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OCLC and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries held a forum on MOOCs and Libraries on March 18th and 19th. This is the first post in a short series on that event. You can also check out the event page for links to videos, presenters’ slides, and more!

It’s been a few weeks, but it still feels like I’m catching my breath following our well attended (and I think successful!) forum, MOOCs and Libraries: Massive Opportunity or Overwhelming Challenge? This event was an attempt to get beyond the plethora of what I’d call “MOOC 101″ and instead focus on the issues facing libraries that are engaging or may soon be engaging with MOOCs. I was fortunate to be tasked with such an engaging topic, and doubly fortunate to team up with Martha Brogan at the University of Pennsylvania and her colleagues (Anuradha Vedantham, Shawn Martin, and Marjorie Hassen) — the University of Pennsylvania Libraries were perfect partners because they haven’t just been thinking about MOOCs, they have been actively engaged with all aspects of MOOCs from planning, to production, to assessment. U. Penn was an early implementer on the Coursera platform, and have now been through several course cycles. I was also fortunate to work with my colleague Chrystie Hill, who lead the charge in bringing public library voices into the event. I was also fortunate, in event planning, to be able to draw upon the expertise resident in the OCLC Research Library Partnership — in November of 2012, I knew little more about MOOCs than what was covered in the popular press. I was educated by colleagues who are working in the field, who spoke from a basis of knowledge and experience, and who were willing to share with me via phone conversations and emails during December and January (my findings are summarized in an earlier post, MOOCs and Libraries: a look at the landscape).

We had a sell out crowd of 125 people attend in person and record breaking online attendance of over 400 (hardly MOOC like, but for sustained attention from afar, it’s very good). We were also fortunate to have a very strong Twitter stream, with contributions from both in person and remote attendees, which helped to “amplify” the event. And we have a record of the meeting in the recorded video (which you may enjoy watching!). Still, I think it’s important to have a summary of the meeting and some notable outcomes. I hope that some of you who attended (or who are able to watch the videos) will join in the conversation. And keep the conversation going by using the hash #mooclib when blogging or Tweeting on this topic.

Carton Rogers, Vice Provost & Director of Penn Libraries, and Ed Rock, Provost and Director of Open Course Initiatives, helped to set the scene for the group. Rogers underscored the confluence of support that the Penn Libraries provide to support learning — library resources, repository services, and courseware support. Deep engagement with Penn’s MOOC efforts was a natural next step for the library, and led to Penn’s hosting this first-of-a-kind meeting. Rock expanded on this, addressing, “Why MOOCs, why Penn, why now?”

The internet, Rock asserted, is now a place of learning so naturally one expects to find the university there. However, there is no one cookie cutter model for how universities engage with MOOCs — each institution needs to think out the role of MOOCs in their own framework. It’s already clear, from the Penn experience, that engaging with MOOCs has altered how people think about teaching — and this is a good thing. They’ve also seen that MOOCs can be used as an intervention in public discourse (a good example of this is the Penn course on vaccines). Rock also emphasized the democratic nature of MOOCs, with participants from residents in assisted living facilities, to autistic children, these courses are open to all ages and stages. He also speculated a bit about the role of the MOOC in a residential college setting — successful completion of a course that is eligible may be treated like an AP course — there is already a system for this in place. Or, a MOOC may be useful in helping students prepare for and test out of gateway classes.

Jim Michalko, Vice President OCLC Research (and a self confessed MOOC virgin), shared some context about MOOCs and online learning; we’ve been here before — or have we? What we have definitely seen before is the media frenzy around online learning or even distance learning — he referenced correspondence courses, Fathom, and Khan Academy, all of which are part of the heritage of what he called “the big three”: Udacity, EdX and Coursera which only launched a year ago. However, this time may well be different — Michalko cited Bill Bowen’s The ‘Cost Disease’
in Higher Education: Is Technology the Answer? as evidence of a “broken business model,” leaving institutions ripe for disruption (à la Clayton Christensen).

In closing he asked some pointed questions: “what business are we in?” “where is the venue for elite education online?” “are institutions engaging in a prestige arms race?” Finally, he predicted a platform war with MOOCs: “not everyone’s going to win.”

My presentation picked up where Jim left off: in all of this, where is the library? I presented findings from my research (which I have summarized previously): libraries are engaging in issues around copyright and IP, and are actively looking to see how to appropriately embed library services and research skills into these new and evoloving environments. Encouragingly, some libraries are part of the core teams being formed on campus which are planning and executing on MOOCs — these partnerships are vital, especially if MOOCs are seen as important to the campus. To be blunt, if it’s politically important, libraries need to be there. I also touched on the exciting ways that public libraries are thinking about MOOCs — not necessarily from the production side, but from the perspective of how these educational tools may fill a need for the diverse audiences they serve.

