Embedding the Managed Repository in National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Semantic Library Services

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Embedding the Managed Repository in National
Science Digital Library (NSDL) Semantic Library
Services

• Carol Minton Morris
• National Science Digital Library
• Fedora Commons
• Ellen Cramer
• National Science Digital Library

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A quick look back at NSDL, and a few facts
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Photograph by Jon Crispin
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• A cross section of email archives of 8
  representative providers revealed over 2,700
  messages, or around 170 messages per provider per
  year.

Carl Lagoze, Tim Cornwell, Naomi Dushay, Dean
Ecktrom, Dean Krafft, and John Saylor Metadata
Aggregation and "Automated Digital Libraries" A
Retrospective on the NSDL Experience.
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• The very notion of a journal of medicine
  separate from a journal of bioinformatics,
  separate from the writings of physicists,
  chemists, psychologists and even kindergarten
  teachers, will someday become as out of date as
  the print journal is becoming to our graduate
  students.

Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., Scientific
Publishing on the Semantic Web, Nature Web
Debates, April 5, 2001
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• 12 million of the 147 U.S. adults who use the
  internet keep blogs.
• The main topic for 37 of those bloggers is my
  life and experiences.
• Bloggers are avid consumers of other peoples
  blogs.

Lenhart, A., Fox S. Bloggers A Portrait of
Americas New Storytellers. Pew Internet and
American Life Project Reports. July 19, 2006.
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Photograph by John Mitani
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Diagram of a Blog, New York Times, April 4, 2007
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• You have a blog. You compose a new post. You
  click Publish and lean back to admire your work.
  Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your
  post slips into a vast and recursive network of
  software agents, where it is crawled, indexed,
  mined, scraped, republished, and propagated
  throughout the Web.

Rose, F., The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From
Servers to Spiders to Suits to You, Wired
Magazine, Jan. 22, 2007
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• Annotations and their association with primary
  resources are one class of the variety of
  relationships that can be established among
  digital content.

Lagoze, C. et al, Representing Contextualized
Information in the NSDL, Proceedings of the
Euorpean Conference on Digital Libraries,
September 2006. Alicante, Spain.
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• Goal for NSDL technical services Put NSDL in
  the path of the user, enabling them to easily and
  comfortably integrate NSDL into their normal
  workflow.

Krafft, D., et al, Working With the NSDL Data
Repository, Proceedings of the NSDL Annual
Meeting, November 2007. Washington, D.C.
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Inserting open source tools into repository
workflows
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Inserting open source tools into repository
workflows
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Inserting open source tools into repository
workflows
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Inserting open source tools into repository
workflows
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Inserting open source tools into repository
workflows
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Expert Voices blogs in the big NSDL.org picture
McArthur, D., National Science Digital Library
Shaping Education's Cyberinfrastructure, IEEE
Computer, Vol. 41, Issue 2, Jan. 2008
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But sadly, if you build it they will not
necessarily come.http//expertvoices.nsdl.org
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• 12 million of the 147 U.S. adults who use the
  internet keep blogs.
• The main topic for 37 of those bloggers is my
  life and experiences.
• Bloggers are avid consumers of other peoples
  blogs.

Lenhart, A., Fox S. Bloggers A Portrait of
Americas New Storytellers. Pew Internet and
American Life Project Reports. July 19, 2006.
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• 8 of the 147 million U.S. adults who use the
  internet also keep blogs.
• .03 of the 270 thousand unique visitors to
  NSDL.org from 06/07-3/08 keep Expert Voices
  blogs.
• The desired topic for NSDL bloggers is
  Connecting STEM resources and current research
  to classrooms.

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User participation in a semantic repository
workflow
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Example 1 Public Insight Journalism

• Professional journalism model based on finding,
  tapping, and mining audiences expertise and
  knowledge while managing public reporting roles
  and participation.
• A public-professional partnership aimed at
  telling great stories based on personal
  relationships and enabled by social technologies
  such as blogs, wikis, tagging systems and virtual
  environments.
• Model developed by Minnesota Public Radio
• http//minnesota.publicradio.org/publicinsightjour
  nalism/

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Example 2 Chain of Transitive Trust

• Authority granted to trusted collaborators, who
  in turn grant authority to additional editors and
  contributors.
• Assumption that collaborators are will utilize
  technologies to independently meet organizational
  communication and content goals.

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NSDLs model(s) for public content creation fall
somewhere in between these two models.
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Growth of Expert Voices Blog Posts as Annotations
to Resources in the Managed NSDL Repository
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Growth of Expert Voices Blog Posts as Annotations
to Resources in the Managed NSDL Repository
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Wiki Workflowhttp//wiki.nsdl.org
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Heres what worked.
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Technical chops

• Having strong technical leadership with the
  ability to respond with timely feedback training,
  and iterative system releases based on user
  experiences worked.

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An experienced reporter

• Hiring a tech-savvy editor/reporter to actively
  recruit participants, find out whats going on,
  coordinate new blogs, provide hands-on, casual
  instruction and technical assistance, and seed
  appropriate content for writers to model blog
  posts on worked.
• This nose-to-the-ground newshound position made
  a version of the Public Insight Journalism
  model possible in Expert Voices.

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The carrot

• Sharing data with potential contributors that
  indicated serendipitous yet significant use of
  repository resources due to referrals from the
  blogosphere with communities of potential
  contributors worked.

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Viral distribution

• Engaging content contributors in experimenting
  with multiple ways to effectively utilize RSS,
  tagging, and feedburners to disseminate content
  from blogs worked.

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Scholarly engagement

• Engaging discipline communities with particular
  points of view and a need to take advantage of
  viral distribution to increase use of vetted
  and managed resources worked.

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Next

• Release of NCore NDR API, and blog /wiki open
  source plugins now available
• http//wiki.nsdl.org/index.php/CommunityNCore
• http//sourceforge.net/projects/nsdl-core
• Continued outreach to content and context
  contributors
• Additional viral distribution experimentation

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Acknowledgements

• The authors gratefully acknowledge
• Prior work by the Cornell University NCore team
  that includes Dean Krafft, Tim Cornwell, Aaron
  Birkland, Jim Blake, and Lynette Rayle.
• The Fedora Commons team that includes Sandy
  Payette, Chris Wilper and Dan Davis.
• The Cornell Information Science Digital Libraries
  Group that includes Carl Lagoze.
• Brad Edmondson, Editor, Expert Voices
• Generous support from the National Science
  Foundation, grants 0227648, 0227656, and 0227888.
  

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Questions?
Carol Minton Morris Dir. Communications and
Outreach National Science Digital Library Fedora
Commons Cornell University Ithaca,
NY communications_at_fedora-commons.org Ellen
Cramer Systems Analyst/Developer National Science
Digital Library Cornell University Ithaca,
NY elly_at_cs.cornell.edu