D-Lib Magazine In Brief and In the News

Contributed by
Dr Paul Ayris
Director of UCL Library Services, UCL Copyright Officer and CEO UCL Press;
Co-Chair LERU CIO Community (League of European Research Universities); Project Coordinator of the LEARN Project
University College London (UCL): LEARN Project
London, United Kingdom
info [at] learn-rdm.eu

We live in the age of the 'data deluge', where digital technology enables us to store petabytes of data and to make that available for sharing as open data. Sharing data has the potential to revolutionise the way that researchers work. It avoids costly duplication in the collecting of data and enables research collaborations across the world which otherwise would not be possible.

Over 2016/17 LEARN will hold a series of workshops in four European countries (UK, Spain, Austria, Finland) and one Latin American country (Chile). These workshops will serve to advocate the recommendations on RDM and open data made by the LERU Roadmap, and gain feedback from workshop attendees for a new Toolkit of best practice. Furthermore, guidance to implement the Roadmap will be provided following identification of best practices supported by case studies identified in part through the workshops. The Project has also compiled an online survey as a self-assessment tool to assist institutions discover how ready they are for managing research data. Again, the survey is based on the issues raised by the LERU Roadmap.

By producing an exemplar RDM policy, which could then be tailored by any university or research institution to meet their needs, LEARN aims to address the challenges of the European Commission's Work Programme concerning the fragmentation of e-infrastructures and the need to maximize on global research data.

Specifically, LEARN will address stakeholder initiatives; policy coordination; take-up of digital infrastructures; and support cooperation with developing countries.

LEARN thus delivers support actions to quicken the take-up of RDM and the move to open data in the emerging world of Open Science.

Quick facts about LEARN

Project Full Title: LEaders Activating Research Networks: Implementing the LERU Research Data Roadmap and Toolkit

Start Date: 01/06/2015 Duration: 24 months

Funding from the European Commission: € 496K*

LEARN Project Partners:
University College London — UCL
Universitat de Barcelona — UB
Stichting Liber (Association of European Research Libraries) — LIBER
Universität Wien — UNIVIE
United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean — UN-ECLAC

Find out more:

Web: learn-rdm.eu
Email: info@learn-rdm.eu
Twitter: @learnRDM

*This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 654139.

Contributed by
Maria Economou
ScotDigiCH co-ordinator
HATII & The Hunterian
Joint Curator / Lecturer
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
maria.economou [at] glasgow.ac.uk

It brings together academics from different disciplines and professionals from Scotland's key cultural organisations in order to investigate how cultural digital resources are used by diverse user groups; how to record their impact on learning, research, and community engagement; and how to maximize their potential. It integrates different methodologies and perspectives (from digital humanities, computing science, museology, social sciences) and uses as a case study the Kelvin Hall Project in Glasgow. The Kelvin Hall project will bring together not only the collections of the three participating institutions, The University of Glasgow's Hunterian Museum, Glasgow Museums and the National Library of Scotland's Moving Image Archive, but also the digital records and resources related to those. Using digital technologies to bring together diverse and extensive collections, support in-depth research and scholarship, but also make them more accessible and easy to use for a wide range of users, brings up its own challenges and questions.

In order to address some of these, we set up ScotDigiCH as an interdisciplinary network of cultural heritage professionals and researchers examining issues of use, value, interpretation and evaluation of digital resources in the cultural heritage sector. Some of the questions the network is investigating are:

These have certainly given us a lot of food for thought at The Hunterian and are informing our Digital Strategy and how we take digital curation, collections documentation, exhibition interpretation and visitor engagement forward, particularly in relation to Kelvin Hall.

Our next event (in December 2016) will be an international symposium bringing together the themes from all four workshops on the use of digital resources in cultural heritage in Glasgow . This will be complimented by a public lecture by Mark O'Neill, Director of Policy and Research at Glasgow Life, who has been influential in developing Glasgow's cultural sector and is also an internationally known advocate for the value of culture and widening participation. This will be followed by an open evening at the newly opened Kelvin Hall exploring the digital collections.

Visit the ScotDigiCH blog or follow us on twitter (@ScotDigiCH) for the Call for Papers for the symposium, which will be out soon. Videos from the workshop presentations can be seen at YouTube.

Contributed by
Carl Wilson, Becky McGuinness, Open Preservation Foundation
and Justin Simpson, Artefactual
becky [at] openpreservation.org

About FIDO
FIDO (Format Identification for Digital Objects) is an open source, command-line tool used to identify the file formats of digital objects. Format identification is an important early step in digital preservation workflows. The format of a file informs many subsequent preservation actions, for example format validation or migration.

