The University of Tennessee, Knoxville School of Information Sciences has been awarded an IMLS grant to study the value of academic libraries. It will collaborate with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Libraries and the Association of Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt from the press release :

Carol Tenopir, a professor in the School of Information Sciences, is the lead investigator on the project; Paula Kaufman, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a co-principal investigator; and Martha Kyrillidou, Senior Director for Statistics and Service Quality Programs, is leading the project from ARL.

The three-year grant, entitled "Value, Outcomes, and Return on Investment of Academic Libraries (Lib-Value)," will work to enrich, expand, test, and implement methodologies measuring the return on investment (ROI) in academic libraries.

"There is an increasing need for academic librarians to demonstrate the return on investment and value of the library to the various stakeholders of the institution and to guide library management in the redirection of library funds to important products and services for the future," Tenopir said. Academic libraries actively participate in the many changes in scholarship, such as the move to e-science, collaborative and participatory scholarship, and focus on new materials such as data, multimedia, and born-digital assets. To remain relevant and central to the academic mission in the future, academic librarians need to be able to demonstrate the value that the academic library provides to the campus community using proven methods of measurement that will allow librarians to determine where their efforts should be concentrated and how funding should be allocated.

The results of the study will provide evidence and a set of tested methodologies and tools to help academic librarians demonstrate how the library provides value to its constituents and ROI to its funders, and to measure which products and services are of most value to enhancing the university’s mission. This project will greatly expand upon earlier studies to consider multiple measures of value that the academic library brings to teaching/learning, research, and social/professional/public engagement functions of the academic institution.

To ensure that the process will be rigorous, realistic, and highly visible in the academic library and university community, an experienced team of academic librarians and outstanding researchers bring their leadership, built on many years of experience, to the project. Two well-known researchers in the library field will serve as consultants: Bruce Kingma, an economist at Syracuse University, and Donald W. King, a statistician at the University of North Carolina at Chapel-Hill. Additional project participants include: Gayle Baker, Ken Wise, Rachel Fleming-May, Regina Mays, Crystal Sherline, and Andrea Baer at the University of Tennessee; Tina Chrzastowski at the University of Illinois; and Henry Gross, Gary Roebuck, and David Green at ARL.

Indiana University has been awarded a $2.38 Million Grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Kuali OLE (Open Library Environment) project.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

IU will lead the Kuali OLE (Open Library Environment) project, a partnership of research libraries dedicated to managing increasingly digital resources and collections. Together, these libraries will develop "community source" software that will be made available to libraries worldwide.

Kuali OLE (pronounced Oh-LAY) partners include Indiana University; Florida Consortium (University of Florida representing Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, Rollins College, University of Central Florida, University of Miami, University of South Florida and the Florida Center for Library Automation); Lehigh University; Triangle Research Libraries Network (represented by Duke University and North Carolina State University); University of Chicago; University of Maryland; University of Michigan; and the University of Pennsylvania.

Large academic research libraries such as these manage and provide access to millions of items, using software to track interrelated transactions that range from ordering and paying for items to loaning materials to library patrons.

As the nature of library collections expands to include more digital materials—including leased electronic journals and digitized photograph collections—libraries are increasingly interested in developing management software for these resources, said Interim Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries Carolyn Walters.

"Libraries now create, lease and share digital materials, but the systems in place for cataloging and tracking these items are based on print collections," said Walters. "With this project, we benefit from working together with a community of academic libraries that want to change the way that information is managed in the scholarly environment."

"Research libraries are in dire need of systems that can support the management of research collections for the next-generation scholar," said Robert H. McDonald, executive director for the project and IU's associate dean for library technologies. "This approach demonstrates the best of open-source software development, directed partnership resource needs, and a market of commercial support providers to truly align with the needs of research libraries within the higher education environment."

More than 200 libraries, educational institutions, professional organizations and businesses laid the groundwork for the Kuali OLE project by participating in the original OLE project, a design phase that was supported by an earlier grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and led by Duke University.

The NSF has issued a revised solicitation for Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure grants (NSF 10-508). It is anticipated that $15,000,000 over a three-year period will be available for 25 to 30 awards. The full proposal deadline is February 26, 2010.

Here's an excerpt:

The FY2010 SDCI solicitation supports the development, deployment, and maintenance of software in the five software focus area listed above, i.e., software for HPC systems, software for digital data management, software for networking, middleware, and cybersecurity, and specifically focuses on cross-cutting issues of CI software sustainability, manageability and power/energy efficiency in each of these software focus areas. . . .

