TripNotes

9/24/09 – links to presentations to come

Sponsored by the Sun Microsystems (soon to be Oracle) Preservation and Archives Special Interest Group (PASIG – http://www.sun-pasig.ning.com/)

Sun PASIG Focus and Global Trends – Art Pasquinelli, Sun Microsystems

• Need an architectural view (systems) of our campus
• Issues
  • IT and economic
  • Disaster recovery and business continuity
  • Power cost, new technology, scalability
• Don’t know when data will become valuable and needed
• Project Wonderland – 100% Java and open source toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds.  Immersive virtual world like Second Life, but much more secure.
• “All About Repositories” Webinar Series (http://www.education-webevents.com/) in Fall 2009 designed to provide overviews of best practices, technology updates, and key trend analyses for academic resources directors, IT managers, digital librarians, repository managers and developers, and curators.

Sun in Education – Brian Perkins and Lisa Hosay, Sun Microsystems

• Online articles and participate in online forums – http://sun.com/innercircle
• Sun Academic Excellence Grants – can get equipment for free; just need to apply (http://www.sun.com/solutions/landing/industry/education/aeg.xml)
• Academic Intitiative – free online curriculum for certification (http://www.sun.com/solutions/landing/industry/education/sai/index.jsp)
• EduSoft – Software programs for education (http://www.sun.com/solutions/landing/industry/education/edusoftware.xml)

Data Curation – Sayeed Choudury, Johns Hopkins University

• Primary Investigator on NSF DataNet Grant for Data Conservancy Project (http://www.cni.org/tfms/2009a.spring/CNI_Choudhury.pdf)
• Library becoming the center for data sets and for conversations
• You really need to move content in and out to understand content and systems, i.e. you need to do it to really understand
• What matters for the library in accepting data sets is that a community can’t handle the size of the set (opportunity for libraries)
• DuraCloud – intermediary between cloud storage companies and libraries (they negotiate what I need with cloud companies)
• Faculty point of view is that releasing data is publication – re-invention of tenure process and requirements needed
• Really large data sets are not appropriate to an institutional repository (IR) but some smaller ones quite appropriate
• Need data but also services to run against the data [in an IR]
• Digital Research and Curation Center at JHU – embedded R&D group in JHU Library
• Conversation needed on what is the nature of collections in this day and age

Institutional Updates

Madeline Law – UMD Law Library

• Digitizing the alumni magazine
• Copyright clearance is an issue for items to deposit in the IR
• Staff/time to do the work is an issue

Steven Mandeville-Gamble – GWU Gelman Library

• Cultivating donors for money to digitize the collections they are donating
• Have received over $1 million through donations for digitizing collections
• Have also received $700,000 for a digitization lab and events space
• Will be digitizing collection of Middle Eastern books (received an IMDS grant)
• Partnering with GU to digitize their collection of books in this area including books from the Qatar campus
• Plan to expand the project into Middle East and Africa
  • Will be digitizing the Oliver (classical archeology/anthropology collection) and the Kiev (Judaica) collections

Wally Grotophorst (channeled by Cynthia Holt) – GMU

• Have our IR called MARS
• Challenges: Data asset management system; infrastructure
• Cynthia’s comments: Positive step forward is that Digital Systems & Programs and Collection Development & Preservation Departments working together on digitization; realization that both departments have a stake and a need to be involved in developing this area at GMU

Leslie Johnston – Library of Congress

• Issues – number of operations they support and the sheer scale
• Inventoried all staff computers for collections which could be archived
• Audience questions re: archival prep and formal evaluation of content for archived
  • They don’t have a content management system; which is a problem

?? – Georgetown

• Digitization program not very far along but expressed the desire for WRLC to play a lead in a consortial digitization program.
• Lene Palmer, as Chair of the WRLC Preservation Advisory Committee, responded that the committee has an interest in expanding their scope into digital preservation
• James Austin Director of IT for WRLC responded that this is a potential role for WRLC

Mike ? – UMD

• Working on auditing the integrity of data over time – how to automate?

Storage Product Overview and Archive & Information Management Trends
Raymond A. Clarke, Sun Microsystems

• Storing data is one thing; being able to retrieve and use it is quite another
• Problems with the multiple iterations of technology over time
• SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) created a Bridging Terminology document (http://www.snia.org/forums/dmf/knowledge/white_papers_and_reports/SNIA-DMF_Building-a-Terminology-Bridge_20090515.pdf) so that everyone can mutually understand terms in digitization
• Why does tape still make sense?  Lasts longer than digital media and the storage capacity has increased tremendously in recent years
• Open Storage
• DAS (Direct Access Storage), SAN (Storage Area Network), NAS (Network Access Storage), OSD, ISD
• More intelligence in the device itself
• Hard drives are much slower than servers, decreasing performance
  • SNIA – 100 year archive project?
  • Cloud computing as a solution (http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-28.pdf) [Cynthia’s note: Could WRLC host a cloud for the consortia?)

