Patricia Cruse

Introduction: The Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program

This special issue of Library Trends is comprised of sixteen articles that tell fascinating stories about the ground-breaking efforts of numerous partners within the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). Since its inception in 2004, NDIIPP has grown from an experimental program into a true partnership of concerned organizations working together to sustain access to digital information that is critical to scholarship and cultural heritage nationwide.1 The seeds for NDIIPP were initially sown in a report issued in July 2000 by the National Research Council titled LC21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress. The report, which was commissioned by the Library and Congress in 1998, was an on-site study of the Library’s technology practices, an initiative conducted by a committee of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council. Among the recommendations of the LC21 report was the point that the Library of Congress should take the lead in the preservation and archiving of digital materials, but that it must continue to work with other institutions in determining collection policies for digital information, and it must accelerate its efforts to meet the growing demand. In December 2000 Congress passed legislation asking the Library of Congress to develop a national program to preserve the ever-growing amounts of digital information, especially materials created only in digital format. This law was passed in order to ensure that this content would be accessible for current and future generations. This program was funded by a

DataUp: A tool to help researchers describe and share tabular data.

100 million congressional appropriation and was formally called the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). In December 2000 Congress released

GPO Gate University of California, San Diego's New Gateway to electronic government information

5 million for the initial planning phase. From that point forward, the Library of Congress sought and solidified collaborations with numerous organizations, both public and private, to

High-quality science requires high-quality open data infrastructure

Scientific datasets have immeasurable value, but they lose their value over time without proper documentation, long-term storage, and easy discovery and access. Across disciplines as diverse as astronomy, demography, archeology, and ecology, large numbers of small heterogeneous datasets (i.e., the long tail of data) are especially at risk unless they are properly documented, saved, and shared. One unifying factor for many of these at-risk datasets is that they reside in spreadsheets. In response to this need, the California Digital Library (CDL) partnered with Microsoft Research Connections and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to create the DataUp data management tool for Microsoft Excel. Many researchers creating these small, heterogeneous datasets use Excel at some point in their data collection and analysis workflow, so we were interested in developing a data management tool that fits easily into those work flows and minimizes the learning curve for researchers. The DataUp project began in August 2011. We first formally assessed the needs of researchers by conducting surveys and interviews of our target research groups: earth, environmental, and ecological scientists. We found that, on average, researchers had very poor data management practices, were not aware of data centers or metadata standards, and did not understand the benefits of data management or sharing. Based on our survey results, we composed a list of desirable components and requirements and solicited feedback from the community to prioritize potential features of the DataUp tool. These requirements were then relayed to the software developers, and DataUp was successfully launched in October 2012.

The challenges of statistical digital libraries

Abstract Over the past year, a team of librarians and computer analysts at the University of California (UC), San Diego developed a new interface for accessing the Government Printing Offices WAIS databases, collectively known as GPO Access. GPO Access has been an important development in the delivery of government information. UC San Diegos new World Wide Web interface, called GPO Gate, provides a powerful, user-friendly method of searching and retrieving full-text government information from GPO access. GPO Gate is now the University of Californias system-wide gateway for GPO Access. The GPO Gate team instituted two mechanisms to monitor database usage: a user-tracking system and a user survey. The user-tracking system logs the number of uses, searches, and retrievals by domain type and identifies users by the database used. Since its inception in August 1995, use of GPO Gate has increased dramatically. Much of the increase can be attributed to searches and retrievals from the Federal Register . The largest single user group is composed of commercial users. The increased use of GPO Gate has many implications for public service related to government documents, including an expansion of the number of users, the need for reference providers to better understand computer hardware and software, and confusion among users caused by rapid changes in the delivery of government information.

DataONE: Data Observation Network for Earth - Preserving Data and Enabling Innovation in the Biological and Environmental Sciences

Resources for data management, discovery and (re)use are numerous and diverse, and more specifically we need data resources that enable the FAIR principles1 of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability of data.

Preservation is not a place

What are statistical digital libraries? Who uses them? For what purpose? How do they differ from or resemble text-focused digital libraries? What are the research issues associated with their use and the implications for interface design?These are just some of the issues the panelists have been grappling with over the last few years as government agencies and academic libraries rush to make their holdings web-accessible to both the users they have always served and all kinds of new users with varying statistical and computing skills.The panelists represent a variety of user-oriented perspectives-some are developers, some are intermediaries, some are users themselves. Their primary user focus varies from university students and faculty to government policy analysts, but the casual or first-time user must also be served.The panelist will focus their remarks on the challenges of statistical libraries on a multitude of dimensions, including technical, social, behavioral, economic, organizational, etc. The discussion should both inform and entice the audience to pursue some difficult and interesting problems in digital library research.