Data in libraries: the big picture – Call for Papers (IFLA)

Date

10 August 2016

Targeted audience : metadata librarians, IT librarians, data scientists, academics involved in data curation projects.

Organizers

• Information Technology
• Academic and Research Libraries
• Big Data Special Interest Group and
• Semantic Web Special Interest Group

The modern, digital library has moved beyond its traditional focus on meta-, bibliographic, and authority data, and manages or works with a broad set of data types,  leveraging an ever-expanding set of tools and techniques to do so.  In addition, the emergence of linked data has created new use cases for that library data.  Library catalogs now incorporate links to external datasets, and integrate those datasets in new applications.  Activities like digitization, digital preservation, online resources management, web archiving, text and data mining,  etc. also create new types of data that libraries both consume and curate. Even library users’ online and onsite activity generates logs and other types of data that can be analysed to improve the services librarians offer to their public. At the same time, Big Data technologies like data virtualization, parallel computing, predictive analytics, machine learning etc. bring the promise of improved performances and smart tools. Libraries are thus empowered to consume and curate data of all kinds in new and innovative ways.

This conference will draw the “big picture” of library data, examining the full spectrum of library activities, and attempting to assess what is achievable using new data technologies in libraries.

Topics may include

• consumption of library linked data along with other types of semantic data,
• curation of research data or other types of user generated data,
• innovative data technologies used for digital preservation and digital libraries,
• analysis of library data using tools such as machine learning, text and data mining or data visualization,
• marketing initiatives in libraries based on users logs and tracks analysis.

Papers can adopt different perspectives, including :

• functional requirements and use scenarios
• feedback on experiments and projects
• presentation of technologies and standards from a library perspective.

Submissions

Submissions (detailed abstracts, 500 to 1500 words) should be sent before 21 February 2016via the Easychair platform: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iflait2016

All proposals must be received by 21 February 2016.

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