Browsing by Subject "access"
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Item Being an 'a11y': Increasing Accessibility in Born Digital Preservation(2014-03-25) Snider, Lisa; Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at AustinIn the past few years, archivists and librarians have grappled with issues associated with the long term preservation of born digital materials. Are we considering the needs of people with disabilities when preserving these materials? This presentation will explore how we can increase accessibility when preserving born digital materials. Taken from an archival point of view, the presentation will focus on one solution that may make our born digital material more accessible to people with disabilities.Item Comparative study of social economic differences in relation to technology competency expectations as perceived by business and educational leaders(Texas A&M University, 2007-04-25) Reyna, Janice MaeThis qualitative study investigated the urgent need for business and public schools to design a comprehensive system for preparing all students for a technological workplace, while giving them the necessary academic foundation for functioning effectively in a work environment. Businesses and communities need to participate with schools, regardless of where the schools are located. Schools, businesses and communities must explore and work together to create new methods for supporting technology in schools and in the workplace. The interviewees who participated in the study consisted of 21 teachers and administrators from four high schools located within four districts in San Antonio, Texas. Two of the high schools were located in southern San Antonio and were classified as lower socioeconomic institutions. The other two high schools were located in northern San Antonio and were classified as upper socioeconomic institutions. Also, seven business leaders were interviewed from (1) grocery, (2) San Antonio city government, (3) military, (4) large retail chain, (5) technology organization and business, (6) telecommunications, and (7) a youth-oriented organization. The major conclusions of the study were that businesses believe that a skill-deficient workplace hampers economic growth and productivity, and a knowledge-deficient high school graduate limits his or her opportunities for an extended academic experience. Few businesses in San Antonio supported or contributed to technology competencies in the selected schools in San Antonio by participating in curriculum development or as partnerships within the schools. All teachers had a high level of understanding about the importance of technology competencies for students. Furthermore, they believed that teachers and administrators must have a well-organized and fluid technology training program that will help integration of technology into the curriculum. Schools within the lower socioeconomic classification did not have many opportunities for training or access to technology; therefore, the teachers did not have the opportunity for building their competencies. In comparison, the schools located in northern San Antonio had more than adequate opportunities for training and access to technology. Educational, business, and community organizations must be concerned with all aspects of student learning and their ability to utilize technology. It is not enough to supply hardware and software to schools.Item The Dr. Hector P. Garcia Papers: Providing Access to Records of an Under-documented(2017-05-24) Cobourn, Alston Brake; Texas A&M University-Corpus ChristiI propose a 7 minute presentation on a project undertaken by TAMU-CC to bring awareness and provide increased access to an important collection, the Dr. Hector P. Garcia papers, which documents his work with and life as a part of the historically under-documented Mexican-American community in South Texas. I will discuss how Special Collections and Archives worked with History Associates to guide their processing of the 600 linear foot collection and creation of a focused Omeka-based digital exhibit. The library also worked with the campus Marketing and Communications & Public Affairs departments to spread the word about the online exhibit through articles on the school website and press releases. We plan to add more access by ingesting all of the digitized items to TAMU-CC's TDL DSpace repository and linking to this content in the collection’s online finding aid. We plan to build upon the excitement this project has generated by next addressing the papers of his sister, Dr. Clotilde P. Garcia, who was also a Corpus Christi doctor and social activist. I am currently developing a processing plan for her 107 linear foot collection and plan to build a focused digital exhibit after I complete processing. We hope to again utilize the TDL to expand digital access.Item Preserving the Image of Fandom: The Sandy Hereld Digitized Media Fanzine Collection at Texas A&M University(2013-06-28) Brett, Jeremy; Texas A&M UniversityMedia fandom - the cultural practice of active interest in various movies or television shows - is a widespread and vibrant part of American popular culture. Fans create all sorts of artifacts related to the objects of their affection, including fanzines. Media fanzines are amateur publications usually (though not always) containing works of fan fiction. Fanzines have been important aspects of fandom for decades - many were created as ephemeral, impermanent print objects, while others were born digital. In either case, whole generations of media fanzines are disappearing and with them, the creative record of this colorful phenomenon. Texas A&M University is involved in creating a unique digital repository consisting of thousands of scanned and archived fanzines dating from the 1960s to the present. Preserving and providing access to fannish materials presents several unique challenges beyond the merely technical. There is the issue of copyright and appropriate permission: most fanzines were copyrighted by their creator and therefore require permission in order to make them accessible. Older fans have often drifted away from their informal creations and many good-faith efforts to locate them are necessary. In addition, many media fanzines are actually anthologies with multiple authors and artists, requiring an untangling of rights and permissions from a single product. Efforts at graceful diplomacy are often necessary, because fans are often very protective of their fannish identities and activities, and reluctant to have those "exposed" to the outside world. We are obliged to explain our motives and our belief in the strong research potential of fans' creations. Metadata creation raises the issue of fannish anonymity. Some fans - those who used pseudonyms or entirely separate cultural identities as fans - do not want their legal names revealed or used, and the desire for continued anonymity requires metadata decisions that reflect this motivation. Media fanzines can be classified under many different subjects and genres - in constructing the metadata structure for the repository we have this ongoing issue of limiting vocabulary to deal with as well. Finally, we were faced with the issue of how to provide access. Online access would, of course, vastly increase potential audiences, but secured onsite access would assuage privacy concerns of many fannish donors. The Hereld DMFC operates now under secured onsite access, but as progress on the collection is made this decision