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Developing a Digital Libraries Education Program: JCDL Workshop Summary
Contributed by: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Indiana University Bloomington jointly hosted a workshop entitled "Developing a Digital Libraries Education Program" at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) in Denver, Colorado, on June 7, 2005. Presenters included Kristine Brancolini, Jerome McDonough, Anita Coleman, Edie Rasmussen, Noriko Hara, Xia Lin, Javed Mostafa, Linda Smith, Molly Dolan, Bill Mischo, Nick Belkin, and Mary Lynn Rice-Lively. Presentations were given by a mixture of digital library practitioners and library school faculty and focused on education for those involved in the creation of digital libraries. In her introduction, Brancolini highlighted the need for library educators to work with practitioners in digital libraries to help develop a well-rounded curriculum. A recurring theme of the workshop was that digital library work is collaborative and education for the field should be as well. Participants discussed the future of digital library projects, and many saw a trend away from stand-alone units to integration with the library as a whole. In his presentation, McDonough mentioned areas in which many digital libraries need more expertise, including licensing negotiation; rights management and content follow-through; XSLT and databases; systems administration; personnel and project management; usability and user services; and technical and structural metadata. Participants also discussed what would be necessary to retrain working librarians to be involved in digital library projects. Workshop attendees debated the form that digital library education should take. Many were strongly in favor of integrating hands-on training in working digital libraries as part of the curriculum. Others proposed a hybrid curriculum to bring together strengths from diverse departments. Most agreed that digital library education should include a combination of theory and practice. Edie Rasmussen gave an overview of past survey results on digital libraries and digital library education, and outlined plans for a survey of digital library professionals in ARL libraries, while Linda Smith presented a draft version of a survey of needs and skills for digital library practitioners to be conducted by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign later this year. Noriko Hara discussed ways in which digital library education could learn from Information Architecture, another field that could be described as practitioner-driven, interdisciplinary, and requiring lifelong learning. During the afternoon session, current recipients of IMLS "Librarians for the 21st Century" grants made presentations on the progress of digital library curricula at their schools. Schools presenting progress reports included Drexel, Indiana University Bloomington, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Rutgers, and University of Texas at Austin. Further details, including slides from the workshop presentations, can be found at <http://lair.indiana.edu/research/dlib/jcdl05/index.php>. NSF/NSDL & CODATA Workshop on International Scientific Data, Standards, and Digital Libraries
Contributed by: The National Science Foundation/National Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Digital Library & International Council for Science Unions Committee on Data for Science and Technology Workshop on International Scientific Data, Standards, and Digital Libraries was held at the 5th ACM/IEEE Joint conference on Digital Libraries on June 10-11, 2005, in Denver, Colorado. The main goal of the workshop was to examine successful models in the development of internationals standards for languages and tools in use with scientific and technical information. Workshop presentations were about discipline-specific international standards activities related to scientific and technical data as well as on scientific discovery in the context of digital libraries. Dr. Robert Hanisch, Project Manager of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Dr. Deborah L. McGuinness, Co-Director of the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University were the plenary speakers. Specific presentation topics included:
A common theme across the talks reiterated the position that an enormously powerful opportunity now exists to advance scientific endeavor more rapidly through shared access to scientific data both within and across scientific domains. Futhermore, researchers and educators are increasingly able to more fully utilize shared scientific data through enhanced methods of visualization at different levels of granularity, from different perspectives, and through derived relations. Common challenges facing many scientific domains include:
Selected papers from the Workshop will be published in an upcoming Special Issue of Data Science Journal, (available at <http://www.datasciencejournal.org/>). Next Generation Knowledge Organization Systems: Integration Challenges and Strategies
Contributed by: The 7th Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) (http://nkos.slis.kent.edu) Workshop was held at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Denver, Co. on June 10, 2005. The program focused on the challenges of developing the next generation of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs), the status of relevant standards, and methodologies, tools and strategies that are being investigated. The workshop was attended by over 25 people with a wide array of interests, including applied linguistics, automated indexing, the semantic web, and distributed ontologies, and many were in attendance to learn about recent innovations and technologies. The workshop began with several case studies on interoperability and integration of KOSs in order to highlight the major issues that need to be resolved. Denise Warzel (National Cancer Institute) described current programs to integrate metadata elements for research data across the Institute and the categorization of data elements using concept codes and conventions for stringing concept codes together