Digital Library Center Blog | UF

I’ve stolen the title of this post from Shawn Rider’s article “Why Nintendo Gets It” because the title explains the whole point of this post and because of the parallels between Google and Nintendo. Nintendo gets it because they understand that games are about playability more so than technological innovation and because they understand that innovation can be  evolutionary or sustaining as well as disruptive. Evolutionary or sustaining innovations build incrementally on existing structures, but disruptive innovation changes the whole landscape.

The 8-bit NES to the Super Nintendo was an evolutionary or sustaining innovation, largely technological, but that technology enabled longer and deeper games. The current console gaming market changed in response to the Sony PlayStation 2 both because of the system and because so many had grown up with games. In the last console release, however, Nintendo showed how they got it by releasing the Wii and inviting all non-players and casual players to get into gaming and inviting existing players to learn to play in new ways. Nintendo used a disruptive technology to their advantage–investing in its development instead of in the best graphics card on the market and instead of pushing an ever-increasing polygon count, they focused on playability and leveraged it for an even greater market share and for a community of Nintendo followers.

Google announced yesterday that they’re scanning microfilm to digitize historical newspapers, which is just the latest of their work to get more content online. This could be seen as an evolutionary innovation, where Google has digitized books and now they’re working on newspapers. However, Google gets it because they make interoperable and open content. Google is digitizing whatever it can and indexing whatever it can to ensure that it has access to the most data for use by Google’s search engine and for Google’s paid services like advertisements. Google isn’t simply adding newspapers into this collective vat of information, though. Google has shown time and again that they’re adding and indexing content so that it can be faceted–for searching only by news or only by places with mapped locations–and that they’re allowing those facets to be connected together in context.

Placing content in context is an enormous task, especially when context means historical, spatial, cultural, social, and personal. Some of the existing components in traditional library records (if complete) can be extended and mined to create a basic infrastructure that can then be further enhanced, mined, and adapted for further use and this is what Google has done. This enhancement, mining, and adaptation are also what UF’s Digital Library Center has been doing for several years beginning in earnest with the Ephemeral Cities Project. The Ephemeral Cities Project began before I came to the Digital Library Center and its goals are only now beginning to be fully realized with the Map It! feature for items in the UF Digital Collections, enabled through KML becoming an Open Standard in 2008 leading to our use of the Google Maps API.

We’ve also been digitizing newspapers for the Florida Digital Newspaper Library and the Caribbean Newspaper Imaging Project, the same reasons Google is interested. Newspapers tell the stories of history in the making, connecting the current social and personal concerns to the larger cultural and historical movements and eras, and newspapers tell the local stories of their areas, along with the larger national and international stories of their days.

What surprises me most is not that Google gets it in terms of seeing the immediate need and the long tail future goals for massive amounts of interoperable data, but that there are so many people who got it and were working toward so much earlier than I’d have expected. In UF’s Digital Library Center alone, Director Erich Kesse first proposed the Ephemeral Cities Project in 2003 and Mark Sullivan (our wonderful programmer at the time who’s still with us as well) began developing the digital library software for users to access such data and for the digital library staff to most easily create the necessary metadata within the digitization process. I can’t say that I got it in 2003, but I’m glad so many others did so that the infrastructure is in place to help support the wonderful projects to come.

I’m also extremely happy that Google gets it in particular because they have the business infrastructure to make the incredibly tedious and expensive work of digitizing materials in context affordable and sustainable through ads which have a return on investment value. Universities return investments from society in the form of knowledge, a more educated and capable workforce and community, and through the infrastructure necessary for other advances, but in difficult economic times the investment itself becomes more difficult. Luckily for all, Google gets the full context of their investment and knows that digitized materials have more value when they can easily be used, thus ensuring greater usage. The smart business plan for Google requires keeping materials open and usable by as many others as possible,making it good business for Google to do what’s already in the public interest. Of course, Google is facing monopolistic concerns and smart business models can go bad with changes in leadership, so its smartest public institutions like universities to continue getting it and ensuring that the digital revolution brings as many benefits as it can for accessing, using, and understanding information while building the infrastructure for the next innovations be they sustaining or disruptive.

