Beyond the Back Room: The Role of Metadata and Catalog Librarians in Digital Humanities

Many professors and students are surprised to learn about the variety of skills metadata and catalog librarians possess that can benefit their digital humanities projects. Metadata and catalog librarians already have experience in areas such as developing project metadata schemas and controlled vocabularies, as well as providing suggestions for project organization, and have the basic abilities needed to support learning new skills such as XML and TEI. This chapter will offer perspectives on how a metadata and catalog librarian can contribute to digital humanities projects. A case study focusing on the involvement of the Metadata and Catalog Librarian with the Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi) at Hamilton College will be used to illustrate one example of how to become successfully involved in digital humanities research on campus

Creating a Relational Distributed Object Store

In and of itself, data storage has apparent business utility. But when we can convert data to information, the utility of stored data increases dramatically. It is the layering of relation atop the data mass that is the engine for such conversion. Frank relation amongst discrete objects sporadically ingested is rare, making the process of synthesizing such relation all the more challenging, but the challenge must be met if we are ever to see an equivalent business value for unstructured data as we already have with structured data. This paper describes a novel construct, referred to as a relational distributed object store (RDOS), that seeks to solve the twin problems of how to persistently and reliably store petabytes of unstructured data while simultaneously creating and persisting relations amongst billions of objects.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure

CHORUS Deliverable 3.3: Vision Document - Intermediate version

The goal of the CHORUS vision document is to create a high level vision on audio-visual search engines in order to give guidance to the future R&D work in this area (in line with the mandate of CHORUS as a Coordination Action). This current intermediate draft of the CHORUS vision document (D3.3) is based on the previous CHORUS vision documents D3.1 to D3.2 and on the results of the six CHORUS Think-Tank meetings held in March, September and November 2007 as well as in April, July and October 2008, and on the feedback from other CHORUS events. The outcome of the six Think-Thank meetings will not just be to the benefit of the participants which are stakeholders and experts from academia and industry – CHORUS, as a coordination action of the EC, will feed back the findings (see Summary) to the projects under its purview and, via its website, to the whole community working in the domain of AV content search. A few subjections of this deliverable are to be completed after the eights (and presumably last) Think-Tank meeting in spring 2009

Models for Learning (Mod4L) Final Report: Representing Learning Designs

The Mod4L Models of Practice project is part of the JISC-funded Design for Learning Programme. It ran from 1 May – 31 December 2006. The philosophy underlying the project was that a general split is evident in the e-learning community between development of e-learning tools, services and standards, and research into how teachers can use these most effectively, and is impeding uptake of new tools and methods by teachers. To help overcome this barrier and bridge the gap, a need is felt for practitioner-focused resources which describe a range of learning designs and offer guidance on how these may be chosen and applied, how they can support effective practice in design for learning, and how they can support the development of effective tools, standards and systems with a learning design capability (see, for example, Griffiths and Blat 2005, JISC 2006). Practice models, it was suggested, were such a resource. The aim of the project was to: develop a range of practice models that could be used by practitioners in real life contexts and have a high impact on improving teaching and learning practice. We worked with two definitions of practice models. Practice models are: 1. generic approaches to the structuring and orchestration of learning activities. They express elements of pedagogic principle and allow practitioners to make informed choices (JISC 2006) However, however effective a learning design may be, it can only be shared with others through a representation. The issue of representation of learning designs is, then, central to the concept of sharing and reuse at the heart of JISC’s Design for Learning programme. Thus practice models should be both representations of effective practice, and effective representations of practice. Hence we arrived at the project working definition of practice models as: 2. Common, but decontextualised, learning designs that are represented in a way that is usable by practitioners (teachers, managers, etc).(Mod4L working definition, Falconer & Littlejohn 2006). A learning design is defined as the outcome of the process of designing, planning and orchestrating learning activities as part of a learning session or programme (JISC 2006). Practice models have many potential uses: they describe a range of learning designs that are found to be effective, and offer guidance on their use; they support sharing, reuse and adaptation of learning designs by teachers, and also the development of tools, standards and systems for planning, editing and running the designs. The project took a practitioner-centred approach, working in close collaboration with a focus group of 12 teachers recruited across a range of disciplines and from both FE and HE. Focus group members are listed in Appendix 1. Information was gathered from the focus group through two face to face workshops, and through their contributions to discussions on the project wiki. This was supplemented by an activity at a JISC pedagogy experts meeting in October 2006, and a part workshop at ALT-C in September 2006. The project interim report of August 2006 contained the outcomes of the first workshop (Falconer and Littlejohn, 2006). The current report refines the discussion of issues of representing learning designs for sharing and reuse evidenced in the interim report and highlights problems with the concept of practice models (section 2), characterises the requirements teachers have of effective representations (section 3), evaluates a number of types of representation against these requirements (section 4), explores the more technically focused role of sequencing representations and controlled vocabularies (sections 5 & 6), documents some generic learning designs (section 8.2) and suggests ways forward for bridging the gap between teachers and developers (section 2.6). All quotations are taken from the Mod4L wiki unless otherwise stated

