Below I've included the Library IT report I presented at last
Tuesday's faculty meeting. In addition, I've added
information that addresses two questions raised at the
faculty meeting regarding what services are available to us
in the Library, and the need for a library IT glossary.
Library Systems Office services:
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/systems/
(this is a good overall page for starters--click on "our
services" link in the left-hand navigation bar to see a full
listing of Systems' services)
Library IT Glossaries:
There are numerous digital library glossaries accessible
through the net, and many of them are not updated on a
regular basis. The information science school at Germany's
University of Duisburg has an interesting and up-to-date
glossary of digital library terms and definitions:
http://www.is.informatik.uniduisburg.de/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Office of Library Information Technology Report, Faculty
Meeting 9/21/05
I would like to take this opportunity to let you all know
about the high-priority activities that the Office of Library
Information Technology Planning and Policy is working on
during the fall semester.
1. Learning Commons: this semester the Library and CITES
will kick off the Learning Commons initiative—our opportunity
to re-conceptualize the Undergraduate Library space to
provide student-centered support for learning, working on
course-related assignments, getting help with using Library
content, and navigating the UIUC campus network and beyond.
In early October the Library and CITES will hold a kick-off
meeting with a planning group that brings in representative
from undergraduate-related programs all over campus. This
meeting will set in motion several implementation groups that
will assess student needs, recommend how CITES and the
Library will blend technology support and information content
services, and will recommend a physical layout for year one
of the Learning Commons. The targeted start date for the
Learning Commons is Fall 2006, but work on the services and
the physical space will commence in the Spring of 2006. Lori
Mestre, the newly-appointed Digital Learning Librarian, will
coordinate the Learning Commons initiative. Others in the
Library who are involved include: Joyce Wright, David Ward,
Lisa Hinchliffe, Bob Burger, John Weible, Beth Sandore. Once
the working groups are formed, a number of Library staff will
be involved in the planning and implementation. Support for
this initiative comes from the Division of Intercollegiate
Athletics, the Library, and CITES.
2. IDEALS: (Illinois Digital Environment for Access to
Learning and Scholarship)
IDEALS is a service offered through the University Library
and CITES under sponsorship of the Provost's Office to
preserve and provide persistent and reliable access to the
digital research and scholarship of faculty, staff, and
students on the UIUC campus in order to give these works the
greatest possible recognition and distribution. IDEALS aims
to complement traditional scholarly publishing. Sarah
Shreeves (Project Coordinator) and Tim Donohue (Research
Programmer) have brought up both an experimental and a
production version of the DSpace repository software, and
they are working with several campus units who are early
adopters of the system. There is a web site for the
initiative so that you can learn more
http://ideals.uiuc.edu. The Web site will change as we
implement the production system and adopt a logo. Sarah will
provide a more in-depth update and more information about how
you can get involved in this initiative later in this meeting.
3. WebFeat Federated Search and SFX Open URL Link Resolver
implementations: Two teams are working to implement these
two software systems that the former ILCSO (now CARLI)
consortium has licensed on behalf of the consortium. SFX
introductory workshops are scheduled over the next few
weeks. Look for more communication on the roll-out of both
of these access-enhancing software systems in the near
future, both in LIBNEWS and at the web sites for each
initiative. The sites for both OLRIT! and the Feds are
linked to http://www.library.uiuc.edu/accessstrategy/.
4. CONTENTdm, the third system licensed by the ILCSO (now
CARLI) consortium, is a software system that supports the
development of digital image, audio, and video collections.
The Library has owned the CONTENTdm software for several
years now and there are a number of image collections already
available through the software. Nuala Koetter of the DSD
made a presentation on CONTENTdm at last week’s ILS forum,
but in the coming months look for more training and
informational activities on building digital collections
using CONTENTdm and other software systems supported by
Library IT. To see currently available digital collections
of the Library, check out
http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/.
5. UIUC Library Joins LOCKSS Alliance to Support E-Journal
Archiving
The University of Illinois Library recently joined the LOCKSS
program as members of the LOCKSS Alliance. LOCKSS (lots of
copies keep stuff safe) is a consortium based at Stanford
University of over 80 institutions world-wide that provides
open-source archiving software, and works with publishers to
get permission to archive Web versions of their e-journals.
Becoming a LOCKSS library involves setting up the LOCKSS
archiving software on a computer, and periodically archiving
selected e-journal titles to which the Library subscribes,
and for which the LOCKSS consortium has obtained permission
from the publishers.
LOCKSS has negotiated permissions to archive e-journals from
over 60 subscription publishers and a number of publishers of
open access journals
(http://lockss.stanford.edu/about/titles.htm).In taking
this step to join the LOCKSS Alliance, the University Library
is adding LOCKSS as one of several digital preservation
technology tools that it will use or acquire in the coming
years to fulfill our commitment to ongoing digital
preservation of important e-content.
