A “math aware” search engine is exactly what it sounds like, a search engine that speaks and understands the language of mathematics. I would be able to locate not only words on pages, but to identify and recognize mathematical symbols, expressions, equations, formulas, and theorems. This is harder than it sounds, since common mathematical symbols can take on special meanings depending on the context in which they appear. This grant funds work by computer scientists Richard Zanibbi and Lee Giles to create an easy to use, fully math aware search engine. Zanibbi and Giles plan the develop state-of-the-art methods for extracting, indexing and retrieving math in documents; develop algorithms for the recognition of handwritten math and math captured in images; and implement these in a user-friendly interface with helpful features like autocompletion of common queries. The new engine will then be tested on Wikipedia and on CiteSeerX, an open-source repository of academic papers. The completed search engine, if successful, would vastly expand the possibilities of discovered for amateur and professional mathematicians alike, with numerous applications in both research and education.

This grant funds an initiative by the Association of Research Libraries to document and clarify copyright and intellectual property law issues related to the archiving of software. Led by intellectual property lawyer, Peter Jaszi, the initiative has three parts. First, Jaszi and a team of collaborators will undertake a broad literature review and conduct some 40 long-form interviews with legal experts, librarians, museum curators, software developers and other stakeholders to produce “a report on problems that arise in software preservation regarding issues of copyright and fair use.” The report will then become the basis for a set of small workshops to generate, after legal review, a code of reasonable best practices used by archivists to resolve those problems. Finally, a substantial outreach push will build community consensus in support of those best practices. The work will be stewarded by the Association of Research Libraries, whose membership has a strong interest in this area, but will also draw heavily on the museum community, as well as major professional organizations in computer science, and other computationally intensive disciplines. The effort promises the legal state-of-play surrounding several thorny intellectual property issues related to software archiving, promote better archival practices across the country and further the cause of reproducibility in research, which depends on the continued availability of software used to generate scientific results.

One obstacle to developing effective data citation practices is that data does not behave like a published article. It can be far more complex, can exist in many successive versions (none of which are canonical), and only a part of a given dataset might be used by a given study. An effective data citation regime must reflect the multitude of ways data can be used in research. These issues were taken up by the California Digital Library (CDL) in a 2014 National Science Foundation planning study to explore the idea of “data level metrics” and determine which metrics would be of most value to researchers. The grant funds an expansion of this work, as the CDL assembles a coalition to implement their findings. Over the next two years, CDL will bring together the organization that mints DOIs for datasets (DataCite) and the organization that manages the standard for article download and access data (COUNTER) with a collection of data repositories (DataONE) in order to implement best data citation practices using extensions to the popular Lagotto article usage tracking software. Beyond their own implementation, this collaboration will work with the Research Data Alliance to build consensus for and recruit additional repositories to adopt their best practices and technical solutions.

In 2013, the Sloan Foundation approved a two-year grant to Joe Karaganis at the American Assembly to prototype a system to aggregate and make available data about what materials are assigned on course syllabi. The resulting Open Syllabus Project team publicly launched the first version of their Syllabus Explorer in early 2016. Within two months, the site logged over 250,000 visits, and was written up in the Chronicle of Higher Education as well as The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Time magazine. Funds from this grant provide continuing support to the effort, allowing the project to increase both the scale and richness of the syllabus data available for analysis. Funded activities include development of algorithms to allow the database to better recognize articles in STEM fields, expansion of the platform to enable the incorporation of datasets, software, and other items that might be published with a Document Object Identifier, and a pilot partnership with the Digital Public Library of America to mobilize the syllabus data in the service of public libraries.