Professional Development

Today Mary Beth, Jean-Paul, and Erik attended the second ASERL lunch n learn webinar. The speakers were Toby Graham from the University of Georgia and Mary Molinaro from the University of Kentucky.

Both presenters discussed several of the digital collections that their institutions have been working on for the last few years. Interestingly, both presenters talked about newspaper digitization (a project that we have worked on from time to time)!

Toby mentioned the XTF system developed by the California Digital Library and Archivist Tookit as two of their systems. They had indexed over 1M objects using this system!

This morning I got rained out of a long run in SLC but did get to hear the incredible sound of thunder as it reverberated across the valley. As I finished up my run on a treadmill I saw a few lighning bolts hit the mountains to the west and was very happy to be inside.

I attended a session from Los Alamos National Laboratory for the one open session of the day and heard about a service oriented approach to creating a large indexing/discovery/service information system. While we are struggling with 1.7 million records, LANL is indexing 95 million! The presentation had lots of technical details but one fascinating standard that they used is the Information Environment Service Registry.

The final keynote by Elizabeth Lawley at RIT discussed a city-wide game that RIT developed in conjunction with the newspaper. The slides are available at slideshare. The game included a number of neat activities including photosynths, quizzes, recipies, photography, and a scavenger hunt. The scavenger hunt was developed using scvngr (a commercial text-message based scavenger system).

Some themes that proved to be interesting this weekend:

1. Library technology solutions continue to push towards more complex systems. XC/RIT, the LANL system, and Vufind were all a few steps further this year. There were lots of libraries who are actively using small scale open source systems and experimenting with open source systems.
2. Libraries are increasingly thinking about their data. I saw a number of small and medium scale projects built on use or resource metadata that historically would not have been heavily used. Likewise, the systems that got demonstrated all had a focus on how to index and manage large datasets. There is an interesting contrast to this trend in the push towards cloud and hosted data/service platforms.
3. Electronic books continue to nudge the marketplace of print books. The GoogleBooks settlement came up several times and there were some interesting ideas surrounding how ebooks could be more heavily used including the adoption of a netflix model (no due dates, automatic queues, intelligent suggestions), the need for more ubiquitous e-book readers (yale research), and the growing comfort with online reading “we spend more time reading information online than we ever did with books but it is still thought of as different.

On the E-book theme there was a great article on the impact that piracy is having on the e-book platform. I also stumbled across the florida orange grove http://florida.theorangegrove.org, a k20 site for open access textbooks. While both of these recent experiences are on opposite side of the same idea (free books!), seeing them both in mainstream media on the same day makes me wonder how central E-books are becoming.

Lots of stuff for day 2 of lita. I would be remiss if I did not mention the spectacular views that I saw during an early morning run

After the run, we started the day with David Weinberger who likes to talk about *my* favorite topic. Both Lauren and Susan have talked about David’s presentation and I don’t have much to add except to say that my favorite quote of the talk “Metadata is what you know, data is what you are looking for.”

During the day I attended a session on the Extensible Catalog (http://extensiblecatalog.org). XC is in beta now and is aiming for a Jan 2010 release. While XC has a discovery layer built in drupal, the harvesting and normalization tools that they are working on have been designed to work with multiple metadata types and systems.

The final presentation of the day focused on usability testing at the University of Illinois for Vufind. As we are currently in the midst of our Vufind service I thought that it would be a useful session. UofI has a very similar implementation as WFU (Advanced Search, Voyager implementation). CARLI (Consortium of Academic & Research Libraries in Illinois) has implemented for their 76 libraries who share a Voyager based I-Share catalog. 6 of those have Vufind running as their primary catalog.

The rollout for CARLI of Vufind was “experimental” and “rapid” :). they froze modifications in Oct 2008 in expectation of Vufind 1.0. Since then they have been tweaking interface & re-indexing but no major development. CARLI is unlikely to implement future versions of Vufind but may continue development that may help them work towards the XC.

One problem that CARLI solved with Vufind was to integrate the holdings of 76 libraries into a single vufind, something we have been trying to do! To do this, they added a field which was bibid plus institutional identifier.

