Digital Library Center Blog | UF

This is exciting news, as are all stories on digital humanities, digital scholarship, and digital innovation centers, labs, institutes and the like because these entities provide a conceptual space (and sometimes this is located in an incredibly useful physical space) to support new forms of scholarship and new ways to increase impact with existing forms of scholarship. These entities are critical to connecting research with the public and public good. Congrats to UNC!

The news story copied below is  from here.

The American Council of Learned Societies invites application for the seventh annual competition of the Digital Innovation Fellowships.

This program supports digitally based research projects in all disciplines of the humanities and humanities-related social sciences.  It is hoped that projects of successful applicants will help advance digital humanistic scholarship by broadening understanding of its nature and exemplifying the robust infrastructure necessary for creating such works.

ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowships are intended to support an academic year dedicated to work on a major scholarly project that takes a digital form. Projects may:

• Address a consequential scholarly question through new research methods, new ways of representing the knowledge produced by research, or both;
• Create new digital research resources;
• Increase the scholarly utility of existing digital resources by developing new means of aggregating, navigating, searching, or analyzing those resources;
• Propose to analyze and reflect upon the new forms of knowledge creation and representation made possible by the digital transformation of scholarship.

ACLS will award up to eight ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowships in this competition year.

Stipends up to $60,000
Project costs up to $25,000

Deadline: September 28, 2011.

For more information visit: http://www.acls.org/programs/digital/

During the 2010-11 cycle, ACLS awarded nearly $15 million to 350 scholars based in the United States and abroad working in the humanities and related social sciences.  Visit the Fellows & Research section to view recent awardee listings and profiles.

American Council of Learned Societies
633 Third Avenue
New York, NY 10017
fellowships@acls.org

University of Florida Event on October 4, 2011, 6pm:
Jane McGonigal: Author and world-renowned gaming expert

Jane McGonigal, PhD, is an expert on alternate reality games and a renowned game developer. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. She has appeared at TED, the New Yorker, and the Web 2.0 summit, among others. Business Week has named her “one of the top 10 innovators to watch.” Watch Jane McGonigal on the Colbert Report.

Text above from the Bob Graham Center for Public Service and available directly from the Center website here.

McGonigal is famous for “I Love Bees” and so many other experiments with games, experimental games, ARGs, and more. Her work is extremely exciting for pushing the theoretical definitions of games/gaming and for real world implications and applications. There’s too much for me to cover here, and her website is the best place for more information: http://janemcgonigal.com/

(The categories on this blog post may be my worst labeling attempt to date. Her work informs everything and I don’t know exactly what her presentation will cover.  So, I just selected a variety of categories without any real logic for doing so.)

In Curator: the Museum Journal, Nancy Proctor has an excellent article on the Google Art Project and its implications for displaying, using, and exploring museum items and museums online. This is an important and useful article for its specific review of the Google Art Project and for the way it points toward future implications of imaging, interface, and interactivity for museum items and museums overall. The University of Florida Libraries explored related issues with the “Arts of Africa” project to digitize museum objects in the round. Many other museums and libraries are working on similar concerns related to artifactuality and technology, with interrelated implications for cultural heritage institutions.

The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture:

seeks to enrich the intellectual potential of our fields to inform understandings of an expanding array of visual practices as they are reshaped within digital culture, while also creating scholarly contexts for the use of digital media in film, media and visual studies.  By working with humanities centers, scholarly societies, and key library, archive, and university press partners, we are investigating and developing sustainable platforms for publishing interactive and rich media scholarship.

The Alliance has strategic partnerships with four archives (the Shoah Foundation, Critical Commons, the Hemispheric Institute’s Digital Video Library, and the Internet Archive) and three university presses (MIT, California and Duke). These  partners are providing the initial testing ground for the investigation of new publishing templates. Through working with the partners and disseminating the research and experimental methods and tools, the Alliance is working to better connect and integrate curated digital archives and scholarly publication by better enabling scholars to work with archival materials and to enable new forms of scholarship and new ways of doing scholarly work. “By creating an alliance between scholars, presses and archives, we will identify broad types of emerging scholarly communication and produce working demonstration projects with each partner press to illustrate these types.”

