Welcome

Module 1: Strategic Developments and Library Management

Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard
Deputy Director General, Royal Library, Denmark

John Palfrey
Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law, Vice Dean, Library and Information Resources, and Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School, USA

The Born Digital generation is coming of age. Is it a generation or in fact a population? Do these young people act differently than their parents and grandparents? And what will the world look like if shaped in their image? Based upon original research and interviews with young people from around the world, John Palfrey will discuss ways in which living digitally is transforming how many young people relate to information and to one another, and how the now ubiquitous and ever-evolving Internet is fundamentally changing behavior relating to information.

During this discussion, he will take up the topic of Digital Natives -- the young people "born digital" after 1980, with access to new technologies, and the skills to use them -- and the implications of these changes in the academic context. These changes have particular consequences for the manner in which higher education institutions approach their teaching and research missions. In particular, academic libraries are undergoing major changes in the digital age -- both due to shifting formats for information and different patterns with respect to how young people access and use that information. These changes will have ramifications for expenditures of funds, emphasis in collecting of materials, presentation and preservation of materials, and the role of librarians in the teaching and research process.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

John Palfrey
Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law, Vice Dean, Library and Information Resources, and Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School, USA

Annu Jauhiainen
Deputy Director of IT, The National Library of Finland, Finland

The tradition of libraries running their library systems with their own staff or with the help of the IT center of the organization has been changing over the last years. While budgets have been diminishing, libraries have been forced to take a closer look at what is their core task and pay attention to how they spend their resources. The key issues are cooperation and collaboration, division of labour and outsourcing.

The library or consortium who is considering to outsource its library system, has to make a thorough analysis of what they want to do themselves at the library and what they want to share with others or buy from outside. They should have a clear vision of what the optimal division of labour is in their case and what are its cost implications. It is important to have an agreement on the responsibilities of each party.

The presentation will explore the different options of how library system management may be organized and what are the benefits of dividing work between different parties and outsourcing the work or part of it to an outside actor. As an example the presentation describes the library network of Finland and the benefits we have gained by moving to a centralized, outsourced systems administration.

Annu Jauhiainen
Deputy Director of IT, The National Library of Finland, Finland

Amos Lakos
Former Librarian Rosenfeld Management Library UCLA, USA

In today's rapidly changing environment, libraries must continually demonstrate that their services have relevance, value and impact on institutional stakeholders and customers. To succeed, decisions and decision making must be based on effective use of data and management information.

This paper is an extension of my earlier work on developing library MIS services and on culture of assessment. I will focus my observations on the new opportunities for data analysis, assessment delivery and decision making in libraries.

In an earlier paper, "Creating a Culture of Assessment: A Catalyst for Organizational Change." Portal 4:3, (July 2004), Shelley Phipps (University of Arizona) and I discussed the need for libraries to build a "culture of assessment" into their larger organizational cultures. We described a new paradigm that encompasses organizational culture change, utilizing the learning organization, and a systems thinking approach. We made the case for transforming library organizational cultures and librarian's professional culture in such a way as to focus on achieving quality and measurable outcomes for library customers and institutional stakeholders. We then defined the components of a culture of assessment and the elements required to implement it in libraries. Additionally, we identified the need for a clearly articulated purpose and strong leadership, the internalization of systems thinking, organizational openness and trust, ongoing open communication, and an actively- encouraged climate of risk taking.

In short, we promulgated a future oriented transformative culture that values and uses assessment to succeed. We know that cultural change in organizations develops slowly and is a learned process. We also acknowledge the need for organizational learning in order to strengthen the foundations supporting transformational change.

However, the information environment continues to rapidly evolve and change at a pace that libraries have difficulty anticipating and responding to. My presentation will examine how developments in the Information Technology (IT) area, especially the increased dominance of very large networked infrastructures and associated services, large scale digitization projects, collaborative frameworks, and economic and market trends, impact and will continue to impact our "library" environment, and how those developments introduce a variety of opportunities to move libraries and librarians to an evidence based framework. Libraries will need to seize these opportunities or face the likelihood of becoming relic or legacy organizations.

