EDUCAUSE | libraries

ALA/LITA Pre-Conference on DataGrid Technologies and Libraries

rmcdonal — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:19:28 -0500

Today is the last day for advance registration for an upcoming pre-conference that I am doing with colleagues from the University of California, San Diego, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the Texas Advanced Computer Center. See registration link and details below.

Datagrid Technologies and Libraries
Friday, June 27, 2008, 9:00 am- 5:00 pm
Anaheim, CA

This pre-conference will be a panel presentation featuring librarians and storage administrators from the UC San Diego Libraries, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the Texas Advanced Computer Center, that will cover various aspects of datagrid technologies for use in libraries. The group will cover the overall benefits of utilizing datagrid technologies with institutional repositories, digital libraries, and digital preservation systems within libraries and will look specifically at case studies of the UCSD Libraries and the SDSC based Chronopolis digital preservation data-grid. Most of the tools for these systems are open source and with very minimal instruction can become an important collaborative network for use with academic bandwidth such as the Internet2 Abilene network for sharing large collections of born-digital material and escaping proprietary hardware lock-in on large-scale or mass digitization initiatives.

Registration - http://www.ala.org/ala/eventsandconferencesb/annual/2008a/registration.cfm

Speakers:
Ardys Kozbial, UC San Diego Libraries
Declan Fleming, UC San Diego Libraries
David Minor, San Diego Supercomputer Center
Robert McDonald, San Diego Supercomputer Center
Chris Jordan, Grid Infrastructure Group, Texas Advanced Computing Center

Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization

buridan — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 07:50:23 -0600

The paper describes four large-scale projects—Google Book Search, Microsoft Live Search Books, Open Content Alliance, and the Million Book Project—and their digitization strategies. It then discusses a range of issues affecting the stewardship of the digital collections they create: selection, quality in content creation, technical infrastructure, and organizational infrastructure. The paper also attempts to foresee the likely impacts of large-scale digitization on book collections.

[From CLIR Report]====this is a council on libraries and information resources report. there are around 140 others. most are open access and very informative.

digital archives, archives

ALA/LITA MidWinter Pre-Conference on User Centered Design

rmcdonal — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 11:58:25 -0600

Just heard about an interesting pre-conference at the American Library Association's midwinter meeting in Philadelphia, PA. It will be a two day course (January 10-11, 2008) on user-centered design by Brenda Reeb from the University of Rochester. Should be a good beginning and intermediate introduction to the processes that have culminated in the open-access monograph that Rochester has recently produced, Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester.

For more info see: http://litablog.org/2007/11/13/lita-workshops-at-2008-ala-midwinter-meeting/

A Few Millennial Sessions at Educause 2007

rmcdonal — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:03:12 -0500

At this year's Educause Annual Conference there were a variety of sessions on millennials. I thought I would list them all here for those interested in this topic. I may have missed a few, if so let me know.

McDonald, Sweeney, Thomas, Walters www.educause.edu/E07/Program/11073?PRODUCT_CODE=E07/SESS047

Deturck, Griscom www.educause.edu/E07/Program/11073?PRODUCT_CODE=E07/SESS019

Somerville www.educause.edu/E07/Program/11073?PRODUCT_CODE=E07/SESS061

Donald, Hardin www.educause.edu/E07/Program/11073?PRODUCT_CODE=E07/SESS098

Campbell www.educause.edu/E07/Program/11073?PRODUCT_CODE=E07/CI15

Gibbons www.educause.edu/E07/Program/11073?PRODUCT_CODE=E07/SESS113&ITIN=False

Open Source Version of UR Book on Topic docushare.lib.rochester.edu/docushare/dsweb/View/Collection-4436

An Interview with Rachel Edwards

mpasiewicz — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 14:49:36 -0500

In this 16 minute recording, we'll hear from Rachael Edwards, Learning Grid Manager at the University of Warwick. Listen in as she shares a bit about their innovative library and learning space.

An Interview with Google's Vint Cerf

mpasiewicz — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 13:41:11 -0500

This 25 minute recording provides coverage of an interview with Google's Vint Cerf. In a couple of weeks, Dr. Cerf will be speaking at our Annual Conference, and we hope to see you then. For now, let's listen in as we cover a range of topics including Google Video, digital preservation, intellectual property, net neutrality and high performance computing.

Electronic Resources and Libraries Conference 2006

Robert H. McDonald — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 16:18:58 -0600

I just wanted to mention a new conference Electronic Resources & Libraries. This new conference being held in Atlanta, GA March 23-25, 2006 has sprung out of an interesting online community electroniclibrarian.org and the electronic resources in libraries (eril) electronic mailing list. The conference agenda can be found online at http://www.electroniclibrarian.org/conf2006/conf2006.htm.

From an online collaborative standpoint, the conference will be utilizing the moodle course management software for ongoing discussions before and after the conference.

The goals of ER&L are:

Electronic Resources & Libraries is both a virtual community and a physical conference. The ideas behind ER&L came from the results of a survey sent out to librarians on the Electronic Resources In Libraries listserv in July 2005. The results indicated a need to look more closely at the state of electronic resources in libraries and to create a community of professionals from various backgrounds and approaches to get a grasp of issues surrounding the changes made in libraries in the digital age.