MIT Press has now published one of the Alliance projects, Learning from YouTube, which is available online. Read more about it on the Alliance blog, which is here.

The University of Florida Libraries are now partner libraries in an innovative and extremely exciting new in-library eBook lending program. The original news release from Internet Archive is copied below and it explains the program.

In-Library eBook Lending Program Launched

Internet Archive and Library Partners Develop Joint Collection of 80,000+ eBooks To Extend Traditional In-Library Lending Model

San Francisco, CA – Today, a group of libraries led by the Internet Archive announced a new, cooperative 80,000+ eBook lending collection of mostly 20th century books on OpenLibrary.org, a site where it’s already possible to read over 1 million eBooks without restriction. During a library visit, patrons with an OpenLibrary.org account can borrow any of these lendable eBooks using laptops, reading devices or library computers. This new twist on the traditional lending model could increase eBook use and revenue for publishers.

“As readers go digital, so are our libraries,” said Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive. “It’s fabulous to work with such a great group of 150 forward-thinking libraries.” (See the list of participating libraries below.)

This new digital lending system will enable patrons of participating libraries to read books in a web browser. “In Silicon Valley, iPads and other reading devices are hugely popular. Our partnership with the Internet Archive and OpenLibrary.org is crucial to achieving our mission – to meet the reading needs of our library visitors and our community,” said Linda Crowe, Executive Director of the Peninsula Library System.

A recent survey of libraries across North America was conducted by Unisphere Research and Information Today, Inc. (ITI). It reported that of the 1,201 libraries canvassed, 73% are seeing increased demand for digital resources with 67% reporting increased demand for wireless access and 62% seeing a surge in demand for web access.

American libraries spend $3-4 billion each year on publishers’ products. “I’m not suggesting we spend less, I am suggesting we spend smarter by buying and lending more eBooks,” asserts Kahle. He is also encouraging libraries worldwide to join in the expansion of this pool of purchased and digitized eBooks so their patrons can borrow from this larger collection.

How it Works

Any OpenLibrary.org account holder can borrow up to 5 eBooks at a time, for up to 2 weeks. Books can only be borrowed by one person at a time. People can choose to borrow either an in-browser version (viewed using the Internet Archive’s BookReader web application), or a PDF or ePub version, managed by the free Adobe Digital Editions software. This new technology follows the lead of the Google eBookstore, which sells books from many publishers to be read using Google’s books-in-browsers technology. Readers can use laptops, library computers and tablet devices including the iPad.

What Participating Libraries Are Saying
The reasons for joining the initiative vary from library to library. Judy Russell, Dean of University Libraries at the University of Florida, said, “We have hundreds of books that are too brittle to circulate. This digitize-and-lend system allows us to provide access to these older books without endangering the physical copy.”

Digital lending also offers wider access to one-of-a-kind or rare books on specific topics such as family histories – popular with genealogists. This pooled collection will enable libraries like the Boston Public Library and the Allen County Public Library in Indiana to share their materials with genealogists around the state, the country and the world.

“Genealogists are some of our most enthusiastic users, and the Boston Public Library holds some genealogy books that exist nowhere else,” said Amy E. Ryan, President of the Boston Public Library. “This lending system allows our users to search for names in these books for the first time, and allows us to efficiently lend some of these books to visitors at distant libraries.”

“Reciprocal sharing of genealogy resources is crucial to family history research. The Allen County Public Library owns the largest public genealogy collection in the country, and we want to make our resources available to as many people as possible. Our partnership in this initiative offers us a chance to reach a wider audience,” said Jeffrey Krull, director of the Allen County Public Library.

Publishers selling their eBooks to participating libraries include Cursor and OR Books. Books purchased will be lent to readers as well as being digitally preserved for the long-term. This continues the traditional relationship and services offered by publishers and libraries.

“Libraries are our allies in creating the best range of discovery mechanisms for writers and readers—enabling open and browser-based lending through the Internet Archive means more books for more readers, and we’re thrilled to do our part in achieving that,” said Richard Nash, founder of Cursor.

John Oakes, founder of OR Books said, “We’re always on the lookout for innovative solutions to solve the conundrum of contemporary publishing, and we are excited to learn about the Internet Archive’s latest project. For us, it’s a way to extend our reach to the crucial library market. We look forward to the results. ”

For More Information
Here are a few eBooks that are only available to people in participating libraries.
Libraries interested in partnering in this program should contact: info@archive.org.
To use this service, please visit a participating library: www.openlibrary.org.
For a list of participating libraries, see below.

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List of Participating Libraries

Aboite Branch Library, Allen County Public Library
Dupont Branch Library, Allen County Public Library
Georgetown Branch Library, Allen County Public Library
Grabill Branch Library, Allen County Public Library
Hessen Cassel Branch Library, Allen County Public Library
Little Turtle Branch Library, Allen County Public Library
Main Library, Allen County Public Library
Monroeville Branch Library, Allen County Public Library
New Haven Branch Library, Allen County Public Library
Pontiac Branch Library, Allen County Public Library
Shawnee Branch Library, Allen County Public Library
Tecumseh Branch Library, Allen County Public Library
Waynedale Branch Library, Allen County Public Library
Woodburn Branch Library, Allen County Public Library
Adams Street Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Brighton Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Charlestown Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Codman Square Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Connolly Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Dudley Branch Library, Boston Public Library
East Boston Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Egleston Square Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Faneuil Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Fields Corner Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Grove Hall Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Honan-Allston Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Hyde Park Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Jamaica Plain Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Lower Mills Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Mattapan Branch Library, Boston Public Library
North End Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Orient Heights Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Parker Hill Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Roslindale Branch Library, Boston Public Library
South Boston Branch Library, Boston Public Library
South End Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Uphams Corner Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Washington Village Branch Library, Boston Public Library
West End Branch Library, Boston Public Library
West Roxbury Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Internet Archive
MBLWHOI Library, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Atherton Library, Atherton, California
Bay Shore Library, Daly City, California
Belmont Library, Belmont, California
Brisbane Library, Brisbane, California
Burlingame Public Library, Burlingame, California
Burlingame Library Easton Branch, Burlingame, California
Cañada College Library, Redwood City, California
College of San Mateo Library, San Mateo, California
East Palo Alto Library, East Palo Alto, California
Fair Oaks Library, Redwood City, California
Foster City Library, Foster City, California
Grand Avenue Branch Library, South San Francisco, California
Half Moon Bay Library, Half Moon Bay, California
Hillsdale Branch Library, San Mateo, California
John Daly Library, Daly City, California
Marina Public Library, San Mateo, California
Menlo Park Library, Menlo Park, California
Menlo Park Library Belle Haven Branch, Menlo Park, California
Millbrae Library, Millbrae, California
Pacifica Sanchez Library, Pacifica, California
Pacifica Sharp Park Library, Pacifica, California
Portola Valley Library, Portola Valley, California
Redwood City Public Library, Redwood City, California
Redwood Shores Branch Library, Redwood City, California
San Bruno Library, San Bruno, California
San Carlos Library, San Carlos, California
San Mateo Public Library, San Mateo, California
Schaberg Library, Redwood City, California
Serramonte Main Library, Daly City, California
Skyline College Library, San Bruno, California
South San Francisco Public Library, South San Francisco, California
Westlake Library, Daly City, California
Woodside Library, Woodside, California
Anza Branch, San Francisco Public Library
Bayview/Anna E. Waden Branch, San Francisco Public Library
Bernal Heights, San Francisco Public Library
Chinatown/Him Mark Lai Branch, San Francisco Public Library
Eureka Valley/Harvey Milk Memorial Branch, San Francisco Public Library
Excelsior, San Francisco Public Library
Glen Park Branch, San Francisco Public Library
Golden Gate Valley Branch, San Francisco Public Library
Ingleside Branch, San Francisco Public Library
San Francisco Public Library, Main
Marina, San Francisco Public Library
Merced Branch Library, San Francisco Public Library
Mission, San Francisco Public Library
Mission Bay, San Francisco Public Library
Noe Valley/Sally Brunn Branch, San Francisco Public Library
North Beach Branch, San Francisco Public Library
Ocean View, San Francisco Public Library
Ortega, San Francisco Public Library
Park Branch, San Francisco Public Library
Parkside, San Francisco Public Library
Portola Branch, San Francisco Public Library
Potrero Branch, San Francisco Public Library
Presidio Branch, San Francisco Public Library
Richmond/Senator Milton Marks Branch, San Francisco Public Library
Sunset, San Francisco Public Library
Visitacion Valley, San Francisco Public Library
West Portal, San Francisco Public Library
Western Addition, San Francisco Public Library
The Urban School of San Francisco
Augustana Campus Library, University of Alberta
Bibliothèque Saint-Jean (BSJ), University of Alberta
Cameron Library, University of Alberta
Herbert T. Coutts (Education & Physical Education) Library, University of Alberta
Rutherford Library, University of Alberta
John A. Weir Memorial Law Library, University of Alberta
John W. Scott Health Sciences Library, University of Alberta
Winspear Business Reference Library, University of Alberta
Architecture and Fine Arts Library, University of Florida
Education Library, University of Florida
Health Science Center Library, University of Florida
Borland Library, University of Florida
Veterinary Medicine Reading Room, University of Florida
Allen H. Neuharth Journalism and Communications Library, University of Florida
Library West, University of Florida
Marston Science Library, University of Florida
Mead Library, University of Florida
Music Library, University of Florida
Smathers Library (East), University of Florida
Robarts Library, University of Toronto
Gerstein Science Information Centre, University of Toronto
Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria University
E J Pratt Library, Victoria University
Emmanuel College Library, Victoria University

