- Great. Thank you.
Welcome everybody to the June 2020 TDL Member Forum.
We're glad you joined us today.
My name is Kristi Park,
I'm the Director of the Texas Digital Library.
I'm joined by Lea DeForest, our communications manager,
Alex Suarez our administrative associate,
and a few of our members who will share announcements throughout today's forum.
Courtney Mumma, our Deputy Director is attending
the virtual Dataverse community meeting and won't be able to join us today,
so I'll be pinch hitting for her in a couple of spots.
We'll follow our usual agenda shown here.
Just a couple of reminders as we start.
If you have questions,
please feel free to use the chat window.
You also have the ability to download
the slides in the files pod at the bottom of the screen.
As I said earlier,
we are recording this so you'll be able to access
it on the TDL YouTube channel later on.
We'll go through our various updates,
we should have some time for Q&A and open discussion at the end.
I want to start by expressing
my hope that each one of you and your loved ones are
well and safe and also acknowledge
the pretty stressful and difficult times we're living in,
both with the pandemic and the huge knock-on effects of that,
and then also the renewed distress
over police violence against black folks and
the protests and unrest that have resulted from that.
It's a lot right now.
But I also want to say that they seem
like exciting times also, at least potentially,
times of possibility and productive unrest,
and maybe a moment in time where white folks can be vulnerable enough to
listen and learn and join with
those who have been asking for change and justice.
It's really hard to know what to say during a time like this,
partly because I think we all know that the time for
words and symbolic action ought to be long past,
and also because these are sensitive topics
and we don't want our words to be hurtful or insensitive or harmful in any way.
I approach anything I say from
a place of great humility and appreciate you all's grace.
But I'll just say a couple of things here from the TDL perspective.
First of all, as we've stated in our public statements from last week,
we stand with black folks who are seeking justice right now,
both in terms of their relationship to law enforcement,
but also generally or specifically in
seeking justice within the library and archives
communities in which we all do our work.
We're committed to orienting our work and our resources to create
safer and more supportive spaces for black folks
and for work that rights the wrongs of the past and of the present.
I think fundamentally that the work of TDL is work
that promotes equity and inclusion as we are working
to provide alternative and non capitalist models
for distributing research and cultural heritage materials.
Models that we hope are more
equitable and provide more equitable access globally.
But we have not always tied that general commitment to
equity and equitable access to issues of racial or gender equity.
In the past few years, starting mostly around 2017,
we started taking some deliberate steps to do that.
We've tried to make sure our annual conference
featured the voices of people of color
and in particular black voices both in our keynote selections,
and in the program generally.
We've paid attention to the racial makeup of our committees to make
sure we have black voices represented there including in leadership.
We've paid attention to our hiring practices and made
deliberate efforts to recruit black and brown candidates.
In the past year,
we've reached out to historically black colleges and universities in
Texas to engage representatives
from those institutions on several of our planning efforts.
None of this is enough, of course,
and one of the ways it's not
enough is that we haven't really talked about it with you,
our members, in ways that allow you to hold us accountable.
So we're going to try to do a better job of that.
Following-up on the statement from last week,
we're first doing some internal planning and holding
some internal discussions about how we can move forward in
a more accountable way and how we can more fully
embody our desire as TDL staff to promote justice,
equity, and inclusion in our communities.
I don't have any big announcement on anything today,
but just want you to know we'll be talking
about it with you more in the months to come,
and we may ask things of you in the months to come.
But for now, we're just asking to
hear from you if you have something that you want to tell us.
That could be an idea,
a constructive criticism or a nonconstructive criticism,
concerns you have, an experience you want to share with us.
Lea has kindly setup a form linked here,
we're calling it a suggestion box,
but it doesn't have to be a suggestion,
it can be anything that you want to share,
and you can use that to anonymously provide us with feedback if you want to.
You can also email us directly,
you can email me or any of our staff who you're comfortable
with to share what you want to share or start a conversation with us,
we would love that.
I also want to remind you of some resources that we have collected
and still are maintaining on
our website related to the COVID-19 pandemic link to here.
Those resources include links to free trainings,
details about upcoming meetings and webinars that we invite you to attend,
and slides and meeting notes from recent events.
I've said it before, it bears repeating,
I'm really grateful for you and proud of the work of all of our members
and our staff during this period of time.
We really appreciate everything you do and we have
really appreciated getting to know
many of our members during
our weekly hangouts which we started once everyone started working from home.
We've had a lot of fruitful conversations,
we've had ideas come up in
the agenda list meetings that in some cases we've been able to act on.
One of those is the creation of a TDL community Slack.
