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Speakers: Michael Day (UKOLN), Janice Ruth (LC), Kathleen Murray/Mark Phillips (North Texas), Victoria Reich (Stanford)
Day:
Spoke on UKOLN's efforts to assist various institutions with the issues facing them in the realm of digital curation and preservation. The Digital Curation Centre for which he works is taking steps toward this end.
Speakers: Leslie Johnston (VIrginia), Sarah Michalak (UNC-Chapel Hill), Deborah Thomas (LC)
Johnston:
Virginia was one of the two lead development sites for Fedora (Cornell the other), funded by Mellon on two occasions. She wanted to be clear that Fedora is not a repository, but a toolkit to build one (a digital asset management system).
Continue reading "DigCCurr 2007: Designing and Implementing IRs Within Institutions" »
Speakers: Peter Bruce (Library and Archives Canada), Adrian Cunningham (Nat'l Archives Australia), Ken Thibodeau (NARA)
Bruce:
Gave a brief history of LAC, which came into being in 2004 as the body responsible for collecting and preserving the documentary heritage of Canada. They collect the full range of digital resources one would expect, from government records to Websites. Base their architecture on OAIS, and are working on building a TDR, trusted digital repository.
Continue reading "DigCCurr 2007: Plenary II - National Libraries and Archives" »
Speakers: Liz Madden (LC), Jinfang Niu (UMich), Soo Young Rieh (UMich)
Madden:
A digital curator has to know at least something about all of the pieces necessary: collecting, processing, etc.
Reporting on lessons learned from American Memory and the Archive Ingest and Handling Test (AIHT). The latter project tests the feasability of moving a digital archive in toto from one institution to another. She admitted that she actually had little to say about AIHT and that she should have removed it from her title.
Oh joy! Someone is going to explain this concept succinctly, I hope.
Speakers: Peter Buneman (U of Edinburgh), William Lefurgy (LC)
Buneman began by pointing out that "nearly all branches of science depend on databases for storage and retrieval of data." From there, he moved to a definition of a curated database, illustrating it by showing the move from a paper journal to online journal, the latter being an example of a curated DB. It's a digital reference work, the value lying in the organization and annotation of data. Of course, as he pointed out, it's rather expensive to handle data in this fashion.
Continue reading "DigCCurr 2007: Plenary I - What is digital curation?" »
Speakers: Richard Cox (Pitt), Michael Moss (U of Glasgow), William Underwood (Georgia Tech Res Inst)
One of my greatest questions before coming to the conference concerned how to say the name DigCCurr. It is pronounced DigSeeker, and stands for Digital Curation Curriculum. Wow, glad that's resolved.
Three speakers: Stephanie Clark (IMLS), Chris Greer (NSF), Carlos Oliveire (European Union)
In his introduction, Joel Wurl of NEH noted that there are a lot of funding agencies "jumping on the bandwagon" when it comes to funding digital projects. As such, the agencies represented on the panel are a relatively small subset of what's available. He noted that the agencies supporting this digital work want to see from applicants that these projects are part of the insititutional mission (and is thus part of the budget), and not wholly grant-supported.
Speaker: Marc Smith (Microsoft Research)
Full title: Pictures of Traces of Places, People, and Groups
First, an apology: my notes for this talk may abruptly cease, as I have to duck out before the end to catch my flight.
Smith is a sociologist speaking on the evolution of social spaces (I think).
Continue reading "CNI Phoenix: Closing Keynote - Microsoft Speaks" »
Speaker: David Lewis (IUPUI)
His talk was based on a paper he wrote; I recommend reading it.
Laid out his assumptions:
Speaker: Paul Courant (UMich)
Courant offered a review of the origin of the project, which has been widely reported and analyzed elsewhere. He pointed out that a project such as this fits their mission statement, and should fit anyone's mission statement.
The digitization began in July 2004, which the first large upload to Google Book Search taking place in November 2005. Books are gone for about 5-7 days for scanning, and are returned in the same condition in which they left. Of course, both the process and technology used are confidential, and he made something of a joke of this.
Speakers: Nancy John (UI Chicago), Edward Valauskas (First Monday)
The full title for this talk was "Trying the Gold Road on a Shoestring Budget: Open Access Publishing with PKP's Open Journal System." Needless to say, I was drawn to this session not only because I am quite familiar with PKP/OJS from attending Access in Canada, but because we in K-State Libraries have discussed moving into the role of publisher, and this desire recently found expression in our strategic plan. While Cornell and other partners (including the U of Utah as I learned at dinner last night) are busy at work on DPubs, it has yet to become a full-fledged publishing platform, as opposed to OJS, which can handle the full lifecycle of journal publishing, from submission to archiving.