I flew in early Friday morning and just made it in time for the opening Keynote. Both Susan and Lauren have talked about this presentation already but I was struck with the statistics she presented from some Pew Internet Trust research. I have to admit that while I agree with the premise that libraries should deliver collections and services on mobile platforms, ‘going mobile’ includes a whole new set of technical and service issues that need to be addressed.

Lita is always a good chance to catch up with folks and today was no exception. A brief conversation with Aaron Trehub at Auburn pointed me to their soon-to-be-public Qualified Dublin Core version of vufind. Following the keynote I caught a session on how the Library of Congress is releasing Open Source Software, a session on how to secure and deploy Linux on public workstations in your library, and the tail end of Lauren’s talk on Bite Sized Repositories.

In short the LOC open source release experience documented their release of an archive specification, initial set of tools called Bagit (http://sourceforge.net/projects/loc-xferutils/). Some interesting issues that came up during that process included:

1. Questions from the legal office about the source, content, intended use, and legal history of the code being released
2. A discussion about whether/how to form a developer community for their release - being a release manager for a community is a significant investment of time
3. Forming an informal group of people to discuss related issues (http://groups.google.com/group/digital-curation)

More to come on Saturday I am sure!

On Wednesday, Barry, Jean-Paul, and Erik attended a Sun Webinar that focused on new advances in Dspace and Fedora. Both products have upcoming releases in the fall of 2009. Of note, the Dspace product (1.6) will have an integrated Embargo feature and will support batch metadata processing.

The Fedora presentation included a short overview of OSGi, a development framework which focuses on a modular service oriented architecture. Both presentations included references to DuraSpace, a new cloud based archiving service developed in conjunction with the duraspace community.

After the Sun webinar we spent a while learning more about DuraCloud in a separate webinar sponsored by the DuraSpace community. Michele Kimpton (CBO of DuraSpace) and Bill Branan (Senior developer for DuraSpace) presented on developments in DuraCloud.

DuraCloud uses cloud computing technology to provide hosted digital library services and replicated storage across multiple cloud systems. The presentation included a number of architecture images but one in particular did a good job showing how DuraCloud will provide services in a cloud environment.

The service will support archiving as well as instance hosting. Some of the initial services they are looking at providing include kultura, dpsace, fedora, taxon-finder, jhove, and lockss. Right now DuraCloud has two pilot partners but hopefully the service will be opened for more participants soon!

Lynn, Mary Beth, Wanda, Patty, Jean-Paul, Kaeley, Barry, Chris B. Lauren C., Lauren P, Kevin, Tim and Erik attended the session which was a presentation on how Georgia Tech (Tyler Walters) and Clemson(Emily Gore) approach digitization and digital priorities.

Emily covered what Clemson is doing and presented on her work building a digital initiatives program including MetaArchive, Open LOCKSS, the development of a written preservation plan and a goal to participate in the development community. She briefly covered their beginning use of Archivist Toolkit. She talked about their use of grants and regional grant/collaborations to digitize resources, work with partners to preserve digital resources, and run a ‘regional scan center.’ She mentioned their work to plan a fedora repository and discussed a project called <a href=”http://www.intelligentriver.org/”>Intelligent River</a>, a site that focuses on archiving real-time hydrologic data and data sets in south carolina.

Tyler Walters talked about the Galileo knowledge repository (http:/GKR.library.gatech.edu) which will focus on providing IR hosting via Dspace, workshops, IR services and a collaborative metadata repository. He also talked about Virtual Research Environments which are based on drupal/fedora sites called islandora (http://vre.upei.ca/dev/islandora) that has been developed by the University of Prince Edward Island. Georgia Tech is going to try out a similar approach. He also discussed e-publishing services offered by the library (Epage @ Tech, The Tower).

Tyler also talked about search & discovery approaches including Vufind, metalib (Xerces Xserver), and Tsquared (Univeristy Sakai system) - a project to integrate metalib into Sakai. As he discussed their architecture he mentioned a sun infinite archive solution, sun storagetek 2540 disk array (16 TB), SL 500 Tape library (529 TB), Managed by Sun’s SAM server and ZFS software.