MOOCs (and online education) is a space in which things are evolving quite rapidly. I think it’s too soon for best practices, or declarations of success or failure. I think it’s a great time for experimentation, for trying things (and strategic abandonment!). This is also a perfect time to share the results of experiments. We are excited that this meeting was a step in that direction, and an important opportunity to share information with one another. But we’re not done yet — we’re at the beginning, not the end.

Next up, I’ll be summarizing the session on copyright, licensing and open access, so stay tuned!

This post is co authored by David Michelson, Vanderbilt University

Over the past year OCLC Research has been working with a group of Syriac studies scholars with the goal of tapping their expertise to enrich the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), by adding Syriac script to existing names and adding new ones. Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic, developed in the kingdom of Mesopotamia in the first century A.D. It flourished in the Persian and Roman Empires, and Syriac texts comprise the third largest surviving corpus of literature from the fourth through seventh centuries, after Greek and Latin. We anticipated that the issues we addressed could then be applied to scholars in other disciplines. We started with the assumption that the scholars could use the Library of Congress’ Metadata Authority Description Schema, or MADS.

We have learned a lot in the process of building a bridge between scholarly interest in names as a subject of historical research and VIAF’s interest in persistent identifiers for each name in authority files. We found that we shared values for name authorities:

• Scholars and librarians share a mutual appreciation for each others’ work on identifying names appearing in historical research.
• Many scholarly projects in the digital humanities are already relying on VIAF for authority control and to anchor Linked Open Data. The Syriac scholars pointed us to digital humanities projects— such as the Fihrist, a union catalog of Islamic manuscripts hosted in the UK, and those listed in the Digital Classicist Wiki under “Very Clean URIs”—that have adopted VIAF URIs as the best method for authority control and to link to other data sets.
• VIAF can provide part of the cyberinfrastructure for digital humanities, a standard way for linking and querying data, a need identified by The American Council of Learned Societies’ national Commission on Cyberinfrastructure.

We discovered two key issues important to scholars that just don’t mesh well with the library practices represented in name authority files, which VIAF aggregates, due to differences in intended audiences, disciplinary norms, and metadata needs:

• Scholars eschew a “preferred name”. Libraries need to bring together all the variant forms of a name under one form, choosing a “predominant form” if a person writes in more one language. This approach meets the discovery needs for a specific national or linguistic community. Scholarship is international, and the “preferred name” in one locale will differ from another. Further, the context is crucial for classifying names. For scholars, a “preferred name” needs to also include by whom and for what purpose it is preferred. For example, a Syriac name in use in 600 may be classified as “classical Syriac”; but the same name in use one thousand years later may be classified as a neo-Aramaic dialect. The same Syriac author might have multiple “preferred forms” in multiple languages (Syriac, Arabic, Greek), each used by different or competing cultural communities. This applies to other languages as well. Scholars resist declaring a “preferred form” because it could exclude some historical or cultural perspective. Each form may be “authoritative” depending on the time and place it appears.
• Scholars need to know the provenance of each form of name. When a name has multiple forms, scholars—especially historians— need to know the provenance of each name, following the citation practices commonly used in their field. Historical and textual scholarship is built on conventions of evidence and values the process of contesting intellectual claims. MADS does not provide the structure for citing these sources or providing the required contextual information. Although library practices require “literary warrant” to justify why one form of name was chosen as the authorized heading or access point, they do not document the context for any of the variant forms. There is not even a field to indicate the language of a name’s form. We can deduce the language of the preferred form only by the source of the authority file. Scholars find little value in name information without provenance data, an equivalent of footnotes.

The good news is that our collaboration has pointed the way for future interaction between VIAF, the VIAF Council, and the scholarly community:

• Syriac studies colleagues are building their own Syriaca.org database where they can describe each personal name with the granularity that meets their scholarly requirements. We will work together to create a crosswalk so that OCLC Research can extract the information that fits into a MADS structure, and can still enrich existing VIAF clusters with Syriac and other script forms or add new names. VIAF and Syriaca.org will follow existing protocols for using the http://viaf.org/viaf/sourceID namespace in minting URIs for new names not yet in VIAF.
• For those who need the additional details, people could click a link to the name in the Syriaca.org database, much as those who want to read a biography of a VIAF name can click on a Wikipedia link, if present. Thus VIAF can still integrate scholars’ expertise and serve scholarly users without needing to overcome the fundamental differences between library and scholarly practices.
• Syriaca.org will work with OCLC and the VIAF Council to establish a path for other scholarly research organizations to contribute to VIAF.