Speakers: David Ward, Lisa Hinchcliffe, and Karen Schmidt, all UIUC
Started with an overview of gamers, age and sex demographics (average age 33, 38% women). Ward's point is that gaming isn't necessarily a teen phenomenon. Pointed out that World of Warcraft alone has 8.5 million players. Points out that gaming is more social than one would assume; players may play alone in their house, but often in groups online.
Speakers: John Mark Ockerbloom, Penn and Ann J. Wolpert, MIT (in absentia due to snow)
Began with an overview of DSpace's development to this point, noting that it's in its fifth release (1.4) and is among the top 2% in terms of downloads via SourceForge. Transitioned to current state by noting issues/problems:
Speaker: Stephen Murray, Columbia U.
Murray is faculty, an art historian. His talk, roughly summarized, is about the presentation of European churches online. He's not an IT person in any sense; he needed collaborators to assist with those aspects, and had plenty, including dual-trained humanist/technologists, which he sees as the future.
Jill Sodt and I attended this roundtable along with about 25 other people. The popularity of the session meant that we had to abandon our table and plop ourselves in a loose semicircle in a space between two rows of poster display stands. It wasn't comfortable and the acoustics were atrocious, but it was highly informative and inspiring!
We learned that many other universities have had adventures with Virtual Reference that were similar to our own. Many had tried QuestionPoint or LivePerson and had grown frustrated with technical glitches and slow response times. Some other systems that people had tried were Velaro, LiveAssistance, Tutor.com, and Docutek VRL plus. The person using Docutek seemed to find it reasonably useful (if my memory serves). Though a few were still using a robust VR package, many had abandoned them altogether and switched to IM.
Many were using Meebo and a few were using Trillian or Gaim. I was interested to hear about a library that has been successfully using Windows Live Messenger and experimenting with VOIP. Another library has been using MS Office Communicator. Evidently these two Microsoft products require a bit of technical ledgerdemain (and expertise) to convince to allow traffic through proxies and firewalls (note: I may be entirely misremembering that bit).
Among our most interesting discussions were those focusing on how to market IM service and how to staff it. Some had tried marketing IM in facebook with very little success. The best approach I heard was from a library that put a small image of it's IM widget on its library homepage. Evidently, a click of the widget directs people to the ask a librarian page. Folks seemed quite interested when Jill and I explained how K-State Libraries have been embedding widgets in KSOL and on subject pages and on the main database page, etc... They were especially intrigued when Jill stated that Meebo tells us which page a question is coming from. They also liked Jenny's idea to use MOO cards to market the service. The issue of staffing IM service generated some animated discussion. Most insisted that IM should be staffed off the main desk, but some said they had been able to make it work from the main desk by adding additional staff to the desk during peak times.
This was a wonderful roundtable!
Just wanted to share a few thought after attending K-State's 4th annual Diversity Summit on April 6th, 2007. The title this year was "A Time for Institutional Accountability, Strategic Planning and Re-Engagement." After a welcome by our own Dean Lori, we heard an inspiring opening by Board of Regents member Janet Perkins. A K-State alum, with experience in elementary education and ESL, she shared her own story of coming to the United States as an 11 year old who had never been to school and did not speak English. To have graduated from both high school and college and now be on the Board of Regents, is proof that engagement and encouragement can make a difference. If you ever have an opportunity to listen to this woman, make the time.
Dr. Myra Gordon presented an update of the Strategic Plan for Diversity, showing changes from 2002 through 2006. It looks like the university is headed in the right direction, but get a better take on that we then broke into 5 groups and were given specific questions to answer within the groups. Concerns from each group were reported back along with ideas of what needs to be done and actions to take. Specifics that were repeated from more than one group included more mentoring for GTA's and new faculty, ideas to improve retention, and the need to broaden the term "diversity" in this context to include more than multi-cultural groups.
For me the highlight of the day was the afternoon presentation on "Cultural Crossroads in the House of Dance and Feathers: Learning Through Engagement." Ronald Lewis the director and K-State faculty and students shared their experiences working with together to rebuild this museum after Hurricane Katrina destroyed 95% of the artifacts and the building in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans. What a perfect example of diversity, cooperation, and engagement this story is. I was certainly touched by the stories told and know these students and the people they met on their journey will not forget what happened.
More information on the Mardi Gras Indians can be found at http://www.jstor.org/view/02763605/ap030020/03a00030/0 and songs can befournd at http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Mardi+Gras=Indian+song+cycle:+a+heroc+tradition-a012170898
Also see photos at http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/pdfplus/10.1525/city.2004.16.1.117
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