FIDO utilises the PRONOM format registry, which is maintained by The National Archives of the U.K. FIDO belongs to a category of open source file identification or file profiling tools, such as DROID, Siegfried, Tika and file. FIDO is written in Python, and is designed to be run from the command line. It is well suited for quickly returning the PRONOM identifiers from single files or batches of files.

Originally developed in 2010, FIDO is stewarded by the Open Preservation Foundation, and maintained by Artefactual as part of their affiliate membership of the Foundation. Artefactual are the lead developers of the Archivematica digital preservation system. FIDO is automatically installed with Archivematica, or it can be installed as a stand-alone tool for use in local digital preservation workflows.

New release
FIDO v1.3.3 was released in May 2016. The latest version uses the PRONOM v84 signature file, released in January 2016. PRONOM v.84 includes updates to container signatures. There is also improved support for Container formats (OLE and zip) and Python 3.

Finally there were bug fixes, new tests, and improved packaging. v1.3.3 was quickly followed by v1.3.4 containing new bug fixes from the community.

FIDO as an open source sustainability success
The development history of FIDO is interesting. FIDO was created by Dr. Adam Farquhar of the British Library, during the EU Planets project. The Open Planets Foundation, now Open Preservation Foundation, was established by some of the consortium partners to sustain the results of Planets and similar R&D projects. This made the Foundation a natural home for FIDO, which is one of the first projects to come under our stewardship.

In September 2011 Maurice de Rooij, formerly of the Nationaal Archief in the Netherlands took up the role of maintainer for FIDO. He developed new features, updated signatures and provided bug fixes for FIDO until the Autumn of 2013. In April 2014 Misty de Meo, formerly of Artefactual, began submitting bug fixes and signature file updates. Artefactual joined the Foundation in July 2015, and became official maintainers of FIDO. The partnership provides a solid foundation for sustainability and future development of this open source tool for the digital preservation community.

Future plans
We have several ideas to improve FIDO, but we don't yet have an official development roadmap. We are considering:

Contributions to open source projects benefit the whole community. Help improve FIDO:

Contributed by
Beth Plale
Professor of Informatics and Computing
Indiana University
919 E. 10th St., Bloomington, Indiana USA
plale [at] indiana.edu

A scholar engaging in close reading of printed texts (periodicals, newspapers, books) will carefully read the texts, making sustained interpretations of brief passages of the texts. This method is effective for a small number of texts, for instance as Murdock et al. found (2015), the thousand or so texts that a scholar will read over their professional career¹. But as pointed out by Schultz (2011)², where there are 200-odd books considered part of the canon of Victorian fiction, there are as many as 60,000 other novels published in 19th-century England making the cannon an insubstantial sample size. Because of the development of views about the significance of comprehensive analysis, and of the increasing availability of digitized texts, close reading is being augmented by what is called macroanalysis (to close reading's microanalysis): the understanding of printed texts not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive numbers of texts.

How does one analyze digitized texts when the texts number into the millions? Enter the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) Data Capsule. The HTRC Data Capsule (DC), at the heart of the HTRC platform, provides scholars with a unique virtual machine (VM) and data enclave that is supported by cyberinfrastructure at Indiana University to run analysis on the content of lists of texts created by scholars. The Data Capsule strikes a balance by giving researchers the freedom to use their own tools to carry out distant reading analysis, while quietly ensuring behind the scenes that those tools are not inadvertently malicious.

The security is needed because the major collection that HTRC Data Capsule provides analysis access to is the over 14,000,000 digitized texts in the HathiTrust Digital Library. Because over 60% of the corpus is in copyright, the processes and policies of the HTRC Data Capsule enforces non-consumptive research³. From the Authors Guild vs Google amended settlement agreement: "Non-Consumptive Research means research in which computational analysis is performed on one or more Books, but not research in which a researcher reads or displays substantial portions of a Book to understand the intellectual content presented within the Book." Non-consumptive analytics includes image analysis, text extraction, textual analysis and information extraction, linguistic analysis, automated translation, and indexing and search.

Practically, a researcher/educator is given an HTRC Data Capsule for a period of weeks to months. The VM is theirs to configure as they wish. They can download tools into the VM and run them. The security in the Data Capsule kicks in when they are ready to actually run their analysis tools. At that point, the VM is switched to a secure mode, and in the secure mode, access to the data is opened up, like opening a portal. The Data Capsule additionally limits how and when the products created by analysis tools leave the capsule. Data products leaving a data capsule must undergo manual results review prior to release.