My conclusions will be future oriented and possibly speculative. They will describe a number of possible scenarios for incorporating data and analysis services to support the need to make evidence-based librarianship the norm.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Amos Lakos
Former Librarian Rosenfeld Management Library UCLA, USA

Irmgard Bomers
Head User Services, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands, the Netherlands

Ask people in the street what a digital library is and 9 out of 10 will answer ‘Google’. The term digital library has become a synonym for Google. This is a poor result, considering all the energy, projects and money libraries all over the world have been investing in digital services.

Coming from the private sector, Irmgard notices that all discussions about digital libraries have one thing in common: they take place within the library community. So it’s time to change this! Irmgard’s presentation is based upon her own experience (dare, care, share) and the marketing theory of the 7 P’s, used in service industries and knowledge-intensive environments.

Irmgard holds a plea for using and rejuvenating the 'library' brand as a whole and stop the marketing of 'digital libraries', because only Google will benefit from it. She argues that libraries should use the strengths of the 'library' brand (world-wide reputation, reliability, quality) and 'load' this brand with digital services. Google can be used as a channel to make your products and services available. Thus, in time, the weaknesses of the brand (musty, just books, a physical place) will disappear into the background.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Irmgard Bomers
Head User Services, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands, the Netherlands

Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard
Deputy Director General, Royal Library, Denmark

Module 2: Change - Making it Happen in Your Library

Jan Wilkinson
University Librarian and Director of the John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester, UK

Lucy Jeynes
Director, Larch Consulting Ltd, UK

What are the factors and situations impacting our organisations? What are the internally-driven issues? Where are we heading?

Organisation structure, processes, technology, buildings, services, products, people, branding, income/funding sources, etc.

Deborah Shorley
Director of Library Services, Imperial College London, United Kingdom

After decades of neglect the University of Sussex library’s staff structure was seriously dysfunctional and needed a radical redesign. This case study details the problems we faced, the ways we handled them and the difficulties encountered on the way. Although it describes the situation in a specific library, it contains lessons for others seeking to make their staff structure fit for purpose.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

What is working well? What is going badly? How could we do things differently?

Lucy Jeynes
Director, Larch Consulting Ltd, UK

A facilitated exercise to explore how teams respond to change, and understand your own organisation's response.

Delegates

Groups discuss a local issue with their group colleagues to see what advice they would give.

Jan Wilkinson
University Librarian and Director of the John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester, UK

Your personal approach to leading change. Dealing with challenges. Techniques, hints and tips.

Jan Wilkinson
University Librarian and Director of the John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester, UK

Module 3: Tomorrow's Library Leaders

Jan Wilkinson
University Librarian and Director of the John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester, UK

Lucy Jeynes
Director, Larch Consulting Ltd, UK

Introduction to what makes a leader, incl. some quotes. Then some examples of leaders, what makes them good?

Each group must create a "Leader Of The Future" for their library. What qualities and skills does that leader need? What tools will they need to do the job? What opportunities do they face?

Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard
Deputy Director General, Royal Library, Denmark

How I became a leader, the journey, the issue of developing my vision.

This session will focus on developing a vision for a case study library. How to paint a picture of the future?

Jan Wilkinson
University Librarian and Director of the John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester, UK

Making it happen: how the vision becomes a reality. Strategic planning made easy.

Identify your leadership style.

Lucy Jeynes
Director, Larch Consulting Ltd, UK

There are number of groups that need to recognize you as a leader. Who are they? What's the best approach?

This will be based on 3 slides drawn up from the Make Your Own Leader workshop earlier in the day. Qualities, skills/capabilities, tools/resources. Up on the screen, score yourself and see in which areas you need to focus your development.

Module 4: Integrated Search Towards Catalogue 2.0

Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard
Deputy Director General, Royal Library, Denmark

Thomas Place
Project Manager Digital Library Innovation, Tilburg University, Library and IT Services, the Netherlands

There are several approaches for giving users integrated access to library resources. Z39.50 enabled libraries to offer a homogeneous user interface to distributed databases. Federated search solutions were a next step, but federated search has several disadvantages. Nowadays, integrated search (based on indexing distributed resources in a central index) is presented as the solution for integrated access.

There are different implementations of integrated search. In this introduction, I will describe the architecture that they have in common. Integrated search solutions not only integrate information resources but also integrate services that make the search results more useable for the users. E.g., availability information offered by OpenURL resolvers and circulation control systems can be integrated seamlessly in the search results. This is not only a technical problem, but also a problem of standard protocols for accessing availability information.

