Based at the Sheridan Libraries, Maryland ArtSource is a
scholarly Web resource on Maryland artists, cultural heritage
institutions, art collections online, art libraries and the
regional art community. It is the collaborative effort of eight
cultural and arts organizations in Baltimore dedicated to
promoting art information resources that illuminate Maryland art
and artists.
http://www.marylandartsource.org
The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music contains 30,000
pieces of music and focuses on popular American music spanning
the period 1780 to 1960. Both the sheet music covers and the
scores have been digitized and the collection is searchable. It
is currently being migrated to an institutional repository
(DSpace). Research activities associated with the collection
include the development of a digital workflow management system,
and research on optical music recognition.
http://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu
The Sheridan Libraries' entire collection of Maryland atlases prior to 1914 has been digitized, creating a resource of over 1,000 plates that can be used with other digital cartographic data and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software. The collection includes historical maps of Baltimore City as well as aerial photographs originally produced for the U. S. Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service to monitor the use of agricultural land.
Original photographs and drawings of lost and hidden Baltimore
from the Sheridan Libraries' Special Collections comprise the
"Lost Baltimore" collection. The Web-based collection includes
approximately 300 images drawn primarily from photographs taken
between the two world wars by Baltimore architect Laurence Hall
Fowler. This photographic record documents a wave of demolition
that took place in Baltimore's historic Mt. Vernon area during
the inter-war period. The images are linked to metadata in a METS
template and will ultimately be linked to a larger Web site
devoted to Baltimore architecture.
The Center for Educational Resources (CER) partners with faculty
to extend their instructional impact through the integration of
digital technologies and innovative teaching strategies. Located
in the library, the Center's mission aligns with the evolving
role of university libraries as they advance from print-based
repositories to electronic collaboratories that enable
application of digital collections and networked services to new
approaches in instructional and scholarly communication. The
CER's popular Technology Fellows Program awards mini-grants to
faculty and students projects that enhance teaching, facilitate
access to course materials, encourage active learning and promote
student/teacher collaboration.
http://www.cer.jhu.edu
Usability testing is increasingly common in the library
community. Digital libraries present issues and opportunities
that merit the investigation of usability testing methods with
the aim of identifying the most appropriate approaches. The
Sheridan Libraries are engaged in research on meaningful
quantitative measures, the location and diversity of digital
library users, partial interface control, realistic vs.
controlled test settings, and the balance of user feedback and
librarian expertise.
http://ldp.library.jhu.edu/research/usability
Hopkins KnowledgeNET is a Web-based service devoted
exclusively to Hopkins alumni. Launched in 2004, this joint
venture of the Sheridan Libraries and the Johns Hopkins Alumni
Association offers free access to hundreds of journals,
newspapers and e-books, and fee-based access to an expanded set
of resources, such as the Harvard Business Review, The Economist,
and many other resources. The service also provides toll-free
phone, e-mail and fax access to a dedicated KnowledgeNET
librarian.
https://hopkinsnet.jhu.edu/
The Sheridan Libraries and the University of Chicago teamed with SirsiDynix on their development of a full-featured Electronic Resource Management (ERM) module. Staff in both academic libraries worked with SirsiDynix to identify functional requirements for the module, which is designed to be a comprehensive ERM solution. Plans call for the Horizon Information Management System to provide an industry-standard platform for e-resource management, and open applications environment with exposed Web Services APIs to Horizon functionality.
CAPM focuses on the evaluation and development of a robotic system that will provide real-time access, through a Web interface, to materials shelved in off-site locations. Also collaborating on the project are faculty from the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Geography and Environmental Engineering at Johns Hopkins and faculty from the Economics Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The first phase of the CAPM Project produced a prototype
retrieval robot and an economic analysis of the potential costs
and benefits. The economic analysis framework is applicable for
assessing general library services.
http://ldp.library.jhu.edu/projects/capm
Gamera is a framework for the creation of structured document
analysis applications by domain experts. It combines a
programming library with GUI tools for the training and
interactive development of recognition systems. Gamera is a
Python-based framework, with many extensions in C++ for low-level
image processing. It runs on Linux, Microsoft Windows and
Macintosh OS X.
http://ldp.library.jhu.edu/projects/gamera/
With Tufts University digital library researchers, the
Sheridan Libraries will provide National Science Digital Library
users with automatic linking services that bind key words and
phrases to supplementary information and infrastructure to
support automatic linking of names and terms in thesauri,
glossaries, encyclopedias, subject hierarchies, and object
catalogs. The SCALE project is funded by the National Science
Foundation.
http://ldp.library.jhu.edu/activities
Baltimore Architecture Project
A collaborative effort led by the Sheridan Libraries, with the Athenaeum of Philadelphia and Towson University, the project will incorporate digital images, biographical information about Baltimore's most prominent architects, and primary source materials pertaining to Baltimore's rich architectural heritage. The Sheridan Libraries will survey local institutions to identify relevant historical resources. The Athenaeum of Philadelphia, which developed a similar resource to document Philadelphia's architectural resources, will assist in the design of the project Web site and underlying database. Towson University will spearhead the efforts to research local architects and architectural firms, and will write the biographical sketches. A $40,000 grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation is funding the pilot phase of the project.
