Overview of content related to 'university of illinois'

Book Review: The Expert Library

editor — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Sylvie Lafortune reviews a book taking a hard look at academic libraries, how they are being redefined and what skills will be required of the staff who will move them forward.

E-Science, creative disorder, innovators wanted, core competencies and hybridisation of library personnel are some of the concepts you will find in the titles of the 13 chapters which make up this collected work. The editors, both library administrators at two large universities in the US, introduce the book by asking: in view of the major changes that are taking place in academic libraries, who should we be hiring to provide services in areas of 'critical campus concern' such as undergraduate research, data curation, intellectual property management and e-science? Indeed, this question is not taken lightly, and some of the answers offered by the authors are the result of extensive, ongoing discussion and reflection on how best to build capacity in libraries to deal with emerging resources and services.

Characterising and Preserving Digital Repositories: File Format Profiles

editor — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Steve Hitchcock and David Tarrant show how file format profiles, the starting point for preservation plans and actions, can also be used to reveal the fingerprints of emerging types of institutional repositories.

International Digital Curation Conference 2010

editor — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Alex Ball reports on the 6th International Digital Curation Conference, held on 7-8 December 2010 in Chicago.

The International Digital Curation Conference has been held annually by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) [1] since 2005, quickly establishing a reputation for high-quality presentations and papers. So much so that, as co-chair Allen Renear explained in his opening remarks, after attending the 2006 Conference in Glasgow [2] delegates from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) offered to bring the event to Chicago.

Data Services for the Sciences: A Needs Assessment

editor — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Brian Westra describes a data services needs assessment for science research staff at the University of Oregon.

Computational science and raw and derivative scientific data are increasingly important to the research enterprise of higher education institutions. Academic libraries are beginning to examine what the expansion of data-intensive e-science means to scholarly communication and information services, and some are reshaping their own programmes to support the digital curation needs of research staff. These changes in libraries may involve repurposing or leveraging existing services, and the development or acquisition of new skills, roles, and organisational structures [1].

Scientific research data management is a fluid and evolving endeavour, reflective of the high rate of change in the information technology landscape, increasing levels of multi-disciplinary research, complex data structures and linkages, advances in data visualisation and analysis, and new tools capable of generating or capturing massive amounts of data.

These factors can create a complex and challenging environment for managing data, and one in which libraries can have a significant positive role supporting e-science. A needs assessment can help to characterise scientists' research methods and data management practices, highlighting gaps and barriers [2], and thereby improve the odds for libraries to plan appropriately and effectively implement services in the local setting [3].

Methods

An initiative to conduct a science data services needs assessment was developed and approved in early 2009 at the University of Oregon. The initiative coincided with the hiring of a science data services librarian, and served as an initial project for the position. A researcher-centric approach to the development of services was a primary factor in using an assessment to shape services [4]. The goals of the project were to:

define the information services needs of science research staff;
inform the Libraries and other stakeholders of gaps in the current service structures; and
identify research groups or staff who would be willing to participate in, and whose datasets would be good subjects for, pilot data curation projects.

The library took the lead role on the assessment, consulting with other stakeholders in its development and implementation. Campus Information Services provided input on questions regarding campus information technology infrastructure, and to avoid unnecessary overlap with other IT service activities focused on research staff. The Vice President for Research and other organisational units were advised of the project and were asked for referrals to potential project participants. These units provided valuable input in the selection of staff contacts. Librarian subject specialists also suggested staff who might be working with data and interested in participating. Librarians responsible for digital collections, records management, scholarly communications, and the institutional repository were involved in the development of the assessment questions and project plan.

The questions used in the assessment were developed through an iterative process. A literature and Web review located several useful resources and examples. These included the University of Minnesota Libraries' study of scientists' research behaviours [3], and a study by Henty, et al. on the data management practices of Australian researchers [5]. The Data Audit Framework (DAF - now called the Data Asset Framework) methodology was considered to provide the most comprehensive set of questions with a field-tested methodology and guidelines [6][7][8][9][10][11]. The stages outlined in the DAF methodology were also instructive, although we elected not to execute a process for identifying and classifying assets (DAF Stage 2), since the organisational structure of our departments and institutes are not conducive to that level of investigation. From the beginning it was recognised that recruitment of scientists was based as much on their willingness to participate as their responsibility for any specific class or type of research-generated data.

The 2010 Information Architecture Summit

editor — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Elizabeth Coburn reports on ASIS&T's 11th Annual Information Architecture Summit, held in Phoenix, Arizona over 9-11 April 2010.

News and Events

editor — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.

