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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