The screen captures of the current VIAF cluster and a Syriac Reference Portal Demo record for Ephrem below help us imagine how VIAF could be enhanced.

VIAF Cluster

Extract from the Syriac Reference Portal Demo

David Michelson is the assistant professor of early Christianity at Vanderbilt University and director of The Syriac Reference Portal, a joint project among Vanderbilt University, Princeton University, St. Michael’s College Vermont, Texas A&M University, Beth Mardutho the Syriac Institute and other affiliate institutions, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Upfront admission: I work from home more than I work in the office. Having said that, either what I say makes sense or it doesn’t — decide for yourself.

Marisa Mayer, Yahoo!’s CEO, provoked outrage from the Internet by banning telecommuting for Yahoo employees. Such outrage was not difficult to predict in this age, with the Internet making it often better and more efficient for employees to work from home than the office. But of course like many things, there is more to this than meets the eye.

She has a point, There IS something to being able to walk down the hall and corner someone in their office. Or running into them while getting lunch or a cup of coffee. I get that, and that’s also why I travel on a regular basis, as my colleagues do even more, back to the Mother Ship. But partly this is still due to old ways of thinking, and please don’t make the mistake that this has anything to do with physical age.

Read the rest of this entry »

We are excited to be working with the Ohio State University (OSU) and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) on a new project to explore the contours of a regional strategy for managing the print book resource in the CHI-PITTS mega-region. Regular readers of this blog will know that mega-regions are geographic areas that typically encompass multiple population centers, exhibit a high degree of economic integration, and are bound together by a rich network of transportation, logistics, and communications infrastructure, as well as mutual cultural interests and similarities. Mega-regions are an intriguing concept for thinking about collaborative activities that scale above small groups of institutions, or even existing library consortia. OCLC Research recently published a report that used a mega-regions framework to explore the characteristics and implications of a North American network of regionally consolidated print book collections.

Over the last few months, we have explored this issue further by working with several US regional library consortia to examine their collective print book holdings in the context of the print book resource and infrastructure available in the mega-region most closely aligned with the location of the consortial membership. We have produced profiles for the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) in the context of the SO-CAL mega-region; the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) and the Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC) in the context of the CHAR-LANTA mega-region; and the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) membership in the context of the BOS-WASH mega-region. We plan to publish a series of case studies highlighting the findings from these consortial profiles in the near future.

Our new collaboration with OSU and the CIC is an extension of this consortial profiling work. In this project, we will examine print book holdings at multiple levels: an institution (OSU); a library consortium (CIC); and a mega-region (CHI-PITTS). The purpose of the work is to conduct a detailed analysis of the factors that an individual library might bring to bear in selecting books to contribute to a shared consortial collection, as well as to compare both the individual library collection and the consortial print book resource to the broader context of the print book resource available in the surrounding mega-region. The CHI-PITTS mega-region, which extends across the upper Midwest from Chicago to Pittsburgh, is the mega-region which aligns most closely with the locations of the CIC membership.

Some of the questions we will address include:

• What part of the OSU print book collection represents a distinctive asset when compared to the aggregate print book holdings within the CIC membership, or the broader CHI-PITTS mega-regional print book resource? What are the characteristics of these distinctive resources with respect to subject, age, and system-wide work-level holdings?
• What part of the OSU collection is widely held across the collections of the CIC membership, or institutions within the CHI-PITTS region? Can a “core” set of titles be identified, at the consortial or regional level, that represent duplicative investment? Are there opportunities to reduce local costs by managing these titles as a shared resource at the consortial or regional level?
• What does the ILL demand profile for OSU tell us about consortial and regional demand for its print book collection? How much of this demand is centered around OSU’s distinctive print book titles? How can OSU cooperate with other CIC members to meet local, consortial, and regional demand for print books?

Carol Pitts Diedrichs, Director of OSU Libraries, has posted a nice summary of the thinking that led up to this joint effort.

OSU volunteered to serve as a test case for this project, with the understanding that findings from the analysis will be useful to all CIC member libraries considering shared print archiving arrangements. Of course, we hope the project will be useful to other libraries as well. There is growing interest in how (or if) the lessons learned in journal archiving projects like the Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST) or the CIC Shared Print Repository can be applied to cooperative efforts to preserve monographic collections. This project should provide some answers. We expect to post periodic updates on the project over the next several months here on Hanging Together, and will publish a synthesis of findings in a final report later this year.