Engagement, Impact, Value Workshop

University of Manchester
Monday 24 May 2010
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/engagement-impact-value-201005/

Open Repositories 2009

editor — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Adrian Stevenson reports on the four-day annual Open Repositories conference held at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, GA, USA over 18 - 21 May 2009.

I recently attended the annual Open Repositories 2009 Conference [1] in Atlanta, Georgia which hosted 326 delegates from 23 countries. For myself, as the SWORD [2] Project Manager, the event proved to be very worthwhile. My colleague Julie Allinson and I were both able to give a plenary presentation on the first day and a half-day workshop on the final day.

Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) Fall Meeting

editor — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Paul Walk reports on the Sun-PASIG winter meeting held in Baltimore, USA on 18-20 November 2008.

I had managed to miss the previous two PASIG (Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group)[1] meetings, so was delighted to find myself finally able to participate by attending the Fall meeting. Conveniently the event was arranged to follow immediately the SPARC Digital Repositories meeting [2], also held in Baltimore, and which I also attended.

Collaborative and Social Tagging Networks

editor — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Emma Tonkin, Edward M. Corrado, Heather Lea Moulaison, Margaret E. I. Kipp, Andrea Resmini, Heather D. Pfeiffer and Qiping Zhang gather a series of international perspectives on the practice of social tagging of documents within a community context.

Social tagging, which is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, and social indexing, allows ordinary users to assign keywords, or tags, to items. Typically these items are Web-based resources and the tags become immediately available for others to see and use. Unlike traditional classification, social tagging keywords are typically freely chosen instead of using a controlled vocabulary.

Limits to Information Transfer: The Boundary Problem

editor — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Jon E. Lervik, Mark Easterby-Smith, Kathryn Fahy and Carole Elliott discuss the challenges in integrating knowledge across boundaries between specialised knowledge communities within an organisation.

2nd International DCC Conference 2006: Digital Data Curation in Practice

editor — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Alexander Ball and Manjula Patel provide an overview of the second annual conference of the Digital Curation Centre.

The International Digital Curation Conference is held annually by the Digital Curation Centre [1] to bring together researchers in the field and promote discussion of policy and strategy. The second conference in this series [2], with the theme 'digital data curation in practice', was held between 21-22 November 2006 in Glasgow.

Stargate: Exploring Static Repositories for Small Publishers

editor — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:00 +0000

R. John Robertson introduces a project examining the potential benefits of OAI-PMH Static Repositories as a means of enabling small publishers to participate more fully in the information environment.

With the wider deployment of repositories, the Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is becoming a common method of supporting interoperability between repositories and services. It provides 'an application-independent interoperability framework based on metadata harvesting' [1]. Nodes in a network using this protocol are 'data providers' or 'service providers'.

Book Review: ARIST 39 - Annual Review of Information Science and Technology

editor — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Day reviews another recent volume of this key annual publication on information science and technology.

The Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) is an important annual publication containing review articles on many topics of relevance to library and information science, published on behalf of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST). Since volume 36 (2002), the editor of ARIST has been Professor Blaise Cronin of Indiana University, Bloomington.

Distributed Services Registry Workshop

editor — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:00:00 +0000

John Gilby reports on the UKOLN/IESR two-day workshop at Scarman House, University of Warwick on 14-15 July 2005.

The number of available online digital collections is growing all the time and with this comes the need to discover these collections, both by machine (m2m) and by end-users. There is also a trend towards service-orientated architectures and a likely critical part of this will be service registries to assist with discovering services andtheir associated collections. UKOLN and the JISC Information Environment Services Registry Project (IESR) [1] organised a two-day workshop to look at some of the issues that are likely to be present in building a distributed approach.

JISC Terminology Services Workshop

editor — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Sarah Shreeves reports on a one-day workshop on current developments and future directions for JISC terminology services held in London, February 2004.

Co-sponsored by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and UKOLN, the JISC Terminology Services Workshop was held at the CBI Conference Centre in London on 13 February 2004. Terminology services are networked services which use knowledge organisation systems (such as ontologies, controlled vocabularies, and classification systems) that can be accessed at certain stages of the production and use of metadata.

OAI: The Fourth Open Archives Forum Workshop

editor — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Manjula Patel provides us with an overview of the 4th Open Archives Forum Workshop.

Welcome and Introduction

Rachel Heery, UKOLN, University of Bath

Delegates were welcomed and reminded that this was the fourth and final in a series of workshops which have been organised by the Open Archives Forum Project. Rachel Heery explained that the project was a supporting action funded by the European Commission to bring together EU researchers and implementers working in the area of open access to archives.

Text Encoding for Interchange: A New Consortium

editor — Thu, 22 Jun 2000 23:00:00 +0000

Lou Burnard on the creation of the TEI Consortium which has been created to take the TEI Guidelines into the XML world.

