2013 Texas Conference on Digital Libraries

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/2249.1/64289

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Online Metadata Generator for Research Data
(2013-03-21) Reilly, Michele; de la Cruz Gutierrez, Manuel; University of Houston
NSF, NIH and other funding agencies are now requiring Data Management Plans that include the expectation of sharing research data. To facilitate this expectation, librarians from the University of Houston are developing an automated online system to document data sets at the various stages of their life cycle. Our process will consist of determining key Dublin Core elements and developing a discipline-specific crosswalk. (This crosswalk translates discipline-specific terminology to that used by Dublin Core.) The discipline-specific terminology and the key element set will be developed in collaboration with faculty researchers. This set will be minimal in order to reduce the burden to the researcher in documenting their data yet provide enough information for the management of the data over its life cycle. Ultimately, the resulting sets will be shared across each discipline community to foster a shared set of standards. This crosswalk will result in a discipline-specific metadata generator. It is envisioned that this discipline-specific metadata generator will be an online system that allows researchers and their assistants to develop metadata on the fly. The discipline-specific metadata generator will crosswalk to Dublin Core ultimately ensuring sharing, discoverability and interoperability of data seamlessly while minimizing researcher effort. The presenters will discuss how they envision the system will work, what steps they are taking in determining key discipline-specific elements - including how those elements crosswalk to Dublin Core - , the progress to date, and the importance of inter-departmental collaboration necessary to make this system a reality.
From Custody to Collaboration: The Post-Custodial Archival Model at the University of Texas Libraries
(2013-03-21) Norsworthy, Kent; Sangwand, T-Kay; University of Texas at Austin
Despite living in an age of ubiquitous access to digital information, scholars still struggle to access both the physical and digital primary sources needed for research and teaching. This can be due to limited access to physical primary sources (i.e. cultural heritage materials located in another country), lack of resources to make analog primary sources digitally accessible (i.e. limited funds and staff for digitization), or lack of a concerted effort to collect born digital materials (i.e. no clear institutional mandate). The inaction around preservation and access can result in the loss of the materials themselves, for example to obscurity and obsolescence, as well as an impoverished historical record. In order to confront these threats while simultaneously supporting scholarly research at The University of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas Libraries has adopted a post-custodial archive model to address the collection, preservation, and access challenges for digitized and born digital archival materials. This approach also allows us to secure valuable scholarly resources for The University of Texas at Austin and the global community and to foster deep collaborative relationships with campus faculty and academic units as well as with our partners around the globe, all in close alignment with the strategic priorities of the Libraries and the University. This presentation will explore the background and rationale that underlies the post-custodial archive model and how this model has been implemented through digital projects such as the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive, Primeros Libros de las Américas, and the Human Rights Documentation Initiative. We will discuss these initiatives as part of broader efforts to redefine the role and identity of the research library as a central component of teaching, scholarship, and resource to 21st century learners, and as an exemplary activity of the University’s commitment to “scholarship and education that advances the social good.”
Determining and Mapping Locations of Study in Scholarly Documents: A Spatial Representation and Visualization Tool for Information Discovery
(2013-03-21) Creel, James; Weimer, Katherine; Texas A&M University
Theses and dissertations play a significant role in the scholarly literature and often refer to locations of interest or regions under study. Through geoparsing, which is the identification and disambiguation of place names, we have created a tool to generate interactive maps of the geographic locations referenced in theses and dissertations. Our visualization affords increased awareness of the numerous locations being researched and which departments and majors are studying each location. More broadly, the interface supports multidisciplinary research, student recruitment and faculty collaboration. Using geographic and gazetteer metadata and open source mapping applications, this tool provides researchers with serendipitous geographic and interdisciplinary connections. The beta version consists of several DSpace curation tasks to take a given ETD through each step of the metadata creation and mapping processes. Once the tool has suggested geospatial metadata for an ETD, the DSpace administrative interface allows curators to approve the suggested metadata values. Our geoparser integrates various open-source tools as well as specialized heuristics to automate the name extraction and disambiguation tasks. We have employed the OpenNLP and Stanford NLP libraries for the name extraction task, and use the Geonames gazetteer as our source for referenced entities. A preliminary evaluation of the tool indicates an accuracy of 84% with regard to the disambiguation of names to specific Geonames IDs. Work toward improving the accuracy is ongoing. The visualization component of the tool reads geospatial metadata as KML and can render the referenced locations in any of three map visualization options selected by the reader: OpenLayers, OpenStreetMaps and Google Maps. Once a site of interest is located on the map, the reader may select a link to the complete thesis or dissertation stored in the university's instance of DSpace, our institutional repository. The long-term goal of this project is to extend the content to include all TDL ETDs for a widely used search mechanism.
