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April 23, 2009
Collaboration Technology and Engaging the Campus symposium
Case Western Reserve University will be hosting the Collaboration Technology and Engaging the Campus symposium on May 7th. The program includes the keynote speech from Laurence F. Johnson (Chief Executive Officer of the New Media Consortium), breakout sessions and panel discussions. Topics include: Green Computing, Collaboration Tools and Learning, Mobility, Faculty Innovations, Intelligent Webs and Privacy Issues, Portfolios and Learning Assessments. More information and a link to the free registration for the day long event can be found here.
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April 06, 2009
Non-Linear Thinking and New Media Literacy
'Non-Linear Thinking and New Media Literacy'
A talk by Jared Bendis, Creative Director of New Media, Freedman Center, Case Western Reserve University. Presented by NORASIST, the Northern Ohio Chapter, American Society for Information Science and Technology
Abstract: "The modern world is an ocean of new media. To navigate this ocean we have created many that help us choose ‘where’ and ‘what’ we watch but not always ‘how’ or’ why’. To survive in this ocean of media we need a vocabulary of criticism and authorship, a “New Media literacy” so we may effectively and efficiently embrace our roles as both artist and critic. One of the key elements in the world of new-media is the non-linear nature of its existence and of our exploration of it. This talk will discuss these themes and how we can better look at the world."
7 PM, Thursday, April 9, 2009
Dampeer Room, Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University
Official program info here
JARED BENDIS is an award winning artist, photographer, filmmaker, and teacher from Cleveland, Ohio. Jared is a specialist in photography, virtual reality, and computer graphics and the Creative Director of New Media for Case Western Reserve University's Freedman Center. Jared received his BA from Case Western Reserve University in Psychology with minors in Music and Art Studio. He received his MA in Art Education from the joint program of Case Western Reserve University and The Cleveland Institute of Art. In 2006 he entered the Art History and Museum Studies PhD joint program from Case Western Reserve University and The Cleveland Museum of Art. He also holds an appointment as adjunct instructor in Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University where he teaches multimedia. On his first trip overseas, in March 2000, Jared visited the Chateau de Pierrefonds and became driven (if not obsessed) with capturing and sharing cultural and architectural experiences. As an artist and teacher, Jared has photographed almost 400 architectural and cultural sites (primarily castles) in 11 countries.
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April 03, 2009
DigCCurr, Chapel Hill, April 1-3, 2009, continued
Day 2
Session 4: Cooperative Approaches to Digital Preservation
Matrin Halbert (Emory University); Tyler Walters (Georgia Institute of Technology); Aaron Trehub (Auburn University); Richard Pearce-Moses (Arizona State Library); Jonathan Crabtree (UNC SLIS faculty)
Four archives were presented and discussed as case studies in this panel- MetaArchive Cooperative; Alabama Digital Preservation Network; Data-PASS and the Persistent Digital Archives and Library System (or PeDALS, also covered in a previous session). The LOCKSS alliance is used in some- distributing data and content between members (to geographically spread the files, as well as providing access to other institutions with membership). LOCKSS is set for both public access and private, as determined by the institution (whether for copyright issues or for private information- such as personal info on archival record, for instance).
Matrin Halbert covered the MetaArchive in a brief recap of its 6 year history. MetaArchive is a cooperative effort, with a fee membership. Institutional liability, incorporation strategies and cost models were studied and applied in the early development phase. They also developed a set of tools based on the needs of the members that worked on top of the existing LOCKSS framework that included shared 'discovery portals'.
Aaron Trehub covered the Alabama Digital Preservation network which combines the digital assets of academic institutions, state agencies and cultural organizations. Each member is responsible for maintaining their own network, upstart fees and the hardware/software required for the network. Currently, ADPN does not charge members, but only require participate in contribution and hosting copies of certain portions of other digital collections. They have two committees for ADPN issues, one covering policy and the other covering the technical aspects. These committee members represent all the members, and also rotate the responsibility.
