Project Information Literacy (PIL) is a series of national research studies that investigates what it is like to be a student in the digital age. Since 2008, we have surveyed and interviewed more than 13,000 college students and recent graduates from over 60 U.S. higher education institutions, making PIL the largest study of information literacy ever conducted. We seek to understand how students find information and conduct research — in their words and through their experiences — for coursework and solving information problems in their everyday lives. In this plenary talk, PIL’s information-seeking model is introduced and key research takeaways are presented from PIL’s different studies. Also included are examples from PIL’s work about how academic librarians throughout the country are developing ways for strengthening and supporting undergraduate research and ultimately, for helping students to succeed at learning.
Citation to persistent sources is fundamental to all academic work. Libraries have traditionally collected, organized and preserved those cited sources. Citations today, however, increasingly refer to web pages, not just print sources. Because web pages change their content and disappear all the time, citations to them are ineffective at best and, at times, misleading. This problem, known as "link rot" or "reference rot," means that much of our citation-dependent scholarship is being written on sand. Perma.cc is one solution to combat link rot. Unlike other web archiving services, such as ArchiveIt, Perma.cc relies on the creator of the work to do the archiving at the time of citation. Authors take snapshots of web pages they cite and deposit them in the Perma.cc service. Once deposited, Perma.cc assigns the web page a unique Perma URL (e.g. https://perma.cc/F37P-2E4V) that authors can add to the original URL in their citations. Should the original link later rot or be changed, readers can follow the Perma.cc URL to view the original source. Perma.cc was originally developed for use by the legal community but has received a National Digital Platform grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to broaden its use beyond the legal community. The service is now free to all colleges and universities. Libraries serve as the registrars for the Perma.cc service and provide support for their institutions' users. This presentation will provide an overview of the service, the role the library plays, and instructions for signing up.
http://perma.cc
With the combination of Wireless, Proxy, and ILS data, libraries today have a 360 degree, highly granular view of researcher activity. These data are valuable for operational decisions, however they have immense privacy implications. We will examine these data, their beneficial uses, and the necessary steps needed to protect researchers.
This presentation will be most relevant for libraries with: centralized wireless; centralized authentication; e.g. CAS, LDAP, Shibboleth; EZProxy or other web proxy to electronic resources, and designated patron type (faculty, undergraduate, etc.) information either in the ILS or in the CAS/LDAP/Shibboleth.
"Building an Islandora Data Repository Using an External DDN Storage Infrastructure" (Hutchens)
The University of Wyoming Libraries have partnered with UW's Advanced Research Computing Center (ARCC) to provide a campus research data repository. Coupling the Libraries' experience with Islandora and Fedora along with ARCC's expertise in high performance computing and storage, we successfully launched the UW Data Repository in September 2016. We now offer all campus researchers single sign-on authentication for dataset and metadata submission, simultaneous DOI assignment and DataCite metadata deposit via the EZID API, as well as unlimited file size storage capacity (something not achievable using Islandora version 7 alone). Using an "endowment" business model to fund storage costs, we have made this service free to all campus users who wish to share their data. Like all solutions, we've encountered numerous problems along the way, our implementation has its drawbacks, and we certainly have more work to do.
"Leveraging IR Collections as Distributed Service Layers" (Benedict, Wheeler)
Consideration of the research impact and organizational value of institutional repositories (IR) highlights the utility of defining and evolving innovative IR service models. As a particular example, the integration of OAI-PMH utilities and custom application programming interfaces (API) within widely adopted IR platforms including Digital Commons and DSpace enable repository managers to develop and promote unique services around IR as content stores for external research systems. In this project briefing, librarians from the University of New Mexico will describe the development of a spatially enabled discovery service that interacts dynamically with a Digital Commons-hosted collection of documents pertaining to Native American Water Rights Settlements (NAWRS). By extending Digital Commons' OAI-PMH metadata schema to incorporate point and polygon representations of the areas referenced within NAWRS documents, librarians were able to build transparent, dynamic linkages between the IR and the externally hosted spatial discovery portal. The resulting service adds value to both endpoints. This project briefing will include a description of the metadata enrichment and OAI-PMH harvest workflows, together with an overview of how the harvested metadata and documents are incorporated within the discovery portal architecture to best leverage the complementary capabilities of Elasticsearch, AngularJS, and the OpenLayers web mapping framework.
Sustainability of open-source software is a continual challenge in the relatively small world of cultural heritage institutions. The challenge is amplified due to the critical preservation implications tied to institutional commitments; cultural heritage institutions are expected to preserve and provide access to repository-held data into the foreseeable future, and yet our models for shared software governance are relatively immature, and commitments to software sustainability ebb and flow over time. The cultural, financial, and philosophical dimensions of the community surrounding the software play as much, if not more, of a role in a project's sustainability as the technology itself. With a collective thirty years of experience grappling with these challenges, the speakers will offer varied perspectives on approaches to ensuring the software that supports the long-term preservation and accessibility of our digital heritage will still exist tomorrow. This session will dive deeper into the specific challenges faced by a few open-source repository software communities, outlining what the Islandora, Hydra, and Fedora communities have done to address sustainability in their projects, past and present, and how well these measures have succeeded. Specific tactics for engaging in these projects will be offered as a call to action.
The Task Force on Technical Approaches to Email, formed in September 2016 and sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Digital Preservation Coalition, is charged with (a) reexamining and assessing current efforts to preserve email; (b) articulating a conceptual and technical framework in which these efforts can operate not as competing solutions, but as elements of an interoperable toolkit to be applied as needed; and (c) constructing a working agenda for the community to refine this technical framework, adjust existing tools to work within this framework, and begin to fill in missing elements. The Task Force will prepare a report of its findings. The report will include recommendations concerning the specific actions that those interested in email archiving can take to demonstrate within 2-5 years that archives can safely accession and preserve records of human expression in the form of email. In this project briefing, Task Force co-chairs Chris Prom and Kate Murray will report on the Task Force's work to date and will solicit feedback and input. This input is critical in helping Task Force members shape the final report and recommendations, which will be issued in late 2017.
http://www.emailarchivestaskforce.org/
High technology collaborative spaces in academic libraries have evolved in a variety of interesting ways over the past two decades. In this session, we will explore developments in facilities termed information or learning commons, digital scholarship centers, makerspaces, media studios, and others. We will review the results of a recent survey on information commons and an associated trends monograph under development. We will explore variations in implementation of newly configured and technology-enabled library spaces, and present our views of the successes and perceived missed opportunities of such facilities as they have developed over the past two decades. The presenters will invite observations from the audience regarding these trends.
http://www.projectinfolit.org/joan-lippincott-smart-talk.html
Academic libraries are taking on more active roles in support of research dissemination. Does a diminished role for university presses necessarily follow? It does not. I’ll discuss the distinctive and increasingly urgent functions of the university press, and the challenge of balancing the imperatives of sustainability and openness. How do we meet the differing requirements of professional, text, and trade authors? How do we fulfill our mission to make our publications available, discoverable, and searchable in digital form now, and in perpetuity? I will also cover strategies to promote productive partnerships, and the significant benefits of closer coordination among presses, libraries, and the academic departments within their institutions.
