CIRSS

Carole Palmer, Director of CIRSS, will participate in the Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure for Collaborative Science, an NSF-funded workshop sponsored by and hosted at NESCent, May 18-20, 2011.

This workshop brings together participants with a diverse set of perspectives, background, and experiences on enabling multi-disciplinary research collaborations that often rely heavily on informatics to succeed. These include informatics practitioners, social scientists, technology experts, and biologists. The workshop provides an opportunity for these groups to meet and exchange their experiences and challenges in designing and using cyberinfrastructure to enable research collaborations. The event is designed to facilitate the emergence of new targets for better coordination, and to forge new collaborations into how cyberinfrastructure can enable scientific culture change.

For more information: https://www.nescent.org/wg_collabsci/Main_Page

When: May 11, 12:30pm
Where: LISB 242

Title: Europeana Data Model
Session Leaders: Katrina Fenlon and Peter Organisciak

Description: With more than 10 million items, Europeana is Europe's largest aggregation of digital cultural heritage resources from libraries, archives, and museums. This session will explore the Europeana Data Model, a new proposal for structuring the data that Europeana will be ingesting, managing and publishing. The Europeana Data Model is designed to replace the Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE), the basic data model that Europeana began life with. Each of the different heritage sectors represented in Europeana uses different data standards, and ESE reduced these to the lowest common denominator. EDM reverses this reductive approach and is an attempt to transcend the respective information perspectives of the sectors that are represented in Europeana – the museums, archives, audiovisual collections and libraries. EDM is not built on any particular community standard but rather adopts an open, cross-domain Semantic Web-based framework that can accommodate the range and richness of particular community standards such as LIDO [LIDO] for museums, EAD1 for archives or METS2 for digital libraries.

Resource: Europeana Data Model primer

What: Units, measures, and physical quantities in WolframAlpha

When: April 27th, 12:30 pm

Session Leader: Michael Trott (Content manager for physics at Wolfram|Alpha)

Where: 242 LISB

Description: All quantitative measurement values come with units (like meters, kilograms, pascals, volts, ...) . In addition to the modern SI, there are thousands of different units in use, sometimes for historical, sometimes for geographic reasons. Recognizing units and converting between them is very important for dimensional calculations, data statistics, and more. The structure of the unit system of Wolfram|Alpha and the statistics about the use of units will be discussed.

April 13th -- Enabling Long-Term Access to Born-Digital Materials on CD-ROMs: Migration, Emulation, and Imperative to Pool Technical Knowledge
Session Leader: Geoffrey Brown, Professor of Computer Science at the School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University


Description: For the past 20 years, CD-ROMs have been the primary media for distributing key economic, scientific, environmental, and societal data as well as educational and scholarly work. Indeed, 10,000's of titles have been published including thousands distributed by the United States and other governments. Yet no viable strategy has been developed to ensure that these materials will be accessible to future generations of scholars. In the short term, these materials are subject to physical degradation which will make them ultimately unreadable and, in the long-term, technological obsolescence will make their contents unusable.

The diaries of H.R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon's chief of staff, were published in their entirety on CD-ROM, but only in abridged form on paper. References by Haldeman to Mark Felt, who was unveiled as the Watergate source, appear only on the CD-ROM version. This CD-ROM no longer operates in modern Windows environments, but can be accessed, with some effort, in an emulation environment. In other cases, the files on a CD-ROM can still be accessed, but may be in obsolete formats. Finally, many publications of government agencies are available only for local use in a few libraries.

I will discuss two aspects of our work in digital preservation – the creation of a browsable networked archive of the approximately 5000 CD-ROMs published by the United States Government Printing Office, and the development of emulation technologies to enable future scholars ready access to materials such as the Haldeman diaries.

The goals for this roundtable are to discuss the limits of the available technological solutions, the social implications their implementation, and the legal constraints on deploying them.

Location: 341 LISB

Resources:

Kam Woods and Geoffrey Brown. Creating Virtual CD-ROM Collections

Stuart Granger. "Emulation as a Preservation Strategy".

Copyright Law Section 108

Date: April 1st, 4:00pm

Place: LISB 126

Title: How LIS Faculty Respond to Library Service Innovations: A Case Study

Session Leader: Sue Searing

Description: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign closed its Library & Information Science Library and replaced it with a virtual library and an embedded librarian. A year later, a survey of the faculty and staff of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) and the University Library assessed how well the new service model meets faculty needs. The data provide a snapshot of how LIS scholars discover and access new publications, how they seek reference assistance, and what they desire from the library. The survey also captured faculty attitudes toward the realignment of library support for their research and teaching.