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 Scholarly Technology Group at Brown is looking for the a research programmer  They’re looking for a creative, technically sophisticated individual who will use computer methods and structured data to augment the research process for humanities scholars. For more information: www.stg.brown.edu or elli_mylonas@brown.edu. To apply, go to the Brown job website, http://careers.brown.edu, and look for job B01052. The position sounds wonderful, and Brown has so many wonderful research projects and researchers - this looks like a great position for current and future work given the many project possibilities and the potential for growth!

One of Zotero’s tag lines, “citation management is only the beginning,” explains its current and coming abilities rather well. The most needed component for Zotero’s widespread adopting is almost officially here with Sync Preview’s online backup and synchronization of each user’s Zotero library. Zotero 1.5 includes other improvements as well, but the most important first changes are the ability to save online and synchronize from multiple computers. That strong, centralized core offers so many amazing possibilities, especially given Zotero’s already impressive abilities.

Applications like this are exactly what web-top, Web 2.0, innovative/emerging scholarly style technologies should be. While Zotero’s Sync Preview is still under development, it’s exciting to see it coming along and so close to being here as a feature!

Now that the UF Digital Collections have worked through a bit more of the backlog–and gotten 2 million pages online!–I’ve started catching up on reading. Many great new (or maybe new-ish) ideas are being realized with sites like Foodsville, which repurposes digitized historical cookbooks to create a cookbook community and herald in innovations in printing, Interactive Relighting technologies that bring new information to life (which is amazing for so many historical documents!), Mscape keeps getting better, IBM and Linden Labs are moving toward virtual world interoperability (which is especially great with Google’s new 3D chat), and Google’s Map Maker has been out for awhile now but it’s also worth mentioning. Even with all of these and so many other new and improving technologies (I *heart* R&D!), the more exciting change, to me, is the shift where more and more people, companies, and entities are starting to “get” the information age.

“Getting it,” of course includes that more people have access, but it also means that more people understand the changes from that information and technology. A recent IBM news release explains it rather well in a single sentence “Data has become the new currency in today’s information economy.” For libraries and other non-profit information holders, this is critical. Too many areas of the commons–libraries, museums, education–have been trapped in a funding nightmare with limited public funds (and not wanting to tax the public they serve) and the lack of a “product” to sell.

The whole point of a “commons” is that it’s for everyone–it’s a public good, like a city park. The problem has always been how to support something that benefits everyone with the least cost to everyone and this is especially difficult when the work is invisible (which non-profits so often try to do–making their work hidden to better showcase their services and contents). In the information age, data has value as a public good and as a source to be mined, coallated, repurposed, and reconfigured into other services and products. As more people “get it”, funding should be available that doesn’t “buy” pubilc goods, but that pays to support it and to use it for other purposes. For instance, a library could digitize materials as funding permits, but then a company could cover the costs of digitizing materials and then return the materials to a library to be openly accessible on the library site and the company could recoup their costs by presenting the newly “acquired” data within an existing service, compiling the new materials within a larger analytical data set, or many other possibilities and then reselling that service as a new or improved service–made possible by improvements in finding, collecting, and using information. We’ve heard “Information Age” and “Internet Age” but the real information age is still gaining momentum and I’m anxiously awaiting what we can really do when we teach our information to dance.

(Of course, there’s a lot of work to go and that’s exciting as well, especially with items that don’t exist online–Googling finds zero results, Worldcat has nothing–from projects like the Digital Library of the Caribbean. There’s so much more to gather, and all the while we get to refine our methods. The real information age means more available to learn, new ways to learn, and an infinitely expanding horizon for playing with information!)