Pasteur’s Own Hand: The Creation of a Digital Repository
(2013-03-21) Greene, Mira; University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston
The Truman G. Blocker, Jr. History of Medicine Collections at the Moody Medical Library at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas, was awarded a NN/LM South Central Region Digital Preservation & Access (DiPA) Award to complete a digital repository of carefully selected material from the private library of Louis Pasteur (1822-1895). This project sought to dramatically improve user awareness and access to the personal and academic thoughts of one of the world's most celebrated scientists. The Pasteur Collection held at the Blocker Collections contains 154 items including books, offprints, prints, manuscripts and unpublished handwritten letters by Pasteur which he maintained in his personal library. In a recent appraisal, the Pasteur Collection was noted as "easily the most significant in the United States and most likely the entire world outside of the material held by the [l'Institiut Pasteur] in France." Our presentation will focus on the award application process and lessons learned, in-house workflows, outsourcing of translation and transcription, creation of audio files, website design, metadata creation, digital repository creation in ContentDM, and exporting of records from ContentDM for batch loading in our TDL repository. This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, under Contract No. HHSN-276-2011-00007-C with the Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library.
Providing Effective Information Services for RCN CE3SAR Project
(2013-03-21) Xu, Hong; Texas A&M University
The research coordination network (RCN) – Climate, Energy, Environment and Engagement in Semiarid Regions (CE3SAR) is a NSF funded project. The overarching goal of the RCN CE3SAR is to form a robust research, educational and engagement network of regional universities, research centers and institutes. The project has extensive information needs such as project presence, data preservation, digital repositories, scholarly communication, project management, information retrieval, and bibliography service. Texas Digital Library and the library of Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi have played important roles in providing services to meet the needs of the RCN CE3SAR project. This presentation aims to share the experience of providing information services to RCN CE3SAR project from the following aspects: Outreaching RCN CE3SAR team; Identifying the project users’ needs; Providing information services; Engaging the project users; Discussing challenges and opportunities.
Automated Archiving of DVD Content
(2013-03-21) Nieto, Heriberto; Lamphear, Anna; University of Texas at Austin; Texas Advanced Computing Center
A little more than a decade after their introduction, DVDs are becoming obsolete. As a result collecting institutions must find a long term preservation solution for content in DVD format. To address this challenge the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) developed an automated workflow for transcoding DVDs using a tool built with open source software. Automated and potentially customizable, the tool allows for the creation of a series of files including a preservation quality file for long term storage, an ISO disk image, streaming files for access purposes, as well as technical and preservation metadata. The tool also applies a reference metric that allows for automated quality checks of the video files. The resulting output can be used as a Submission Information Package (SIP) suitable for ingest into a repository. The University of Texas Libraries is testing the tool on its DVD collections, streamlining workflows for both preservation and access. Several modifications have been made to the tool to support the production needs of the Libraries. This presentation will highlight aspects of the development of the tool and will discuss the implementation and testing in reference to the resultant output files and metadata, the differences between the museum and library workflow application, and the overall usefulness of the tool. Contributors on the project include: Maria Esteva (TACC, UT Austin); Karla Vega (TACC, UT Austin); Heriberto Nieto (TACC, UT Austin); Bethany Scott (Charlotte Mecklenburg Library); Kertana Kumar (College of Natural Sciences, UT Austin); Vandy Henriksen (UT Libraries); Anna Lamphear (UT Libraries); Jennifer Lee (UT Libraries); Wendy Martin (UT Libraries).
