Wired Campus: Research Librarians Consider the Risks and Rewards of Collaboration

By Jennifer Howard via Wired Campus/COHE:
From the Article:

Big-scale collaborations and digital-era collection strategies took center stage at the Association of Research Libraries’ membership meeting, held here last week. The library directors and others who attended heard about ambitious research and preservation projects like the HathiTrust digital repository and the proposed Digital Public Library of America, plans for which are moving ahead.
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Presentations from several librarians made it clear that they, too, are finding new ways to work. Trevor Owens is an information technology specialist with the National Digital Infrastructure and Information Preservation Program, or NDIIPP, at the Library of Congress. He talked about the need for collection-level tools that allow scholars and curators to see beyond catalog records.
Mr. Owens described Recollection, a free platform built by NDIIPP and a company named Zepheira to give a better “collection-level view” of libraries’ holdings. The platform can be used to build interactive maps, timelines, and other interfaces from descriptive metadata and other information in library catalogs. So, for instance, plain-text place names on a spreadsheet can be turned into points of latitude and longitude and plotted on a map.

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Filed under: Libraries, Maps, News, Open Access, Preservation, Public Libraries