Ann Washington, from the University of Houston suggested this,
who thought it was a fantastic idea.
So we've launched a TDL Community Slack,
where folks can come and talk about whatever it is they want to talk about,
whether that's gardening, animal crossing,
pets or even work,
I think we have a metadata channel in there as well.
This is completely community driven.
It's there for you if you want to connect with
other TDL members across the state and we hope you'll join it.
You can email us if you want to join and we will send an invitation.
You can email us at info@tdl.org to get that started.
I'll also note that we have been holding our hangouts weekly on Wednesdays.
We are not holding one today because of the forum,
but we'll resume that next week and we hope you'll join us.
Finally, you'll probably remember
that earlier in the spring,
we announced a project called Find Five,
that showcases the digital collections of our member institutions and
encouraged non-digital library staff to
engage with the digital content in their repositories.
I couldn't be more thrilled with
the response that we got from all of you to this project,
and I think you'll be very pleased with it, too.
We have published all of the entries to the Find Five project on our website.
You can follow the link here on the slide to view
the exhibits page and see the eight institutions represented there.
We'll be sending out an announcement about the project soon,
so keep an eye out for that and be sure to
share it with your teammates and friends.
We're also going to be highlighting
these individual collections through social media.
So be on the lookout for that and be sure to retweet or share your collection,
your mini collection, when it gets posted.
This is really fun and we've enjoyed learning more about
the digital collections in our member's repositories.
Okay, so we'll move on to some service and project updates.
Starting with outcome of
our recent governing board meeting which happened last Tuesday.
That is a decision for TDL to
join to a pilot one-year membership
in the carpentry organization to focus on data carpentry.
I'll talk a little bit about what that means.
The Texas Data Repository Steering Committee requested this past year,
that TDL consider a one-year pilot membership in the Carpentries as a mean
to increase literacy among TDL library staff in fundamental data skills,
needed to conduct research and
to prepare them as workshop leaders in these skills.
The Carpentries is a community-driven collective of
instructors who teach
foundational computational and data science skills to researchers.
So we're hoping, through this membership,
that will train TDL member librarians in carpentry's principles and in
this data science skills and be able to build greater capacity for ongoing,
sustainable carpentry instructions at institutions across Texas.
And we also hope that by learning
best practices for managing data through these workshops,
that researchers at our member institutions
will be better equipped to share data that is findable,
accessible, interoperable, and reproducible.
In other words, that aligns with the fair principle.
So the board approved this pilot membership,
this will be for next fiscal year,
will be joining at the silver level for one year and focused on data carpentry,
meaning of data science, skills building efforts.
So as a result to this,
we'll have for 1.5 day carpentry's coordinated
workshops that will be hosted at libraries across the state.
We're hoping that we'll be able to do those in person,
at some point next year.
We will be able to certify
six carpentry instructors within TDL member institutions.
This is a virtual training program that certifies these carpentry instructors.
We'll be selecting those through
the TDR's Project Team that is going to be coordinating with efforts.
Texas Data Repository members will have priority
for one of those six certifications,
and we'll be sharing more about that later on.
The TDR Project Team is also planning a session at TCDL in May, 2021.
And we'll also have a staff representative seat on
the carpentry's member councils as a result of this membership.
So we're really in the early phases at this.
Nothing will happen in practice until the next fiscal year, until the fall.
But we wanted you to know that this was in the works,
we're really excited about it and I think it's going to be a great,
great opportunity to build
some needed expertise within our community in data management realm.
If you have any questions about this,
please feel free to contact us at info @tdl.org
and we will find the right folks to answer this.
I also just want to say,
this was a really grassroots idea.
It came out of our TDR steering committee.
They did the work to survey the membership and build the case for this
and bring it to us and it was really great to see that.
We're grateful to them for doing that work to bring it to us.
Secondly, I want to give you some updates
on Open Journal Systems or journal hosting service.
We are continuing migrations of our hosted OJS journals to version
3.1.2.
Last week, we launched migrations for four additional institutions,
listed here on the five,
UT, Rio Grande Valley,
UT Austin, A&M International,
and Texas Woman's University.
That continues and will likely continue through the summer.
We'll be wrapping those migrations up.
I also want to call your attention to two new community resources available
to OJS users that are now available in the TDL wiki.
One is an excellent slide sets on functionality and
OJS three related to copyright, licensing and orchid.
That was put together by Laura Waugh from Texas State University and
presented at our last OJS user group meeting.
The second is a really great set of instructions for
using one of our most popular plugins in Open Journal Systems,
the quick submit plugin from Susan Atkins at Sam Houston State University.