The Austin Fanzine Project: Phase Two
(2013-03-21) Hecker, Jennifer; Powell, Kevin; University of Texas at Austin
A fanzine is a "nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon (such as a literary or musical genre) for the pleasure of others who share their interest” (Wikipedia). You can think of them as pre-internet blogs. Fanzines are lately gaining popularity in college classrooms, as professors in journalism, anthropology, art, and literature incorporate them into their curricula, and librarians and archivists all over the world are finding ways to increase access to and preservation of these ephemeral, sometimes unique objects of human expression. Archivist Jennifer Hecker founded Austin Fanzine Project in the summer of 2012 as a way to increase access to the fanzines that document Austin's 1990s underground music scene by crowd sourcing their digitization, transcription and indexing. The project also functions as an ad-hoc learning lab for issues around digitization, transcription, linked data, digital preservation, privacy and copyright, and archival collaboration and innovation. Phase One of the project was a self-contained test run focusing on only one document. Phase Two has already begun and will feature more material, more complex issues, and more collaboration. Ms. Hecker will introduce the project and describe progress made to date, while UT iSchool master's degree candidate, Kevin Powell, will discuss the policy and workflow issues he addressed during his Spring 2013 Capstone work on the project.
From Mishmash to MeSH: Subject Headings Changes for a Collection
(2013-03-21) Kainerstorfer, Cameron; Perkins, Heather; UT Southwestern Medical Center
What is the half-life of a subject heading? Transfer between systems, input errors, workflow and staff changes all contribute to decay in subject heading quality. This presentation will cover highlights from a recent project to review and modify subject headings for the electronic theses and dissertations collection within the UT Southwestern institutional repository. Project work was primarily conducted by a UNT graduate school library science student as part of an semester-long internship in 2012. Developed by the repository administrator and metadata manager, this also served as a springboard for future intern projects. The presentation will also highlight: Targeted quality improvement through a small, manageable project, Cooperation between different library departments, Access issues for repository work in DSpace conducted by non-affiliated personnel (off-campus access; institutional accounts; etc.), Needs of particular interest to a medical institution (MeSH vs. other subject headings; embargoed or limited content).
Understanding Large Digital Collections and Learning New Tools: The Texas Digital Newspaper Program Visualizations.
(2013-03-21) Phillips, Mark; Hicks, Will; University of North Texas
As digital library collections continue to increase in size it becomes necessary to use new tools and techniques to communicate and understand the rich content held in these collections to curators and end users. This presentation discusses the use of the D3 Javascript library to visualize and provide new insight to the Texas Digital Newspaper Program (TDNP) hosted by The Portal to Texas History as a case study. The collection contains over one million pages of Texas newspapers from the 1830's to modern day covering over one hundred counties, and hundreds of titles. An overview of existing newspaper visualization projects will be presented as well as an explanation of how the presenters prepared the data for these visualizations using the publicly available TDNP OAI-PMH repository and the open source D3 Javascript library.
The Digital Preservation Network at UT Austin
(2013-03-21) Jordan, Chris; University of Texas at Austin; Texas Advanced Computing Center
The University of Texas at Austin is a key participant in the Digital Preservation Network(DPN), an organization that intends to provide a common vehicle for long-term preservation of the most important scholarly products of member institutions. This presentation will provide a brief introduction to the goals of the Digital Preservation Network and its relationship to regional preservation efforts including TDL. We will discuss the developing technical architecture for data replication in DPN and the role of the Texas Advanced Computing Center and TDL in developing and deploying that architecture. We will briefly describe the design principles behind the architecture and the manner in which the replication technology is overlaid on existing ingest and storage mechanisms.
How Digital Libraries Can Create a Culture of Open Access on Campus
(2013-03-21) Keralis, Spencer; Helge, Kris; Waugh, Laura; Stark, Shannon; Najmi, Anjum; University of North Texas
As Open Access has flourished into an International movement that is shaping the progressive landscape of scholarly communication, a growing number of institutions are implementing policy changes aimed at the higher institutional levels. Policy implementation, however, is only the one step in creating a culture of Open Access on a campus. Digital Libraries have led the movement by instituting Institutional Repositories for scholarly works and research data, but it has become increasingly evident that academic institutions must implement strategies for raising the awareness of Open Access and promoting the involvement of their academic scholars and students. It is no longer a question of whether or not to promote the open accessibility of these works among our academic community, but how best to do so. This roundtable discussion will offer ideas, strategies, and thoughtful conversations on how to equip a campus with the resources it needs to promote and assist researchers in adopting Open Access. This panel will feature faculty; a graduate student; scholarly communications, institutional repository, and strategic projects librarians to provide a balanced perspective of Open Access implementation at one Texas institution.
