Browsing by Author "Phillips, Scott"
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Item Embedding A Digital Repository within the Texas A&M University Library Web Services(2008-06-09) Leggett, John; Tarpley, Jeremy; Ponsford, Bennett; Phillips, Scott; Mikeal, Adam; Maslov, Alexey; Messinger, Tina; Armstrong, Tommy; Creel, James; Texas A&M University; Texas Digital LibraryThe development and deployment of the Manakin theme for the digital repository at Texas A&M University provides an informative case study in embedding DSpace repositories within an institutional web presence. Last year, the Texas A&M University Libraries began a redesign of the existing web interface in accordance with a new institution-wide branding initiative. A collaborative effort between administrators, designers, and developers has yielded a look and feel for the institutional repository that integrates seamlessly with the library's and university's other web services while providing the unique functionalities required by various and diverse collections. The use of Manakin themes ensured that the development process was modular and employed well-established web development techniques and technologies. The design of the digital repository theme began with consultations between library designers and TAMU branding authorities. The designers used Photoshop to produce mock-up pages for primary use cases with colors, fonts, and graphics that adhered to the institutional branding mandates while satisfying usability heuristics. These designs underwent iterative refinement with comments from administrators and developers. When all parties were satisfied, the design team translated the images into HTML and CSS mock-ups for web browser rendering. Designers handed off the HTML code to the Manakin theme developers, who coded XSL to produce such HTML from XML DRI data generated from the repository. Developers coded additional Javascript to implement the UI vision of the designers. Developers produced two Manakin themes of different specificity - A theme for the repository in general, and one that specifically applied to the Geologic Atlas of the United States map collection. That theme, known as "Geofolios," employs the Yahoo! Maps API and Google Earth overlays to allow patrons to browse the collection in the context of manipulable maps indicating the geographic context of the folios. In summary, embedding the digital repository in the institutional web presence required no more effort than other XML-based content would have. The pre-development design process and use of XSL transforms are standard practices in institutional web development. Manakin's ability to apply themes to specific content enabled a neat separation of development between the Geofolios theme and the general theme. THe augmentation of additional collections with customized interfaces in the future would be a similarly modular activity. Importantly, the use of Manakin themes provides a seamless integration between the repository and the library's existing web presence, reducing patrons' cognitive overhead in navigating between the repository and other services.Item ETD Management in DSpace(2009-05-27) Mikeal, Adam; Creel, James; Maslov, Alexey; Phillips, Scott; Texas A&M UniversityThe Texas Digital Library (TDL) is a consortium of public and private educational institutions from across the state of Texas. Founded in 2005, TDL exists to promote the scholarly activities of its members. One such activity is the collection and dissemination of ETDs. A federated collection of ETDs from multiple institutions was created in 2006, and has since grown into an all-encompassing ETD Repository project that is partially supported by a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS). This project seeks to address the full life-cycle of ETDs, providing tools and services from the point of ingestion, through the review process, and finally to dissemination in the centrally federated repository. A primary component of this project was the development of Vireo, a web application for ETD submittal and management. Built directly into the DSpace repository, Vireo provides a customized submission process for students, and a rich, “Web-2.0″ style management interface for graduate and library staff. Because it is built directly in the DSpace repository, scalability is possible from a single department or college up to a multiple-institution consortium. In 2008, we reported the results of a demonstrator system that took place at Texas A&M University. Vireo has replaced the legacy application and is now the single point of entry for all theses and dissertations at that university. Rollout to other schools will follow a gradual, phased approach. This presentation examines the challenges faced as Texas A&M transitioned to a new ETD management system, and the architectural issues involved with scaling such a system to a statewide consortium. Finally, it will discuss the application’s release to the ETD community under an open-source license.Item ETD Management in the Texas Digital Library(2008-06-09) Brace, Tim; Mikeal, Adam; Paz, Jay; Phillips, Scott; McFarland, Mark; Leggett, John; Texas A&M University; University of Texas at Austin; Texas Digital LibraryOne of the earliest TDL initiatives was a federated collection of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) from across the state. There are currently four schools contributing over 4000 ETDs per year, and with 16 participating member schools in TDL, this number is continually increasing. A diverse set of content contributors introduces problems of inconsistent metadata and incompatible storage and access methods, making it difficult to offer effective tools and services. This situation drove the decision to create a common system for managing the entire life-cycle of ETDs, from the point of ingestion to final publication. ETD management fits nicely with the other services offered by TDL, and a single point of ingestion is appealing for both technical and economic reasons. In 2007, we reported on the status of the functional system prototype. Much progress has been made toward implementation of this system, starting with the majority of the development, and leading to the demonstrator event that is currently taking place in spring 2008 at Texas A&M University and the University of Texas. This presentation discusses the ETD management system from a functional point-of-view, starting with the student interface for ETD submission (the ingestion point into the repository), and then covering the administrative interface used by university staff members for managing the iterative verification workflow. Finally, we will discuss the requirements for moving forward into a production environment. These include testing and scaling the system to handle the large numbers of users dispersed over a significant geographic area (Texas is the third-highest producer of PhDs in the United States). Rough timelines will be discussed for deployment, first at Texas A&M and the University of Texas, then as the system is gradually expanded through a program of beta testers, and finally into