Against the backdrop of a powerful desire for national modernization, the Long 1960s (c. 1955-1975) witnessed attempts to build, literally, a better post-war Britain. The unprecedented burst of building activity that marked the post-war years included the planning and construction of hundreds of public library buildings, clothed in a variety of modernist styles symbolic of the period's spirit of renewal. Described at the time as a "national health service for reading," public libraries assumed a prominent position in the post-war welfare state. Through analysis of extant buildings and primary source documents, the research will examine what modernist library design meant to librarians, architects, local politicians and planners, and the public. The research will contribute...

This project develops a freely available database that links Medline papers and U.S. patents, through identification of individuals who authored both papers and patents and analysis of citations between papers and patents. These patent-paper-author links will then enable identification of similar organizations and in some cases, science/technology field and geography. Co-authorship networks for scientists are also prepared, annotated and made available on the Dataverse Network System (DVN), analogously to what has been done for inventors in the patent record (NSF proposal 0830287). This integrated database enables researchers to investigate how 1) grants enable papers, 2) papers influence patenting, and 3) scientific knowledge ultimately diffuses and influences the entire patent record...

The goal of Data Curation Education in Research Centers (DCERC) is to develop a sustainable and transferable model for educating Library and Information Science (LIS) masters and doctoral students in data curation through field experiences in research and data centers. DCERC will establish and implement a graduate research and education program in scientific data curation that will bring students into the real world of scientific data curation, where they will engage with current practices and challenges, and share their developing expertise and research in the area. The program builds on the well-...

The Digital Collections and Content (DCC) project is a multi-phase research effort funded by IMLS to explore the socio-technical requirements for a successful digital aggregation. Conceived in 2002 as a combined collection registry and metadata repository aimed to provide a single access point to collections built from digitization efforts funded through IMLS's National Leadership Grant and LSTA programs, the IMLS DCC project explored key digital libraries issues ranging from collaboration stakeholder needs to metadata quality and interoperability.

Beginning in 2007, the second phase of the IMLS DCC project, through the DCC project's Opening History aggregation, which gathered together digital collections of digitized and born-digital U.S. cultural heritage resources,...

The IMLS Digital Collections & Content (DCC) team has received a $50,000 sub-award from the Digital Public Library of America’s (DPLA) Secretariat to further refine the team’s DPLA Beta Sprint prototype. The Beta Sprint prototype was originally developed during Summer 2011 as part of the DPLA Beta Sprint. The prototype was selected as one of six finalist projects showcased during the DPLA’s Fall 2011 Plenary Meeting in Washington, D.C.

Bringing together resources from over 1000 cultural heritage collections across the U.S., the prototype builds on the Digital Collections and Content, developed with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the team’s knowledge and experiences aggregating metadata records from varied institutions ranging from...

Field experience has long been recognized as a critical component of Library and Information Science (LIS) education. While on-the-ground experience and anecdotal evidence about the strengths and weaknesses of field experience programs abound, the LIS field lacks the research found in complementary fields such as education and nursing that is required to identify and promote “best practices” for this important component of LIS education. Field Strength, a project to be led by the University Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in collaboration with the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, will begin to identify best practices in field experience in LIS education. The iSchools and University Libraries at the University of Maryland and...

Mak's book, "How the Page Matters," historicizes recent debates about eBooks and similar technologies by casting the page as an interface that has been under development since the scrolls of Antiquity. "How the Page Matters" tracks the page through the manuscripts of the Middle Ages, the printed books of the early modern period, and onto digital displays. By locating the page in a broader tradition of writing technologies, the book re-examines the print and digital 'revolutions' and shows that the questions raised by digital theorists about the visualization of information are not new, but are instead the persistent issues in a long history of graphic reproduction. "How the Page Matters" contends that the material of the page is constitutive of knowledge; the...

Inclusive Gigabit Libraries: Learn, Discuss and Brainstorm consists of an educational campaign to raise awareness of next generation networks and how libraries might participate in U.S. Ignite-related initiatives; at least six national forums for about 150 library leaders; development of at least five case studies; and a white paper that will synthesize the forums and case studies.

The primary goal of the US Ignite Partnership will be to catalyze approximately 60 advanced, next-generation applications over the next five years in six areas of national priority: education and workforce development, advanced manufacturing, health, transportation, public safety, and clean energy.

The white paper will assess the governance, staff and financial resources and capabilities...