There will be a lot of overlap in the information that is made available in the integrated search solutions of individual universities. There is a lot to be gained by universities working together. Sharing indexes would be ideal, but in many cases not yet technically feasible. Universities could also share metadata. Other forms of collaborations with respect to technical solutions and service sharing are also possible.

I will conclude my presentation with an overview of Dutch initiatives in the field of integrated search and of Dutch search solutions like Meresco, PurpleSearch and Omega.

Thomas Place
Project Manager Digital Library Innovation, Tilburg University, Library and IT Services, the Netherlands

Jørgen Madsen
IT Consultant, The Royal Library, Denmark

A bird's eye view of Primo and how it fits into The Royal Library of Denmark's vision for a search solution that encompasses a quite complex consortium setup. The presentation will give a short overview of the most important out-of-box functionality in Primo and how this is used and fits in with regard to the Royal Library's context.

David Lindahl
Principal Investigator, eXtensible Catalog Project, University of Rochester Libraries, USA

The eXtensible Catalog (XC) Project is developing a set of open-source applications that will provide libraries with an alternative way to reveal their collections to library users. XC software will provide easy access to all resources (both digital and physical collections) across a variety of databases, metadata schemas and standards. It will enable library content to be revealed through other services that libraries may already be using, such as content management systems and learning management systems. In this session, two of the five XC applications will be discussed, the XC Drupal Toolkit and the XC LMS Toolkit.

• The XC Drupal toolkit includes an out-of-the-box, customizable, faceted and FRBRized user interface for discovery of library resources. Built on top of a web content management system, libraries will be able to build additional functionality. Library resources and webpage content can be presented together, and with functionality (such as user-generated metadata and web 2.0 features) applied to that content in a consistent way. This approach will enable libraries to easily share open-source code that they might write (in the form of Drupal modules) with other libraries.

• The XC Learning Management System (LMS) Toolkit will offer integration with learning management systems in academic libraries. This toolkit allows librarians and instructors to identify relationships between courses and library resources and then present those resources in the context of courses in the learning management system. XC will include drivers for Blackboard and documentation on how to extend the software for use with other learning management systems.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Mads Villadsen
IT Developer, State and University Library Århus, Denmark

A brief look at the features of Summa and the search interface currently in use at the State and University Library in Aarhus, Denmark. In particular, there will be a focus on the level of integration that has been achieved with the underlying library systems.

Benoît Pauwels
Head Automation Team, Université Libre de Bruxelles Libraries, Belgium

VuFind has been one of the pioneering search & find solutions, and, despite the recent departure of the lead developer from the development team at Villanova University, has acquired quite some popularity as a portal solution in mainly university and national libraries over the past years. The presentation will start off with a short overview of the main features and functionalities that are offered by the open source VuFind integrated search & find solution. VuFind is typically known as a frontend search experience for library catalogs, and the underlying code and libraries used in the software reflect this. ULB Libraries however have adopted VuFind in different use cases: national union catalog, regional repository of e-theses, and the public search & find interface for its own in-house information sources. In all of these cases information resources are harvested over OAI-PMH and are indexed into a database Lucene, using the SOLR API. This presentation will briefly go into some detail on this technical implementation and show the resulting interfaces.

Jørgen Madsen
IT Consultant, The Royal Library, Denmark

This session will discuss in detail the very complex setup of libraries that make up the integrated search solution of The Royal Library and its consortium partners: the institute and faculty libraries at Copenhagen University. Emphasis will be on the challenges facing a system that needs to cater to the needs of both a national library and a university library.

Particular focus will be on the heterogenous user groups and their varied access rights and how this is dealt with in one interface that needs to handle very different user needs and material types.

The considerations for handling licensed material will be discussed in depth. Special focus will be on the integrated/federated mix and what the choices behind this solution were. Considerations for the future desirability for true data mix and potential problems with this approach will also be discussed.

Furthermore, the issue of data clean-up will be addressed with special focus on deduplication, how this is handled, and what the advantages are.

Finally, the road ahead as far as future development plans will be presented.