Reference Architectures for Repositories and Preservation Archiving
Keith Rajecki, Sun Microsystems

• Challenges
• Ingest
• Sustainability – cost
• Data integrity
• Cost
• Scalability
• Hardware
• Migrations
• People
• Software
• Access
• Bit rot (computing term used either to describe gradual decay of storage media or to facetiously describe the spontaneous degradation of a software program over time)
  • Value of reference architectures
  • Minimize cost, complexity, and deployment time
  • Flexibility to build performance, economy, or mixed archive repository
  • Fedora, Fedora/Drupal (Islandora), DSpace, EPrints, Duraspace (cloud), Ex Libris Rosetta, VTLS VITAL, SAF/WMS, Tessella Safety Deposit Box (SDB)
    • Virtualized Repository Appliance (great starting point)
    • Open repository appliance
    • Scale out
      • Sun’s Infinite Archive System Approach (next level)
      • Cloud computing is usually the second or third layer in preservation architecture

Tessella Overview
Mark Evans

• DIOSCURI
• SDB – Safety Deposit Box
• Contains policy info
• Contains factual info
• Technical registry - PRONOM
• OAIS (Open Archival Information System) – reference model includes “active preservation” framework

1. Ingest toolkit
2. Passive preservation

• Represents the AIP
• Configurable metadata schema
• Automated integrity check

1. Active preservation

• Characterization – What do I have in my archive?
• Preservation planning – guard against obsolescence
• Preservation processing – migration
• Primary configuration

1. Standalone archive
2. Black-box archive (web service API)
3. Active preservation plug-in (storage adapter; 3^rd party content storage)

• Characterisation
• Characterizes files: DROID (Digital Record Object Identification), JHOVE
• Embedded object extraction, e.g. picture on a page
• Record components, e.g. position of objects on a page
  • Projects Using Tessella Solutions
  • Planets – preservation planning project as an interoperability solution
  • KEEP – Keeping Emulation Environments Portable
  • JHU Data Conservancy project

Ex Libris Rosetta
Mark ?

• OAIS – basis for standardization of the underpinning and framework
• With digital preservation, there is an absolute dependency on technology
• Preservation System Qualities
  In Collecting
• Producer management
• Support for wide variety of sources and formats
• Allowing the system to be extended using deposit SDK
• Characterization

In Archiving

• Ensuring security – write once, no delete; auditing mechanism
• Ensure minimal dependency
• Ensure integrity
• Support for curatorial process

In Preserving

• Ensuring long-term viability by supporting migration policies using a preservation planning module which includes:
  • Risk analysis assessment process
  • Embedding of migration tools
  • Managing the migration process

In Access

• Ensuring persistency using persistent identifier tools
• Providing simple online access
• Support for dissemination copies with on the fly conversions
• Allowing integration with other library systems
  • Rule-based preservation system
  • Example of an implementation is the National Library of New Zealand INDIGO system
  • PrestoPRIME – A/V preservation innovation (http://www.prestoprime.org)
  • DigiTool
  • Classic tool built for access
  • Not a long-term preservation tool
  • Upgradable to Rosetta

Versatile
Ian Jobson

• Islandora
• Being developed by Mark Leggott at the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI)
• glue between Fedora and Drupal
• Integral part of the system, i.e. not standalone
• Drupal front-end
  • Changes/customization to Drupal doesn’t affect the back end (Fedora)

ShareStream
??

• Turnkey solution for institution’s rich media needs
• Provides the means to digitize, archive, preserve, manage, and deliver rich media within LMS’s, i.e. Blackboard, and other online learning destinations in a secure, auditable environment
• Integrates with LDAP
• Pass through credentials from one point
• Administers DRM needs of media
• Integrated with campus networks, ensuring availability in a secure, controlled environment wherever online teaching/learning research take place
• Connector to include federated search link to search in other repositories
• Works with AquaBrowser
• [Cynthia’s Note: Potential collaboration opportunity with ITU and other departments on campus]

Further Reading

SNIA Data Management Forum.  May 2009.  Building a terminology bridge: Guidelines to digital information retention and preservation practices in the datacenter.   Accessed September 25, 2009, at http://www.snia.org/forums/dmf/knowledge/white_papers_and_reports/SNIA-DMF_Building-a-Terminology-Bridge_20090515.pdf

Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access.  December 2008.  Sustaining the digital investment: Issues and challenges of economically sustainable digital preservation.  Accessed September 25, 2009, at http://brtf.sdsc.edu/biblio/BRTF_Interim_Report.pdf

Berman, Francine.  December 2008.  Got data? A guide to data preservation in the information age.  Communications of the ACM, 51(12): 50-56.  Accessed September 25, 2009, at ACM Digital Library http://portal.acm.org/

Armbrust, Michael, Armando Fox, Rean Griffith, Anthony Joseph, Randy Katz, Andrew Konwinski, Gunho Lee, David Patterson, Ariel Rabkin, Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia.  2009.  Above the clouds: A Berkeley view of cloud computing.  Accessed September 28, 2009, at http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-28.pdf

International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres (IAML) with International Musicological Society (IMS)

July 5-10, 2009
Amsterdam, Netherlands

Steve Gerber
Performing Arts Librarian and
Adjunct Professor of Music

I was invited to present a paper at this conference by the chair of IAML’s Libraries in Music Teaching Institutions branch. I was recommended by a Library of Congress librarian who had heard my talk at a regional gathering of music librarians in 2007. This was my first visit to Europe but, I hope, not the last. As the World War I pop song asks, “How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?”

This joint conference of approximately 500 music librarians and musicologists from around the world was held in the Amsterdam Conservatory and the Amsterdam Public Library, two new, adjacent, 8-story buildings in the former Port of Amsterdam area (portions of which are being demolished and redeveloped).

