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What you missed at the DASER summit

2004; Association for Information Science and Technology; Volume: 30; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/bult.1720300609

2163-4289

Michael R. Leach,

Library Science and Information Systems

The first Digital Archives for Science and Engineering Resources (DASER) Summit was held November 21–23, 2003, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Over 90 participants from four countries and more than a dozen states attended the conference, which explored issues surrounding the creation of science- and engineering-based digital archives, including standards, metadata, software and tool development, and long-term preservation. This summit was the first sponsored by an ASIS&T Special Interest Group – SIG/STI (Scientific and Technical Information Systems) – and an ASIS&T Chapter – NEASIS&T (New England chapter). One of the goals of this summit was to evaluate this program model for future program planning within ASIS&T. All indications are that the model has succeeded, and the Society has gained valuable experience that will allow us to further refine this program development strategy. A full report will be presented at the August 2004 Board of Director's retreat, with subsequent publication on the ASIS&T website. Highlights will be presented at various venues at the Annual Meeting in November. The DASER Program & Logistics Committee, which consists of Julie Arnold, Margret Branschofsky, Darcy Duke, Deb Helman, Michael Leach (chair) and K.T. Vaughan, hopes that other SIGs and chapters will adopt this model to develop new summit programs in the near future. The summit kicked off on Friday evening with a social event at the MIT Barker Engineering Library. In a relaxed setting, complete with ample food and drink, participants enjoyed networking inside this famous location – beneath the “dome” of MIT. Members of the Summit Program Committee as well as volunteers from the Simmons ASIS&T Student Chapter were on hand to greet participants. A continental breakfast the next morning in the Wiesner Building, home of the MIT Media Lab, kicked off the panel sessions in the Bartos Theater. Panel 1 highlighted issues related to metadata and standards in the digital archives realm. Jeff Beck, National Institutes of Health and the National Library of Medicine (NLM), discussed PubMed Central and the NLM's efforts at creating and using DTDs (document or data type definitions used with markup languages such as XML). MacKenzie Smith of MIT followed with an overview of METS: Metadata Encoding & Transmission Standard, which provides description, administrative, behavioral and structural metadata with a file inventory to “wrap” digital objects in any digital archive or institutional repository. For more information on the DASER Summit, including speaker PowerPoint presentations, please go to www.asist.org/Chapters/neasis/daser/index.html Panel 2 focused on digital repository systems. Suzanne Samuel, California Digital Library, discussed the CDL eScholarship Repository project. Margret Branschofsky followed with a description the DSpace project at MIT, while Leslie Johnston presented the Fedora repository implementation at the University of Virginia. Wrapping up this session was Kimberly Douglas, California Institute of Technology, focusing on the Caltech experience in creating a digital repository. At this point in the program, participants and speakers took a short walk from the Wiesner Building to the MIT Faculty Club for a catered luncheon, where everyone got the opportunity to network and chat about the issues raised in the first panel sessions. The afternoon began with Panel Session 3, titled “Beyond Words: Issues in Data Archives.” Four speakers addressed a variety of issues and experiences related to their implementation of data archives. Volker Brendel, Iowa State University, discussed the development, maintenance and sharing of small-scale databases for genome research. Bob Dragoset of the National Institute of Standards and Technology followed with a description of the physical reference data of the NIST physics laboratory. Peter Knoop of the University of Michigan discussed the UARC/SPARC (Space Physics & Aeronomy Research Collaboratory) experience from 1993 to 2002. Sue Rhee of Stanford University focused on issues in managing and disseminating changing information in biology. The last panel on Saturday was titled “Will It Last Forever: Preservation of Digital Material.” Stephen Abrams of Harvard University discussed the global file format registry. The next speaker was Tom Robertson of Stanford University, who highlighted the LOCKSS model — Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe — of digital preservation. Nancy McGovern of Cornell University rounded off this panel by highlighting one risk management approach for Web resources — virtual remote control. Participants joined one of several networking dinners on Saturday evening, hosted by members of the DASER Program Committee. The City of Cambridge is blessed with many excellent eating establishments as many of the participants discovered, including a Massachusetts staple — seafood. Sunday morning the participants once again gathered in the Bartos Theater. The last panel session for the summit focused on the details of four specific digital archives projects. Matthew Cockerill highlighted BioMed Central's role as an open access publisher and its role in digital archiving. Guenther Eichhorn from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics described the NASA Astrophysical Data System (ADS)/Astronomy Digital Library, a worldwide collaboration to provide access to the astronomical literature. Sandra McIntyre, Health Education Assets Library, followed with a discussion of multimedia assets management for health sciences education. Brandon Muramatsu of the National Engineering Education Delivery System (NEEDS) at University of California, Berkeley, rounded off this panel with a discussion of NEEDS, SMETE.ORG and educational digital libraries. In the closing keynote address, Clifford Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information, and past president of ASIS&T, synthesized much of the summit's presentations, providing a larger framework of reference for these cutting-edge research projects and services. For more on the content of this talk, see the related article by Beatrice Pulliam. Planning for a second DASER Summit is well underway for the spring of 2005 at the University of Maryland campus in College Park. By the time this article appears in print, or shortly thereafter, announcements on the exact days and times, as well as program details, should be available on the ASIS&T website. Stay tuned.