David Lindahl
Principal Investigator, eXtensible Catalog Project, University of Rochester Libraries, USA

In this session, three of the five XC applications will be presented: OAI, NCIP and Metadata Services Toolkits.

• The XC OAI Toolkit enables metadata connectivity and synchronization between existing repositories and XC.
• The XC NCIP Toolkit enables circulation and authentication connectivity between integrated library systems and XC.

• The XC Metadata Services Toolkit (MST) includes services to convert MARC and DC data into a common facet-able schema (XC includes support for over 100 MARC tags), FRBRization of MARC and Dublin Core metadata, authority control matching across schema, and services to normalize and clean up metadata. In addition, the architecture of the MST offers the ability for anyone to build their own plug-in MST service. An example of such a service might be to convert another schema into XC schema. These services can then be shared with other libraries.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Mads Villadsen
IT Developer, State and University Library Århus, Denmark

Mads Villadsen presents the evolution of Summa's facetting and clustering system and looks at the importance of facets and clusters in general as integrated search moves forward.

Based on different implementations of Summa he will present various ways of showing facets to the user while also talking about experiences gained at the State and University Library by doing user studies along with analyzing data from log statistics.

Next, he will talk about the automated clustering of records, the State and University Library's previous work in this area, and the things they are currently planning.

This talk will illustrate these issues and more, while keeping a focus on the features that make the Summa system unique.

Benoît Pauwels
Head Automation Team, Université Libre de Bruxelles Libraries, Belgium

The definition of Web 2.0 is still unclear to most people, even for those who are working on the implementation of its functionalities on a daily basis. One could consider that the term is used as a buzz-word to denote all nice, user friendly, rather easy to implement add-ons that render a web-based search & find interface information richer and hence more interesting and attractive to end users.

This presentation will first give an overview of what typically falls under this definition: tagging, comments, reviews, ratings, book covers, table of contents (TOC), recommender features, etc. In essence, these add-ons are all typically built as a mash-up functionality, where bits of metadata are used to obtain extra information from a third-party web service.

One of the most desired features in a search& find solution is of course the possibility to find out in an easy and straightforward way whether a copy of a publication is available to the end user, be it a paper or electronic copy. Various search engine implementations have developed this functionality, typically coupled with an OpenURL resolver solution. However, a standard way of expressing information on the availability of a copy is still missing. This results in certain platforms performing better than others in this respect, and globally in a rather poor end user experience.

The second part of this presentation will propose a solution in the form of a new OFI Community Profile (a new XML-based standard, currently under review with various experts). We will also show how this standard could be extrapolated in such a way that certain Web 2.0 functionalities present in a search & find interface remain under the control of the end user's institution, instead of being imposed by the owner of the search & find platform, as is the case nowadays.

Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard
Deputy Director General, Royal Library, Denmark

Thomas Place
Project Manager Renovation Digital Library, Tilburg University, Library and IT Services, the Netherlands

Jørgen Madsen
IT Consultant, The Royal Library, Denmark

David Lindahl
Principal Investigator, eXtensible Catalog Project, University of Rochester Libraries, USA

Mads Villadsen
IT Developer, State and University Library Århus, Denmark

Benoît Pauwels
Head Automation Team, Université Libre de Bruxelles Libraries, Belgium

Free time

Opportunity for shopping or for visiting Tilburg or another city. For tips, see Holland.com.

Social Programme - Kroller Muller Museum & Het Loo Royal Palace

Everyone at their own tempo will have the opportunity to explore this Indoor/Outdoor museum. Enjoy the use of one of the many free white bicycles and tour around the beautiful National Forest Hoge Veluwe, or spend your time enjoying the many sculptures in the Kroller Muller sculpture garden Kroller Muller Statue Garden

Enjoy an audio tour of this 300 year old palace as you learn about some of it's previous inhabitants. Weather permitting take a chance to see the extensive gardens which will be sure to impress the least adept gardeners.

Module 5: Institutional Repositories - Preservation and Advocacy

Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard
Deputy Director General, Royal Library, Denmark

Heather Joseph
Executive Director, SPARC, USA

Over the past year, the growing movement towards Open Access has experienced several milestone events, resulting in a growing sense that Open Access is on its way to becoming a permanent, established part of the scholarly communications landscape.