The HTRC Data Capsule currently enables access to the works in HT that are in the public domain. Preliminary access through the capsules to digitized works in-copyright is anticipated in early 2017. At that point, the HTRC Data Capsule is expected to give access in 2017 to the full 14,000,000+ volumes in the HathiTrust Digital Library.

The HTRC Data Capsule system was prototyped through a three year grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (2011-2015). Extension of the HTRC Data Capsule project to larger compute resources and integration with the HTRC worksets was recently funded by a grant from the Andrew T. Mellon Foundation (2016-2018).

¹ Darwin read 916 books during the major portion of his research career (1837 - 1860), and his personal library was 1,484 volumes at his death (1882). For Darwin: Exploration and Exploitation of Victorian Science in Darwin's Reading Notebooks, Jaimie Murdock, Colin Allen, Simon DeDeo, 2015, http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.07175 (in review).

² Kathryn Schulz, "What is Distant Reading?" NYTimes Sunday Book Review, Jun 24, 2011.

Library Freedom Project Reports 20 Organizations Have Endorsed the Library Digital Privacy Pledge

June 24, 2016, filed by Gary Price, on Infodocket — "20 Organizations-libraries, publishers, library vendors, and library organizations have endorsed the Library Freedom Project's 'Library Digital Privacy Pledge'. These organizations are improving privacy for library users by implementing secure protocols on their web services and asking partners to do likewise."

"Websites that do not use secure protocols, such as HTTPS, expose their users to surveillance and intrusion in the network. A wifi or cellphone user who connects to an insecure library or publisher website makes every click visible to the wifi or cellphone provider, others connected to the same network. Content can be inspected and altered by every node participating in the user's connection. The resulting lack of privacy and security can is incompatible with the ethics and values of libraries. In the past few years, while Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the United States federal government have worked to implement HTTPS on all their web sites; the Let's Encrypt certificate authority has made secure infrastructure available to even the smallest web site...."

"...To add your organization to the list (published here ) or get more information, email the Library Freedom Project at pledge(at)libraryfreedomproject(dot)org."

OCLC wins Knight News Challenge award to promote collaboration between public libraries and Wikipedia

June 23, 2016 — "OCLC has been named a winner of the Knight News Challenge, an initiative of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, for a project that will promote collaboration between public libraries and Wikipedia and bring together authoritative library resources and contributors to one of the most popular information resources on the web."

"The project was selected as a winner from more than 600 applications and 47 semifinalists. Launched in September 2015, the Knight News Challenge on Libraries is funding breakthrough ideas that help libraries serve 21st century information needs."

"WebJunction, a program of OCLC Research, will work with a Wikipedian-in-Residence to deliver a national-scale training program that will build library staff skills to create and edit Wikipedia articles and to implement a Wikipedia outreach program in their local communities. This will include teaching U.S. public library staff the basics of Wikipedia editing and community norms, and giving library staff tools to engage local, experienced Wikipedians in related library events and activities."

June 14, 2016 — "Sari Feldman, president of the American Library Association (ALA), released the following statement regarding the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruling on United States Telecom Association, et al., v. Federal Communications Commission and United States of America:"

"'The American Library Association hails the U.S. Court of Appeals decision today upholding the Federal Communications Commission's Open Internet Order. America's libraries collect, create and disseminate essential information to the public over the Internet. We also ensure our users are able to access the Internet and create and distribute their own digital content and applications. Keeping an open Internet – often referred to as 'network neutrality' – is essential to meeting our mission in serving our communities.'..."

Key committee recommends Dr. Carla Hayden for Senate confirmation as nation's Librarian of Congress

June 9, 2016 — "Earlier today, the Senate Rules Committee voted to recommend that the full Senate approve the nomination of Dr. Carla Hayden to serve as the nation's next Librarian of Congress. Dr. Hayden, who served as President of the American Library Association (ALA) from 2003 to 2004, would be the first woman and first African American, and just 14th Librarian of Congress, in history."

"To be confirmed, a majority (51 or more) Senators must vote 'aye' when Dr. Hayden's name comes before them for confirmation. A vote in the full Senate has yet to be scheduled but could well occur prior to the beginning of the Senate's summer recess in mid-July, possibly sooner...."

