Open Knowledge and the Public Interest (OKAPI)

Main website:  http://okapi.berkeley.edu 
Primary contact:  Noah Wittman
Collection description: Open Knowledge and the Public Interest (OKAPI) is a team of creative and technical professionals and UC Berkeley faculty who are focused on bringing together people, tools and ideas to improve public scholarship on the UC Berkeley campus. OKAPI is sponsored by the office of the Chief Information Officer and supported in large part through grant-funded projects. OKAPI’s primary aim is to pioneer a new center that will dramatically improve the public’s access to UC Berkeley’s research knowledge and collections. As part of the Scholar’s Box project, OKAPI is developing innovative models for licensing, publishing, and distributing digital research collections and facilitating their re-use by the public and K-12 teachers and students. OKAPI is also partnering with a number of organizations on initiatives relating to open knowledge and public scholarship.
Project Writeup:

OKAPI COLLECTIONS for MVP Proof-of-Concept

Overview

OKAPI has three collections created as part of the US Department of Education Scholar’s Box project. The UC Berkeley Anthropology Digital Resource Pool contains 75,000 multimedia assets (photos, videos, pdfs), including course materials, research collections, and student projects. The Curiosity Box will contain 50 to100 prized research and teaching possessions from diverse scholars across campus. Remixing Catalhoyuk contains 65,000 photos, videos and articles. Because the Digital Resource Pool contains the Catalhoyuk collection, we currently have 75,000 total assets amounting to 750 GB of data. We expect this figure to grow to 100,000 assets or 1TB of data over the next year.

Learn more: http://okapi.wordpress.com/projects/fipse-the-scholars-box/

 Objectives

Our objective for the MVP POC is to provide archival storage and multiple levels of access for each the OKAPI collections.

Storage:

  • Robust, archival storage with regular tape backups (or equivalent)

Access:

  • High speed network for delivery of large multimedia files (e.g., video, tiffs)
  • Open SQL database
  • OAI-PMH server for sharing data with other collections
  • RSS/XML data feeds for sharing data
  • Google Site Maps and other techniques for better search engine exposure
  • Three Levels of Access Control: Private—Single User, Restricted—CalNet, Public

 Criteria for Success

MVP project provides OKAPI collections with long-term solution for data storage and Internet access.

 Timing

Launch Remixing Catalhoyuk Website with data in MVP by September 30, 2007.

Have Digital Resource Pool data in MVP by September 30, 2007, for use by pilot teachers and students.

Launch Curiosity Box exhibition with data in MVP by December 1, 2007.

Expected Users

Users/Viewers:

Remixing Catalhoyuk: 50-100k public visitors/yr

Anthropology Digital Resource Pool: 10-20 public visitors/yr (may dramatically increase as collection grows), 1000 students/year, dozens of faculty & GSIs/year

Curiosity Box: 2000-1000 public visitors/yr

Contributors:

Remixing Catalhoyuk: several contributors

Anthropology Digital Resource Pool: dozens of contributors

Curiosity Box: contributions from 50 campus scholars, one publisher