News

Viewshare User Stories Emerge

January 30, 2012

The Library of Congress has launched the Viewshare User Stories page, and it already has compelling examples of curators maintaining digital collections in the areas of education (University of Mississippi and Desegregation of Virginia Education [DOVE] project), preservation/display of cultural artifacts (Brooklyn Public Library) and environment (California Digital Library). Viewshare continues to grow and evolve, and we look forward to seeing what new user stories will be added in 2012.

The Library of Congress, in partnership with Zepheira, launched Viewshare.org in November 2011. Viewshare is a free platform for National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) partners to generate and customize views, (interactive maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds) that allow users to experience their digital collections.

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Viewshare named one of the Top Ten Digital Preservation Developments of 2011

January 11, 2012

Library of Congress has named Viewshare as one the most memorable digital preservation happenings of 2011 on their blog The Signal. Other developments recognized in 2011 were, the National Digital Steward Alliance and the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education Program.

The Library of Congress, in partnership with Zepheira, launched Viewshare.org in November 2011. Viewshare is a free platform for NDIIPP partners to generate and customize views, (interactive maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds) that allow users to experience their digital collections.

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Zepheira to present at ALA Linked Data Symposium

December 8, 2011

Eric Miller from Zepheira will be giving the opening presentation at ALA Mid-Winter Conference Midwinter Symposium: “Libraries, Linked Data and the Semantic Web: Positioning Our Catalogs to Participate in the 21st Century Global Information Marketplace” from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 20, 2012 in Chicago.

Presented by the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services, this symposium introduces the Semantic Web and the basics of linked data. Eric will describe state of the art tools in current use by libraries and share some practical experience in linking library data to the greater linked data cloud.

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Library of Congress launches Recollection as Viewshare.org

November 10, 2011

The Library of Congress, in partnership with Zepheira, has launched its latest version of Recollection as a newly branded site called Viewshare.org. Viewshare.org is a platform for empowering curators, archivists, and librarians to provide access to the digital cultural heritage objects they are preserving.

The transition to the new domain name represents a more significant commitment by the Library to this project. The Library and Zepheira continue to actively evolve the project and improve the software and putting it on its own domain name makes it easier to find, use, and share.

Read the Library’s announcement or watch the screencast to learn more.

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Zepheira keynote presentation at VALA 2012

October 31, 2011

Eric Miller from Zepheira will be giving a keynote presentation at the VALA – Libraries, Technology and the Future 2012 Conference on February 8, 2012. The VALA 2012 Conference will be held February 6-9 in Melbourne, Australia.

Eric’s presentation will provide an overview of Linked Data, highlight several relevant, practical examples of this work currently underway in the library, museum and digital preservation communities. This talk will further discuss several practical areas where libraries, museums and archives and can further be accelerated by Linked Data principals.

The VALA2012 theme, eM-powering eFutures, promotes the understanding and use of communication technology in libraries and the related museums, archives and galleries services.

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October 6, Day of Digital Archives

October 6, 2011

Day of Digital Archives is an initiative spearheaded by Gretchen Gueguen, Digital Archivist at the University of Virgina, to raise awareness of digital archives by engaging practitioners in the field to describe their work via social media.  As we work with digital archives on a daily basis, we are pleased to be able to participate.

Our best known contribution to the community is the open source Recollection project, developed in conjunction with the Library of Congress and NDIIPP. Recollection picks up where most digital archiving software leaves off, importing curated collections from an archive where they can be augmented, visually enhanced, republished, and ultimately shared.

Recollection makes use of the popular publishing framework, Exhibit, developed by MIT’s Simile project a few years ago, but currently being updated as part of the Exhibit3 project in conjunction with MIT.  Exhibit3′s primary added value over the original Exhibit project is scalability up to one million triples, making it not only suitable for publishing large collections, but of some archives too! We’ve posted some sample large exhibits as part of our recent beta release.

Here are two exhibits that demonstrate many of the features of both Recollection and the original Exhibit project;

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Charitable Program Update

October 4, 2011

It’s been six months since we launched our charitable giving program, which included ongoing financial support for Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) and Partners in Health (PIH), as well as the donation of computational cycles to the Folding at home (FAH) project. Time for an update.

In that time, PIH have continued to apply their community partnering model to places in need, in particular Haiti where cholera remains an enormous problem long after the catastrophic earthquake almost two years ago.

MSF, as a much larger organization than PIH, is simultaneously involved with many efforts around the world too numerous to highlight here. However, a few times a year they publish a short video which summarizes their work over the course of a month. The latest is September 2011, a Month in Focus which runs about seven minutes.

Our computers – both Zepheira-managed servers as well as the desktops and laptops of our team – continue to fold proteins for FAH at a staggering pace.  Though active for only six months, Team Zepheira ranks in the 94th percentile (11008 out of 205287 teams) and have already folded 1200 work units, achieving 170000 points.  We’ll try to dig up some more resources to push us past the likes of Team Snaztastic and the Indigo Bunny Heroes, and onward into the top 10000!

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The Art of Linked Data: Architecting Recollection

September 29, 2011

Uche Ogbuji has authored the column “The Art of Linked Data: Architecting Recollection” for semanticweb.com. In this article, he discusses observations, reflections and practical advice from various projects applying Linked Data and thus Semantic Web principles across diverse domains.

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Zepheira completes prototype for ‘Reference Extract,’ with funding by The MacArthur Foundation

September 19, 2011

In 2010 The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awarded $350,000 to fund researchers and developers from OCLC, the information schools of Syracuse University and the University of Washington and Zepheira LLC to develop a pilot of a ‘credibility engine,’ a system that supports augmenting Web searches with measures of credibility derived from the unique experience and expertise of librarians worldwide. This work is the prototype phase of the ‘Reference Extract’ project.

In August, 2011 Zepheira and OCLC presented the results of this effort, delivered well ahead of schedule and under budget, to The MacArthur Foundation in Chicago. Zepheira presented tools used to analyze the metrics of URLs from OCLC’s QuestionPoint collaborative virtual reference service, in which librarians answer patron requests for credible information on particular topics through an interactive interface. The presentation also included a demonstration of the Reference Extract prototype in action, which is also available as a screencast.

Zepheira, OCLC and the participating universities will continue to investigate how best to evolve the prototype into a sustainable service long-term.

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Exhibit 3.0 Part 1 – An Open Source Software Platform for Publishing Linked Data

September 8, 2011

Part one of a two-part series on Exhibit 3.0 was recently published on Semanticweb.com. The article, co-authored by MacKenzie Smith, Research Director at MIT Libraries and Eric Miller, President of Zepheira, is titled Exhibit 3.0 Part 1 – An Open Source Software Platform for Publishing Linked Data.

The MIT Simile project, a joint project between MIT Libraries, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the World Wide Web Consortium, has spent the last decade developing and experimenting with new open source software tools for Web-based data publishing. This led to the release of Exhibit, a JavaScript browser widget for searching, browsing, navigating and visualizing data. Exhibit lets Web site authors create dynamic publications of their data collections without resorting to complex programming, database or server technologies.

In the article, Eric and MacKenzie discuss the next phase of the project which provides a new architecture for Exhibit that increases scalability and addresses other limitations identified by its users. This Exhibit 3.0 project is made possible by generous support from the Library of Congress. It is a partnership among MIT Libraries, MIT CSAIL and Zepheira, including personnel who are SIMILE project alumnus.

Part 2 of this article will be released in late September/early October.

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