What will it take for the whole of NSDL to add up to more than the sum of its parts in creating innovative access to cyberlearning opportunities for the nation’s students and teachers? It’s an interesting question that two parts of NSDL went to Washington to try and answer for representatives of the National Science Foundation (NSF), which provides funding for NSDL’s Technical Network Services (TNS), Resource Center (RC), Pathways and more than 200 digital library projects since 2000. Carl Lagoze, PI TNS, Kaye Howe, PI RC and Tamara Sumner, Co-PI TNS, shared progress, ideas, strategies and updates with NSF program officers and others on April 17, 2009.

Warm spring weather set the stage for lively NSDL presentations that were focused on lessons learned about the evolution of NSDL from its early days as a static library “meme” (an understandable unit of interrelated cultural and scholarly ideas and practices)-driven model to what it is in 2009—a network of distributed people, projects, standards, content and technologies that combine to create an educational contextual layer over and across STEM disciplines and resources.

Dr. Hal Richtol, NSF NSDL Program Director, began the presentation with a historical reference to the early days of the NSDL program by explaining its 1996-1997 roots in NSF-funded planning studies (see NSDL Reflections Weblog, “Implementations and Innovation in the NSDL” by William Arms). Dr. Linda Slakey, NSF Division of Undergraduate Education Division Director followed by explaining that the term “cyberlearning” was originally used by an EHR working group to focus thinking around the idea of a “platform perspective” in support of online leaning opportunities. She noted that NSDL has been asked to provide cyberlearning infrastructure in a very broad context.

Dr. Wanda Ward, NSF Education and Human Resources Acting Assistant Director, sees NSDL at a key intersection of NSF’s evolving view of cyberlearning and the importance of placing STEM content in context. To emphasize this evolution she noted that NSF changed the meaning behind the acronymn used to brand “NSDL” from “National Science Digital Library” to “National STEM Education Distributed Learning.”

NSDL TNS PI  Carl Lagoze at NSF.

Carl Lagoze, PI, Technical Network Services, Cornell University, placed NSDL in yet another context–that of digital libraries and the Web over the last fifteen years. He noted that Dr. Ward’s explanation of why the meaning behind the NSDL acronym had evolved was a good introduction to his overview of a changed and disrupted digital library “meme.” In 1992 Esther Dyson asked, “What is the digital library? That term smacks of “filmed play,” “horseless carriage,” and the like. The digital library will be less like a library than we think, and more like itself.” The real question for NSDL and other digital library projects what what were the characteristics that would make the digital library “more like itself?”

Lagoze noted that early digital libraries were generally in synch with the idea that core library services were related to core concepts through an intermediated service layer that closely resembled physical library services. Lagoze explained this idea by saying, “Chaos was tamed by the discipline of a union catalog.”

“In the 90s the web was like watching TV,” he went on. “It was a static document information space with walled gardens, silos and artifacts from the traditional Library meme brought into an electronic version of the Library.” This meme was then disrupted by ubiquitous Web technologies like Google. He believes that we now share a vision of a Web that will integrate highly valued information spaces like NSDL into the fabric of the semantic web.

NSDL RC PI  Kaye Howe highlights Resource Center activities at NSF.

Dr. Kaye Howe, PI, Resource Center, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), followed Lagoze with a look at Project Tomorrow findings from surveys they have conducted of over 1.5 million students from 14 thousand schools since 2003. She emphasized that Project Tomorrow is working with NSDL’s Resource Center and discovering that there is a danger of students “tuning out” when they get to schools where the Web is either blocked or not easily accessible. She warned that schools could become irrelevant unless teachers, communities and educational organizations like NSDL can find ways to keep students actively engaged in mediated online learning.

Howe went on to explain the costly and challenging “quest” with regard to evaluating the educational significance of NSDL and other resources as part of a network of national STEM education distributed learning. Howe referred to Book III of Jonathan’s Swifts Gulliver’s Travels, A Voyage To Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubbdrib,and Japan, in which the scholarly inhabitants of the flying island of Laputa were such deep thinkers that each required,

“ A soft Flap on his Eyes; because he is always so wrapped up in Cogitation, that he is in manifest Danger of falling down every Precipice, and bouncing his Head against every Post; and in the Streets, of jostling others, or being jostled himself into the Kennel.”

Howe’s point was that the processes and deliberations with which educational evaluation writ large is approached do not always lead to meaningful understandings of how students’ ability to learn is improved through cyber-enabled methods. She detailed aspects of NSDL’s leadership in facilitating ongoing discussion and distributed problem solving in determining the value of online STEM educational resources and opportunities as part of the way forward in finding out more about what works for teachers and students online.

Tamara Sumner, Co-PI NSDL TNS, discusses NSDL Technical Network Services improvements.

Dr. Tamara Sumner, Co-PI PI, Technical Network Services, University of Colorado, reviewed the Technical Network Services role that NSF envisioned in the solicitation and highlighted recent accomplishments towards delivering those services in the first six months of TNS operation .She highlighted early examples of how TNS is creating and maintaining a cyberlearning platform (http://ncore.nsdl.org) while strategically moving forward to engage a community of educational technology developers.

“TNS is streamlining operations,” She said. An extensive audit of NSDL’s technical services and infrastructure in Fall 2008 provided many examples of just where that streamlining could occur. As an example she pointed out, “Single sign-on was developed for NSDL by Columbia University with Shibboleth technology to safely shuffle users between walled gardens of content. This approach is no longer needed because NSDL partners have largely embraced open access concepts.” As a result more lightweight authorization processes will be implemented to serve NSDL’s reduced needs and eliminate costly infrastructure. She also outlined plans to selectively prune collections from the
large 2 million+ digital object NSDL Data Repository to dramatically improve the educational utility of the collection.

