Category: Research Libraries

"HydraDAM2: Extending Fedora 4 and Hydra for Media Preservation"

Jon W. Dunn et al. have self-archived "HydraDAM2: Extending Fedora 4 and Hydra for Media Preservation."

Here's an excerpt:

The overarching goal of the HydraDAM2 project, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation and Access Research and Development program, was to extend the existing HydraDAM digital asset management system, developed with prior NEH support, to be able to serve as a digital preservation repository for time-based media collections implementable at a wide range of institutions using multiple digital storage strategies. The new open source digital preservation repository system developed as part of the project by partners Indiana University (IU) and WGBH, known as Phydo, is based on the Fedora 4.x digital repository system and Samvera (formerly Hydra) repository application development framework and is intended to support storage and long-term preservation management of audio and video files and their accompanying metadata. This white paper describes the work of the HydraDAM2 project to develop the Phydo system, along with future plans.

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"Portico Places Archive Replica at the National Library of the Netherlands"

Portico has released "Portico Places Archive Replica at the National Library of the Netherlands."

Here's an excerpt:

Portico and the National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek or KB) have partnered to establish an online replica of the Portico archive that will be hosted by the KB. . . .

Portico additionally has a replica of the archive hosted in the U.S, and another in cloud storage. Kate Wittenberg, Managing Director of Portico, said, "We believe that placing a replica of the Portico archive in Europe, hosted by the KB, will provide Portico’s library and publisher supporters around the world with additional assurance of the long-term safeguarding of the content we preserve."

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Chief Librarian and Dean of Libraries at Hunter College, CUNY

Hunter College, CUNY is recruiting a Chief Librarian and Dean of Libraries.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

The Hunter College Libraries sit at the intellectual crossroads of the College, and the Chief Librarian and Dean will be tasked with ensuring that they continue to support the College’s mission of research productivity and innovation, professional preparation, and world-class undergraduate and graduate education. Hunter's five library branches occupy four campuses across New York City and are home to a collection of over 700,000 materials, and resources. The libraries include the Leon and Toby Cooperman Library (68th Street campus), School of Education Library (within Cooperman), Nursing and Health Professions Library (HPL at Brookdale), Schools of Social Work and Public Health Library (at the Silberman campus), and the Judith and Stanley Zabar Art Library.

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"Adaptation: the Continuing Evolution of the New York Public Library’s Digital Design System"

Jennifer L. Anderson and Edwin Guzman have published "Adaptation: the Continuing Evolution of the New York Public Library's Digital Design System" in the Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

A design system is crucial for sustaining both the continuity and the advancement of a website's design. But it's hard to create such a system when content, technology, and staff are constantly changing. This is the situation faced by the Digital team at the New York Public Library. When those are the conditions of the problem, the design system needs to be modular, distributed, and standardized, so that it can withstand constant change and provide a reliable foundation. NYPL's design system has gone through three major iterations, each a step towards the best way to manage design principles across an abundance of heterogeneous content and many contributors who brought different skills to the team and department at different times. Starting from an abstracted framework that provided a template for future systems, then a specific component system for a new project, and finally a system of interoperable components and layouts, NYPL's Digital team continues to grow and adapt its digital design resource.

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"Machine Learning and the Library or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Robot Overlords"

Charlie Harper has published "Machine Learning and the Library or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Robot Overlords" in he Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Machine learning algorithms and technologies are becoming a regular part of daily life – including life in the libraries. Through this article, I hope to:

* To introduce the reader to the basic terminology and concepts of machine learning
* To make the reader consider the potential ethical and privacy issues that libraries will face as machine learning permeates society
* To demonstrate hypothetical possibilities for applying machine learning to circulation and collections data using TensorFlow/Keras and open datasets

For a look at earlier AI activity in libraries, see: “Artificial Intelligence in Libraries in the Late 1980's and Early 1990's.”

