Indiana University Libraries Digital Projects & Services

In this talk, I will present an innovative method of automatically generating (1) a textual review paper, given a scientific topic (i.e., keyword); and (2) a literature review section, based on a piece of working text (i.e., a publication abstract or introduction). We proposed a four-step solution for generating an automatic review paper or literature review section: Citation Recommendation (generating a list of citations) given a user information need, Citation Management (generating clusters of citations), Review Generation (summarizing citation clusters into collections of candidate sentences), and Readability Enhancement (optimizing sentence representation). The aim of this proposed project is to give scholars easier access to decent-quality literature reviews relevant to their information needs (working text or a keyword represented topic). Automatically generated textual research reviews could be an important supplementary information access or provide additional feature to a classical academic search system, i.e., Google Scholar.

This project was funded by an NEH Office of Digital Humanities Startup Grant and is managed by Indiana University Libraries. This grant funded the creation of two Video plugins for Omeka. One allows the importing of Annotator's Workbench (a digital video segmentation and annotation tool developed as part of the Eviada Project) annotations and segmentations into Omeka as Items. In addition, another plugin was developed to present these video segments in Omeka and Omeka exhibits. Both plugins will be reviewed as well as a short background on Omeka.

Recently, the Indiana University Libraries implemented Blacklight, an open source discovery layer, as the new public interface for IUCAT, the statewide shared online catalog. Blacklight was chosen as the solution to improve the usability and accessibility of the catalog in response to user and staff dissatisfaction with the traditional ILS OPAC interface and in preparation for IU’s upcoming move to the Kuali Open Library Environment (OLE). A successful discovery implementation requires buy-in from library staff as well as the approval and acceptance of users; this presentation will highlight the numerous challenges in achieving success in a complex environment of diverse stakeholders with divergent needs and goals. Courtney will give a brief overview of the project thus far, discuss the impact of the new interface on user and staff workflows, and share hopes for further enhancements and plans for the transition to OLE.

Today’s scholars are at a critical juncture with respect to how they will measure the impact of their research in coming years. At the same time that scholars in various disciplines are increasingly being encouraged to share their research data, new technologies are enabling the measurement of the variety of ways in which such data is shared and reused. This talk will explain not only recent initiatives to develop standards and technologies to support data citation, but other frameworks for measurement that aim to quantify the impact that curators and digital libraries’ designs have on the reuse of research data. It will also cover ways in which researchers can leverage campus and national resources to promote the tracking of impact metrics for their own data.

This talk will focus on new developments regarding statistics and altmetrics in the IUScholarWorks institutional repository. It will cover the technology and policies behind a recently added statistics module, which displays filtered data regarding views and downloads for all items in the repository. Additionally, we will discuss an experimental new feature, the integration of alternative metrics ("altmetrics"; which track social media mentions of scholarship) into the repository display.

The UITS Advanced Visualization Lab, a Cyberinfrastructure and Service Center of the Pervasive Technology Institute, has created a set of functional, relatively low-cost displays to help tackle the advanced visualization challenges facing Indiana University faculty, staff, and students. All of these displays use commercial-off-the-shelf hardware and available software and share user-centric qualities including high interactivity, a low barrier of entry, and some level of immersion. Each display can easily be built, installed, and configured in a variety of spaces. During this talk, we will discuss the IQ-Table, a 55” monitor equipped with 32-point multi-touch capabilities. We will review the existing installations on the IUB and IUPUI campuses and discuss how you can engage with the AVL to borrow or build your own IQ-Table. Finally, we will take a detailed look at the AVL’s Collection Viewer software, and how to customize it to present your own content.

Historically, libraries— especially academic libraries—have contributed to the development of the TEI Guidelines, largely in response to mandates to provide access to and preserve electronic texts. The institutions leveraged standards such as the TEI Guidelines and traditional library expertise—authority control, subject analysis, and bibliographic description—to positively impact publishing and academic research. But the advent of mass digitization efforts involving scanning of pages called into question such a role for libraries in text encoding. Still, with the rise of library involvement in digital humanities initiatives and renewed interest in supporting text analysis, it is unclear how these events relates to the evolution of text encoding projects in libraries.

