ER&L 2014

Our resource management tools demand authoritative, normalized data, yet the metadata we work with rarely cooperates. But help exists! Learn how three librarians are using OpenRefine, a free data transformation tool, in their institutional repositories, catalogs, and the Global Open Knowledgebase and be inspired to tackle your institution's metadata mess.

At Brooklyn College, technology and library staff took an entrepreneurial approach to meeting technology needs, improving budgets, fostering creativity, and demonstrating value. We've developed 8 products, including an award-winning CMS used by 8 CUNY libraries and a user-friendly book scanner. We hope to spur broader collaboration among libraries.

Last summer a joint team involving Duke University Libraries and IBM spent three months developing IBM's Business Process Manager, transforming the way the online databases are managed. This presentation will provide an overview of the and database workflow, with a demo of the new system and its integration points with other tools.

How do we preserve our traditional library patron privacy ethic in an age of networked services? This presentation has two parts. (1) I will present a summary of a usage data inventory the Cornell University Library did recently and how the results of that study are informing Library policy moving forward. (2) I will present a synthesis of what the library literature says about our post-Snowden reality.

Explore two exciting new technologies for teaching and learning, Google Glass and 3D printing, through a case study from the University of Colorado Boulder and a "proof of concept" from the University of Texas at El Paso. See examples of how CU Boulder's librarians have partnered with campus faculty to examine the applications of Google Glass in teaching and learning. Touch and feel real 3D-printed objects created by UTEP faculty member Dr. Michael Kolitsky, and learn how copyright and intellectual property laws come into play.

With growing online education and MOOC trends, libraries and e-resources can play a role and bring value. Learn how UT Austin creates edX MOOCs and coordinates faculty, resources and administration, and uses emerging technologies like SIPX to save costs, enhance course quality and track valuable data analytics.

Wikipedia articles, tweets, and other forms of user-generated content (UGC) play an essential role in the experience of the average Web user. Outside the public eye, UGC has become equally indispensable as a source of world knowledge for systems and algorithms that help us make sense of big data. In this talk, I will demonstrate that UGC reflects the cultural diversity of its contributors to a previously unidentified extent and that this diversity has important implications for Web users and existing UGC-based technologies. Focusing on Wikipedia, I will show how UGC diversity can be extracted and measured using diversity mining algorithms and techniques from geographic information science. Finally, through two novel applications – Omnipedia and Atlasify – I will highlight the exciting potential for a new class of technologies enabled by the ability to harvest diverse perspectives from UGC.

Brent Hecht is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Minnesota. With interests that lie at the intersection of human–computer interaction, geography, and big data, his research centers on the relationship between big data and human factors such as culture. A major focus of his work involves volunteered geographic information and its application in location-aware technologies.

Dr. Hecht received a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University, a Master’s degree in geography from UC Santa Barbara, and dual Bachelor’s degrees in computer science and geography from Macalester College. He was a keynote speaker at WikiSym – the premiere conference on wikis and open collaboration – and has received awards for his research at top-tier publication venues in human-computer interaction and geography (e.g. ACM CHI, COSIT). He has collaborated with Google Research, Xerox PARC, and Microsoft Research, and his work been featured in the MIT Technology Review, New Scientist, AllThingsDigital, and various international TV, radio, and Internet outlets.

Wednesday Keynote session sponsored by IBM

The workshop is geared towards complete newbies. People with no Python experience may be interested in the class also. We will look at typical problems encountered by Librarians and how to go about using computers/computation to solve them.

The workshop will be facilitated by Matt Zumwalt, who has taught this material numerous times within the context of of HydraCamp trainings in North America and Europe.~ The RailsBridge curriculum provides a fun way to get started or level up with Rails, Ruby, and other web technologies. It was designed for events that focus on increasing diversity in tech, so that people of all backgrounds can feel welcome and comfortable in our industry. For more information on RailsBridge, see http://www.railsbridge.org/
In this workshop, we will cover installing Ruby on Rails and working through the “classic” RailsBridge curriculum, which takes you step-by-step through making a Rails app, one command at a time. The curriculum is outlined on the RailsBridge website at http://docs.railsbridge.org/docs/
Presented with funding from CurateCamp and Digital Library Federatio