LofT Notes 3 - 6/20/2001
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LofT Notes is a periodic newsletter designed to keep UVa Library staff informed about new and interesting digital initiatives being undertaken throughout the Library, upcoming speakers and presentations, and other news. In this Issue:
Library of Tomorrow Question and Answer Session Held About 20 staff attended an open Q&A session on June 12th. Topics discussed during this hour-long conversation included budgeting for Library of Tomorrow implementation, the impact of a new Provost and Dean on LofT, server deployment, SIRSI upgrades, information community staffing plans, metadata development and the status of the DL testbed. Please stay tuned for future Q&A sessions. Melinda Baumann to head Digital Production Facility Melinda Baumann has been named Manager of the new Digital Library Collections Production Services. This service, one of the main recommendations from the LofT planning process, will report to Kendon Stubbs as part of Central Services. This service will allow us to amass digital content for the library in an efficient and cost-effective manner. Melinda will be working with Kendon in locating and designing space for this facility as well creating job descriptions for and filing the initial staff lines. Library Awarded Mellon Grant for American Studies Information Community The "Building an American Studies Information Community" project will concentrate on building the infrastructure for an information community by concentrating on collections and tools that are particularly useful to the scholars and students studying American Culture. Thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, we will have two years funding for a community coordinator and a full-time programmer, as well as money that can be used for student and hourly help. Work will concentrate on building the appropriate collection in the new digital library system that we are developing, starting with our existing text, image, statistical and GIS collections. In addition to developing work-flow support for the new production facility, research will concentrate on how we can use information technology to support and enhance the effort to harvest and enrich metadata from collections that we buy or those we may acquire by harvesting Open Archive servers. New Web Statistics Program Analyzing traffic on the Library's web site(s) has been identified as a library priority, and as part of meeting this challenge, the library has purchased the Enterprise Reporting Server package from Webtrends, Inc. This package will be installed and made available on webstats.lib.virginia.edu, and will analyze and report web traffic from all of the Library's web servers. ACH Conference Presentation Matt Gibson and Christine Ruotolo presented their paper "Beyond the Web: TEI and the Ebook Revolution" at the 2001 joint conference of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing. Their presentation covered the mechanics of ebook production and the conversion workflow the Electronic Text Center hopes to implement in the near future. They also discussed the user response to our ebook collection, and the advantages and disadvantages that different formats offer to scholars and instructors in the humanities. Their paper has been submitted for publication in the conference proceedings. The Library's ebook collection can be accessed at: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks. Library Adds IEEE Content
On-Line The library has recently added IEEE Xplore to its growing collection of on-line resources in the pure and applied sciences. The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) publishes highly cited titles in fields such as electrical engineering, telecommunications, computer science, and robotics. IEEE Xplore provides access (from 1998 to present) to 106 IEEE-published journals and magazines and over 345 IEEE-sponsored conference proceedings. You can access IEEE Xplore at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/lpdocs/epic03/. For more information contact Heather Packard (has8d). Library Participates
in LOCKSS Project The Library has agreed to participate in the LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) project. The LOCKSS project, headed by Stanford University with funding from NSF, Sun Microsystems and the Mellon Foundation, is an online archiving program designed to provide reliable, persistent access to academic materials published on the Internet. Chris Hoebeke will be leading the Library's involvement in this endeavor. More information about LOCKSS can be found at http://lockss.stanford.edu. |