"Open Science Support as a Portfolio of Services and Projects: From Awareness to Engagement"

Birgit Schmidt et al. have published "Open Science Support as a Portfolio of Services and Projects: From Awareness to Engagement" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

Together with many other universities worldwide, the University of Gõttingen has aimed to unlock the full potential of networked digital scientific communication by strengthening open access as early as the late 1990s. Open science policies at the institutional level consequently followed and have been with us for over a decade. However, for several reasons, their adoption often is still far from complete when it comes to the practices of researchers or research groups. To improve this situation at our university, there is dedicated support at the infrastructural level: the university library collaborates with several campus units in developing and running services, activities and projects in support of open access and open science. This article outlines our main activity areas and aligns them with the overall rationale to reach higher uptake and acceptance of open science practice at the university. The mentioned examples of our activities highlight how we seek to advance open science along the needs and perspectives of diverse audiences and by running it as a multi-stakeholder endeavor. Therefore, our activities involve library colleagues with diverse backgrounds, faculty and early career researchers, research managers, as well as project and infrastructure staff. We conclude with a summary of achievements and challenges to be faced.

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"How Are We Measuring Up? Evaluating Research Data Services in Academic Libraries"

Heather L. Coates et al. have published "How Are We Measuring Up? Evaluating Research Data Services in Academic Libraries" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

INTRODUCTION In the years since the emergence of federal funding agency data management and sharing requirements (http://datasharing.sparcopen.org/data), research data services (RDS) have expanded to dozens of academic libraries in the United States. As these services have matured, service providers have begun to assess them. Given a lack of practical guidance in the literature, we seek to begin the discussion with several case studies and an exploration of four approaches suitable to assessing these emerging services. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM This article examines five case studies that vary by staffing, drivers, and institutional context in order to begin a practice-oriented conversation about how to evaluate and assess research data services in academic libraries. The case studies highlight some commonly discussed challenges, including insufficient training and resources, competing demands for evaluation efforts, and the tension between evidence that can be easily gathered and that which addresses our most important questions. We explore reflective practice, formative evaluation, developmental evaluation, and evidence-based library and information practice for ideas to advance practice. NEXT STEPS Data specialists engaged in providing research data services need strategies and tools with which to make decisions about their services. These range from identifying stakeholder needs to refining existing services to determining when to extend and discontinue declining services. While the landscape of research data services is broad and diverse, there are common needs that we can address as a community. To that end, we have created a community-owned space to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and existing resources.

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Gale S. Etschmaier Named as Dean of Florida State University Libraries

The Florida State University Libraries have released "FSU Names New Dean of University Libraries."

Here's an excerpt:

At San Diego State, Etschmaier provided leadership for the library and the university's student computer hub with more than 700 computers. She oversaw 80 faculty and staff, 100 student assistants and a budget of approximately $12 million.

Prior to her tenure at San Diego State, Etschmaier spent a decade as associate university librarian for public service at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

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Artificial Intelligence in Libraries in the Late 1980’s and Early 1990’s

In the late 1980's and early 1990's, academic libraries were creating prototype and operational expert systems using expert system shells and logic programming languages, such as Prolog.

A snapshot of this activity in ARL libraries is:

Expert Systems in ARL Libraries, SPEC Kit 174. Bailey, Charles W., Jr., and Judy E. Myers. Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, 1991.

In-depth treatments include:

Alberico, Ralph, and Mary Micco. Expert Systems For Reference and Information Retrieval. Westport: Meckler, 1990.

Aluri, Rao., and Donald E. Riggs, eds. Expert Systems in Libraries. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1990.

You can get a sense of the AI activities in research libraries during this period by reading articles about the University of Houston Libraries' grant-funded Intelligent Reference Information System Project, which was prototyped in expert system shells and completed in Prolog. The Prolog code was freely distributed to over 500 libraries and other institutions (on floppy disk!).

Bailey, Charles W., Jr., and Robin N. Downes. "Intelligent Reference Information System (IRIS)," In 101 Success Stories of Information Technology in Higher Education: The Joe Wyatt Challenge," ed. Judith V. Boettcher, 402-407. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993.