to provide comparable semantic meanings. Neil Sarkar's project at the American Museum of Natural History investigated whether the Unified Medical Language System, with its rich set of relationships, could be used to seed an ontology for entomology. The biomedical ontology was helpful particularly in the area of anatomy, but discipline-specific ontologies are still needed. Sue Ellen Wright and Marcia Lei Zeng (Kent State University) and Gail Hodge (Information International Associates, Inc.) gave updates on a variety of new or newly revised standards and best practices, including the British Standard for "Structured Vocabularies for Information Retrieval" (BS 8723), ISO TC 37 standards supporting the basic principles of terminology management (http://www.tc37sc4.org/), and the W3C's SKOS Core RDF vocabulary for thesauri and other types of KOS (http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/) to improve computer processing of traditional KOS structures. The eXtended Metadata Registries (XMDR) Project (http://www.xmdr.org), described by Bruce Bargmeyer (Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory), will extend the ISO 11179 metadata registry standard to allow for the registration and classification of data elements using more complex KOS structures. The vision is for a network of independent registries and a suite of services to utilize them. Jay Ven Eman provided an overview of OWL and described how the basic components of a thesaurus can be represented in OWL based on the Data Harmony process of Access Innovations, Inc. Douglas Tudhope (University of Glamorgen) described FACET (Faceted Access to Cultural Terminology) (http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/~FACET/facetproject.html), which looks at query, and semantic expansion and terminology services using SKOS and the SKOS API. An online web demonstrator using the GEMET, the general environmental thesaurus from the European Environment Agency, illustrates thesaurus content and semantic expansion. The NSDL Strand Map Service developed an interactive tool for teachers and learners to discover scientific information. This project, presented by Tamara Sumner (University of Colorado, Boulder), illustrates an educational cyberinfrastructure and learning environment based on web services. Strand maps assist with bringing functioning science into the classroom by associating content with learning standards. The workshop concluded with a general discussion session and the identification of research and development needs. The group discussed the status of standards and their applicability to practical work. Practitioners often bend the rules or operate outside the standards, because it isn't clear how various standards "fit" together or how standards should be implemented. Standards harmonization and best practices are needed as well as tools that help developers integrate KOS into desktop software and support the conversion and manipulation of KOSs into multiple expressions without loss or painful translation. Definitions are needed in KOS systems especially for those that might be useful across disciplines. This workshop brought together people representing a variety of KOS structures and different disciplines – academics and practitioners who are interested in text, data and multimedia. However, it is important to continue to reach out to other communities as well. The NKOS group is an informal association for the discussion of the functional and data models for enabling knowledge organization systems (KOS), such as classification systems, thesauri, gazetteers, and ontologies, as networked interactive information services to support the description and retrieval of diverse information resources through the Internet. There have been seven official NKOS workshops in the US, since 1997, and three in Europe as part of the European Conferences on Digital Libraries (ECDL). A fourth European NKOS workshop will take place at ECDL 2005 in Vienna, Austria, in September. The NKOS group has a website at <http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/> and maintains a listserv. The presentation slides for this workshop, as well as previous workshops, are available through the NKOS website. In the NewsExcerpts from Recent Press Releases and AnnouncementsDr. Robert S. Martin Completes Term as Director of the Institute of Museum and Library ServicesJuly 13, 2005 - "Dr. Robert S. Martin completed his four-year term as Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) yesterday. Dr. Martin was nominated by the President of the United States to be Director of IMLS in June 2001; the U.S. Senate subsequently confirmed his nomination by unanimous consent. During his tenure, IMLS has awarded 4,704 grants to America's museums and libraries totaling more than $899 million." "A librarian, archivist, educator, and administrator, Dr. Martin was Professor and Interim Director of the School of Library and Information Studies at Texas Women's University (TWU) prior to his appointment at IMLS. From 1995 to 1999, he was Director and Librarian of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. Dr. Martin will return to work at the Denton campus of TWU on September 1, 2006 where he has been named the Lillian Bradshaw Endowed Chair in Library Science." "Since Dr. Martin assumed the directorship of IMLS, the agency's budget has increased from $232,321,000 to $280,564,000. In addition, in September 2003, President George W. Bush signed the Museum and Library Services Act of 2003 reauthorizing the agency through 2009. The legislation received bi-partisan support from Congress and enthusiastic backing from the library and museum communities." For more information, please see the full press release at <http://www.imls.gov/whatsnew/current/071305.htm>. The 2005 Conservation Awards - Digital Preservation AwardJuly 12, 2005 - "The Digital Preservation Award of £5,000 is sponsored by the Digital Preservation Coalition. This prestigious Award recognises the many new initiatives being undertaken in the challenging field of digital preservation. Shortlisted for the Digital Preservation Award are:
