» NSDL Road Reports NSDL.org > Expert Voices > NSDL Road Reports Larger Text NSDL Road Reports NSDL reaches out to individuals and organizations by exhibiting, attending and presenting at national and international STEM meetings and conferences. Read current first-hand reports about NSDL-on-the-road including photographs! Contributors: Brad Edmondson Carol Minton Morris Eileen McIlvain Jessica Fries-Gaither Michael Luby Pat Viele Robert Payo Robert Payo Susan Jesuroga Dean Krafft Mick Khoo Special Libraries Association 2008 Monday, June 23rd, 2008 2:08 pm Contributed by: Pat Viele SLA June 15-18, 2008 Seattle, Washington As usual, my activities were mainly with the Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics (PAM) division of SLA. I gave a brief report about the meeting “Graduate Education in Physics: Which Way Forward” at which I gave a poster presentation on information fluency at the PAM-wide roundtable discussion. I gave a two hour poster presentation on comPADRE with Dr. Bruce Mason, Principle Investigator for the comPADRE project. comPADRE is the physics and astronomy portion of NSDL. Bruce and I also presented together at the Physics Round Table discussion. We are proposing that science librarians can help spread the word about comPADRE (and all of NSDL) by attending regional meetings of groups such as the American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers, etc. I also attended the Astronomy Round Table discussion. There was a discussion about the usefulness of and demand for paper pre-prints now that articles are on-line. Two groups of faculty still want the paper: older faculty who have always done it that way and the newer faculty who want copies to send to family and friends. The Institute of Physics announced a change in the pricing structure for the astronomy journals that they took on in 2008 (formerly published by the U. of Chicago Press). I attended a session “The Science of Coffee”, which was quite interesting. The speaker was Dr. Joe Vinson of the University of Scranton. His presentation will be on the SLA web site soon. His article “Take Two Cups of Coffee and Call Me Tomorrow” is on his web page: http://academic.scranton.edu/department/chemistry/ I also attended the session “Alternative Fuels: Technologies for a Healthy Planet”. Dr. Richard Nelson , Kansas State University and Alvetta Pindell, from the Information and Research Services Branch of the National Agricultural Library spoke. Their presentations will soon be on the SLA web site. An interesting web site that was mentioned is: http://www.biodiesel.org/ Quite a bit of my time was spent with vendors. Thomson Reuters has a new “vertical search” engine that was demonstrated. It is in beta test currently. The person who demonstrated the systems said: “Using context shrinks the haystack and makes the needle bigger.” He contends that the new search engine will eliminate spam and move the most relevant sites to the top of the list. AIP is pleased to announce that Physics Today no longer has a one year embargo and is available back to issue one. The one year embargo applied to institutional subscriptions. Faculty got very frustrated by that. Sara Tompson, at the University of Southern California attends physics colloquia and prepares bibliographies related to the topic. The physics faculty and grad student look forward to the service. http://isd.usc.edu/~sarat/PhysColloqBibliogs.html The winner of the International Scholarship this year is Mandy Taha, Senior Research Services Librarian, Biblioteca Alexandrina. She spoke at the PAM wide round table. The facility is quite spectacular. http://www.bibalex.org/english/aboutus/building/facts.htm Scitopia celebrated a one year anniversary. They have added more publishers to the systems this year. (scitopia.org) As always, I enjoyed meeting with my colleagues and sharing ideas. Pat Viele Posted in Topics: General Add a Comment » The Petabyte Problem: Scrubbing, Curating and Publishing Big Data Friday, June 20th, 2008 6:57 am Contributed by: Carol Minton Morris One strategy for classifying the millions of galaxies mapped by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey was to open the Galaxy Zoo , invite the public to look at the new creatures, and give them tools to record their observations. When Alex Szalay is not considering improved strategies for managing and sharing big data, and how that might be an effective force for advancing science, he is the lead guitarist for the jazz and progressive rock band Panta Rhei. Szalay presented the third and final keynote, “Scientific Publishing in the Era of Pedabyte Data,” at JCDL on June 19, 2008. He opened with a look at the evolution of science: 1,000 yrs ago science was empirical; during the last few hundred years science was theoretical using models and generalizations; a computational branch emerged in the last few decades, and; today science is about data exploration. Scientific data doubles every year which has fundamentally changed the nature of scientific computing. Today scientific computing cuts across disciplines and has become unwieldy making it more difficult to extract knowledge. He noted that 20% of the worlds servers are feeding information to big data centers–Google MSN, Yahoo, Amazon, and Ebay–so it’s not only just about scientific data. Szalay has been personally involved in the expotential growth of astronomy data from the late 1990s to 2008 due to his role with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) that has been “mapping the universe” as part of the Virtual Observatory activities for the last ten years. SDSS is now complete, and is in the process of developing the final data release. The completed SDSS archive will contain over 100 terabytes and will be managed by Johns Hopkins University. Sky Survey user sessions show a constant and increasing use of the SDSS data. Data versioning was SDSS’s biggest challenge, and he emphasized that there is a need to develop automation for more steps of the steps in curating data for final publication–collection, raw, calibrated, and derived. Szalay believes that scientific discoveries are made at the edges and