Carnegie Mellon Libraries: What's New Archive

DIGITAL LIBRARIES COLLOQUIUM
Cyberscholarship: supercomputing meets digital libraries, with the Web as a case study

Presenter: William Arms, Cornell University
Where: Room 404, School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, 135 North Bellefield Avenue
When: noon to 1:30 pm, Friday December 7, 2007

Abstract
When supercomputing and digital libraries meet, exciting things happen. While a scholar can read only one document at a time, a supercomputer can read millions simultaneously. Cyberscholarship is a new methodology of research in which the computer acts as an agent for the researcher, discovering latent patterns and relationships that would never be found manually. Turning this vision into practice is challenging. The lecture will use the Cornell Web Lab as a case study. This is a vast digital library that is organizing the historical collections of the Internet Archive for researchers of all disciplines, particularly social scientists for whom the collections are a treasure trove. The lab will be discussed from many angles: technical, cultural, legal, financial, and organizational. The most fascinating aspect is the human computer interaction. How can social scientists do effective research without being forced to become experts in supercomputing?

Bio:
William Arms is a professor in the Cornell's department of Computer Science and was the first director of the Information Science program. His research concentrates on Web information systems, digital libraries, and electronic publishing. He is a member of the Web Laboratory project, which is building a very large-scale testbed for the Web, using the Internet Archive's historic collections. From 1996-2006, he was a leader of the NSF's program to build a large scale digital library for science education (NSDL).

Before coming to Cornell University, he was Vice President for the Academic Service division at Carnegie Mellon, which included the Andrew project in campus-wide networking and distributed computing, educational computing, and libraries. He has also held appointments at Dartmouth College and the British Open University.

He is a past chair of the ACM Publications Board and of the Educom trustees, and is currently chair of the Cornell University Library Board. His book, Digital Libraries, was published by the M.I.T. Press in 2000. This year, he and Ronald Larsen of the University of Pittsburgh were co-chairs of an NSF study on Cyberscholarship.

William Arms received his B.A. in mathematics from Oxford University in 1966, an M.Sc. (Econ) from the London School of Economics in 1967, and a doctorate in operational research from the University of Sussex in 1973.

More About the Digital Libraries Colloquium series
http://www.sis.pitt.edu/academics/colloquia/DL.html