From the cornucopia of offerings, I attended sessions in English on the following mix of professional and scholarly topics:

• “Sirens of Pirate Bay” – M. Bossenbroek (National Library of the Netherlands). Overview of music and media copyright/licensing/digitization/ challenges in the European Commonwealth. The term “pirate” of course has multiple meanings, one of which is an allusion to various grass-roots anti-copyright ”pirate parties” in European politics- one of these actually won a parliamentary seat in Belgium’s last election.
• “Notation and Sound” (I attended two sessions out of four devoted to this theme) – papers by S. Durante (U Padua), J. Grier (U Western Ontario), M. Veselinovic-Hofman (U Belgrade), N. Cook (U Cambridge), and J Rink (U London) examining various aspects of a recent shift in scholarly/ontological emphasis from the score as musical object of study to the recording as musical object of study.
• “Antiquarian Music Collecting and Performing” – lecture and performance by eminent musicologist, collector of manuscripts/early editions, and harpsichordist Ton Koopman (Dir, Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra).|
• “RILM Update” – B D Mackenzie (CUNY). RILM (Repertoire International de la Literature Musicale) Abstracts is one of the four “R” international indexing projects overseen by IAML and IMS (the others are RIPM dealing with 19th-c periodicals, RISM dealing with mss & early imprints in SpCs, and RIdIM, dealing with iconography).
• “Carl Nielsen Edition: Before, During, After” – N. Krabbe (Copenhagen Royal Library). A case-study on the critical editing and publication of the collected works of Denmark’s major composer and cultural icon.
• “Training for Specialists and Non-Specialists” – papers by J. Valk (Rotterdam Public Library) on sheet-music reference instruction for non-musician reference librarians, by J. Diet (Bavarian State Library) on a new music librarianship program at Stuttgart Media University, and by J. Wagstaff (U Illinois) on distance-learning for music librarianship.
• “Libraries and Collections” – papers by E. Zinkevych (Tchaikovsky Academy of Kiev) and A Vitolo (Music Library and Museum of Bologna) on rediscovery of significant collections of music and books- 19th-c German by the former, Renaissance Italian by the latter.
• “Editorial Issues in 19th-Century Music” – papers by P. Gossett (U Chicago) on ornamentation in variant Rossini opera mss and by S. Filler (U Chicago) on dating and evaluating uncompleted orchestral works by Mahler.
• “Musical Adaptation” – papers by M Marin (U Madrid) and R Minor (SUNY Stony Brook) on keyboard versions of Haydn symphonies popular in Spain in the early 1800s and on cultural-semiotic aspects of the transformation of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger into parlor-piano arrangements for domestic consumption in 1907 Germany.
• “Hofmeister Past and Present” – panel featuring J Jaenecke (Berlin State Library), C Banks (U Aberdeen), and K Hamilton (Royal College of Music, London) discussing history and uses of the now-completed Hofmeister digitization project; Hofmeister was a music publisher who established and disseminated a meticulous monthly index of all sheet music published, week-by-week, in Germany from 1829 to 1900.
• “Sociology of Music Information Literacy” – papers by M Germer (U of the Arts, Philadelphia), O Bisbjerg (Aarhus State Library, Denmark), and T Cimarusti (Texas Tech) on psychology of knowledge acquisition, research communication with Web 2.0 tools, and results of a preliminary music-article-searching study comparing Google Scholar, PRIMO, RILM Abstracts, and print bibliographies.
• “The Music Librarian as a Pedagogical Resource” – this session featured my paper entitled DRIVE-BY, DROP-IN MUSICOLOGY: A LIAISON LIBRARIAN’S INITIATIVE (7 MB of illustrative slides available at http://mason.gmu.edu/~sgerber/iamlslides.ppt ), as well as presentations by D Baumann (U Zurich) and J Gottlieb (Juilliard School of Music). Approximately 50-60 people attended this session, and I received several compliments afterward, including the observation that what I presented was practical and immediately applicable (vs. abstract and theoretical).

Steve Gerber speaking in Haitink Hall of Amsterdam Conservatory

I did sit through one long and one short presentation in German, 99% of which blew by me incomprehensibly. I thought I knew German. I only know it when it sits still on the page and I have a good dictionary beside me.

I also participated in a IAML group tour, exhibit, and program on early printed music editions at U Amsterdam Library’s special collections division, and a backstage tour of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, a 125-year-old symphony hall with, allegedly, the most perfect musical acoustics in the world (ironically, I did not hear any music here). Musical events during the conference included an invigorating jazz concert by world-fusion trio Fugimundi and a tedious concert of post-modernist music and media by the avant-garde wind ensemble Orkest de Volharding.

I broke away from the official proceedings one afternoon to explore central Amsterdam on foot and by waterway, making a canal-boat excursion, a visit to Vincent Van Gogh Museum, and a visit to Anne Frankhuis and Museum. Took pictures of canals, houseboats, bridges, bicycles… etc.

I had the pleasure of attending Open Repositories 2009, which took place on May 18-21, 2009, in Atlanta, GA, at Georgia Tech University. The conference web site states “Open Repositories attempts to create an opportunity to explore the challenges faced by user communities and others in today’s world.”

The conference was more or less split into two halves, with the first two days being like your typical conference with two large rooms with presentations taking place simultaneously. The last two days were held in a different location with smaller rooms, where users of different software packages could focus on issues pertaining to their chosen platform – Dspace, Fedora, and EPrints. As this was a four day conference, I’ll hit what I consider the highlights.

The first morning started off interesting, with Cornell’s Simeon Warner discussing the need for Author IDs, which would enable authors to be linked to a unique identifier, instead of relying on their name as is the standard practice. This would allow functionalities such as “allow me to see all papers by THIS Mr. Lee”, and allow for services to interact with only Mr. Lee’s papers. Additionally, this could allow one to be able to see papers by Mr. Lee in all repositories. This allows for increased statistical measurements as well, as you can get accurate measures of usage and co-usage/citations. The creation of a standard Author ID is sticky, however, as issues such as privacy, legality, effort, accuracy, longevity, openness, and control are raised. Additional challenges are issues such as dealing with a paper with 10 or 2500 authors. Warner mentions the always-accurate statement that author adoption of an open AuthorID would be driven by the services it allows.

Folllowing Warner, Matthew Zumwalt of MediaShelf gave a lively presentation where he promoted and championed the Agile development of lightweight applications that live on top of more involved and technically robust systems. He demonstrated a variety of small Ruby on Rails applications that existed on top of a Fedora backend. He made the statement that data needs to be separated from the software so that developers can quickly build “fun” applications that do what you need. I’m of the opinion that these applications were clearly not fully realized, but the concept that the archival software does not necessarily have to be the presentation and interaction software is definitely worthwhile to explore and champion.

