Category: Digital Libraries

"Library Leadership for the Digital Age"

Ithaka S+R has released "Library Leadership for the Digital Age."

Here's an excerpt:

Users think libraries are—or at least should be—digital. And yet, we in academic libraries are still counting how many of everything we have in our local collections. We brag about how big we are or how specialized we are. We advertise our job openings with language suggesting that our size is an indicator of greatness. But as libraries become digital, the language about size or subject strength seems slightly ridiculous.

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"Developing Best Practices in Digital Library Assessment: Year One Update"

Joyce Chapman, Jody DeRidder and Santi Thompson have published "Developing Best Practices in Digital Library Assessment: Year One Update" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

In the face of limited resources and increasing demand for online access to digital library content, we need to strategically focus our efforts and better understand users, impact, and associated costs. However, methods for assessment of digital libraries are not standardized. In an effort to address this crucial gap, the Digital Library Federation Assessment Interest Group has engaged the community over the past year in the development of best practices and guidelines. With this article, the authors provide an update on progress to date and solicit participation in an evolving effort to develop viable solutions.

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"What Technology Skills Do Developers Need? A Text Analysis of Job Listings in Library and Information Science (LIS) from Jobs.code4lib.org"

Monica Maceli has published "What Technology Skills Do Developers Need? A Text Analysis of Job Listings in Library and Information Science (LIS) from Jobs.code4lib.org " in Information Technology and Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

Technology plays an indisputably vital role in library and information science (LIS) work; this rapidly moving landscape can create challenges for practitioners and educators seeking to keep pace with such change. In pursuit of building our understanding of currently sought technology competencies in developer-oriented positions within LIS, this paper reports the results of a text analysis of a large collection of job listings culled from the Code4lib jobs website. Beginning over a decade ago as a popular mailing list covering the intersection of technology and library work, the Code4lib organization's current offerings include a website that collects and organizes LIS-related technology job listings. The results of the text analysis of this dataset suggest the currently vital technology skills and concepts that existing and aspiring practitioners may target in their continuing education as developers.

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CDL Executive Director Laine Farley to Retire

Laine Farley, CDL Executive Director, will retire on 9/30/15.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

During her tenure, the scope and extent of CDL's digital library programs have undergone significant expansion, ensuring the national prominence of the digital library services that CDL manages on behalf of the University of California campuses. Among her many accomplishments as Executive Director have been fostering initiatives in library publishing and data management, developing policies and tools for UC's open access initiatives, overseeing the largescale digitization of UC library holdings in partnership with Google and the Internet Archive, and establishing UC libraries as founding members of the HathiTrust.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

IMLS Releases Four National Digital Platform Grant Proposals

IMLS has released four national digital platform grant proposals for projects it awarded grants to.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

  • Fostering a New National Library Network through a Community-­Based, Connected Repository System (LG-70-15-0006): The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), Stanford University, and DuraSpace will foster a greatly expanded network of open-access, content-hosting "hubs" that will enable discovery and interoperability, as well as the reuse of digital resources by people from this country and around the world. The three partners will engage in a major development of the community-driven open source Hydra project to provide these hubs with a new all-in-one solution, which will also allow countless other institutions to easily join the national digital platform.
  • Museum Hub for Open Content (LG-70-15-0002): ARTstor, in collaboration with the El Paso Museum of Art, the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Staten Island Museum, and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) will create and implement software to enable museums to contribute digital image collections for open public access. The project will lower barriers to museum contributions to the DPLA by producing enhanced metadata tools, intellectual property rights decision support tools, and a direct-to-DPLA publishing capacity.
  • Combining Social Media Storytelling with Web Archives (LG-71-15-0077): Old Dominion University and the Internet Archive will collaborate to develop tools and techniques for integrating "storytelling" social media and web archiving. The partners will use information retrieval techniques to (semi-)automatically generate stories summarizing a collection and mine existing public stories as a basis for librarians, archivists, and curators to create collections about breaking events.
  • Repository Services for Accessible Course Content (LG-72-15-0009): This planning project, led by Tufts University, will bring together experts from disability services, including librarians, IT professionals, advocates, and legal counsel, to develop work plans for shared infrastructure, within which universities can support their students with disabilities. The intention is to create specifications and a business model that will complement existing platforms and services.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

DLPA Strategic Plan 2015 through 2017

The Digital Public Library of America has released DLPA Strategic Plan 2015 through 2017.