open enrollment.Item Introducing Vireo: ETD Submittal and Management for DSpace(2009-07) Mikeal, Adam; Phillips, Scott; Leggett, John J.; McFarland, MarkThe Texas Digital Library (TDL) is a consortium of public and private institutions from across the state of Texas; a major project in TDL is the development of a state-wide repository for managing the entire life-cycle of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). The Texas ETD Repository is a large effort that span multiple independent initiatives, all of which interact to support the overall task of managing ETDs in Texas. This presentation will describe Vireo, the customized submission and workflow management application that TDL developed for DSpace, and it's role within the Texas ETD Repository. We will describe its current implementation as a Manakin aspect and theme, and discuss the future plans for the application, including its release to the repository community under an open source license.Item Item Repository Interoperability in the Texas Digital Library Through the Use of OAI-ORE(2009-05-27) Maslov, Alexey; Creel, James; Mikeal, Adam; Phillips, Scott; Texas A&M UniversityOne of the more prominent projects undertaken by the Texas Digital Library is the creation and maintenance of a federated collection of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) from its member institutions. Currently, the maintenance of this collection is performed via a manual process, leading to scalability issues as the collection grows. The DSpace OAI Harvesting project was started with the aim of improving current federation methods. It relies on integrating two key technologies into the DSpace repository platform: OAI-PMH and OAI-ORE. The Open Archives Initiative’s (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a well-established mechanism for harvesting metadata between repository systems. The DSpace platform supports metadata dissemination through OAI-PMH, allowing collections to be regularly harvested by external agents such as Google, or the NDLTD’s Union Catalog of ETDs. This protocol’s ubiquity is well-deserved: it is simple and flexible, allowing for selective harvest by date ranges and sets, as well as specific metadata formats. Although dissemination through OAI-PMH has been a feature of DSpace for some time, harvesting support was missing, and was added as part of this project. As its name implies, OAI-PMH is concerned with metadata; it cannot transmit actual content. This need is addressed by another standard from OAI, called Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE). This protocol allows us to describe abstract sets of Web resources as nested groups called aggregations. The second part of this DSpace OAI Harvesting project was to make DSpace “ORE-aware”, so that when the harvesting engine encounters ORE descriptions, it is able to fetch the content from the remote repository and create a new local copy. This presentation will describe the OAI Harvesting project, and discuss its impact on the various TDL repositories, all of which use the DSpace platform. For the federated ETD collection, this technology will enable the maintenance of the collection to move from a manual process to an automatic one. It also opens up interesting possibilities for specializing various repositories for specific tasks; for example using a DSpace instance solely for ETD workflow and management and then harvesting the results into the main repository. Finally, we will discuss the impact of this project on repository architectures in general.Item Toward Automatic Metadata Assignment in the Texas A&M University Digital Repository(2009-05-27) Creel, James; Maslov, Alexey; Mikeal, Adam; Phillips, Scott; Texas A&M UniversityWe are researching and developing tools to automatically assign high-quality metadata to documents in the Texas A&M University Digital Repository, a DSpace repository. A reliable automation of the metadata assignment process confers several advantages. First, the submission workflow may be streamlined by providing the user with pre-filled input fields. Second, existing collections may have their items automatically augmented with new metadata fields, usually a lengthy and painstaking process for human catalogers. Finally, the repository may be systematically reviewed for metadata errors. Metadata in a DSpace repository exist at several levels and in various forms. Some forms are suitable for automatic assignment whereas others remain beyond the scope of modern artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Though we typically think of metadata in a DSpace repository as being applied at the item level, metadata are also applied at the bistream, bundle, collection, and community levels. Among these levels, we are currently interested in the bistream and item levels. At the bistream level, the metadata are restricted to name (always a filename), type (typically a MIME type) and description. The type is currently determined on the basis of filename extensions. We propose to employ the UNIX file command to achieve less error-prone type assignment. The description field, consisting of unrestricted text, poses greater challenges and will be the focus of future research. At the item level, metadata are restricted only by schemas registered in the repository, typically including Dublin Core (DC). Among the unqualified DC fields, some are highly amenable to automatic assignment while others pose formidable difficulties in light of the high degree of accuracy required. At present, we find it appropriate to tailor metadata assignment tools on a collection-by-collection basis. This is so because the necessary metadata fields vary between collections; whereas geographic metadata may be relevant to a collection of maps, committee member metadata may be relevant to a collection of theses. Additionally, by focusing on a particular collection the software may assume particular structural consistencies between documents. For example, our experimental software can accurately assign title, author, committee member, degree level, abstract, and subject area metadata to TAMU ETDs by virtue of the fact that the locations of these strings are virtually guaranteed within these documents. Furthermore, stylistic and subject-matter consistencies between documents in a collection can facilitate statistical-linguistically informed inferences about those documents. Experimentally, we are employing named entity recognition software to identify references to people, places, and things within documents by using statistical linguistic clues. These identifications may be used to provide subject metadata, geographic metadata, and other types of metadata fields depending on the collection. In the future, we plan to integrate named entity recognition with a formal knowledge base of entities, events, and relations, which can dynamically grow with the repository. This knowledge-based integration is the first step in a long journey toward automatic assignment of complex fields like descriptions and summaries of documents.Item Visualizing DSpace: Google Summer of Code 2007(2007) Phillips, Scott