PRIMM and Proper: Authentic Investigation in HE Introductory Programming with PeerWise and GitHub

We explore the use of the PRIMM methodology (Predict, Run, Investigate, Modify, Make) within a higher education introductory programming setting, particularly focusing on the three first three steps. Formative prediction questions on the effects of changes to HTML, CSS or JavaScript code are constructed by students using PeerWise system, based on their own investigation. Authenticity of the task is enhanced by presenting the peer prediction questions as pull requests to a GitHub repository, mirroring the code review process followed by professionals working within software development teams. We report on student engagement with the formative practical exercises and analyse the content of the questions they asked

From the Desktop to the Cloud: Leveraging Hybrid Storage Architectures in Your Repository

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PresentationsDate: 2009-05-19 01:00 PM – 02:30 PMRepositories collect and manage data holdings using a storage device. Mainly this has been a local file system, but recently attempts have been made at using open storage products and cloud storage solutions, such as Sun's Honeycomb and Amazon S3 respectively. Each of these solutions has their own pros and cons but There are advantages in adopting a hybrid model for repository storage, combining the relative strengths of each one in a policy-determined model. In this paper we present an implementation of a repository storage layer which can dynamically handle and manage a hybrid storage systemJoint Information Systems Committee (JISC

A Cooperative Model for Preserving Historical Television News Content

The archival profession must begin to confront the many challenges inherent in the large-scale preservation of twentieth century audio/visual resources. A significant portion of our shared cultural heritage, including historical television news recordings, is at risk due to complicated copyright issues, degradation of the original media, the cost involved in digitizing audio/visual resources, and the difficulty of preserving high resolution digital video files. Cooperation between heritage institutions and content creators facilitated by a Custodial Partnership Model is the key to overcoming these significant challenges. The University of North Texas (UNT) and the Dallas/Fort Worth (Texas) affiliate station of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC 5/KXAS) have partnered to preserve the content of the oldest television news station in Texas. This unique partnership will not only preserve over 60 years of television news content through the digitization of original 16mm film and video, but it will also result in free public access to the digitized content online. This paper will explain this partnership from the perspective of both the library and the television news station, and it will provide s possible solutions to the issues of copyright, funding and access to audio/visual collections. Examples from the UNT-NBC 5/KXAS partnership will serve to illustrate the crucial need to preserve audio/visual collections and the challenges facing institutions preserving large scale audio/visual collections. Lastly, this paper introduces the Custodial Partnership Model, a new paradigm for future heritage institution/content creator partnerships and recommendations for future modes of cooperation

Pathways: Augmenting interoperability across scholarly repositories

In the emerging eScience environment, repositories of papers, datasets, software, etc., should be the foundation of a global and natively-digital scholarly communications system. The current infrastructure falls far short of this goal. Cross-repository interoperability must be augmented to support the many workflows and value-chains involved in scholarly communication. This will not be achieved through the promotion of single repository architecture or content representation, but instead requires an interoperability framework to connect the many heterogeneous systems that will exist. We present a simple data model and service architecture that augments repository interoperability to enable scholarly value-chains to be implemented. We describe an experiment that demonstrates how the proposed infrastructure can be deployed to implement the workflow involved in the creation of an overlay journal over several different repository systems (Fedora, aDORe, DSpace and arXiv).Comment: 18 pages. Accepted for International Journal on Digital Libraries special issue on Digital Libraries and eScienc

ScholarlyCommons FY17 Report

ScholarlyCommons (http://repository.upenn.edu/) has served as the University of Pennsylvania’s open access institutional repository since 2004. The repository has allowed for faculty and others to share scholarly publications publicly and without paywalls. For the first ten years, it saw slow but steady growth in the deposit of a relatively small number of publications, as well as dissertations and theses. Since 2014, ScholarlyCommons has grown dramatically to include a wide variety of collections from Penn community members. ScholarlyCommons saw an array of positive developments in FY17. The number of materials posted to the repository hewed closely to the strong upward growth trends of the past three years, new staffing and training workflows were developed, and a slate of services were introduced that make it easier for the Penn community to capitalize on our offerings. This report will provide an overview of collection statistics, staffing, and other key developments in FY17. This report will also provide a general snapshot of overall repository growth