Here's an excerpt:

We must, first and foremost, complete our hub network so that all collections and item types in America have an on-ramp to DPLA; fully build out our technology platform to ensure we have a solid foundation for many years to come and that anticipates further growth and diversification; and pursue an outreach plan that gets DPLA resources more widely into the hands of the global public, into education at all levels from kindergarten through graduate schools (with a special focus on underresourced organizations), and onto the screens of eager amateur and family historians and the developers who are creating the latest apps and websites.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"On Being a Hub: Some Details behind Providing Metadata for the Digital Public Library of America"

Lisa Gregory and Stephanie Williams have published "On Being a Hub: Some Details behind Providing Metadata for the Digital Public Library of America" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

After years of planning, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) launched in 2013. Institutions from around the United States contribute to the DPLA through regional "service hubs," entities that aggregate digital collections metadata for harvest by the DPLA. The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center has been one of these service hubs since the end of 2013. This article describes the technological side of being a service hub for the DPLA, from choosing metadata requirements and reviewing software, to the workflow used each month when providing hundreds of metadata feeds for DPLA harvest. The authors hope it will be of interest to those pursuing metadata aggregation, whether for the DPLA or for other purposes.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Digital Public Library of America Gets $594,000 Grant

The Digital Public Library of America Gets received a $594,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) announced today $594,000 in new funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to research potential sustainability models and to pursue the most promising option (or options). This two-year grant will allow DPLA to expand its staff to target opportunities for further development and revenue, without compromising its mission of open access to the riches of America's libraries, archives, and museums.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap

Head of Digital Initiatives at Utah State University Libraries

The Utah State University Libraries are recruiting a Head of Digital Initiatives.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

Utah State University Libraries seeks an innovative, collaborative, and highly organized Head of Digital Initiatives to lead digital collection and scholarly communication services that support the research and teaching needs of the University. Reporting to the Director for Digital and Information Technology, the successful candidate will direct the Libraries' digital initiatives programs, including the Digital Library and Digital Commons institutional repository.

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"Checking In With Google Books, HathiTrust, and the DPLA"

Naomi Eichenlaub has published "Checking In With Google Books, HathiTrust, and the DPLA" in Computers in Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

Google Books and HathiTrust have been making headlines in the library world and beyond for years now, while a new player, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), has only recently entered the scene. This article will provide a "state of the environment" update for these digital library projects including project history and background. It will also examine some challenges common to all three projects including copyright, orphan works, metadata, and quality issues.

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European Digital Library Project: "Report on the EuDML External Cooperation Model"

Thierry Bouche and Jiri Rákosnik have self-archived "Report on the EuDML External Cooperation Model" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

The EuDML project was explicitly envisioned as a pilot project addressing two intimately intertwined challenges: (i) setting up the technical infrastructure to create a unified access point for the digital mathematical content hosted by different organizations across various countries; (ii) defining a cooperation model with a variety of stakeholders that would allow building a reliable and durable global reference library, aiming to be eventually exhaustive. On both sides the project reached clear successes and modified the state-of-the-art. In this paper we report on the latter one.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap |

Appraising our Digital Investment: Sustainability of Digitized Special Collections in ARL Libraries

ARL and Ithaka S+R have released Appraising our Digital Investment: Sustainability of Digitized Special Collections in ARL Libraries .

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The research reveals that understanding the continuing costs for sustaining digital collections is a challenge across libraries. Responsibility is frequently dispersed among departments, and staff time and other costs are rarely allocated expressly to these activities or accounted for project-by-project. Almost universally, libraries are funding this activity out of their base budgets, suggesting that they will continue to need to shift funds from other things in order to support this as a priority.

While libraries are supporting these collections within their operations, the study's findings also reflect concern over sustainability, with librarians citing lack of funding and staff capacity as major challenges to sufficient investment in their digital collections. . . .

The three-part survey, designed with input from the ARL community, was sent to all ARL member libraries in the US and Canada and completed by 89 library directors, a response rate of 70%. In addition to the institutional perspective provided by library directors, library staff responded to other sections to offer insight into activities and costs for all of their institution's digitized collections, and questions about individual projects.

| Digital Scholarship's Digital/Print Books | Digital Scholarship |

ResourceSync Framework Specification—Beta Draft

NISO and the Open Archives Initiative have released ResourceSync Framework Specification—Beta Draft.

