News, page 2

Exhibit 3 Beta Release Announced

September 2, 2011

TThe Exhibit3 team is proud to announce the beta release of Exhibit 3. This 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. View release features, where to download it and how to give us your feedback on the Exhibit 3 Project site.

The release includes both the new client and the server component of Exhibit 3, so you can see how going from a client only collection to a client/server collection will work. The new client is less functional than the current Exhibit 2 client, but will improve over the next few months. We will be posting a timeline for the rest of the year to the Web page soon, so those of you who need to wait for a more stable version or one with a particular feature will have some idea of when to expect that. Over the next few months we’ll also create a lot of new documentation, but for now we just have what’s in the code and some basic instructions for building the system.

So for those of you who’ve been waiting, we hope you’ll try it out and give us your thoughts! Bugs and feature requests are welcome via GitHub and discussions welcome on the SIMILE Widgets mailing list.

For those interested in seeing some of this work in action check out the early demonstrations of both the new client and the server component of Exhibit 3.

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Open Source Release of Recollection Platform

September 2, 2011

Zepheira, in conjunction with the Library of Congress, is pleased to announce the full open source release of the Recollection software platform. Recollection is a web application that enables librarians, archivists, curators, and historians to create dynamic interfaces to cultural heritage collections. To learn more about Recollection, visit the site or watch the screencast.

View the Library’s release announcement or to access the code visit the Library’s project page on Sourceforge.

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Library of Congress NDIIPP Partner Meeting: Highlights and Presentations

August 22, 2011

The Library of Congress held its annual NDIIPP Partner Meeting in Washington, DC from July 20 – 22. The meeting is a showcase for the innovation which is taking place among the Library’s digital preservation partners. Martha Anderson, Director of Program Management for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, gave an overview of top developments in this space in her closing presentation.

In addition, presentations from the conference program entitled “Make It Work: Improvisations on the stewardship of digital information” have now been posted and are available for those who were not able to attend the meeting in person. Zepheira was in attendance and co-presented “Exhibit3@MIT: Lessons learned from 10 years of the Simile Project for building library open source software”.

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Linked Data at the Library of Congress

August 15, 2011

Laura Campbell, CIO of the Library of Congress, spoke at the recent Semantic Technologies Conference about how the world’s largest library leverages semantic technology to help manage the vast resources of the LoC. In her keynote address, Ms. Campbell spoke about how the Library of Congress is leveraging linked data technologies in three key areas:

  • Managing existing collections
  • Maintaining the Library of Congress’s role as a leader in the distribution of canonical information
  • Fulfilling the mission to collect, preserve, and provide access to a more digital collection

The keynote covered several of the key linked data initiatives underway at the Library including project Recollection, a joint project with Zepheira. The keynote in its entirety, is presented below.

 

To read more about Recollection and the Library of Congress, check out this recent series about the Recollections Project.

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Exhibit 3 Face to Face meeting boosts the project

July 25, 2011

A few Zepheirans met with their colleagues on the collaborative Exhibit 3 project, building a publishing framework for large scale data-rich interactive Web pages, building on the success of the original Exhibit. Meeting in space generously provided by Google in Mountain View, CA, key project members from Google, MIT, The Library of Congress and Zepheira discussed progress, technical issues and opportunities to spread the word about Exhibit 3. This face-to-face meeting helped boost efforts, including the meeting of a key milestone, loading 100,000 records into Exhibit 3.

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Fast Company highlights Project Recollection

June 13, 2011

Tim Carmody of Fast Company magazine introduces Project Recollection to a broader audience in the article “Recollection: A Collaborative Tool For Sharing And Visualizing Cultural Data” (8 June 2011).  His overview of the system, which Zepheira is developing in partnership with the U.S. Library of Congress, has the following subtitle:

A new service from the Library of Congress lets you build maps, graphs, timelines, and trees from the collective digital and digitized history of an entire nation.

Carmody discusses the usefulness of Recollection for digital preservation, archiving and education, summarizing its benefits.