The ER&L conference will be the first step to building a shared understanding about the unique medium of electronic resources and management and developing a supportive community for dissemination of basic practices and latest developments in the field. The electroniclibrarian.org website will continue to serve as an online collaboratory for information on this topic.

More on The Long Tail and Libraries

Robert H. McDonald — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 13:47:24 -0600

I have not posted in a while but recently found a great resource on one of my favorite topics The Long Tail Theory. This started from a Chris Anderson article in Wired Magazine. However OCLC had a great article on this in their newsletter last spring. See http://www.oclc.org/news/publications/newsletters/oclc/2005/268/thelongtail.htm

University of Michigan President comments on Google ...

mpasiewicz — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 16:54:00 -0600

C|NET has a nine and a half minute video of Mary Sue Coleman speaking about their library digitization project.
http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6036176.html

The transcript of her speech is available her:
http://www.umich.edu/pres/speeches/060206google.html

An Interview with ALA's Rick Weingarten

mpasiewicz — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 16:44:00 -0600

In this 32 minute recording, I join Rick Weingarten, Director of the ALA's Office of IT Policy, for a look inside the beltway. Join us as he shares a brief bit of background about the American Library Association and a fairly interesting discussion about privacy, the google print litigation, and internet governance.

Also of interest could be ACRL's blog entry noting a number of higher ed associations have released a guide to copyright. Oh, and don't forget resources from our own policy office ;)

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2005 Fall Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

Millennials and Libraries

Robert H. McDonald — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 16:23:31 -0600

My colleague, Chuck Thomas, and I have put up a recent paper that we did "Millennial Net Value(s): Disconnects Between Libraries and the Information Age Mindset" in the FSU Institutional Repository. This paper was originally created for the wonderful symposium Free Culture & the Digital Library held at Emory University. We are very interested in working with other libraries in studying subsets of this generation and how research libraries can evolve to support their research and information needs. This would be a good book opportunity as well. If you are interested, please contact us at cthomas at mailer.fsu.edu or rmcdonal at mailer.fsu.edu.

A few links of interest relating to libraries and web 2.0

mpasiewicz — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 16:03:00 -0600

Lorcan Dempsey on the Flickization of Yahoo
http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000861.html

Lorcan Dempsey on FRBR and David Weinberger's comments on xISBN
http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000859.html

Folksonomies and the Ministry of Reshelving
http://www.libraryjournal.com/blog/670000067/post/210001821.html?nid=2700

Allan Carrington on the scene with a group from Penn State talking about Instructional Design Librarians

mpasiewicz — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 10:38:00 -0500

Joan Lippincott's comments about the growing need for interaction between librarians and instructional technologies, dovetail nicely with this interview conducted by Allan Carrington about the unique role of a Instructional Design Librarian at Penn State University.

Open-Source Digital Publishing - DPubs - Commons Based Peer Production

Robert H. McDonald — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 11:11:00 -0500

This moring I was the session convener for the session on DPubs. This is an exciting new open source collaboration between the Cornell University Libraries and the Pennsylvania State University Libraries. It was interesting that the term commons based peer production (CBPP) did not come up. I have been hearing this everywhere lately when describing open-source collaborations.

Well, back to DPubs, it is interesting to hear that they are working on kickstart scripts to make installation as easily replicable as possible. This is great becasue I want to setup an install on RedHat as soon as possible.

For those of you using DSpace or Fedora for Institutional Repositories keep DPubs in mind as they want to use their publication tools as an API for these IR tools in order to generate more content for IR's.

Thanks to Thomas Hickerson, David Ruddy, and Eric Ferrin for such an inspiring presentation.

Their presentation is already online thanks to the new self-submission site for Educause.

See:
http://www.educause.edu/E05/Program/5085?PRODUCT_CODE=E05/SESS006

Information commons interview with Joan Lippincott

dianao — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 12:48:06 -0500

Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), joined me for an interview to supplement our recent focus session on informal learning spaces. Joan has held positions in a number of libraries, so I wanted to get her views about the role of libraries and information commons as informal learning spaces. I also asked Joan to explore how we might adjust these spaces to take advantage of what we know about students and how they learn.

Utne on libraries

mpasiewicz — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 12:15:11 -0500

Utne has an interesting article on libraries entitled Knowledge for Sale: Are America's public libraries on the verge of losing their way? Also interesting is another article by the same author entitled The New Monastic Librarians.

<sidebar>
One major book distributor has added support for library book leasing program. It will certainly be interesting to see where they take this.
</sidebar>

Cataloging, Classification and Social Computing

mpasiewicz — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 10:59:00 -0500

"Will Google’s Keyword Searching Eliminate the Need for LC Cataloging and Classification?" Well, Thomas Mann has some ideas. Read more at http://www.guild2910.org/searching.htm

IMHO, I think it is too early to tell what the web has in store for us ... especially while social computing is at a such an infantile stage. As I ponder the future of interesting activities like Odeo's distributed folksonomy support, where anyone can tag an item, as well as more established, but still young players like wikipedia, metabrainz and others, I can't help but think that there is much that we can't predict about the potential for disruptive technologies ... especially if someone were to bind traditional metadata stores from sources like libraries (content that is more or less widely available), with a more contemporary twist. That would certainly be a fun project to work on!

On a somewhat related note, you might find the following
series of essays about "the new gatekeepers" of interest...

http://civilities.net/TheNewGatekeepers