EDUCAUSE | Contributed by Organizations or Campuses; Articles, Papers, and Reports; and Resource Sharing

Beyond Being There: A Blueprint for Advancing the Design, Development, and Evaluation of Virtual Organizations

ckeller — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:01:37 -0500

This report is based primarily on a workshop involving 42 people from academia and industry.
The goal of the workshop was to share systematic knowledge about the components, characteristics,
practices, and transformative impact of effective VOs; identify topics for future research that will
inform the ongoing design, development, and analysis of VOs for science and engineering research
and education; and create a new cross-disciplinary VO research community to conduct research across
a range of important topics. A subsequent workshop brought together more than 200 practitioners and
VO researchers to discuss how to build effective virtual organizations, and some of the material from
that workshop is represented here.

Open Science Grid: Building and Sustaining General Cyberinfrastructure Using a Collaborative Approach

ckeller — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 11:09:19 -0500

The author describes in this paper the creation and operation of the Open Science Grid (OSG [1]), a distributed shared cyberinfrastructure driven by the milestones of a diverse group of research communities. The effort is fundamentally collaborative, with domain scientists, computer scientists and technology specialists and providers from more than 70 U.S. universities, national laboratories and organizations providing resources, tools and expertise. The evolving OSG facility provides computing and storage resources for particle and nuclear physics, gravitational wave experiments, digital astronomy, molecular genomics, nanoscience and applied mathematics. The OSG consortium also partners with campus and regional grids, large projects such as TeraGrid [2], Earth System Grid [3], Enabling Grids for E–sciencE (EGEE [4]) in Europe and related efforts in South America and Asia to facilitate interoperability across national and international boundaries.

OSG’s experience broadly illustrates the breadth and scale of effort that a diverse, evolving collaboration must undertake in building and sustaining large–scale cyberinfrastructure serving multiple communities. Scalability — in resource size, number of member organizations and application diversity — remains a central concern. As a result, many interesting [5] challenges continue to emerge and their resolution requires engaged partners and creative adjustments.

Digital Repositories in UK universities and colleges

drupal — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 12:31:51 -0600

Sometimes a word acquires so many meanings that it becomes difficult to use clearly. This happened to 'portal', and it may be happening to 'repository'. There is a lot of development work underway that claims to relate to repositories, that might previously have been related to 'archives', 'digital libraries' or 'content management systems'. Defining the boundaries is probably a waste of time, so for the purposes of this article, I'll take a reasonably pragmatic approach, which is to say a repository is a digital object store into which material can be deposited. Repositories therefore offer information professionals a way of becoming more involved in the processes whereby digital information is made shareable, applying their expertise earlier in the information cycle than has often been the case.

Shared CMS Hosting Services in Ohio: Year One

drupal — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:37:56 -0600

To encourage shared infrastructure, the Ohio Board of Regents funded a partnership among the Ohio Digital Commons for Education (ODCE), the University of Cincinnati (UC) and Kent State University (KSU) to provide statewide CMS hosting, content repository, and authentication services in Ohio.

Web 2.0: Building the New Library

drupal — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 16:28:03 -0600

The author explores some of the recent buzz around the concept of 'Web 2.0' and asks what it means for libraries and related organisations.

Emerging Visions for Access in the Twenty-first Century Library

drupal — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 11:41:00 -0500

Abstractpub119 Emerging Visions for Access in the Twenty-first Century LibraryCONFERENCE PROCEEDINGSDOCUMENTATION ABSTRACTS, INC.INSTITUTES FOR INFORMATION SCIENCEAPRIL 21–22, 2003Presented by the Council on Library and Information Resources and the California Digital Library(8/03, 84 pp.) $20ISBN 1-932326-03-0 "Emerging Visions for Access in the Twenty-first Century Library" is the second in a series of international symposiums that are supported by a grant from Documentation Abstracts, Inc. (DAI). The institutes will address key issues in information science relating to digital libraries, economics of information, or resources for scholarship.This volume of conference proceedings is from the April 2003 symposium. Included are the following:
* Welcoming Remarks, Lawrence H. Pitts
* Reaching across Library Boundaries, Robert S. Martin
* The Personal Library: Integrating the Library in the Networking Society, Jens Thorhauge
* Libraries Empower People to Participate in a Civil Society, Gary E. Strong
* Toward Supported "Communities of Interest" in Digital Environments, Robin Stanton
* The Library and Education: Integrating Information Landscapes, Michael McRobbie
* The Open Access Movement in Scholarly Communication, Michael Eisen
* Lessons in Deep Resource Sharing from the University of California Libraries, Daniel Greenstein

Between Rhizomes and Trees: P2P Information Systems

drupal — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 16:26:16 -0600

The aim of the first part of this paper is to provide an overview of information retrieval in Peer–to–Peer (P2P) information systems in the file–sharing domain. Starting with a general overview of the concept of P2P information systems, the paper then focuses on five desktop–accessible P2P information systems: Napster with its clones OpenNap and eDonkey, and Gnutella and FastTrack (i.e., Kazaa). A detailed description is given of the attributes and properties of each P2P file–sharing information system, followed by an evaluation of the respective P2P file–sharing applications, taking each in turn and examining their respective strengths and weaknesses. This paper concludes with a critical comparative analysis and gives some suggestions for further investigation.