"All the shortlisted projects will give a presentation to the Digital Preservation Awards judges in September....See the Conservation Awards website for further information on the judging panel: <http://www.consawards.ukic.org.uk/judges.html#dpa>" For further information on the Awards visit: <http://www.consawards.ukic.org.uk/>. Announcing details of international collaboration through e-FrameworkJuly 12, 2005 - "The e-Framework for Education and Research is a visionary new initiative that brings together and builds on the successes of a number of JISC development programmes – including the JISC Information Environment activity (IE), e-Learning Framework (ELF) and the Virtual Research Environment Programme." "The goal of the e-Framework initiative is to develop a service-orientated approach to the development and integration of computer systems in the sphere of teaching, learning, research and administration." For more information, please see <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=e_framework_news_120705>. Journals free for Humanities disciplinesJuly 11, 2005 - "...A JISC-funded service is helping to promote access to quality assured e-journals across all humanities subjects. More than 100 journals for those studying a wide variety of disciplines - including languages, religion, classics, archaeology and history - are now freely available online in one place from Humbul, a hub of the Resource Discovery Network. Each journal has been reviewed by a subject expert including information about the editor, publisher and language of the journal, and of course with a link to the journal's location on the Web." For more information, please see <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=humbul_news_110705>. University of North Texas (UNT) Team Fosters New RFID InitiativesJuly 11, 2005 - "The UNT RFID Research Group is currently involved in several initiatives to provide education about Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in North Texas. The UNT Research Group is comprised of over 80 faculty experts and graduate students in the multiple engineering and logistic facets of this technology. These experts represent many UNT colleges and schools, including Business, Education, Library & Information Sciences, Engineering and Computer Science, Community Service, and Visual Arts. In addition, other campus experts include transportation and security, the libraries, healthcare, facilities, and information technology. The UNT RFID Research Group was formed by RFID researchers Dr. Chang Koh (Information Technology and Decision Sciences), Dr. Stephen Swartz (Logistics), and Dr. Hai Deng (Electrical Engineering), coordinated through the Texas Center for Digital Knowledge (TxCDK)." "RFID is very present in the media spotlight with its new applications in soccer event ticketing, casino chip authentication, wristbands for sporting events, patient tracking, and child safety in theme parks, contactless payment cards, and automobiles to name a few. Many of us use the technology everyday for keyless entry to our cars or toll tag access...." "...The UNT RFID Research Group is currently planning a series of seminars co-sponsored by the National RFID Forum for business and industry in the North Texas area....In addition to the future seminars, the TxCDK will be co-sponsoring an RFID Institute in October with the National Information Standards Organization. This institute will address standards issues about encoding and privacy concerns in the information industry among publishers, booksellers, corporate knowledge centers, and libraries. The Institute registration is open to the public and will include industry leaders from RFID companies, software and hardware giants, the Electronic Freedom Foundation, EPC Global, and many others." For more information, please contact Corrie Marsh <cmarsh@unt.edu>. Librarians and Information Professionals Among Recipients of the 2005 Emerald Literati Network Awards for ExcellenceJuly 11, 2005 - "Emerald Group Publishing announces the winners of the annual Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence. Representing a dedication towards achieving the highest standards in academic publishing, these awards reflect a broad array of individual and partnership achievements. An offshoot of the Emerald Literati Club, this network of authors and scholars forms the backbone of Emerald content and creates a pool of talent unrivaled in the academic publishing world." "A full listing of award winners is available at: <http://www.emeraldinsight.com/literaticlub/whatsnew/awards.htm>." £6 million allocated by Scottish Funding Councils for e-learningJuly 8, 2005"JISC will be managing six new projects which will put to the test conclusions made about e-learning in Further and Higher education. Through £6 million funding from the Scottish Funding Councils for Further and Higher Education, the activities will include:
For more information, please see the official media release at <http://www.sfc.ac.uk/joint_info/media/2005/PRSFC0205.html>. Over $21 Million to Recruit New Librarians and Help Offset National ShortageJune 28, 2005 - "The federal Institute of Museum and Library Services announced $21,087,684 in grants to 37 universities, libraries, and library organizations across the country today to recruit and educate a new generation of librarians. The grants are designed to help offset a current shortage of school library media specialists, library school faculty, and librarians working in underserved communities, as well a looming shortage of library directors and other senior librarians who are expected to retire in the next 20 years. For a contact list of the organizations funded with descriptions of their recruitment and education projects, please access <http://www.imls.gov/whatsnew/current/062805L21index.htm>." "Since First Lady Laura Bush first announced the President would support a multi-million [dollar] initiative to recruit new librarians in 2002, the Institute has funded 1,537 master's degree students, 119 doctoral students, 660 pre-professional students, and 378 continuing education students." For more information, please see the full press release at <http://www.imls.gov/whatsnew/current/062805a.htm>. Copyright