Integrating the Classroom and the Digitization Center: An Innovative Approach
(2013-03-21) Ames, Eric; Baylor University
Following several successful years of building increasingly larger, highly impactful digital collections, the Baylor University Digital Projects Group chose the Spring 2013 semester to take the next step in its development by creating a new graduate level course for the Department of Museum Studies called Technology and Outreach in Museums. Taught by Eric Ames, Curator of Digital Collections and a lecturer in the department, the course is an innovative approach to integrating classroom lectures and philosophical exploration of the topic with hands-on, intensive training on current digitization and outreach methods using the resources of the Electronic Library’s Riley Digitization Center. The purpose of the course is to give graduate students the opportunity to select materials from non-digitized archival collections; curate the materials for inclusion in a digital exhibit/collection; digitize the materials using the scanning equipment of the Riley Center; create a digital exhibit; and formulate a marketing plan to promote the exhibit to scholars, faculty and the general public. This presentation will focus on the development, proceedings and lessons learned over the course of the semester. Ames will also present tips for institutions interested in following a similar path, including how to manage the interests and skill levels of 15 graduate students in a working digitization center, challenges to implementing technological solutions and students’ perspectives on the course. If possible, a graduate student from the course will be invited to attend and lend his/her perspective on the course.
Vamp It Up and Make It Better: Auditing and Upgrading Metadata in the UH Digital Library
(2013-03-21) Thompson, Santi; Wu, Annie; University of Houston
Since 2009 the University of Houston Libraries have expanded access to the rare and special collections through the University of Houston Digital Library (UHDL). Three years and nearly 50,000 digital items later, UHDL has the potential to be a powerful resource for researchers of all kinds. To facilitate this kind of research, users rely on UHDL metadata to be robust, reliable, retrievable and sharable. While the current state of metadata in the digital library allows for browsing and searching, missing and inconsistent metadata restrict both discoverability and interoperability. As a result of these barriers, the Metadata and Bibliographic Services Department is initiating a project to audit and upgrade the existing metadata produced for the UHDL. This presentation outlines the audit and upgrade process to date. It provides an overview of our methodology, including focus group interviews, data inspection, and benchmarking. It also identifies key recommendations and strategies for upgrading the existing UHDL metadata, including guidelines for future UHDL metadata creation. The presentation is designed to offer suggestions to other institutions interested in conducting a metadata audit. It also encourages audience members to share other tools and techniques to implement an audit.
GALILEO Knowledge Repository (GKR): A Collaborative Statewide Institutional Repository
(2013-03-21) Givens, Marlee; Georgia Institute of Technology
In 2004, a small group of libraries from the University System of Georgia (USG) began discussing the idea of building a collaborative statewide institutional repository (IR). Georgia Tech was just starting SMARTech, a DSpace repository, and since then a number of other libraries around the system have started their own IR projects. In 2009, Georgia Tech was awarded a grant from IMLS to build the GALILEO Knowledge Repository. Goals for this project include building and hosting four new repositories; developing a central repository of standardized, harvested metadata from participating IRs in the USG; creating the open source collection mapping tool; implementing IR-related services such as digitization and content submission; conducting a statewide faculty survey; and hosting a national symposium and workshop on consortial IRs. Marlee Givens, the GKR's project manager, will present GKR as a case study in building and managing a collaborative IR service.
Extreme Makeover: Digital Library Edition
(2013-03-21) Cofield, Melanie; Tarleton Law Library, University of Texas at Austin
Featuring a digital library of early Texas legal documents built more than a decade ago and needing upgrades, this is a tale of renovation efforts requiring a sustained group effort. Librarians, archivists, students, and a programmer have worked together over time to evaluate the resource, identify practical fix-it strategies, and forge a more user-friendly and sustainable web resource for scholars, teachers and students interested in Texas legal history.
