DPLA Plenary Session – Afternoon

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Erik

The afternoon started with beta-sprint presentations showing off system proof-of-concept applications. CLIR showed a system that aggregated data from publicly supported research projects from IMLS. The beta sprint projects are located at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/dpla/ and show off ways of aggregating and sharing metadata, discovery systems and new approaches to indexing. There are some live links to these sites at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/dpla/Beta_Sprint.

There was an interesting theme throughout the day about the relative value and sustainability of interfaces vs aggregated and curated data. The first few sprint projects certainly sought to bridge this divide. The third presentation (extraMUROS) showed off a system designed around HTML5 and Zeega which is tuned for creating interactive documentaries. I got the sense that design of this system focused as much on discovery, creation, recreation, publishing and curation as much as it focused on data aggregation. EXTRAmuros showed off a re-visualized collection of american landscape and architecture. The views included images, categories, user-added collections.

The presentation that allowed was by John Butler and Wendy Lougee and focused on bringing together and enhancing access to government publications suing linked open data and crowd sourcing. Their beta-sprint video is at http://z.umn.edu/dplaumn. The folks from the National Technical University of Athens MINT Group talked about a metadata schema mapping system that has seen widespread adoption in Europe (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR3HMAanmzM).

David Weinberger talked about library cloud, a metadata server service that aggregates library metadata and re-publishes it as open data. It includes resource metadata, circulation met data, and metadata about digital objects. The site is instantiate using a second project called shelf life which shows how this aggregated metadata can be used as a discovery system for aggregated resources with lots of embedded metadata, social interaction and external resources.

Following the sprint section we heard from lightning round presentations – bookworm Alpha, a ‘LinkedIn’ profile for libraries idea, and WikiCite – a wiki for crowd sourcing and discussing citations in context.

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Digital Public Library of America Plenary Session – Morning

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Erik

Today I am at the Plenary meting of the Digital Public Library of America. The day-long session is focusing on exploring new collaborative ways in which libraries can contribute to the singular goal of, as one person said “the wal-mart of digital libraries.” The initial announcement of the day was a 5 million dollar grant from the Sloan and Arcadia foundations. This is understandably a significant step forward for the DPLA and marks a chance to grow.

In the second session of the morning we heard from Deanna Marcum, Susan Hildreth and David Ferriero. Deanna talked about the history of digitization at the LOC (28M digitized so far) and recounted the beginning of a distributed CD-ROM based digital library in the 1990s. David talked about the work being done at the National Archives and related a story about a project to declassify information resources, the work of which was facilitated by the use of research using publicly available resources to understand what information had already been unleashed to the web.


The Eurpoeana Digital Library announced a collaborative project with DLPA to produce a virtual exhibit on the people and experience of Europeans who emigrated to America. Jill Cousins from Europeana talked about open data, open source, open licensing, interoperability. This idea – that data and metadata needed to be freely available and interoperable seems to permeate this project as much as the idea of widespread digitization and community building does (very exciting, of course for people who like metadata). John Palfrey talked about the five areas of focus of DPLA planning – Code, Metadata, Content, Tools/Services and Community. On this theme Peggy Rudd said that the guiding principle of the DPLA should be that “all people in this country should have access to this infrastructure of ideas.” Brewster KAle shared the idea that we need to use difference licensing and access methods for different materials (Publish public domain, digitize and lend out of print resources, and buy to lend in print resources). Jill Cousins said “we are the generation that can give access to the analogue past.”

The sessions are being graphically recorded on massive whiteboards. More photos coming of these.

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LBSC 670 Guest Speaker – Carolyn McCallum

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Erik

In Class this week we had Carolyn McCallum (Wake Forest University – Go Deacs!) attend as a virtual guest lecturer. Carolyn talked about the profession of cataloging and took the class through the process of creating original cataloging records including everything from descriptive representation right through to subject analysis and call number assignment!

Carolyn presented using WebEx and our invitation to the MLS community in the iSchool at the University of Maryland managed to get a few interested participants from outside the course. Carolyn’s presentation materials are available here.

More guest speakers are coming for LBSC670 this fall. For a complete list, check the course website

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2011 ASIS&T

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Erik

ASIS&T for me was punctuated with some interesting talks, enjoyment in seeing my friends from UNC & USC again and a few tourist moments in New Orleans. The most illuminating talk I attended was by by Steve Kelling who talked about the value of crowdsourcing in data gathering. Kelling talked about eBird, a collaborative bird mapping project that has been gathering data since 2002. He really drove the point home about the value of community sourced environmental data when he showed migratory maps and structured data that just could not be generated any other way.

The work on FRBR that Carolyn McCallum, Patty Strickland and I had done earlier this year was well received during the poster session. A number of people had worked on similar projects with comparable outcomes and it was good to be able to talk through ideas about ‘what’s next’ for FRBR research.

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“Why libraries virtualize” – MCLS

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Erik

Today I had the opportunity to talk at the Midwest Collaborative Library Service annual meeting. The topic was cloud computing and I took the time to lay out some of the initial data from my survey on library adoption of cloud computing.

Why Libraries Virtualize

The discussion following the talk focused on licensing and ownership issues, on DRM, and on the problems associated with making e-books accessible using print book models (e.g. single user at a time, queued hold lists).

Lansing is a pretty (and rural!) town and I was struck with the fact that they have corn fields and rural roads inside the beltway :)

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