Friday, April 16, 2010
digital humanities at liberal arts colleges
At the NITLE Summit, I became aware of some digital humanities programs at liberal arts colleges. I'm working to move our digital services work here at Watzek towards a more fleshed out digital initiatives program, so I was really excited to see other colleges moving in this direction including Hamilton, Wheaton, Occidental, and Willamette.
open access and institutional repositories
I have been watching with interest as some liberal arts college libraries adopt faculty resolutions on open access and commit to archiving preprint versions of journal articles in their institutional repositories. Oberlin did this not too long ago, and Rollins passed a resolution in February.
I spoke with Jonathon Miller about the Rollins initiative at the NITLE Summit in New Orleans last month. He said that one key to their success was that a couple faculty champions backed the process. Faculty were motivated to support the proposal because of a.) an awareness of the financial problems related to the current systems of scholarly communication and b.) a motivation to more widely disseminate their work, especially to scholars without access to pricey journals.
While I am supportive of such resolutions, I do question whether associated mandates to deposit scholarship in an institutional repository make sense. As an alternative, I would propose adopting a faculty resolution in support of open access with a mandate (or at least a suggestion) that faculty deposit preprints of articles in an appropriate disciplinary repository like arXive. It seems to me that most faculty work fits better alongside other work in the same discipline rather than alongside mostly unrelated work done at the same institution.
Institutional repositories can be beneficial as a way of showcasing and tracking the scholarly output of an institution. But I think that newer platforms like Vivo and BibApp that support scholarly bibliographies but also aim to achieve broader things like scholarly reputation management and the fostering of interdisciplinary connections are a potentially more effective way of doing this.
I spoke with Jonathon Miller about the Rollins initiative at the NITLE Summit in New Orleans last month. He said that one key to their success was that a couple faculty champions backed the process. Faculty were motivated to support the proposal because of a.) an awareness of the financial problems related to the current systems of scholarly communication and b.) a motivation to more widely disseminate their work, especially to scholars without access to pricey journals.
While I am supportive of such resolutions, I do question whether associated mandates to deposit scholarship in an institutional repository make sense. As an alternative, I would propose adopting a faculty resolution in support of open access with a mandate (or at least a suggestion) that faculty deposit preprints of articles in an appropriate disciplinary repository like arXive. It seems to me that most faculty work fits better alongside other work in the same discipline rather than alongside mostly unrelated work done at the same institution.
Institutional repositories can be beneficial as a way of showcasing and tracking the scholarly output of an institution. But I think that newer platforms like Vivo and BibApp that support scholarly bibliographies but also aim to achieve broader things like scholarly reputation management and the fostering of interdisciplinary connections are a potentially more effective way of doing this.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
WorldCat Local and Electronic Resources
One of our biggest frustrations with WorldCat Local has been the difficulties involved in surfacing e-book collections. The standard way of adding an ebook set to your catalog--uploading a file of MARC records provided by the vendor--doesn't surface records in WCL.
To get records for an e book set in WCL, you need to add records to your local ILS catalog, make sure those records have OCLC numbers in them and have your holdings set on the corresponding records in OCLC. This can be hard to achieve if vendor provided record sets don't have OCLC numbers on them to start with.
OCLC has an initiative in place to get vendor supplied MARC records into WorldCat, but agreements are not in place for all vendors and the process is somewhat cumbersome. Also, as I understand it, in some cases these vendor record sets aren't truly in WorldCat, they just show up in certain WorldCat Local instances where the library subscribes to the ebook collection. Effectively, this is creating "shadow" records in WorldCat that are only available to certain subscribers.
I really wish that we could just flip on and off collections of ebooks in WCL in the same way that one adds and removes collections of e journals in Serials Solutions' management interface. Having to load records into a local system and worry about connecting those records to OCLC records is a big hassle. I realize that there may be some vendor licensing issues that prevent this, but this seems like a good goal.
Perhaps there could be some kind of connection between Serials Solutions and OCLC along the same lines as their e serials holdings project that would achieve this sort of ease in adding and removing e book sets.
Another question to ask within the e book arena: why are we so dependent on vendors for bibliographic records? Libraries should be able to collectively catalog e book sets, especially in cases where the vendors want to hold their records tightly to their chest. Some kind of crowdsourcing application for cataloging an entire e book set might achieve this. Any libraries who want records for a certain e book set sign up, and the app divvies up cataloging between them.
To get records for an e book set in WCL, you need to add records to your local ILS catalog, make sure those records have OCLC numbers in them and have your holdings set on the corresponding records in OCLC. This can be hard to achieve if vendor provided record sets don't have OCLC numbers on them to start with.