Electronic Finding Aid for the Papers of Jacob Blaustein
In 2004, the Sheridan Libraries received an extraordinary collection of papers related to the personal and professional life of Jacob Blaustein, who together with his father Louis, founded the American Oil Company in 1910. The Libraries have created a template for the EAD compliant finding aid that is being developed to provide access to the rich research resources in the collection. This project is supported by funding from the Louis and Jacob Blaustein family foundations.
Unified Medical Language System-Based Archive System for Digital Resources
The enormous amount of health-related material generated in digital format-lab images, statistical data, databases, clinical correspondence, internal reports, and pre-published papers-are of great value to research and teaching, yet are challenging for health science librarians to manage, archive, and preserve. A variety of institutional repositories have recently emerged that allow faculty to access, share, search, and retrieve their digital material, but none of them offer built-in metadata subject categorization, metadata indexing, and a comprehensive search/retrieval interface geared towards time-crunched health sciences professionals, and most of them require considerable human involvement and have complicated or time-consuming submission processes.
With funding from the National Library of Medicine, the university's Welch Medical Library and the School of Medicine's Microscope Facility will develop a Unified Medical Language System-based Archive System (UAS) that will enable health science professionals to create digital archives to manage their work and help medical librarians to acquire, organize, and preserve their institution's digital materials. The system will be based on open-source code and technology and open standards and will be integrated with an XML-based UMLS Web service as its metadata source.
Electronic Theses and Dissertations Pilot
The Sheridan Libraries have launched a pilot project this year to evaluate various electronic publishing systems including DSpace, eprints, DPubS, and DiVA for electronic theses and dissertations at Johns Hopkins. The pilot is a component of the larger initiative led by the Libraries to create an institutional repository.
http://ldp.library.jhu.edu/activities/etdpilotSakai
The Sheridan Libraries, in collaboration with IT@JH, are participants in the Sakai Educational Partners Program (SEPP), a community of higher education institutions that are developing an open-source, open-standards collaboration and learning environment (CLE). Sakai will offer features and tools to support electronic and distance learning, and collaboration for work groups or teams. Given its flexible design and open nature, Sakai provides the capability to integrate new services and features within a course management environment, and preserve the digital content that supports learning
http://ldp.library.jhu.edu/activitiesA Technology Analysis of Repositories and Services
The Sheridan Libraries, in collaboration with the University of Virginia, MIT, and an extensive network of collaborators, are conducting an architecture and technology evaluation of repository software and services such as e-learning, e-publishing, and digital preservation. The result will be a set of best practices and recommendations that will inform the development of repositories, services, and appropriate interfaces. This project is funded by an award of $111,000 from the Mellon Foundation.
Digital Medieval Manuscripts- Roman de la Rose
An award of $717,000 this year from the Mellon Foundation is funding the next phase of the Rose project to enhance medieval studies through digital technology. The Mellon funding will enable the project team to develop an integrated approach to preservation and access through the design of a repository, which will house the digital content and support its easy integration into learning environments. In addition, the award will support the creation of an advisory board, a technical conference, and the digitization of additional versions of Roman de la Rose, the story of a dreamer pursuing Love while encountering obstacles, adventures and life lessons along the way.
Begun in 1998, this collaboration between the Johns Hopkins University's Sheridan Libraries' Digital Knowledge Center and the Department of Romance Languages enables new approaches to medieval studies through the creation of digital surrogates, transcriptions, and text and image searching. Rather than travel thousands of miles to make comparisons of these texts, scholars can easily compare and study them online.
To date, Rose manuscripts from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University have been digitized.Digital Audio Archive Project
This project focuses on the design and creation of an effective and economical workflow management system for digitizing analog audio tapes, and building a Web-based digital audio library. The primary goal is to reduce the costs associated with building a digital audio library. Emphasis is placed on using best practices, open standards and open-source software. The Sheridan Libraries are working with Indiana University, which is providing the tested through a subset of their audio tape collection in the music archives. This project is funded by a $230,000 grant from IMLS.
The Archive Ingest Handling Test (AIHT) is part of the Library of Congress' National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). The Sheridan Libraries' AIHT work focuses on the preservation of the 9/11 archive. It will ingest this archive into DSpace and Fedora, and examine both format migration and archive transfer issues. Funded by the Library of Congress.
