Neil Beagrie, Programme Director, JISC
Continuing Access and Digital Preservation - the JISC Strategy for 2002-5
Presentation: [Powerpoint version] | [ HTML version]

Peter Buneman, Professor, University of Edinburgh
Archiving Scientific Data
Scientific databases and any digital library with evolving content present new problems for archiving. Frequent archiving is space-consuming and makes. Infrequent archiving means delay in publishing the latest data.

We present an archiving technique for hierarchical data with key structure. Our approach is based on the notion of timestamps whereby an element appearing in multiple versions of the database is stored only once along with a compact description of versions in which it appears. We develop an archiving tool for XML data that is capable of providing meaningful change descriptions and can also efficiently support a variety of basic functions concerning the evolution of data such as retrieval of any specific version from the archive and querying the temporal history of any element. This is in contrast to diff-based approaches where such operations may require undoing a large number of changes or significant reasoning with the deltas. Surprisingly, our archiving technique does not incur any significant space overhead when contrasted with other approaches. Our experimental results support this and also show that the compacted archive file interacts well with other compression techniques. Finally, another useful property of our approach is that the resulting archive is also in XML and hence can directly leverage existing XML tools.

Stephen Miller, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego
Bridging the Gap between Libraries and Data Archives: Progress Report
Presentation: [Powerpoint version] | [ HTML version]

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Ross MacIntyre, Senior Project Manager, MIMAS, University of Manchester
Creating a metadatabase for MIMAS services.

The presentation covered a recently completed project which developed a repository of metadata information relating to MIMAS data and information services.

A Z39.50 (Bath profile-compliant) infrastructure has been created, using Cheshire software, which provides access to the primary metadata associated with the datasets hosted by MIMAS. The metadata is qualified Dublin Core, encoded in XML.

The use of open standards has meant the data can be exploited further within JISC's evolving 'Information Environment', notably it has been incorporated into work on Collection Level Descriptions and supports the Open Archive Initiative's Metadata Harvesting Protocol.

Presentation: [Powerpoint version] | [ HTML version]

Pete Johnston, Research Officer, UKOLN, University of Bath
Surveying the landscape: collection-level description & resource discovery

Kurt Maly, Chair, Dominion University, Archon
A digital library that federates physics collections with varying degrees of metadata richness
Presentation: [Powerpoint version] | [ HTML version]

Andy Dong, Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley
Enhancing the Interoperability of Educational Digital Libraries
This presentation covers the development of an operational collection of collections for the US National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Digital Library (or NSDL) program to demonstrate the implementation of interoperability technologies that will enable NSDL collections to share key services and learning resources . One of the principal objectives of this research is to identify the needs of disciplinary collections at various stages of digital library development, from community building to shared metadata agreements to developed federated functionality -- and what interoperability technologies can be applied at each stage of development. The presentation highlights progress in:
- establishing information architecture design principles for educational digital libraries and how they influenced the design of the digital library services
- a federated search service based on SOAP; and
- a learner-centered meta-thesaurus for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education.

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Ann Weeks, Professor of the Practice, University of Maryland, College of Information Studies
Creating an International Children's Digital Library

The importance of books in children's lives cannot be minimized. However, access to diverse multicultural literature can be limited despite the best efforts of librarians, teachers, and parents. The financial resources for collections, particularly in urban areas in the United States and in many areas throughout the world, are limited and insufficient to provide the diverse collections reflective of today's populations and children's needs. To address these needs, a team from The Internet Archive, the largest library of the Internet, and the University of Maryland, a leader in children's interface design, is creating the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL). The ICDL will give young people around the world access to children's literature through a large-scale digital archive of more than 10,000 digitized children's books. A prototype of the ICDL will be launched at an event to be held at the US Library of Congress during National Children's Book Week in November 2002.

Visit "Search Kids" at: http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/kiddesign/searchkids.shtml

Muniram Budhu, Professor, University of Arizona, NSDL
GROW-NCERL: A digital library of interactive collections in soils, rock and water resources engineering

The US National Science Foundation has established a program to create a National Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL). One of the subsidiary NSDL libraries under development is the National Civil Engineering Educational Resources Library (NCERL). NCERL is intended to be a digital library collection of quality civil engineering information and resources that will provide the knowledge base to make citizens more informed about their built-environment and have rapid access to cutting edge civil engineering technologies and high quality education resources. The first phase of NCERL is the creation and collection of digital resources in three areas of civil engineering geotechnical (soils) engineering, rock engineering and water resources engineering (GROW).

A team of educators, resource creators, librarians, computer and assessment specialists from different units (College of Engineering & Mines, University Library, School of Information Resources and Library Science, Computer and Communication Information Technologies, and Assessment and Enrollment Research) within the University of Arizona has been assembled to develop, collect and transform, and disseminate digital information on geotechnical engineering, rock engineering and water resources engineering.