The next session featured Pablo Fernicola of Microsoft, Adrian Stevenson from the University of Bath, and Julie Allinson from the University of York giving some updates on SWORD, the Simple Web Service Offering Repository Deposit. Some of the tools mentioned or demonstrated were web-based, desktop-based, MS Office plugins, and facebook (and other) widgets. SWORD currently makes use of the Atom Publishing Protocol, which has pros and cons. It believe it was mentioned that SWORD v2 would likely move to a different protocol, but don’t quote me on that.

My notes from the afternoon sessions are a bit vague, in that I have some interesting points noted but not where they came from – so I’ll just list them here. One point mentioned was that “data curation is hard”, in that there is a tension between solid standards and technical innovation. There are heavy requirements of ensuring provenance and dealing with custom data types or software. Micro-services, such as the ones Zumwalt mentions, were mentioned, to exist as low-barrier, low-commitment, tools – leveraging native OS file management tools to create flexible systems. “We are GOOD at file systems” was a statement, so it makes sense to create an “object system” using these ideas.

The keynote was from John Wilbanks, the Vice President of Science at Creative Commons. He gave the keynote at the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008, which I attended, and this was a slight variation on that presentation. Wilbanks stresses a new way of thinking about copyright and digital information – digital paper is still the same old analog way of thinking about knowledge existing through pen and paper. Researchers need to be able to see the return on investment – that repositories are worth it.

Tuesday began with a discussion by Wayne Johnston of the University of Guelph Library, where he focused on the branding and promotion of a repository. He talked about how social marketing – using commercial marketing principles to effect behavioral change – could be used to increase the adoption of a repository. The naming of a product or service is often the first impression, and “Institutional Repository” is pretty bad – bureaucratic and passive. The name of an IR should be meaningful if possible, which can be difficult. Promotion is also important – events, presentations, invitations to faculty, the creation of promotional kits, all can help. Graphic design is also an important factor – the site has to look professional and be understandable to users.

Elizabeth Yaken of the University of Michigan then discussed MIRACLE – Making IR’s a Collaborative Learning Environment. UM undertook a census involving interviews with users, user studies, case studies, and such, to take internal measures. They conducted interviews with library and campus leaders, IT staff, other campus IRs, users, and contributers. Their mission was to change the message from the “IR” to one of “authors rights” – the KEY to buy in, according to her. The IR needs to help realize the library’s vision in the 21st century. Content, services, sustainability of the IR may not be sufficient for actual IMPACT, however. The IR needs to be framed in terms of long-term library goals.

The Library of Congress outlined a tool they created to manage the transfer of the incredibly large amount of data they received from various projects, known as BagIt. Transfer is important to manage well because it’s a large part of their daily operations, and digitization can create one or hundreds of files, existing in multiple locations simultaneously – good tools reduce the number of tasks performed and items tracked by people. They also demonstrated an inventory program that records package and file events, which helps with risk assessment and storage audits. The knowledge of file holdings and the file life cycle events reduces risks. They stressed that these modular tools and services can be both extended upon but exist independently, giving them flexibility and nimbleness.

Over lunch, I attended a “Birds of a Feather” session where Tim Donohue and Sarah Shreeves demonstrated their beta of BibApp, a very nice looking program that strives to match the researchers at an institution with their work, and mines the data to determine collaborations and other links. It also allows for depositing the work directly into a repository and for tracking the Open Access allowances the publisher of the work provides. It looks to be an exciting and useful piece of software and I am looking forward to the 1.0 release.

John Kunze, Stephen Abrams, and Patricia Cruse discussed the California Digital Library’s project to re-invision its curation infrastructure as a set of micro-services rather than a single monolithic one. They believe it is safer and more cost-effective to plan to deal with the transient nature of systems and plan on managing instead of resisting change. Each function of the repository is small and self-contained, which allows them to be more easily developed and maintained. This lower level of initial investment allows them to be easily replaced as needed. They stressed clearly articulating needs and outcomes before implementing software – create STRATEGIES, then software.

Steve DiDomenico and Claire Stewart from Northwestern University discussed their Mounting Books Project, which is a large book scanning project taking place there. They outlined the issues faced with hardware, student workers, brittle pages, large fold outs, and so on, and the errors caused by massive volumes of data.

Wednesday was the beginning of the breakout sessions, so the presentations became more DSpace-focused. The morning began with an overview of DuraSpace, the fairly new combination of DSpace and Fedora. Sandy Payette of Fedora Commons and Michele Kimpton of DSpace talked about the future directions for the two software packages and of the organization. DuraSpace is the umbrella organization for DSpace and Fedora, with no initial change of governance of the ways communities update the software. Over time there is the hope that synergies will be found and the communities will move towards a single entity.

Dspace 2 is planned for 2010, which is a major restructuring. In the mean time, DSpace 1.6 will contain bug fixes and add in feature requests, and be a stepping stone to 2.0. Dspace 2.0 will have no more strict communities, collections, and items, but instead be built around entities, relationships, and properties with the old community model built on top for the user interface. A detailed model was shown about how entities related to each other and have properties applied to both. Additionally, a superior metadata schema is employed that allows for any entity to have metadata, which can allow for increased support for things such as journals with volumes, issues, and individual articles.

I attended the DSpace “manager track” in the afternoon, which moved away from the technical side of things and focused on use cases. Sue Kunda of Oregon State University demonstrated their ETD workflow, which wasn’t drastically different from our own here at Mason. Sean Thomas of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated CiteLine, a web site that looks to provide a similar functionality to BibApp. It uses open source software to create a centralized service for citation data, and making that data more interactive.