Thank you to those community members for those resources,
I want to make sure everybody knows about them.
As a reminder, our OJS user group meets monthly and
is intended for library folks who were supporting
the service for faculty members at their institution.
The next meeting is July second,
and we're slated to talk about indexing and
discoverability of OJS journals there.
Next step, I'm going to provide an update on
Vireo upgrades in lieu of Courtney today,
since she's not able to be with us.
We have begun the process of
moving our hosted installation for
Vireo to the latest version, Vireo version four.
If you are a manager of Vireo at your institution,
I'm sure have been in contact with Courtney by now to
schedule that migration at a time that's convenient for your institution.
We've already been piloting the new version with several member institutions
and we've begun a production upgrade process with Sam Houston State University.
We'll be working with each of you throughout
the summer and fall to get those installations
up-to-date and we have
some extensive documentation available to you in the Wiki.
We have a link to the upgrade FAQs here that you can refer to you.
Yesterday, Courtney and the Vireo user groups steering committee
hosted the virtual annual meeting of the Vireo users group to
discuss the new version of Vireo along with some other issues of concern to
the open source community and we had
more than 40 people from around the world in attendance to that meeting,
Vireo users from across the US,
but also Amsterdam, and Canada,
and some other places.
Notes from the meeting are linked too,
from the slide and our recording will be made
available as we get that processed.
Finally, I just wanted to note here on the slide that we do have
a Vireo for training webinar scheduled for Friday,
July 17th, from 1:00-03:00 PM.
It'll be on Zoom,
and you need to register for it if you're going to attend.
If you work with Vireo at all,
this will be a good opportunity for you to get a look at the new features than
Vireo 4 and some of
the changes in the administrative interface that you'll need to know about.
- Now I'm going to pass it on to Jonathon Youssefnia.
Jonathon was one of TDL's Capstone students from
the spring semester and he is going to talk about his project a little bit,
so Jonathon, take it away.
- Thank you, Kristi.
Hi, everyone, this is Jonathon.
I am the licensing and
electronic resources coordinator for the UT Austin library,
and I graduated from the School of Information here in May.
Last semester, I completed my Capstone Project with TDL
by developing a member directory to be hosted on to TDL's website,
and as you know,
TDL counts many talented information professionals among its membership,
so the goal of my project was to create a searchable directory of
experts on various subject matters to be used
by TDL members as a resource for collaboration and support.
My first step was to produce and distribute a survey to gather
information about TDL members and partners and the skills that they possess,
so thank you, everyone,
who participated in the survey.
Once we had that data,
I created a searchable database to be hosted on
the TDL website using a WordPress plugin,
but I recommended after doing a comparative analysis from
different plug-in option and I also
developed a maintenance plan for data hygiene.
You can find a link to the directory in this slide if you want to take a look,
and expect to see an announcement once it
is integrated into the site navigation.
At the top of the page,
we look for the skills we've surveyed members
on so you can see all of the possible search terms.
Then beneath that, there's an alphabetical scroll list tied to
member last name so you can get to a particular letter of the alphabet.
Then under that, you'll find a search box where you can search for
a skill from that with a term or a tool, or someone's name.
Now, our hope is that TDL members and partners will use
this database to find potential partners for collaboration,
maybe future mentors, project assistance and advice,
and any other way you find to make the database
beneficial for you and your team.
Then lastly, if you didn't have a chance to participate in
the original survey and would like to add your information to the database,
you can just email TDL,
and they'll be happy to help get you set up.
If you have any questions,
feel free to type them in the chat,
and other than that, I just want to say thank you to Lea,
and everyone at TDL for a great semester.
Now I'll hand things off to Brenna Wheeler.
- Thank you so much, Jonathon.
That's going to be a really great tool for people to use,
I'm excited to see where it goes.
I also recently graduated a couple of
weeks ago and so this is my Capstone Project,
where I created a data curation workflow for Liaison Librarian,
I'm sure at the University of Texas, Austin to use.
To create the workflow,
I had to follow three main tasks.
The first one was to identify tools that will be useful for libraries to you,
namely, the Dataverse API and the Dataverse
curation tool developed by the Dataverse Project.
Both of these were a lot better at looking at large batches of metadata,
so there would be great for
an administrative level but not so much the curation.
Second big project was to assess
all the published datasets currently in the UT Austin Dataverse.
That was probably a good 50% of my work right there.
Things I looked at was just how rich was the metadata,
does it explain how the data was created,
how it was manipulated, why it was there.
I also looked at what software was used such as Final Cut ,
and then also looking at,
if documentation was provided,
such as read me files or codec.
