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2009-2010 Smathers Libraries Mini Grant
APPLICATION COVER SHEET
Application due: Thursday, October 1, 2009, 5:00 PM


Principal Investigator (PI) Name: Dina Benson
Department: Digital Library Center
Email address: dbenson@uflib.ufl.edu


Phone: 273-2910


X_ Check here if this is your first grant application as PI.


Title of grant application project: University of Florida Institutional History Project


X Check here for Emerging Technologies (ET) Funds
_ Check here if any IT support is necessary

Project abstract (no more than 100 words):

The UF Institutional History Project will use an emerging technology, the Encoded Archival
Context (EAC) metadata schema, to encode historical information about UF's colleges,
departments, and administrative units. Released in August 2009, EAC is an international
standard for encoding contextual information about "individuals, families and corporate bodies
that create, preserve, use and are responsible for and/or associated with records in a variety of
ways." This proposal requests funds to hire two students to gather data from digital and print
sources and to encode this data using EAC, and funding for a third student to program code for
an EAC editor.

Funds requested (Limit of $5,000):
Emerging Technologies (ET) (Limit of $10,000): $10,000

Describe how the10% mandatory cost share will be met (be specific):

Please list the library resources to be used in this project and the name/and initials of the person
authorizing the intended use and date authorized. If you need more room, continue on a
separate page.

Resources Required for Project as applicable Authorizing Individual Date
including cost share contributions Initials Authorized
DLC-Digitization Laurie Taylor
Special & Area Studies Collections Rich Bennett


Submitted by:


PI Signature


Date


Approved by:


Dept. Chair Signature


Date








Project Description
The University of Florida Institutional History Project will document the evolution of UF's organizational
structure from its founding to the present. The project will take advantage of an emerging technology, the
Encoded Archival Context (EAC) metadata schema, to encode historical information about UF's colleges,
departments, centers, and administrative units. Released in August 2009, EAC is an international standard for
encoding contextual descriptive information about "the individuals, families and corporate bodies that create,
preserve, use and are responsible for and/or associated with records in a variety of ways."

Project funds will be used to hire two students to gather historical contextual data about UF units. The students
will collect data from a variety of print and digital sources including University Archives finding aids,
departmental histories, organization charts, faculty handbooks, annual reports, accreditation documents, and
yearbooks. Much of this information is accessible in the University Archives, and some current information is
maintained by the Office of Institutional Planning and Research. This project will not produce a comprehensive,
detailed institutional history of UF. Rather, the students will capture data documenting the organizational
structure over time. Important data sources will include titles of units and offices, title changes,
begin/transition/end dates, hierarchical structures, etc.

Project funds also will be used to hire one student to write the code to allow EAC instances to be read and written
into data structures within the .Net environment. Thus, the project will produce: 1) programming code for an EAC
reader/writer and 2) EAC records for each UF unit, documenting creation dates, name changes and similar
transitional events, relationships, and other contextual descriptive information over time.

Project Significance/Rationale
To assist researchers in interpreting records, we provide information describing the circumstances under which
records were created and/or used by their creators. This contextual information not only includes the identification
and history of the agents responsible for creation but also the relationships that exist between agents. By
collecting and encoding this contextual information about UF we enable a more complete description and
understanding of all of the records and digital objects created or maintained by UF. We also support enhanced
discovery of records based on provenance.

For several years, the Libraries and others in Florida have needed a metadata schema to describe complex
contextual information about the creators of records. In 2006-07, staff from multiple departments in the Libraries
participated in statewide discussions regarding the need for a "life events" metadata schema for encoding
information about people, corporate bodies, places, events, relationships, and links with physical records and
digital objects. Members of a special Life Events Standards Task Group charged by the Digital Development and
Access Committee of the Council of State University Libraries evaluated several metadata standards but
concluded that no existing standard met the wide variety of needs.

Until now we have created authority records to standardize the names of persons and corporate bodies to facilitate
the discovery of resources. However, authority records are insufficient because they do not allow us to encode
detailed, complex information about agents. We need to encode information about specific activities or events -
when they occurred, where they occurred, what other agents were involved, etc. MARC lacks the ability to
properly handle important contextual elements such as geography (e.g., places of life events), functions, legal
statuses, affiliations, relationships, etc.1 Some of this information can be included in notes fields, but this reduces
the usability of the data. Although more recent standards like MADS (Metadata for Authority Description) do


