Entries for July 21, 2006

FREE ONLINE - Building a National Science Digital Library

UPDATE: If you did not participate in the live presentation, the PowerPoint and related materials are available.

Your host, Steve Worona, will be joined by Dean Krafft, and the topic will be "Building a National Science Digital Library."

Since 2000, the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Core Integration team has been creating the infrastructure for a digital library of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics resources. That library now contains more than a million resources from approximately 100 collections. In this talk, Dean Krafft will give a short historical overview of the NSDL and describe the current NSDL community and participants. He will then review the technical underpinnings of NSDL 1.0, a library built on metadata harvesting, and describe some of the challenges encountered. For the past year, the project has been working on NSDL 2.0, a new version of the library built on the Fedora repository architecture. For the last part of the talk, Krafft will describe this new library architecture and explain how it supports creating context for science resources, how it enhances the selection and use of library materials, and what these capabilities mean for the users of the NSDL.

Dean Krafft is currently a senior research associate in computer science at Cornell University, serving primarily as a researcher but also as an IT administrator. On the research side, he is the principal investigator for the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Project (http://nsdl.org/) at Cornell. Krafft leads the effort to develop key components of the Core Integration Technology for the library and manages the team that maintains the production library services. He works with the other institutions involved in the Core Integration effort to specify, develop, and provide new digital library technologies to the more than a hundred NSF-funded projects involved in the NSDL program.

As an administrator, he serves as director of information technology for computing and information science. He helps provide oversight for the Computer Facilities Support group, represents CIS to the campus-wide IT Managers Council, and focuses on a number of issues including IT policy, software acquisition, and computer security. He received his PhD in computer science from Cornell in 1981.

Grads to Rewrite Engineering Theses

Here is an update to one of my earlier posts. It appears that the students accused of plagiarism will be given a chance to correct their mistakes. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer (July 21, 2006), a majority of the 37 students have agreed to the terms as established by Ohio University.

Mapping Wireless Networks

MIT's iSPOTS project aims at describing changes in living and working at MIT by mapping the dynamics of the wireless network in real-time. Check out the various graphic representations of wireless usage at MIT. They are hoping this project would lead to analysis tools that other organizations and cities could use.

Are Scientists Forced to Waste Their Time & Expertise?

The Chronicle of Higher Education (July 10, 2006, Scientists spend nearly half their time on administrative tasks, survey finds) shared the results of a study that showed 42% of a scientists research time is used in filling out forms or participating in meetings.

Also, from the study, was the result that academic faculty thought they could save four hours per week with more administrative help. This is in direct competition with actions usually taken by academic institutions or businesses to save money by cutting administrative positions. It makes one ask - are we paying for and providing enough hours for our science researchers to do their best, most cost effective work?

The Case community can access the full article from the E-Journal Portal. Several of the sources have a one month embargo before the article is available.

(VIA: Case Daily, July 10, 2006)