William E. Moen from the University of North Texas demonstrated their learning object repository, and discussed the problems and thought processes involved. They had to wrap their heads around how to break apart a course into granular elements and how to store these in a way that made sense to users. They utilized a Manakin-based interface to highly customize the presentation of the learning objects to people interacting with the system.

I didn’t note which individual made the presentation, but four people from both Texas A&M and the University of Texas worked on a project called Vireo, which was a very robust overhaul to DSpace for managing ETD submissions and the documents themselves. It incorporated many features that would be useful for DSpace proper, such as faceted browsing and a straightforward depositing mechanism, but unfortunately this was tailored specifically for ETD documents and the specific needs of those data types. It was a very nice solution to the problem and hopefully will be made available to the public soon.

The day ended with a poster session minute madness, where all the poster presenters had one minute to describe what their project was. Then we had the opportunity to interact with the presenters and learn about their projects.

Thursday was mostly a wrap-up day. I attended a presentation by Tim Donohue where he outlined various methods of customizing the DSpace 1.5 interface, and two members of the DSpace Foundation discussed updates from the Outreach Committee and their next steps. After that were workshops. I chose to attend one concerning SWORD, where I saw a demonstration of a nice SWORD depositing application that used the Adobe Air framework, which is kind of a java-esque multi-platform runtime environment. The application allowed for applying metadata to documents and then uploading them to the repository. Much of the discussion pertained to developers, however.

To summarize: it was pretty clear that much of the discussion focused on individuals developing tools locally that would be more nimble and replaceable than the software that stored the data for the long term. The separation of the data management and the data interaction/display makes sense, as it is likely easier to build a tool that can handle the needs of interacting with dynamic information types on TOP of the software that manages the complexities of digital preservation, instead of relying on one software to do both. Additionally, this shows again how infrequently the out-of-the-box software truly meets user needs – the institutions realized they had to take control of the display of their information. Some of the more advanced institutions were building entire systems for the management of and interaction with their data, but looking at it in a strategies first, software second way.

It’s pretty clear to me that institutional repositories are still seeking a true foundation to build from, and there still is a lack of understanding of just what the role of the repository is within the institution. Software foundations are joining together, new versions are rolling out, people are creating highly customized interfaces to meet very specific internal needs – it’s very dynamic. I’m excited to see some projects that attempt to get some of the biggest problems I face as a repo manager – dealing with authors and their work, the copyright issues with the work, and getting that work into the repository.

The future of repositories is uncertain, but certainly going SOMEWHERE. Where that is remains to be seen. I’m concerned that smaller institutions, or those that do not place a high priority on digital preservation/data curation, will be heavily relying on either open source or commercial software to meet their initial needs, but not placing any dollars into hiring developers or enough staff to really do something. As Elizabeth Yaken said, the repository has to be a part of the library’s total vision, and I’m fearful that this isn’t the case in many places.

This past November the DC Chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association hosted their annual World Usability Day program. This year’s theme, The Two-Way Street: People adapting to transportation and transportation adapting to people (PDF), focused on how the human factors and usability professions have positively influenced the design of transportation systems ranging from public transportation and freeways to air traffic control. There was also lengthy discussion on what role user-centered design will play in the creation of future transportation systems.

This year’s World Usability Day featured a group of speakers pulled from multiple disciplines, who gave individual presentations and also participated in a panel discussion. Additionally, the event also included multiple poster presentations that highlighted current usability work related to transportation.

Full details about the presenters and the posters can be found on the UPA DC World Usablity Day Web site.

The speakers all displayed an impressive body of knowledge in their fields, however I noticed a common theme among many of their talks; namely, that transportation and traffic is a problem that has to have constraints placed upon it and as something that has to be controlled through rules, standards, etc. Something about this need for control and enforcement struck me as potentially flawed. While, I’m certainly don’t have anything close to the subject expertise of the speakers, I do have a running fascination and irritation with the inefficiencies of our transportation systems (really, who can live in the DC area and not have a few opinions on this topic).

While listening to these arguments that mostly viewed greater and greater control and engineering as one of the best means for improving transportation, I was reminded that of a recent piece in the Atlantic by John Staddon titled Distracting Miss Daisy, where he observes that “the dominant motive in the U.S. traffic-control community seems to be distrust, and policies are usually designed to control drivers and reduce their discretion.” He argues that this approach actually makes the roads less safe for drivers by forcing them to pay more attention to signs than to the road. While Staddon largely uses anecdotal evidence to make his point, there is something to it that seems intuitively true.

All of this reminded me of John Carroll’s Minimalist approach to instruction and documentation, which argues against excessive expository content in favor of more focus on practical examples that get the user up and running as soon as possible. While Carroll’s work mostly focuses the documentation of computer applications and not transportation instructions and “signage”, I can’t help but think that there could be some potentially significant similarities between these two topics.

Attended the Coalition for Networked Information 2008 Fall Meeting the other day, primarily to serve on a Mason presentation panel: Academic Research Portals: Integrating Librarians and Academic Programs.   We had a decent turnout (60+ people in the audience) and a lot of engaged questioners afterward.   I put together a website to serve as documentation for our “briefing” as CNI presentations are called.  Available here:

http://researchportals.gmu.edu

The opening plenary for the Fall meeting was given by Cliff Lynch, CNI’s Executive Director.  As usual, Cliff offered lots to think about and made a number of interesting points as he surveyed the immediate future of networked information.   I’ll offer this link to Bryan Alexander’s Liberal Education Today blog for a bullet list of items Cliff touched upon.