boundaries or large data sets–the places where you might not naturally be looking. The number of connections that can be made among data sets the more likely that something new will be discovered along the edges suggesting data federation is significant. Scientific projects that generate data are often short term–3-5 years. Data is only “uploaded” at the end of a project–the data will never catch up with the published discoveries. He advocates for projects becoming more active data curators and publishers further up stream in the investigative process. One way to do this is to consider methods for “taking the analysis to the data” to manipulate data at the database. In any scenario he noted that finding the right data to answer a question cannot be optimal because data is fuzzy and machine resources are limited. Next generation data analysis will require a combination of statistics and computer science to create novel data structures and randomized algorithms. Szalay suggests that Power Laws arise in social systems where people are faced with many choices such as in the analysis of enormous data sets–more choices make the distribution, or long tail, more extreme. People’s choices, made by brains are naturally designed to sort, order, and balance, affect one another and are not random events. He cited long tail distribution observations including those of Pareto who suggested that 20% of population holds 80% of wealth, and more currently those of Chris Anderson who believes that everything on the web is a Power Law. He suggests that the there is a science project pyramid–single lab at the base, multi-campus in the center, and international consortia on top. Often a scientific discipline will recognize the need for a major “giga” initiatives such as supercomputing research that is highly collaborative and distributed. The output from these efforts at every scale contain: –Literature –Derived and re-combined data –Raw data Szalay would like to see a continous feedback loop among these three aspects where data and analysis are always updating. To answer the question, “How can you publish data so that others might recreate your results in 100 yrs.,” he referred to Gray’s laws of Data Engineering: scientific computing revolves around data; scale-out the solution for analysis; take the analysis to the data; start with 20 queries, and; go from working to working. One successful experiment in scaling out the solution for analysis came about because the Sloan Digital Sky Survey generated more data than scientists have time to study or classify, coupled with the fact that astronomy is attractive to the public. Astronomers asked citizens for help in classifying over a million galaxies by establishing the Galaxy Zoo. This public science analysis solution has received enormous publicity and has allowed 100,000 citizens from all over the globe to contribute to discovery by helping to classify galaxies online while viewing beautiful images of unkown locations in the universe. For example, a German teacher found and called attention to an object that she had no experience in analyzing. Her observation turned out to be a significant discovery. The object that proved to be a Voowerp. Szalay believes that the educational impact of this work is enormous. Data sharing and publishing would benefit from the establishment of specialized Journals for data. He emphasized that scholarly communications are no longer characterized by a paper trail, but rather by an email trail along with resources collected by the Internet Archive, wiki pages, some science blogs, collaborative workbenches, and even instant messages. Technology plus sociology plus economics must come together to continue to work on how to preserve our ntellectual data resources. Any one discipline alone is not enough to solve the data deluge problem. Both the promise and the unpredictability of increased participation in citizen science is yet another unknown. If there are 1,000s of new discoveries each day in public science is there any way to know how this will scale or does this create a horrifying potential for even more data? Posted in Topics: Fedora , General , Repositories , Science , Technology Add a Comment » Transforming Data Access with Many Eyes Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 10:42 am Contributed by: Carol Minton Morris Martin Wattenberg developed the “Baby Name Wizard” which provides a visual analysis tool to help users assess the popularity of baby names over time as a companion to “The Baby Name Wizard: A Magical Method for Finding the Perfect Name for Your Baby” written by his wife, Laura Wattenberg. The opening JCDL plenary lecture on Wednesday June 18, 2008 was given by IBM Visual Communications researchers Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg. Both are new media artists who focus their work around data visualizations that allow anyone to “look at tons of numbers easily.” They are currently transforming data access and analysis with a new web site called Many Eyes. Information visualization was accomplished in the 1990s by and for experts. These early images were often of colorful landscapes that represented many data. Viegas believes that visualizations can be more powerful when lay users begin to understand visualization and “the traces people leave online.” Some of Viegas’ work at MIT focused on “getting a sense of the relationship you are carrying” by text analysis and visualization of email archives. Her research project entitled Themail gathered archives from people who were guaranteed that their privacy would be protected. As it turned out the email contributors wanted to play with the visualizations even though the images often represented very private life events. The email analysis visualizations turned out to be social artifacts around which people wanted to gather for further conversation and reflection. Wattenberg also noticed that tools like the Baby Name Wizard were being used by people who did not need to name a child or, in some cases, even like babies. People were interested in collaborating and building on each others ideas and work. What was powerful was the number of