1 Kathleen D. Roe, Director of Archives and Records Management for New York State Archives explains: "EAC is the whole
context, not just the authoritative version of a corporate, personal or family name. It gives one the capacity to provide a lot of
information [...] on the functions of that organization, its predecessor and successor names/organizational structure, leaders
of the organization, and so forth. [...] We have sometimes tens, if not hundreds of series created by one agency. Rather than
embed the contextual [...] information on the agency in each finding aid (what a waste of time to do and manage), [we] have
'agency history' records that we connect to the individual series [...] EAC-CPF gives us the structure to provide this
information in more useful and productive ways, and [offers] possibilities for sharing contextual information across
repositories." (Email to EAD a Ilisicln .loc.gov, in email discussion "Re: Implementing EAC-CPF, Sept. 25, 2009)








include some of the elements missing in MARC (e.g., affiliations),2 they still lack the richness and flexibility of
EAC. Even more recent standards like FOAF (friend of a friend), which is used in connecting individual identities
and relationships for social networking software, offer little more than a traditional MARC authority record.
Unlike those standards, EAC offers a standard for including full contextual information to define entities and their
relationships within multiple ontologies. As the more encompassing standard, EAC would also be able to be
"dumbed-down" into standards like FOAF for use in other semantic systems.

The EAC schema is based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML), which enables the display, discovery and
sharing of contextual information. The standard is maintained by the Society of American Archivists in
partnership with the Berlin State Library, and is compatible with ISAAR(CPF), the International Standard
Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families. EAC allows us to encode contextual
information about the creation and use of historical records by agents including individuals, families, and
organizations. In addition to basic biographical and historical data, the contextual information may describe
functions, activities, geographic places, events, and relationships to other agents.

The richness and flexibility of the EAC schema makes it possible to enhance all digital services based on
provenance. EAC supports the linking of contextual information about record-creating agents to digital object
metadata or to descriptions of library and archives holdings. It also supports the linking of contextual information
about one agent to contextual information describing other agents, based on defined relationships between the
agents and/or their records. EAC can be used for authority file encoding either as a standalone schema or in
combination with other standards. For example, EAC can be used in conjunction with the Encoded Archival
Description (EAD) schema for encoding and delivering archival finding aids. EAD would be used to encode
descriptive information about archival records, and EAC would be used to encode contextual metadata about the
agents responsible for creating the records.

As the example EAC record from the National Library of Australia shows (Appendix A), the EAC format allows
for robust authority records. However, those records must be tied to other information sources in order to enrich
the overall information environment by providing additional context. Authority records created with contextual
information in a standards-based form can provide additional information, thus enriching existing information
sources, and can enable enhanced functionality.

The process to create and support EAC records for UF entities will add support for linked data as a whole, in
addition to showing immediate benefits. The programming support for an EAC reader and writer in .NET will
make the addition of EACs and EADs into the UFDC System much simpler and it will greatly simplify the
general flow of metadata between the digital objects and archives, which in turn will ease processing and increase
usability for patrons. The eventual full integration with the UFDC System and other systems in the Libraries will
greatly enhance ease of use by patrons. For instance, the JISC Names Project to implement similar contextual
record connections states that one of its goals is to allow for the "reliable retrieval of all materials provided by a
particular individual or department (and not those of others with similar names)."3 The Names Project goes on to
note that the increased search reliability and accuracy would allow for further improvements, including the
enabling of "navigation between identities. For example X collaborates with Y, so retrieve everything by Y."

Like the Names Project, which correctly anticipates needing to use multiple standards (MARC, EAC, and FOAF)
and needing to augment those with additional data, this project recognizes the need to use, support, and enhance
multiple standards. For instance, future projects will need to utilize the existing linked data resources from the
Library of Congress,4 Open Library,5 and the many others.



2 The design principles for MADS remain limited for the foreseeable future: http \ \ .loc.gov/standards/mods/design-
principles-mods-mads.html
3 "Names Project Plan," August 2009: http://names.mimas.ac.uk/documents/Names_project_plan v4_Aug09.pdf
4 http://id.loc.gov/authorities/sh85001725
5 http://blog.openlibraiy.org/2009/08/11/api-with-rdfxml-output-available/








Resources Needed/Impacts on Other Departments
In addition to the funding requested to hire three student assistants, the project will require existing computer
equipment in Special Collections and the DLC, and access to resources available in Special Collections. Carl Van
Ness and John Nemmers will supervise the students as they identify resources and capture data. Dina Benson (PI),
Laurie Taylor, and Mark Sullivan in the DLC will supervise the students in formatting the captured data. Mark
Sullivan will supervise a student in creating the .Net programming for the open-source EAC metadata editor.