"...'Dr. Hayden is one vote away from confirmation as Librarian of Congress and she is poised to become the first professional librarian to be named Librarian of Congress in over 60 years. Once confirmed, she will be the perfect Librarian to pilot the Library of Congress fully into the 21st century, transforming it again into the social and cultural engine of progress and democracy for all Americans that it was meant to be.'"

June 9, 2016 — "Each year, the Institute of Museum and Library Services presents select museums and libraries with the nation's highest honor, the National Medal for Museum and Library Service. The award recognizes libraries and museums that make significant and exceptional contributions in service to their communities."

"MLS is now accepting nominations for the 2017 awards. Anyone--an employee, a board member, a member of the public, or an elected official--can nominate an institution. To be considered, the institution must complete and return a nomination form by October 3, 2016."

"All types of nonprofit libraries and library organizations, associations and consortia are eligible, including academic, school, digital, and special libraries or archives. Public or private nonprofit museums of any discipline (including general, art, history, science and technology, children's, and natural history and anthropology), as well as historic houses and sites, arboretums, nature centers, aquariums, zoos, botanical gardens, and planetariums are also eligible."

June 8, 2016 — "Directions for a new piece of 'some assembly required' furniture are only useful if the user has the parts listed in the instruction manual. That makes putting those coffee tables and bookcases relatively easy to put together, compared to designing and constructing your own from scratch."

"Scientists at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are hoping to do the same thing with computer code. 'Whole Tale,' a new, five-year, $5 million National Science Foundation-funded Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (DIBBs) project, aims to give researchers the same instructions and ingredients to help ensure reproducibility and pave the way for new discoveries."

"Whole Tale will enable researchers to examine, transform, and then seamlessly republish research data, creating 'living articles' that will enable new discovery by allowing researchers to construct representations and syntheses of data."

June 7, 2016 — "OCLC Research will partner with grant recipient Cornell University Library and several other organizations to hold a national forum on issues concerning local authorities in library metadata. Under the lead of Chew Chiat Naun of Cornell, the forum has the objective to seek a common understanding among various stakeholders of the problems inherent in sharing authorities. Stakeholders include the LAM community, vendors of integrated library systems (ILS) and research information management services, authority vendors, content providers, academic administrators, and the communities they serve. This work is being funded by a $98,484 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)."

"From the grant proposal: 'By facilitating a national forum, we plan to identify solutions for facilitating the creation of more shareable authorities. This is a critical area in which a highly collaborative effort can promote interoperable metadata and linked data readiness. [...] Linked data offers the promise of unified discovery of knowledge relating to persons and organizations in place of the current fragmented user experience. [...] The goals of the forum are firstly to develop this shared understanding and document it in the form of a reference model and associated white paper, and secondly to identify and characterize a set of larger objectives around which interested stakeholders can convene to plan further action.'"

"The potential impact of addressing issues related to sharing local authorities includes aiding cross-platform discovery and supporting research information management, such as tracking scholarly output."

June 3, 2016 — "When a member of the Flint Water Study team tests and records results from a drop of water. When a student steps into Goodwin Hall, activating sensors to track usability and traffic patterns."

"But data, especially big data that has to be analyzed computationally, sometimes creates as many questions as it answers. Where does it all go? How do we store it? Who pays to store it? What kind of computer do we need to process the data? And how can we make sure that people years from now will still be able to access and reuse it?"

"University Libraries, in partnership with Virginia Tech researchers working with big data, is exploring these questions and more with the support of a $308,175 National Leadership Grant for Libraries from the Institute of Museum and Library Services."

"The project team includes: Zhiwu Xie, technology development librarian in the University Libraries; Tyler Walters, dean and professor, University Libraries; Edward Fox, professor of computer science in the College of Engineering; and Pablo Tarazaga, assistant professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering. Jiangping Chen, associate professor in the Department of Library and Information Sciences at the University of North Texas, will also help evaluate and review the project."

First Lady Michelle Obama Honors Extraordinary Museums, Libraries with National Medal

June 2, 2016 — "Yesterday at the White House, First Lady Michelle Obama joined the Institute of Museum and Library Services Director Dr. Kathryn K. Matthew to honor the recipients of the 2016 National Medal for Museum and Library Service. The award is the highest honor recognizing museums and libraries for service to the community. Ten institutions were recognized."

"The First Lady presented the National Medal to directors and community members from each institution who shared how the museum or library has made a significant difference in their lives. Mrs. Obama noted, 'Day after day, year after year, our nation's libraries and museums are here for our communities. And at the end of the day, you all don't measure your impact by the number of books on your shelves or pieces in your exhibits, but by the young people you inspire, the lives you transform, and the impact you have every single day on your communities.'"