people trying to make sense collectively. Viegas and Wattenberg wondered what might happen if the audience around visualizations was scaled up. At Many Eyes users create their own visualizations using their own, or provided data sets, discuss what they see, and share insights with their communities of friends, family and colleagues. Many Eyes encourages users to broadcast their data visualizations in other blogs by providing html snippets to add to web pages. Viegas and Wattenberg have developed a system that enables data analysis as a distributed social process. The more you understand about context the richer the understanding of the data. For example, each time a user comments in the Many Eyes blog , the system adds a notation to the data visualization. The system has proven to be particularly interesting for word analysis of political speeches allowing users to “dive deeply and a non-linear way.” So what are people doing when they go to Many Eyes? Someone created a social network image based on a new testament data set. The visualization traveled far and wide and inspired blog discussions that cut across many discipline communities including technology and the social sciences. This phenomena is a text book example of what Viegas and Wattenberg hoped would happen–if there is a community that is already interested in a particular data set then Many Eyes provides the ability to visualize issues and spark discussions. Tag clouds for political discussions have proven to be very popular as is crime analysis and advocacy for changes in laws or policies. Many Eyes visualizations may be published papers or broadcast in blogs with attribution The overall goal is to multiply the impact of data. Viegas and Wattenberg believe that many more people can come to conclusions and form questions if they have tools to connect people to the meaning of the data. Posted in Topics: Social Studies , Technology Add a Comment » Joint Conference on Digital Libraries Opens Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 11:06 am Contributed by: Carol Minton Morris View of Pittsburgh from the Duquesne Incline at night. There are five funicular or cliff railways in the United States. Two of these inclined railways are located in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, PA At a conference where ideas about the theory and practice of information engineering in digital libraries would be presented, it was appropriate to meet in a city where both physical and theoretical knowledge engineering have played roles. Dr. Bob Reagan opened the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) by offering attendees a sense of this unique city. Reagan has helped to train the Apollo astronauts, and most recently edited Bridges of Pittsburgh. This book presents details of the colorful history surrounding the 446 bridges–more than Venice–that span the confluence of three rivers where Pittsburgh nestles among hills and mountains. This is the place where Andrew Carnegie also founded a library knowledge empire that would spread 2.5 thousand libraries to 5 countries. In 1940 Frank Lloyd Wright suggested that Pittsburgh should be abandoned because of significant pollution due to steel manufacturing. Currently Pittsburgh has been ranked the #1 Most Livable City in America by Places Rated Almanac , and is rated # 2 in the Most Scenic Places in the US. Bill Buxton Pinciple Scientist at Microsoft Research, Professor at U Toronto and principle in Buxton Design, and outdoor enthusiast who has written about how Ice climbing and how it relates to life was the keynote speaker on day one. Buxton wonders what Carnegie would think of the current nature of digital libraries. We have invested so much in traditional libraries–what advances are represented in digital libraries? A sense of place is an inherent part of a bricks and mortar library where the library is one of the most significant public buildings in many towns and cities. Carnegie’s message was that ‘Architecture’ mattered in the quest for and preservation of knowledge. Librarians were also an important part of the Carnegie library equation as ‘Human intermediaries’ who were experts in specific collections or fields. Search mechanisms were library cards that contained history of use, notations, and were themselves historic objects. This context was lost in going digital. Search and browse can map to historic concepts of sense of place and information mediation in Carnegie’s libraries, but in Buxton’s view often fall short. Scholarly endeavors such as research and writing are associated with libraries. We may not be better informed than at any other point in history because of the erroneous idea that if we build networks they will come. “It takes more than building the ball field,” Buxton stated. “The challenge of how to create use and access is not a technical problem. We must be vigilant in setting up social structures that support digital knowledge the way that Carnegie leveraged architecture, people and hands-on notation in support of scholarship. There is no design discipline that is as close in nature as architecture is to technical architecture. Buxton feels that in the software industry, “We don’t have any architects–we have structural engineers. If we look at software development from a design perspective would anyone go to the 17th floor of a building designed by software engineers?” “Our technologies and our information are becoming ’spaceless,’ unlike when knowledge was embedded in ‘place’ as in Carnegie’s time,” He said. Buxton feels that ubiquitous computing, or transparent computing, begins to bring the notion of a sense of place back to technology. If we meet technology where we live the order of a home or of a building come into play in how we interact with information and what inquiries we make. As a designer Buxton believes that form follows function. If digital information models are not as complex and diverse as what we now have on paper then it will be impoverished. Newspapers, for example, are separate classes of documents that are different from journals or books. A notion of these idea containers as specific types of communication devices that convey information in the abstract does not work. There is something missing from the picture. Usability should be a basic right. He compared a review of an art exhibit with a review of a new piece of reading technology. The art review contained no commentary about whether the paintings were viewable or accessible in the gallery. Rather the text was focused on ideas and techniques. The tech review was mostly about whether or not the reader was easy to use. The act of design can be reduced to, ‘Design is choice.’ Buxton feels that our children deserve a technology future that we chose for them, carefully. Posted in Topics: Education , Open Source , Repositories , Science , Technology Add a Comment » Sun Microsystems Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 12:50 pm Contributed by: Carol Minton Morris San Francisco, CA According to an IBM study all 1 ,407,724,920 people who use the internet will double the amount of digital information in the world every 11 hours by 2010. Should we keep it all? And if the answer is yes, how will that work exactly? Should it be accessible or will it land in a “dark” archive to be mined by future digital archeologists for it’s meaning and context? Sun Microsystems hosted a group of leaders from institutions and organizations worldwide in San Francisco May 23-25, 2008 to condsider these and other questions at the Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) meeting. Presentations were focused on technical and organizational strategies for how burgeoning collections of global knowledge that now include very large data sets might be managed and sustained. Institutional capacity for creating, managing and studying many pedabytes of scientific and humanities data has increased as mass storage and information technologies have advanced. Presentations from PASIG are available here: http://events-at-sun.com/pasig_spring/presentations/ . A San Francisco Chronicle article entitled, “Librarians Discuss How to Store World’s Data” by Tom Abate about the meeting can be accessed here. Humans have never before been challenged with having to save so much information. Historically people have been compelled by circumstance to “let stuff go,” albeit often unwillingly. The list of what many of us leave behind can include almost everything we care about–books, hard drives, memorabilia and artworks–to even bigger items such as houses and cars. Whether selling, donating, recycling, sharing or being forced to abandon our stuff, we are more or less wired to cope with the lifecycle of “things” as they intersect with our lives. The ancient Alexandria Library, for example, was founded in the third century B.C. and painstakingly developed over time by scribes who hand-copied texts that often arrived by ship. When the library burned scholars and citizens mourned the passing of an irreplaceable collection of knowledge. In 2003 a new Library of Alexandria was founded based on the same ancient scholarly traditions. The open and unique practice and style of early Egyptian scholarship persists in the new library even if the highly combustible scrolls and artifacts do not. Determining “how” information is developed and made available, and what policies surround its use may be as significant as “what” the content of the information is in determining the “value” of which data should be preserved for the future. — Fedora Commons, the DSpace Federation, EPrints and many other organizations who make use of these and other types of repository software presented overviews of priorities, community developments and technical achievments. The Fedora Commons, DSpace, and EPrints presentations from Sun PASIG are available here. — Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons sketched recent Fedora Commons history and reviewed what’s on the short term horizon. Scholarly communications, semantic knowledge spaces, data curation and preservation and archiving are all areas where Fedora Commons has established new and ongoing partnerships to help create technology to sustain the world’s knowledge repositories and archives. Fedora Commons is establishing community-led Solution Councils for open access publication, data curation, eresearch, and preservation and archiving. In the near term these groups will articulate a mission and develop requirements that will lead to establishing bundles of software and applications to address the needs of organizations whose efforts are focused in these four areas. What is Fedora right now? Payette reviewed Fedora’s key features which include a digital object model that can: – Aggregate content “datastreams” in an object… any type of content – Intermix both local content and external content – Relationships among digital objects (via RDF) – Register “content models” for known object patterns As well as Repository Services: – Modular – Web service interfaces (REST/SOAP) – Versioning – Dynamic service binding based on object content model types – File-centric (all essential characteristics in XML files) – RDF-based indexing (semantic triplestoreindex with query) – Security with pluggable authentication and XACML policies – Journaling (replay all events to create replicas of repository) — Andrew Treolar presented an overview of the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). This is a multi-institution, long-term and very large data pilot project established to ensure that researchers are able to identify, locate, access and analyze any available research data. They are looking at issues such as multi-discipline access and use outside of research. Australian funding agencies are tracking the implications of the ANDS work so that they can potentially require a data management plan as a part of new research grants. — Michelle Kimpton, executive director, DSpace Federation gave a report on the recent release of DSpace 1.5 which uses the Maven build system. This distributed development tool supports “publishing models.” This functionality is useful for those who are looking to use DSpace “beyond institutional repositories.” The DSpace Federation has changed the model for how they work with their community in order to manage