– Wally

I attended the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008, in Baltimore, MD, on November 17th and 18th. This was followed by a DSpace-specific meeting held on the morning of November 19th. The conference was attended by somewhere in the range of 250-300 people (estimated). The attendees ranged from digital repository managers, library administrators, scholarly communication librarians, liaison librarians, and information technologists. I won’t write much (or anything) about parts that I didn’t think were very novel or applicable to Mason.

MONDAY:

The opening keynote was given by John Wilbanks, the Vice President for Science at Creative Commons. This was a very solid keynote, with realistic points made that reflected the current state of scholarly communication and repositories. He made the statement that we must be able to identify what needs are central to scholars and researchers and meet those needs with our service and technology offerings. While not a new idea, it’s important to repeat. An important point he made was that innovation tends to be slow, incremental, and sadly, NOT innovative. An example of this, to him, was the PDF file, which is merely a better/faster/cheaper version of a 400 year old technology, the print journal. PROCESS change is far slower than PRODUCT change. He talked about copyright (which makes sense, as he is from Creative Commons), and said that a major issue with copyright was that copyright “locks” the container, so content is leased or tented by libraries – “the container locks the facts”. With CC licenses and icons proliferating, rights clearance is going to be come only more complex.

He reminded the audience that faculty need carrots, incentives, to spend time uploading their documents to repositories – “does this help me get tenure?” There is a tension that exists between meeting the demands of adding content and providing services (I can vouch for this). There are conflicts with the “protection instinct” – the idea of map data developers to lock data so they can be used to make money – ie map data developers protecting their data to sell it to Garmin.

Networks, Wilbanks says, have a much larger incentive than an individual silo. On a network, simple and open wins. A question to ask is “what can only a network of populated IRs solve?” This is a key part of any incentive change. The true incentive is to let people who want to share be more successful. We want users to be able to say “the web just got magically better because of my library”.

Next was a panel of presentations about “New Horizons”, which examined different ways universities and institutions are using repositories to share data. Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean for Library Digital Programs at The Johns Hopkins University, discussed “a data-centric view of the academic universe”. He explained that historically, infrastructures become more accessible, reliable, and transparent as they mature. Different community systems coming together will create this infrastrucure. The re-use of data is extremely important in research, as data is mined over and over again for new developments. He described a variety of astronomy projects that are bringing different research projects to a common location. Being able to go somewhere, connect to other things, and do something with it – that makes something useful. During the Q/A session, an important note was to use your “Faculty champions” who can give you word-of-mouth support. The library can serve as a neutral place that faculty can go to.

The afternoon session began with a panel of presentations about “Value-added User Services”. There is a distinction between faculty and researchers and the people who come to access that content, which must be kept in mind. Repository managers have to think about how to keep people coming back. The thoughts of faculty members can potentially be summarized as DIFM – Do It For Me – things such as permissions, hunting and gathering, scanning, typesetting (!?), metadata, uploading, usage reporting, promoting. One method of promotion being used at some institutions is look for public arenas of “linking out” to sites such as Wikipedia to bring traffic in to the repository. Getting to the point where faculty actually come to the library for their e-publishing needs would be ideal, obviously.

A way that repositories are helping researchers is by reducing direct requests for authors and institutions. Quality statistics are also important to let researchers know how the repository distributes their work. Some libraries are distilling of access logs – removing duplicate accesses (10 seconds per HTML file, 30 seconds per PDF), limiting data by file extensions – to increase the accuracy of the results.

The day ended with the Innovation Fair. This was a rapid-fire session with 2 minute presentations about different, well, innovations that different institutions and universities are doing. I was lucky enough to present about Mason’s ETD program and how our library worked in an interdepartmental fashion to develop a workflow to mange the ETD documents.

TUESDAY:
Tuesday was, honestly, a bit disappointing for me. The morning began with a discussion of the current policy environment. There were representatives from Europe, Japan, and the United States. These weren’t really applicable to what I do as a repository manager so I won’t say much about these parts.
Following this was an interesting session about campus publishing strategies at three different institutions.

The main themes of the session were:
- reframe conversation away from repositories and structures, and think about what makes something successful
- focus on visiblility and incentive – “why do I need an IR?”
- publishing support – for low budget journals, conference proposals and proceedings, working papers, disciplinary and departmental collections, faculty homepages, digital scholarly publications – these are somewhat unclassifiable
- building a network of distributed network of administrators to vet content and uploading documents – e-scholarship liaisons who work with subject librarians and admins
- emphasize services
- make the IR more oriented towards user – many display and “qwik pix” options, software readers, results winnowing
- use the repository for a showcase of student research and publications
- preservation and promotion of on-campus publications

The closing keynote was a traditional look at what makes a repository successful in an ideal situation. It wasn’t much new to anyone who has worked in repositories for some time.

DSPACE MEETING:
The DSpace Foundation held a meeting the morning following the conference. It began with a demonstration about the Manakin interface, which showed some of the possibilities at various levels of modifications. It eased my mind regarding the complexity of the Manakin interface. There was an open discussion about how to better communicate and what modes of communication might function the best.

MY THOUGHTS:
- While SPARC is certainly interested in scholarly communication and likely had a bias towards discussion of it, this meeting certainly demonstrated that using a repository as a scholarly communication/publication platform is a growing trend.
- The discussions pretty clearly showed that the repository has to adapt to local needs and focus on services that meet those needs
- Successful repositories have the support of the institution on a variety of levels, and most often have multiple staff members supporting technical advancement and outreach efforts

Attended the CNI Spring Meeting in Minneapolis, April 7-8, 2008. I’ll take this opportunity to excerpt a bit of a post on the DPSD blog:

CNI Spring Meeting

An oddity from my flight up to Minneapolis: the guy across the aisle from me was Vermont’s senator, Patrick Leahy. I don’t know which surprised me more: that a US senator would fly coach or that the fellow standing there all by himself to meet Leahy as we deplaned was Walter Mondale.