Then finally, by all means [inaudible] ,
just to keep an open communication with the Liaison librarians.
When I started this project,
I met with the STEM social sciences team that
I then proceeded to have more questionnaires,
more individual interviews, just to get
an idea of what further experience they have with
their researches and where some improvements could be found.
Then I also took the work folder I created and
presented a rough draft to most of the librarians,
I think there are about 20 people at that session.
Just to get their feedback and start the discussion
of how we can work through this,
how it can be improved?
What vocabulary needed to be developed?
I took all this feedback,
I took the data assessment and I basically
applied it to the curated workflow developed by the data curation network.
They already had a pretty good workflow in place,
I just took the information I gathered,
and they localized it,
specifically, to our data work.
On this letters, provided the summary of each of
the main major steps for checking the data;
is there a description?
Is there a title? Understanding the metadata
that would explain how the data is structured.
Augmenting the data sets.
How can we enhance metadata for findability?
Transforming data sets, what format is being used?
What are the restrictions?
Is there a non-proprietary equivalent?
Evaluating your data set,
since the data set meets our requirements.
Requesting additional information from the researcher to improve the dataset,
and are we documenting these changes [NOISE].
I believe each of these steps tell us
about five to seven bullet points in the [inaudible] ,
so the librarians can have
the list front of the [inaudible] they're going to and
evaluating the datasets and they can just check it
off and identify areas that might need professional work.
The next step for this project,
the major thing is to solicit volunteers for this data curation team.
Depending on people's comfort level and how
available they are to contribute to this project.
The second major step is to create a guideline or
a procedure for additional librarian involvement in data curation.
Because right now, this process,
datasets are being deposited and ensuring,
"Okay, does it meet the requirements."
Like say, there's a large petition that might want the librarians to
help develop a workflow for depositing lead datasets,
or if there's a large project that need additional help from
the librarians to make sure that all goals and requirements are being met.
Until in those types of situations,
at what point do we say,
"Okay, the basic feedback,
that's a privy, that's part of our job."
But after that point,
we're going to need credits for doing this extra work.
That leads it into the third type of recommendation for
PDI to create the City curator elements within the schema for that way.
Librarians who are doing this type of work,
and in addition, to ensure that other tasks can get credit for this project.
That's my cast on.
Thank you, Lea, Kristi,
and TDL for inviting me here and I'll be taking questions later.
- Thank you so much,
Brenna and Jonathon, for your excellent work this past semester,
both of you have created
really important capacity-building projects
that all of us at TDL are going to benefit from, for years to come.
We're really grateful for your effort and your excellent work. Hi, everyone.
This is Lea DeForest,
I'm the communications manager with Texas Digital Library.
I do recognize the time, and please,
it's not a problem if you need to take off,
we had too much to tell you today.
[LAUGHTER].
We do have a few more announcements,
if you can spare a few extra minutes for us, thanks.
As you can see on the screen,
I am really excited to get to announce that TDL has collected
the inaugural cohorts of the earlier ambassadors.
I got them all listed up there,
but this group of seven people
had to go through an application process.
We had some amazing applicants that was not an easy decision.
This very well poised system, the consortium.
I'm really pleased to get to serve alongside
these ambassadors as the staff liaison for TDL,
the ambassadors all that you see here on this list have
committed to two years to service and are going to
develop a community of practice around OER and
hopefully become a force of expertise for all consortium members.
These ambassadors, we've met once,
just the very kind of low-key getting-to-know-you session.
We're going to begin meeting monthly starting in July 2020
after we complete the online open textbook network summer institute.
So if you have any questions or suggestions about the ambassadors,
please feel free to email me or our info@TDL.
Now, we just have a few community updates,
and I'm going to hand things over Alex to get us started.
- Thanks, Lea and hello everyone.
This is Alex Suarez,
TDL's admin and conference planner.
As a reminder, the TDL award ceremony,
which was originally created to take place during
the opening plenary session ahead of keynote
is going to be held online on July 30th.
Give a truly inspiring within award winners
this year and I hope you all will be able to attend.
We couldn't not honor the liaison award winners this year.
So please go ahead and register for
the event by following the link on the slide.
Interspersed throughout the award ceremony TDL delivery a
few key updates regarding our accomplishments over the past year,
as well as what we envision moving into our next phase.
Please make sure you've signed up for our email list,
so you don't miss our official email announcement and invitation.
A handful of TCDL related events have moved online and we
already hosted a few successful birds-of-a-feather and either group meeting.
Feel free to take a look at the date and
time we've put on the slide for upcoming
online TCDL events and be sure to register ahead of time.
Feel free to contact me or e-mail us at info@TDL.org if you have any questions.