growth. Almost anyone can now contribute code right away because builders do not contribute code back to the core. Manakin is part of DSpace 1.5 and is the DSpace default user interface. Mankin allows for customized UIs that look more like a digital library. A number of organizations are using Manakin as a front end to their repositories. More information is available in this December 2007 article from DLib Magazine: “Manakin, A New Face for DSpace.” — Dave Tarrant, PRESERV and the University of Southampton, introduced a storage controller for EPrints repository software . The controller supports a pluggable storage layer for repositories, providing the ability to store objects in different locations based on metadata or type, and enables direct interaction between the repository software and open storage platforms. Tarrant’s presentation, “From Open Storage to Smart Storage: Enabling EPrints Repository Preservation” can be accessed here. Posted in Topics: Fedora , Open Source , Repositories , Science , Social Studies , Technology Add a Comment » NSDL Director Kaye Howe at JA-SIG, “Ubiquity, Interdependence, and the Age of Collaboration” Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 1:48 pm Contributed by: Carol Minton Morris To listen to Howe’s lecture click here: Download link NSDL Core Integration Director Kaye Howe. Saint Paul, Minnesota was the site of JA-SIG 2008 April 27-30, 2008. With the theme, “Higher Education Solutions: The Community Source Way” it’s no surprise that National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Core Integration Director Kaye Howe was on hand to deliver the closing keynote address entitled, “”Ubiquity, Interdependence, and the Age of Collaboration.” She noted that Prometheus discovered both the power and danger of knowledge when he stole fire from the gods for use by mere mortals. “There is no going back once you have stolen fire,” she said. “Education is the great activity of the fallen world,” she said. “It is what we need to create a just society,” and yet, she pointed out, “We think of all the difficulties and all the ways we have to reinvent this wheel over and over again.” Howe is no stranger to pointing out that the legacy of working together to create widely accessible opportunities for education has been one of conflict. These initiatives have at their core the conundrum of both striving for perfection while building on imperfect systems. She noted that the power of collaboration has at its roots a rich scholarly history and tradition with well-known relationships such as the public and private lives of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as examples of a stormy collaboration with a remarkably successful outcome. She concluded by noting that “The imperfect is our paradise,” as Wallace Stevens suggests in “The Poems of Our Climate.” THE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATE Wallace Stevens I Clear water in a brilliant bowl, Pink and white carnations. The light In the room more like a snowy air, Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow At the end of winter when afternoons return. Pink and white carnations - one desires So much more than that. The day itself Is simplified: a bowl of white, Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round, With nothing more than the carnations there. II Say even that this complete simplicity Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed The evilly compounded, vital I And made it fresh in a world of white, A world of clear water, brilliant-edged, Still one would want more, one would need more, More than a world of white and snowy scents. III There would still remain the never-resting mind, So that one would want to escape, come back To what had been so long composed. The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds. Posted in Topics: Education , Social Studies , Technology Add a Comment » “Getting Connected: Social Science in the Age of Networks” Monday, April 28th, 2008 1:42 pm Contributed by: Carol Minton Morris On April 23, 2008 Cornell University’s 2005-2008 Networks Theme Project capped the three-year teaching and research initiative with a lecture by team members including David Easley (Economics), Jon Kleinberg (Computer Science), Kathleen O’Connor (JGSM), Michael Macy (Sociology), and Dan Huttenlocher (Computer Science & JGSM) entitled “Getting Connected: Social Science in the Age of Networks.” David Easley introduced the idea of networks by comparing something as easy to understand as a map of the London Underground with station hubs and connecting train lines, to esoteric systems based on ideas and beliefs such as as the intertwined and often hard to detect connections among groups of people where a person is a node, and the edges between one individual and another are different types of relationships. Though the internet has made the study of the spread of networks that convey disease, rumor, and history easier because digital traces can now be tracked and measured, interpretation is still the key to making sense of their significance for people and policy-makers. As Michael Macy noted, “You can interview friends, but you cannot interview a friendship.” The initiative itself was an interesting social network that encouraged collaboration across disciplinary boundaries. 