In this contribution, the salient features of GROW-NCERL are described. GROW-NCERL is intended to be a "one-stop" access for quality information, resources, and activities to meet the learning, teaching and research needs of a wide audience including higher education, professionals, and the general public. GROW-NCERL provides resources within a structured dynamic learning environment to enhance learning. The emphases are on graphics, interactive animations and contextual information.

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Andy Powell, Distributed Systems, UKOLN, University of Bath
Technical overview of the JISC Information Environment

Presentation: [Powerpoint version] | [ HTML version]

Peter Binkley, Digital Initiatives Technology Librarian, University of Alberta
National and Provincial Initiatives in Canada

William Arms, Professor of Computer Science, Cornell University and Steve Griffin, Programme Director, National Science Foundation (NSF)
The NSDL: A case study in interoperability

Monica Bonett, Software Developer, UKOLN, University of Bath
IMesh Toolkit: A SOAP-based approach to managing subject gateway user profiles.

Presentation: [HTML version]

Judith Klavans, Director, CRIA, Columbia University

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Alan Robiette, Programme Director, JISC
New Developments in Authentication and Access Management

This presentation reviews the emerging developments in managing access to electronic information, with particular reference to standards and architectures. Projects which will be discussed include Shibboleth (Internet2), PAPI (Spanish national academic network) and Athens (EduServ). Finally it will examine the possible cross-fertilisation between digital library activities and the Grid model of distributed systems.

David Millman, Director, Information Services and Research and Development, Columbia University

Presentation: [Powerpoint version]

Paul Watry and Robert Sanderson, CHESHIRE, Liverpool University Library
Cheshire demonstration
This presentation Introduces Cheshire information retrieval system.
Demonstrates cross-searching (WARM)
Demonstrates new Cheshire III client
Demonstrates new visualization client

David Medyckyj-Scott, Manager Geo-data Services, EDINA, University of Edinburgh
Geo-data service developments at EDINA - interoperability in the Information Environment.

EDINA's mission is to enhance the productivity of research, learning and teaching in UK higher and further education. It does this through providing staff and students with access to key information resources, as part of the JISCs Information Environment.

Geo-spatial data and geo-referenced information is becoming an increasingly important part of EDINAs activities. This presentation will describe the various geo-data projects EDINA is undertaking as part of the JISC 5/99 programme. Projects to be described include: Go-Geo! a geo-data portal; Geo-x-walk, a gazetteer server and e-MapScholar, which is looking at the creation of a service which provides customisable, interactive learning material about geo-spatial data and concepts.

Interoperability between these demonstrator services and EDINAs other geo-data services is critical and the presentation will look at how the adoption of the Open GIS Consortiums implementation specifications is helping us achieve interoperability. Finally, the presentation will look at how Go-Geo! and Geo-x-walk are providing mechanisms which, if generally adopted, could enable geographic searching of the resources within the JISC Information Environment.

Presentation: [Powerpoint version] | [ HTML version]

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Dennis Nicholson, Director, CDLR
The HILT High Level Thesaurus Project, Phases I and II

Presentation covers the HILT High Level Thesaurus Project Phase I results and the plans for a Phase II Pilot

Presentation: [Powerpoint version] | [ HTML version]

Greg Newton-Ingham, Head of National Advisory Service for Moving Pictures and Sound, MAAS - Media Online
A overview of all the stages from content selection through to use within the DNER and UK academic community. The presentation covers:

Selection
Aquisition
Encoding
Storage
Delivery
Use

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Jim Strom, Head of Advanced Telematics, University of Manchester
Streaming Video: Overcoming Barriers for Teaching and Learning

Streaming media has become easier to establish with the availability of highly adaptive PC-based production and web delivery tools. Moreover streaming technology has enabled the lecturer to be a producer and broadcaster as well as a consumer, removing the heavy dependency on media support staff. However, local technological, infrastructural and pedagogical issues continue to be a barrier to a broader take-up of this new delivery medium.

This presentation examines issues that relate to these barriers, exploring approaches to streaming media implementation which are low-resource in terms of skills, time and cost, and looking at the technological (and pedagogical) trade-off between ease-of-use and production quality in different subject areas. Different integration models will be identified, drawn from project case studies, reflecting the importance to both the learner and the teacher of image, interactivity and integration.

The paper draws on the work of the UK JISC/DNER project - Click and Go Video - to provide help and guidance for the UK academic community in streaming video production, delivery and pedagogy. The project has formulated guidelines, checklists and web-based illustrations to help lecturers overcome practical difficulties and share examples of best practice.

