Robert H. McDonald

Towards Sustainable Curation and Preservation: The SEAD Project's Data Services Approach

When the effort to curate and preserve data is made at the end of a project, there is little opportunity to leverage ongoing research work to reduce curation costs or conversely, to leverage curation efforts to improve research productivity. In the Sustainable Environment Actionable Data (SEAD) project, we have envisioned a more active approach to data curation and preservation in which these processes occur in parallel with research and generate sufficient short and long-term return on researcher investments for self-interest to drive their adoption. In this paper, we describe the conceptual framework motivating the SEAD project and the suite of data services we have developed and deployed as an initial implementation of this approach. Use cases in which these services can reduce curation effort and aid ongoing research are highlighted and, based on our experience to date, we identify some key architectural features of our approach as well as open challenges to fully realizing the value of this approach in the broad ecosystem of cyberinfrastructure.

MediaWiki Open-Source Software as Infrastructure for Electronic Resources Outreach

ABSTRACT This article describes the bundling of MediaWiki into the electronic resource access strategy to enable custom content that supports online training and course-based information literacy objectives.

The new frontier of institutional repositories: A common destination with different paths1

Since the Fall 2002 ARL/CNI/SPARC workshop on digital institutional repositories, many research libraries have considered whether institutional repositories are feasible for their institutions. Though institutional repositories offer great possibilities, associated technical and policy challenges can be intimidating, especially for institutions devoting limited resources to an institutional repository. This paper presents the experiences of three different ARL (Association of Research Libraries) member libraries who wanted to exploit the opportunities offered by institutional repositories. These libraries at Florida State University, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and the Georgia Institute of Technology differed in their motivations, the resources that were available within their respective institutions, and the strategies they employed for defining, scoping and implementing repositories. Their accounts of the journey to a shared destination illustrate how varied the surrounding landscapes and selected paths can become.

NDIIPP Models for Mass Data Transmission and Storage

Preservation of digital content into the future will rely on the ability of institutions to provide robust system infrastructures that leverage the use of distributed and shared services and tools. The academic, nonprofit, and government entities that make up the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) partner network have been working toward an architecture that can provide for reliable redundant geographically dispersed copies of their digital content. The NDIIPP program has conducted a set of initiatives that have enabled partners to better understand the requirements for effective collection interchange. The NDIIPP program partnered with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) to determine the feasibility of data transmission and storage utilizing the best of breed technologies inherent to U.S. high-speed research networks and high-performance computing data storage infrastructures. The results of this partnership guided the development of the Library of Congresss cyberinfrastructure and its approach to network data transfer. Other NDIIPP partners, too, are researching a range of network architecture models for data exchange and storage. All of these explorations will build toward the development of best practices for sustainable interoperability and storage solutions.

Topic Exploration with the HTRC Data Capsule for Non-Consumptive Research

In this half-day tutorial, we will show 1) how the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) Data Capsule can be used for non-consumptive research over collection of texts and 2) how integrated tools for LDA topic modeling and visualization can be used to drive formulation of new research questions. Participants will be given an account in the HTRC Data Capsule and taught how to use the workset manager to create a corpus, and then use the VMs secure mode to download texts and analyze their contents.

HathiTrust research center: computational access for digital humanities and beyond

Academic libraries are increasingly looking to provide services that allow their users to work with digital collections in innovative ways, for example, to analyze large volumes of digitized collections. The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is a large collaborative that provides an innovative research infrastructure for dealing with massive amounts of digital texts. In this poster, we report on the technical progress of the HTRC as well as on the efforts to build a user community around our cyberinfrastructure.

The SEAD DataNet prototype: data preservation services for sustainability science

In this poster we will present the SEAD project [1] and its prototype software and describe how SEAD approaches long-term data preservation and access through multiple partnerships and how it supports sustainability science researchers in their data management, analysis and archival needs. SEADs initial prototype system currently is being tested by ingesting datasets from the National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics (1.6 terabyte of data containing over 450,000 files) [2] and packaging them for transmission to long-term archival storage.

A performance support systems approach to digital publishing in libraries

Electronic performance support tools are used in many workplaces, but digital libraries have not evaluated their potential usefulness. In a pilot project, the Florida State University Libraries developed inexpensive performance support tools for three types of in-house digital publishing. This strategy improved productivity and quality control