280 students from 33 majors participated in two conferences: Search and Diffusion on Social Networks Workshop and the Cornell Microsoft International Symposium on Self-Organizing Online Communities , attended lectures, took part in reading groups and made over 600 blog posts in NSDL’s Expert Voices . Jon Kleinberg observed that undergraduate students were able to take part in “Building the science behind the world they inhabit.” Students studied situations like how a network of apartment roommates functions, and how social network theories applied to their own day-to-day experiences on line and in real life. Posted in Topics: Science , Social Studies , Technology Add a Comment » Fedora Day at OR08 Kicks Off With Organizational and Technical Overview Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 9:01 am Contributed by: Carol Minton Morris Fedora Day at OR08 began as 50 Fedora Commons t-shirts with two different slogans flew off a table outside a lecture hall at the University of Southampton, UK. Fedora users, organizers, developers, vendors, and planners were assembled as part of the Third International Open Repositories Conference to share ideas and discuss future plans for the Fedora Commons organization and software framework. Executive director Sandy Payette began her welcoming remarks and technical overview by asking the over 137 participants in an packed lecture hall to “tell us what you think in the Fedora Commons sloganfest”—in exchange for a t-shirt. The two Fedora Commons slogan candidates are “Connecting Digital Content to the Future,” (the explicit message) and “All Ways, Always” (the implicit message). Payette delivered a quick overview of Fedora’s history and mission stressing that engaging the diverse and motivated user and developer communities has resulted in a strong core platform that is flexible and extensible with a wealth of community-created, related technical innovations. “The more people who participate, the stronger the software will be,” she said. She also emphasized Fedora Commons commitment to additional community-focused documentation that gets at a sense of what best practices are, and noted “Fedora Commons open source projects can be integrated together.” New types of durable digital objects, solutions for data, enabling use and re-use, bridging web and enterprise solutions, and more open source integrations are all part of current ideas driven by use cases that include scholarly and scientific research and communication; data curation, linking, and publishing; preservation and archiving; knowledge spaces that include a variety of educational settings; and more. In 2008 Fedora Commons Director of Community Strategies Thorny Staples will initiate “Community Solution Councils,” championed by community leaders. The Open Access Publication Solution Council will be led by Richard Cave, Public Library of Science; The Data Curation, Solution Council will be led by Sayeed Choudhury, the Preservation and Archiving Solution Council will be led by Ron Janz. An eResearch Solution Council is also planned. Solution Councils will create a vision and requirements for each of these areas, moving towards community developed end-to-end solution bundles. She offered a top-level summary of framework components: Fedora Repository project –the original Fedora Project Fedora Middleware Project –service integration and enterprise-orientation for repositories Akubra Storage Project –New storage plug-in architecture; transactional file system Topaz Project –Fedora Commons incubating; core componentn for semantic-enabled apps Mulgara Triplestore Project –Independent, Fedora supported developer; highly scalable triplestore. She explained that Dan Davis, Fedora Commons Chief Architect, has launched “The Fedora Commons Technology Roadmap” to better meet the planning needs of community members. Payette described the “permanent draft document” as an evolving and changing view as the community gives feedback. The Fedora Commons roadmap is somewhat like the Eclipse model that includes an overview, themes, priorities, and release plans. The Fedora Commons Roadmap consists of an overview with drill-down to a table that includes the feature name, action (where it is in development), availability (when?) and notes. Please visit the Roadmap now on the web site at http://fedora-commons.org/resources/roadmap.php . and send comments. A Q and A followed: Q: What are thinking of in terms of sheer scale? We in Europe and looking at unestimated jumps in scale with data.” SP: We need to understand what is the maximum vertical scale we can expect—what is max and what are pinch points—both Sun and FIZ Karlsruhe are working on this. Architectural strategies for how pedabyte storage exists behind Fedora—how it pokes into that data are significant. We need to further understand dimensions of scalability. Q: I would like to know more about content models. We want a basic set and then we would like to plug other validators in from the community. We want to show the richer ones. Posted in Topics: Fedora , OR08 , Open Source , Repositories , Technology Add or View Comments (3) » Open Repository Leaders Meet in Southampton, UK Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 5:46 am Contributed by: Carol Minton Morris The Southampton Bargate located in the midst of downtown shops, is part of the old town walls dating back to the Saxon era. The Third Annual Open Repositories Conference (OR08) opened at the University of Southampton, UK, on April 1, 2008 with an observation by conference co-chair Les Carr. He suggested that the collective efforts of the 480+ delegates—repository managers, librarians, archivists, developers, project leaders and representatives from IT companies—who are working directly with worldwide research and information producers are creating a global web of knowledge. Carr and his University of Southampton team have made all OR08 conference proceedings available in—what a surprise—a repository. You may browse and download presentations and posters here: http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/view/subjects/ . Peter Murray-Rust, a Reader in Molecular Informatics at the University of Cambridge and Senior Research Fellow of Churchill College, gave the keynote address. He began his talk by asking how many of the assembled attendees worked in laboratories. A small number of hands went up. “We have a data drought,” He said. “Permission barriers caused 90% by people and only 10% by technology are preventing direct access to up-to-date scientific research findings.” Murray Rust suggested that the long tail of science, where most discovery takes place, has as its unit of allegiance membership in a small group working in laboratories. “You can’t sit in a building with ivy growing up it and be removed from scientists in laboratories with their test tubes and small furry animals and call yourself a ’scientific repositorian,’” he said, ” Scientists don’t understand relational databases and hate metadata