennsylvania. State College offers a vibrant community with outstanding recreational facilities, a low crime rate, and excellent public schools. The campus is within a half-day drive to Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City and Pittsburgh. For more information, please visit http://www.libraries.psu.edu and http://www.cbicc.org/

Application Instructions:

Send a letter of application, resume, and the names and contact information of three references to Search Committee, The Pennsylvania State University, Box DCC-PSUA, 511 Paterno Library, University Park, PA 16802, via email to lhrsearches@psulias.psu.edu, or fax to 814-863-5592. Review of applications will begin March 2, 2009 and continue until the position is filled.

Penn State is committed to affirmative action, equal opportunity, and the diversity of its workforce.