OCLC has an initiative in place to get vendor supplied MARC records into WorldCat, but agreements are not in place for all vendors and the process is somewhat cumbersome. Also, as I understand it, in some cases these vendor record sets aren't truly in WorldCat, they just show up in certain WorldCat Local instances where the library subscribes to the ebook collection. Effectively, this is creating "shadow" records in WorldCat that are only available to certain subscribers.
I really wish that we could just flip on and off collections of ebooks in WCL in the same way that one adds and removes collections of e journals in Serials Solutions' management interface. Having to load records into a local system and worry about connecting those records to OCLC records is a big hassle. I realize that there may be some vendor licensing issues that prevent this, but this seems like a good goal.
Perhaps there could be some kind of connection between Serials Solutions and OCLC along the same lines as their e serials holdings project that would achieve this sort of ease in adding and removing e book sets.
Another question to ask within the e book arena: why are we so dependent on vendors for bibliographic records? Libraries should be able to collectively catalog e book sets, especially in cases where the vendors want to hold their records tightly to their chest. Some kind of crowdsourcing application for cataloging an entire e book set might achieve this. Any libraries who want records for a certain e book set sign up, and the app divvies up cataloging between them.
Monday, February 15, 2010
shared ILS concept
The Orbis Cascade Alliance's Collaborative Tech Services Team has been charged with implementing "a Shared Best Practices working group to develop guidelines for effective technical services policies and operations that support the Alliance goal of a shared ILS (Integrated Library System)."
At our team's first meeting, I was charged with taking a shot at what an ideal Alliance shared ILS might look like. I am supposed to produce a white paper on this topic for consideration by the Team.
The work of the Shared Bibliographic Database Task Force serves as a good starting point in this thinking process. Their report points out many of the potential implications of a shared ILS as well as advantages and drawbacks (scenario 3).
Perhaps the most common notion of a shared ILS would be all 36 Alliance members piling on board a traditional ILS software package that was designed for large, complex organizations (but might not be designed to handle as many separate and large organizations and sub organizations as comprise the Alliance). A big advantage in doing this would be savings on system maintenance, local system administration and hardware costs.
To make this happen successfully, member libraries would have to standardize their operations around certain system settings like circulation loan rules because the system simply couldn't handle as much local variation as is in place now. This standardization might create efficiencies in itself in that it would promote common best-practices workflows around the shared settings. A shared system could also create efficiencies through the reuse and sharing of data. For example, by sharing bibliographic records, we could reduce the overall time and effort required for database maintenance.
The big disadvantage in sharing a system this way would be a potential lack of flexibility to tailor the system to the each institution's needs: whether this customization came in the form of special loan rules, distinct subject headings, etc. Another issue might be that the system would simply become unwieldy for staff to use because data from all the institutions would overload user interfaces for staff. Imagine having to wade through hundreds of item records for a given bibiliographic record (of course these effects could be mitigated by special views, etc.) And finally another disadvantage would be the potential red tape needed to make any change to system settings.
Another model of a "shared ILS" would provide every library with an independent "virtual" ILS delivered in a Software As a Service (SAAS) fashion. Because the software would be delivered over the web, we would "share" the underlying software and computing infrastructure. We'd be "sharing" an ILS with other Alliance members (and perhaps whomever else the vendor contracted with) but we wouldn't even know it. By doing things this way, we wouldn't lose any independence and we'd still potentially save money on system maintenance (both vendor supplied and via our own staff). But we wouldn't be gaining any potential benefits possible through the sharing of data.
The third option would be a hybrid of the two above and is the one that probably corresponds to the most likely reality. The ILS would be shared where there were benefits to be gained, separate where there were not. For example, in circulation every library could have their own patron types and loan rules, but those patron types and loan rules would map to higher consortial levels of abstraction in order to support borrowing between institutions (kind of like they do now in Navigator but in the same system). In acquisitions, data about what materials were on order at each institution would be shared, but fund data wouldn't. In cataloging, we would share bibliographic records but perhaps control some of our own fields. In e resources, both individual and group purchases and licenses would be supported.
Another twist, of course, is the notion of sharing the ILS on a global level, which is more or less the vision of OCLC webscale management services. This creates the need for an even higher level of abstraction than at that of the consortium.
In coming up with a model for an ideal shared ILS for the Alliance, I'll be considering all of these scenarios.
At our team's first meeting, I was charged with taking a shot at what an ideal Alliance shared ILS might look like. I am supposed to produce a white paper on this topic for consideration by the Team.