and keywords. They file everything on their desktops.” He gave several examples of technologies and services that would help scientists in laboratories, and some that would not: “Scientists don’t want “notebooks.” Any deviation from common notation methods is too much work and they won’t use the tools.” –RSS systems that email him “active molecules” harvested and updated by robots –”Sticks” or incentives that compel scientists to contribute –Text mining technologies that reclaim “lost” data from PDFs –Involvment in scientific data collection workflow “upstream” closer to where data is created –Pedabyte stores at universities so that there are facilities to hold scientific data at the source NCore PI Dean Krafft after his presentation at OR08 Gardens in Southampton’s Central Park, and part of a mosaic found in the park. Interoperability Dean Krafft, NSDL NCore gave an overview of what was included in the NCore package of technologies and standards that allow for greater flexibility in collaborating and creating context around library resources. Krafft’s presentation was significant in scope and impact and provided attendees with multiple ideas for matching semantic content to this open source system that builds on the Fedora platform. Sustainability Sustainability affects what happens over time to virtually all aspects of the personnel and technology associated with ongoing repository operations possible. Stuart Haber began the Sustainability sessions at OR08 with a presentation entitled, “A Content Integrity Service for Digital Repositories.” He suggests that it is critical to be able to verify that a document, or piece of content is what it claims to be. His system creates a “witness” for each piece of a document—paragraph, sentence, speech, for example. The “witness” then computes a certificate of authenticity that is coupled and stored with the original document. — Mary Marlino spoke frankly from personal experience about what to do when the email arrives informing you that your funding will not continue. She explained her planning for sustainability and asked that people think openly about what happens when and if a funding agency might “pull the plug.” She introduced fundamentals about DLESE, The Digital Library for Earth System Education —one of the first big digital library projects in the U.S. DLESE preceded NSDL by 18 months and was a grassroots, community-led project with 13,500 digital educational resources organized into 41 thematic collections in the completed collection. As an organization DLESE was a focal point for community action in geoscience education and developed numerous best practices towards building education-based digital libraries. Innovative teacher services such as online Strand Maps based on AAAS Project 2061 Benchmarks for Science Literacy were also developed for DLESE’s large and distributed community of K12 teachers. NSF gave the DLESE team a one-year time frame, with one year of limited development support to ensure that users could continue to have access to DLESE resources for the not-clearly-defined “forseeable future.” They launched an analytical process to define core library components, come up with cost estimates, and criteria for selecting new business models. They wanted to continue library operations and selected a model that would extend end-user services and retain access for their user base of 1+ million users through the DLESE.org web site. Host selection involved making sure that users would still have free access, and that the institution they chose would have some financial stability. The artifact was sustained in partnership with several groups—NSDL, DLS, UCAR, and NCAR, but the sense of community and ownership was lost. Marlino reiterated that she did not know what would happen with to the DLESE community and their embedded sense of ownership in their digital library. — Les Carr presented, “End of Life Scenarios for the Repositories of Virtual Organizations.” In giving this talk he did not want to be known as the “man who burns repositories” as a result of this talk. His alternative title for the talk was “Or: who cleans up when the party ends?” Collecting and curating over time is what a persistent and permanent repository backed by policies and institutional commitment implies—it is not intended to be a fly-by-night dumping ground. How old is old? How persistent is persistent? A review of venerable institutions like the University of Oxford, for example, shows that it was in existence in 1096, and may have been in existence even earlier. Seats of learning are by their nature institutions that can be counted on to last. Virtual libraries or repositories have only been around for the last decade or so, and often come into existence as a part of grant activities and without the benefit of clear institutional affiliation. Institutional repositories have long lifespans. Virtual repositories generally have shorter lifespans. Carr suggests that the “Squillions of Dollars” spent on international, highly collaborative multi-million dollar projects may equate to a longer repository lifespan. If the institution that backs the repository,however, disappears, contents are often tied up in administrative and resource allocation knots leaving information consumers without access. Links and references Presentations and posters from OR08 http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/view/subjects/ Flickr photos http://flickr.com/search/?q=OR08&w=all Posted in Topics: OR08 , Open Source , Repositories , Social Studies , Technology Add a Comment » Polar News and Notes: Friday at NSTA: Science Notebooks and Nonfiction Trade Books Saturday, March 29th, 2008 8:11 am Contributed by: Jessica Fries-Gaither Friday at NSTA’s national conference in Boston, MA included two informative literacy sessions. Scaffolding Inquiry: Research on Writing in Science Dr. Rick Vanosdall, Director of the Center of Excellence for Learning Sciences  at Tennessee State UniverVsity presented an overview of research results from his work with Dr. Mike Klentschy, the Superintendant of Schools of the En Centro School District in En Centro, California. During