The idea behind Recollection is simple: it allows the LoC and its cultural heritage partner institutions to easily pool and visualize their collections. What was a giant, unwieldy database can be easily transformed into an interactive timeline, map, tag cloud, or a range of other highly readable interfaces. Then you can embed the tool back into your own organization’s site. Think of it as a kind of YouTube for museums (or amateur historians).

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Eric Miller to give invited Linked Data talk at 2011 American Library Association Annual Conference

April 27, 2011

The Library of Congress’ Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) has invited Eric Miller to speak on Linked Data and Libraries at the annual American Library Association ALA Conference in New Orleans, LA. on Sunday June 26. The Program for Cooperative Cataloging and its membership focus on timely and quality collaborative creation of bibliographic and authority records.

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 and cooperative cataloging practices can further be accelerated by Linked Data principals. By exposing bibliographic and authority records as ‘Web control points’, libraries are well positioned to enable greater collaboration in both traditional and non-traditional communities as well as providing new means for users to navigate, discover and access quality information in a Web of data.

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Library of Congress Hosting Recollection Workshop on 19 April

April 15, 2011

The NDIIPP Program at the Library of Congress will be hosting a free online workshop for digital preservation partners next Tuesday, April 19th at 1ET. Trevor Owens will demonstrate how preservation partners can use this free Library of Congress-sponsored software to easily create intuitive interfaces to their digital collections.

Details and registration information

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Zepheira and Partners to speak at 2011 Semantic Technology Conference

April 1, 2011

Zepheira team members and partners will be speaking at the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference to be held in San Francisco June 5-9.

Talks will highlight practical applications of linked data technologies in collaboration with the Library of Congress and MIT:

Closing Keynote: Semantic Technology at the Library of Congress: Laura Campbell, Associate Librarian for Strategic Initiatives and Chief Information Officer for the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is utilizing linked data and semantic technologies in several current projects including Project Recollection and it’s Digital Preservation Initiative. Laura Campbell, CIO of the LoC, will describe these efforts and the reasons for choosing to enable them with semantics.

Presentation: Exhibit3: Publishing Framework for Large Scale Data-Rich Interactive Web Pages: MacKenzie Smith, Research Director at MIT Libraries and Eric Miller, President of Zepheira

In January 2011, MIT and Zepheira began work on Exhibit 3.0, a new project funded by the Library of Congress to redevelop the popular Exhibit tool from the MIT Simile Project. Exhibit was originally developed as an ambitious collaboration of the MIT Libraries, the MIT CSAIL, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to explore applications of the Semantic Web to problems of information management across both large-scale digital libraries and small-scale personal collections. This presentation will discuss the new architecture and features, highlight work done to date, demonstrate some of Exhibit 3.0 capabilities and gather input from the audience on how to build interest and involvement from the community in this work.

Presentation: Recollection: A Linked Data Platform of America’s Memory Trevor Owens, Digital Archivist at the Library of Congress and Eric Miller, President of Zepheira

The mission of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) is to develop a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations. In 2008, the NDIIPP partners shared content through a simple web page. In order to explore more useful tools and processes for sharing diverse content across partners’ collections, the Library began the Project Recollection Pilot in 2009 with Zepheira to develop a proof of concept that can be used to collect and explore information about digital collections. This presentation will discuss the architecture and features of the Recollection platform, highlight work done to date, discuss future directions of this work and gather input from the audience on how to build interest and involvement from the community.

For more information on times and locations of these sessions visit the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference Agenda at a Glance

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Announcing Zepheira’s Charitable Giving Program

March 31, 2011

We are pleased to announce the start of Zepheira’s charitable giving program, an ongoing corporate effort that grew out of our shared desire to be part of building a better world. At its inception, our program includes regular financial support for Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders, global responders to natural disasters, epidemics, and conflicts with skilled medical care, and Partners in Health, long term health care providers for high risk populations in the poorest parts of the world. We are also dedicating our spare computational resources to the Folding@home distributed computing project, working towards medical cures through increased scientific understanding of diseases. We will continue to evolve our program and document its progress through our charitable program site.

As a corporation merging business goals with a devotion to bettering our world, we are interested in hearing new ideas on how to travel in both realms and in locating partners to travel them with. Contact us at char...@zepheira.com if you’d like to talk.

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