Digitization 101

As received in email.

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Thanks to another student, Alicia Annal, for bringing this content on digital curation from Helen Tibbo to my class' attention. There is both a video of her talk (below) and a printed version of Tibbo's remarks.

Depending on what circles you travel in, you've been hearing about "big data."  This has become the rage; grabbing headlines and creating its own conferences.  The fact that we have been able to create digital information - even through digitization - has laid the foundation for big data. 

What is big data?  Big data is not the spreadsheet on your laptop.  It is data that is too large to handle, store, analyze and preserve without specific tools.  Michael Chui, a Senior Fellow in the McKinsey Global Institute, noted that in the United States, the average company with more than 1000 employees (in most sectors) have more data than the Library of Congress.  Companies that have a good IT and information infrastructure are better poised to capture the value from this data. 

If you are a special librarian working in a corporation, likely someone is talking about big data and making decisions about how to handle it.  Are you a part of that conversation?

The same is true for academic librarians.  Some agencies are mandating that grant recipients make available their research data.  Likely there are specific conversations occurring about this that you should be including in.

For many librarians, the big data at your fingertips is your circulation data or data created when your databases are accessed.  The conversation you need to have is with your software suppliers.  Are they creating tools that will help you analyze this big data?

This McKinsey podcast (18 min. MP3) will provide a good overview of big data and help you understand why it is important.  Yes, the entire podcast is geared toward business.  That's okay.  In fact, more library and information science professionals are pursuing working with big data in businesses, so this will give you an idea of why.

Podcast Description:

The amount of data in the world is exploding. Companies and organizations capture trillions of bytes of information about individuals, customers, suppliers, and operations. Meanwhile, millions of networked sensors are being embedded in the physical world in devices such as mobile phones and automobiles, sensing, creating, and communicating additional data. This so called "Big Data" has the potential to be aggregated, analyzed, and used to generate concrete insights and inform decisions. A recent study developed by the McKinsey Global Institute examines the potential value that big data can create for organizations and sectors in the economy, and explores what leaders of organizations and policy makers need to do to capture that value. McKinsey's research on Big Data is discussed by Michael Chui, a Senior Fellow in the McKinsey Global Institute who is based in McKinsey's San Francisco office.

As received in email.

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Registration Now Open!

Visit http://ils.unc.edu/digccurr/institute.html for more information.

REGISTRATION LINK: http://cfx.research.unc.edu/res_classreg/browse_single.cfm?New=1&event=612E21BE7477F79D361921C40901D94BE49885E1

The Institute consists of one five-day session in May 2012 and a two-day follow-up session and a day-long symposium in January 2013. Each day of the summer session will include lectures, discussion and hands-on "lab" components. A course pack and a private, online discussion space will be provided to supplement learning and application of the material. An opening reception dinner on Sunday, Continental breakfast, break time snacks and coffee, and a dinner on Thursday will also be included.

This institute is designed to foster skills, knowledge and community-building among professionals responsible for the curation of digital materials.

Registration:

• Regular registration : $950
• Late registration (after April 15, 2012): $1,050
• Summer Institute accommodations (includes 5 nights of a private room in a 4 room/2 bath dorm suite on the UNC campus, with kitchen, linens, and internet access): $300*

*We highly recommend that you choose the on-campus accommodations but many area hotels will be available. This fee covers accommodations for May 2012 only.

If you are a grant recipient working on a digital project, we recommend that you check with your program officer to request approval to use available grant funds to attend the institute.

Institute Instructors Include:

• From the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Dr. Cal Lee, Dr. Richard Marciano, Dr. Helen Tibbo.
• Dr. Nancy McGovern, from the University of Michigan.
• Dr. Seamus Ross, from the University of Toronto.
• Dr. Carolyn Hank, McGill University.

Institute Components: (may be subject to some revisions and reorganization)

• Overview of digital curation definition, scope and main functions
• Where you see yourself in the digital curation landscape
• Digital curation program development
• Engendering Trust: Processes, Procedures and Forms of Evidence
• LAB - DRAMBORA in action

• Strategies for engaging data communities
• Characterizing, analyzing and evaluating the producer information environment
• Submission and transfer scenarios – push and pull (illustrative examples)
• Defining submission agreements and policies
• Strategies for writing policies that can be expressed as rules and rules that can automatically executed
• LAB - Making requirements machine-actionable

• Importance of infrastructure independence
• Overview of digital preservation challenges and opportunities
• Managing in response to technological change
• Detaching Bits from their Physical Media: Considerations, Tools and Methods
• LAB - Curation of Unidentified Files