First, following the lead of funders in Europe, the U.S. Congress passed its first law requiring the National Institutes of Health to require that articles resulting from its funding be made openly accessible via its digital repository. We’ll examine the initial impact of these first mandatory Open Access Policies to see how the research community has responded. We’ll also discuss how policymakers in other countries have reacted to these developments, examining proposed policies that are emerging in all corners of the world. Finally, we will look at how the publishing communities response to these policies has evolved.

Close on the heels of the passage of these national policies, several universities in Europe, Canada and the U.S. have implemented institutional mandates that call for open access to scholarly articles produced by faculty members. We’ll look at the nature of these policies, which range from deposit to permission mandates, and examine the landscape for signs of wider adoption. We’ll also discuss the most common arguments against the implementation of such policies that have arisen in campus discussions, and explore strategies and tactics that librarians can use to help contribute positively to the discussions.

At the same time, the number of Open Access journals has topped 4,000, and the number of Open Access digital repositories is well over 1,300. With the explosion in the number of venues for publication and archiving providing a rich new landscape of choices for authors, along with new supportive policies emerging at the institutional and national level, we’ll discuss whether open access has reached a point where it is poised to become a new norm in the scholarly communications landscape. We’ll actively explore strategies in three areas – education, advocacy, and new project incubation – that librarians can employ to ensure that the ultimate answer to the question posed above is “yes.”

Heather Joseph
Executive Director, SPARC, USA

Marcel Ras
Manager e-Depot, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands, Acquisitions & Processing Division, the Netherlands

Marijke Dewaerheijt
Digital Collection Manager, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands, Acquisitions & Processing Division, the Netherlands

In this workshop two topics will be covered:

• the role and responsibilities of institutions in the long term preservation of their collections in institutional repositories
• the Dutch situation where repository collections are preserved at the National Library of the Netherlands

The e-Depot is a digital archive environment for permanent access to digital information sources. Without this environment, digital sources would become unreadable at a rapid pace, because software and hardware quickly become obsolete and the information carriers have a limited lifespan. The aim of the e-Depot is thus to store Electronic Publications and secure permanent access to scientific information for the research community.

The Koninklijke Bibliotheek (the national library of the Netherlands) uses transparent procedures for including and processing digital publications. Quality control is part of its inclusion policy as well as the actual processing of e-Depot materials. The e-Depot has been developed to facilitate permanent storage and long-term access. The two main strategies for permanent access are migration and emulation. Fully integrated into its organization, long-term archiving of digital publications is part of the KB's collection policy and daily processing processes. Its Research and Development department continuously studies new developments in digital sustainability in an international context. The e-Depot system and the processing processes for digital publications are regularly updated, and new tools are developed and implemented for this purpose. The KB strives for international certification of the e-Depot to reflect its quality.

Within the context of the Dutch DARE project, and for the purpose of long-term storage and permanent access to the digital materials of Dutch institutional repositories, a link has been established between these IRs and the KB's e-Depot. Regular harvest of relevant repository material will guarantee permanent access to this material through the KB. This will enable the IRs to use KB's long-term preservation services of digital publications.

Marcel Ras
Manager e-Depot, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands, Acquisitions & Processing Division, the Netherlands

Marijke Dewaerheijt
Digital Collection Manager, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands, Acquisitions & Processing Division, the Netherlands

Tim Brody
Researcher, University of Southampton, School of Electronics and Computer Science, United Kingdom

The proponents of providing open access to research literature hope that it will maximise the benefit derived from making research results publicly available. This improvement will result from both increasing the potential audience for research outputs (by removing access-toll barriers) and by providing earlier access (through pre-print and draft versions, where appropriate).

But for those that make open access versions available, does it actually increase citations? In this talk I will discuss a number of studies that have addressed this question.

As with all statistical problems citation impact has to be treated carefully, especially given the politics surrounding the use of citations as a means of measuring research quality. Citation data are difficult to collect and analyse - while there are several sources of citation data these are often commercial and closed to scrutiny, or limited in their coverage. Due to the statistical nature of citation data it's also necessary to take care when applying statistical processes, as they can be easily distorted.

Despite these limitations citation data provides us the best opportunity to delve into the effects of policy on research. As the quality of tools for analysing citation data improves, we can potentially provide new means of discovery of research and research trends. Added to this are potential new measures that can be enabled with the Web - in-links/out-links, download counts and textual analysis.