Data curation and the migration and integration of disparate content into an institutional repository.
Choudhury, S, DiLauro, T, and Martino, J. Choice and Empowerment. Campus Technology eLearning Dialogue. January 19, 2005.
Ross, S, Donnelly, M, Dobreva, M, Abbott, D, McHugh, A, and Rusbridge, A. Core Technologies for the Cultural and Scientific Heritage Sector: Gamera. DigiCULT Technology Watch Report: 2005, 48-51.
2004
Anderson, T, Gourley, J, and Harvey, K ARTstor Usability Evaluation . World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, & Higher Education 2004, 213-220.
Droettboom, M, and Fujinaga, I. Symbol-Level Groundtruthing Environment for OMR . Proceedings of the 5th ISMIR Conference. Edited by ISMIR. (2004).
Martino, Jim. Is Metadata Too Subjective? MELD, the MedBiquitous E-Learning Discourse, an online community. (2004) http://meld.medbiq.org/divergent_views/metadata_martino.htm.
2003
Droettboom, M. Correcting Broken Characters in the Recognition of Historical Printed Documents . Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. (2003). Edited by IEEE.
Droettboom, M, MacMillan, K, and Fujinaga, I. The Gamera Framework for Building Custom Recognition Systems. Symposium on Document Image Understanding Technologies (2003), 275-86.
Droettboom, M. Optical Music Interpretation . Proceedings of the Joint IAPR International Workshop on Structural, Syntactic, and Statistical Pattern Recognition. Edited by IAPR (2003).
Heath, F, Kyrillidou, M, Webster, D, Choudhury, S, Hobbs, B, Lorie, M., and Flores, N. Emerging Tools for Evaluating Digital Library Services: Conceptual Adaptations of LibQUAL+ and CAPM . Journal of Digital Information (2003) 4:2 (170).
Suthakorn, J, Lee, S, Zhou, Y, Choudhury, S, and Chirikjian,
GS). An Enhanced Robotic Library System for an Off-Site Shelving
Facility.
Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Field and
Service Robotics (2003).
2002
Choudhury, S., B. Hobbs, M. Lorie, and N. Flores. A Framework for Evaluating Digital Library Services. D-Lib Magazine 2002, 8 (7/8).
Droettboom, M., K. MacMillan, I. Fujinaga, G. S. Choudhury, T. DiLauro, M. Patton, and T. Anderson. Using Gamera for the recognition of cultural heritage materials. Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), (2002), 11-17.
Suthakorn, J., S. Lee, Y. Zhou, R. Thomas, G.S. Choudhury, and G.S. Chirikjian. A Robotic Library System for an Off-Site Shelving Facility. Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Volume 4 (2002), 3589-3594.
2001
MacMillan, K., M. Droettboom, I. Fujinaga. 2001 Gamera: A Python-based toolkit for Structured Document Recognition. Submitted to the 10th International Python Conference.
Droettboom, M., I. Fujinaga, K. MacMillan, M. Patton, J. Warner, G. S. Choudhury and T. DiLauro. 2001. Expressive and efficient retrieval of musical data. Proceedings, International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval. 173-8.
MacMillan, K., M. Droettboom and I. Fujinaga. 2001. Gamera: A structured document recognition application development environment. Proceedings, International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval. 15-6.
Choudhury, G. S., T. DiLauro, M. Droettboom, I. Fujinaga, and K. MacMillan. 2001. Strike up the score: Deriving searchable and playable digital formats from sheet music. D-Lib Magazine 7 (2).
Droettboom, M., and I. Fujinaga. 2001. Interpreting the semantics of music notation using an extensible and object-oriented system. Proceedings of the Ninth International Python Conference. 71-85.
Choudhury, G. S., C. Requardt, I. Fujinaga, T. DiLauro, E. W. Brown, J. W. Warner, and B. Harrington. 2000. Digital workflow management: The Lester S. Levy digitized collection of sheet music. First Monday 5 (6).
Brown, E. and J. Warner. Automated Name Authority Control. Proceedings of the First ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). 21-22.
DiLauro, T., G.S. Choudhury, M. Patton, J. Warner, and E. Brown (2001). Automated Name Authority Control and Enhanced Searching in the Levy Collection. D-Lib Magazine 7 (4).
Choudhury, G.S., M. Lorie, E. Fitzpatrick, B. Hobbs, G. Chirikjian, A. Okamura, and N.E. Flores. 2001. Comprehensive Access to Printed Materials (CAPM). Proceedings of the First ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). 174-75.
2000
Choudhury, S., T. DiLauro, M. Droettboom, I. Fujinaga, B. Harrington and K. MacMillan. 2000. Optical Music Recognition System within a Large-Scale Digitization Project. Proceedings, International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval.