|
Trip report
Coalition for Networked Information's (CNI) Spring 2003 Task Force Meeting, Washington, DC. April 28-29
CNI usually holds its spring meeting in DC and its fall meeting at a different location. This December, for example, the Fall Task Force meeting will be held in Portland. See http://www.cni.org for more information. CNI is also one of the sponsors of Net2003, a conference about federal policy, networking and IT in higher education that some of our telecom colleagues have attended. Visit CNI's website at for more information about the Spring Task Force Meeting, this meeting's plenary speakers, and the many concurrent project briefings that were given. There are surely many that will be of interest to you. Plenary SpeakersThe opening keynote address was delivered by Ms. J. C. Herz, the principal of Joystick Nation Inc., a research and design firm that "applies the principles of game design to products, services, and learning systems." Herz writes and speaks of realizing an understanding of "ecology, online social dynamics, complex systems, and information theory" to properly capture the potential of the human-human interaction in the networked environment. She is the author of two books, Surfing on the Internet (Little Brown, 1994) and Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds (Little Brown, 1997). Herz sits on the National Research Council's Committee on Creativity and Information Technology and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's study group on patterns of emergent behavior in massively multiplayer persistent worlds. In addition to teaching a graduate course at NYU, "The Anthropology of Massively Multiplayer Online Games," she has lectured at Carnegie Mellon University, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, the University of California's Institute for Creative Technologies, the Annenberg Center for Communications, and Yale. In "Gaming the System: What Higher Education Can Learn from Multiplayer Online Worlds" (I think this is a chapter from the book; it can be retrieved at http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffpiu019.pdf) she expressed her thoughts about lessons gleaned from gaming behavior and online content. She said that for the coursework delivered by institutions of higher learning to become meaningful,
Some other links to Herz's work: An index of articles written for the New York Times, 1998-2000 (free, but registration required) [http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/reference/indexgametheory.html] "Harnessing the Hive: How Online Games Drive Networked Innovation" Edventure, October 2002 [http://www.edventure.com/release1/abstracts.cfm?Counter=4007862] "Computer Games and the Military, Two Views" with Michael
R. Macedonia, Defense Horizons, April 2002 [http://www.ndu.edu/inss/DefHor/DH11/DH11.htm] Herz spoke about the Wikipedia as in interesting example of online group dynamics and that the Wikipedia seems to be working and moving forward. The Wikipedia "is a multilingual project to create a complete and accurate open content encyclopedia. We started on January 15, 2001 and are already working on 119305 articles in the English version." Other observations she made about the Net and its social role pointed to how speed and fluidity changes the dynamic. The Internet, in fact, can be described as massively multiplayer. The closing plenary session featured a talk by Timothy Lance, President and Chairman of the Board of Directors of NYSERNet [http://nysernet.org] and professor of mathematics at the University of Albany, State University of New York. Lance's talk, which was quite interesting, was entitled "Advanced Networks: New Developments and Future Potential." If you would like to read some of his work, here are two references with links.