A couple of other events that we have coming up,
we have our GIS Interest Group,
which is following the success of the
GIS birds-of-a-feather meeting earlier this month.
TDL partnering up with Michael Shansky as UT Library
and other members and partners to start a GIS interest group.
If you're interested in learning more about how
geographic information seem to work,
how you might launch GIS initiative on your campus
and or meet other people working with GIS and libraries,
archives and official collection.
Then join us tomorrow afternoon at 02:00 PM.
Registration is required.
So click on the link on the left side of the slide to register.
Next month, we also have an exciting webinar
planned with Greg Kim of the New York Public Library.
Greg will present the fundamental with copyright law,
including the duration of protection for both published and archival items.
The webinar we'll also cover fair use and other limitations.
Registration is required [LAUGHTER] and you can
click on the link on the right side of of the slide to register.
Now, I hand things back over to Lea.
- We giveaway the surprise again.
Thanks, Alex, for all of your hard work getting this events coordinated.
I know it's not easy to switch a conference to a virtual format and so we're
trying to be really thoughtful about which events makes sense bring online.
Then everybody fingers crossed 2021 in person.
Okay, I'm also going to share another event with you all.
So following the success of both some big OER events that happened in 2018,
we had the statewide OER summit and in 2019
we had a statewide open education Texas convening.
TDL have partnered with the Digital Higher Education Consortium,
of Texas often known as Digihectex to jointly
organize a new annual open education conference here in Texas,
it's called Open Texas.
The purpose of this conference will be to convene librarian, faculty,
administrators, and other open education practitioners and advocates in Texas.
Save the date for this in-person events.
Again, fingers crossed, this will be taking place in Houston,
Texas at the University of Houston downtown campus
next March 11th and 12th in 2021.
A lot more to come here.
We haven't yet opened our CFP or registration,
but we plan to soon,
so keep an eye out for those updates.
Before I move to the next slide, oh good.
Okay, you're here Santi.
Last but not least, we have some exciting news and we want
to congratulate someone who is very special to us at TDL.
Santi Thompson was selected as the inaugural recipient of
the Eva Digital Research Endowed Library Professorship
at the University of Houston.
Many of you know Santi,
he is the head of Digital Research Services at UH libraries.
His new role will help UH libraries expand
their service in emerging areas such as digital research,
data preservation and accessibility and [inaudible] So Santi,
has a long list of impressive accomplishments,
but they are outshined by his kindness,
his humor and his commitment to you and to us by elevating
the work of librarians ambassadors and students and scholars in our community.
If you click on the link, you can read more
about Santi's new role in the professorship
and hope you'll join me in the rest of
TDL staff in congratulating Santi in his new role.
I think that is it, back to you Kristi.
- Okay. Thank you.
Thanks Alex, and Brenna,
and Jonathon for all of the wonderful updates and reports.
We are way over time today,
so I really appreciate everybody sticking with us.
We had a lot to share and it didn't help that I was a minute or two
late getting online. Thanks for your patience.
We are happy to take some questions and
I see that there is one question for Brenna,
if Brenna is still on the line.
Brian checks the state.
- Hello.
- Lorene, said she missed what you said about
the data curators getting credit or something for their work.
Could you repeat that?
- Yeah, I really rushed through that part.
We had conversation with librarians,
with various librarians and also not just about data curation,
but also about literature review,
that'll becoming more common for actual librarians.
In our data curation team,
what we had in mind was to take volunteers from [inaudible]
librarians who are currently
dividing the time between a lot of different parts.
So what we talk about was,
one librarian said, like, "Oh,
I think my department would love to use these services and
would definitely want my feedback,
but I don't think I can help them catalog every single data
set that comes in or at least guys can do it."
So one thing we talked about with
creating this metadata element of data curator or data steward.
That way, people on the team
if the researcher needs
additional help outside of that basic feedback that they're getting.
They can talk to the librarians or any librarian that is associated with them.
That could be relevant to their interest and that librarian can
receive credit for the additional work they're
doing outside of the data curation,
the basic data curation work as well.
What that looks like would probably depend
on the individual guideline for this process.
- All right, thanks, Brenna.
- Thank you. Are there other questions?
- I'm not seeing any typing.
Well, I will just conclude by saying thanks again to all our presenters today.
Thank you to all of you for
attending and sticking with us 10 minutes past the hour.
We will be back again.
Well, we'll be back in next week for our Hangouts.
If you want to join us there,
we'll be back again next month for the TDL forum,
same time, same place in July.
In the meantime, we hope you will stay safe and well
and reach out to us if you need anything. Thanks, everybody.