Building a Portable Environment for Working with Restricted Library Collections
This presentation will describe a secure virtual environment for providing access to restricted library collections and demonstrate how this environment can support digital humanities, using the example of Temple University Libraries’ Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio’s development and implementation efforts. Supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, we modified the HathiTrust Research Center data capsule framework [1, 2] and developed a portable environment that can be deployed in any cloud platform. We identified and removed dependencies on a physical machine and specific software versions required by the original architecture and developed an Ansible playbook that simplifies and automates the deployment of the data capsule environment. We also explored the legal ramifications of research libraries using different hosting set-ups to share their proprietary data. In the presentation we will share the socio-technical challenges our project faced, including re-use of an existing framework developed in a different context, implementation of newer technological innovations, such as Ansible and cloud-native technologies, and building cross-institutional collaborations that contribute to projects’ long-term sustainability and success. We hope to engage the audience in the discussion of how the data capsule appliance can be deployed as an experimental service for enhancing scholarly research that uses modest technical and human resources and allows libraries to gauge interest and decide whether it merits additional resources. We also hope to find collaborators interested in contributing to this effort. References 1. Zeng, J., Ruan, G. Crowell, A., Prakash, A. & Plale, B. (2014). Cloud computing data capsules for non-consumptive use of texts. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM workshop on Scientific cloud computing (ScienceCloud ‘14). DOI: 10.1145/2608029.2608031 2. Borders,K., Weele, E. V.., Lau, B., & Prakash, A. (2009). Protecting confidential data on personal computers with storage capsules. In Proceedings of the 18th USENIX Security Symposium (SSYM’99).