The LOCKSS Alliance is a membership organization for
libraries interested in LOCKSS as part of their strategy for
building and preserving digital collections of e-journals and
other web-based content. Until recently LOCKSS has been
supported by a variety of grants and in-kind contributions.
The Alliance was formed recently in an effort to stabilize
the support for LOCKSS software development and program
activities. It is governed by a Board of Directors, and
staffed by project team members. The Alliance is working
intensively with the Board as well as a newly-appointed
Technical Policy committee to determine LOCKSS' technical
development directions and priorities, and how LOCKSS can
establish a permanent role in the library and publisher
communities. Beth Sandore is a member of the Technical
Policy committee, representing the UIUC Library.
Nuala Koetter and John Weible will be responsible for
implementing the LOCKSS server in the Library, and they will
work closely with the Office of Library Collections and
Acquisitions in this endeavor.
6. We have nearly passed the first year of joint work with
GSLIS, OCLC, NCSA and partner libraries in our work on the
Library of Congress National Digital Information
Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP)—
http://ndiipp.uiuc.edu. For the next two years bothGSLIS
and the Grainger Engineering Library will concentrate on
testing and evaluating several open source institutional
repository software systems, and we will work with a number
of state and academic libraries to test the suitability of
different repository systems with different formats of
digital content (text, audio, video, numeric datasets). We
are also working with OCLC to develop and test tools that
will help libraries automatically collect and archive Web
information in very specific ways. This project brings
together librarians and computing professionals from the
Grainger Digital Library Initiative the Library Systems
Office, and the IDEALS institutional repository initiative.
7. Content Management Systems (CMS) to replace the Gateway
Web site:
Web content management systems help organizations with many
web pages and web-based forms and databases to keep better
track of their content and provide them with easier
mechanisms to keep their web content up-to-date. One big
reason why we are interested in content management systems so
that those of us who don't know how to create Web (or html)
documents can do so without knowing html encoding.
In late November, 2005, Library IT will initiate the formal
process of selecting a content management system for the UIUC
Library, and an implementation group will be appointed to
develop formal functional requirements and the group will
draw as much as possible on the needs expressed in this forum
by Library staff. We will target next fall, 2006 as the
initial roll-out time for the first public phase of the
Library's content management system.
In the next three months, the Services Advisory Committee
will work with Library IT to help all Library staff develop a
better understanding of what content management systems are
and what kinds of things they might support to make our work
more effective, if not easier. I'd like to encourage
everyone to participate in the Library’s CMS forum
discussion, and to try out some of the library CMS examples
at other institutions (Indiana University Library created
their own CMS that runs their entire public web site--it's
very nicely done). And, if you have questions or want to make
comments, please post them to the forum
(http://www.library.uiuc.edu/systems/forum.html),or feel
free to email me (sandore@uiuc.edu).
8. Digital Services and Development unit has moved to the
Main Library and has set up its offices in Room 423. Please
stop by and welcome Nuala Koetter, Amy Maroso-Hatcher, and
YuPing Tseng. The DSD will be finishing up a joint IMLS
National Leadership Grant with the Illinois State Library
that has provided in-person and online digitization training
for hundreds of professionals from libraries, museums, and
archives in Illinois and world-wide over the past two years.
A final report with a survey of the effectiveness of training
will be forthcoming in early 2006.
9. New Titles List (RSS Feed). We are planning two upgrades
to the New Titles List this fall, after which we'll probably
declare it a finished product (at least until the next round
of Voyager release). Look for the first upgrade to be
announced on LIBNEWS in two or three weeks. While this is a
small project, it seems to have been very well-received,
particularly as one of the first forays into RSS feed
technologies.
10. Work in committees or groups:
Several IT people will be actively involved in getting CAPT
off the ground this fall;
Following on two of the recommendations from the Digital
Content Creation Team (DCCT), two activities are going
forward:
Nuala Koetter and Chris Prom are working on a recommendation
to the Executive Committee to create new opportunities for
staff to work on Library digital projects;
A working group has been formed that will develop a plan for
long-term storage and digital preservation of the Library’s
digital assets. They will make a recommendation to the EC by
January 15, 2006.
21 Sept. 2005 (B. Sandore)
Beth Sandore
Associate University Librarian for
Information Technology Planning and Policy
Professor of Library Administration
246A Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
University of Illinois
Urbana, Illinois 61801
Tel. 217.333.2592
Fax 217.244.4358
Net sandore@uiuc.edu
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Last modified by: Jie Zhao on 12/15/08