Lorcan Dempsey (VP of Research at OCLC) has long said that we need to “make our data work harder.” And for years that is exactly what OCLC Research has been doing. So when I was asked to speak on data mining at the OCLC European, Middle East, and African Regional Council Meeting in Strasbourg, France, I knew I would have a lot to talk about. Too much, in fact.

Instead of trying to cover everything we’ve been doing in a whirlwind of slides that no one would remember, I decided to use WorldCat Identities as a “poster child” for the kinds of data mining activities we have been doing recently here at OCLC Research. Then, I described another, related project — the Virtual International Authority File. To bring it all home I mentioned how we’re considering how we might be able to marry these two resources into one “super” identities service.

Consider what it would mean to take an aggregation of library-curated authority records and enhance it with algorithmically-derived data from WorldCat as well as links to other resources about creators such as Wikipedia. This would provide a rich resource of information about creators, all sitting behind authoritative and maintained identifiers that could be used in emerging new bibliographic structures such as is being created by the Library of Congress’ Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative. The mind reels with the possibilities.

But before I could jump into all this I needed a way to quickly explain why we are doing things like this — and how we are doing them. I decided I needed to make a video. So last week that is exactly what I did, with help from colleagues in Dublin. The result was less than three-and-a-half minutes long, and yet it amply set the stage for what was to come after. Plus, it can have a life of its own.

Take a look yourself, at “Cataloging Unchained”, and let me know what you think in the comments.

Hurrah! After about 18 months of enjoyable collaboration with new colleagues from RLUK (Research Libraries UK, the ARL equivalent over there across the Atlantic), our rather hefty report was co-published by OCLC Research and RLUK last week. The project was launched on the heels of our predecessor project that studied research libraries in the US and Canada, which was published as Taking Our Pulse in 2010. The projects were similar in two basic respects: both populations comprised a disparate array of special collections research libraries across multiple nations, and data gathering for the UK/Ireland was based on a variant of the US/Canada survey instrument.

A lot of similarities in the data exist as well. The top six “most challenging issues” were the same for both populations (though not in the same order): outreach and user services, space and facilities, born-digital materials, digitization, cataloguing and metadata, and preservation (“collection care” in the UK/Ireland). In general, the use of all types of material by all types of users increased over the preceding decade. Collecting and management of born-digital archival materials remains in its infancy in both sectors. Use of minimal-level processing techniques is used (at least sometimes) by strong majorities of both populations. For staff education and training, born digital was the most frequently cited area of need. Collaborative collection development is relatively common but is invariably informal and within a localized area.

On the other hand, we saw some big differences. External funds (e.g., gifts or endowments) for acquisition of materials are far larger in the US/Canada. Interlibrary loan of original rare or unique materials, which has become increasingly common in the US, is rarely practiced in the UK. A significantly higher percentage of archival finding aids are online in the UK and Ireland–perhaps due to the strong national hubs that exist.

RLUK was very interested in seeing how their data would compare with that of ARL libraries, which was a key reason for keeping the two instruments in synch, so we took a close look at similarities and differences in a nine-page section toward the end of the report.

There’s no way I could have done this project on my own. The expertise and perspective brought by my UK co-authors was essential, and their esprit de corps made the entire process a delight. The effort was coordinated by David Prosser and Mike Mertens, the RLUK executives, whose collegiality and make-it-happen attitude were equally essential.

Not yet available for your mobile devices, but easy enough to haul around in your dropbox!

Last month I facilitated a forum at the New-York Historical Society about Putting ‘Special’ in the ‘Collective Collection.’ We think it might be the first ever meeting about the centrality of distinctive and unique materials in discourse about the contemporary research ecosystem of shared print agreements, digital materials (both free and licensed), print collections, regional consortia, and resource sharing.

The meeting was standing room only, with a substantial waiting list. This group of thoughtful representatives from OCLC Research Library Partnership institutions set out to reconsider entrenched ideas about the irrelevance, or even the danger, of the collective collection to special collections.

What is the collective collection? In the recent mega-regions report, Constance and Brian defined the “collective collection” to be the combined holdings of a group of institutions, excluding duplicate holdings.

In our thought experiment, we mentally set aside the widespread overlapping collections, like those runs of STEM journals, subscriptions to Evans Online, or Google Books and the Hathi Trust. What’s left is a virtual collection of scarce publications – all in situ – that are held across the institutions in the group.

What remains is the rare stuff, “thy true heritage.” It is the widely-held material that allows us to focus on collecting (collectively) in the margins. The collective collection is not complete without special collections.

What does this strategy mean for researchers? It means that I can look every one of them in the eye and tell them that I can get them everything they need, regardless of where those materials “live”. And I can provide my rare books and special collections to all of my researchers, no matter where they do their work.