Tim Brody
Researcher, University of Southampton, School of Electronics and Computer Science, United Kingdom

Alma Swan
Director, Key Perspectives Ltd, United Kingdom

Open Access is a critical component of the vision for the way future research is carried out and communicated, but researchers - and institutional managers - are still not sufficiently aware and informed about its benefits and about how to provide it.

I will present an overview of Open Access advocacy highlighting, with the aid of exemplars, the best practice around today. We will review what doesn't work particularly well, and what really does bring results, taking into account the spectrum of interests and needs across the disciplines. What works for chemists does not necessarily do anything for a historian and advocacy programmes must take this into account.

As well as reviewing the issues and drawing out points of good practice, the session will provide delegates with some useful materials that they can use in their own advocacy programmes to promote Open Access within their own organisations.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Alma Swan
Director, Key Perspectives Ltd, United Kingdom

Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard
Deputy Director General, Royal Library, Denmark

Module 6: Libraries and Research Data - Embracing New Content

Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard
Deputy Director General, Royal Library, Denmark

Stephen Pinfield
Chief Information Officer, University of Nottingham, Information Services, United Kingdom

We are already experiencing a data deluge. Dealing with data is now a major challenge. The challenge lies not just in storing data (although that is in itself a significant undertaking) but in managing the whole data life cycle: creation, selection, ingest, storage, metadata production, retrieval, and preservation. Addressing that challenge will help to unlock the real potential of data for the research community and beyond.

This presentation will provide an overview of the issues associated with dealing with research data. It will also look at the role librarians can play in this by applying their skills and expertise in this new context.

The processes and systems which support data curation will be set in a wider context of e-infrastructure development. Related e-infrastructure systems - including repositories, analytical tools, collaboration technologies and networks - need to be managed as components of an overall e-research environment. The role played by this infrastructure in creating greater effectiveness in scientific research and research communication will be considered. Some issues, such as data validation, data search and retrieval, links between data and published outputs, and open access to data and publications are obvious ones where librarians can make a useful contribution and thus improve scientific research.

Data is produced and used in different ways by different disciplines. It is essential to develop services that take into account disciplinary differences but also allow cross-disciplinary interactions. This is an ongoing challenge in which, once again, librarians can play an important role.

One important issue in data curation is the relationship between institutional, consortial, disciplinary, national and international provision. This presentation will draw on evidence gathered as part of the large-scale feasibility study of the UK Research Data Service (UKRDS). This study included an assessment of the overall situation in the UK as well as a detailed set of case studies from several individual universities. Experiences in launching a 'pathfinder' phase of the UKRDS will also be analysed and their relevance to other countries and sectors discussed.

Key policy international developments will also be considered. These include initiatives such as OECD Ministerial Declarations on data access and sharing, and recent policy initiatives from the EU, Germany, USA, and Australia.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Stephen Pinfield
Chief Information Officer, University of Nottingham, Information Services, United Kingdom

Micah Altman
Senior Scientist, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, USA

How do scientists manage research data during and after publication of research? How should they? This presentation traces data from creation through publication and dissemination, and focuses on issues related to open access.

Scientific data were among the first sorts of information to be generated in digital form, and some data archives have been preserving such data for nearly a century. Nonetheless treatment of such data is wildly inconsistent across institutions and fields, and wide gaps remain between systems/practices for data creation, preservation, and scholarly publication.

This presentation will present principles for scientific data dissemination, and discuss significant gaps in the current infrastructure supporting quantitative scholarly analysis. The presentation will emphasize particularly:

• Principles for access to data
• Advantages of open data access
• Barriers to open access
• Legal issues - privacy, confidentiality, and intellectual property
• Disciplinary and organizational open data initiatives
• Institutional models for providing access
• Open access licenses and norms
• Technical requirements for open access
• Open infrastructure and open source tools

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Micah Altman
Senior Scientist, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, USA

Charles (Chuck) Humphrey
Data Library Coordinator, University of Alberta Libraries, Canada

A life cycle model of data stewardship will be presented showing the stages through which research data move from conception to production, analysis, deposit, and re-use. Moving from stage to stage throughout this life cycle, different entities or organisations have primary custodial responsibility for data. This presentation will address the custodial role that libraries can contribute in such a life cycle model. Research occurs within a community of players, many of whom work together in various forms of formal and informal partnerships. This is also reflected in the data stewardship life cycle, where data libraries are among a variety of organisations working with and supporting data. These include the newly emerging national data service facilities (for example, the Australian National Data Service) and national data archives (for example, those represented by the Council of European Social Science Data Archives.) While this presentation will focus specifically on the functions that data libraries perform in the life cycle, areas will be noted where these other organisations differ as well as complement one another in constituting a larger partnership in research.