Here's an excerpt:

This ResourceSync specification describes a synchronization framework for the web consisting of various capabilities that allow third party systems to remain synchronized with a server's evolving resources. The capabilities can be combined in a modular manner to meet local or community requirements. The specification also describes how a server can advertise the synchronization capabilities it supports and how third party systems can discover this information. The specification repurposes the document formats defined by the Sitemap protocol and introduces extensions for them.

| A Look Back at 22 Years as an Open Access Publisher | Digital Scholarship |

Sustaining Our Digital Future: Institutional Strategies for Digital Content

Ithaka S+R has released Sustaining Our Digital Future: Institutional Strategies for Digital Content.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This study involved interviews with more than 80 project leaders and university, library, and museum administrators across the United Kingdom. In the first phase, we interviewed 40 practitioners in the higher education and cultural heritage sectors throughout the United Kingdom to gain an understanding of the processes in place to support digital content post-grant. In the second phase, we closely examined the digital strategies in place at three institutions to better understand the digital content the institutions support, their processes for creating and supporting that content, and, more generally, the role that digital content plays in the strategy of their institutions.

| Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works (EPUB file, PDF file, paperback, and XHTML website; over 650 entries) | Digital Scholarship |

The Web as Infrastructure For Scholarly Research and Communication (Video)

The Digital Curation Centre has released The Web as Infrastructure For Scholarly Research and Communication, a video of a keynote presentation by Herbert Van de Sompel at the 8th International Digital Curation Conference. His presentation slides are also available.

| Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 2 | Digital Scholarship |

Amy Rudersdorf Named Assistant Director for Content at the Digital Public Library of America

Amy Rudersdorf has been named Assistant Director for Content at the Digital Public Library of America.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

As the Assistant Director for Content, Rudersdorf will be responsible for digitization partnerships and related workflows, metadata normalization and shareability, and community engagement to promote the DPLA as a community resource. . . .

Rudersdorf currently serves as the director of the Digital Information Management Program at the State Library of North Carolina. Rudersdorf is a Library of Congress National Digital Stewardship Alliance coordinating committee member and an active voice in the digital preservation community. Rudersdorf teaches library graduate school courses on digital libraries and preservation (San Jose State University) and metadata (North Carolina Central University). Prior to moving to state government, Rudersdorf worked with digital collections in special collections at North Carolina State University, coordinated a digital production group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and worked with public libraries throughout Wisconsin to aid in the development and coordination of Library and Service Technology Act (LSTA) funded digitization grants.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

Measuring the Impact of Digital Resources: The Balanced Value Impact Model

King's College London has released Measuring the Impact of Digital Resources: The Balanced Value Impact Model.

Here's an excerpt:

This document synthesizes information from the whole Impact Assessment sector and then proposes the Balanced Value Impact Model as a means to effectively carry out an Impact Assessment relating to the benefits of digitization and digital resources in general. It seeks to help the communities identified above to provide a compelling argument for future work. Thus, you will find in this document information on:

  • Where the value and impact can be found in digital resources,
  • Who are the beneficiaries gaining from the impact and value,
  • How to measure change and impact for digital resources,
  • What makes for good indicators of change in people’s lives,
  • How to do an Impact Assessment using the Balanced Value Impact Model, and
  • How to present a convincing evidence-based argument for digital resources?

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

"Digitization of Cultural Heritage—Standards, Institutions, Initiatives"

Kalina Sotirova, Juliana Peneva, Stanislav Ivanov, Rositza Doneva, and Milena Dobreva have self-archived "Digitization of Cultural Heritage—Standards, Institutions, Initiatives" in the NBU Scholar Electronic Repository.

Here's an excerpt:

The first chapter "Digitization of Cultural Heritage—Standards, Institutions, Initiatives" provides an introduction to the area of digitisation. The main pillars of process of creating, preserving and accessing of cultural heritage in digital space are observed. The importance of metadata in the process of accessing to information is outlined. The metadata schemas and standards used in cultural heritage are discussed. In order to reach digital objects in virtual space they are organized in digital libraries. Contemporary digital libraries are trying to deliver richer and better functionality, which usually is user oriented and depending on current IT trend. Additionally, the chapter is focused on some initiatives on world and European level that during the years enforce the process of digitization and organizing digital objects in the cultural heritage domain. In recent years, the main focus in the creation of digital resources shifts from "system-centred" to "user-centred" since most of the issues around this content are related to making it accessible and usable for the real users. So, the user studies and involving the users on early stages of design and planning the functionality of the product which is being developed stands on leading position.

| Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works | Digital Scholarship |

Committee Formed to Examine National-Scale Higher Education Digital Projects

The Council on Library and Information Resources and Vanderbilt University have formed the Committee on Coherence at Scale for Higher Education to examine national-scale higher education digital projects.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The group, called the Committee on Coherence at Scale for Higher Education, comprises college and university presidents and provosts, deans, university librarians, and association heads. The committee will provide the leadership necessary to ensure that these projects are designed and developed as elements of a larger and encompassing digital environment. . . .