Clearance Center and R.R. Bowker Announce Copyright Integration PartnershipJune 27, 2005 - "Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), the world's premier provider of copyright licensing and compliance solutions, and R.R. Bowker, a leading provider of bibliographic information, today announced a new partnership that integrates copyright permission into three of Bowker's Web-based information services. " "Books In Print, Global Books In Print, and Ulrich's Resource Linker now allow librarians and staff to quickly and easily clear copyright permissions as they search for bibliographic information about specific books, journals and other copyrighted material. Customers simply select the "get permission" link featured on each of the three information services, and are taken to the appropriate permission service and search results page on copyright.com. User and bibliographic information is automatically transferred from Bowker applications to copyright.com, eliminating the customer's need to log in, re-enter information or conduct another title search." For more information, please see the press release at <http://www.copyright.com/ccc/do/viewPage?pageCode=au107>. U.S. Public Libraries Providing Unprecedented Access to Computers, the Internet, and Technology TrainingNew study shows libraries need support to sustain quality access to free computer services June 23, 2005, American Library Association - "Nearly every U.S. public library offers free access to computers and the Internet, but overall libraries are challenged to provide enough workstations to meet demand, pay for ongoing Internet connectivity costs, and plan for necessary upgrades to the technology, according to a report released today at the opening of the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference. The report was conducted by the Information Use Management and Policy Institute at Florida State University (FSU) and commissioned by the ALA and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation." "New data shows that 98.9 percent of all public libraries offer free public access to computers and the Internet – a growth of more than 400 percent since 1996, when just one in four libraries did." "Millions of Americans use computers in public libraries to access government services, research health information, enroll in distance-learning classes, and start small businesses. Library computers have become so popular that more than 85 percent of libraries say they are not able to meet demand for computers at certain times during the day." For more information, please see the full press release at <http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=News&template=/ContentManagement/ Naturejobs unveils category-killer website for scientific recruiters and jobseekersJune 16, 2005, announcement by the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) "In a continued effort to improve its service, Naturejobs launches a totally new online 'scientific careers magazine'....The focus of the new naturejobs.com, The Online Career Magazine for Scientists, will be to offer jobseekers from across the boundaries of discipline, geography and level a complete careers portal for scientific career news and information plus the most complete choices of the best jobs in science." For more information, please see the full press release at <http://npg.nature.com/pdf/new_nj.pdf>. OCLC pilot designed to increase use of libraries' eSerialsJune 15, 2005 - "OCLC will begin a pilot project later this month that will make it easy for library staff and patrons to find and use full-text electronic journals in library collections. The pilot will involve 20 libraries and four partners--TDNet, EBSCO, Serials Solutions and Ex Libris." "The pilot will make eSerials as visible as print materials in WorldCat, the world's largest database of items held in libraries, and will expose those records to searchers on the open Web through the Open WorldCat program." For more information, please see <http://www.oclc.org/news/releases/200510.htm>. CARLI announces formation of a new consortiumJune 13, 2005 - "The Board of Directors of the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) is pleased to announce the formation of a new consortium to serve the higher education community in Illinois. CARLI was formed by consolidating three existing academic consortia: the Illinois Cooperative Collection Management Program (http://www.niulib.niu.edu/ccm/), nearly 20 years old with 115 member libraries; the Illinois Digital Academic Library (http://www.idal.illinois.edu/), founded in 1999 with 150 members; and the Illinois Library Computer Systems Organization (http://office.ilcso.illinois.edu/), nearly 25 years old, with 65 members). " "CARLI was formed to improve the efficiency and cost effectiveness of services, increase the effectiveness of consortial and member library staff efforts, and create opportunities to pursue new programs and services that the three constituent consortia would not have been able to provide on their own. For a list of CARLI member libraries, see: http://www.carli.illinois.edu/members.html." "CARLI's mission is to lead Illinois academic libraries to create and sustain a rich, supportive, and diverse knowledge environment that furthers teaching, learning, and research through the sharing of collections, expertise and programs. Among the services CARLI will support are ILLINET Online, an integrated library system that supports the local operations of 65 college and university libraries, and offers resource sharing services to all the state's libraries; subsidized and brokered electronic resources for 150 Illinois colleges and universities; and several digital library products: a digital object management system, a federated search engine, and a link resolver, currently being implemented for 65 libraries. Other functions include grants for shared collection management, continuing education, and advocacy for Illinois academic libraries." For more information, please see <http://www.carli.illinois.edu/>. Copyright 2005 © Corporation for National Research InitiativesTop |
Contents doi:10.1045/july2005-inbrief |