The experiences in North America demonstrate that libraries can support access to research data and thereby make a significant contribution to research. In many ways, work in a data library is similar to services already performed in reference and collections development. Consequently, library directors should not be fearful of incorporating research data into their service offerings, especially if they head a research library. There are varying levels of service that can be offered for research data and as the level of support increases, the skill level required of the data librarian correspondingly increases. For example, as a data reference service moves from quick reference to a consultation service, greater skills in working with data are required. This presentation will comment on a variety of service levels that can be offered.

Where does a data librarian learn the skills needed to support a specific level of service? Without a degree specialisation in data librarianship formally available in Canada, a training programme was introduced in 1997 in conjunction with the Data Liberation Initiative (DLI). Started in 1996, DLI provided post-secondary institutions in Canada with affordable and equitable access to expensive Statistics Canada data through a subscription service. Within the first year of operation, a need for a baseline of professional competencies in data services was clearly identified. Four regional workshops were conducted across Canada in 1997, which have been subsequently offered annually to librarians supporting DLI in their institutions. Over the years, a curriculum has been developed around data skills, data knowledge, and data service attitudes. This training programme has become an integral part of DLI and is in many ways is the true success story of this initiative. The DLI experience and other strategies developed for training data librarians in Canada and the United States will be discussed.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Charles (Chuck) Humphrey
Data Library Coordinator, University of Alberta Libraries, Canada

Ken Miller
Associate Director - Head of Information Development, Programming and e-Social Science, UK Data Archive, United Kingdom

Traditionally, peer reviewed published articles in learned journals were the valued outputs from research carried out at institutions of higher and further education. The preservation of these valued outputs was down to the publishers and if lucky the researchers themselves. The underlying data on which the research was based was quite often discarded. Some forward-seeing funders of research did realise the value of this other kind of output and set up subject based data archives. The main aims of these repositories were to encourage data sharing and secondary analysis.

In recent years several events have occurred which are changing the research environment:

• The value of the underlying data has been more widely recognised, some publishers are insisting that the data be uploaded alongside any article submitted for review.
• Several initiatives have been undertaken to try and make stronger links between published research and the underlying data.
• The institutions of higher and further education are creating their own repositories to preserve the outputs, including data, of the research carried out at their establishments.
• The practice of collaborative research and data sharing is becoming more wide spread.
• The growth of non-peer reviewed electronic publication and the interest in data of new players, such as Google.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Ken Miller
Associate Director - Head of Information Development, Programming and e-Social Science, UK Data Archive, United Kingdom

Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard
Deputy Director General, Royal Library, Denmark

Module 7: Libraries and Collaborative Research Communities

Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard
Deputy Director General, Royal Library, Denmark

Aldo de Moor
Director, CommunitySense - community informatics research in practice, the Netherlands

Inspiration is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for collaborative communities to work. Such communities make use of complex Internet-based tool systems. In these systems, communication is fragmented among many tools, such as blogs, wikis, e-mail, videoconferencing or Skype, and numerous web sites and services. This fragmentation often leads to a lack of awareness by community members of what their collaborative responsibilities and permissions are at a particular stage. This results in collaboration coming to a halt. To address this problem, explicit attention needs to be paid to community activation: who is when and in what way to initiate, execute and evaluate the goal-oriented communication processes that make up effective and efficient collaboration in a community?