Resources:

Background documents on the LIS library new service model are available here. See especially: Team implementation report (February 2009)

The librarian's library in transition from physical to virtual place

March 30th -- The Digital Public Library of America Initiative: Considering Content and Scope
Session Leader: Carole Palmer (Director of CIRSS)

Location: LISB room 242, 12:30-2:00

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) initiative began in December 2010 with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This ERRT session will provide an overview of the initiative and the first working meeting held at Harvard on March 1st on content and scope issues. We will discuss themes that emerged from the meeting and questions about Europeana as a model for DPLA and possible roles for our Digital Collections and Content project and the inclusion of the aggregation in DPLA.

Resources:

DPLA Wiki: Please review the Content and Scope section, and the workshop links, in particular. Workshop participants are listed here.

See also a recently released Concept Note, an outcome of the March 1st meeting.

See the main DPLA website at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard for additional information and context.

March 11th -- CIRSS Seminar Series -- Definitions of Dataset in the Scientific and Technical Literature
Session Leader: Simone Sacchi

Description: The integration of heterogeneous data in varying formats and from diverse communities requires an improved understanding of the concept of a dataset, and of key related concepts, such as format, encoding, and version. Ultimately, a normative formal framework of such concepts will be needed to support the effective curation, integration, and use of shared multi-disciplinary scientific data. To prepare for the development of this framework we reviewed the definitions of dataset found in technical documentation and the scientific literature. Four basic features can be identified as common to most definitions: grouping, content, relatedness, and purpose. In this summary of our results we describe each of these features, indicating the directions a more formal analysis might take.

Resources:

Renear, A., Sacchi, S., & Wickett, K. (2010, October 22-27). Definitions of Dataset in the Scientific and Technical Literature. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T), October 22-27, 2010, Pittsburgh, PA.

March 2nd

Disciplinary Culture And Interoperability, An Incompatible Mix?
Session Leader: Carl Lagoze, Associate Professor of Information Science at Cornell University

Location: This session will take place in 341 LISB.

Description: interoperability: A key enabler of cyberinfrastructure development is the ability to discover and deploy functionality that leverages commonalities amongst the practices of scientists in diverse fields, thereby allowing data sharing and other collaborative activities amongst them. However, there is good evidence from the literature that individual disciplinary cultures are deeply culturally embedded and based on the number of factors including the nature of the research, the economic value of the research products, and in some cases dysfunctional, historically-based path dependencies. Our own work examining the research practices and collaborative patterns of chemists and physicists has shown strong evidence of this. Designers and researchers of cyberinfrastructure are faced with two unpleasant alternatives. Ignore aspects of these disciplinary idiosyncrasies and possibly create cyberinfrastructure that its target communities resist. Or, accommodate these differences by creating “lowest common denominator” cyberinfrastructure that fails to provide sufficient functionality to really facilitate new scientific practices. These are some of the questions we face the Data Conservancy project, which is funded by the National Science Foundation to research, prototype, and possibly develop new cyber infrastructure for data Curation. I certainly don't know the answers to these questions and look forward to a stimulate discussion on the best way to approach this problem.

Background Material:

• P.N. Edwards, S.J. Jackson, G.C. Bowker, and C.P. Knobel, Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensions, and Design, National Science Foundation, 2007.
• C.L. Palmer and M.H. Cragin, “Scholarship and disciplinary practices,” Annual review of information science and technology, vol. 42, 2008, p. 163–212.
• T. Velden and C. Lagoze, “Communicating Chemistry,” Nature Chemistry, vol. 1, 2009.
• T. Velden, A.-ul Haque, and C. Lagoze, “A new approach to analyzing patterns of collaboration in co-authorship networks: mesoscopic analysis and interpretation,” Scientometrics, Apr. 2010.

Date: February 25th

Location: LISB 126

Time: 4:00 pm

Title: Beyond Size and Search: Building Contextual Mass in Digital Aggregations for Scholarly Use
 

Session Leaders: Katrina Fenlon and Carole Palmer

Description: At present there are no established collection development methods for building large-scale digital aggregations. However, to realize the potential of the collective base of digital content and advance scholarship, aggregations must do more than provide search of sizable bodies of content. Informed by empirical understanding of scholarly information practices, the IMLS Digital Collections and Content project developed an aggregation strategy for building Opening History, one of the largest digital cultural heritage aggregations in the country. The strategy applied policy-driven collecting, based on the principle of contextual mass, and conspectus-style evaluation of collection-level metadata to identify strong subject areas within the aggregation. Analysis of density, interconnectedness, diversity, and small/large collection complementarity determined subject concentrations and thematic strengths to be prioritized for future collection development and used as organizational structures for browsing and visualization. The approach models how scholars build their own personal research collections, as they follow leads from collection to collection across institutions near and far, and adds value that cannot be achieved through conventional retrieval and browsing at the item-level. This presentation is based on a paper presented at ASIS&T 2010, in Pittsburgh in late October.

Resources:

Palmer, C., Zavalina, O., Fenlon, K. (2010). Beyond Size and Search: Building Contextual Mass in Digital Aggregations for Scholarly Use. ASIST 2010, October 20-27, 2010, Pittsburgh, PA.

More information may be found here.