Data-PASS- Social science emphasis; Syndicated storage platform; Emphasized the scalability and asymmetric qualities of Data-PASS
Session 5- Gaps and Persistent Challenges
Donald Sawyer (VIE, Inc.) spoke about the challenges of past migration and transformation of data in the past, mainly pertaining to his many years experience at the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC). (Article from the mid-90s talking about their Digital Linear Tape Jukebox) Sawyer maintains that loss is in some ways inevitable, whether due to organizational, hardware/software inefficiencies or just human error. Automated checks are necessary, but should not be exclusive in storage procedures and should include independent, manual operations as well. Sawyer spoke to digital loss, and commented that there is loss in physical documents as well, but just perhaps more possibilities to create systems to retain digital content much longer than the physical, though only with a solid, active digital preservation program in place.
Kevin Ashley (University of London Computer Centre) spoke about digital authenticity by way of bit stream preservation, but also in the explicit use of preservation and administrative metadata (or, 'putting the tangible on the intangible'). Questions of preservation planning for newer formats and the inclusion of all types of digital content (blogs, websites, virtual worlds) were raised, with long term flexibility in incorporating new media and also perhaps looking to larger digital collections. Mentioned David Rosenthal's work on Digital Preservation (article from 2005 on digital preservation systems)
Digital Curation Research
William Underwood (Research on Speech Acts and Electronic Records): Analyzing the writing of archival description to provide a method of automatic recognition for record collections. Underwood used a collection of Presidential records as a base collection to analyze this research and identified over 200 'speech acts' and creating a method to categorize and provide a search mechanism for the collection in a different manner of retrieval.
Bernadette Callery (University of Pittsburgh) covered a recent project for graduate students at Pitt to reconstruct lost web pages using the Internet Archive. (More info about project here. Questions arose about the authenticity of digital content, broken links and other lost web pages, and digital reconstruction efforts. Callery likened the work to art restoration, in distinguishing the reconstructions from the new content.
Leslie Johnston (Library of Congress, Strategic Initiatives) Current work at Library of Congress to fully define the modular services (transfer, transport and inventory) in a more meaningful way into the day to day production and workflow of the office. Development of an Inventory Tool splits content into metadata/access files and storage (in cases of images; the JP2 for example would be split from the tiff here). jBPM XML workflow tools are being used by LC; also BIL Java Library. A file package format (BagIT) is in test, using a minimal identification and description requirements (focus is on a reassurance on a full digital transfer, not speaking to the content of material). With the enormity of the incoming data collections, the Library of Congress had to quickly find a way to correlate digital content from multiple contributors, while also maintaining an inventory across multiple storage areas.
Digital Curation Tools and Strategies
David Giaretta (Preservation Workflows, Strategies and Infrastructure)
PARSE.insight is one of the project Giaretta mentioned in his presentation, with a published 'roadmap' of the group that covers a number of both technical and non-technical aspects of the work.
Robin Rice (EDINA and Data Library, University of Edinburgh) Data Information Specialists Committee - UK (DISC-UK) formed in the need for a common ground to share experiences between UK institutions and discuss work models, workflows, and tools/technologies for digital projects. One of the more interesting applications and research is in the Web 2.0 environment (recent article from Stuart MacDonald)
Mike Smorul (University of Maryland)- Audit Control Environment (ACE)- a way to validate the integrity of digital information by way of mathematical technique. The method in which the ACE works is in a series of ways for someone to check digital contents, in both centralized and distributed environments. It also creates an efficient method to correctly and consistently maintain the integrity of data over time. ACE creates a solidified tree root directory, greatly decreasing the time required in future validation processes to ascertain the integrity of files. It can also detect duplications and located renamed files.
Information about the upcoming DigCCurr Professional Institute:Curation Practices for the Digital Object Lifecycle, June 21-26, 2009 and Jan. 6-7, 2010
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DigCCurr, Chapel Hill, April 1-3, 2009
Day 1
Some highlights from the first day of the DigCCurr conference in Chapel Hill, NC.