The work of the Shared Bibliographic Database Task Force serves as a good starting point in this thinking process. Their report points out many of the potential implications of a shared ILS as well as advantages and drawbacks (scenario 3).
Perhaps the most common notion of a shared ILS would be all 36 Alliance members piling on board a traditional ILS software package that was designed for large, complex organizations (but might not be designed to handle as many separate and large organizations and sub organizations as comprise the Alliance). A big advantage in doing this would be savings on system maintenance, local system administration and hardware costs.
To make this happen successfully, member libraries would have to standardize their operations around certain system settings like circulation loan rules because the system simply couldn't handle as much local variation as is in place now. This standardization might create efficiencies in itself in that it would promote common best-practices workflows around the shared settings. A shared system could also create efficiencies through the reuse and sharing of data. For example, by sharing bibliographic records, we could reduce the overall time and effort required for database maintenance.
The big disadvantage in sharing a system this way would be a potential lack of flexibility to tailor the system to the each institution's needs: whether this customization came in the form of special loan rules, distinct subject headings, etc. Another issue might be that the system would simply become unwieldy for staff to use because data from all the institutions would overload user interfaces for staff. Imagine having to wade through hundreds of item records for a given bibiliographic record (of course these effects could be mitigated by special views, etc.) And finally another disadvantage would be the potential red tape needed to make any change to system settings.
Another model of a "shared ILS" would provide every library with an independent "virtual" ILS delivered in a Software As a Service (SAAS) fashion. Because the software would be delivered over the web, we would "share" the underlying software and computing infrastructure. We'd be "sharing" an ILS with other Alliance members (and perhaps whomever else the vendor contracted with) but we wouldn't even know it. By doing things this way, we wouldn't lose any independence and we'd still potentially save money on system maintenance (both vendor supplied and via our own staff). But we wouldn't be gaining any potential benefits possible through the sharing of data.
The third option would be a hybrid of the two above and is the one that probably corresponds to the most likely reality. The ILS would be shared where there were benefits to be gained, separate where there were not. For example, in circulation every library could have their own patron types and loan rules, but those patron types and loan rules would map to higher consortial levels of abstraction in order to support borrowing between institutions (kind of like they do now in Navigator but in the same system). In acquisitions, data about what materials were on order at each institution would be shared, but fund data wouldn't. In cataloging, we would share bibliographic records but perhaps control some of our own fields. In e resources, both individual and group purchases and licenses would be supported.
Another twist, of course, is the notion of sharing the ILS on a global level, which is more or less the vision of OCLC webscale management services. This creates the need for an even higher level of abstraction than at that of the consortium.
In coming up with a model for an ideal shared ILS for the Alliance, I'll be considering all of these scenarios.
Liberal Arts and Web Collaboration
Pete Vidito, of our Environmental Studies program, recently published a web page that suggests how elements of liberal arts learning can be developed using Web 2.0 tools.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Semantic Web at Liberal Arts Colleges
As a NITLE online seminar, NITLE's Director of Research Bryan Alexander gave a great overview of the semantic web and potential applications in academia. It was impressive how much he fit into an hour long session. Today, I was thinking about how this would have made a cool day long workshop, but then we really would have needed to move from the theoretical to the practical.
I think that as more academic content gets marked up semantically, it should change the way we do research. Searching and organizing content as one does academic research should get more sophisticated.
We could start marking up data in our digital collections using RDF. Looks like there is a good way of doing this for creative commons data. Search engines are starting to use this information more.
I think that as more academic content gets marked up semantically, it should change the way we do research. Searching and organizing content as one does academic research should get more sophisticated.
We could start marking up data in our digital collections using RDF. Looks like there is a good way of doing this for creative commons data. Search engines are starting to use this information more.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Digital Initiatives at a Liberal Arts College Library
At work, I've been thinking about new digital services that the library could introduce, potentially in partnership with other units at L&C. Here is the draft of a short paper that I've put together on the topic:
Potential Future Digital Initiatives at Watzek Library
This paper is intended to stimulate thinking and discussion about potential digital initiatives involving a variety of constituents at Lewis & Clark including faculty, the Library, IT, New Media, etc.
As the nature of research, scholarship, and learning changes in an increasingly digital environment, academic libraries need to rethink the services that they are providing. This rethinking is even more crucial in a tight budget environment where we need to maximize the impact of the funds expended on library services and resources.
