LTS advances Lehigh research by providing scholarly materials and research computing resources, by offering research consultations with students and faculty, by partnering on grants and research projects, and by incentivizing and recognizing excellence in research.
Innovating in the libraries
Lehigh was one of the first academic libraries in the world to fully migrate to the open source Library Services Platform FOLIO, which will allow us to enhance digital and physical lending, collections acquisitions and analytics, data and machine learning decision making, and further collaboration at the local, consortia, and global level.
2019 saw the monumental collaborative grant-funded project Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis, known as BiblioPhilly, come to a close, though the value of the content and attention paid by the media, scholars, and beyond continues to grow. Led by Lehigh University Special Collections, a partnership of 15 Philadelphia-area libraries, including the University of Pennsylvania and the Free Library of Philadelphia, has scanned and digitized more than 160,000 pages of European medieval and early modern codices with extensive metadata, making them publicly accessible to students, scholars, and researchers throughout the world, with use in myriad disciplines already in evidence.
Lehigh undergraduates Rebecca Luttinen and Brooke Schaeffer shared the Libraries Student Research Prize for 2020. Sponsored by Library and Technology Services (LTS) and the Friends of the Lehigh Libraries, the Prize recognizes excellence in undergraduate scholarship and the use of library and research resources.
The Libraries Technical Services Department helped make public Lehigh University Art Galleries’ collection of 2,011 books about art and artists, exposing their published content as well as treasures such as inscriptions from the authors and artists, often with handwritten personal messages and dedications.
Lehigh's Visualization Lab is a collaborative space that can effortlessly shift from the examination of visual data on a vast pixel canvas to the evaluation of the pedagogical value of virtual reality environments. The Lab features several innovative visualization tools, including a MultiTaction Curved iWall for the collaborative investigation of digital information at large scale. In addition, the Lab is outfitted with an HTC VIVE system, which provides users with an immersive virtual reality experience.
The CITL and NET teams worked to support the technology and resources required by the Nano Human Interface initiative, led by its director, Dr. Martin Harmer. The mission of the NHI initiative is to develop a new artificial intelligence support system necessary to achieve the goal of visualizing and interacting with complex, multidimensional sets of data. Currently, this is taking place in campus labs but will soon expand remotely across universities.
CITL named Assistant Professor Valerie Taylor (Psychology, Africana Studies) its 2020/21 Digital Scholarship Faculty Fellow. As a Fellow, Professor Taylor is further developing her research interests in how virtual reality (VR) can be leveraged to encourage empathic engagement in challenging interracial interactions.
LTS played a leadership role in the Humanities Lab, a three year Mellon-funded grant to transform our institution by integrating the Humanities across all disciplines on campus, showcasing our Humanities scholars, programs, students, and facilities, while intentionally integrating the work and impact of the Humanities across various disciplines, including social sciences, arts, and STEM fields.
Expanding access to library materials
- We became a member of the Center for Research Libraries, giving Lehigh scholars more options for requesting specialized materials, and HathiTrust, joining more than 150 academic and research libraries committed to digitally preserving the cultural record.
- Launched our OverDrive Black Voices Collection. In rapid response to the growing need for access to resources about the Black experience, librarians curated a diverse collection of ebooks and audiobooks encompassing memoirs, novels, short story collections, nonfiction books, and poetry. Response from campus was immediate and enthusiastic: the first series, the Black Lives Matter Reading List, included 76 titles, which had been checked out over 200 times in June alone.
- Our Digital Scholarship Team is partnering with College of Education professors Tom Hammond and Al Bodzin to provide geospatial/GIS support for a four-year, federally-funded grant that studies the application of geospatial technologies in secondary classrooms, with a goal of promoting STEM-related college and career interest and geospatial thinking skills among a large, varied group of students in Delaware, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Washington.
- “Writing FDR: Exploring the Great Depression through the Voice of a President and the Pens of the People,” doctoral student project, Christopher Brockman. The DST staff worked with graduate student Chris Brockman on visualizing the impressive collection of 10,000 letters written to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. The project was the digital companion to Brockman’s dissertation, which he successfully defended in April 2020.