We’ve frequently heard requests from internal users and patrons for a flipbook style view. In researching options, the Gnubook’s javascript-based page turner looked best and the Library of Congress came out with a clean implementation in October that was easy to emulate. Mark Sullivan, programmer for SobekCM, reviewed it and added the view in under a day. The new view is enabled within SobekCM so all collections, including the UF Digital Collections and the Digital Library of the Caribbean, have it enabled.

The flipbook view is active for the entire Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Digital Collection and this is an example: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00089012/00001/pageturner

The view is accessible from the “page turner” tab on all Baldwin items. This page shows the tab: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00088831/00001
This is the direct link format for the page turner: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00088831/00001/pageturner Notice the wonderfully simplified URL structure remains even with the newly added feature.

The flipbook view will expand to other collections later, but it was most requested for and the best fit for the Baldwin books (because of the haptic nature of children’s books, beautiful images, and lack of small print overall). This sort of view is also very important to ensure that SobekCM easily supports the next generation of touch interfaces.

Not only does the new interface for the Florida Aerial Photography Digital Collection support searching using the Google Map interface (complete with drag and drop pins for search refinement), it also supports searching by address. If that weren’t enough, Mark Sullivan (UF Digital Collections and Digital Library Center Programmer) now has the location circled on the images.

Drawing something on the images may seem easy, but it isn’t. Drawing on a normal image is easy – image size, where to draw, calculate, etc.  The images in the Florida Aerial Photography Digital Collection are being delivered by a JPEG2000 server. The server allows people to select the size of the image, the zoom level, and the area to focus on. Drawing on these images thus requires interaction with the JPEG2000 server to know the size and location on the image in all permutations. This is impressive alone, and made all the more impressive by having it along with so many other improvements, all of which work seamlessly together.

Other improvements include enhancements to the left-side navigation bar. It now includes a list of the specific resulting tiles by area, a thumbnail image of the complete tile for use in re-positioning on the tile, and a small Google Map for use in positioning in context.

Try out the new interface for the Florida Aerial Photography Digital Collection using the map search here!

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