Bailey, Charles W., Jr. "The Intelligent Reference Information System Project: A Merger of CD-ROM LAN and Expert System Technologies." Information Technology and Libraries 11 (September 1992): 237-244.

Bailey, Charles W., Jr., and Thomas C. Wilson. "The Intelligent Reference Information System CD-ROM Network." In Library LANs: Case Studies in Practice and Application, ed. Marshall Breeding, 157-171. Westport, CT: Meckler, 1992.

Bailey, Charles W., Jr. "Building Knowledge-Based Systems for Public Use: The Intelligent Reference Systems Project at the University of Houston Libraries." In Convergence: Proceedings of the Second National Conference of the Library and Information Technology Association, October 2-6, 1988, ed. Michael Gorman, 190-194. Chicago: American Library Association., 1990.

Bailey, Charles W., Jr., and Kathleen Gunning. "The Intelligent Reference Information System." CD-ROM Librarian 5 (September 1990): 10-19.

Bailey, Charles W., Jr., Jeff Fadell, Judy E. Myers, and Thomas C. Wilson. "The Index Expert System: A Knowledge-Based System to Assist Users in Index Selection." Reference Services Review 17, no. 4 (1989): 19-28.

For an example of contemporaneous thinking about AI potentials among librarians, see:

Bailey, Charles W., Jr. "Intelligent Library Systems: Artificial Intelligence Technology and Library Automation Systems." In Advances in Library Automation and Networking, vol. 4, ed. Joe A. Hewitt, 1-23. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1991.

There has been very little activity in this area since the turn of the 21st century, but here's an example:

Ma, Wei. "A Database Selection Expert System Based on Reference Librarian's Database Selection Strategy: A Usability and Empirical Evaluation." Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 53 no. 7 (2002): 567-580.

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"Software Curation in Research Libraries: Practice and Promise"

Alexandra Chassanoff et al. have self-archived "Software Curation in Research Libraries: Practice and Promise."

Here's an excerpt:

Research software plays an increasingly vital role in the scholarly record. Academic research libraries are in the early stages of exploring strategies for curating and preserving research software, aiming to provide long-term access and use. In 2016, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) began offering postdoctoral fellowships in software curation. Four institutions hosted the initial cohort of fellows. This article describes the work activities and research program of the cohort, highlighting the challenges and benefits of doing this exploratory work in research libraries.

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"Health Sciences Libraries Advancing Collaborative Clinical Research Data Management in Universities"

Tania P. Bardyn et al. have published "Health Sciences Libraries Advancing Collaborative Clinical Research Data Management in Universities" in the Journal of eScience Librarianship.

Here's an excerpt:

Purpose: Medical libraries need to actively review their service models and explore partnerships with other campus entities to provide better-coordinated clinical research management services to faculty and researchers. TRAIL (Translational Research and Information Lab), a five-partner initiative at the University of Washington (UW), explores how best to leverage existing expertise and space to deliver clinical research data management (CRDM) services and emerging technology support to clinical researchers at UW and collaborating institutions in the Pacific Northwest.

Methods: The initiative offers 14 services and a technology-enhanced innovation lab located in the Health Sciences Library (HSL) to support the University of Washington clinical and research enterprise. Sharing of staff and resources merges library and non-library workflows, better coordinating data and innovation services to clinical researchers. Librarians have adopted new roles in CRDM, such as providing user support and training for UW's Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) instance.

Results: TRAIL staff are quickly adapting to changing workflows and shared services, including teaching classes on tools used to manage clinical research data. Researcher interest in TRAIL has sparked new collaborative initiatives and service offerings. Marketing and promotion will be important for raising researchers’ awareness of available services.

Conclusions: Medical librarians are developing new skills by supporting and teaching CRDM. Clinical and data librarians better understand the information needs of clinical and translational researchers by being involved in the earlier stages of the research cycle and identifying technologies that can improve healthcare outcomes. At health sciences libraries, leveraging existing resources and bringing services together is central to how university medical librarians will operate in the future.

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