Keynote: 'Building the Universal Library: The Promise and Challenges of HathiTrust', John Wilkin
Mr. Wilkin began by outlining the services and accomplishments of the past few years of this shared digital repository, representing partnerships between multiple larger higher research institutions. Wilkin highlighted the use of the OAIS model ('information echo system') and also addressing the challenges of restricted use (i.e. providing sampled areas of text or 'in-house' browsing only of certain texts-- or 'non-consumptive access'). He is enthusiastic about the future growth of the repository (currently over 3 million texts), as well as enhancements (Digital Braille at University of Michigan; Arabic manuscripts with a blog element to supplement minimal catalog info).
Some of the interesting points brought up in the Q & A included overall sustainability and the lack of involvement from either Library of Congress or NARA, as well as any smaller research institution or image based digital libraries (question about museum involvement).
Concurrent Session: Distributed Frameworks for Archival Presentation
Richard Marciano (SILS, UNC); Caryn Wojcik (Michigan Historical Center); Eliot Wilczek (Tufts University); Reagan Moore (SILS, UNC)
i Rule Oriented Data System (iRODS- Policy Distributed Data Management- open source, under BSD license and supportive of any framework (UNIX, LINUX, Mac and PC). Adaptive and customizable; setting behaviors and ability to automate administrative processes and tasks. These management processes are remotely executable, set by a procedural workflow. Development of an ISO standard (MOIMS-rac). Accessing data reinforces data maintenance procedure, acting as a kind of policy firewall to ensure the accuracy and integrity of digital material.
dcape- Distributed Custodial Archival Preservation Environment
Part of a 2 1/2 year project of research and application for smaller collections and institutions. Provides business model for smaller budgets. Works in consultation with many of the participants of the iRODS taskforce. Research focused on data storage infrastructure, built specifically for a digital preservation environment (many of the same elements of iRODS echoed in this project).
Tufts University- Eliot Wilczek
Fedora: Digital records, EAD, images- ca. 95,000 objects (including VUE, Visual Understanding Environment- open source project at Tufts)
Have in place a series of set internal digital record management policies and procedures, as well as Ingest Guide.
TAPER- Tufts Accessioning Program for Electronic Records
Demos + Tools
Including: PLATO, Hoppla, Digital Curation Exchange (DCE), Dioscuri, Preservation Manager and the Universal Virtual Computer, PeDALS, Prometheus, MediaPedia, ContextMiner, iRODS, Content DM, DRAMBORA
Some of these focused on migrating content over time (a few focused on automating these efforts in the form of transforming/updating digital material at point of access), while others like Dioscuri and Preservation Manager attempted to either emulate the original rendering, or in the least preserve the necessary information of the original software/hardware
Metadata Paper Session:
'Integrating Metadata into the NARA Transcontinental Persistent Archive Prototype via the OAI-PMH'
Merging multiple models into theory and practice (Archivist's Preservation Model, Digital Library Model, Data Grids Model). Policy was coded as a function- pushing existing content and its related metadata into preservation environments using data grids. Metadata is parsed into an XML object and XSLT/etc to further define the desired searchable and non-searchable elements of a digital object (When the massive number of objects and data was initially run, the info deemed more extraneous drastically affected search time
'Effective Access to Digital Assets: An XML-based EAD Search System'
Drawing parallels between archival collection and arrangement with computer systems (fonds as to a dataspace)
Retrieving Encoded Archival Desciptions More Effectively (README) project
Creating three methods to search EAD- full text, IAM (an way to filter the individual XML nodes) and AMC (archival materials in context- retaining the tree/tag order of EAD)
'The Russian Doll Effect: A Case Study in Digital Artifact Recontextualization'
Approaching existing digital collections and reinterpreting material into other methods of presentation and use (Second Life, Microsoft Surface, MetaCafe, Flickr)
Used regional partnerships to enhance the project and collection (art museum, for example)
GPS coordinates worked into existing metadata records to reinterpret digital content into a virtual timeline and map of campus through the years (video, audio and images have been used here)
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