CNI's summary of his talk follows:
I particularly enjoyed listening to his remarks because I like reading and discussing the social impact of the Net. Lance commented that the network lives within our social and political environment. A keystone of his talk was the image of earth from space showing where the most light was generated. I'm sure you have seen this at one point. He shared some anecdotal information about how Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in July 1969 and three months later the first host-to-host computer over the "internet" was realized. He showed a "Moore's Law" chart that you can find on Intel's website [http://www.intel.com/research/silicon/mooreslaw.htm] comparing the number of transistor's to the growth of processors which served as a lead to comparing that to internet traffic rapid growth in terabits per month. Lance then talked more about how computers support communication and how they have opened up the world. Compare this growth to the darker areas on the NASA earth's light image and you can see how it change can happen so quickly. New ideas are coming faster than the speed of light, metaphorically speaking. There are enormous social consequences at hand. He referred us to Mark Luker's technological development spiral. I searched in Google and found a couple links related to this concept. Try this one for a greater understanding of the concept. Educom Review "Moving Forward on Two Fronts," Jan/Feb 1998. Other interesting points he brought forward included a description of the attributes of a network
Networks are also extensible and scalable. We now are talking about the "last mile" as the "first mile;" that is, getting homes and offices connected. We have the large-scale network in place but getting the requisite high speed access out instead of just broadcast in should now be the impetus of our efforts to fulfill the social and political promise of the Net. Project BriefingsMuch of what is presented at a CNI meeting is by members who report on the status of new projects and initiatives. There is a mix of topics that are technology or networking oriented with others that focus on technology in higher education, digital library projects or library digitization projects. I make the distinction between "digital library" and "library digitization" as the former in my mind takes on the breadth of what the NSF tends to consider a "digital library." There are often six or seven concurrent project briefings raising the age-old dilemma of what to attend. What follows are comments on the ones I attended. There are links on the CNI site to abstracts for all the briefings. Lots of interesting work going on out there and I encourage you check it out. "Linking Courseware to Library Resources Using OpenURL: Experience, Possibilities, and Future Direction'" presented by David W. Lewis, Dean of the IUPUI University Library Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis; Oren Beit-Arie, Vice-President of Research and Managing Director of ISD ExLibris (USA), Inc.; and Christopher Awre, Programme Manager Joint Information Systems Committee. Their presentation presented a conceptual framework for dealing with the linking of library resources and course management systems, and described a piece of the framework they plan to implement shortly. This is of interest to us at the U of A because we have a few different course management systems implemented around campus (WebCT, POLIS, Blackboard, and Desire2Learn). We also have an online course reserve system operated out of the Main Library, some faculty working with fee-based reading lists such as XanEdu, and other types of reading lists accessible via the Web to students. Lewis reported on what his institution has observed from different constituency groups. Faculty wants to locate materials, find them, and search for other resources. Students want one click access to resources, no additional authentication requirements, 24X7 access, and links not references. Librarians want to use publications already purchased and limit fees. When dealing with purchased content, traditional bibliographic control doesn't help much. In the IUPUI environment, they have a need to enable tunneling from their CMS to textual databases that the institution has invested resources in providing. A primary question, therefore, is how do you make a citation behave like a link. OpenURL they said, has a core piece of the solution. Beit-Arie demonstrated how they are working with his company's Ex Libris system to make clicking on the SFX button go to a link server and collect an OpenURL. The link server can enrich the metadata. As part of a general development of the OpenURL standard, currently in version 1.0 he sees a possible framework for addressing the many related issues. The standard, he showed involves: referent, resolver, referrer, requester, referring entity and the service type. Avre discussed the current program of work at the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), in the UK where they are serving over 6000 UK institutions. They are working to link library resources to courseware in a project named ìLinking Digital Libraries with Virtual Learning Environments (DiVLE) using the OpenURL standard. Another project is linking reading lists to source material. "The Fedora Project: An Open Source Repository for the Management of Content and Services," was presented by Thornton Staples, Director of Research and Development, University of Virginia Library, and Ms. Sandy Payette, Researcher, Cornell University. Staples opened by explaining that priorities for digital libraries are managing digital resources as if they are all the same; delivering resources contained in a number of contents; and supporting digital scholarship wherever it may lead. Like many in the audience, they have found that commercial digital library products have