The committee will focus on research and analysis of the large projects and their correlation; initial costs, operating costs and business plans for sustainability; and benefits and transformational aspects. Examples of these projects include the Hathi Trust, the Digital Public Library of America, the Digital Preservation Network, and data curation centers. Results of the committee's work will be publicized regularly.

| Digital Curation Resource Guide | Digital Scholarship |

Digital Public Library of America Gets $250,000 Grant from IMLS for Digital Hubs Pilot Program

The Digital Public Library of America has been awarded a $250,000 grant by IMLS for its Digital Hubs Pilot Program.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) announced today a $250,000 grant to support the development of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The National Leadership Grant for Libraries in the Advancing Digital Resources category will help fund the launch of the DPLA's Digital Hubs Pilot Program, a project that will take the first steps to bring together existing U.S. digital library infrastructure into a sustainable national digital library system. . . .

Under the Digital Hubs Pilot Program, the DPLA will partner with existing statewide digital library projects (service hubs) and existing large content repositories (content hubs) to define, test, and implement digital services and participation agreements. Led by DPLA Director for Content Emily Gore, the Hubs Program will establish foundational sites in the DPLA, a distributed national network of connected service and content hubs.

This grant specifically will support the planning and implementation of a regional service hub pilot at the Mountain West Digital Library, including the set up and coordinated rollout of regional digital services, such as digitization services, metadata consultation, data aggregation, repository services, and community programming, as well as related workshops and meetings.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

You’ve Got to Walk Before You Can Run: First Steps for Managing Born-Digital Content Received on Physical Media

OCLC Research has released You've Got to Walk Before You Can Run: First Steps for Managing Born-Digital Content Received on Physical Media,

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

You've Got to Walk Before You Can Run: First Steps for Managing Born-Digital Content Received on Physical Media is intended for anyone who doesn't know where to begin in managing born-digital materials. It errs on the side of simplicity and describes what is truly necessary to start managing born-digital content on physical media, and it presents a list of the basic steps without expanding on archival theory or the use of particular software tools. It does not assume that policies are in place or that those performing the tasks are familiar with traditional archival practices, nor does it assume that significant IT support is available.

Read more about it at "Defining 'Born Digital': An Essay by Ricky Erway, OCLC Research."

| Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works | Digital Scholarship |

"’As We May Digitize’—Institutions and Documents Reconfigured"

Mats Dahlström, Joacim Hansson, and Ulrika Kjellman have published "'As We May Digitize'—Institutions and Documents Reconfigured" in the latest issue of LIBER Quarterly: The Journal of European Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

This article frames digitization as a knowledge organization practice in libraries and museums. The primarily discriminatory practices of museums are compared with the non-discriminatory practices of libraries when managing their respective cultural heritage collections. . . . Two poles along a digitization strategy scale, mass digitization and critical digitization, are distinguished in the article. As memory institutions are redefined in their development of digitized document collections, e.g., by increasingly emphasizing a common trans-national rather than national cultural heritage, mass digitization and critical digitization represent alternative avenues. . . . The article re-contextualizes current digitization discourse: a) historically, by suggesting that digitization brings ancient practices back to life rather than invents entirely new ones from scratch; b) conceptually, by presenting a new label (critical digitization) for a digitization strategy that has hitherto been downplayed in digitization discourse; and c) theoretically, by exploring the relations between the values of different digitization strategies, the reconfiguration of collections as they are digitized, and the redefinition of MLA institutions through those processes.

| Digital Scholarship's Digital/Print Books | Digital Scholarship |

"Building the Ecology of Libraries—An Interview with Brewster Kahle"

The Open Knowlege Foundation Blog has published "Building the Ecology of Libraries—An Interview with Brewster Kahle."

Here's an excerpt:

What are the challenges faced by the Internet Archive regarding the digitization of books?

There are two big problems: there is going and building a digital collection, either by digitizing materials or buying electronic books. And the other is: how do you make this available, especially the in-copyright works? For digitizing books, it costs about 10 cents a page to do a beautiful rendition of a book. So, for approximately 30 dollars a book for 300 pages you can do a gorgeous job. Google does it much more quickly and it costs only about 5 dollars for each book. So it really is much less expensive in less quality, but they are able to do things at scale. We digitize about 1000 books every day in 23 scanning centers in six countries. We will set up scanning centers anywhere, or, if there are people that would like to staff the scanners themselves, we provide the scanners and all of the backend processing for free, until we run out of scanners and we've got a bunch of them. So we're looking either for people that want to scan their own collections by providing there own labour or they can employ us to do it and all told it is 10 cent a page to complete.

| Digital Scholarship's Digital Bibliographies | Digital Scholarship |