Plenary Session One: The Power of Shared Data

Summary of Session

This session looks at the power of shared data in   the context of academic research.  It will illustrate how large instances of data or “big data” is being opened up for analysis, with amazing results. 

Abstracts:

Culturomics: Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitised Books:  Jean-Baptiste Michel

Jean-Baptiste along with a colleague, Erez Liberman Aiden, constructed a corpus of digitised texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enabled them to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. They surveyed the vast terrain of ‘culturomics,’ focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. They showed how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. Culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.

Leveraging WorldCat: Data Mining the Largest Library Database in the World:
Roy Tennant

With nearly 300 million bibliographic records, WorldCat is the largest aggregation of shared library data in the world. With access to this data on a large parallel processing computer cluster, OCLC Research has undertaken a number of projects to maximize its value by processing the data in interesting ways to create new services. Work is also being done to report back to the library profession on how the MARC standard has been used over the last 40 years. Tennant will describe some of these efforts as an illustration of the power of mining shared library data.

Plenary Session Two: Library Perspectives of Sharing Data

Summary of Session

Libraries have been pooling their data, for different purposes, for decades.  This session will take a look at what a library’s present and future requirements for aggregating and sharing data might be.  We will hear from one major library on their work with data both nationally and internationally.  And then hear a research perspective on why large-scale metadata aggregations are desirable.

Abstracts:

Sharing Data Nationally and Internationally - the strategy of the Swiss National Library: Marie-Christine Doffey

In September 2012, the Swiss National Library announced that as part of its open data strategy the metadata of Helveticat, its online catalogue, are available under the Creative Commons License CC0 1.0 to be freely used by third parties. This formalized – and extended - the library’s openness to sharing data, a strategy that it, and many library partners nationally and internationally have followed for years in the cultural heritage world e.g. for partners in Switzerland, in WorldCat, within the European Library and also in Europeana, with the goal of widening access to collections.  Now any interested party may take and re-use the metadata as they wish and the announcement was widely taken up across open data fora on the Web. The presentation will look at the Swiss National Library’s strategy in this field, address questions raised for other datasets, share its experiences of data sharing, nationally and internationally, and attempt to assess the impact of its open data strategy six months after the announcement.

Metadata out of control: network-level metadata aggregations
Titia van der Werf

As libraries, archives and museums, we have become convinced that sharing our metadata on the web will increase our exposure and promote the use of our collections. In the past seven years or so, we have invested substantial effort and resources in making our metadata available on the web, beyond our own controlled systems. We have populated large-scale metadata aggregations and discovery systems. This has proven to be hard because we were not used to what metadata looks like outside our local context. As a result serious data quality issues have become manifest in large metadata aggregations of heterogeneous content. How far away are we from realising the promise that aggregations can enhance data quality and end-user experience? This presentation will look into some of the research done in this area and future directions.

Plenary Session Three: Progress on Moving Data to the Cloud

Summary of Session

A fixture of every year’s meeting is the opportunity to hear from the OCLC leadership.

Abstracts

OCLC WorldShare Update
Jay Jordan

Jay will give an update on OCLC’s open architecture.  This will include progress on delivering new WorldShare management services from a shared library platform and the emphasis on creating an open infrastructure that other providers in the sector, including library members, are using.

EMEA Models for Cooperation:
Eric van Lubeek

Eric will pick up on how the WorldShare strategy in EMEA will form new models for cooperation with regional and national partnerships being central to its evolution.

How French Libraries will move to the cloud:
Raymond Bérard and Jean Bernon

ABES (French bibliographic agency for higher education), believes that next generation library systems are a credible alternative to traditional systems. ABES, which runs the French union catalogue (SUDOC), has decided, together with a group of French academic libraries, to switch from their traditional systems (a central base feeding local systems) to a cloud-based solution. A study is now investigating all the potential impacts of this move including, technical, legal, and organisational. A tender will be launched in late 2013. This presentation will address all the issues of such a strategic move, with a specific focus on the transition phase between the existing and the future models. Not avoiding all the sensible issues such as security, privacy, data quality, licensing of data, costs, adapting skills, and the risks of mono-dependency on a vendor.

Plenary Session Four: Linked Data

Summary of Session

This session will provide insight and understanding of the potential that the introduction of linked data principles and practices will bring to libraries and the wider information driven landscape that they are part of.  

Abstracts

Linking data in the enterprise: the road to Olympics 2012:
Silver Oliver

Linked data as an approach to sharing and managing metadata is a current but new topic for libraries. In this talk Silver will cover a series of established case studies in the adoption of linked data in the enterprise. Drawing from his work at the BBC he will tell the story of how the they came to work with linked data and the problems it was used to solve. Reaching its pinnacle as the platform sitting behind the BBC’s Olympics 2012 coverage. 

Culturegraph Project (Title To be confirmed)
Markus Geipel

As more and more cultural heritage data become openly available, the opportunities to combine data sets to build new services and applications multiply. To do so, however, relations between as yet unconnected data sets need to be created. Given the size and complexity of metadata, this is a major challenge.

To address this challenge the German National Library is developing Culturegraph, an open platform for connecting and processing metadata. Its guiding principles are transparency and high performance. The presentation will show how these principles are put into practice to store, process and index over 100 million bibliographic records. Applications include data bundling to identify duplicates, performing statistical analyses and augmenting searches. Future perspectives are facilitating multilingual search for authority data, data enrichment as well as automatic translation of classification systems.

Linked Data and OCLC:
Richard Wallis

Linked Data has become the topic of the moment for library focussed conferences. Why have these simple principles put forward by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 2006 and the associated standards from the Web, become potentially so important to the library community?  Providing a background will lead to an insight into how OCLC and others have used Linked Data in innovative ways to publish and share their data. Building on these early steps and looking to the future we will see how adopting Linked Data could help libraries become core to the web of data, and impact the way they think about and manage their resources.

Plenary Session Five:  Innovating with Data

Summary of Session

It is entirely appropriate that we close our Meeting with the question, what should this all mean for our community of users?  Having data that is dynamic, openly usable and re-usable means that we can build new applications for our communities that will entertain educate and inform in ways previously not imagined. In our closing session, Dr. Klaus Ceynowa will talk about how the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has grasped this opportunity to deliver innovative new services to its users.

Augmented Reality, Location Based Services and More: Innovative use Scenarios for Library Content:
Dr Klaus Ceynowa

The future of the digital world of knowledge will be determined by three major trends in web technology: the transition from the stationary to the mobile internet, the predominance of highly personalized applications available on the spot (e.g. location-based services), and the replacement of keyboard and mouse by natural user interfaces (from GUI to NUI, gesture-based computing). Basically this means the end of the familiar ‘internet working place’ as the primary way for distributing and accessing digital information in favour of the ‘all-pervasive internet’ that will be fully integrated in our daily routines of work and life.

How can digital content and information be optimally designed and processed in order to ‘function’ seamlessly in the new user scenarios of mobile and personalized knowledge worlds? The Bavarian State Library has been experimenting for some years in the field of tools, methods, and services for the ‘contextualization’ of digital content: mobile apps, augmented reality, location-based services, 3D computing, gesture- and picture-based search and presentation systems are some examples that will be shown and discussed with respect to their potential for innovative information services. It thus becomes clear that a rich, multi-medial offer of digital content and services is only half way to success. What equally counts is the seamless integration of content and services into the fascinating and immersive user scenarios of future digital life.