Digital Libraries

Studying how to most effectively store, structure, retrieve, interpret and preserve collections of digital objects to serve a particular community or communities

Researchers Working in this Area

Related Research Projects

AEOLIAN (Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Organizations)

Time frame
2021-2023
Investigator
Glen Layne-Worthey
Total funding to date
$49,820.00
Funding agency
National Endowment for the Humanities

Many digital archival collections are limited due to factors such as privacy concerns and copyright. AEOLIAN combines innovative AI methods and the knowledge of scholars from multiple cultural institutions to address the accessibility of these collections, ultimately making them more accessible. Additionally, the project aims to foster collaboration amongst scholars and practitioners from…

artificial intelligence

Broadening Access to Text Analysis by Describing Uncertainty

Time frame
2020-Present
Investigator
Ted Underwood
Total funding to date
$73,122.00
Funding agency
National Endowment for the Humanities

A project to study errors and paratextual noise in optically transcribed digital library texts, and the consequences of these errors on historical and humanistic conclusions measuring trends across time.

The noise associated with digital transcription has become an important obstacle to humanistic research. While the errors in digital texts are easily observed, the…

describing uncertainty in research

CAREER: Using Network Analysis to Assess Confidence in Research Synthesis

Time frame
2021-Present
Investigator
Jodi Schneider
Total funding to date
$599,963.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Policy in areas such as conservation, energy, healthcare, and sustainable development is informed by a variety of factors, including the best available science. Determining the best available science requires synthesizing multiple scientific results to gauge both the level of scientific consensus and the reliability of the research. However, on some policy-relevant topics, syntheses continue…

network of dots

Data Capsule Appliance for Research Analysis of Restricted and Sensitive Data in Academic Libraries

Time frame
2017-Present
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$32,500.00
Funding agency
Institute of Museum and Library Services

Indiana University, in partnership with eight other academic libraries, will enable new kinds of computational research while ensuring librarians remain expert stewards of information collections. In the last decade, there has been a nearly exponential increase in the volume of digital content, much of which could be valuable for computational research. However, not all datasets can be made…

Digging Deeper, Reaching Further: Libraries Empowering Users to Mine the HathiTrust Digital Library Resources

Time frame
2015-2018
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$398,844.00
Funding agency
Institute of Museum and Library Services

Librarians and digital humanities scholars from the University of Illinois in partnership with colleagues at Indiana University, Northwestern University, Lafayette College, the University of North Carolina, and the HathiTrust Research Center will develop a shared curriculum for use in academic libraries and a train the trainer series designed to assist librarians in getting started with the…

Federated Repositories of Accessible Learning Materials for Higher Education II

Time frame
2021-Present
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$95,000.00
Funding agency
University of Virginia

By law, any material required for the education of a disabled student must be made accessible for them in a timely manner. In the United States, the legal obligation to provide accessible learning materials falls on individual educational institutions, and universities and colleges across the country are scrambling to meet their responsibilities to students with special information-access…

game pieces in a board game

HathiTrust + Bookworm Project

Time frame
2014-Present
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$504,373.00
Funding agency
National Endowment for the Humanities

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is partnering with the Cultural Observatory team that developed the Google Books Ngram Viewer together with Google. The goal of this collaboration is to implement a greatly enhanced open-source version of the Cultural Observatory’s open-source “Bookworm” text analysis and visualization tool designed to assist scholars to meet the challenges posed by the…

HathiTrust + Bookworm project

HathiTrust Research Center Phase 2

Time frame
2019-Present
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$535,292.00
Funding agency
HathiTrust

The HathiTrust has provided funding for the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), colocated at University of Illinois and Indiana University, to serve as the research arm of the HathiTrust and create an agile, technology-rich service for researchers in the digital humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and informatics. This service will help researchers conduct nonconsumptive research on…

HathiTrust Research Center: New Opportunities through Computational Analysis of HathiTrust Digital Library 2014-2018

Time frame
2014-2018
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$1,000,000.00
Funding agency
HathiTrust

The HathiTrust has provided funding for the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), colocated at University of Illinois and Indiana University, to serve as the research arm of the HathiTrust and create an agile, technology-rich service for researchers in the digital humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and informatics. This service will help researchers conduct nonconsumptive research on…

Identifying Potential Bias in Science Using Citation Network Structures

Time frame
2020-2022
Investigator
Jodi Schneider
Total funding to date
$29,960.00
Funding agency
Campus Research Board

Biased citation benefits authors in the short-term by bolstering grants and papers, making them more easily accepted. However, it can have severe negative consequences for scientific inquiry. The need for a bias detection tool is evident from previous studies on citation bias, but existing work lacks crucial elements needed to scale the underlying approaches. This project will test the…

abstract science concept

Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science II: Research and Development towards the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern

Time frame
2022-Present
Investigator
Jodi Schneider
Total funding to date
$249,998.00
Funding agency
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

This project is intended to reduce the real and perceived danger to science and society when retracted research is mistakenly circulated within the digital scholarly record. The goal is to build more confidence in scientific discovery. Retraction alerts readers to unreliable scholarly material and is intended to remove that information from the citable record. Harm can result when faulty…

retracted science

Scholar-Curated Worksets for Analysis, Reuse & Dissemination (SCWAReD)

Time frame
2021-Present
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$1,031,655.00
Funding agency
Indiana University

The Scholar-Curated Worksets for Analysis, Reuse & Dissemination (SCWAReD, pronounced “squared”) project is intended to produce a suite of curated, targeted HTRC (HathiTrust Research Center) worksets and illustrative, reusable research models that demonstrate the collaborative workset-building, textual analysis, workflow development, and dataset creation activities typically carried out by…

person sitting at desk working on computer

Textual Geographies

Time frame
2016-2019
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$15,536.00
Funding agency
National Endowment for the Humanities

Textual Geographies uses named entity recognition and geolocation to extract place names from multilingual (English, German, Spanish, and Chinese) printed volumes held by the HathiTrust digital library and to associate those names with detailed geographic information. The project corpus currently includes about 10 million volumes published between 1700 and the present day.

Textual Geographies logo

The Governing Knowledge Commons Research Coordination Network

Time frame
2021-Present
Investigator
Madelyn Sanfilippo
Total funding to date
$16,818.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Knowledge commons refer to the institutionalized community governance of sharing, creating, and curating a wide range of intellectual and cultural resources. This project will establish a Research Coordination Network (RCN) designed to build a research community that will advance these scientific principles. In doing so it will aid in the development of empirical and theoretical insights into…

black & white photo of book stack

The Internet of Musical Events Digital Scholarship Community and the Archiving of Performance (InterMuse)

Time frame
2021-Present
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$100,840.00
Funding agency
University of York

This project arises from longstanding recognition of the challenges associated with the documentation of, and access to, collections of performance ephemera, for which the British Library is a key repository in the UK. Live musical events play a vital role in community life across the globe, yet they often leave only faint traces on the historical record, even in modern times. Sources can be…

sheet music

The Reading Time Machine: Transforming Astrophysical Literature into Actionable Data

Time frame
2021-Present
Investigator
Jill Naiman
Total funding to date
$506,912.00
Funding agency
NASA

This project is a collaboration with Harvard University and the Astrophysics Data System (ADS), a digital library portal operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. With over 15 million records, ADS is one of the most important archives in the scientific field of astronomy.

"Newer documents are ‘born digital,’ making them machine-readable and…

solar system

WCSA+DC

Time frame
2016-Present
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$1,170,000.00
Funding agency
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

This project builds upon, extends, and integrates two developmental research threads within the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC). The first thread originates from work that was conducted in the Workset Collections for Scholarly Analysis (WCSA): Prototyping Project. The second thread continues the work of…

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