Digital lifecycles and file types: final report

The Rights and Rewards in Blended Institutional Repositories Project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) under the Digital Repositories Programme. This represents a cooperative venture between the Department of Information Science (DIS), the Engineering Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (engCETL) and the University Library. The two year project aims to establish a single Blended repository to meet the teaching and research needs of this institution. It will address the motivational issues facing depositors of teaching materials with a focus on the associated Rights and Rewards. This digital lifecycles study will identify the most appropriate materials for submission to the project’s demonstrator repository. This takes into account factors like: granularity, persistence and multimedia types that can be supported for both teaching and research materials. It also documents the existing lifecycles of these items and the tools and specifications needed within a repository frameworks to support these lifecycles. For example, it will identify appropriate granularity of teaching resources and appropriate methods for content packaging. The results of the study will help to identify which types of files are currently in use, which formats should be supported by the repository system ultimately selected for the demonstrator repository. This information is likely to be of benefit to other projects and institutions in the process of setting up an Institutional Repository (IR)

Integration of Visual Languages with SCS tools in the Software Development Industry

Source Control Systems (SCS), also known as Version Control Systems (VCS), help teams to organize and track changes in the software development process. These systems have become vital in the software development industry as the increased growth and geographical diversity of teams, forced them to find solutions to deal with multiple people accessing the same pieces of software concurrently. Although for a while SCS seemed to be coping well with the needs of software development, the rise of the low-code platforms and Visual Programming Languages (VPLs) brought a new challenge to version control: how to manage visual artifacts without losing SCS functionalities? The biggest cause of this challenge is the fact that SCS are mostly oriented to work with text-based programming languages. Thus text-oriented SCS are (in general) incapable of dealing with visual artifacts as well as they do with text. So, to cope with the loss of SCS functionalities in VPLs projects, teams either accept and work with this loss or are forced to come up with a solution of their own to tackle a specific version control problem. These issues can be found in the OutSystems platform, which is our case study. To solve this problem, we propose a system, termed OSGit, that acts as a man-in-themiddle between the low-code platform and the designated SCS. The proposed system will translate the requested version control operations from the low-code platform to native operations of the given SCS. In operations that require visual artifacts to be managed - like applying blames - we propose the creation of metadata files. The metadata files contain the needed information about the visual elements used to build applications in the lowcode platform. This information is thus a compacted representation of the visual elements through text. Therefore, using metadata files will allow the SCS to correctly handle the required visual artifacts while integrating this system with a low-code platform or a VPL. The produced system obtained auspicious results in the usability tests that were performed and that featured ten OutSystems developers. They showed great satisfaction when using OSGit and also gave suggestions for future improvements. OSGit bridges the gap between text-based SCS and visual artifacts, which proves the possibility of integrating these systems in the world of VPL with a high-level of user satisfaction