Next ASERL Lunch-n-Learn on November 12th with Mary Molinaro (U-Kentucky) and Toby Graham (U-Georgia)!

In September and October there will be three Sun Webinars that look at cloud computing and its role in institutional repositories. If you enjoyed reading about the Berkman Webinar then these are for you!

• New DuraSpace ‘Stack’ Releases: Fedora Commons, DSpace, and Mulgara
  Wednesday, September 30th, 2009, 1:00pm - 2:00pm
• SPARC OA Week Kick-off Presentation and Presentation of DuraSpace OA Week Winners
  Wednesday, October 14th, 2009, 12:00pm - 1:00pm
• Repositories in the Cloud: How to Participate in the DuraCloud Pilot Program
  Wednesday, October 28th, 2009, 1:00pm - 2:00pm

All sessions will be held in the Bridge Screening Room.

On Friday Erik & Sarah watched a webinar sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. The speaker was Lee Dirks, the Director, Education & Scholarly Communication at Microsoft External Research.

Lee discussed the future of scholarly communication, touching on issues of preserving the entire research process (including background research, testing, collaboration, etc). He also talked about the role that linked data and complex community-based data analysis sites such as Swivel and Freebase are doing to create a new type of research archive.

His themes also included cloud computing, linked data, and preservation and archiving, and new publication mechanisms including Data.gov, SciVee, Mendeley/Papers, and Jove (Journal of Visualized Experiments). His discussion of these sites was cursory but touched on some really neat ways in which machine readable data is being used to create/preserve knowledge.

He touched on SmugMug, Google Wave, and other cloud based sites on the way to talking about Duraspace/Duracloud as examples of new approaches to archiving and providing services for complex data.

He concluded with the observation that there is still a gap between what these systems are capable of and what researchers and scientists know/think about e-research and the role it plays in science, peer review, and publication.

During the Q&A a discussion about data-aggregation sites included Fluxnet and Dataverse, a data harvesting and preservation site (similar it appears to the Internet Archive) that provides cloud solutions for the archiving and preservation problem that Lee said was one of the goals of Duracloud.

The most provocative comment of the session (roughly quoted) was:

“The safe world of collecting books and scholarly journals has been done…data curation, provision of services, working with publishers, and working with scholars…grey literature…that is the stuff we need to apply our skills to.”

Inevitably, this raised the question of “what makes a good librarian?” The answer focused on a ’service orientation’ that builds services on top of data that includes business, informatics, legal, and technology training.

Interested in more? the NSF report on Data in the 21st Century is a good place to start!

On Thursday I attend a workshop on POGIL (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning). POGIL is a technique that was developed in the sciences (Chemistry and Biology) which focuses on active learning and peer instruction.

During the workshop, we learned about POGIL using (you got it) POGIL techniques. One primary method of learning in POGIL is to form small groups (3-4 people) which work through a detailed exercise. Each member of the group has one or more assigned roles (Manager, Recorder, Presenter, Technician, etc). The primary role of the instructor is to serve as facilitator and to deliver brief periods of instruction which build on the activities.

As part of the workshop, we observed a POGIL based chemistry class. It was an interesting experience (40 students learned while the class watched observed) to say the least but I was struck with how effectively the instructor (Andrei Straumanis) coordinated a the classroom and how he used Information Technology to enhance the experience.

Lots more about POGIL can be found at http://www.pogil.org. If you want to hear more, talk about how we could develop a POGIL Information Literacy curriculum, or see an example exercise, stop by to chat!

On Monday, Erik led a short class on the process for submitting to WakeSpace for library staff. The class focused on the elements to gather prior to submission and the hands-on task of actually submitting the work.

As part of the class a wiki page on submitting items to WakeSpace was developed that covers the details of how to obtain copyright permissions, how to decide what to upload, and the process for creating an account and uploading your documents. If you have suggestions for improvements to the page feel free to go edit!

If you have questions about how to submit or what qualifies, feel free to get in touch with Erik or Barry and one of us will help you through the process. We will be offering another session in early September as well.