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The top story for August is about efforts to make the resources in digital libraries more accessible to scholars in the humanities and social sciences. While there has been a process of adaptation and growing use of educational technologies among scholars in the physical sciences, scholars in the humanities have been slower to find the means, and the need, to capitalize on and incorporate digital resources into research and teaching. The Digital Library Federation convened a Scholars' Advisory Panel in Washington, D.C., co-chaired by the IU, to gather humanities scholars who have made use of digital and Internet resources in their work. Our lead story reports on the conference and points to some interesting websites developed to promote research and learning in literature and history. Also in this issue, read about the July alt-i-lab Conference, including an IU presentation and a number of papers and presentations about tools and strategies to share digital resources. The lead story is introduced on the IU Main page and printed in full below. Stories featured in this issue are:
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IU At Digital Library Federation Scholars' Panel
The Digital Library Federation (DLF) convened a scholars' advisory panel in Washington, D.C. in early June. The gathering, of more than a dozen humanities scholars from universities and archival institutions around the country, was co-chaired by the DLF's David Seaman, and the IU's David Greenbaum.
The meeting grew out of a desire to learn from working scholars what they value and what they need from digital library services; it was conceived and planned as a forum to assess the library and archival community's current understandings of how expectations of library users might differentiate from the expressed needs of scholars.
Each scholar who was part of the panel is actively engaged in creating and using digital library content, often in partnership with an academic library. Among the institutions represented were: Michigan State University; Johns Hopkins University; the Thomas Jefferson Papers; the University of Nebraska, Lincoln; the University of Rochester; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the University of Virginia; and George Mason University.
Among the fields of scholarship represented, there were professors of: Italian, French, English, American Studies, Middle East Studies, Sociology, New Media, Religious Studies, and several Historians.
Over the course of the two day conference, panel members described the work and projects they are engaged in. Among the projects attending scholars have been instrumental in developing and supporting are:
DLF Executive Director David Seaman set the tone for the meeting by explaining the DLF's plans for new library tools and services, and its strategic goal of creating a Distributed Open Digital Library (DODL). DODL (and yes, they are searching for a new name!) will provide a single point of entry to multiple, digitized collections. The DLF also expects to provide finding services for this digital library and thematic portals to help scholars locate material for their own fields and areas of study. The DODL collection will begin with materials in the humanities and social sciences, and concentrate on topics, themes, genres and formats, and include material from special collections. For more about DODL (and the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, NDIIPP) here's a link to an informative paper—in PDF format—delivered in March 2004 by Deanna Marcum, Associate Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress.
To pave the way for a Distributed Open Digital Library, DLF is currently focused on creating a cyberinfrastructure of shared libraries, and encouraging a willingness among institutions to change their own behaviors to achieve this goal, and, in the process, change the way "digital content behaves". As noted in a recent report to the National Science Foundation entitled Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure: "cyberinfrastructure refers to infrastructure based upon distributed computer, information and communication technology. If infrastructure is required for an industrial economy, then we could say that cyberinfrastructure is required for a knowledge economy."
Seaman remarked that it will be important for the DLF to follow the lead of the NSF and work in parallel to create the means, within humanities and social sciences, to sustain a knowledge economy. He went on to note some of the steps needed to implement necessary changes. Discussion was then opened up to the panel. Among the top needs mentioned is the creation of new tools. In the general discussion, panel members talked about the need for tools that can collect, manipulate, author, and share information.
The panel also discussed some of the skepticism surrounding, and impediments to, wider adaptation of digital and information technologies among humanities scholars and professors. Among them: fear of work being stolen; lack of peer acceptance of scholarly work that produces a digital repository-as opposed to writing a book; along these same lines, lack of recognition for digital work in the current "reward system" (e.g. tenure decisions); skepticism about "institutional repositories"; and, the difficulty of getting technology into humanities disciplines.
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IU Presents At alt-i-lab 2004
During the third week of July, in Redwood City, California, developers, users and vendors of learning technologies gathered at the second annual alt-i-lab conference organized by IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. The focus of this year's meeting was the discussion and advancement of strategies and projects to promote interoperability among different learning technology platforms. The conference attracted participants from technical and business communities, as well as from libraries and academic institutions.