2. Software for Digital Data

The Data focus area addresses software that promotes acquisition, transport, discovery, access, analysis, and preservation of very large-scale digital data in support of large scale applications or data sets transitioning to use by communities other than the ones that originally gathered the data. Examples of such datasets includes climatologic, ecologic, phonologic, observation data, sensor systems, spatial visualizations, multi-dimensional datasets correlated with metadata and so forth.

Specific focus areas in Software for Digital Data for the FY2010 SDCI solicitation include:

• Documentation/Metadata: Tools for automated/facilitated metadata creation/acquisition, including linking data and metadata to assist in curation efforts; tools to enable the creation and application of ontologies, semantic discovery, assessment, comparison, and integration of new composite ontologies.
• Security/Protection: Tools for data authentication, tiered/layered access systems for data confidentiality/privacy protection, replication tools to ensure data protection across varied storage systems/strategies, rules-based data security management tools, and assurance tools to test for digital forgery and privacy violations.
• Data transport/management: Tools to enable acquisition of high data rate high volume data from varied, distributed data sources (including sensors systems and instruments), while addressing stringent space and data quality constraints; tools to assist in improved low-level management of data and transport to take better advantage of limited bandwidth.
• Data analytics and visualization: Tools that operate in (near) real-time, not traditional batch mode, on possible streaming data, in-transit data processing, data integration and fusion.  

JISC has announced that eight projects have been awarded Digging into Data Challenge grants.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"Data mining and analysis are not just for scientists" is the message coming strongly out of an international JISC-funded competition, the "Digging into Data Challenge."

Entrants have been challenged to answer the question "what would you do with a million books? Or a million pages of newspapers? Or a million photographs of artworks?" That is, how can analysis done over immense quantities of digital data be employed in humanities and social science research? What would you do with a million books? Or a million pages of newspapers? Or a million photographs of artworks?

Eight international research teams from the UK, US and Canada will be using a variety of data analysis tools to demonstrate that techniques currently used in the sciences can leverage open, new avenues for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

The winners of the competition are announced today by the four leading research agencies sponsoring the competition: JISC, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), both of the United States.

Investment from the four agencies together amounts to over a million pounds, allowing new links to be forged across the different countries, as well as breaking down disciplinary boundaries.

Here are the funded projects

• Data Mining with Criminal Intent: George Mason University, University of Alberta, and University of Hertfordshire
• Digging into Image Data to Answer Authorship Related Questions: Michigan State University, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and University of Sheffield
• Digging into the Enlightenment: Mapping the Republic of Letters: University of Oklahoma, University of Oxford, and Stanford University
• Harvesting Speech Datasets for Linguistic Research on the Web: McGill University and Cornell University
• Mining a Year of Speech: University of Oxford and University of Pennsylvania
• Railroads and the Making of Modern America—Tools for Spatio-Temporal Correlation, Analysis, and Visualization: University of Portsmouth and University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, University of Southampton, and McGill University
• Towards Dynamic Variorum Editions: Mount Allison University, Imperial College, London, and Tufts University

Paul Ginsparg, professor of physics and information science at Cornell University, has been awarded a $882,610 grant by the NSF for the Tools for Open Access Cyberinfrastructure project, which will enhance the popular arXiv repository. The grant was funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Here's an excerpt from the grant award :

This project proposes to investigate and implement a variety of tools for enhancing the very widely used and popular Arxiv.org infrastructure, based on information filters for assisted service discovery and selection, text-mining, information genealogy, automated classification and identification of composite resources, data-mining, usage analyses, matching and ranking heuristics, support for next-generation document formats, and semantic markup.

Read more about it at "Stimulus Grant to Enhance arXiv E-Preprints for Scientists."

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has awarded $249,623 to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science for the Closing the Digital Curation Gap project.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Scientists, researchers, and scholars across the world generate vast amounts of digital data, but the scientific record and the documentary heritage created in digital form are at risk—from technology obsolescence, from the fragility of digital media, and from the lack of baseline practices for managing and preserving digital data. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) School of Information and Library Science, working with the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and partners in the United Kingdom (U.K.), are collaborating on the Closing the Digital Curation Gap (CDCG) project to establish baseline practices for the storage, maintenance, and preservation of digital data to help ensure their enhancement and continuing long-term use. Because digital curation, or the management and preservation of digital data over the full life cycle, is of strategic importance to the library and archives fields, IMLS is funding the project through a cooperative agreement with UNC-CH. U.K. partners include the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), which supports innovation in digital technologies in U.K. colleges and universities, and its funded entities, the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) and the Digital Curation Centre (DCC).