Great Lakes Consortium awards access to Blue Waters supercomputer to 11 research projects

June 2, 2016 — "How the flu virus enters a cell in the body. Evaluating economic policy impacts of potential future climate change. Understanding the dynamics and physics of atomic matter during galaxy cluster formation. These are just a few of the research projects being pursued by the 11 science and engineering teams from across the country who were awarded time on the Blue Waters supercomputer through the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation. Over a 12-month period, these science and engineering teams will have a combined total of more than 4.3 million node hours on Blue Waters."

"The Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation is a collaboration among 29 colleges, universities, national research laboratories, and other educational institutions that facilitates the widespread and effective use of petascale high-performance computing. The consortium has been part of the Blue Waters project for the past eight years and makes annual peer-reviewed allocations on Blue Waters to research projects from GLCPC member institutions."

May 31, 2016 — "Institutional library budgets across the globe will increase by 1.4 per cent overall this year, reports the Annual Library Budget Survey, carried out by the Publishers Communication Group (PCG), Ingenta's publishing consultancy arm."

"The worldwide study, which interviewed senior librarians in 686 institutional libraries across the globe about their budget spend predictions for 2016, discovered that libraries in the Middle East and Africa region expect the highest levels of budget growth at 4.2 per cent, followed by Asia Pacific (+2.8 per cent) and South America (+2.1 per cent)."

"In contrast, the survey found that the outlook in more mature markets was far less optimistic, with North American libraries predicting a very modest 1 per cent rise in budget spend, and European libraries anticipating a decrease in spend of 0.1 per cent."

"Across the main budget lines, spend on materials (all information content provision) was expected to increase by a total of 1.2 per cent, with expenditure on serial set to rise by 1.4 per cent and on books by 1.3 per cent. In North America, librarians estimate their book budgets will grow by 1.9 per cent, while investment in serials will only see a marginal increase of 0.2 per cent."

May 25, 2016 announcement from Jane Mandelbaum, Library of Congress — "Nominations are now being accepted for the 2016 Innovation Awards for the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA)! The NDSA Innovation Working Group established the Innovation Awards in 2012 to recognize and encourage innovation in the field of digital stewardship."

"As a diverse membership group with a shared commitment to digital preservation, the NDSA understands the importance of innovation and risk-taking in developing and supporting a broad range of successful digital preservation activities. Acknowledging that innovative digital stewardship can take many forms, eligibility for these awards has been left purposely broad. Nominations are open to anyone or anything that falls into the above categories and any entity can be nominated for one of the four awards. Nominees should be US-based people and projects or collaborative international projects that contain a US-based partner. This is your chance to help us highlight and reward novel, risk-taking, and inventive approaches to the challenges of digital preservation."

"For more information on the details on awards from previous years, please see here: http://ndsa.org/awards/."

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant will fund development of shared model across 6 academic libraries

May 17, 2016 — "In an effort to improve researcher support, the University of Minnesota Libraries will lead efforts to develop a network for sharing data curation resources and staff across six major academic libraries. The one-year project is funded by Alfred P Sloan Foundation."

"The Data Curation Network will develop a 'network of expertise' model for data curation services that will enable academic libraries to collectively, and more effectively, curate a wider variety of data types – for example, by discipline and file format – that expands beyond what any single institution might offer alone. The goal is to better support researchers faced with a growing number of requirements to openly and ethically share their research data...."

"...The one-year project planning team, led by Lisa R. Johnston, Research Data Management/Curation Lead at the University of Minnesota Libraries, is charged with determining how to effectively implement, assess, and sustain a shared staffing model for providing data curation services."

May 16, 2016 — "The Institute of Museum and Library Services announced today that Dr. Marvin D. Carr has joined the agency as STEM and Community Engagement Advisor. "

"Dr. Carr previously served as Policy Advisor for STEM Education, Innovation, and Diversity to U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy...."

"...Dr. Carr joins IMLS as it works to pull together best practices in the STEM area. The STEM Expert Facilitation of Family Learning in Libraries and Museums, or STEMeX, initiative will provide grants up to $1,000,000 for projects of up to two years. Funded through the National Leadership Grants program, STEMeX has a goal of addressing challenges faced by museums and libraries and advancing practices in that field. Applications were due May 1 and the first STEMeX grant awards should be announced in coming months."