Visiting Professor Presents on Digital Library Project
Dr. Edward Fox has been tapping into the power of the internet for decades. Now, he is involved in a project to create digital collections archiving man-made and human disasters in the modern era. The Crisis Tragedy and Recovery Network (CTRnet) has the overarching goals of providing access to these resources and preserving them for future use. The intended audience ranges from victims and their families to policy makers to researchers in disciplines like sociology, history and anthropology. The other side of the project is making much of the collecting automated.
The 4/16 Digital LIbrary was a starting
point for CTRnet.
Fox , a professor at Virginia Tech, spoke to a group of SLIS students and others from the university community about his work with digital libraries and electronic resources.
He said after the Virginia Tech shooting in April of 2007, he and others saw a need for a place to share photos and develop resources to help a community recover from the tragedy. Through a grant, the 4/16 Digital Library was born.
“In the usual mode of science and scholarship we say how do we generalize and broaden and help other people?” he said.
That’s where CTRnet comes in. The project started looking at collecting resources for school-related tragedies, including other school shootings. The Iowa Flood of 2008 and recent typhoons in Asia are also things they want to look into.
“If you don’t do it quickly, you lose things and no one else is doing it,” he said.
This summer, the project got a grant from the National Science Foundation to continue research. One of the technologies they are looking into is crawling. For example, CTRnet has a partnership with the Internet Archive that allows them to crawl and collect 17 million URLs a year. But that can get used up quickly if a crawl isn’t focused and just keeps following links to nonrelevant webpages.
CTRnet relies on volunteers and partnerships with many organizations. In the future, they hope to improve the efficiency of the crawls and have volunteers to spot “seeds” (or starting points for those crawls). Another approach they are working on is “storytelling”, or identifying chains among documents, such as to find connections between events, through text analysis of content collections
But the broader research question remains how to help a community recover from disaster or crisis.
“Does technology help? Can we use it to help people who are suffering from this?” Fox said.