- Migrated our digital and institutional repository projects to the Islandora open source digital repository platform, enabling access to faculty and student publications and to student dissertations and theses.
- Launched the TRAC Research Fellows initiative to support students in research-intensive courses.
- Successful negotiation with Elsevier, Royal Society of Chemistry, AIP, Wiley, and PALCI Collective Collections Group led to new resources for the campus community, including the JSTOR collections, and the complete Wiley ebooks collection, an all-in Oxford University Press collection, the EBSCO Academic Collection, and online access to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
- Special Collections acquired the Bethlehem Police Department Records (1917-1949), an important addition to the local history collections.
- We published over 300 Special Collections finding aids in ArchivesSpace, giving greater discoverability of archival collections at Lehigh and around the world.
- Special Collections began archiving the personal accounts of Lehigh’s community during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the Collecting COVID-19 project, we are collecting written journal entries, recorded audio or video descriptions or stories, oral histories, saved social media posts, and other types of multimedia. You tell the story. We’ll do the rest.
- The Lehigh Libraries joined Project ReShare as a founding member in April 2020 to develop the first user-centered, community-owned resource sharing platform that will support unprecedented access to print and electronic collections across the globe.
- The Library implemented BrowZine, a tablet, mobile, and web application that lets users easily browse, read, and monitor thousands of scholarly journals available through the Lehigh Libraries. BrowZine sorts Lehigh's ejournals by broad subject categories and then into narrower disciplines. The result is an easy and familiar way to help you keep up with the latest research in your field.
- Migration of The Brown and White to Veridian ensures a better user experience for members of the Lehigh community seeking information about Lehigh history.
- To support Lehigh’s research mission, Lehigh Libraries became an institutional member of ORCID—or Open Researcher and Contributor Identifiers—which provides unique IDs that researchers can use to identify their academic work, while helping funders, publishers, scholarly societies, and other researchers to quickly find publications.
- Architecting the Secure Health Data Enclave As Lehigh boldly expands into health related research, LTS has been collaborating with researchers and leaders around campus to design secure, compliant research solutions.
Research Computing
Our research computing team partnered with a faculty group led by Edmund Webb III on a successful $400K NSF grant to create a new High Performance Computing Cluster named “Hawk.” The cluster consists of 34 nodes, 1,752 CPUs, 32GPUs, 17.4TB memory, providing 15.3M core-hours of computing, and 77.3 TFLOPs of peak performance.
We expanded Sol, our existing cluster, by adding 6 nodes between April and June, 2020 via investments by Lisa Fredin (Chemistry) and the new College of Health. Sol now consists of 87 nodes, 2404 CPUs, 120 GPUs, 13.6TB total memory, providing 21.06M core-hours of computing, and 129 TFLOPs of peak performance. PIs with significant usage were:
- Biological Sciences - Greg Lang, Wonpil Im
- Chemistry - Lisa Fredin, Xioaji Xu
- Physics - Chinedu Ekuma, Dimitrios Vavylonis, Beall Fowler
- Mathematics - Yue Yu
- Chemical Engineering - Anand Jagota, Javier Buceta, Jeetain Mittal, Srinivas Rangarajan
- Mechanical Engineering - Alp Oztekin, Ed Webb, Hannah Dailey, Ganesh Balasubramanian, Frank Zhang
- Computer Science & Engineering - Brian Chen
- Materials Science & Engineering - Himanshu Jain, Jeff Rickman
- Civil & Structural Engineering - Paolo Bocchini
- Economics - Seth Richards-Shubik
- DATA - OliverYao
The EWFM Data Center Cooling Expansion Project was integral to keeping our data center operating and able to accept additional nodes for HPC. The HPC work directly supports teaching and research.
Over 128 faculty, students, and staff attended 19 Research Computing seminars on topics such as Research Computing Resources, Programming and Data Visualization in Python and R, Concepts in Machine Learning, and Text Mining.
Research Computing: By the numbers
- 3.16M high-performance computing jobs run
- consuming 12.8M core-hours of computing
- by 139 users
- representing 42 majors or departments
- affiliated with 39 Project Investigators
- from 13 departments