JA-SIG monday
Check JA-SIG page for presentation uploads.
Check out DSpace’s Michele Klimpton’s talk.
Opening Session
50 percent first timers here
Keynote panel : introductions to software projects by representatives from dspace, fedora, fluid, internet2, kuali, sakai
Internet2
original idea was that commercial sector would not be able to sustain internet for academic needs
middleware initiative to foster research mission
federated login? shibboleth, campus id svcs, grouper, signet,for collaborative tools.
Fluid
cross-project collaboration. usability focused. allow users to focus on their tasks. virtual usability lab for remote testing.
Sakai (UH’s Laulima)
use cases beyond classroom spt. e-portfolio, research collaborations. sakai-ware integrates library resources. moving to community of enterpprise deployment. concerns abuot having sw used by 10s of 1000s. reqmts from technical, usr spt, and end user communities. looking at other svcs that could be integrated (do not reinvent wheel), e.g. calendar, java document storage, etc. also workflow. looking at fluid for usability, both end user and developer.
Kuali
where banner, sap, peoplesoft have been. koias (?) by mit for research administration also being extended. kuali rice : developer tools. similar to sakai, being rolled out. sustainability issues.
Note to folks : UH ITS is looking at adopting this product.
fedora commons
flexible, extensible, dig object repository architecture developed out of cornell. maybe oldest of projects. carl lagozi involved in 2001. may have been 1st open source project funded by Mellon, which also funded kuali & sakai. Includes oai, semantic technology integration, ingesting.
Not so focused on institutional repositories, which is dspace’s focus. Fedora Commons is about preserving, archiving, re-use, data resources. Fedora has organized as a 502c3. There are 5 open src projects under fedora commons: topaz proj, cougar project, mobera(sp?). 127 known installations of fedora. 4 yrs to come up w/ sustainability plan. data curation, open access policies, etc.
dspace
Started in 2000. Enable researchers to have broader & permanent access to their works. over 300 institutions. 25% in US. very active abroad. no centralized dev. over 100 active developers. 14 lead developers who take community code and roll it into core source. primarily used by libraries, 70% of use cases libraries. Others: corporations, research orgs. Can use it out of the box. Can ingest, search & browse, can manage workflows, features storage asset system, some preservation tools.
New executive director Klimpton’s background is non-profit, not academic. It was getting difficult to coordinate priorities & needs and how that was being filtered to development team. Copyright to software used to be held by hp & mit. Moved copyright to dspace foundation, which would be committed to keeping copyright open.
Strategic objectives: work w/ community to advance platform. Michele hired in april. Priority is to advance the tools. 1.5 released in OR2008. It doubled size of code, w/ 30 developers worldwide. Next large release being planned, with goal for more modularity where people can choose tools such as assetstore. fewer dependencies. Building partnerships & joint dev projects that can address community at large. Zotera & citation mgmt. partnership with Sun and Honeycomb assetstore system. NITLE is a non-profit working to provide repository services to smaller academic institutions.
jasig
Original mission to provide a gathering place for java users in academic spaces. Early on created commercial partnerships. Mellon funding. Central Authentication Service (CAS) created by Yale. u-portal project started. jasig formed 501c3 and looking at sustainability. Release of up3. Interested in community source mgmt. Managing user requests & sustainability.
Session: USING FEDORA TO MANAGE STUDENT DOCUMENTS
Coldfusion front end
Simple config: object and multiple datastreams
Complex config e.g.: header object : objects. dublin core at both levels.
This application: Admissions Office. New student process generates tiff pages.
Student document : RELS-EXT (relates child objects to parent object), tiffs, pdfs, dublin core. Tiffs converted to multipage pdf. People have not asked for for OCRd PDFs.
Naming convention: if datastream beings with T, then it is a tiff.
system functions:
- display a folder
- view a pdf
- create a new folder (newstudent record)
- create a newdocument
- add a page to an existing doc
cornell uses kerberos identity credentialing software and needed to be integrated w/ fedora.
“adding page to an existing document” tool simply looks like a tiff upload. Cornell scanning everything to tiffs and uploading to folder.
Encountered some problems with batch uploads, esp. with big pdfs. The tiffs upload one at a time thru user interface. Pressure to perform faster. This implementation is only tiff upload. Browse to image, upload to coldfusion server. Created a new dsid (datastream id?), using getNextPid method.
Create a new document: doc types, e.g. independent study.
getNextPID, Preparefedora object, pull in FOXML template (fedora xml), make substitutions, ingest.
When creating a new document, system checks for student id and provides student info.
Includes external webservice utility to convert multiple tiffs into one multi-page pdf. Also delete page, delete document, regenerate pdf. Pdfs sometimes get corrupted. Regenerate pdf tool to allow user to regenerate pdf. This brings up some digital preservation issues. sometimes pages are missing from the pdf.
Using dc.title for student name, dc.date for date of birth. Yes, not conventional, was an expedient decision.
When user looks at document page listing, tiffs are named as coded, e.g. t0004. No indication of contents of that tiff. I guess it depends a lot on looking at the pdf, which would be the compilation of the tiffs. Maybe the numeric sequence tells acrobat the order of the tiffs…?
Session: BIRDS OF FEATHER SEMANTIC WEB
Check out simile.mit.edu
Cornell: Vivo : relational db. You can go to any person at Cornell and pull up relationships for that person. You can search on bee keeping and get search results of researchers. Includes bios and publications.
Then people wanted filtered view of this, e.g. look at just life scientists. sounds like a fresh database. They have been looking at moving to a new framework, took 2 programmers. used HP jenna framework that handles triple store.
People can login via kerberos and update their own pages. Colleges are asking for reporting mechanism, e.g. faculty research focus or what they are saying about their courses.