What are the implications for library administrators? The distinctiveness of your library’s materials – in concert with your colleagues’ special collections – is the hallmark of the collective collection.

Share your ideas, in comments below, or in email to me.

In a previous post I described how I could now string search WorldCat using the Research compute cluster and Hadoop. This means I can find any string of characters anywhere in a MARC record and output the OCLC numbers of matches and/or the entire record, all within a few minutes. Keep in mind we are now talking about nearly 300 million records.

String searching is not, by any means, the only way we use Hadoop. It is actually more common for us to use code (typically written in Java, Python, or Perl) to parse the records and output portions for further processing. But since I had been using such code for simply identifying records of interest, I began to wonder which method of processing was faster.

In a short experiment I quickly proved that string searching was about three times faster for simple identification and output of records than was the code I had previously been using. This is because, I believe, the code I had been using would parse the record before determining if it met my criteria. This one extra step added so much overhead to the process that it would take 15 minutes (in one test) rather than 5.

This likely means that in some cases where relatively few records would match your criteria, you would still be better off extracting the records by string searching and then running your extraction code against them off-cluster. For example, if I wanted to pull out the 245 fields of, say, about 1,000 records, I’d likely be better off extracting the records I wanted by string searching and then process that file directly without using Hadoop.

One last permutation, however. If your process is one that identifies 1,000 records in some situations and several million in another, having one process through which all operations flow is more efficient than two or more separate processes.

And so it goes. Another day and another adventure in Hadoop.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you know that MOOCs have been causing a bit of a stir in the academic sector. In the last year, MOOCs have exploded, from a handful of early innovators, to dozens of elite institutions becoming partners with organizations like Coursera, edX, and in the UK, the Open University lead FutureLearn venture. The reasons for this are many, well-documented, and also highly debated. Instead of reviewing what you can read elsewhere, I’d like to focus on the relationship between MOOCs and libraries. Here’s what I was curious about: What is the connection between MOOCs and libraries? What’s happening now and where are the opportunities?

To answer my question, I reached out to members of the OCLC Research Library Partnership. This group comprises 20 of 32 Coursera institutions; 3 of 6 edX institutions; and 4 of 12 FutureLearn institutions. I was fortunate to have either an email exchange or (even better) a phone call with nearly everyone I contacted. This information from those in the trenches has been invaluable. In these exchanges, I asked my basic questions: what are you doing now? what do you think the next steps are? As expected, a number of themes have emerged, along with a wide variety of attitudes (from white knuckle fear to excitement, and everything in between ). Below is a summary of what I’ve learned so far.

FutureLearn has not quite fully launched yet, but the libraries at those institutions are planning to work with one another (good news). Within edX, the librarians have also formed an informal network (more good news). Within the larger Coursera network of institutions, there is no similar alliance of librarians.

Here are some some of the themes that have emerged:

I did these interviews as background for an event we’ve been planning together with the University of Pennsylvania Libraries (and which I’m pleased to announce!) “MOOCs and Libraries: Massive Opportunity or Overwhelming Challenge?” March 18-19. We’re still shaping the program and confirming speakers, but if you check out the event page, you will see the various themes we’ll be covering.

Do you have other ideas? Want to be part of the conversation? Leave a comment here, send me an email, or Tweet under the hash #mooclib. I look forward to hearing from you!

I am delighted that a paper titled “Trust in Digital Repositories” co-authored by my OCLC Research colleague, Ixchel Faniel, was given the best conference paper award at the just-concluded International Data Curation Conference in Amsterdam. Okay, she had help. Co-authors are Elizabeth Yakel (University of Michigan School of Information) with Adam Kriesberg (UMSI) and Ayoung Yoon (University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science).

We can’t link to the paper because it hasn’t been published yet. However you will find the presentation slides embedded in the conference program that I linked to above.

The work described in the presentation looked at whether the actions stipulated as key to the audit and certification of trustworthy digital repositories were actually instrumental in creating trust in the designated community of users. Plain language – we said do these things and you should be trusted. Are those really the things that influence the repository users’ judgement about trustworthiness? And does that judgement differ by disciplinary affiliation?

I’m not going to spoil it. What do you think?

This work was based on the Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification checklist that OCLC Research published about five years ago. The Digital Curation Center itself has a nice page on the development of the certification checklist which goes back quite a long way. The Research Libraries Group had a lot to do with its origins thanks to my former colleague, Robin Dale.

It pleases me that this work has bridged organizations and colleagues. Shout out to Robin. Congratulations to Ixchel.