the seesion, Vanosdall described and provided examples of writing samples that have improved learning opportunities for all students and shared research on Scaffolded Guided Inquiry. Scaffolded Guided Inquiry is an instructional technique that builds scaffolds, or supports, into a guided inquiry approach to learning. As described in a recent paper: In their approach, students are guided and supported through the process of constructing their understanding of scientific concepts and the process of scientific inquiry as they work through the lessons, record predictions, observations, and reflections in their journals, and learn to articulate claims and evidence for their conclusions. (Vanosdall, Klentschy, Hedges, and Weisbaum, 2007) Support is also built in for teachers. As described by the researchers: The teachers’ guides are modified in several important ways, to model for teachers the essential elements of effective standards-based instruction. First, the lessons in the unit are linked directly to specific standards in the state curriculum and assessment guides. Teachers know what standards are being addressed in each unit and lesson. Second, critical or “benchmark” lessons are identified so the teachers know which lessons are critical in the development of student understanding. Third, questioning, experimentation, and reflection are all modeled in order to support the teacher through classroom activities and interactions. Finally, the use of student notebooks is emphasized as a way for the teacher to assess student’s understanding and to provide the feedback that is necessary for student learning (Vanosdall, Klentschy, Hedges, and Weisbaum 2007).  SGI lessons were developed for popular science kits used in elementary and middle level classrooms. Science notebooks were used as the vehicle for tracing the development of student conceptions in science. SGI has four phases: Setting the Stage for learning, Formulating Investigable Questions, Conducting the Investigation, and Making Meaning. In the first phase, Setting the Stage, the focus is on cognitive academic language development, including developing a consistent vocabulary for objects in the kit. In the second stage, students are presented with an engaging scenario that is aligned to the concepts being addressed. Students use this scenario to write focus questions and predictions using the stem “I think…because…”. The inclusion of the “because” clause is essential in helping students link prior knowledge to the new scenario. Both focus questions and predictions, which are entirely student generated, are recorded in the science notebook. The third stage involves planning and conducting the investigation. Again, students are responsible for planning and recording the procedural steps followed in their investigation. SGI makes use of the familiar narrative structure (first, next, last) to assist students in procedural writing. Students then conduct the investigation and record their data in an organizer of their own construction. Allowing students to construct their own data tables builds an operational sense of variables, setting the stage for later introduction of concepts such as independent and dependent variables. Students record both positive and negative results to build the understanding that learning can result from both. Pictures and diagrams are also often utilized. The final stage, making meaning, is arguably the most important. Supported by student-centered “making meaning conferences,” students make claims that are explicity linked to evidence. Students also write conclusions by rewording their focus questions into declarative statements. Finally, reflections allow students to pose further wonderings that may be explored through open inquiry. The use of supports for teachers and students, the use of science notebooks, and the careful alignment of the intended, implemented, and actual curriculum has been effective. Studies show that Scaffolded Guided Inquiry produced greater gains in knowledge than text or kit-based instruction. A new book, Using Science Notebooks in Elementary Classrooms , provides more information and samples from student notebooks. Nonfiction Trade Books Dr. Donna L. Knoell presented “Enhancing Science Instruction and Literacy with Quality Nonfiction Trade Books, Related Resources, and Investigations.” In her session, she enthusiastically shared how the use of nonfiction trade books allow students to do, talk, read, and write science. Drawing on her own teaching experience as well as her work with NSTA Review Board for the annual list of Outstanding Science Trade Books, her presentation included a lengthy bibliography of trade books as well as a packet of resources for integrating content area reading into K-8 classrooms. Knoell also discussed differentiated text, an exciting idea for supporting students of all reading levels in the science classroom. On first glance, two copies of a differentiated text look identical, with the same headings, boldfaced words, and images. On closer inspection or a careful reading, you will notice that the copies differ only in the text stucture used to convey identical concepts. The use of varying levels of sophistication with identical content means that teachers can assign appropriate levels of expository text to their students while teaching the same concepts to all. This exciting type of expository text is currently available from Heinemann and Delta Education . For a sampling of outstanding science trade books, view the 2008 award winners. Lists from previous years are also available on the NSTA web site. Posted in Topics: Education , Science Add a Comment » « Previous Entries Sign In Categories Education Fedora General Health Mathematics Open Source OR08 Repositories Science Social Studies Technology Bookmarks Annual Meeting 2007 NSDL website Previous Posts June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 Expert Voices Help Expert Voices User Feedback Syndicate RSS Feed Help with feeds Email notifications Delivered by FeedBurner Expert Voices 1.0 powered by: Content distributed under: Sign In | NSDL.ORG | Contact | Help | Privacy | Funded by NSF