This flier was distributed to fill attendees in on NSDL TNS strategic plans going forward.

Echoing Dr. Slakey’s remarks on taking a plaform perspective to enable innovation in cyberlearning Sumner reported on the release of NSDL EduPak on Mar. 31. NSDL EduPak 1.0 (#0840744 ) is a publicly available, lightweight version of NCore (http://ncore.nsdl.org), established in 2008 as an open-source digital library platform of technology and standards that create a dynamic information layer on top of library resources. Built using NCore components, EduPak is an all-in-one, open source, education digital repository solution bundle that provides a general platform for building digital libraries. Using NSDL EduPak national educational organizations and institutions focused on establishing specialized digital collections, educational researchers, and discipline-oriented pedagogical product providers can use this basic technology—a repository API, a collection management system and a search service–to build educational digital repositories in support of cyberlearning goals (download it here: http://wiki.nsdl.org/index.php/Community:EduPak).

Sumner concluded by saying, “NSDL is a learning community that is increasingly large and diverse.” To adequately serve this shifting community in an age when the next-best-new thing is always being served up on the Web visionaries like Clayton Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson, and Michael B. Horn (Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns), who articulate how teaching and learning might operate in an age of of disruptive technology need to be listened to in formulating plans for NSDL’s future.

The hour-long discussion that followed among NSF program officers, NSDL Pathways representatives, NSDL PIs and researchers made it clear that enthusiasm for NSDL as an evolving and highly-valued part of national STEM educational infrastructure for teaching and learning was high.

The NSDL EduPak magnet goes well on any refridgerator.

Carol Minton Morris, Ben O’Steen, and David Flanders In a call to “keep it real” the 1977 Doobie Brothers’ hit song “Takin it to the Streets” contains the words, “You, telling me the things you’re gonna do for me; I aint blind and I dont like what I think I see.” Developer Happiness Days (DEV8D) organizers David Flanders and Ben O’Stein borrowed a bit of that spirit to take intense and often useful hallway conversations from around the fringes of larger tech-and-info-culture conferences (where they feel that they are ignored) to make them the centerpiece of an unconference event aptly named Developer Happiness Days. The goal for the meeting held in London Feb. 8-12, 2009 was to keep it real, lively, relevant and most importantly fun–for technology developers.

At work and play at DEV8D. Photo courtesy of Dave Pattern, Library Systems Manager, University of Huddersfield, UK, and Bryony Ramsden.

The idea of happiness as the basis for a technical gathering is nothing to laugh at. The 2006 global map of “Subjective Well-being” by Adrian White, University of Leicester, suggests that there are a lot of people out there, technically oriented and otherwise, who could use some cheering up. While we might be able to name a few things that please us, general happiness is often regarded as an illusive, hard-to-measure quality that tends to be something we recognize, fleetingly, when we experience it.

Flanders and O’Steen came up with methods that put developers and their ideas first to increase feelings of well-being. O’Steen suggests in his blog, “A good innovative developer is creativity and a pragmatic attitude; someone with the ‘rough consensus, running code‘ mentality that pervades good software innovation.” DEV8D was all about fostering “play, vagueness and communication” by putting unlikely concepts and people together to create surprise and inspiration. They even considered the “usual suspect-type” of developer who might be shy about sharing ideas and personal information in a face-to-face, social-work environment. O’Steen continues, “There is a need to provide means for people to break the ice, and to strike up conversations with people that they can recognize as being of like minds.” He suggest that simple feedback loops such as being thanked for even small contributions can lead to increased communication and agreement in technical development processes.

The developers who participated spoke and wrote eloquently about what they learned (see related posts below). They managed their time at this carefully designed event to enable hands-on learning about rapid prototyping tools such as Python and Django, while also trying them out in a technical community. Lively question and answer sessions where participants agreed to the rule, “what is said in the room, stays in the room” promoted honest information exchanges.

A few successful techniques balanced play with free time, useful activities and leveraging lightweight Web 2.o technologies. Noting that everyone likes to get a high scores whether in video games or in social network sites, O’Steen used a service created by Sam Easterby-Smith on day two of the conference to collect metrics via twitter and provide feedback to participants (“Happyness-o-meter”). Wordle was used to create a word cloud snapshots of each attendee’s web space as an abstract way of sharing information. Other easy-going game-like activities helped to keep people engaged and interested. Some DEV8D events were held in local pubs on the outside chance that people might relax in these types of informal settings.

By the second day DEV8D evolved into a build-your-own-experience that consisted of an all-hands “base camp” where developers came and went, hung out, worked on problems collaboratively and reflected on evolving perceptions. A series of “lightning talks” on a variety of short topics encouraged attendees to only attend those sessions that were of particular interest while leaving open the possibility of mixing and matching.

The main event was a ‘Developer Decathlon’ competition where attendees  assembled into nine teams and were encouraged to make something useful and creative in exchange for a chance to win cash prizes. The jury is still out on who will take home the cash prize so stay tuned to DEV8D to find out what went on.

DEV8D on the Web:

DEV8D JISC blog: http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org/ Read posts from the event about collective intelligence and how technology can help to access it, a five minute interview with Ross Gardler, Apache, Mark Dewey’s semantic search idea, more rapid ideas,  a video of Peter Sefton’s lightning talk about focusing on something simple like making PDF documents more usable, all about “uber users” and several others.

