The Harvard Library Lab has announced its first ten projects, based on proposals submitted between August and December 2010. Among the proposals backed in the first round are Highbrow, a tool that would allow for easier viewing and analysis of annotations in scholarly texts; and Deposit@Harvard, described as a unified web-based interface deposit tool that enables the user to submit scholarship simultaneously to multiple internal and external repositories.
The Harvard Library Lab was established in July 2010 to fund new information-technology projects from Harvard students, faculty, and staff that aim to benefit libraries.
The lab, which is managed by the library's Office of Scholarly Communication, will be using up to $1 million to fund projects over the coming year. This is part of a $5 million grant the library received from the UK-based Arcadia Fund in April 2009. Funding amounts for individual projects in this round were not disclosed.
Two of the ten projects will be reportedly headed by David Weinberger, a senior fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Laboratory at Harvard Law School.
One ambitious proposal describes the LibraryCloud server, a web metadata server that grew out of the Library Innovation Lab's ShelfLife project. ShelfLife is a web-based research tool with social-networking aspects that aims to allow researchers to read about and comment on books, which can aid other researchers to find works addressing common themes.
According to Weinberger, the goal of LibraryCloud is to allow access to a wide range of Harvard Library metadata - including library catalogue information, checkout and reserve data, and more - via an application programming interface (API) that would allow developers to create new apps based on the information. Weinberger said that he expects LibraryCloud will be made available to other development projects at Harvard in about two to three months, while development continues for several months beyond that.
Weinberger will also lead another funded project - a modest series of biweekly 20-minute Library Innovation Podcasts [PDF], featuring conversations with library innovators. The podcasts will be hosted on the Innovation Lab's website, and will begin appearing in about a month.
A third funded project associated with the Harvard Library Innovation Lab is the Library Analytics Toolkit. The toolkit aims to allow librarians to more easily gauge and analyse usage data at Harvard libraries campus-wide. That project is headed by Kim Dulin, also a Co-director of the lab.
A second round of funding decisions regarding new projects will be announced in May 2011, with proposals due by April 1.
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