In order for older texts to be searchable, contemporary English needs to be translated into language from various historical timeframes. The project will develop software that will let people enter a query in contemporary English, and search over English texts throughout history—from Medieval times to the present day. The project will mostly involve training statistical models that assign probabilities of the translation to a word or phrase in a target English language. The project will also look at how to display results in order to provide the user with the most probable answer to the query.

Mix IT Up! Youth Advocacy Librarianship focuses on creating intentionally structured, youth­-centered, engaged learning opportunities related to information technologies. Mix IT Up! enhances youth services by developing a library and information science (LIS) specialization that dovetails with community informatics and youth service in order to focus on systematically training librarians as youth advocates. Mix IT Up! actively recruits youth advocacy fellows from traditionally underrepresented groups in LIS - American Indian, Latino/a, African American, and working­ class - by providing academic and financial support. Fellows are placed in long-term youth advocacy projects that partner with community organizations serving youth. Fellows also engage with selected community...

This project will investigate and implement a systematic approach to developing useful, meaningful, and usable digital collections. Building on the prior work of the IMLS Digital Collections and Content (DCC) project, the researchers will explore how to use the relationships between collection-level and item-level metadata in federated digital repositories to preserve content and make the content more useful for scholars and the public. The project will experiment with and test metasearch capabilities, and expand and improve the IMLS DCC with new IMLS-funded and other digital content and advanced search...

This project will enhance the GSLIS doctoral program by building a stronger research community within the school for the study of information in society, including policy, economic, and historical dimensions. Project goals include enhancing the doctoral program curriculum; connecting the research community to the wider world of librarianship; and attracting and supporting thirteen diverse students, especially those from underrepresented groups, with a specific focus on recruiting doctoral students who will teach master's students capable of becoming future leaders in public, academic, and school libraries.

Structural analysis of music (formal analysis) is one of the most fundamental analyses performed by music researchers, usually preceding any other types of analysis because it provides the overall view of the piece. Its importance is reflected by the fact that the course on formal analysis is often one of the core music undergraduate music curricula with several major textbooks on the subject. The main goal of formal analysis is to find similar sections within a piece of music and labeling these section such as, ABA and ABCB'A or with further analysis these sections can be marked with predefined labels such as Intro, Verse, Verse, Bridge, Chorus, Verse, and Outro (popular music) or Introduction, Exposition, Development, Recapitulation, and Coda (sonata form). Thus, the...

The Site-Based Data Curation (SBDC) project is a two-year effort to develop a framework of policies and processes for the curation of “site-based” digital research data that responds to the needs of long-tail science researchers and site managers, and promotes coordination with libraries and data repositories. The SBDC framework will be developed by experts in data curation, research library repositories, domain science, and research site management, providing a curation model that includes: 1) policies to infuse principled curation practices early in the data lifecycle; and 2) processes for curating cohesive aggregations of usable digital data for transfer from research sites to libraries and repositories. The SBDC framework is an important step forward in evolving the professional...

This project will create both a master’s and doctoral-level specialization in Sociotechnical Data Analytics (SODA). Partnerships with local researchers and businesses who already work with large data-sets will enable MS graduates to receive first-hand experience with both the social and technical implications of large digital data collections, and thus be well-prepared for leadership roles in academic and corporate environments. Similarly, doctoral students will consider multiple stages of the information lifecycle, which will help to ensure that their research findings will generalize to a range of...

The Sowing Seeds project will establish a new community technology center (CTC) in Danville, Illinois, and expand basic training to this and four existing CTCs in Champaign-Urbana and East St. Louis, Iliinois. Basic skills are just the gateway, however. The grant will allow for expansion of our advanced digital media training focused on the development of skills necessary to meet the NETS standards of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE).

Time affects information retrieval in many ways. Collections of documents change as new items are indexed. The content of documents themselves may change. Users submit queries at particular moments in time. And perhaps most importantly, people’s assessment of a document’s relevance to a query is often time-dependent. For example, searchers of news archives might seek information on a past event where relevant documents cluster in a window of time. Users of social media services such as Twitter demand topically relevant information that is new. People who monitor particular topics in the news (for example, editors of Wikipedia) take action when they find information that is topically relevant and that changes current knowledge. The traces of information created by change in documents,...

For over two millennia, librarians have played a critical role in the production and transmission of knowledge. They have helped to collect, catalogue, and curate a vast range of materials that constitute much of our cultural heritage - from epic poetry on papyrus scrolls to PDFs of scholarly articles. This project interrogates these practices by building a librarian's cabinet of curiosity, and populating it with explicit examples of the mundane activities that occur in and around the library.