As you may well have seen, IMLS released its 2005 National
Leadership Grants for Libraries awards last week <see http://www.imls.gov/whatsnew/current/092005_nlgindex.htm
for the entire list>.
DLF libraries made a strong showing,
and apologies if I missed anyone:
Indiana University - Bloomington, IN
- $768,747
2005 National Leadership Grants for Libraries - Building
Digital Resources
Over the past several decades, information technology has
become an essential part of how music libraries deliver services and
collections to music students and faculty. Yet, even with technological
advances, music students and faculty have not been able to transform routine
listening assignments that traditionally involve studying a printed score while
listening to a recording. Over the past four years Indiana University (IU) has
developed an experimental digital music library system known as Variations2. Building
on IU's past experience in creating the original
Variations, one of the world's first digital music library systems, Variations2
provides a complete environment in which students and faculty can discover,
listen to, view, annotate, and interact with music. It is clear from consistent
communication that many libraries, of all sizes, public as well as academic,
are interested in implementing a system like Variations2 for their clientele.
However, the current Variations2 system is tied to the technical and service
environment of IU and additional work is required to turn it into a system that
can be distributed and used by others. The Indiana University Digital Library
Program project will create Variations3, a turnkey digital music library and
learning system that can be easily deployed at a wide range of college and
university libraries with minimal technical support and at minimal cost to the
institutions.
OCLC/Rutgers University, School of Communication,
Information and Library Studies - New Brunswick,
NJ - $684,996
2005 National Leadership Grants for Libraries - Research and
Demonstration
Rutgers University School of Communication, Information and
Library Studies and OCLC
Online Computer
Library Center
will research and evaluate the sustainability and relevance of virtual
reference services (VRS). VRS are human-mediated, Internet-based library
information services. The increasing use of VRS by the public has increased the
demand on libraries to provide reference services online, and this project aims
to improve libraries' ability to respond to the demand. The project will
develop a theoretical model for VRS that incorporates interpersonal and content
issues and will make research-based recommendations for library staff to
increase user satisfaction and attract nonusers. It will also make
recommendations for VRS software development and interface design and produce a
research agenda for user-centered VRS.
University of Chicago - Chicago, IL
- $249,857
2005 National Leadership Grants for Libraries - Building
Digital Resources
The Goodspeed Manuscript
Collection Project will produce a digital collection of 65 Greek, Syriac, Ethiopian, Armenian, Arabic, and Latin manuscripts
dating from the seventh to the nineteenth centuries. Created in many of the key
production centers of Asia Minor, the Balkans, Armenia,
and North Africa, these resources are
seriously understudied because access is currently limited to individual,
on-site consultation. The manuscripts are of great artistic and historical,
significance and include examples of the Byzantine and Eastern schools of
manuscript illumination. The digital collection project will allow, free to the
public, comparative and cross-cultural textual and iconographic research
through open source interfaces for searching, browsing, page turning, and
zooming in and out of high-resolution images.
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, MI
- $510,205
2005 National Leadership Grants for Libraries - Research and
Demonstration
Institutional repositories are under development on many
academic campuses and are becomingly an increasingly important information
resource for researchers, faculty, students, and other members of the academic
community. The University of Michigan's School
of Information will
investigate the development of institutional repositories in colleges and
universities to identify models and best practices in administration, technical
infrastructure, and access to collections. The researchers will survey
institutional repositories in North America,
produce case studies that illustrate key elements contributing to successful
repositories, specify variables that influence success, evaluate repositories
through user studies, and create instruments and protocols for reuse of data by
other investigators and repository staff.
University of Tennessee - Knoxville, TN
- $928,080
2005 National Leadership Grants for Libraries - Building
Digital Resources
The University of Tennessee and nine partner institutions throughout
the state will build a free, full-text searchable electronic database of 10,000
unique and historically significant items from Tennessee libraries, museums, and other
repositories. The project will create three regional centers to administer a
statewide network of shared resources, provide training opportunities, and
developing common technical standards. It will also begin to integrate
digitized primary sources into the state's K-12 teaching curriculums through
user-based assessments. An online database of primary sources will enable
teachers to introduce students to important topics and integrate resources into
lessons. Tennessee
history is a vital component of the state education system and has contributed
to the nation's historical record since the early republic period to the
present. The project will connect libraries, museums, and archives throughout Tennessee directly to
teachers, students, researchers, and others.
University of Tennessee, Office of
Research - Knoxville, TN - $199,995
2005 National Leadership Grants for Libraries - Research and
Demonstration
The University of Tennessee, in partnership with the University of Wisconsin,
Milwaukee, will
analyze the needs and query behaviors of users who search for information on
the Web. The aim of the project is to create new models for information
discovery that incorporate algorithms for conceptual matching, allowing users
to search for concepts as an alternative to entering search terms. The research
will affect the design of new search interactions for digital libraries and Web
search engines.
University of Texas at Austin,
Office of Sponsored Projects - Austin,
TX - $157,172
2005 National Leadership Grants for Libraries - Research and
Demonstration
The Open Choice project will create, test, and evaluate an
"open source" Internet content filter for use in libraries.
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Two others that caught my eye –
not from DLF members but from projects by faculty on our IMLS/OAI Scholars’
Advisory Panel. SmartFox addresses
that often-heard need from scholars for a way to gather up material into
personal collections (an area also addressed in other ways by Berkeley’s
Scholars Box and Waikato’s Greenstone).
George Mason University
- Fairfax, VA - $249,420
2005 National Leadership Grants for Libraries - Building
Digital Resources
George Mason University's Center
for History and New Media will develop free, open source Web browser tools to
enhance the use of digital library and museum collections. These tools will
turn a regular browser into SmartFox: the Scholar's
Browser for Digital Collections, which will allow users to capture and organize
digital scholarly materials. SmartFox will relieve
libraries and museums of the need to build personal collection tools for their
users and will leverage the substantial investment they have already made in
digitizing collection materials. In addition to capturing and organizing
digital materials seamlessly from diverse, heterogeneous sources it will also
enable better provenance and rights tracking for items collected in scholarly
research.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln - Lincoln, NE
- $169,651
2005 National Leadership Grants for Libraries - Research and
Demonstration
The University
of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries
will use the Walt Whitman Archive project to create a model metadata encoding
and transmission standard (METS) profile for digital thematic research
collections. Digital thematic research collections constitute a distinct class
of digital collection that typically requires high-quality data and metadata,
in-depth description, high resolution files, and encoded texts. While standards
have been developed for each of these, there has not yet been a disciplined
effort to integrate the standards. Created by scholars in collaboration with
librarians/archivists, thematic research collections are directed primarily at
other scholars, though they are also used by students from kindergarten through
graduate school, and by life-long learners. By standardizing the way metadata
is encoded, creators of digital thematic research collections can make their
work more sustainable and universally usable. The Whitman Archive is a complex
project that uses multiple metadata schema thereby
providing an excellent test case.
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