This was a working meeting; the conference agenda was geared toward topical working sessions: presentations, demonstrations and discussion groups in which informed participants assessed the status of demonstrated work or products. Discussions were devoted to proposing plans for overcoming some of the current challenges to systems interoperability and identifying objectives for future research and development in the interoperability field.
On Wednesday, July 21st, IU's Raymond Yee and the UC Berkeley Library's Rick Beaubien, led a topical working session entitled: Mets and Content Packaging. (Scroll to the bottom of the page linked here for a link to the Yee and Beaubien Power Point presentation.) The session attracted members of the educational technology and digital library communities. Yee and Beaubien sketched the background of the development and history of METS — Metadata Encoding Transmission Standard. METS, first developed at UC Berkeley in the 1990's, is an XML-based set of specifications to provide a vocabulary and syntax for identifying the digital components in a digital object, as well as for specifying the location of these components, and expressing their structural relationships.
The use of METS is still in an early-adaptor stage, and the primary adaptors of METS are libraries and museums that make parts of their archives available in digital format. Yee and Beaubien went on to discuss the work they have been doing recently, supported by the The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to develop crosswalks between METS and IMS-CP.
IMS-CP is an alternate XML-based specification set, used predominantly in educational technology systems. The XML formats used in the METS and IMS-CP domains are different because each community established its format in isolation from the other. However, METS remains the promising format in the digital library world, and IMS-CP is the corresponding promising format in the educational technology world.
Nevertheless, it has become increasingly accepted that users, such as faculty and students, will want to take materials from digital libraries and use them in educational technology systems. There is currently no easy way for this interoperability to take place. Recent assessments of faculty, librarians, and students, conducted by the California Digital Library, point to the need for digital libraries and educational technologies to jointly solve the problems of interoperability. The recent Mellon funded "crosswalks" work, carried out by the IU and the UCB Library, has been addressing this need.
Given the fact that digital libraries and educational technology use incompatible XML formats, the IU/UC Library crosswalks work presented at alt-I-lab discussed a first attempt to deal with the differences involved, and create a crosswalk that translates data from one format to another. The crosswalks work produced a paper by Yee and Beaubien titled The Preliminary Crosswalk from METS to IMS-CP published in a special issue of Library Hi-Tech.
In an attempt to offer a bridge between these two specifications this paper: 1) provides a comparison of the conceptual models between these two specifications; 2) describes how METS-encoded library content can be converted into digital objects for IMS-compliant systems through an XSLT-based crosswalk; 3) explains the design and limitations of XSLT-based translations; and 4) points out how crosswalks are related to other techniques to enhance interoperability.
In addition to his presentation with Rick Beaubien, Raymond Yee also demonstrated IU's Scholar's Box, which continues to be developed with input from recent crosswalks work.
For more information from the alt-I-lab conference visit the following links (note the papers linked to below are in PDF format):
And finally, a review of the alt-I-lab conference written for CETIS, the Center for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards, by Wilbert Krann.
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Incoming Chancellor Pledges Increased Accessibility And Funding For Berkeley
UC Berkeley has a new Chancellor: Robert Birgeneau. Birgeneau, who will take over as the new Chancellor in October, is pictured here with his wife Mary Catherine; he has served as president of the University of Toronto since 2000.
Below you will find excerpts from, and links to, stories that first appeared in campus and community sources; they introduce the new Chancellor and report on last week's announcement of Chancellor Robert Berdahl's successor. There are a number of articles at the UC Berkeley NewsCenter.
First, a story by Bonnie Azab Powell, NewsCenter | 27 July 2004
BERKELEY — Accompanied by joking references to bevies of Bobs and big shoes, the ninth chancellor of UC Berkeley, Robert J. Birgeneau, was formally introduced to the campus community today by the outgoing chancellor, Robert M. Berdahl, and UC President Robert C. Dynes. (The three Bobs are all more than six feet tall.) In between the lighthearted banter, however, Birgeneau made some serious pledges to his new constituency about ensuring equal educational access for all Californians, increasing private funding while aggressively securing public monies, and encouraging interdisciplinary research as the best way to solve the world's problems.
Continue here to the whole story by Bonnie Azab Powell, and more about Robert Birgeneau, at the UC Berkeley NewsCenter.
