Part of the mission of Digital Research & Publishing is to serve as a test kitchen of sorts for emerging library programs and services. Toward this end, we are experimenting with the development of:
3D Digitization
Libraries have well-defined standards and efficient workflows for creating digital libraries of text and image collections, and emerging best practices for audio and video. DRP is now investigating effective ways to represent artifacts and other 3D objects in a digital environment. The project is initially focused on the library’s Fluxus collection, working in collaboration with the Digital Studio for Public Humanities to support Stephen Voyce’s Fluxus Digital Archive.
In the coming year, we will explore a variety of approaches to digitizing artifacts, including planetary scanning, modeling and visualization, and photo-documentation in order to find the most effective ways to represent artifacts in a digital environment.
Geospatial Data Portal
With the ubiquitous uptake of easy-to-use mapping tools and the increasing desire of students and faculty to represent their ideas spatially, there is a growing demand for GIS support, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. DRP is championing a campus-wide effort to define and implement a GIS infrastructure suitable to meet the institution’s needs.
In the coming year, we will build a layered platform to enable discovery and delivery of the library’s geospatial data resources by redesigning our GIS data repository, ensuring library geospatial resources are in a planned campus-wide GIS web service, and building a GIS data portal using OpenGeoportal.
Linked Open Data
DRP is leading an initiative for a linked open data framework that would enable the library to build bridges among our many data silos. In order to participate in the data commons, we recognize that we must first network our own data silos using emerging semantic web technology, thereby exposing our resources through machine-actionable data elements.
In the coming year, we will be mapping data silos, developing an extensible identifier framework, and creating a prototype RDF data store with the hope of becoming one more node in the Linked Open Data cloud.
Participatory Archives
The Iowa Digital Library holds over 1 million digital objects — many more than library staff could ever catalog alone — so we’re appealing to the public to help out by attaching text in the form of transcriptions, tags, and comments. DRP has launched DIY History, a crowdsourcing platform giving volunteers a way to contribute to digital library initiatives. DIY History currently draws from five of our collections: Civil War Diaries and Letters, Szathmary Culinary Manuscripts and Cookbooks, Iowa Women’s Lives: Letters and Diaries, Building the Transcontinental Railroad, and Nile Kinnick.
In the coming year, we plan to add more content, enhance functionality, and identify other opportunities for users to participate in digital archives.
Publishing Services
Academic libraries have long championed open access and the changing nature of scholarly communication, and DRP wants to make sure our library is ready to prove up by offering sustainable and scalable publishing services. Building on our success with journals and peer-reviewed series, scholarly archives, and out-of-print books, we are developing a more robust set of publishing services as a viable alternative to commercial publishing, exploring ways to grow the institutional repository exponentially, and experimenting with non-traditional publishing models that accelerate disseminating scholarly information and take advantage of formats beyond traditional print.
In the coming year we plan to promote an expanded suite of journal publishing services, automate ingest of faculty publications from “green” publishers who permit self-archiving, expand support for digital editions of media-rich publications in the digital humanities, and develop a comprehensive plan for digital publishing services.