This paper presents the results of a survey of library employees to learn more about text encoding practices and to gauge current attitudes toward text encoding. The survey asked such questions as:

• As library services evolve to promote varied modes of scholarly communications and accompanying services, and digital library initiatives become more widespread and increasingly decentralized, how is text encoding situated in these new or expanding areas?
• Do we see trends in uptake or downsizing of text encoding initiatives in smaller or larger academic institutions? How does administrative support or lack thereof impact the level of interest and engagement in TEI-based projects across the library as whole?
• What is the nature of library-led or -partnered electronic text projects, and is there an increase or decrease in local mass digitization or scholarly encoding initiatives?

Preliminary analysis shows, despite assumptions of decline, that over 80% of eligible respondents are actively engaged in text encoding projects, and many others are planning to embark on a new project. The presentation will unveil a full analysis.

The PetrArchive is a new digital archive and “rich text” edition of Francesco Petrarca’s iconic fourteenth-century songbook Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf; Canzoniere). A primary goal of the PetrArchive is to document, investigate and illustrate the graphic codes and structures—especially the “visual poetics”—of the work. Our paper will discuss and demonstrate specifically the broad issue of indexicality in the context of the digital editing and encoding practices and strategies adopted and exploited in pursuit of this goal.

The Rvf is both in its manuscript tradition and our new edition a highly indexed and indexable book. An index often contains a list of words, subjects, titles and addresses, as well as pointers and locations of references. These lists and addresses provide a representation, map, or model of a document. A comprehensive, hierarchical, multifaceted index to, for instance, a large edition of letters is of tremendous practical value as a guide through the collection. An index may also be a remarkable work in itself as a structured conceptual model of the contents of a collection. Often indexical structures are embedded in the document as we find in the Bible and other religious texts, with book titles, chapter and verse numbers, and cross-references embedded throughout the text. Petrarch’s adherence in his model holograph MS Vatican Latino 3195 to his 31-line graphic canvas and his designs of various combinations of verse forms to fill that canvas generate, among other things, a visual index to the document, with the textual and graphic shapes of the manuscript serving as a visual map of genre and generic juxtaposition. Our project will build a graphic representation, or visualization, of the manuscript that will allow readers to browse and scan—by shape and structure—the distribution, combination, and juxtaposition of genre and form throughout the manuscript.

Another aspect of our visual and schematic indices to the edition will be the animation of Petrarch’s own poetics of erasure and transcription, through which he revises his texts but also deforms the patterns of his own indexical practices to highlight the importance of the work’s visual-poetic structuring. We will demonstrate an example of this deformation in our animation of the canzone Quel’ antiquo mio dolce empio signore (Rvf 360). In his own holograph MS, by then a service copy, Petrarch is forced to abandon his ideal layout for the prosodic form of the canzone. Only in subsequent MSS will the canzone revert to its ideal, authorial form not in the author’s hand. Our representation will allow readers to view the poem morphing from one layout to the other, requiring the encoding of both the actual and ideal layout in the document and the interpretation of those codes in the digital design and publishing layers of the edition. Beyond their instant utility in allowing users an overview of the design of individual MS pages and of the Rvf’s complex system of combining forms, these indices reconfigure the equally complex layers of indexical structures inherent in a scholarly edition.

Libraries are interested in providing better, more comprehensive access to physical and digital collections, institutionally and collectively. Indiana University is improving its discovery tools with multiple projects in active development, using Blacklight as a primary interface for IUCAT (the online public catalog) and as an interface for a cross-collection search of digital objects from the library’s digital repository. Blacklight, using Solr indexing for different types of collections, represents a potential means of enabling more seamless discovery across many data sources, including digital objects, catalog records and library website content. Courtney and Julie will discuss findings of a survey of academic and educational institutions engaged in similar Solr-based discovery/access projects and will also discuss combining large and distinct resource sets using Blacklight/Solr at IU, focusing on user experience and metadata/indexing perspectives.