Exploring the viability of semi-automated document markup

Digital humanities scholarship has long acknowledged the abundant theoretical advantages of text encoding; more questionable is whether the advantages can, in practice and in general, outweigh the costs of the usually labor-intensive task of encoding. Markup of literary texts has not yet been undertaken on a scale large enough to realize many of its potential applications and benefits. If we can reduce the human labor required to encode texts, libraries and their users can take greater advantage of the hosts of texts being produced by various mass digitization projects, and can focus more attention on implementing tools that use underlying encodings. How far can automation take an encoding effort? And what implications might that have for libraries and their users? Compelled by such questions, this paper explores the viability of semi-automated text encodingunpublishednot peer reviewe

Digital Collection Contexts: iConference 2014 Workshop Report

The "Digital Collection Contexts: Intellectual and Organizational Functions at Scale" workshop was held March 4, 2014, at the iConference in Berlin, Germany. The aim was to unite a community of faculty, students, system designers, and developers interested in digital collections, particularly in the context of cultural heritage aggregations. Organized by a team from the University of Illinois, the Europeana Foundation, and the University of Texas at Austin, the one-day workshop brought together an international group of experts representing diverse threads of current research and development to engage on the role of collections in the digital environment and to identify new directions for inquiry.This report compiles the position papers and includes synopses of the presentations by the authors and ensuing discussions.Ope

IMLS Digital Collections and Content: Interim Report for April - Sept. 2009

During the performance period of April 1, 2009 through September 30, 2009, the IMLS DCC Flickr Feasibility Study began; Opening History aggregation grew and its subject strengths in particular increased through targeted collection development; the Interface subgroup developed a prototype of an Opening History interface more reliant on visualizations of data; CIMR (Collection Item Metadata Relationships) subgroup established an RDF triplestore for testing inferences; and Infrastructure subgroup was established.IMLS Grant LG-06-07-0020unpublishednot peer reviewe

IMLS DCC 2010 Advisory Board Meeting: Introduction and Update on Opening History

Update on the IMLS Digital Collections and Content Project's Opening History aggregation: growth of collections through state library participation, the contextual mass approach to collection development, diversity of institutions and types of items represented.Institute of Museum and Library Services LG-02-02-0281unpublishednot peer reviewe

National evaluation of IMLS DCC & implications for DPLA

This slideset summarizes the results of a national survey of reference services providers, which aimed to evaluate the Institute of Museum and Library Services Digital Collections and Content resource. The full report will follow.unpublishednot peer reviewe

Extending the reach of our collective cultural heritage: The IMLS DCC Flickr Feasibility Study

The Flickr Feasibility Study investigated the roles and processes required for a digital collection aggregator to facilitate participation of cultural heritage institutions in Web 2.0 communities. The results demonstrate that providing this service for museums, libraries, and archives can be a natural extension of aggregation activities. While the role is complicated by the varying requirements of different kinds of institutions, analysis of user interactions can guide both collection development and building of communities of interest around cultural heritage collections.IMLS LG-06-07-0020published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Modeling Cultural Collections for Digital Aggregation and Exchange Environments

This report presents the results of a collaboration between members of the IMLS Digital Collections and Content (DCC) project and developers of the Europeana Data Model (EDM) to construct a formal extension of EDM that explicitly accommodates representation of collections and collection/item relationships. The goal is to enhance the representation facilities of EDM, and to make EDM conducive to representing collection-level data from DCC and other digital content providers. We report on the outcomes of the collaboration – use cases, requirements, and recommendations for modeling collections in exchange and aggregation environments – prefaced by a short section covering background on the foundational DCC and Europeana initiatives and an overview of related work in the field.Partially funded by IMLS National Leadership Grant LG-06-07-002

Using Collections and Worksets in Large-Scale Corpora: Preliminary Findings from the Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis Project

Scholars from numerous disciplines rely on collections of texts to support research activities. On this diverse and interdisciplinary frontier of digital scholarship, libraries and information institutions must 1) prepare to support research using large collections of digitized texts, and 2) understand the different methods of analysis being applied to the collections of digitized text across disciplines. The HathiTrust Research Center's Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis (WCSA) project conducted a series of focus groups and interviews to analyze and understand the scholarly practices of researchers that use large-scale, digital text corpora. This poster presents preliminary findings from that study, which offers early insights into user requirements for scholarly research with textual corpora.publishedye

Nine Best Practices for Research Software Registries and Repositories: A Concise Guide

Scientific software registries and repositories serve various roles in their respective disciplines. These resources improve software discoverability and research transparency, provide information for software citations, and foster preservation of computational methods that might otherwise be lost over time, thereby supporting research reproducibility and replicability. However, developing these resources takes effort, and few guidelines are available to help prospective creators of registries and repositories. To address this need, we present a set of nine best practices that can help managers define the scope, practices, and rules that govern individual registries and repositories. These best practices were distilled from the experiences of the creators of existing resources, convened by a Task Force of the FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group during the years 2019-2020. We believe that putting in place specific policies such as those presented here will help scientific software registries and repositories better serve their users and their disciplines