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SAA publishes SI student’s podcast case study

August 26, 2010

Alexis Antracoli: Podcasts in the Archives

Second-year MSI student Alexis Antracoli (ARM) recently had her case study on archiving podcasts at the University of Michigan accepted for publication on the Society of American Archivists (SAA) website.

Podcasts in the Archives: Archiving Podcasting Content at the University of Michigan is one of the Campus Case Studies published on the SAA portal. Campus Case Studies are reports by university archivists on working solutions for born-digital records.

The initial Campus Case Studies resulted from a workshop of university archivists on “The Development of Case Studies for the Effective Management of University Digital Records” held at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan in September 2007. The Campus Case Studies portal was launched with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Antracoli’s poster on her study was one of the 10 presented by SI students and graduates at the 2010 SAA conference in Washington, D.C., in August. See related blog post.

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SI archival students, grads shine at SAA

August 20, 2010

Associate Professor Elizabeth Yakel reports that SI master’s and doctoral students and graduates had a major presence at the recent Society of American Archivists conference in Washington, D.C. Of the 36 participants in the student poster sessions, ten were from SI. Many were digital preservation interns from Yakel’s Engaging Communities to Foster Internships for Preservation and Digital Curation project, funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

SI participants and their posters:

“Going Digital: Internships to Prepare the Next Generation of Preservationists”
Magia Krause (Ph.D. ’10)

“Podcasts in the Archives: Preserving Podcasting Content at the University of Michigan”
Alexis A. Antracoli, MSI student

“Economic Impact of Archives in Local Communities”
A Young Yoon (MSI ’10) and Ricardo Punzalan, Ph.D. student (with Amber L. Cushing, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

“Trusty, Tried, and True: Proving Institutional Reliability with OAIS Compliance and Policy Development”
Angelina Zaytsev, MSI student

“Mapping the Past: Connecting Pre-1910 Images to Their Modern-day Locations”
Christiane Evaskis (MSI ’10)

“Looking for a Web Archivist? Check Out Your Local Schools”
Lori Donovan (MSI ’10). Lori was hired at the Internet Archive through this internship.

“Lights, Camera, Action: A Survey of Audio and Moving Image Material from the Robert Altman Archive“
Brian Wilson (MSI ’10) and David Quick  (MSI ’10)

“The Case Studies and Generalized Scenarios Behind the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access Final Report”
Elizabeth Bedford (MSI ’10). She is now working at the Inter-University Consortium for  Political and Social Research.

“Voices of Our Town: Creating a Best-Practice Archive for Local Radio News”
Emilia Askari, MSI student

“Preserving Research Data: What Researchers Want”
Kathleen Fear, Ph.D. student

Lori Donovan: Looking for a Web Archivist?

Magia Krause: Going Digital

David Quick and Brian Wilson: Lights, Camera, Action

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Jackson grant to study high-speed broadband

August 12, 2010

Calling broadband “indispensable infrastructure for the twenty first century … essential to both our economy and our democracy in the digital age,” the Federal Communications Commission, in response to a Congressional mandate, has prepared The National Broadband Plan. Its ambitious agenda features a wide array of goals at the national level, designed to increase broadband access and digital literacy throughout the U.S.

But what, exactly, will be the impact of high-speed broadband and other technological investments at the community level? That is the question raised by Assistant Professor Steven J. Jackson, who has been awarded a two-year grant by the Ford Foundation to study the effect that widespread broadband availability may have on the social, economic and cultural lives in a community.

This project compares broadband development processes and outcomes across three leading domestic broadband initiatives: the federal government’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) and Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP), and the experimental Google Fiber initiative. Working closely with the sponsoring organizations and project grantees, the study will address three central questions:

1)    What role do existing community resources and networks play in efforts to mobilize, secure funding for, and deploy high-speed broadband infrastructure?

2)    What new or extended forms of social interaction are supported by high-speed broadband access?

3)    What forms of local social and technical innovation may be supported or enhanced by broadband development?

In general, the study will focus on BTOP and BIP awardees in Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio. Selected Google Fiber communities will be included in the study as the test site awardees are announced.

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SI shares NSF grant to develop TeraGrid monitor

July 22, 2010

The School of Information, in partnership with the University at Buffalo of the State University of New York, and Indiana University, has been awarded a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help shape a “Technology Audit and Insertion Service for TeraGrid.” The manager of SI’s contribution to the project is SI senior associate dean of faculty Thomas Finholt. SUNY Buffalo is the lead institution on the project.

The overall grant will be used to develop technical monitoring and auditing tools for TeraGrid Extreme Digital Resource for Science and Engineering (TG:XD). TG:XD is the next phase in the NSF’s ongoing efforts to build a massive cyberinfrastructure that delivers high-end digital services that provide US researchers and educators with the capability to work with extremely large amounts of digital data and provide access to extreme-scale digital resources beyond what is available on a typical campus.