In the past five years, Watzek Library has developed its capacity to support digital initiatives in three main areas: enhancements to the library website and the functions it provides to support research, the Visual Resources Collection, and Special Collections and Archives. Some of the projects that we have completed include the Special Collections and Archives Digital Collection, the MDID image collection, our senior theses collection, accessCeramics, and the William Stafford Archives. Work on these projects has allowed us to develop expertise in information architecture, design, web programming, metadata management, Web 2.0 technologies, and digital scholarship.
As we look towards the future, we would like to broaden the impact of Watzek's digital initiatives and make more connections with academic endeavors across the College. These are a list of possible digital services that the library could offer in the future. In one form or another, they are being offered by colleges and universities around the United States. We are putting this list forward to gauge interest and applicability at Lewis & Clark.
Thematic Digital Collections: Faculty may have interest in developing an online archive of primary materials, scholarship, or data associated with their scholarship and/or teaching. The Library might partner with faculty on the development of online collections of images, documents, or other media surrounding a particular topic. We could provide the expertise in digitization, software selection, database design, metadata schemas, information architecture and search engine optimization needed to develop such projects. Our collaboration might take the form of a consultation or a more extensive partnership for larger collections that would fit in with Watzek Library's long term digital collections. One example of such a project is accessCeramics, a database of contemporary ceramics images developed as a partnership between Assistant Professor of Ceramics Ted Vogel and Watzek Library. accessCeramics has paired Vogel's connections to the ceramics community and interest in curating an online collection of images with Watzek Library's expertise in digital collections. A few other examples of thematic archives arranged around faculty research interests include the Gerald Warner Taiwan image collection, a project of Associate Professor Paul D. Barclay and Digital Inititives Librarian Eric Luhrs at Layfayette College, the Anarchy Archives, a project of Professor David Ward at Pitzer College, and the Murals of Northern Ireland collection a project of Tony Crowley, the Hartley Burr Alexander Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College and one of numerous thematic collections in the Claremont Colleges Digital Library.
Institutional Repository: The library could support an online digital archive devoted to storing and making accessible digital objects associated with the academic life of the College. The content might include faculty and student scholarship, materials from College symposia, and other media. The library already archives student theses, as do some individual departments. For an example of an institutional repository at a liberal arts college, see Macalester's Digital Commons.
Platforms for Collaborative Student Research: In the digital environment, there are growing opportunities for students to work together on research projects. Using social bookmarking software and wikis, students can share resources with each other. Lewis & Clark's Environmental Studies program uses delicious.com to accumulate and organize research resources around particular sites. Software like the History Engine gives students a platform for the publishing of original research using primary sources. The library could serve as a consultant with faculty in the deployment and use of these resources. The library could also act as an agent to preserve the output of these collaborations over time.
Data Curation: Lewis & Clark has several active research laboratories in the sciences and social sciences. The library could serve as a consultant in the organization and long term storage and preservation of data output as a result of this research, whether in local or remote repositories. The library could recommend remote digital archives, storage technologies, metadata schemas, and information architectures that suit the needs of a particular research lab. To our knowledge, this is a relatively new area for liberal arts colleges and we do not have successful examples of this type of service.
Expanding Visual Resources: Our Visual Resources Collection currently supports teaching with images of art and culture through a local collection of images (MDID) as well as licensed collections of images such as ARTstor. These images are used primarily by Art and Art History faculty, but are also used by faculty in other humanities disciplines as well as the social sciences. Should we expand our support for images to include scientific images and the scientific disciplines? Currently, our expertise in images is limited largely to still images and 2d images. Should we develop expertise in acquisition and delivery of moving images as well as three dimensional image technology?
Web Archiving: Content on the web represents a range of activities across Lewis & Clark, both academic and non-academic. Meeting minutes, departmental rosters, symposia programs, syllabi, campus news, etc. all live on the web. But much of this content is ephemeral: it is taken down and disappears after it no longer has currency. Should the library take responsibility for archiving all or part of Lewis & Clark's web output for the needs of future generations? Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Swarthmore have a web archiving initiative underway using the Achive-It software from the Internet Archive.
Potential Future Digital Initiatives at Watzek Library
This paper is intended to stimulate thinking and discussion about potential digital initiatives involving a variety of constituents at Lewis & Clark including faculty, the Library, IT, New Media, etc.
As the nature of research, scholarship, and learning changes in an increasingly digital environment, academic libraries need to rethink the services that they are providing. This rethinking is even more crucial in a tight budget environment where we need to maximize the impact of the funds expended on library services and resources.