numerous shortcomings. These products must approach a common denominator which is fine for a good deal of the customer base but fail to provide the robustness needed by some institutions - such as Cornell and Virginia. Since 1997, Cornell has been developing Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture and with an additional $1M from Mellon it is working with the U of Virginia to make it full-based. The goal is for users to access data objects through particular "behaviors" designed into the system architecture. Fedora is a very powerful product already and Payette assured the audience that it installs easily on a large number of platforms. They are looking for deployment partners (it is free) and the only conditions are to provide periodic summary reports. There is an article by Thornton and Payette in the April 2003 D-LIB Magazine. Cliff Lynch, CNI's Executive Director lead a report/discussion entitled "IMS/CNI White Paper on Learning Management Systems and Digital Libraries." IMS Global Learning Consortium and CNI see the rapidly evolving areas of digital libraries and learning object repositories as an important area to develop standards around. They are working on developing an alliance around common architectural, functional models, joint specifications and improved technical interoperability. Lynch reported that the White Paper is about two more months from being released so he could not share it at the meeting. However, he explained that one of the most pronounced issues higher education is facing today involves deploying course management systems on our campuses. Issues include determining who is going to manage the CMS, how to integrated it to other campuses, how to integrate digital objects and course-packs, and addressing the interoperability barriers related to library resources already owned in purchased packages. In addition, we face dependencies on other work such as metadata, authentication and authorization. Digital rights management includes enforcement and rights documentation. But reading lists need our focused attention. How can we import and export them between various systems? We think of e-reserves, site-licensed items, the public Web and our learning management systems in different ways. Also, where do persistent identifiers fit in? (Fedora has built PIDs into the architecture). This is all pretty interesting to me, because Jenny Franklin in the U of A's Learning Technologies Center, is working closely with the designers of the CMS Desire2Learn to create a reusable learning objects repository as part of the system. Raymond Yee, Technology Architect for the Interactive University Project at University of California, Berkeley, presented "Enhancing Interoperability between Digital Libraries and Educational Technology via XML Crosswalks." Yee's abstract is going to be better for many of you to read than my summary. So, here it is. "Lack of interoperability among software systems and repositories from different domains is a major barrier to the exchange of digital content. The UC Berkeley Interactive University Project (IU) has been exploring how semantic interoperability in the following four domains can be enhanced through the use of XSLT-based crosswalks between key XML specifications: 1) digital libraries and repositories (METS); 2) educational technologies (SCORM, IMS specifications); 3) Web syndication and portal technologies (RSS); and 4) desktop applications and structured content authoring tools. (e.g., Microsoft Office 11). The outcome of this work includes crosswalks among METS, SCORM/IMS-CP, and RSS and an exploratory architecture and software prototypes for the deployment of crosswalks. The IU will relate the crosswalks to other approaches to semantic interoperability." "OAI Metadata Harvesting and Institutional Repositories," was presented by Martin Halbert, Director of Library Systems at Emory University. Halbert started his presentation out with a discussion of Clayton Christensen's premise in The Innovator's Dilemma, a book that reviews disruptive technologies. Disruptive technologies induce changes in technology and market structure and if a business is not attuned to these changes, even the best can find themselves out-of-business. This was an interesting discussion and the second in-a-row of meetings I've been at where a speaker recommended this book (I got a copy last Tuesday). Anyway, from this discussion, Halbert went into a discussion about the problem of how major resources are devoted to creating institutional repositories. He mentioned the difference between prescriptive emphasis versus descriptive emphasis and that he is planning a study over the summer to explore the costs and benefits of controlled metadata using library catalogers. What was interesting was the discussion around all this. The room had a number of metadata gurus in it as well as a few who had read The Innovator's Dilemma. It was suggested that using catalogers and LC Subject headings to ascribe a level of control to the Internet resources runs contrary to Christensen's thesis that disruptive technologies do not take on practices of past methods but rather replace them with new. There was also interesting discussion about how one enters controlled vocabularies in a community. That is, is it strictly controlled, or uncontrolled and assigned by the users who are not formally trained, or a combination of both. Popularity, it was noted, does not equate to automatically to authenticity nor authority. It was further observed that going the route of cataloging Web resources using LC Subject Headings is doomed since LC catalogers can only do 2M items a year and there is no way that at that rate, they could approach what is happening on the Web. At least, that is what I heard being said at the meeting. Indeed, this is an interesting topic and well worth following. Stuart Glogoff |