The digital age raises new challenges for institutions that have traditionally been involved in the stewardship of the cultural record. One is the stewardship of items that were born digital, those the museum world distinguishes as digital accessions. Another is the creation and stewardship of digital images of two- and three-dimensional artifacts, including texts, in the collections of these institutions. Such images exist for many purposes — for preservation and dissemination as well as for new and innovative kinds of exploration and exploitation. The description, control and use of both classes of images consume scarce resources and require new kinds of expertise. Four of the articles in this issue address these challenges. In our special section Digital Desires: What Are Museums Up To? section editor Layna White and contributors Shyam Oberoi and Sally Hubbard examine the role and management of digital objects in art museums. In her introduction Layna explains how museums use images, while Shyam and Sally discuss the problems of implementing institution-wide digital asset management systems (DAMS) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty Research Institute, respectively. In contrast universities are the principal focus of the fourth article, a report on Clifford Lynch's plenary session talk at the ASIS&T 2007 Annual Meeting in Milwaukee. He believes that in addressing their current problems cultural institutions must focus on their responsibilities for cultural stewardship, not on salvaging the means by which these responsibilities have been fulfilled for the last century, which may now be untenable or superseded. Closer to home some of these same issues are reflected in the President's Page. ASIS&T also must struggle with the balance between the paper and the electronic worlds and with the economics of scholarly publishing. President Nancy Roderer brings us up-to-date on the current highest priority of the Board of Directors and the staff, the re-compete of the contract to publish the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. The new contract, when it has been negotiated, will most likely incorporate all ASIS&T publications and will have to deal with the many issues related to electronic publication that have arisen over the last decade. Another aspect of scholarly publishing is also addressed by Elise Langdon-Neuner, editor of The Write Stuff (the journal of the European Medical Writers Association) and a member of the editorial board of European Science Editing (the journal of the European Association of Science Editors). In “Let Them Speak English” she reviews the current environment surrounding publication in English for non-native speakers. She also considers the cost to the broader intellectual community of forcing scholars to write in a language that is not their own and the possibilities for making the content of publications originally published in other languages more widely available in English. Our two final items are less closely related to the above themes or to each other, but each makes its own contribution. First, Andrew Sears and his colleagues report on a National Science Foundation workshop from 2006 aimed at setting a research agenda for human-centered computing. The paper summarizes the workshop's suggested research areas and also its observations on interdisciplinary research in the field. Finally, this issue's information architecture (IA) columnist, Mark Nolan, discusses the potential for exploiting the exploratory search model in IA.
Editor's Summary The International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) conference welcomed the European Doctoral Forum in Vienna in July 2013. ASIS&T SIG/MET and ASIS&T's European Student Chapter joined the University of Vienna's Center for Doctoral Studies in organizing the forum, which provided an opportunity for doctoral students to discuss their research and receive feedback from renowned scientometricians. Nine students representing five countries and a variety of disciplines presented their work. Topics included altmetrics, electronic visualization and regional differences in research over time. The scholarly exchanges were capped by lunch and traditional Viennese coffees.
Editor's Summary Peering behind the screen of a database or website reveals the methods and benefits of incorporating a taxonomy. A digital taxonomy file contains terms, term records with details of relationships and a hierarchical structure. The terms are used to categorize content and apply as metanames describing website content items. Digging deeper, the taxonomy terms are stored and associated with a relational database management system, object-oriented database or XML-based database system. Taxonomy terms can be presented to the end user in a browsable format along with term record details for additional guidance. Captured in the inverted index of search software, the terms promote findability and search success. Documents with taxonomy terms attached can be accurately retrieved regardless of where they are held, and terms can be repurposed as site labels and points of association between internal content items.
Editor's Summary A highlight of the 2012 ASIS&T Annual Meeting, the pre-conference session on the History of ASIS&T and Information Science and Technology Worldwide drew presenters and attendees from around the globe. The day featured papers on four historical themes, starting with the institutional roots of ASIS&T and recognizing decades of research presented in the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. The evolution of the field was apparent through a review of information revolutions prompted by the printing press, the post-World War II information crisis and the Internet, as well as through presentations on digital curation, ongoing work on relevance, sense-making theory and developments from Croatia to France. Discussion of the historical contexts of technology innovations and impacts considered photographic documentary techniques, binary computing and networking standards. The development of foundational ideas was explored through presentations on pioneering document indexing methods, the semantic challenge of term-oriented retrieval, early European perceptions of classification systems and the French view of communication and information science. Efforts to deepen the historical understanding of information science and technology will continue through oral history interviews, funded research and awards for outstanding papers.
CON T E N T S NEX T PAGE > < PRE V I OUS PAGE I t is perhaps no coincidence that academic librarians are accelerating their efforts to curate research data at the same time that attention is increasingly being focused on big data. But in a college or university setting, a preoccupation with big data may be unrealistic and unproductive. Instead, our concerns should be with small data and the challenges of managing a myriad of diverse and undocumented, yet small, datasets. With big data at the forefront of discussion, it is easy to imagine that all scientists are routinely generating massive quantities of research data. And some are. But many of these big data producers work in federal or private labs that are out of the reach of academic librarians. Or they work in universities but are supported by grants enabling them to hire staff and build infrastructure necessary to manage their own data without assistance from librarians. What remains is the majority of researchers based in colleges and universities, who conduct several small, interrelated projects simultaneously, many of which are either not federally funded or not funded at all. Some of these projects culminate in journal articles and conference presentations, and others quietly phase out, but in either case, the data are rarely preserved or disseminated. Although science is rapidly evolving with advances in thinking and technology, it has not undergone a paradigm shift, at least not yet. Despite having more sophisticated tools, most scientists continue to make progress via incremental steps – series of observational, experimental or computational studies that each generate a relatively small amount of data. The same is true for researchers in the social sciences and humanities, who also typically produce modestly sized datasets or collections of digital objects. It is these small datasets that academic librarians are most likely to encounter [1]. It is also easy to get the impression that, as a general rule, big data are more important than small data. But the value of a dataset is not a function of its size. Certainly the curation of big data is vital in many cases. Consider the unique conglomeration of weather conditions leading up to the recent superstorm Sandy. Meteorological data captured from this event are not reproducible. If the data are not preserved, scientists lose opportunities to gain additional insights into how such storms arise and how to improve our weather prediction systems. However, big data often accumulate through unfocused sweeps of the environment at Looking Out for the Little Guy: Small Data Curation by Katherine Goold Akers