• Returning to First Principles: Core Professional Principles to Drive Digital Curation
• Characterization of digital objects
• LAB - Assessing File Format Robustness
• Access and use considerations
• Access and user interface examples
• How and why to conduct research on digital collection needs
• LAB - Analyzing server logs and developing strategies based on what you find

• Overview and characterization of existing tools
• LAB - Evaluating set of software options to support a given digital curation workflow
• Formulating your six-month action plan - task for each individual, with instructors available to provide guidance
• Summary of action plans
• Clarifying roles and expectations for the next six months

January 7-8, 2013
Participants in the May event will return to Chapel Hill in Jan. 2013 to discuss their experiences in implementing what they have learned in their own work environments. Participants will compare experiences, lessons learned and strategies for continuing progress. Friday, January 4th will be a public symposium, free to the Institute participants. (Accommodations for January will be the responsibility of the attendee.)

Visit http://ils.unc.edu/digccurr/institute.html for more information.

For more information, contact Angela Murillo (amurillo@email.unc.edu) for Institute questions or Wakefield Harper (wharper@email.unc.edu) for payment or registration questions.

I have not been posting regularly about upcoming conferences that may be of interest to you.  My apologies.  Here are a few that have recently appeared in my mail.

Born of Disruption: An Emerging New Normal for the Information Landscape
NFAIS Annual Conference
Feb. 26-8, 2012
Philadelphia, PA
http://www.nfais.org

Future Perfect 2012: Digital Preservation by Design
March 26-27, 2012
Wellington, NZ
http://futureperfect.org.nz

DIGITAL DIRECTIONS: New Foundations: Creation - Curation - Use
Sponsored by The Northeast Document Conservation Center
June 13-15, 2012
Boston, MA
http://nedcc.org/dd2012/

Jeanne Kramer-Smyth, the author of Spellbound Blog, has written a piece on transferring data from old 5.25" floppy disks.  This follows Jason Scott's July 12 post where he offers to help people retrieve data from these old disks. He also wrote a procedure for how to do it. Scott said that a growing number of organizations and people are focusing on this, but that they are focusing on it too late.  The data on those disks may already be gone.  However, if you have 5.25 floppies, check out the Kramer-Smyth and Scott blog posts for information on how to rescue that old data.

If you have 3.5" floppy disks, you should be considering what to do with them now.  There are still 3.5" disk drives around, so you do have the possibility of reading those disks and transferring that data from them, without a huge amount of hassle.  Now would also be a good time to decide if you just want to toss the disks in the trash and forget about them. If you are going to throw away any disks, remember to render them unreadable by harming the media, especially if you think the disk contains any sensitive or confidential information.

Bill LeFurgy, digital initiatives librarian at the Library of Congress, wrote:

I often hear from students and others with questions about the skills they need to compete in the job market. What programming languages should I learn? How much do I need to know about specific digital formats? Which standards should I study in detail?

 “No, no–those are the wrong questions!”

That’s what I want to shout when I hear this line of inquiry. But I don’t yell because it’s rude and because I know the impulse flows from my own bias toward broader, more adaptive skills.

Read his complete answer, especially if you're a student wondering about the skills you really need!

As received via email.

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IDCC11 will be presented by the Digital Curation Centre, UK in  partnership with the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). The Programme Committee invites submissions of papers that reflect current concerns in digital curation and specific concerns arising from our conference theme:

• Lessons learned from the inter-disciplinary use of open data: examples of enablers, barriers and success stories
• Curation of mixed data collections, with open and sensitive or private content
• Gathering evidence for benefits of data sharing
• Building capacity for the effective management, sharing and reuse of open data
• Scale issues in the management of sensitive data
• Tensions between maintaining quality and openness
• Linked data, open data, closed data and provenance
• Technical and organisational solutions for data security
• Developing new metrics for open data
• Ethical issues and personal data
• Legislation and open data

Full details of the Call for Papers can be found at: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc11/call-papers

Submissions will be accepted from 9 May 2011

Received via email from Charles W. Bailey, Jr., who continues to compile interesting bibliographies.