In the past five years, Watzek Library has developed its capacity to support digital initiatives in three main areas: enhancements to the library website and the functions it provides to support research, the Visual Resources Collection, and Special Collections and Archives. Some of the projects that we have completed include the Special Collections and Archives Digital Collection, the MDID image collection, our senior theses collection, accessCeramics, and the William Stafford Archives. Work on these projects has allowed us to develop expertise in information architecture, design, web programming, metadata management, Web 2.0 technologies, and digital scholarship.
As we look towards the future, we would like to broaden the impact of Watzek's digital initiatives and make more connections with academic endeavors across the College. These are a list of possible digital services that the library could offer in the future. In one form or another, they are being offered by colleges and universities around the United States. We are putting this list forward to gauge interest and applicability at Lewis & Clark.
Thematic Digital Collections: Faculty may have interest in developing an online archive of primary materials, scholarship, or data associated with their scholarship and/or teaching. The Library might partner with faculty on the development of online collections of images, documents, or other media surrounding a particular topic. We could provide the expertise in digitization, software selection, database design, metadata schemas, information architecture and search engine optimization needed to develop such projects. Our collaboration might take the form of a consultation or a more extensive partnership for larger collections that would fit in with Watzek Library's long term digital collections. One example of such a project is accessCeramics, a database of contemporary ceramics images developed as a partnership between Assistant Professor of Ceramics Ted Vogel and Watzek Library. accessCeramics has paired Vogel's connections to the ceramics community and interest in curating an online collection of images with Watzek Library's expertise in digital collections. A few other examples of thematic archives arranged around faculty research interests include the Gerald Warner Taiwan image collection, a project of Associate Professor Paul D. Barclay and Digital Inititives Librarian Eric Luhrs at Layfayette College, the Anarchy Archives, a project of Professor David Ward at Pitzer College, and the Murals of Northern Ireland collection a project of Tony Crowley, the Hartley Burr Alexander Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College and one of numerous thematic collections in the Claremont Colleges Digital Library.
Institutional Repository: The library could support an online digital archive devoted to storing and making accessible digital objects associated with the academic life of the College. The content might include faculty and student scholarship, materials from College symposia, and other media. The library already archives student theses, as do some individual departments. For an example of an institutional repository at a liberal arts college, see Macalester's Digital Commons.
Platforms for Collaborative Student Research: In the digital environment, there are growing opportunities for students to work together on research projects. Using social bookmarking software and wikis, students can share resources with each other. Lewis & Clark's Environmental Studies program uses delicious.com to accumulate and organize research resources around particular sites. Software like the History Engine gives students a platform for the publishing of original research using primary sources. The library could serve as a consultant with faculty in the deployment and use of these resources. The library could also act as an agent to preserve the output of these collaborations over time.
Data Curation: Lewis & Clark has several active research laboratories in the sciences and social sciences. The library could serve as a consultant in the organization and long term storage and preservation of data output as a result of this research, whether in local or remote repositories. The library could recommend remote digital archives, storage technologies, metadata schemas, and information architectures that suit the needs of a particular research lab. To our knowledge, this is a relatively new area for liberal arts colleges and we do not have successful examples of this type of service.
Expanding Visual Resources: Our Visual Resources Collection currently supports teaching with images of art and culture through a local collection of images (MDID) as well as licensed collections of images such as ARTstor. These images are used primarily by Art and Art History faculty, but are also used by faculty in other humanities disciplines as well as the social sciences. Should we expand our support for images to include scientific images and the scientific disciplines? Currently, our expertise in images is limited largely to still images and 2d images. Should we develop expertise in acquisition and delivery of moving images as well as three dimensional image technology?
Web Archiving: Content on the web represents a range of activities across Lewis & Clark, both academic and non-academic. Meeting minutes, departmental rosters, symposia programs, syllabi, campus news, etc. all live on the web. But much of this content is ephemeral: it is taken down and disappears after it no longer has currency. Should the library take responsibility for archiving all or part of Lewis & Clark's web output for the needs of future generations? Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Swarthmore have a web archiving initiative underway using the Achive-It software from the Internet Archive.
Services to Support Scholarly Communication in the Digital Environment: The library could develop a menu of services to support faculty as they publish their research. These services could include: consulting/education on copyright and open access, assistance with acquiring rights for digital assets (such as images) for use in publication, advice on publishing research data, assistance with scholarly reputation management on the web. Oberlin College's Library has an initiative focused on transforming scholarly communication, which includes advising faculty on copyright and open access opportunities.
Mark Dahl
Associate Director for Digital Initiatives and Collection Management
Watzek Library
Lewis & Clark College
Mark Dahl
Associate Director for Digital Initiatives and Collection Management
Watzek Library
Lewis & Clark College
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