Google Code DEV8D Web site: http://code.google.com/p/developerhappinessdays/

Aridadne article by Julian Cheal: dev8D: JISC Developer Happiness Days http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/jisc-dev8d-rpt/

Ben O’Steen blog post: Developer Happiness days - Why happyness is important  http://oxfordrepo.blogspot.com/2009/02/developer-happiness-days-why-happyness.html

JISC Developer Happiness Days by Julliette Culver: http://www.jvvw.com/?p=292

Educators, parents, technology developers, information science researchers, and almost anyone with one foot in a social networking space are mildly curious about how interconnected digital information pipelines work–me too. That’s why I attended a recent workshop about one of them–Twitter–offered by Kaila Bussert from the Cornell University Library. I discovered, as many other users have before me, that a twittle knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

“Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again” is the message that Twitter users may see on their screens along with this whimsical “Fail Whale” image created by Sydney artist and designer Yiying Lu when the Twitter system cannot keep up with microbloggers.

Twitter began as one of those small technical phenomena that seemed to have limited use for serious endeavors and was reported to have grown to include over 1.3M unique monthly visitors (April 2008) from every corner of private and public life. That number grew to 3M monthly users by June of 2008. The simple question that underpins the entire Twitter universe is, “What are you doing?” The 140-character response to that question fired people’s imaginations while creating yet another digital communication pipeline to get the word out about YOU.

Since Twitter launched in 2006 businesses, news organizations, universities, schools and now even members of Congress and the NSF have found ways to use Twitter microblogs to communicate about a wide range of topics. It has been described as a personal news wire that provides regular people who serendipitously find themselves in the midst of a news event with the ability to text their observations to Twitter. Stories abound about how major news outlets now scan Twitter feeds to find out where news is breaking.

The Pew/Internet and American Life Project reports, “11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others.” The bread and butter of this service remains people’s fascination with their ability to broadcast ambient facts about their day-to-day lives. Seemingly mundane reports about drinking coffee and carpooling often result in reports of news and information that turn out to be of interest to almost everyone depending on who you are, where you are, and what you do everyday. Last week, for example, even some Oscar night glitterati decided to bypass mainstream entertainment reporters in favor of sending their own direct tweets from after parties.

It seems to some analysts that these tiny bursts of information may be the closest thing we have seen to real time group conversation. The most direct way to discover for yourself how Twitter “feels” is to go to http://twitter.com/,register, and explain what you are doing.You will begin to get a few requests to follow your tweets over the next few days.

There are hundreds of Twitter-related tools and resources on the web. Here are a few that may help you begin your twek. And really, that’ s the last “tw” word invention I will make you read. The others belong to someone else. 

twitterholic (don’t your thumbs hurt yet?) At this web site you can tweet your twitter page stats that are carefully hoovered up by twittastic robots a few times a day.

twhirl Send and receive tweets from your desktop.

Twitbin Send and receive tweets using this Firefox add-on.

Tiny URL Shorten long URLs to reduce the number of characters in your tweets.

Twitzer Use this Firefox add-on to shorten your tweets.

Lahinsky, Adam. “The True Meaning of Twitter.” Fortune. 158.3 (2008): 39.

Follow me at http://twitter.com/mintonmorris.

Columbus, Ohio On Feb. 4-5, 2009 the MSP2 (Middle School Portal) Advisory Board met at at COSI. For a portal that is dedicated to making quality STEM resources widely available, and FUN for middle school instruction, the venue could not have been chosen better. COSI has thrilled nearly 19 million visitors with exhibits and hands-on activities from Poison Frogs and Rat Basketball to Extreme Screen Theatre and art that acts like science for over 40 years. It’s no wonder that COSI (Center of Science and Industry) Science Museum is Parents magazine’s number one pick for best science center in the country. Kim Lightle, PI, organized the MSP2 (Middle School Portal) Advisory Board Meeting to get advice on how to continue to leverage resources and staff to meet the needs of students and teachers nationwide. Over 30 teachers, administrators, education researchers, and education technology specialists met over two days to get to know one another, share lessons learned, and ultimately form a stronger network to meet expanded MSP2 teaching and learning goals based on leveraging Web 2.0 technologies. Launching a new NING community space is part of the MSP2 strategy to engage new middle school education audience groups.Lightle described interconnected project and program relationships that remind her of “nesting Russian dolls” in introducing an introductory panel discussion aimed at helping advisory board members understand the MSP2 operational context. Mary Henton, National Middle School Association, Sarita Pillai, FunWorks, Carol Minton Morris, and Eileen McIlvain NSDL, set the stage for describing MSP2 as an NSF NSDL-funded Pathways project that takes advantage of existing NSDL technical and social cyberinfrastructure in combination with significant long term educational associations and ongoing digital library project expertise.

Minton Morris began by describing NSDL’s Technical Network Services in support of a national educational technical cyberinfrastrucure. Currently the NCore suite of TNS technologies, standards are available for use by educational projects nationwide.

An open source release of a bundled “EduPack” consisting of the NSDL Data Repository (NDR) API based on Fedora, the NSDL Collection System (NCS), and the Digital Discovery Service will be released through Fedora Commons this spring. The EduPack will allow educational projects nationwide to jump start without having to reinvent the technical wheel. This public, open source release will signal a new kind of engagement with educational technical developers within NSDL Pathways like MSP2 to enable targeted hands-on technical innovation.

Economic Reality

Good ideas and the best of intentions cannot mask the fact that times are tough. Sustainability strategies for how to maintain significant educational initiatives such as MSP2 and many others were on the minds of most attendees. Marketing, audience, communication and engagement ideas were woven into most conversations and brainstorming sessions.

