Digital Library Center Blog | UF

News

The W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group (http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/) has been chartered from May 2010 through August 2011 to prepare a series of reports on the existing and potential use of Linked Data technology for publishing library data. The group is currently preparing:

A report which consists of

• “Benefits”
• “Vocabularies and Datasets”
• “Relevant Technologies”
• “Implementation challenges”
• “Recommendations”
• “Use Cases”, a survey report describing existing projects
• “Vocabularies and Datasets”, a survey report

The group invites comments from interested members of the public.

Feedback can sent as comments to individual sections posted on the dedicated blog or by email to a public mailing list (public-lld@w3.org, archived at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lld/ ) using descriptive subject lines such as ‘[COMMENTS] “Benefits” section’

Comments will be especially welcome in the next four weeks (through 22 July). Reviewers should note that as with Wikipedia, the text may be revised and corrected by its editors in response to comments at any time, but that earlier versions of a document may be viewed by clicking on the History tab.

It is anticipated that the three reports will be published in final form by 31 August.

The Data Documentation Initiative 3 (DDI 3) standard is a simply fabulous and full standard for metadata (data about data) as well as for the data contents, making it a full payload standard.

DDI 3 is such an exciting standard because it allows for the possibility of true and full computational support for data harmonization and for really working with longitudinal data. It’s the type of data standard I’d been waiting for because it gets it. Data standards need to be able to support documenting, containing, expressing, and computing (analysis, harmonization, limitations on disclosure, everything we now do with less than ideal systems and methods). DDI 3 does this and that’s why groups like ICPSR are already using it.  DDI 3 is already on its way to becoming ubiquitous, but more tools for it are needed.

News of others using and supporting DDI 3 is always good. Thus, it’s wonderful news that Colectica has been awarded an NIH Grant for DDI 3-based data extraction tools. From the Colectica website:

The award is a Phase I grant that provides supplemental support of Algenta’s research on an “Open Standards-Based Data Extraction Web Tool for Complex Longitudinal Datasets”. This Phase I feasibility study aims to analyze to data preparation and metadata creation workflow needed to prepare a study for online data extraction, to validate the use of the Data Documentation Initiative’s DDI 3 standard for the basis of such a tool, and to create prototype web-based data extraction software. While the focus is on longitudinal surveys, the proposed system would also handle cross-sectional, time-series, and non-repeated studies. The aim is to improve research methodologies through a simplification of the process used for discovering, retrieving, and analyzing data relevant to a researcher’s investigation and to improve data citations, aiding in reproducible research. The research includes consultation with researchers from ICPSR at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and the Mid-Life in the United States Longitudinal Study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

?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.

Awesome news from CDL, so reposting below. The original is here.

Prototype interface released for searching archival authority records

CDL’s Digital Special Collections program is pleased to announce the public release of a draft prototype historical access system for the Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC).

SNAC is a two-year research project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, that is creating a set of authority records by extracting information from archival finding aids and enhancing it with other sources.  The project uses the new standard Encoded Archival Context—Corporate bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF).  Data for the research is being provided by the Online Archive of California, among several other sources.  Learn more about SNAC.

CDL’s role in the SNAC project is to build a prototype interface that links the authority records in a “historical social network.”  Such a system has the potential to significantly expand access to a range of humanities resources, as well as our knowledge of the connections between people, families, and organizations over time.

The user prototype is being developed using an iterative approach.  This first release of the system provides the most basic functionality required for researchers to imagine how they might interact with archival authority records.  Development of further iterations of the prototype will continue through Spring 2012.

Tell us what you think!

We welcome your suggestions on both the design of the prototype interface and the processing of the data.  What features do you think would be most useful for researchers?

Direct access to the prototype system, a description of project work to date, and a link to the feedback forum can be found at http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/prototype.html.

From the SNAC website:

Leveraging the new standard Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF), the SNAC Project will use digital technology to “unlock” descriptions of people from finding aids and link them together in exciting new ways. We will:

• Create efficient open-source tools that allow archivists to separate the process of describing people from that of records.
• Create a prototype integrated historical resource and access system that will link descriptions of people to one another and to descriptions of resources in archives, libraries and museums; online biographical and historical databases; and other diverse resources.

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.

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!

The US National Archives announced earlier this week that they will be contributing materials to the World Digital Library! This is not unexpected, but still wonderful news because it will place so many resources together in a convenient interface, and each time one collection is contributed to another mismatches and other conflicts occur that result in better interoperability.