The CNI meeting was the usual combination of several really interesting presentations and at least one where I suspect the important thing was to present *something* at CNI and it didn’t really matter so much what it was.

One highlight was a talk by Chad Kainz and David Greenbaum on their relatively new Bamboo project (http://projectbamboo.org). They’re embarking on an 18-month series of workshops and conversations, trying to figure out ways to improve cross-disciplinary academic innovation by defining and then developing pieces of what I guess you’d call a humanities cyberinfrastructure.

I also enjoyed a presentation by Joan Lippincott on the current state of “computer labs -> information commons -> learning commons -> academic spaces” planning across campuses. We may add this sort of space at Mason in the next few years and I wanted hear what others were thinking. I wasn’t sure I’d benefit from the session (it’s not an area I spend much time thinking about) but I ended up really enjoying it. Many confirmed my own bias: loading up a room with desktop computers is so yesterday—students today come into the library with the computer (laptop). What they want is a flat surface, electricity, robust wired and ubiquitous wireless networking and access to peripherals they either can’t afford or don’t want to purchase, store or maintain.

LOCKSS

We also had a LOCKSS Alliance meeting prior to the conference which I believe resulted in the idea that a LOCKSS appliance should be able to respond as a target for OpenURL resolvers. I’ll await an official announcement on whether this will indeed be a developmental priority for the LOCKSS team but that was my sense of the group’s wishes.

LOCKSSed OUT

Here’s a tidbit I picked up on during our meeting: recently the e-journal Graft: Organ and Cell Transplantion ceased publication—constituting a “trigger” event both for CLOCKSS and Portico. The Portico people were first in line to CrossRef and got the DOI for Graft articles to resolve to Portico…leaving CLOCKSS out in the cold in terms of DOI namespace.

DOIs can resolve to only one location which suggests that DOI will make a pretty ineffective tool for digital preservation. To see how it works (and how it doesn’t), here’s the DOI for an article from Graft:

10.1177/1522162802239751

If you search that in DOI resolver at crossref.org, you’ll end up at this page:

Too bad if your Portico insurance policy’s premiums aren’t up to date. You can, of course, get this content from the Creative-Commons licensed CLOCKSS system if you happen to know that it exists there:

http://graft.edina.clockss.org/cgi/content/abstract/6/1/6

This “happen to know it exists there” problem is one that the CLOCKSS group is trying to solve. Getting CrossRef to support multi-homed DOIs would be a useful start. Enabling a LOCKSS (and CLOCKSS) appliance to respond to OpenURL requests as a target source would be another. Getting SAGE to list both Portico and CLOCKSS as a source for “moved” content would be the sort of thing that might help too. Supposedly “library-friendly” entities like Portico jumping in to lock content behind their fee-based wall isn’t at all helpful.

A few days after I posted the entry on the DPSD blog, I received a comment from Ed Pentz, Executive Director of Crossref:

Hi,

I’m Executive Director of CrossRef, the DOI registration agency for the Graft DOIs, so I wanted to provide some more information about what we’re planning for “moved” content (or content subject to a trigger event). We will be setting up Multiple Resolution for such DOIs so that URLs for the different archive locations can be registered. On clicking a DOI a user will be taken to a page with a list of the locations (CLOCKSS, Portico, KB, etc). We’ve been talking to CLOCKSS in addition to Portico so no one is being left out in the cold. We should have this in place in a couple of months.

posted by: Wally Grotophorst

Some thoughts on the 2008 Computers in Libraries conference.

Although most of the sessions that I attended related mostly with public libraries, and even less of the content related to technical services (let alone cataloging), there are some highlights that I would like to mention. Several tracks were concerned with our next catalog interface, whether it be open source or not. Even the open source tracks deal with the ubiquitous “next-gen” catalog (or as Marshall Breeding from Vanderbilt , among others, said “open source discovery products” — as a side note, I really enjoyed the two sessions of his I saw, which can be found here and here). But I was happy to notice that emphasis was placed on the library as a community (the Shifted Librarian, Jenny Levine) and making people happy (keynote speaker, Liz Lawley), items that I would list under good customer service practices (some of this might be difficult to relate to cataloging, or at least need some creative thinking).

There was one session late in the day on Tuesday given by Cathy Weng and Jia Mi from the College of New Jersey that I want to highlight. They have been involved in a study that looked at search features and bibliographic displays of all 123 ARL libraries. How wonderfully fascinating! Although their results have not been published yet, the presentation was well organized with lots of examples of real catalogs (including MSU). Their conclusion states that MARC is not set up well for bibliographic DISPLAY (especially if you have random people trying to “enhance” it — this is my comment) and can lead to a confusing time for the patron. It would be interesting to know how library patrons think of their catalog displays, but that is probably a different study if it’s been done at all.

The other session that I thought was particularly interesting AND it actually mentioned cataloging was on Koha, the open-source complete ILS. Joshua Ferraro from Liblime was there to talk about it on Wednesday afternoon. The public interface is based on Amazon.com, but he also gave a brief (because of time) preview of the back end including the cataloging area. Cataloging is set up with an email interface. Once you have a list of bib records, you can see what they look like in a “preview” screen under the results list. I asked Joshua after the presentation about staff searches and global update. He said that you can search for specific subfields in MARC (all thought I’m not sure about the 007 since those technically aren’t subfields) and from results list you can update all or selected records. Currently, anyone with access to the cataloging area could change any record, but Liblime is working on limiting various functions based on log in.