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Version 2 of the Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship as an XHTML website with live links to many included works.  This selective bibliography includes over 500 articles, books, and technical reports  that are useful in understanding digital curation and preservation.  All included works are in English.  It is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Table of Contents:

1 General Works about Digital Curation and Preservation
2 Digital Preservation Copyright Issues
3 Digital Preservation of Formats and Materials
   3.1 General Works
   3.2 Digital Data
   3.3 Digital Media
   3.4 E-journals
   3.5 Other Digital Formats and Materials
   3.6 World-Wide Web
4 Digital Preservation Metadata
5 Digital Preservation Models and Policies
6 Digital Preservation National and International Efforts
7 Digital Preservation Projects and Institutional
Implementations
8 Digital Preservation Research
9 Digital Preservation Services
   9.1 JSTOR
   9.2 LOCKSS
   9.3 Portico
10 Digital Preservation Strategies
11 Digital Repository Digital Preservation Issues
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author

Materials from the December 2010 International Digital Curation Conference are now available online, including presentation materials and 19 videos.  Among the videos are videos of the keynotes and other sessions, as well as informal interviews.

3:34 p.m. - Link is fixed.

In the past, I have tended to use an Amazon.com wish list as well as blog posts to track books of interest relating to digitization and copyright.  Earlier this year, I converted those into an Amazon Listmania list and then added other related books from Amazon.  A few people have stumbled across the list and perhaps have found it useful.  If you're curious about what's on it, check it out.

For me, this is truly a list to use to jog my memory.  Yeah...I saw a copyright book that would be useful...what was it again?  If you'd like to create a list to jog your memory, you can do it in Amazon (or another online bookseller), LibraryThing or on other web sites.  (And having it online really is more useful than in a document on your computer.)  The trick is to find a place that you'll remember and that will have or allow you to enter information that you know will be useful.  Not only is that list then available for you, but you can also share it with others.  And perhaps, if funding is available, it could be the list you use to updated your institution's collection.

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FTC Disclaimer: Digitization 101 is an Amazon affiliate and may receive a small commission if you purchase a product or service from an Digitization 101 Amazon link. (Trust me, I'm not getting rich off of Amazon.)

As received via email.

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The call for papers for IDCC10 is open until 23 July 2010.

• To share good practice, skills and knowledge transfer
• To influence and inform future digital curation policy & practice
• To test out curation resources and toolkits
• To explore collaborative possibilities and partnerships
• To engage with curation educators and trainers

• Kevin Ashley, Director of the Digital Curation Centre
• Christine Borgman, Presidential Chair & Professor of Information Studies, University of California Los Angeles
• Sheila Corrall, Professor of Librarianship & Information Management, University of Sheffield
• Stephen Friend, President and CEO Sage Bionetworks
• Chris Lintott, Principal Investigator, Galaxy Zoo, University of Oxford
• Clifford Lynch,  Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information
• MacKenzie Smith, Associate Director for Technology, MIT Libraries.
• Barend Mons, WikiProteins, Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam
• John Unsworth, Dean and Professor Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
• Antony Williams, Vice President of Strategic Development, ChemSpider at the Royal Society of Chemistry

Registration will open on 1 September 2010.

Sent on behalf of IDCC10 Programme Committee:

Co-chaired by Kevin Ashley, Director of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), Liz Lyon, Associate Director of the DCC, Allen Renear and Melissa Cragin from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois, Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information.

As received via email.

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Please join us at CURATEcamp 2010, an unconference on curation micro-services, at the University of California, Berkeley, August 16-17, 2010. Thanks to the generous support of Penn State's Digital Library technologies group and the California Digital Library, food (breakfast and lunch) and lodging will be provided at no cost during the conference. Lodging will be single rooms in the UC-Berkeley dorms on the Clark Kerr Campus from August 15-17. You are responsible for your travel arrangements and off-campus lodging arrangements should you prefer the hotel experience to the dormitory experience. Space is limited, so register today:

More information at:

 As received in email.

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JISC, the Digital Preservation Coalition, Portico and the University of London Computer Centre are pleased to announce the release of a new report investigating long term access to digitised collections.

The digital universe grew by 62% in 2009, but those adding to these resources need to think long term if they want to make best use of their public funding. Clearly stated preservation policies are essential in guaranteeing that researchers in the future will be able to access and use a digital resource, according to a new report funded by JISC. But the responsibility needs to be shared between funders, who must articulate the need for data curation, and universities, who need to implement a preservation policy for each digital collection.

The advice comes as the government announces a new 'right to data' so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis. JISC has invested more than £20 million in the last five years so that students and researchers can have instant and flexible access to a range of the UK's most important archival collections.

Alastair Dunning, programme manager at JISC, said: "Although our initial goal was to examine our own projects, the recommendations and outcomes are relevant to funders and projects in many different sectors."

Dr William Kilbride, Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition, said: "JISC challenged us to work in fine detail and in broad strokes at the same time. We immersed ourselves in the detail of sixteen different projects with a brief to support these projects and use that experience for a strategic and lasting contribution based on hard empirical evidence."