Well-curated data can be made accessible for a variety of audiences. For example, the data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (www.sdss.org) at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico is available to professional astronomers worldwide as well as to schoolchildren, teachers, and citizen scientists through its Galaxy Zoo project. Galaxy Zoo, now in its second version, invites citizen scientists to assist in classifying over a million galaxies (www.galaxyzoo.org). With good preservation techniques, this data will be available into the future to provide documentation of the sky as it currently appears.

Data and information science researchers have already developed many viable applications, models, strategies, and standards for the long term care of digital objects. This project will help bridge a significant gap between the progress of digital curation research and development and the professional practices of archivists, librarians, and museum curators. Project partners will develop guidelines for digital curation practices, especially for staff in small to medium-sized cultural heritage institutions where digital assets are most at risk. Larger institutions will also benefit. To develop baseline practices, a working group will establish and support a network of digital curation practitioners, researchers, and educators through face-to-face meetings, web-based communication, and other communication tools. Project staff will also use surveys, interviews, and case studies to develop a plan for ongoing development of digital curation frameworks, guidance, and best practices. The team will also promote roles that various organizations can play and identify future opportunities for collaboration.

As part of this project, the Digital Curation Manual, which is maintained by the DCC, will be updated and expanded www.dcc.ac.uk/resource/curation-manual/chapters and the Digital Curation Exchange web portal will receive support (http://digitalcurationexchange.org). Through these efforts, the CDCG project will lay the foundation that will inform future training, education, and practice. The project's research, publications, practical tool integration, and outreach and training efforts will be of value to organizations charged with maintaining digital assets over the long term.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has made its 2010 National Leadership Grant guidelines available.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is accepting grant applications for the agency’s 2010 National Leadership Grant (NLG) program. Applications, guidelines, and examples of successful proposals can be found on the agency's Web site. The deadline for submitting applications is February 1, 2010.

For the past 12 years, the National Leadership Grants program has been the capstone program for IMLS, providing the agency's highest level of support for innovative projects that provide important research, tools, and models for library and museum programs across the country. Museums and libraries interested in submitting NLG proposals to IMLS can apply for one of two types of grants: Projects or Collaborative Planning Grants. Each of these types applies to the four funding categories: Advancing Digital Resources, Library-Museum Collaboration, Research, and Demonstration.

The National Institutes of Health have awarded the University of Florida a $12.2 million grant to develop VIVOweb. The Cornell University Library and Indiana University are grant partners.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

By fostering alliances, it is hoped that biomedical research and discovery will move faster. The project will rest on VIVO, a technology developed at Cornell since 2003. It built a comprehensive network of scientists that identified existing projects and initiated new cooperation.

"Before VIVO, the Cornell librarians heard a lot of frustration from faculty members who couldn't find collaborators from different disciplines across campus,” Medha Devare, Cornell librarian for bioinformatics and life sciences. "The idea of VIVO was to transcend administrative divisions and create a single point of access for scholarly interaction. Now that VIVO is expanding across institutions, the biomedical community will be able to benefit from that bird's eye perspective of their research."

Money for the new grant, awarded through NIH's National Center for Research Resources, originated from American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding. This has already opened eight positions at Cornell and more jobs at the other partners.

Cornell will spearhead the development of the multi-institutional functionality of the VIVO technology; the University of Florida will focus on developing technology for keeping each site's data current; and Indiana University Bloomington will develop social networking tools to enable researchers to find others with similar interests. Four other institutions — Scripps Research Institute, Juniper, Fla.; Ponce School of Medicine, Ponce, P.R.; Washington University of St. Louis; and the Weill Cornell Medical College, New York City—will serve as implementation sites.

Jon Corson-Rikert, head of Information Technology Services at Cornell's Mann Library, initially developed VIVO in 2003. As researchers and administrators embraced the newly created network, a team of programmers, designers and librarians expanded the project to all other disciplines at Cornell.