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) was originally established in 1987 with the goal of creating a community-based standard for text encoding and interchange. It came into being as the result of a perception in many different parts of the academic research community that the rising tide of digitized media (largely known, in those distant days, as "electronic" or even "machine-readable" texts) threatened to engulf everything in a war of competing formats and encoding systems.

Metadata: Image Retrieval

editor — Fri, 19 Mar 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Day reports on combining content-based and metadata-based approaches.

Introduction

Image-based information is a key component of human progress in a number of distinct subject domains and digital image retrieval is a fast-growing research area with regard to both still and moving images. In order to address some relevant issues the Second UK Conference on Image Retrieval - the Challenge of Image Retrieval (CIR 99) was held in Newcastle upon Tyne on the 25 and 26 February 1999 [1]. Participants included both researchers and practitioners in the area of image retrieval.

Formats for the Electronic Library

editor — Wed, 19 Mar 1997 00:00:00 +0000

Judith Wusteman describes the document formats used in electronic serials.

Every day, subscribers to the the NewJour mailing list [1] receive notification of new Internet-available electronic serials. The NewJour definition of a serial covers everything from journals to magazines and newsletters; from the British Accounting Review to Ariadne, to The (virtual) Baguette and I Love My Nanny. Some days, a dozen or more publications are announced. As of 13th February 1997, the NewJour archive contained 3,240 items.

A Brief History of the American Library Association Web Site

editor — Sun, 19 Jan 1997 00:00:00 +0000

A brief history of the American Library Association Web Site: Rob Carlson, Internet Coordinator of the ALA, introduces us to the acclaimed Web site of the largest Library Association in the World.

The American Library Association's (ALA) web site [1] is a large and growing part of the Association's five-year plan, dubbed ALA Goal 2000, to focus its resources on the public's right to a free and open information society.

Public Libraries, Public Support? the Mission Behind Buildings, Books and Bytes

editor — Sun, 19 Jan 1997 00:00:00 +0000

Laura Weiss outlines a major American survey that looked at the disparity between key librarians views of the future, and what the public who used those libraries really wanted.

With more and more Americans turning to their desk-top computers for information, American libraries have been struggling to redefine their role. Numerous library leaders, aware of the seismic impact of the digital revolution, have crafted visions for their field that include cutting edge, building-without-walls, digital libraries, as well as partnerships with other public service information providers, such as schools and public broadcasters.

Allerton 1996

editor — Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Clare Davies reports on this years event in an annual conference series addressing user-centred aspects of library and information science.

The Allerton Institute is an annual conference series addressing user-centred aspects of library and information science, organised by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA. The conference, which this year took place from 27-29 October, is held in the disorientatingly English-stately-home-ish setting of the Robert Allerton House and Park near Monticello, Illinois. This lovely mansion and its landscaped wooded grounds were built around the turn of the century, and were later donated to the university.

Open Peer Review & Argumentation: Loosening the Paper Chains on Journals

editor — Wed, 18 Sep 1996 23:00:00 +0000

Tamara Sumner and Simon Buckingham Shum of the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University, describe the design and implementation of the Journal of Interactive Media in Education, and some of the issues behind the approach that this journal takes to the process of scholarly review.

The emergence of the internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) have potentially profound implications for scholarly practice, particularly in the submission, review, and publication of articles in journals. However to date, much of the impact of these new technologies on journals has been on digitising the products of journal publication; the scholarly processes involved in reviewing articles remain unchanged and unsupported.

The Katharine Sharp Review

editor — Wed, 18 Sep 1996 23:00:00 +0000

Kevin Ward, the editor of the Katherine Sharp Review, gives an overview of the first two years of this major journal for Librarians, and looks to its future.

I would like to think that library and information science education is preparing students for employment as traditional librarians, information professionals, or even future LIS educators. In each of these areas there is a call for publication as a requirement for tenure or promotion, or perhaps even as a requirement for attaining the position. Thus it would be of some importance if the student has had some sort of experience with the procedures and expectations before arriving in the workplace or interview.

Netskills Corner

editor — Fri, 19 Jan 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Netskills corner - Brian Kelly, Senior Trainer at Netskills, reviews Internet Explorer, Microsoft's Browser for Windows 95.

In the beginning was Tim Berners-Lee's WWW (World Wide Web) browser for the NeXT. Then came the CERN WWW line browser and the Viola graphical browser for X. However the first widely- used WWW browser was NCSA Mosaic which was developed initially for X, and then for the Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh environments. NCSA Mosaic was developed by a group led by Marc Andreessen at the National Center For Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.