The results of this work published today contain recommendations for institutions, funders and those assessing funding projects and programmes.  The authors anticipate that the template used to survey the projects could also form a useful blueprint for funders and assessors in the future.

The Greater Western Library Alliance webinar on data curation entitled "What kinds of data are libraries managing, how are they doing it and with what staff?" is available for replay.  During the program, Anne Graham and Amy Stout of the MIT Libraries discussed issues around starting a data management program and provided an overview of what libraries need to know before starting a data management program.  Sayeed Choudhury discussed early experiences related to the Data Conservancy, one of two current awards through NSF’s DataNet program.  The webinar is 1 hr. 7 min. in length.

One of Charles Bailey's fortes in the creation of outstanding bibliogrpahies and the passion to keep them up-to-date.  So I'm very pleased to see that he has created a "Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography" and marked it as being version 1.0.  In his introduction, Bailey wrote:

This bibliography presents selected English-language articles, books, and technical reports that are useful in understanding digital curation and preservation. Most sources have been published between 2000 and the present; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 2000 are also included.

Published with a Creative Commons license, this bibliography will be a great starting point for anyone who wants to learn more about digital curation. Students especially would do well to bookmark it and refer to it.

In the scope notes, Bailey has a definition of digital curation and is a bit more extensive that the one I've published.   From recent conversations, I know that the word "curation" means different things to different people.  However, when we talk about digital curation, the key concept is "stewardship" even if that word is not used.

One of the webinars has already occurred, but the other two are still in the future.  The webinars are being recorded and those recordings will be made available online. 

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The Greater Western Library Alliance is providing a series of three free webinars on the topic of data  curation. The webinars will be conducted using “Wimba” webinar software. No pre-registration is
necessary. The webinar login address is: http://67.202.209.36/index.html.pl?launcherlink=1&credential_2=&channel=GWLA_DCC&presenterOnLoad=0&clear_login_cookie=1.

At the login page, select “Participant”. If you haven’t accessed Wimba before, you’ll need to run the “Wizard” setup (even if you have entered Wimba before, it’s recommend to run the “Wizard”). It takes (1
– 4) minutes for the software to confirm the participant’s system compatibility, so allow time accordingly; we recommended that you login at least ten minutes prior to the presentation. The “Wizard” has (5) checks to walk through; all that’s required is to press ‘next’ (there is an ‘audio test’). In order to use the audio function,
you’ll need a headset, or a computer with both ‘mic’ and ‘speakers’.


Each of the webinars will be recorded. After each session, a URL will be posted to mailing lists where the series was announced.

Presentation Details:

1. Big Picture Overview of Data Curation, Thursday May 6, 12-1:30 EST

Over this decade, increasingly more people are viewing research data as an asset requiring proper  management and long-term stewardship. This outlook is a major cultural shift from the perspective that
knowledge outputs such as journal articles and books are the sole treasures of research.  One consequence is that librarians in research institutions are now having to consider how to incorporate data as a library resource.  Chuck Humphrey’s presentation provides an introduction to basic data concepts relevant to librarians.  Topics to be discussed include how to differentiate research data from everything else that is digital, how lifecycle data management helps us better deal with data as a resource, how collections remain
important in managing data and how levels of service can be defined for data.

It is important to understand data curation within the larger scholarly communication context, and then to identify opportunities and capacities where librarians can and should find a role to engage.

Given a definition that ranges from managing to archiving to preserving data along the data lifecycle, there are various points where data curation services can be pursued by librarians: at a point of research initiation (articulating the problem and pursuing  funding), at a point of recent or ongoing research (organization
within the lab), at a point where a larger community needs to be engaged (broadening access), and at a point where time scale is important (archiving and preserving in a repository). D. Scott Brant will discuss the role of librarians in pursuing and engaging in these data curation activities with specific examples presented.

Speakers:

Charles (Chuck) Humphrey has been the Head of the Data Library at the University of Alberta since 1992 and began a data library service in 1980 in the University’s academic computing centre while employed as a
statistical consultant. In 2000, Mr. Humphrey also assumed responsibility for the implementation and  management of a Statistics Canada Research Data Centre (RDC) at the University of Alberta, which is a data enclave for Statistics Canada confidential data. As the Academic Director of the RDC, he oversees the operations of this facility and serves on the RDC National Coordinating Committee.

D. Scott Brandt is a professor of library science and associate dean for research in the Purdue University Libraries. Primarily he helps guide the Libraries’ research and facilitates participation in sponsored funding (e.g., NSF, IMLS, local seed grants)—-since April 2005, Purdue librarians have participated in more than 70 grant applications with more than 80 faculty across campus. As acting director of the Distributed Data Curation Center, he overseesinvestigation into curation issues of organizing, discovery and access to, and archiving research data in complex environments. Prior to arriving at Purdue in 1993 he was associate head of the Science and Engineering Libraries at MIT, and is the author of Teaching Technology (2002) and Unix in Libraries (1991).