Ability to generate pick-list of graduate students.
Ability to generate research teams.
Another project looking at amazon-like “if you like this, then you might like…”
Exposing data on the web, maybe using rdf to include metadata in page.
Cornell global access has a cute interface… includes geographic data .
Dspace did a rudimentary crosswalk to getdata and expose via rdf to oai. using longwell. Mark Diggory is looking for a way to express the same user experience thru the ui that the machine can see. Goal to get the metadata resolvable in the browser so user can have views of that content and the user can pull in the content and use it locally. Lot of this work seems to be focused in the ORE space. Mark feels there is vacuum. if you are putting the information out there how do you discover it…do you put all these complex relationships and put them into a digital object? The rdf can explode. You will need tools to determine how much content you want to expose. This is Mark’s problem space.
ORE is looking at an rdf model for scholarly publishing and versioning. rdf is a version of METS but much freer.
Session: NITLE
dspace.nitle.org homepage :listing of institutions as communities.
- can set up dedicated instance, also
- about a few thousand $$
- provides backup services
Most of their clients had backlog of digitized collections.
Some inter-institutional projects.
Featuring student scholarship
Librarians are looking at benchmarking student publishing.
They have a federated ldap system something like shibboleth. It will ask where you are from, check you against the campus ldap. You get group rights from campus ldap.
Each campus has administrator level rights, so there is a lot of trust.
Google analytics tracking by community & community hierarchy
Offers dspace training, repository manager focused.
Training uses multi-point video conference for training
Peer support & community, annual user community mtg in june 2008. Virtualuser community meetings. foster peer-support among campuses.
dspace technology fellowships, hosting events, share results of experiences
A campus can participate in just user community or in just training services
Services in: dspace, Multipoint Interactive Videoconferencing, and Sakai and Moodle
NITLE would be interested in Sakai/Dspace integration
Community source: higher ed should own its own technology innovations; innovation should exist in a virtuous cycle with research & teaching needs and practice; aggregating resources effectively behind open source products and community is our best option.
Software as a service model. e.g. google, flickr, basecamp, etc. most higher ed comm source products do not match this model. Helpful for smaller organizations and larger orgs exploring internal SAAS service models or other models. Can it address the “flood” by creating opportunities to scale implementations?
nitle.org
Experimental site : http://markets.nitle.org : sign up and trade
Some size limits
Batchloading consulting svcs.
Sword and lni developments will look good.
nitle owns the handle system… so moving collections from nitle’s shared instance to individual dspace instances might be an issue, but so far it is not a difficult area.
Big area of interest is streaming media—tim donohue is working on this
Nitle serves non-profits non-academia
Nitle is subsidiary of Ithaca Harbor, a 501c3 that is an incubator for helping non-profits leverage IT technologies.
Service is about a year old.
Session: IMPLEMENTING OPEN SOURCE PORTFOLIO TOOLS IN SAKAI
Kenrick Chun at UH ITS might be using OSP in Sakai, according to presenter, Janice Smith.
Open Source Portfolio born at Univ. of Minnesota & recently made open source. rSmart is company working on this project.
CLE = collaborative learning environment – rSMart’s contribution to sakai
They do some sys analysis for sakai implementations of portfolio
Teaching students how to manage their virtual identity.
Has a resume wizard. gathers structured data in xsd format. Categories such as activities, relevant c ourses, honors, experience, travel, urls, etc. System generates a resume view. You can select a variety of views. There are some institutions looking at using this.
Next archtype : portfolios for teaching & learning. Institutions can construct matrices to structure student learning in relation to learning outcomes.
Faculty can use evaluation tool to evaluate student’s work. Students can share contents with others via portfolio.
Portfolios forr assessment & accreditation. Usually combined w/ portfolios for teaching & learning.
Rhode Island network for technology worked with RI dept. of ed. All 2008 graduates submit a graduation portfolio. teachers create matrices for learning outcomes, students submit work for each cell, teachers rate work. Everyone generates a report, students, faculty, and admin districts.
You can do work in one space and repurpose it for another space.
Client group: need sincere interest, enthusiasm, identified purpose, disciplinary standards, outcomes, and objectives, availability of champions, multi year commitment to process, available resources.
New sakai tool interface with 2.5. portfolio templaes, layouts, styles, and reports need coding.
How do you create a culture on campus that supports portfolios?
- Every campus is a collection of subcultures, unique to them and common to the campus culture.
- Changing any part of the cultural system requires an adjustment to the whole system.
- Understanding culture helps motivating & persuading, developing specific strategies & plan of action.
- Challenges: lack of faculty & student time and energy, lack of funding, lack of understanding of value of epotfolios, lack of willingness of administrators to promote, lack of tech resources, tech phobia or change phobia.
What are student beliefs and values regarding success as a student?
- available power resources
- good teaching.
- peer influence & grapevine
Motivators for student: improves learning outcomes; improves thru creativity & increased control. Better positioning for career, more relevant to real world, improved student resources, enhancment of self-esteem and confidence. Receive cedit and recognition for doing activities.
For faculty: belief about teaching & learning, avail power sources, faculty accomplishments rewarded by system, peer influence. Needs to solve problems for faculty, less time required for necessary tasks, promotion & tenure, awards & recognition.
Must have buy-in from faculty. Often-time students will push, e.g. for course content mgt system. Starts with a few early adopters, usually w/ lots of students. Beware of multiple systems. There is the element of commitment to student of hosting their material for several years.
Administrator beliefs & values
www.osportfolio.org
www.sakaiproject.org
www.rsmart.com
Who owns the intellectual property in a portfolio? FERPA. Minnesota law interprets is that the individual owns the data. Some institutions lay claim to the student’s work. Sometimes the Institutional Review Board (human subject research) may be involved.
