The Li Ka Shing Library adopted a strategic and collaborative approach in implementing its institutional repository. Engaging the institution’s policy stakeholders including the University’s Provost early in the day, a strategic planning and governance committee was established to guide the vision and objectives for the institutional repository. The platform served to decide on intellectual property rights and copyright policies and addressed the need for a more coordinated approach to managing accountability at all levels, from the institution right down to the individual. The strategy presented opportunities for enhancing faculty productivity through taking a holistic approach to supporting the lifecycle of research and consolidating information needs on research and teaching data across the organization. As a result, the drivers for the enrichment and sustainability of the institutional repository were set in place.

Presentation [ PPT ]

Imagine coming to a forum where your most pressing agenda is discussed in an environment of people and information flow. Yes, people flow! Employing a knowledge sharing technique called Open Space Technology or OST, the forum will engage you within a setting where you create and manage your own agenda.  A powerful technique, OST is used to surface important ideas, insights, recommendations, conclusions, questions for further study and plans for immediate action. So, come with your agenda items to the forum to explore the above theme and leave with a wealth of knowledge.

Presentation [ PPT ]

The definition and purpose of crowdsourcing and social engagement with users will be discussed with particular reference to the Australian Newspapers service http://newspapers.nla.gov.au, FamilySearch http://familysearchindexing.org, Wikipedia http://wikipedia.org and the Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net. These services have harnessed thousands of digital volunteers who transcribe, create, enhance and correct text. The successful strategies which motivated users to help, engage, and develop the outcomes will be examined. How can the lessons learnt be applied more broadly across the library and archive sector and what is the future potential? Users no longer expect to be passive receivers of information and want to engage with data, each other and non-profit making organisations to help achieve what may seem to be impossible goals and targets. If libraries want to stay relevant and valued, offer high quality data and continue to have a significant social impact they are well advised to have active engagement strategies and harness crowdsourcing techniques and partnerships to enhance their services. Can libraries respond to the shift in power and control of information and do we dare give users something greater than power – freedom?

Presentation [ PPT | DOC ]

The Hong Kong Memory Project (HKMP) was initiated by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Government in 2002. The goal is to establish a web-based digital repository for the collection, preservation, presentation and dissemination of Hong Kong’s unique historical and cultural heritage. In 2006, the Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC) donated US$10 million to fund the project for 5 years. At the same time, HKJC also asked the Centre of Asian Studies (CAS) and Libraries of The University of Hong Kong (HKUL) to participate in the project, responsible for content development and system setup of the repository.

CAS and HKUL have been working closely together with HKJC, HKSAR Government and other stakeholders to create the digital repository since November 2006. Much has been achieved over the past two and a half years, including putting together a team of dedicated staff, drawing up copyright guidelines and contracts, seeking support from contributors and recently, issuing the tender document for procuring hardware and software of the HKMP system. A prototype website has also been created to gauge comments from target groups through running a series of usability tests. It is expected that the HKMP website would be available to the general public by 2011, before the repository is handed over to the HKSAR Government for continual maintenance and development.

Presentation [ PDF ]

Wikipedia is a goldmine of information; not just for its many readers, but also for the growing community of researchers who recognize it as a resource of exceptional scale and utility. It represents a vast investment of manual effort and judgment: a huge, constantly evolving tapestry of concepts and relations that is being applied to a host of tasks.

This talk will introduce the process of “wikification”; that is, automatically and judiciously augmenting a plain-text document with pertinent hyperlinks to Wikipedia articles — as though the document were itself a Wikipedia article. We first describe how Wikipedia can be used to determine semantic relatedness, and then introduce a new, high-performance method of wikification that exploits Wikipedia’s 60 M internal hyperlinks for relational information and their anchor texts as lexical information, using simple machine learning.

The result amounts to a new semantic representation of text in terms of the salient concepts it mentions, where “concept” is equated to “Wikipedia article.” Wikification is a useful process in itself, adding value to plain text documents. More importantly, it supports new methods of document processing that exploit Wikipedia’s internal hyperlinks for relational information and their anchor texts as lexical information.

Presentation [ Open ] – (Requires Adobe Flash Player)

This presentation discusses data management within the context of the University of Otago. It follows up on the Library’s Biodiversity Data Management Project that ended in mid 2009 and was the theme of a presentation at PRDLA 2008. “One year after” will report the final outcomes of the project and provide a profile on other digital and e-research initiatives at the University of Otago in which the Library is participating.

Presentation [ PPT ]

The current status of University of Hawaii at Manoa Library Pacific-related image collections including the Steve Thomas Traditional Voyaging, George Grace and Margo Duggan collections, all posted to the web using the OAI harvestable Streetprint Digital Library software and the Henry P. Edmunds and William A. Bryan photographs of Rapanui and the venerable Trust Territory Archive photo collection will be discussed. The Pacific Collection future plans and wish lists for digitization of additional collections and their relationship with existing collections in the ODiL will be described.  Hawaii-related collections of images (Save our Surf) as well as text (Hawaiian Historical Society) will be highlighted and recent experiments with updating the Annexation of Hawaii web site and the UHM Library’s participation in the U.S. National Digital Newspaper Program will also be described.  Thoughts (possibly scandalous or heretical) about the ODiL portal in light of very new developments such as the World Digital Library and slightly older initiatives such as the UNESCO Memory of the World Committee for Asia/Pacific may be voiced.

Presentation [ PPT ]