According to Finholt, the School of Information will have responsibility for assessing user needs and performing a usability analysis for TG:XD. The process will involve a combination of methodologies, including surveys, social network analysis, interviews, and direct observation. SI will be developing mechanisms to allow users to understand the performance of the system and the interface design, with the goal of achieving maximum utilization.

While the primary user of this performance monitor will be the NSF, the programming will be designed with open source software and could have wider applications in the cloud-computing industry and for universities seeking to improve the performance and delivery of resources.

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Qiaozhu Mei receives NSF grant to study information credibility

July 1, 2010

Assistant Professor Qiaozhu Mei has been awarded a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to fund his project “Assessing Information Credibility without Authoritative Sources.”

His study will examine the spread of controversial claims through social media and utilize tools such as text-mining systems and reputational mechanisms to assess their credibility. Techniques that will be developed over the course of the project have the potential to help consumers cope with the transition from authoritative sources of information, such as newspapers and encyclopedias, to amateur or “crowd-sourced” information such as Wikipedia. Toward the end of the project, the investigators plan to demonstrate the tools they develop to high school students, to build awareness of the diversity of beliefs on topics of public interest.

Co-investigators on the project are Professor Paul Resnick, Professor Dragomir Radev, and Assistant Professor Rahul Sami.

Mei joined the SI faculty in 2009. He holds a joint appointment as assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science. In 2007-08, he was awarded one of only five national Yahoo! Ph.D. student fellowships while pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois.

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‘Library Hi Tech’ journal publishes Donaldson paper

June 28, 2010

A paper by doctoral student Devan Donaldson has been published in Library Hi Tech journal. Donaldson is lead author of “Implementing PREMIS: A Case Study of the Florida Digital Archive” with Associate Professor Paul Conway. Library Hi Tech is a quarterly peer-reviewed, scholarly journal on computing and technology for library scientists. The article is in vol. 28, pp. 273-289.

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Veinot receives health information behavior grant

June 16, 2010

Assistant Professor Tiffany Veinot has received an Early Career Development Grant through the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program administered by the Institute of Museum and Library Studies (IMLS). Veinot’s first external grant as a principal investigator will fund an independent research program on health information behaviors in marginalized families and communities.

“This is the highest award given by IMLS to junior faculty and recognizes the best researchers in the country,” said Associate Dean for Research and Innovation Thomas Finholt. “Tiffany is to be heartily congratulated.”

Veinot’s study will investigate the information networks and activities of chronically ill people and their family members and the roles they play in chronic illness-related coping, care, and support within families. The research will involve individual interviews, family group interviews, and family network analysis with members of families in southeast Michigan dealing with HIV/AIDS or diabetes.

Results of this study will inform the development of innovative consumer health information services and systems to better support families. It will also contribute to the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian program’s goal of ensuring that the future library workforce will have the skills required to meet the nation’s new information needs. Research findings will be incorporated into the LIS curriculum at the School of Information.

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SI students noted in Mobile Apps Challenge

May 14, 2010

Two School of Information master’s students were recognized as runners-up in the 2010 Mobile Apps Innovation Challenge. Alex Pompe and Janani Sundar were cited for their efforts. The contest was sponsored by Information and Technology Services and the Office of Technology Transfer.

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MSI student Sangmi Park drives home a winner

May 7, 2010

SI master’s student Sangmi Park is a member of the winning team in a contest sponsored by Ford Research and Advanced Engineering. The challenge was to design a cloud-based application that combines social networks, GPS location awareness, and real-time vehicle data to help drivers get where they want to go safely and efficiently — and have some fun in the process.

The contest was part of the course, “Cloud Computing in the Commute,” offered this spring by SI and the College of Engineering and taught by University of Michigan professors and Ford engineers. The students developed their apps using a Ford Fiesta with built-in touch screen, on Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows Azure platforms.

Six competing teams presented their applications to a panel of judges from Ford, the University of Michigan, Intel, and Microsoft. The winning application, Caravan Track, allows groups travelling together in separate vehicles to track each other along the journey, map routes, share information on fuel levels and speed, and send messages about road conditions and hazards without needing to type.

Park’s role was interaction designer, designing the user interface for the car application. According to Park, “It was a great opportunity for me to see how both designer and programmer work together and learn their roles in creating such an application. From this project, I’ve learned how to design UI to meet real-world needs using current technology.”

(more…)

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SI Research Celebration set for May 2

April 30, 2010

The annual School of Information Research Celebration will take place at 2 p.m. Monday, May 2 in the Ehrlicher Room, 3100 North Quad. Doug Van Houweling, associate dean for research and innovation, will present the 2010-11 annual report, highlights of current research projects, and a preview of what’s ahead in 2011-12. The event will also include the presentation of the Yahoo! Student Teaching Awards. A dessert reception will follow.

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