Marcia Mardis, Florida State University said, “We need to represent the hearts of the users and minds of the funders.” Her statement became the overall theme for sustainability discussions.

The Sustainability Group discussed multiple strategies and ideas to make this dual focus work:

1. Make a case for MSP2 as a workforce development tool that might fit well with the evolving economic and scientific agenda of the Obama administration. An example of a successful educational workforce partnership program is IBM Transition to Teaching.

2. Review the DLESE example of sustaining a core collection using NSDL systems and technology

3. Investigate new corporate, entrepreneurial partnerships that might evolce into development and stewardship models

4. More “Strategic librarianship.” The group defined this as a successful institutional school or university library program based on making sure the administrators understand your educational digital efforts, and that mutual goals are aligned.

5. Don’t ignore innovation. The NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure is interested in the K12 education space. Where does MSP2 fit in? How can ed tech innovation become a part of national cyberinfrastructure?

6. Keep track of emerging “products:” specialized webcasts with Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears materials and seminars; quarterly database of webinars exhibiting best practices

7. Create a solid, marketable “brand” for MSP2.

The sustainability group concluded that their vision is to make three promises to teachers regarding a new MSP2 online portal:

1. This is my kind of place; a place that you can make your own.
2. This is a place where I can find resources
3. This is a place where I can go further

Further the group decided that a rubric for identifying group (online) formation, use, engagement and trending translate user experience value into marketing strategy and strategic messaging around:

1. Content
2. Administration
3. Funders

Would enable MSP2 to deliver on these teacher promises.

Ithaca, NY Workflows are a repeatable sequence of operations that achieve an outcome. A scientific workflow is unique among other types of workflows because it specifically represents a graphical model of data flow among processing steps. The Kepler Project provides an open source scientific workflow tool that allows users to author and execute scientific workflows.

Watch and listen to video and audio of this Golden-Crowned Sparrow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library web site.

Paul Allen, Assistant Director of Information Science programs at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, recently gave an introduction to the concepts behind the NSDL-funded biodiversity pipeline project known as “Science Pipes,” based on Kepler, for Fedora Commons developers. Science Pipes will support inquiry-based learning, allowing analysis results and visualizations to be dynamically incorporated into web sites (e.g. blogs) for dissemination and consumption.

New scientific knowledge is synthesized through analysis. The fine points of modeling and repeated analysis on sets of data present investigators with issues such as how analysis frameworks can be repeated, how do you keep track of steps “in your head,” processes and analysis systems sometimes do not synch, components are often not re-used, and there is not accepted way to publish workflow results.

A typical scientific workflow might include data collection, cleaning, analysis,  modeling and graphing into a visual display. Users access “Directors” and “Actors” in the Kepler system to maniplulate data through a workflow. A “director” is an execution model that tells an “actor” to perform a related series of functions such as “download sensor data.”

Kepler-based SciencePipes is designed to provide an environment in which students, educators, citizens, resource managers, and scientists can create and share analyses and visualizations of biodiversity data. CLO maintains significant biodiversity resources such as the Macaulay Library that houses the world’s largest online archive of animal sounds and videos.

Baltimore, MD Is there anyone out there who has an in-box, spam filter, hard drive, or update feed that is not brimming with outdated, digital junk? And are you even sure about whether it’s junk or not? Like old string, your institution may have a particular reason for keeping a collection of regularly updated data. It might even be an important reason. Welcome to the world of the Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) fall meeting.

Physicists at Tel-Aviv University in Israel created this mathematical representation of the devices that send vast amounts of data across the Web.

Ask any systems administrator holding back a flood of content and they will tell you that their finger in the digital dyke is the only thing keeping your personal computing devices from being swept away by a virtual rising tide of data. At last month’s Sun PASIG fall meeting held in Baltimore use cases, data “floodwatch” metrics, technical architectures and storage strategies were examined and discussed as ways to move towards making use of, and tracking what seem like “bazillions” of proliferating data points. To download Sun PASIG Meeting presentations please visit http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_fall08/presentations.html.

Mike Keller, University Librarian, Director of Academic Information Resources, Stanford University, opened Sun PASIG. He painted an optimistic picture of new directions that Sun Microsystems will take in the future, particularly with regard to creating an ongoing global best practices forum for high performance computing, and solutions for storage and easier-to-implement reference architectures. Keller introduced Ernie Ingles, Vice-Provost and Chief Librarian, University of Alberta who suggested, “The future has not yet been preserved.” He asked attendees to imagine laying the technical and social frameworks for preserving “memory objects” whose meaning will be far greater than any anonymous data for future generations.

National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP)

Martha Anderson, Director of Program Management, NDIIPP, (National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program) U.S. Library of Congress presented a “Major Trends Overview.” The Library of Congress’s efforts to preserve US heritage and knowledge takes into account multiple dimensions of preservation from the vantage points of “today, tomorrow and forever.” She suggested that reading Philip K. Dick’s 1969 science fiction collection entitled The Preserving Machine would help attendees gain into some of the real issues involved in an expansive view of preserving knowledge that were the stuff of science fiction 40 years ago. Anderson said, “We [NDIIPP] want to bridge the present to the future and we are building machines to help us do that.”

Sun Storage Technologies

Sun systems and architecture specialists sketched out assumptions, solutions and new ideas around creating long-term facilities for large data acquisition, storage and management. Chris Wood, Storage CTO, Sun Microsystems, Inc. said, “Over time systems, software and people will be replaced and data will be preserved. Every component will fail or be swapped out.” He went on, “Twenty years ago they were thinking machines, and then general purpose computing took over—specialized hardware will always lose. Multiple archive models must be supported.” The model he presented supports LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, as well as ILS models. Wood believes that many types of architectures that support clouds or “federated services” will emerge over time.

Several Sun presenters emphasized the role of energy consumption in the digital preservation equation. Over time the energy price tag for operating almost any piece of hardware will surpass its original cost. As the cost for storage systems decrease and energy prices increase institutions will continue to be faced with deciding how much data they can afford to keep.

The DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons Collaborate on “DuraSpace”

DSpace and Fedora Commons held several meetings at Sun PASIG. The first introduced the organizations’ joint DuraSpace inititative. This six-month investigation funded by the Mellon Foundation is being led by the DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons to determine the feasibility of establishing an open, durable store service layer to leverage repository development in compute and storage clouds. The idea behind DuraSpace is to provide a trusted, value-added service layer to augment the capabilities of generic storage providers by making stored digital content more durable, manageable, accessible and sharable.

The second part of the meeting was dedicated to a community discussion about establishing a professional development curriculum for existing and potential repository developers, managers and curators with support from Sun Microsystems.

Outreach staff from DSpace and Fedora Commons explained that the key shared objective is to strengthen and engage repository user and developer communities worldwide. Attendees expressed interest in the concept of a repository professional development seminar series that would include preservation and archiving as part of an integrated curriculum as well as one-off profiles, use cases and “how-to” topics. Seminar leaders and topics are being sought. Please contact Carissa Smith at if you are interested in working on the joint seminar series.

DSpace and Fedora developers met at noon on Nov. 19 to move towards shared understandings for how the two popular repository’s technology development strategies might be brought closer together. By taking a step back from existing concepts of how each system operates, simple storage may be viewed as a logical first “rung” on a “ladder” towards interoperability. Four progressive laddering concepts are:

1. Content blobs (bottom rung of the ladder)
2. Facts about blobs and their interrelationships (next rung up the ladder)
3. Aggregations (next rung up the ladder)
4. Enriched semanticunderstanding—recommendations and best practices about how to expose things that filters down to the bottom layer. (top rung)

U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

Kenneth Thibodeau, Director, Electronic Records Archives Program, NHE, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) (http://www.archives.gov/) opened afternoon sessions on November 19 by explaining that he woke up each day thinking, “Today’s the day the sky is going to fall.” With 852 requirements statements for establishing a scalable, extensible and evolvable view of digitally preserving the reliable transmission of digitally encoded information over time and technology in support of nothing less than protecting “Records [that] help us claim our rights and entitlements, hold our elected officials accountable for their actions, and document our history as a nation,” his concern is understandable.

As a small example of the volume of data that NARA is legally responsible for, Thibodeau explained that they will take legal ownership of 150 terabytes of data containing 100 million email messages when President Bush leaves office.

He advocates a cyclical approach to systems development and production designed for growth, evolution, openness and closure, and stresses that NARA systems cannot satisfy end users. There is a need for information “brokers,” like university libraries, to provide user services. Thibodeau would like to make it easier for third parties to package and promote NARA resources and information.

Beyond Fedora 3.0

After the 2008 releases of Fedora 3.0 and 3.01 with a Content Model Architecture (CMA) providing an integrated structure for persisting and delivering the essential characteristics of digital objects , Sandy Payette, Executive Director, Fedora Commons said, “We stood back and strategized.”

She went on, “Waves of repository-enabled applications have emerged—institutional repository and digital library apps; collaborative “Web 2.0” apps; eScience, eResearch, and data curation apps… We can build amazing private islands.” Should we stay within this institutional-specific and organizational-specific small island application development paradigm? She believes that repository communities must evolve from “systems” to “networks” that are characterized by:

–integrated systems
–distributed control
–generic gateways
–more open
–more reconfigurable

Payette concluded by saying that new ways to expose content, backend storage abstraction, performance and scalability, and the content service ladder concept promote greater interoperability. Strategic collaborations such as the DSpace and Fedora DuraSpace initiative will find ways to blend networks using repository infrastructure and services. “What we build today needs to be evolveable and organic. The only systems that last are the ones that change,” she said.

The National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure DataNet Program

Lucy Nowell, Program Director, Office of CyberInfrastructure (OCI), U.S. National Science Foundation says, “In 2007 the amount of information created surpassed, for the first time, our ability to preserve it on the planet.” A single project funded by OCI, for example, might generate 30 terabytes of data per night.

OCI’s answer to what to do about this wealth of information lies in establishing the Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners (DataNet) program. DataNet is focused on creating a national framework, culture change, tools, resources, opportunities and exploration around the curation and use of data by building a “network of data networks” similar to the Internet.

DataNet seeks to preserve the history of science by not only capturing “big science” data, but also by saving the long tail of small science that provides critical evidence of primary science.

A Very Large, Scalable, Data Architecture

The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints (LDS) has established and maintains the largest genealogical library in the world to “preserve the heritage of mankind,” and makes it freely available to the public. How much information is that? More than 10 billion names have been cataloged since 1894 from images of birth and death information recorded in family and public documents that equal 10% of all the human beings who have ever lived on the planet. Their near-term goal is to be able to publish 1 billion new genealogical record images every year.

Gary Wright, Digital Preservation Product Manager and Randy Stokes, Principal Engineer, FamilySearch, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints explained that records are available through the catalog of the Family History Library and may be accessed through the FamilySearch web site. Though recent record collection efforts are digitally-based, the historical preservation strategy for collecting images of birth and death records from around the planet was to store them on microfilm. Currently that microfilm is being digitized and a new architecture for preserving the collection is being developed.

Complex systems for ingesting, disseminating, preserving and supporting tens to hundreds of petabytes of data consisting of more than 100 billion objects are currently being developed using the Sun Storage Tek SL8500 Modular Library System.

Final Observations: How the PASIG fits into the Global Project Landscape

Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), offered a final keynote summary at Sun PASIG. In the ongoing “tech vs. policy” conversation he suggests that there are limits to what can be accomplished. There must be an emphasis on economic issues with an eye to what can be optimized and what can be left behind. We cannot pursue perfection, and a balance between better, faster and cheaper must be found.

Lynch is looking for economies of scale in federation models. With advances such as the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) moving assets is getting easier. Services that can help to establish provenance, authenticity along with more network trust models such as Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) are needed.

“Cloud” storage could be an economic win especially if facilities are located where energy costs are low. Lynch cautioned that there are no standards for cloud agreements—what are services; how with risks be monetized, and; how will media and format migrations be handled?

He reminded the audience, who perhaps were already on this page after three days of presentations about ubiquitous and persistent data, that there is a lack of framework to discuss “what to give up” as knowledge preservation issues loom. “It is an ugly conversation but we are morally obligated to have it,” Lynch concluded.

Printed scholarly publications in the main reading room at the New York Public Library. © 2008 Carol Minton Morris

Baltimore, MD SPARC IR morning “Campus Publishing Strategies” sessions focused on making use of, and understanding the evolution of scholarly publishing as a platform for scholarly discourse as well as a process for developing intellectual products. Moderator Richard Fyffe, Grinnell College, reminded the audience that Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, CNI, had cautioned against losing the role of institutions in establishing educational repositories.

Rea Devakos, Coordinator, Scholarly Communication Initiatives, University of Toronto Libraries, talked about work on the Synergies Project which is a national platform for scholarly publishing in Canada focused on humanities. She explained, “Context has been added as a fundamental characteristic of information.” The Synergies consortium consists of five core member institutions led by Université de Montréal and 16 regional partners. [from the web site] “In bringing Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities research to the internet, Synergies will not only bring that research into the mainstream of worldwide research discourse but also it will legitimize online publication in Social Sciences and Humanities.”

The University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) will host the Access 2009 Conference, billed as “The premier library technology conference.” UPEI recently released “Islandora” which is an open source Fedora digital repository for a Drupal front-end that provides an easy way to build and manage repository content for use by web sites

Catherine Mitchell, Director, eScholarship Publishing Group, California Digital Library, University of California, opened her remarks by suggesting that we stop talking about repositories. In her view quantification standards such as size and number of downloads do not work because the comparative scale of institutions are so different. There are ten large campuses in the University of California system, for example. In spite of the enormous overall size of UC holdings and usage, she views the lack of visibility of e-scholarship and the associated lack of incentives for participating in open access deposit efforts as impediments to moving forward towards creating robust open access repositories.

Their model is to establish marketing campaigns at each institution facilitated by an outreach and marketing coordinator who in turn creates user groups within each of their institutions in collaboration with e-scholarship liaisons and local site administrators

“Interface design,”Mitchell says, “Is the elephant in the middle of the room.” Their new web site design is very simple. She said, “The homepage is a place where people seldom go and it must be [designed] as a marketing tool.”

How scholarly publishing models translate to small colleges and universities involves looking into the strategic reasons that the library might be involved as a publisher according to Janet Sietman, Digital Commons Project Manager and Teresa Fishel, Library Director, Macalester College. Located in St. Paul, Minnesota with a population of 1,900 students, 57% come from outside the Midwest. Macalester has 164 faculty members and 19 library staff members. The point of convergence with regard to how to provide scholarly publishing efforts on campus was in “Services.”

At Macalester their institutional repository is a showcase for student research and publications, and provides visibility for faculty scholarship. Additionally new opportunities for libraries were assessed as part of the IR planning process. They saw that by applying traditional library cataloging, selecting, managing content skills they could begin to address the need for institutional change. These e-activities added value over time. They also discovered ways to leverage materials through external web services (Google services).

Currently they expect a 400% increase in downloads from DigitalCommons@Macalester next year as interest in born digital journals that are published from their repository grows. Faculty at this small institution see heightened visibility of research materials as an advantage going forward.

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SPARC IR luncheon speaker Bob Witeck, CEO Witeck-Combs Communications, Inc., Washington, D.C., welcomed fellow “Smarty pants and know-it-alls.” Witeck stated that he had never done delivery of “real knowledge.” Irregardless he views SPARC library and scholarly publishing attendees as fellow marketers.

In collaborative efforts such as scholarly publishing key marketing messages are an integral part of the work everyone needs to do together to succeed. He suggests that finding out who cares about issues such as the reach of shared knowledge in digital formats and why that matters in a world where science has been kept secret are significant. Witeck says, “Right now we may have a perfect storm of opportunity around making publicly-funded science, public, because it’s all about trust and value.”

In the discussion that followed Les Carr pointed out that when you live in an institutional environment it’s all about proving that something is better than another thing. While he agrees that marketing, or being able to tell a good story is useful, he finds that institutions are not so good at using marketing tools such as creative design, media, and coming up with well-crafted marketing messages.

Witeck answered that the best messages might be articulated by people other than scholars, researchers or librarians. “Stop talking to yourselves,” he said. Bright young faculty and champions for new ideas are powerful messengers. Additionally he believes that institutional leaders should be on board with the marketing messages, and be willing to carry messages forward. Enlist third parties, focus on funders and work towards solution-driven business strategies are all part of overcoming institutional barriers to successful deployment of scholarly assets:

1. Articulate what IRs can do for stakeholder communities

2. Establish processes for figuring out what to talk about

3. What are the key points in the message

Stories about compelling content, real substance, shared value and solution-driven components are parts of an overall narrative that can help communicate institutional ideas around participation and adoption of on line scholarly publishing strategies.

The Bromo-Seltzer Tower in Baltimore, Maryland. © by James G. Howes, 2008.

Baltimore, MD Bromo-Seltzer was invented in this town by Captain Isaac Emerson. To celebrate his tummy-taming elixir he built a clock tower in 1911 that was intended to look like the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy. The Baltimore version included a marvelous 51-foot lighted blue rotating bottle on top.

The big blue bottle is long gone but the Bromo-Seltzer Tower remains. Preservationists, archivists, librarians and technology specialists might argue that the blue bottle has gone the way of other parts and pieces of our cultural heritage as increasing amounts of digital information and data threaten to overrun the institutions whose job it is to preserve knowledge into the future. At the SPARC Institutional Repostiories (SPARC IR) Conference and the Sun Microsystems Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) attendees reviewed new solutions and grappled with the thorny issues around creating durable knowledge for future generations in an era of burgeoning information.

SPARC IR, November 18

Living in a land of “Plenty ‘O Information” has caused libraries and institutional repositories from all parts of the world to examine policies, look to economies of scale, and find new ways to disseminate intellectual products in order to provide greater service with public funds. Innovation and entrepreneurial initiatives also provide new ways to consider funding access to scholarship and scholarly resources.

In Nov. 18, 2006 SPARC IR morning sessions David Prosser, Director, SPARC Europe, Syun Tutiya, Chiba University, Japan. The Japanese Policy Environment and Bonnie Klein, Defense Technology Information Center, USA, U.S. Federal Government Repositories & Public Access to Grant Research presented different views of legal and open access policy environments around access to data and information in their three countries.

European information policy is interested in leading the charge towards making materials open and available as a way to stiulate and drive economic development. The Berlin Declaration in Support of Open Access, for example, now has 255 signatories worldwide including Germany, France, Austria, Sweden, China and others. The Wellcome Trust has independently funded biomedical research that is mandated for deposit by UK law, as is publicly-funded research. “Any original research paper” is required to be deposited. Other European research organizations are have also begun putting policies in place to require deposit of papers.

Japan is concerned with getting the technology right prior to instituting overall policy. Tutiya reported, “No policy is our policy.” Assessment and establishing industry/society relationships are two aspects of how ideas around Open Access policies are evolving. Japanese information managers are working towards being able to harvest metadata nationally and are concluding that “environments [for data and information] are more important.”

CENDI is an interagency group of United States federal agencies whose work involves managing repositories, information centers and the government printing office. All 13 CENDI agencies play a role in addressing science- and technology-based national priorities—26 agencies fund about 1,000 grant programs.

Since 2001 online public information facilities such as Science.gov have been paid for out of pocket by participating agencies to provide greater citizen access to basic science research results. Version 5 has just been launched which includes a federated search over many federal repository databases

WorldWideScience.org is an even larger collaborative effort with the British Library. It was launched during the summer of 2007 with 15 partner countries including China. The “fundamental research” represented at World Wide Science can be defined as basic and applied research in science and engineering, the results of which are ordinarily pubished and shared broadly—about 70% of U.S. research falls under this category.

An ongoing discussion is how to structure “interim” scientific reporting. Early results are not always peer-reviewed and can include spotty data types and formats. Only 53% of grantees thought that early posting on a government web site was a good idea because:

–an invention could be prematurely disclosed

–scholarly journals view web site postings as “publication.”

Klein concluded, “[US] Government agencies feel that they do not have the right to mandate Open Access.”

To be continued . . .

The ComPADRE web site (http://www.compadre.org/portal/) provides access to a growing network of educational resource collections supporting teachers and students in Physics and Astronomy.

From Pat (Viele) the Science Librarian (Pat’s Picks for STEM Educators) The fall meeting of the NYS Section of the American Physical Society was held on on November 14th and 15th. I gave a poster session on Friday evening introducing attendees to ComPADRE (Communities for Physics and Astronomy Digital Resources for Education). ComPADRE is the physics and astronomy section or “Pathway” of the NSDL. At the Special Libraries Association meeting in June 2008, the principle investigator for ComPADRE (Bruce Mason) and I gave a poster session together. We both felt it would be good to spread the word about comPADRE at section meetings for APS and at similar organizations.

My purpose in giving a poster session was two-fold:

1. to spread the word about an excellent digital library
2. to demonstrate what librarians can do to support teaching and research in physics and astronomy

I had many interesting conversations with faculty and students. As I suspected, they were interested not only in teaching college level courses, but also reaching out to school children and the general public.

New York, NY Will tracking pop stars and images of swirling hurricanes on cell phones and through social networking sites become what future generations think of as “news”? Over 100 media representatives, librarians, academics and technology specialists gathered at the New York Public Library to talk about preserving news for future scholars on Oct. 23 - 24, 2008. As “On the Record” A Forum on Electronic Media and the Preservation of News got underway it was clear that one thread of the discussion would also address the larger issue of keeping the genre of serious public news reporting alive in an era of shrinking interest and tight budgets (New York Times Co. Reports an Earnings Decline of 51%, New York Times, Oct. 23, 2008). The event was sponsored by the New York Public Library (NYPL) and the Center for Research Libraries/Global Resources Network.

Clockwise from top left: The NYPL entrance; the main reading room; the map room.