Other universities began to explore the open-source, free software. VIVO has been adopted for local networks at other universities and institutions in the United States, Australia and China. This new project will follow VIVO's original model and build a multi-institutional platform for the biomedical community.

The Cornell effort to develop VIVOweb will be led by Dean Krafft, the Library's chief technology strategist, Corson-Rikert and Devare. VIVOweb's open Semantic Web/Linked Data approach will empower researchers to extend their research communities—not just via prior knowledge or serendipity, but through recommendation or suggestion networks based on common traits described in the VIVOweb researcher profiles.

The Columbia University Libraries and the Cornell University Library have received a grant to fund their 2CUL partnership project.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $385,000 to the libraries at Columbia University in New York City and Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., to support the development of an innovative partnership dubbed "2CUL." This new relationship has the potential to become the most expansive collaboration to date between major research libraries.

Starting this fall, Cornell and Columbia will plan significant partnerships in collaborative collection development, acquisitions and processing. The two universities will form a separate service entity to facilitate the collaboration. Ithaka, a not-for-profit organization that assists research libraries and the academic community to leverage advancing information technologies, will provide project management and assist in the planning. Initial work will focus on several global collecting areas, as well as collaborative funding and support of technical infrastructure in various areas.

2CUL — pronounced "too cool" — stands for the acronyms of both Columbia University Library and Cornell University Library. The partnership is not a merger, and the two libraries remain separate institutions.

"2CUL represents a new, radical form of collaboration that pairs two leading research libraries in a voluntary, equal partnership," said James G. Neal, Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University. "Columbia University Libraries and Cornell University Library are committed to developing an enduring and transformative partnership that will enable us to achieve greater efficiencies and effectiveness and to address new challenges through combined forces."

"2CUL will ameliorate the impact of budget cuts while building our librarie' ability to innovate," said Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian at Cornell University. "This partnership is predicated on Cornell and Columbia’s shared commitment to reinvigorate our libraries in response to and in anticipation of changes in digital access, interdisciplinary research and scholarly communication. It also allows us to provide the best possible experience for our users."

Over the next two years, 2CUL will explore ways to improve the quality of collections and services offered to campus constituencies, redirect resources to emerging needs, and make each institution more competitive in securing government and foundation support. The relationship could also provide a new blueprint for broad, non-exclusive partnerships between other academic libraries and other parts of the academy.

The Georgia Institute of Technology Library and Information Center has been awarded a $857,005 grant for its "The GALILEO Knowledge Repository (GKR): Advancing the Access and Management of Scholarly Digital Content" project.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Georgia Tech, in partnership with the University of Georgia, Georgia State University, the Medical College of Georgia, Georgia Southern University, Valdosta State University, Albany State University, North Georgia College and State University, and the College of Coastal Georgia, will build a statewide digital repository to provide access to scholarly works and research information. The principal investigator on the grant is Tyler Walters, Associate Director for Technology and Resource Services, the Georgia Institute of Technology Library and Information Center; the co-PI is P. Toby Graham, Director, Digital Library of Georgia, University of Georgia Libraries.

The scholarly works and research information to be held by the GKR are materials such as:

Annual Reports; Audio/Video Recordings; Conference Papers; Electronic Theses and Dissertations; Instructional Materials; Lecture Series and Symposia Materials; Newsletters; Pre-Prints/Post-Prints; Proceedings; Research and Technical Reports; Web Sites; White Papers; and Working Papers.

The GKR program has five activities that it will complete during the grant:

1. Conduct a survey and focus groups of the USG librarians' and faculty's usage and perceptions of digital repositories.
2. Establish a service to host individual repositories for four participating USG institutions (Medical College of Georgia, Georgia Southern University, Albany State University, College of Coastal Georgia)
3. Build a central, searchable web site and database from all eight GKR-related digital repositories, featuring the GKR-developed repository collection mapping tool. This will be done by harvesting database records from all eight GKR-related digital repositories (the four hosted repositories mentioned above, plus existing repositories at Georgia Tech, University of Georgia, Georgia State University, and Valdosta State University).
4. Establish repository-related services for the GKR partners: copyright assistance, digitization, content submission into their repository, and digital preservation
5. Design and offer to a nationwide audience a symposium and workshop on managing statewide and consortial repositories. The goal of the training program is to increase the number of digital repositories operating in the U.S. and the number of information professionals with the knowledge and skills to manage repositories consortially.