2. What kinds of data are libraries managing, how are they doing it and with what staff?, Tuesday June 1, 12-1:30 EST

After giving a brief background summary of what the MIT Libraries are doing, Anne Graham and Amy Stout will discuss issues surrounding starting a data management program and provide an overview of what
libraries need to know before starting a data management program. They will discuss the following topics from a subject librarian perspective:

• How does your library system operate?
• Are you better off starting your program from the top-down or using a grassroots approach?
•  Making contact with your faculty and finding out what they need 
• Learning about data and e-science
• Developing relationships across departments that will facilitate your offering of  services to people outside the library system 

Sayeed Choudhury will discuss early experiences related to the Data Conservancy, one of two current awards through NSF’s DataNet program. Choudhury will speak specifically about the types of data being
considered for the early prototype development, the initial technical architecture, and the new duties or skill sets that are being developed as a result of these activities.

Speakers:

Anne Graham is Civil and Environmental Engineering Librarian and GIS Liaison and Amy Stout is Computer Science Librarian at MIT Libraries. Both Anne and Amy have been working on starting data services at the
MIT Libraries. This includes educating faculty, students and lab managers about “best practices” for data management as well as initiating projects that encourage faculty to look to the libraries for the stewardship of their data.

G. Sayeed Choudhury is the Associate Dean for Library Digital Programs and Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University. He is also the Director of Operations for the Institute of Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES) based at Johns Hopkins. He is a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins, a Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Senior Presidential Fellow with the Council on Library and Information Resources. He is a member of the ICPSR Council and DuraSpace Board.

3. What is happening at GWLA Libraries and what are next steps for GWLA?, Thursday July 1, 12-1:30 EST

Presenters from several GWLA libraries will provide 5 minute presentations on what is happening at their institutions, at what stage they are at with data curation, and what they see as a possible GWLA role. Presentations will be followed by discussion about possible next steps for GWLA and potential areas of collaboration among GWLA libraries regarding data curation.

Speakers: GWLA members involved in data curation [an OSU wiki will be updated as GWLA speakers are confirmed for the 3rd webinar: http://wiki.library.oregonstate.edu/confluence/x/0wV9|../x/0wV9
<http://wiki.library.oregonstate.edu/confluence/x/0wV9%7C../x/0wV9>
<http://wiki.library.oregonstate.edu/confluence/x/0wV9%7C../x/0wV9> ]

I received this announcement via email. NEDCC always hosts quality events.

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PRESENTED BY the Northeast Document Conservation Center

HOSTED BY the MIT Libraries

THE TECTONICS OF DIGITAL CURATION explores the sustainability of cultural collections created for and maintained on the Web. At this two-day symposium, a diverse faculty of national experts will examine the forces at play in our increasingly networked society.

TOPICS WILL INCLUDE: divergence and complexity in information networking; digital preservation repositories; electronic copyright and intellectual property; collaborative and commercial preservation models; digital archiving strategies; open access to scholarly communication; the networked self; preservation of CAD models; and preservation of community-built digital creations (video games).

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
Librarians, archivists, museum professionals, IT professionals, CIOs, administrators, scientists, architects, and scholars - any decision-maker responsible for creating, managing, or preserving digital resources that are accessed via networked systems

COST: $325; students: $275
REGISTRATION DEADLINE: Friday, May 14, 2010

FOR COMPLETE INFORMATION AND TO REGISTER: Visit www.nedcc.org

This came to me via email....

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IDCC10 will be presented jointly by the Digital Curation Centre, UK and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in partnership with the Coalition for
Networked Information (CNI).

The Programme Committee invites the submission of papers that reflect developing trends in curation and address the issues of growing the curation community to meet the challenges of the next decade. Papers can be research or practice based. Of particular interest:

• How is the digital curation community growing?
• How are data curation skills embedded in the curriculum?
• How curators are deployed in practice?
• What are the new research and development results in data curation?

All papers accepted for the conference will be published in the International Journal of Digital Curation (http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc)

Full details of the Call for Papers can be found at: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2010/call-for-papers/

Submissions will be accepted from 1 May 2010

Sent on behalf of IDCC10 Programme Committee: Co-chaired by Kevin Ashley, Director Designate of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), Liz Lyon, Associate Director of the DCC, Allen Renear and Melissa Cragin from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois.