Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship

CIRSS Home Projects

Current Projects

Data Curation Education in Research Centers Program (DCERC)
The Data Curation Education in Research Centers (DCERC) will develop a model for educating Library and Information Science masters and doctoral students in data curation through field experiences in research and data centers. We will implement a graduate research and education program in data curation to bring students into the world of scientific data curation. Building on the strengths of our partners-the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science, the University of Tennessee School of Information Sciences, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, we address needs for research expertise and scientific data curation professionals.
PI: Carole Palmer; Co-PI: Mary Marlino - NCAR; Carol Tenopir - University Tennessee at Knoxville
Funded by: Institute of Museum and Library Services #RE-02-10-0004-10

Developing a Model for Sociotechnical Data Analytics Education (SODA)
The goal of this program is to provide students with an understanding of both the social and technical aspects of data analytics to prepare the next generation of leaders who can work with big data. Classroom experience culminates with a hands-on practicum, project or research focus on any aspect of data analytics.
PI: Cathy Blake
Funded by: Institute of Museum and Library Services #RE-05-12-0054-12

Digital Humanities Data Curation: NEH Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities
The University of Illinois is collaborating with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH, project lead) and the Center for Digital Scholarship at Brown University to develop and conduct a series of advanced institutes on data curation for the digital humanities.  The series of three-day institutes will be held at the University of Maryland, College Park, Brown University, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for 51 participants on approaches to data curation of humanities research materials for librarians, archivists, and humanities scholars.
Project Director: Megan Senseney
Funded by: National Endowment for the Humanities

Improving Information Retrieval by Analysis of Temporal Evidence in a Unified Model
Students funded under this project will work with closely the project leader, Miles Efron, to develop state-of-the-art search engines and related information retrieval (IR) technologies.
PI: Miles Efron
Funded by: National Science Foundation #1217279

Libraries: Transformation of the Humanities
Humanities scholars are increasingly using digital technologies to create and share work. Within this new education and research climate, humanities undergraduates have unprecedented opportunities to contribute and to conduct research of real value. Johns Hopkins University Library System and its partners from Tufts University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will develop collaborative virtual work space, including collections and services, designed to support a new "collaborative lab culture." This new model will explore and demonstrate the ways that libraries can support new modes of collaboration in research and learning.
PI: Allen Renear; Project PI: Sayeed Choudhury, JHU; co-PI: Gregory Crane, Tufts
Funded by: Institute of Museum and Library Services

Open Annotation Collaboration (Phases I, II and III)
This 3-phase project seeks to facilitate the emergence of a Web and Resource-centric interoperable annotation environment that allows leveraging annotations across the boundaries of annotation clients, annotation servers, and content collections; to demonstrate through implementations an interoperable annotation environment enabled by the interoperability specifications in settings characterized by a variety of annotation client/server environments, content collections, and scholarly use cases; and to seed widespread adoption by deploying robust, production-quality applications conformant with the interoperable annotation environment in ubiquitous and specialized services, tools, and content used by scholars.
PI: Timothy Cole; Partner PI's: Jane Hunter, University of Queensland; James Smith, University of Maryland; Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory; co-PI:s Anna Gerber, University of Queensland; Robert Sanderson, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Funded by: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Site-Based Data Curation at Yellowstone National Park (SBDC)
A two-year project to develop a framework of policies and processes for the curation of “site-based” digital research data that responds to the needs of small science researchers and site managers, and promotes coordination with libraries and data repositories.
PI: Carole Palmer, Co-PI: Bruce Fouke, Ann Rodman (Yellowstone), Sayeed Choudhury (JHU)
Funded by: Institute of Museum and Library Services #LG-06-12-0706-12

Collaborative Research: The Impact of Scientific Funding
Link MEDLINE articles and U.S. patents using state-of-the-art name disambiguation algorithms.
PI: Vetle Torvik
Funded by: National Science Foundation

Data Conservancy
The five-year award, one of the first two in the NSF's DataNet program, is building infrastructure for the management of the ever-increasing amounts of digital research data.
PI: Sayeed Choudhury, Johns Hopkins University; Co-PI: Carole Palmer
Funded by: National Science Foundation

Data Curation Education Program (DCEP)
The Data Curation Education Program (DCEP) is a data curation specialization within the ALA-accredited Master of Science at the University of Illinois's Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Our program offers a focus on data collection and management, knowledge representation, digital preservation and archiving, data standards, and policy, providing the theory and skills necessary to work directly with academic and industry researchers who need data curation expertise.
PI: Allen Renear
Funded by: Institute of Museum and Library Services

Defining and Solving Key Challenges in Microblog Search
Explore both theoretical models and prototype search systems to address core problems in microblog search.
PI: Miles Efron
Funded by: Google

Digital Collections and Content (DCC)
Begun in 2002, this IMLS-funded project provides integrated access to the digital content developed through the IMLS National Leadership Grant (NLG) program. Current work is aimed at creating federations based on principled selection and integration of sources and exploiting the relationships between collection-level and item-level metadata.
PI: Carole Palmer
Funded by: Institute of Museum and Library Services

Expand SEASR Services
Explore text-mining as a tool for understanding the humanities.
PI: John Unsworth
Funded by: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

HathiTrust Research Center Early Research Project
As input into the development, design, and improvement of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), recipients of Google's Digital Humanities Grants were interviewed to identify issues encountered during their projects.
PI: Carole Palmer
Funded by: HathiTrust Research Center

Impact Assessment of Social Justice Documentaries
Films are produced, screened and perceived as part of a larger and continuously changing ecosystem that involves multiple stakeholders and themes. This project will measure the impact of social justice documentaries by capturing, modeling and analyzing the map of these stakeholders and themes in a systematic, scalable and analytically rigorous fashion. This solution will result in a validated, re-useable and end-user friendly methodology and technology that practitioners can use to assess the long-term impact of media productions beyond the number of people who have seen a screening or visited a webpage. Moreover, bringing the proposed computational methodology into a real-world application context can serve as a case-study for demonstrating the usability of this cutting-edge solution.
PI: Jana Diesner
Funded by: Ford Foundation #0125-6162

Meeting the Challenge of Language Change in Text Retrieval with Machine Translation Techniques
Convert a query in contemporary English to English terms used in text from Medieval times to the present.
PI: Miles Efron
Funded by: Google

Opening History
Investigating the aggregation of distributed and complementary cultural heritage collections to build contextual mass for historians, and developing techniques for browsing and linking to related resources outside of OH.
PI: Carole Palmer
Funded by: Institute of Museum and Library Services

Preserving Virtual Worlds 2
Preserving Virtual Worlds project will explore methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction. PVW 2 will improve the capacity of libraries, museums, and archives to preserve computer games, video games, and interactive fiction.
PI: Jerome McDonough
Funded by: Institute of Museum and Library Services

Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information (SALAMI)
Create a framework for analyzing musical audio data and use the framework to process songs from a range of online sources.
PI: Stephen Downie
Funded by: National Endowment for the Humanities

Text Mining in Environmental Literature
Develop text mining methods that enable resolve contradictory and redundant evidence from text.
PI: Cathy Blake
Funded by: Environmental Change Institute

The Investigative Journalism Education Consortium
Develop the next generation of investigative journalists who can make the best use of the new digital tools.
PI: Brant Houston
Funded by: McCormick Foundation

Towards Evidence-Based Discovery
Understand both human and automated methods to synthesize evidence from text.
PI: Catherine Blake
Funded by: National Science Foundation

Past Projects

ACRL Academic Trends and Statistics Survey
An annual survey on behalf of the Association of College and Research Libraries to collect information on library collections, expenditures and personnel and North American academic research libraries.
PI: Carole Palmer
Funded by: American Library Association

Better Repositories Are Information Networks (BRAIN)
Development of a tool to retrieve related documents among the contents of institutional repositories.
PI: John Unsworth
Funded by: No Outside Funding

Biological Information Specialist Program
The Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences accepts applications for a biological informatics masters degree program for Biological Information Specialists (BIS). Unlike most existing educational programs in bioinformatics, the BIS program takes a broad view of biology and informatics to train professionals to bridge arenas of information technology development in the biological sciences. Program and application details can be found on the GSLIS Website.
PI: Carole Palmer; Co-PIs: P. Brian Heidorn, W. John MacMullen
Funded by: National Science Foundation #0524567

Curation Profiles Project
GSLIS and the UIUC Library are partnering with the Purdue University Libraries (D. Scott Brandt, PI) on a $272,229 grant, "Investigating Data Curation Profiles Across Multiple Research Disciplines." This project combines both library and research domain strengths of the University of Illinois and Purdue University Libraries to investigate questions related to data collection, management, publication and preservation, including "at which point in the research cycle are researchers willing to share data, with whom, and under what conditions?" In addition, we will consider the role of academic libraries in supporting e-science activities, by studying how librarians can interact with scientists to make their research output available, identifying practices and tools to support further metadata development and capture workflow.
PI: D. Scott Brandt, Purdue University
Funded by: Institute of Museum and Library Services

Disciplinary Research Practices and Library Services in the Online Environment
A report commissions by OCLC Research and the RLG Partnership to identify recent literature on changing scholarly research practices and how research libraries can best support researchers across disciplines.
PI: Carole Palmer
Funded by: OCLC

ECHO DEPository
A three-year digital preservation research and development project in partnership with OCLC, funded by the Library of Congress.
PI: John Unsworth and Beth Sandore
Funded by: Library of Congress (NDIIPP)

Folktales, Facets, and FRBR
Through the project Folktales, Facets, and FRBR, CIRSS affiliated faculty members Kathryn La Barre and Carol Tilley propose to enhance access to folktales through the systematic and rigorous application of facet analysis and the development of user- and task-focused models of information representation.
PI: Carol Tilly & Kathryn La Barre

Information and Discovery in Neuroscience
This project aims to specify information technology needed to 1) improve neuroscientists' ability to synthesize existing research results and share information and 2) support different modes of discovery and collaboration. Through field studies at neuroscience labs we are identifying high impact information, critical information problems, and constraints on the transfer and exchange of information within research teams and between specializations and disciplines.
PI: Carole Palmer
Funded by: National Science Foundation

Intermediary Models for Institutional Repository Development (IMIRD)
A pilot project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation exploring institutional repository development strategies at three research universities and the role of librarians in these initiatives.
PI: Carole Palmer
Funded by: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Libraries and 9/11 and the U.S.A. Patriot Act
In November of 2001, shortly after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, the Library Research Center (now CIRSS) mailed a questionnaire to 629 public libraries in Illinois. With funding from the Illinois State Library system, the survey sought to understand how public libraries were responding to new security measures and to the events of September 11, 2001. The questionnaire received 553 (87.9%) responses, providing insight into questions regarding security, staff attitudes, collection development, attitude toward users, and general knowledge of the USA PATRIOT Act. The results of this survey were published in the Winter 2002 issue of Illinois Libraries.
PI: Leigh Estabrook
Funded by: Illinois State Library

Metadata Offer New Knowledge (MONK)
MONK is a digital environment designed to help humanities scholars discover and analyze patterns in the texts they study.
PI: John Unsworth
Funded by: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Networked Environment for Music Analysis (NEMA) - Was International Music Information Retrieval Systems Evaluation Laboratory (IMIRSEL)
The objective of the International Music Information Retrieval Systems Evaluation Laboratory(IMIRSEL) is the establishment of the necessary resources for scientifically valid development as well as evaluation of emerging Music Information Retrieval (MIR), Music Digital Library (MDL) techniques and technologies.
PI: J. Stephen Downie
Funded by: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Public Library Data Service (PLDS) Statistical Report
An annual survey on behalf of the Public Library Association presenting exclusive, timely data on library finances, resources, annual use figures, and technology.
PI: Carole Palmer
Funded by: American Library Association

User Satisfaction with Access to Government Information and Services at Public Libraries and Public Access Computing Centers
This IMLS-funded project explores how people find government information and to what extent libraries and public access computing centers support government information seeking behavior.
PI: Carole Palmer
Funded by: Institute of Museum and Library Services