Robert Birgeneau, October 20, 2003: I believe that as an institution of higher education, we have an obligation to show leadership in areas where the general public may lag behind. This was the case during the era of civil rights, and it is the case today as we address issues of gender and sexuality. We cannot let controversy or inflexible opinions deter us from raising awareness and promoting understanding. Our campus must be an inclusive and welcoming community, and it must be so in full awareness of our religiously pluralistic environment. We can have diversity within diversity by being respectful of each other. At the same time, we can learn much more about what it is to be human by understanding humanity in all of its rich variety. In the process we can become an even greater university.
Continue here for a sampling of more written and spoken statements from Birgeneau's tenure at the University of Toronto.
The Los Angeles Times report on Birgeneau's appointment can be read here.
A Contra Costa Times editorial discusses the challenges facing the new Chancellor.
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Budget Agreement Spares UC Students Some Pain
From the July 28, San Francisco Chronicle | California's proposed budget deal would restore millions of dollars to the University of California and allow it to offer admission to 5,800 eligible freshmen who had been told they would have to attend community college for two years.
The budget deal, which still needs legislative approval, also delivered good news to the California State University and the state's community colleges, with money to cover eligible students and some additional enrollment growth. The deal also restores $20 million to the UC Merced campus, allowing it to open with 1,000 students in September 2005.
"We walked into the budget negotiations saying that is our No. 1 priority, that we continue to put education before everything else," said state Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez, D-Los Angeles.
Under terms of the agreement worked out with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the restored funding to UC will allow the state to fulfill its promise in the 1960 state education Master Plan. That promise is a seat at UC to any student who takes required courses and meets its standards for high grades and test scores.
Read the complete San Francisco Chronicle article here.
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Web Diarists Are Now Official Members Of The Convention Press Corps
This article by Jennifer Lee in the July 26 edition of the New York Times discusses the emergence of webloggers at this summer's political conventions.
Even as many networks are reducing their coverage of the increasingly predictable political conventions, the political blogs, which have become a fruitful alternative for individual voices, have been ablaze over the prospect of officially covering conventions for the first time. . . About three dozen bloggers . . . have been given press credentials for the Democratic convention in Boston . . . Organizers of the Republican convention have said they plan to issue credentials to 10 to 20 bloggers.
"What bloggers do for the Democrats is that we enable the party base, those who are in the middle or upper class who are deeply involved in Internet and activism, to get a viewpoint they can get fired up about," said Stephen Yellin, a 16-year-old high school student from Berkeley Heights, N.J., who was credentialed to attend the convention. Mr. Yellin has attracted a large online following for his contributions on DailyKos.com. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, a lawyer in Berkeley, Calif., who runs DailyKos.com, has raised around $400,000 for Senator John Kerry's campaign, the Democratic Party and other political candidates.
Read the entire NY Times article here. For a post-Democratic convention report on how the blogging went, as well as a list of the sites of bloggers granted convention credentials, see this San Francisco Chronicle article published July 30, and this article in the August 1 New York Times.
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Upcoming Events
EarthTeam, an environmental network for teens, teachers and youth leaders, sponsors a free networking lunch each August for teachers and other adults who work with youth and the environment. This August 18, from 11:30am–2:30, in Berkeley, at the First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way, EarthTeam will sponsor its 4th Annual Free Teachers Lunch. As their announcement states:
We provide a lovely catered lunch with wine as well as an update on environmental education in the Bay Area by outstanding teachers in the field. A panel of teachers make brief presentations about teaching environmental education, organizing an Environmental Academy and running successful environmental clubs. You'll have a chance to ask questions as well as network with other teachers. The event is co-sponsored UC Berkeley's University/School Project and the CREEC Network.
For more information about this event check out the EarthTeam announcement.
There are still two August courses for Teachers this summer; visit the Bay Area Writing Project (BAWP) site to check out availability for an Aug 2-13 two-week course is for new teachers of English who work with academically and culturally diverse student populations. Or, second course, during the same time period, for teachers of grades 6 through college who are interested in learning more about the relationship between the knowledge of grammar and the teaching of writing. Join colleagues to learn in programs that are teacher-centered, interactive and collaborative. Explore and question, write and revise, read and discuss – recharge your batteries by learning with other teachers. All BAWP summer programs are led by BAWP Teacher-Consultants who are experienced classroom teachers with special expertise in the teaching of writing. Check out this summer's course listings and dates, and find a link to a PDF registration form here.
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