Plan of Action
Nov.-Dec. 2009 Advertise three student positions: two data positions and one programmer position.
Create list of organizational data sources (Van Ness and Nemmers).
Repurpose existing contextual data encoded in EAD finding aids by programmatically
transforming EAD elements to corresponding EAC elements (Nemmers).
Jan 2010 Hire and train the two data gathering students (Van Ness and Nemmers).
Students begin formatting the data: Depending on the nature and format of the resources, the
students will either key in the information or scan and convert to text using Optical
Character Recognition (OCR) technology (Benson and Taylor).
Hire programmer student and explain programming requirements (Taylor and Sullivan).
Jan.-May 2010 Data students collect contextual data.
Programmer develops the .Net programming to create an open-source metadata editor to
facilitate the creation and editing of EAC metadata.
May-June 2010 Programmer submits EAC editor, and Sullivan completes testing/revision of EAC editor.
June 2010 Data students complete data gathering and formatting.
July-Aug. 2010 Data students create EAC instances using editor (process includes input of contextual data).
Sept.-Oct. 2010 Revision of existing EAD files using revised EAC contextual data (Nemmers).
Publication of EAC instances online in both XML and HTML.

Measures of Success and Implications for the Future
The project will be successful if 1) we are able to create code for an open-source EAC editor, and 2) we are able
to create an EAC instance for every college, department or unit that has existed at UF since its founding. Of
course, some units have changed names, merged, etc., so there will not be a one-to-one relationship between the
number of UF units and the number of EAC instances. The project will demonstrate that EAC is the best schema
for managing contextual metadata at UF. Specifically, it will prove that EAC can support and enhance the
discovery and sharing of contextual data about individuals and corporate bodes responsible for creating records.
The EAC instances created during the project period will be made available online in both XML and HTML.
Following the grant, the EAC files will be available for use with metadata for digital objects in UFDC and the
Institutional Repository, to enhance provenance-based discovery in the GatorScholar tool, and to link with EAD
finding aids describing holdings in the University Archives. For example, the project will build toward showing
the additional functionality from the EAC records in the IR. In the future, this will serve to increase usability and
better highlight the IR and the resources it contains.

Not only will this proof of concept project demonstrate existing uses for EAC, but it allow the project team to
discover in a short period of time how to best implement EAC to support a wide variety of potential uses relating
to digital services at UF and partner institutions. Once the concept is proven in this pilot project using UF's
corporate units, future expansion will focus on the creation of EAC instances for individuals and families. As UF
will be an early adopter of EAC, the project team also will seek to disseminate information about the project via
listservs, journal articles, presentations and other venues.

Although immediate future activities will focus on the agents responsible for creating records held by UF, the
ultimate goal will be to establish UF as maintainer of the primary EAC database for contextual information in
Florida and the Caribbean. This project will serve a basis for the development of the larger IMLS or LSTA grant
project where UF will collect, preserve and disseminate metadata about people and corporate bodies harvested
from contributors in the state, region, and worldwide.








Appendix A: EAC Example from the National Library of Australia
https://wiki.nla.gov.au/download/attachments/32189/oliphant-BrSp.xml?version=l



xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi: schemaLocation="http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/eac
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/eac/shared/eac/eac.xsd">

P000683b








Oliphant
Marcus Laurence Elwin
Sir
1901-10-08-2000-07-14
Kent Town, South Australia, Australia
Canberra, Australian Capital Territory,
Australia


Oliphant
Mark
Sir












http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/bsparcs/biogs/P000683b.htm







http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/bsparcs/biogs/P000683b.htm

School of Physical Sciences, Australian National University 1950-63, and first President of the Australian
Academy of Science 1954-56. He continued as professor at ANU 1964-67 and was Governor of South Australia
1971-76.]]>

1959, AC 1977. Educated University of Adelaide and Cambridge. Messel Research Fellow, Royal Society 1931,
lecturer and Fellow, St John's College 1934, Assistant Director of Research, Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge
1935, Australian Representative of Atomic Energy Commission 1946, Poynting Professor of Physics, University
of Birmingham 1937-50, Vice-Principal 1948-49, Director, Research School of Physical Sciences, Australian
National University 1950-63, Professor of Physics of Ionised Gases, Honorary Fellow, Institute of Advanced
Studies, Australian National University 1964-67, Governor of South Australia 1971-76. Fellow, Royal Society
1937, Hughes Medal, Royal Society 1943, Silvanius Thomson Medal, Institute of Radiology 1946, Trasenoter,
l'Association des Ingenieurs, Liege 1947, Faraday Medal, Institution of Electrical Engineers 1948, Foundation
Fellow, Australian Academy of Science 1954, President of the Australian Academy of Science 1954-57, Bakerian
Lecture, Royal Society 1955, Rutherford Memorial Lecture, Royal Society 1955, Galathea Medal, H.M. The King
of Denmark 1956, Australian Institution of Production Engineers Medal 1958, Matthew Flinders Medal,
Australian Academy of Science 1961, James Cook Medal, The Royal Society of New South Wales 1974,
Foundation Fellow, Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering 1975, ANZAAS Medal
1979. ]]>

http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/bsparcs/scripts/bs-
bib.php3 ?pubid=B SOL00569