Presentation: [Powerpoint version]

Steve Hitchcock, University of Southampton
From eprint archives to open archives and OAI: the Open Citation project

This presentation covers progress since Stratford All-Projects meeting in 2000

- Demonstrate some new services
- Outline key tasks remaining
- Beyond the Open Citation Project

Presentation: [Powerpoint version] | [ HTML version]

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John MacColl, Sub-librarian, Edinburgh University Library
Climbing the Scholarly Publishing Mountain with Project SHERPA

This presentation considers the scholarly publishing crisis as perceived by the major UK research libraries (the Consortium of University Research Libraries) which recently made the successful proposal to JISC for Project SHERPA ('Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access'). It covers:

* the scholarly publishing crisis
* the benefits of a free corpus of research articles
* the challenges of creating open research archives in UK universities
* why digital preservation is crucial
* Project SHERPA and its objectives

Paper: [PDF format]

Presentation: [Powerpoint version] | [ HTML version]

Patrick Min, Graduate Student, Princeton University
Query Interfaces for a 3D Model Search Engine

The goal of this project is to collect from the web, and make available through a variety of useful interfaces, 3D models for use in 3D computer graphics applications. Key issues are the efficient acquisition of these models from the web, designing effective shape matching methods, and designing user-friendly query interfaces. This presentation focuses on the design of shape-based query interfaces.

Presentation: [Powerpoint version] | [ HTML version]

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Colin Allen, Associate Editor, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The presentation describes evidence of our current progress towards making the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy the most authoritative source of information about philosophy on the web, and discusses the features of our software that have made it possible to administer a project involving 620 authors and 70 subject editors with a very small paid staff. It covers alternative plans for the long term sustainability of the encyclopedia and describes the drawbacks of subscription-based models of support.

Presentation: [RTF version] | [ HTML version]

The presentation features the Shuhai Wenyuan Digital Database and Internet Worktable

- What this allows students to do
- How this affects classroom dynamics
- What emerges as a desirable additional tool - something we would like some help with.

Presentation: [Powerpoint version] | [tilesHTML version ]

Doug Pearson, Manager, Digital Media Network Services, Indiana University
The Indiana University Digital Music Library

The presentation is a briefing on the progress and developments of the Indiana University Variations2 Digital Music Library project. We will be releasing version 1.0 of our software and making it available to the satellite sites, beginning with three sites in the UK in June/July. The presentation will provide background information on project goals, research areas, development status and future objectives.

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Jerry Goldman, Professor, Northwestern University
Dead man talking: findings from the "national gallery of the spoken word"

Our cultural heritage extends beyond text and images to audio and video. Storage requirements and lack of agreement on standards have stood in the way of a preservation strategy. The longer we wait, the lower the cost and the greater the likelihood that a standard will emerge. This logic may leave archivists and librarians immobilized and when action comes, the deluge will also arrive. Moreover, the risks of waiting are real and substantial. The amount of audio materials now in libraries and archives (either on vinyl, open-reel, cassettes, and digital) is staggering. My talk will explore some ways to address digitizing spoken-word collections for preservation, delivery and access.

It may be necessary to convince text-driven skeptics of the value in spoken-word materials. Scholars and print journalists are complicit in the commitment to text-only versions of 'history' and 'news.' For historians, their methodology relies on structured interviews, transcription, and the opportunity for subjects to revise their remarks. The result is a written transcript, the sine qua non of the oral historian. For journalists, the story comes to the reader in the inverted pyramid form with a strong lead and the facts to support it buried in the paragraphs that follow. But I would maintain that the written transcript and the print news story, while valuable, are pretenders to history or news. The document is not the text, but the spoken word, which contains emotive information to inform and enlighten the listener whether student or scholar or journalist.

The tasks are substantial but the good news is that costs are declining rapidly. Moreover, the current decay of analog audio materials demands action now. The National Gallery of the Spoken Word, an DLI2-sponsored project at Michigan State University, has been addressing several issues, including preservation of analog materials and digitization of new content. As a co-principal investigator on this project, I will report on preservation, digitization, delivery, and use.

Spoken word materials can be deeply affecting. They bring to life in ways that text cannot a vital aspect of our heritage. Yet for all its power, these materials remain rigidly linear. One must listen in order to find the relevant or appropriate part. For example, President Richard Nixon employed voice-activated devices to capture every conversation and glass clink in the Oval Office, on the telephone, in the Executive Office Building, and at Camp David and other venues. In this remarkable 3000+ hour collection, how does one find the needle in the haystack? Metadata help, such as conversation logs and dates. But that simply narrows the field. Until recently, one had to listen to hours and hours of information, but new search strategies will make access and use far easier.

The last issue I plan to address is the manner of use. Once you find the critical evidence, how do you preserve it in a standard form that you can cite and others can check? Today's print citation practices do not come close to achieving the precision and efficient verification that a digitized world enables. But here too the future is bright. The ability to identify start- and stop-points in a digital stream will become standard and tools exist today to exploit this pinpoint accuracy.

The future may seem overwhelming when we contemplate the enormity of the task. The challenge we face is action versus inaction. And act we must because the risk to our oral heritage in the face of inaction will prove unfortunate indeed.

Presentation: [ HTML version]

Presentation: [Powerpoint version] | [ HTML version]

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Email comments to s.hassen@ukoln.ac.uk
Page last revised on: 12-Aug-2002