may change. The construction of the Sandy Hereld DMFC provides a number of interesting questions (and some answers) relating to digital archiving and how institutions can successfully build and maintain repositories of digital material, material with incredible potential for institutional and collection promotion and outreach.Item Session 3E | What’s Next? UX for Discovery Systems Beyond the Initial Launch(Texas Digital Library, 2022-05-25) Miles, ChassidyThe University of North Texas Libraries conducted user research for the redesign of the online catalog in 2020. Due to the significant changes we were able to make to the infrastructure and functionality of the interface before the initial release, we decided that regularly incorporating UX was critical for making user-centered improvements. This presentation will examine the challenges we experienced managing multiple UX projects with limited resources. I will detail the strategies we created to enhance the efficiency of our user studies and the improvements we have been able to make as a result. Finally, I will close by discussing possible next steps. This presentation is beneficial for those seeking to enhance usability and access for users of their discovery systems.Item Transforming Access to Texts with 18thConnect and TypeWright(2014-03-14) Grumbach, Elizabeth; Texas A&M University18thConnect is a digital aggregator and virtual research environment (VRE) for eighteenth-century researchers. As part of a larger community of VRE’s, all organized under the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) and based on the NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) model for peer review and scholarship, 18thConnect has to tackle issues relevant to its period-specific research community. As a result, the TypeWright application was built for the 18thConnect platform in order to provide an easily-accessible, crowd-sourced correction tool for eighteenth-century texts. The TypeWright tool was designed to solve issues with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for early printed texts, specifically those in Gale/Cengage Learning’s Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) subscription database, to provide accurate text for full-text searching, data mining, and the creation of digital scholarly editions. Because these texts were photographed, microfilmed, and then digitized over a period of 40 years, their quality negatively impacts OCR text output. In addition, early printing conventions, especially early typefaces and paper quality, cause OCR engines to mis-recognize the word images on a page. To foster the sustainability and use of these texts in scholarship, TypeWright was created to enable users to correct, by hand, save, and share their editing with the 18thConnect community. For this poster presentation, I intend to focus on illuminating the following three aspects of the TypeWright tool: 1. Correcting a text in TypeWright, or, briefly explaining the accessible user interface. When a user accesses the 18thConnect site, they can search for “TypeWright-enabled” texts, right now consisting of the 183,000 documents contained in ECCO. Once a user has selected a text, they are ported into the editing interface, which displays snippets of the page image for transcription in the text editing box below. The text editing box already contains the text generated by a previous OCR process, so that the user can either edit the text, or confirm the current text is correct. 2. Liberating a text in TypeWright, or, how users can request full text and XML for a document after completing correction; After a user, or a group of users working collaboratively, have completed correcting a document, their work is reviewed by TypeWright administrators. If the work passes the evaluation process, then the user(s) are able to receive the corrected plain text or XML/TEI-encoded files. If the work fails evaluation (which is rare) users are instructed to look for common “correction” mistakes, and fix them. 3. Using a text after TypeWright correction, or, the benefit of crowdsourcing correction for the academic community. Once a user has received their corrected text files, 18thConnect administrators advise users to use this data in their digital project, then submit that digital project for peer review to 18thConnect. In addition, the corrected text, per our agreements with Gale/Cengage Learning, return to that database to improve the searchability of this proprietary product, which constitutes an important resource for the eighteenth-century scholarly community.Item The Truth of the Story Lies in the Details: Challenges of Providing Context in the Born Digital Materials of Writers(2017-05-24) Adams, Abby; Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at AustinBy now, librarians and archivists are familiar with the challenges surrounding data recovery and preservation of born digital materials in archival collections but providing researchers access to such content, particularly in the papers of writers, can be a multi-faceted problem. As we know, not all legacy file formats are conducive to migration, and it is impossible to find applications to view each and every format. Conversely, many scholars want access to a creator’s works in the original environment they were generated in. Much can be discovered about an digital writing habits and computing history and what influence, if any, they had on his/her composition style. From the size of a computer screen to the sticky notes on a desktop to annotations in a word processing document, these details and more provide key contextual information that is often lost in a standard on-site access model where files are migrated to a software agnostic format and viewed on a modern day computer. As more and more researchers seek answers to these questions, answers that are much clearer with analog collection materials, what responsibilities do librarians and archivists have to gather and disseminate a creator’s computing history and digital writing habits, to collect and maintain obsolete hardware and software, to develop models for emulation and virtualization services? The presentation will address such issues using collections at the Harry Ransom Center as examples.Item Who gives a DAM?: The Iterative Process for Assessing Digital Asset Management Tools(2016-05-25) Bailey, Greg; Bondurant, John; Buckner, Sean; Creel, James; duPlessis, Anton; Huff, Jeremy; Melgoza, Pauline; Mosbo, Julie; Muise, Ian; Potvin, Sarah; Sewell, Robin; Wright, Brian; Texas A&M UniversityA task force based in the Texas A&M University Libraries is working to assess digital asset systems (DAMS). While situated in the Libraries, the task force is supplemented by campus collaborators from the College of Architecture and University Marketing & Communications, with the goal of recommending a tool or tools that will meet the access and exhibition needs for digital collections of not only the TAMU Libraries, but also of other entities across campus. Over the course of the past 18 months, the task force has conducted a needs assessment, surveyed campus stakeholders, developed long and short lists of DAMS, produced a robust testing instrument, brought various systems into production for testing, and run tests against high-scoring systems. This poster reports on the iterative processes behind our assessment work, which originated as a Libraries effort and grew to encompass more complex needs, and presents findings from our testing.