Alex Jones, Laurence M. Lombard Lecturer in the Press and Public Policy Director Shorenstein Center, Harvard University, and John Carroll, Former Editor of the Los Angeles Times discussed the significant public record that news provides in their keynote conversation.

Though their missions may sometimes diverge, Jones pointed out that the great libraries of the world are in the same business as great newspapers in trying to make distinctions between fact, fiction, and authentic knowledge. Jones and Carroll were in agreement that serious public affairs news reporting as a service in support of a citizen’s ability to make informed decisions about participating in democratic processes is now threatened in the United States.

Jones explained that The New York Times was the first news organization to publish a searchable news index in 1913. This early effort to treat a news record as a scholarly resource was printed on longer-lasting paper to aid in its preservation. This gigantic book cataloged every article by date and location on each physical page by year. The New York Times sold two copies in every town—one to the editor of the paper and one to the library for reference.

Carroll explained that today people expect better and immediate access to news and other content. News delivered in paper editions has not traditionally provided minute-by-minute information. News is now primarily born digital—produced in electronic form online and over the air waves. Both libraries and news organization’s preservation strategies have been developed to preserve paper or facsimile versions of paper on microfilm.

Other speakers pointed out that the future of microfilm as a preservation technology is not assured as digital imaging revenues continue to out pace film technology profits.

Newspapers’ business models have been shattered. Web news engages young readers, ruins paper circulation revenues, and has wrecked havoc with the print advertising model. Community newspapers were once an accepted monopoly because there was no other way to advertise goods and services in order to reach potential local customers. After an economic boom in the 1980s when most newspapers added investigative reporters, they are now in economic decline.

Large media corporations often acquire struggling newspapers, and replace them with online and broadcast media organizations which do not place an emphasis on having reporters in the field. Newspaper reporters are part of a traditional newsroom culture whose activities have been understood to contribute to the greater good. By actively looking for facts and verifying details newspaper reporters have created a record of public affairs that often does not exist anywhere else.

Jones and Carroll regard newspaper readers as both customers and citizens. “We perform a function in support of their citizenship,” said Carroll. They concluded by suggesting that new economic models to ensure that news in the public interest survives are needed.

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Several speakers presented library challenges and strategies around understanding news content and structure in order to preserve it digitally and on microfilm. Andrew Madden, Director of Strategic Partnerships, Google, presented the company’s recently announced historic newspaper archive microfilm scanning initiative that seeks to organize the world’s older information and make it as universally accessible and useful as Google’s other web-based information (Google to Digitize Newspaper Archives, The New York Times, Sept. 8, 2008).

Content within Google indices has increased particularly with respect to burgeoning types and formats. Google Earth, Books, and You Tube are some examples. Because less than 1/2 of 1% of all Google users use advanced search or look beyond the first page of search results, there are questions about how to manage and provide access to specialized and complex content going forward.

People often look for older content within the Google News space. “Archival” can mean 30 days or older, although users could be searching for 200-year-old documents. Two years ago Google News stories were maintained in the news space for 30 days, and then were rolled into the crowded Google index.

For the last five years Google has begun to focus on off line content with scanning initiatives like the Google Book project and discovered that before 1995 most news was not born digital, and had been preserved on microfilm if it has been preserved at all.

Madden pointed out that Google would like to work with libraries in the same way that they work with publishers as they look towards preserving news archives. Google underwrites the cost of the program, and will share advertising revenues in exchange for access to content.

Rights management is a critical piece of the project of going forward as it has been for Google Books. Experimentation with providing partial news archive content is encouraged. Along with providing digital news archives back to originating sites in an I-frame, Google will provides a use analysis “dashboard” to partners. Google News Archive bundles a microfilm reader service within the browser.

Madden believes that making news archive content live back on library and publisher web sites will enhance context for understanding the historical record of news.

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Valerie Komor, Director of the Corporate Archives of the Associated Press, suggested that there was a disconnect between what news “is”—information that people read and react to right now—and the concept of news as a part of the historic scholarly record. “News is not written or reviewed to last beyond today even though we understand its cultural and historic value. We must ensure that format is not destiny,” She said.

Which is why born digital news, its meaning, and how its natural structures are tracked and managed, were also on the minds of attendees. While many preservationists roll their eyeballs and throw up their hands when venues for news aggregation such as Twitter and Facebook are mentioned, others, like Sree Sreenivasan, Dean of Student Affairs and New Media Professor, Columbia University, caution that the onslaught of new communications methods and strategies cannot be overlooked in shaping policies for preserving the news record. News is emerging in new types of online “pockets” every day.

Sreenivasan explained, for example, that news of a recent California earthquake was first reported on Twitter by a person who was experiencing the effects first-hand.

“Facebook is competing with the Internet for your time and attention,” He said, “That’s their strategy.” With more than 100 million Facebook users worldwide, it seems to be working. He believes that journalists should take advantage of social spaces like Facebook where “BAW” (Bored at Work) users can easily stumble on news.

He suggests that libraries and news organizations might look into ways to host citizen journalism news content in the future as a way to generate revenue.

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In conclusion Bernard Reilly, President, Center for Research Libraries made several observations: paper and microfilm are rear-guard news preservation strategies that will go away in 5-7 years; collective support for local preservation efforts is key; transparency helps in sharing information about efforts especially around collection development.; systematic opportunism works–taking a comprehensive approach to collecting materials, and; common requirements for “default” news repositories such as LC, CDL, Google, News Bank, ICPSR and Portico will promote interoperability and utility in managing digital news objects. The Center for Research Libraries and the Global Resources Network will release a report based on presentations and discussions from this meeting.