MAPI: towards the integrated exploitation of bioinformatics Web Services

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Bioinformatics is commonly featured as a well assorted list of available web resources. Although diversity of services is positive in general, the proliferation of tools, their dispersion and heterogeneity complicate the integrated exploitation of such data processing capacity.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>To facilitate the construction of software clients and make integrated use of this variety of tools, we present a modular programmatic application interface (<it>MAPI</it>) that provides the necessary functionality for uniform representation of Web Services metadata descriptors including their management and invocation protocols of the services which they represent. This document describes the main functionality of the framework and how it can be used to facilitate the deployment of new software under a unified structure of bioinformatics Web Services. A notable feature of <it>MAPI </it>is the modular organization of the functionality into different modules associated with specific tasks. This means that only the modules needed for the client have to be installed, and that the module functionality can be extended without the need for re-writing the software client.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The potential utility and versatility of the software library has been demonstrated by the implementation of several currently available clients that cover different aspects of integrated data processing, ranging from service discovery to service invocation with advanced features such as workflows composition and asynchronous services calls to multiple types of Web Services including those registered in repositories (e.g. <it>GRID</it>-based, SOAP, <it>BioMOBY</it>, <it>R-bioconductor</it>, and others).</p

Cybraries in paradise: new technologies and ethnographic repositories.

Digital technologies are altering research practices surrounding creation and use of ethnographic field recordings, and the methodologies and paradigms of the disciplines centered around their interpretation. In this chapter we discuss some examples of our current research practices as fieldworkers in active engagement with cultural heritage communities documenting music and language in the Asia- Pacific region, and as developers and curators of the digital repository PARADISEC (the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures: ). We suggest a number of benefits that the use of digital technologies can bring to the recording of material from small and endangered cultures, and to its re-use by communities and researchers. We believe it is a matter of social justice as well as scientific interest that ethnographic recordings held in higher education institutions should be preserved and made accessible to future generations. We argue that, with appropriate planning and care by researchers, digitization of research recordings in audiovisual media can facilitate access by remote communities to records of their cultural heritage held in higher education institutions to a far greater extent than was possible in the analog age.Australian Research Counci

Cybraries in paradise: new technologies and ethnographic repositories.

Digital technologies are altering research practices surrounding creation and use of ethnographic field recordings, and the methodologies and paradigms of the disciplines centered around their interpretation. In this chapter we discuss some examples of our current research practices as fieldworkers in active engagement with cultural heritage communities documenting music and language in the Asia- Pacific region, and as developers and curators of the digital repository PARADISEC (the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures: ). We suggest a number of benefits that the use of digital technologies can bring to the recording of material from small and endangered cultures, and to its re-use by communities and researchers. We believe it is a matter of social justice as well as scientific interest that ethnographic recordings held in higher education institutions should be preserved and made accessible to future generations. We argue that, with appropriate planning and care by researchers, digitization of research recordings in audiovisual media can facilitate access by remote communities to records of their cultural heritage held in higher education institutions to a far greater extent than was possible in the analog age.Australian Research Counci

BlobCR: Virtual Disk Based Checkpoint-Restart for HPC Applications on IaaS Clouds

International audienceInfrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing is gaining significant interest in industry and academia as an alternative platform for running HPC applications. Given the need to provide fault tolerance, support for suspend-resume and offline migration, an efficient Checkpoint-Restart mechanism becomes paramount in this context. We propose BlobCR, a dedicated checkpoint repository that is able to take live incremental snapshots of the whole disk attached to the virtual machine (VM) instances. BlobCR aims to minimize the performance overhead of checkpointing by persisting VM disk snapshots asynchronously in the background using a low overhead technique we call selective copy-on-write. It includes support for both application-level and process-level checkpointing, as well as support to roll back file system changes. Experiments at large scale demonstrate the benefits of our proposal both in synthetic settings and for a real-life HPC application