Australian Academy of Science
1994







http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/bsparcs/scripts/bs-
bib.php3 ?pubid=B SOL00400











Australian Science Archives Project
1995







http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/bsparcs/scripts/bs-
bib.php3?pubid=B SOLOO841



Australian Science Archives Project
1997







http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/bsparcs/scripts/bs-
bib.php3?pubid=ASBS00285




2000







http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/bsparcs/scripts/bs-
bib.php3?pubid=BSOL00864



Australasian Science
1997







http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/bsparcs/scripts/bs-
bib.php3?pubid=ASBS00480











2001







Adolph Basser Library, Australian Academy of
Science
Marcus Laurence Elwin Oliphant Records
MS 31
Tape recording of 'Looking Back' a series of six programmes
broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (Corporation) in 1977; address entitled 'A Physicist's
Concept of God' 1963; press-cuttings 1964, 1976; typescript of the Australian Broadcasting Commission
programme 'Insight', no.354 on Oliphant 1971; 19 files relating to the Australian Academy of Science 1953-67;
various reprints to 1982 [26 cm, MS 31].
1953 1982
0.26 m





Physicist











MINI GRANT PROGRAM DOCUMENTATION


Mini Grant Budget Form

Please add lines to table as needed. If you need help completing this form, please contact Bess de Farber, PH#;


1. Salaries and Wages (no fringe benefits required)
Name of Person Salary times % of effort Grant Funds Cost Share
Data Collection Student $8/hr x 32 weeks x 0.25 FTE $2,880.00 $0.00
Data Collection Student $8/hr x 32 weeks x 0.25 FTE $2,880.00 $0.00
Programming Student $15/hr x 16 weeks x 0.375 FTE $3,600.00 $0.00
Carl Van Ness (SASC) $60,075 x 32 weeks x 0.025 FTE $0.00 $924.23
John Nemmers (SASC) $52,163 x 32 weeks x 0.025 FTE $0.00 $802.51
Mark Sullivan (DLC) $$ x 32 weeks x 0.025 FTE $0.00 $0.00
Laurie Taylor (DLC) $$ x 12 weeks x 0.025 FTE $0.00 $0.00
$0.00 $0.00
SUBTOTAL $9,360.00 $1,726.74

2. Equipment
Item Quantity times Cost Grant Funds Cost Share
$0.00 $0.00
$0.00 $0.00
$0.00 $0.00
$0.00 $0.00
$0.00 $0.00
SUBTOTAL $0.00 $0.00

3. Supplies
Item Quantity times Cost Grant Funds Cost Share
$0.00 $0.00
$0.00 $0.00
$0.00 $0.00
$0.00 $0.00
$0.00 $0.00
SUBTOTAL $0.00 $0.00

4. Travel
From/To # of people/# of days Grant Funds Cost Share
$0.00 $0.00
$0.00 $0.00
$0.00 $0.00
$0.00 $0.00
$0.00 $0.00
SUBTOTAL $0.00 $0.00

5. Other (services vended, etc.)
Item Quantity times cost Grant Funds Cost Share
$0.00 $0.00
$0.00 $0.00
$0.00 $0.00
$0.00 $0.00
$0.00 $0.00
SUBTOTAL $0.00 $0.00







MINI GRANT PROGRAM DOCUMENTATION


Grant Funds Cost Share
Total Direct Costs (add subtotals of items 1-5) $9,360.00 $1,726.74







MINI GRANT PROGRAM DOCUMENTATION




273-2519.



Total
$2,880.00
$2,880.00
$3,600.00
$924.23
$802.51
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00
$11,086.74


Total
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00


Total
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00


Total
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00


Total
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00






MINI GRANT PROGRAM DOCUMENTATION



Total
$11,086.74










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The Institutional Repository at the University of Florida is the digital archive for the intellectual output
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Submit your own research papers and reports


The University of Florida Libraries founded and support the IR@UF in order to offer a central location for
the collection, preservation, and dissemination of scholarly, research, and creative production alongside
historical materials from the University of Florida. The historical materials provide context for research and
researchers, providing insight into the history, nature, and culture of the University.

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