Aldo de Moor outlines a conceptual model of online collaborative communities. This model is the basis for collaboration patterns that capture socio-technical lessons learnt about in which work context best to use specific Internet tool capabilities. Such patterns combine collaborative requirements in terms of workflows and norms (as defined by the goals and culture of the community) with the technological affordances and constraints of the tool system. In a digital class experiment, for example, he found that adding a blog monitor tool was crucial. It helped to connect the previously disconnected processes of information collecting (using blogs) and group report authoring (using a dedicated authoring tool). Capturing and analyzing such specific lessons learnt can help in distilling more generally applicable collaboration patterns. These patterns can be used, for instance, in defining the specific task roles to be played by community members and the technical configuration of the tool systems they use. He discusses how collaboration patterns could be used for the activation of research collaboratories.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Aldo de Moor
Director, CommunitySense - community informatics research in practice, the Netherlands

John Butler
Associate University Librarian for Information Technology, University of Minnesota Libraries, USA

The University of Minnesota has engaged in the collaborative development of two virtual communities (VCs): EthicShare: a Collaborative Virtual Community and HarvestChoice: Better Choices, Better Lives.

• EthicShare is a multi-institutional, information research and collaboration website for scholars working in the fields of practical ethics.
• HarvestChoice is a large-scale global project that supports the food policy analyst community.

Several intriguing challenges have surfaced in the course of VC development. These include creating a scaleable and replicable model that is sufficiently sensitive to the inherent cultural differences found across disciplines. In the case of EthicShare, we are challenged to provide humanities scholars, who generally speaking are accustomed to working along solitary lines, with some trustworthy, experimental ground to explore new approaches that leverage community intelligence. Underlying all VC development is the significant challenge of long-term sustainability. The scope of concerns here range from the straight economics of "keeping this service running" to harnessing the capacity of the community itself to sustain, manage, and enrich the resource itself. Can we expect scholarly communities to play this role if doing so dilutes their capacity to produce scholarship? What are the incentives to this form of contribution? Are there lessons to be learned about community-built and -replenished information resources from efforts like Wikipedia? What do we know from models like the National Science Foundation's concept of Virtual Organizations that may inform this work by libraries? The arena of VC development is clearly rich with research and development potential.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

John Butler
Associate University Librarian for Information Technology, University of Minnesota Libraries, USA

Judith Wusteman
University College Dublin, UCD School of Information and Library Studies, Ireland

A new generation of research, e-Research, has emerged. It is epitomised by its collaborative, multi-disciplinary nature, the increasingly huge volumes of data it processes and generates, and the advanced infrastructure that enables the sharing of vast amounts of computer power and storage. As e-Research evolves, so Virtual Research Environments (VREs) take shape to support it. Also known as collaboratories, VREs aim to facilitate e-Research by providing tools and technologies in an integrated environment to support individual researchers and collaborative teams.

VREs will increasingly change the face of research, and librarians have a crucial role to play in their successful development and optimal use. But librarian involvement in VREs will not materialise by default. VREs are only now beginning to move from theory to practice; now is the ideal time for librarians to proactively identify and advocate for their potential roles.

This session provides an overview of VREs, illustrated with examples of research developments, mainly in the UK. It then considers the potential role for librarians in three aspects of VREs: development, training and use. Specifically, librarians could be involved in collaboration with research communities to determine user requirements and to facilitate user evaluation. They could also provide user training in VRE use, just as they provide training in VLE use at present. And, finally, librarians could employ their data management and communication skills in order to contribute to the management of VREs.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Judith Wusteman
University College Dublin, UCD School of Information and Library Studies, Ireland

Gary Olson
Donald Bren Chair of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine, Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, USA

A collaboratory is an organizational entity that spans distance, supports rich and recurring human interaction oriented to a common research task, and provides access to data sources, artifacts and tools required to accomplish research tasks. Collaboratories come in many sizes and shapes, and have now emerged in almost all areas of scholarship, including more recently the social sciences and humanities.

We have known for some time that working together is in itself a complex human activity, and all the research shows that adding geographic distance as a factor only complicates matters further. Our research group has been studying collaboratories for more than a decade, and have examined scores of them to try to uncover a pattern as to why some succeed and many fail. We have summarized our findings in a series of working hypotheses, which I will describe, and illustrate with concrete examples.

I will also pay specific attention to the role of digital libraries and associated information professionals in the collaboratory vision.

Paper, slides and recommended reading

Gary Olson
Donald Bren Chair of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine, Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, USA

Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard
Deputy Director General, Royal Library, Denmark