Mapping the Southwest Project: Putting the Region’s Maps Online
(2013-03-26) Alemneh, Daniel; Jones, Jerrell; Hartman, Cathy; Phillips, Mark; Hodges, Ann; Husman, Ben; University of North Texas; University of Texas at Arlington
The University of North Texas Libraries and its partner, the University of Texas at Arlington’s Special Collections, are working on a 3-year (2010 to 2013) collaborative “Mapping the Southwest” project, sponsored by a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) We the People grant. For this project we are digitizing 5,000 historically-significant maps and more than 80% are already processed and available online for free public access through The Portal to Texas History: http://texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/UTAM/browse/ All of the maps digitized for this grant meet the UNT metadata requirements, which means that all are Open Archive Initiative-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) harvestable, and are interoperable or compliant with widely adopted standards (such as Dublin Core, MARC, MODS, and PREMIS). On the Portal, users can find materials using a basic search, an advanced search, or through multiple browse interfaces. Digital object display on the Portal has been optimized for indexing by Google and other search engines. Overall, 44% of all traffic to the Portal is referred from search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc. To attract lay people to the good quality resources in our collections, we have also added extensive external links into our digital materials from Wikipedia, which has resulted in significant increases in usage of the collections. Among other digital libraries functionalities, when users find maps in the Portal, the maps manifest within a zoom feature that does not require any special downloads or software. The zooming software works with Flash Player, which is ubiquitous, reaching 99% of Internet users. The zooming feature allows users to see every detail of the map; grab and move the map with a click and pull mouse motion; or move the area of selection by dropping and dragging the selection area on the object icon. As we approach the project completion phase, this poster describes the lessons learned, and project impact not only in terms of showcasing the cartography of the region, but also in promoting best practices and advancing the capacity of academic libraries to reliably curate, preserve, and provide seamless access to such wide-format items to the diverse global user community.
The Denton Declaration: An Open Data Manifesto
(2013-03-26) Keralis, Spencer; Stark, Shannon; University of North Texas
On May 22, 2012 at the University of North Texas, a group of technologists and librarians, scholars and researchers, university administrators, and other stakeholders gathered to discuss and articulate best practices and emerging trends in research data management. The resulting document, The Denton Declaration, bridges the converging interests of these interest groups and promotes collaboration, transparency, and accountability across organizational and disciplinary boundaries. This poster presentation will describe the process of developing the Declaration, crediting collaborators and participating institutions; will discuss why we chose the genre of the Manifesto (rather than a more traditional report), reproduce key principles of open data from the Declaration, illustrate the international network of cosigners that have championed the Declaration, and invite the TCDL community to join us in advocating these principles throughout the academy.
Scanning TRAIL Project Technical Reports: A Workflow for a Large-Scale Collaborative Digitization Effort
(2013-03-26) Tarver, Hannah; University of North Texas
As part of the Technical Report Archive and Image Library (TRAIL) project, the University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries Digital Projects Unit (DPU) has been working with the University of Arizona (UA) during the last three years to digitize technical reports that have oversized fold-outs and which are of non-consistent. Project managers in the DPU have developed a straightforward workflow for handling the large volume of technical reports for this collaborative effort. The poster would illustrate the process we use to digitize the reports including inventory, scanning, processing, metadata, and upload. The same workflow could be used by other institutions to manage similar large-scale digitization of text objects.
“This is totally going on our blog.” Using WordPress and Edublogs to Enhance Access to Digital Collections
(2013-03-26) Ames, Eric; Baylor University
From its first post on November 9, 2011 to the present, the Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections Blog has been access 10,630 times by users around the world. Increasingly, the blog serves as a major entry point into the collection, with users’ Google searches leading them to its posts detailing everything from in-depth looks at a particular digital collection to professional musings and analysis of the processes behind the creation of digital collections. This poster presentation will provide an in-depth look at how the Digital Projects Group uses the blog to achieve a number of goals, such as: Providing context for collections Establishing a resource for small museums and archives to receive information on digitization trends and processes Presenting unique stories and items from the Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections Serving as a central clearinghouse for information related to the DPG The poster presentation will be of interest to institutions that are considering starting a blog in conjunction with their digital collections; institutions that are currently using a blog but are looking for new ways to utilize them; and anyone interested in how to mine existing digital collections for stories to present via a blog.
The Monster MeSH!—Taming Medical Subject Headings for an ETD Collection
(2013-03-26) Perkins, Heather; Kainerstorfer, Cameron; DeWeese, Misou; UT Southwestern Medical Center
In 2012, the repository administrator and metadata manager developed a semester-long project to review and modify subject headings for the electronic theses and dissertations collection within the UT Southwestern institutional repository. This also served as a test case and springboard for future intern projects. The focus of this poster will be the challenges encountered during the project, how those challenges were met for this project, and other options for future consideration. Poster highlights: Schedule coordination with larger intern program (rounding, departmental visits, etc.) DSpace training program for intern Issues with access for a non-institutional account Remote work and file transfers Project documentation: methods and motivations Medical institutions and special needs (MeSH, HIPAA, and more)

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