This year, CiL set up tables in the front of all the rooms for computer users that included power strips! This is an excellent addition to the conference (and could probably use 2+ rows of tables), but the wireless remained a lot to be desired even when it was available. Oh well….maybe next year things will be better. AND…one last thing, the chairs were just horrible. I know that carrying my backpack around with a computer and pre-calc text books will cause issues, but these chairs (especially in the room/rooms where the keynotes were) were killing me. They gave quite a bit while leaning back and thus gave no support at all. Of course, this is not CiL’s fault that they were so bad. Silly chairs…

For a complete list of sessions that I attended, see my notes from the conference (items in [square brackets] are my thoughts/comments).

Approximately 500 persons attended the 77th annual gathering of MLA, the professional organization for music librarians and those who share their interests. The conference was held at the Newport Hyatt, which was undergoing substantial remodeling and new construction, requiring the use of two additional overflow hotels and shuttle vehicles.

I attended a pre-conference, full-day series of “train the trainer” sessions in connection with an MLA initiative to provide workshops in the basics of music librarianship to interested venues. My focus will be on music reference services and sources; other incipient trainers will handle music cataloging and music collection development. The lead presenter in my area was Jeannete Casey from the music library at UW-Madision. Marketing and fullfilment of these learning opportunites regionally will be coordinated by the Atlantic chapter of MLA (and I expect to discuss this intiative with the professional development chair for VLA- our own Heather Hannan- soon).

I threw my hat into the ring, so to speak, to fill an open position on MLA’s electronic reference resources subcommittee, met with them, and expect to hear whether my application was accepted within the next month. I participated in the American Music Roundtable discussion, which was dominated by pop music fans; my stated interest in 19th-century musical Americana seemed somewhat out of place.

I also volunteered for shifts at the registration desk, the placement desk, and in the MLA souvenir shop. This shaved $50 off my registration fee.

As at many conferences of this type, I sometimes had to make difficult decisions regarding which of two or three simultaneous sessions to attend. (Among those I missed was a history of the Newport Jazz Festival with a description of its archival resources.) I did hear the following presentations:

LICENSING MUSIC panel:
“Licenses, Libraries, and Limitations: Contracting around Copyright Law and the Implications Therein,” Elizabeth Winston (Catholic University of America);
“The Legal and Practical Intricacies of Licensing Music Materials,” Philip Ponella (Indiana University);
“Performing Ensemble Librarianship 101, or You Need a License to do That?,” Jane Cross (U.S. Marine Band) and Laurie Lake (Indiana University).

TEACHING MUSIC BIBLIOGRAPHY panel:
“Impact of Scholarly Editions on Musicology and Performance,” Keith Cochran (Indiana University);
“RISM and Primary-Source Awareness,” Daniel Zager (Eastman School of Music);
“Evaluating the Online Version of Garland Encyclopedia of World Music,” Alec McLane (Wesleyan University).

ONLINE MUSIC RESEARCH TOOLS panel:
“Finding Music Information in Social Science Databases,” Darwin F. Scott (Brandeis University);
“Improving Access through the Web: The Library of Congress Performing Arts Encyclopedia,” Karen Lund (Library of Congress).

MISCELLANEOUS presentations:
“What Are They Citing? Citation Analysis of Student Bibliographies,” Verletta kern (University of Redlands);
“Albanian Traditional Music,” Spiro Shetuni (Winthrop University);
“Using Flowcharts for Training Reference Assistants in Known-Item Reference Transactions,” Stephen Henry (University of Maryland-College Park).
“Using Clickers in the Classroom: Adding an Interactive Element to BI,” Nobyue Matsuoka-Motley (American University);
“Violin Parlor-Music Pedagogy through Study of Violin Method Books of Local Professor L.E. Hersey,” Christine Kubiak (Illinois State University) and Stephanie Hewson (Dominican University).

In addition to these informative sessions by librarian peers, I was invited to product showcase-plus-breakfast presentations (never turn down a free meal) by vendors Alexander Street Press and Oxford University Press, spotlighting upcoming streaming-video opera and dance products by the former, and new electronic reference offerings and improved functionality for Grove Music Online by the latter.

Musical events included concerts by Newport Baroque Orchestra (classical) and the New Lost Chicken Ramblers (string folk & contradance music), which I did not attend, and by the Northeast Navy Showband (jazz), the Rum-Soaked Crooks (sea shanties & similar folk music), and the MLA Big Band (jazz), which I did. I also scoured souvenir shops looking for Newport Jazz Festival items but there were none to be had- the licensing is very tightly controlled. At the closing banquet I sat next to and talked shop with Susan Vita, chief of the music division at Library of Congress, one of many new contacts made at this conference.

Although it was a little awkward to head off to a conference after being at Mason for only two weeks, I appreciate the Libraries’ willingness to have me attend the 2008 EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Meeting in San Antonio, January 28-30, 2008. This was my second year to attend ELI, and it remains one of my favorite conferences to attend.

The theme of this year’s conference was “Connecting and Reflecting: Preparing Learners for Life 2.0,” and the sessions, generally, reflected this theme in various ways by exploring higher education’s engagement with new learning models, with attention to the related contexts of increasing technological capabilities and evolving student expectations. Conference attendees were invited to explore new technologies and pedagogical approaches and consider the implications for their own institutions.

Keynote sessions were given by Henry Jenkins, Belle Wheelan, and Bob Young, and two of the three were quite good. There are some reflections and discussions of the third keynote here and here.

The conference website describes the annual meeting as “a setting for interactive, hands-on learning and networking, with a variety of presentations, discussions, and workshops. Sessions … fall into one of three interest areas: learners, learning principles and practices, and learning technologies.” For librarians with an interest in instructional technology, there is much of value to be experienced here.

For the last two years, I have found that I leave ELI feeling tired but energized, challenged but inspired, and wishing that the conference wasn’t over so quickly.

I have posted several pages of notes from the conference on the Libraries’ intranet. (link to .doc)