Browsing by Subject "digital libraries"
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Item A Digital Library Approach to the Reconstruction of Ancient Sunken Ships(2011-10-21) Monroy Cobar, Carlos A.Throughout the ages, countless shipwrecks have left behind a rich historical and technological legacy. In this context, nautical archaeologists study the remains of these boats and ships and the cultures that created and used them. Ship reconstruction can be seen as an incomplete jigsaw reconstruction problem. Therefore, I hypothesize that a computational approach based on digital libraries can enhance the reconstruction of a composite object (ship) from fragmented, incomplete, and damaged pieces (timbers and ship remains). This dissertation describes a framework for enabling the integration of textual and visual information pertaining to wooden vessels from sources in multiple languages. Linking related pieces of information relies on query expansion and improving relevance. This is accomplished with the implementation of an algorithm that derives relationships from terms in a specialized glossary, combining them with properties and concepts expressed in an ontology. The main archaeological sources used in this dissertation are data generated from a 17th-century Portuguese ship, the Pepper Wreck, complemented with information obtained from other documented and studied shipwrecks. Shipbuilding treatises spanning from the late 16th- to the 19th-centuries provide textual sources along with various illustrations. Additional visual materials come from a repository of photographs and drawings documenting numerous underwater excavations and surveys. The ontology is based on a rich database of archaeological information compiled by Mr. Richard Steffy. The original database was analyzed and transformed into an ontological representation in RDF-OWL. Its creation followed an iterative methodology which included numerous revisions by nautical archaeologists. Although this ontology does not pretend to be a final version, it provides a robust conceptualization. The proposed approach is evaluated by measuring the usefulness of the glossary and the ontology. Evaluation results show improvements in query expansion across languages based on Blind Relevance Feedback using the glossary as query expansion collection. Similarly, contextualization was also improved by using the ontology for categorizing query results. These results suggest that related external sources can be exploited to better contextualize information in a particular domain. Given the characteristics of the materials in nautical archaeology, the framework proposed in this dissertation can be adapted and extended to other domains.Item Austin Music Documentation Initiative Portal(2015-04-27) Atkins, Grace; Rainey, Hannah; Selvidge, Jeremy; University of Texas at AustinAustin, Texas is famous for a thriving music scene. The contemporary scene is apparent to all who travel and move to Austin, yet the rich history and development of the music scene is hidden in various private and public collections. The Austin Music Documentation Initiative (AMDI) intends to increase access and awareness of the music history of Austin by providing a portal through which organizations and individuals can contribute metadata and thumbnails of Austin music history related materials. Under the guidance of the digital archivist at the Perry-Castaneda Library, students from the Spring 2015 section of Digital Libraries at the UT iSchool will create a proof of concept cataloging app for the AMDI. The proof of concept app will be used in support of grant applications. The end goal for this project will include a metadata schema, as well as a form and workflow for uploading metadata to a central directory.Item Baylor University and the Texas Digital Library(2010-05-17) Orr, Pattie; Baylor UniversityBaylor University was one of the first institutions to join the Texas Digital Library and it has been integral to the development of the consortium as a collaborative enterprise. The presentation will discuss Baylor’s decision to join TDL during its first year, its role as a collaborative participant in the consortium, the advantages to Baylor of statewide collaboration, and its views on the benefits to library operations, the university itself, and the state of TexasItem The Browning Letters Online(Texas Digital Library, 2012-05-25) Stuhr, Darryl; Baylor UniversityThe Baylor University Electronic Library Digitization Group partnered with the special collection Armstrong Browning Library in summer 2011 to digitize, and place online, 2,800 letters written to and from Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. Wellesley College also joined the partnership and offered to share 573 of their digitized letters with Baylor to help develop the virtual collection of Browning Letters. Baylor was excited to partner with Wellesley because they own the original love letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. The presentation will share the Digitization Group’s experience and will cover the collaborative component of the project, in-house and outsourced digitization, project workflow including data migration between systems, batch loading metadata and objects into The Baylor Library digital collection access system CONTENTdm, and the handling of full-text transcripts to the digital objects. The target audience is libraries interested in mounting digital letter collections and those interested in collaborative digital projects.Item Collaborative Authoring of Walden's Paths(2012-10-19) Li, YuanlingThe World Wide Web contains rich collections of digital materials that can be used in education and learning settings. The collaborative authoring prototype of Walden's Paths targets two groups of users: educators and learners. From the perspective of educators, the authoring tool allows educators to collaboratively build a Walden's Path by filtering and organizing web pages into an ordered linear structure for the common information needs, which can be extended, tailored and modified into a derivative path from its parent version to meet dynamic and evolving educational requirements. From the students' perspective, Walden's Paths provide a shared knowledge space that facilitates collaborative learning. Specifically, collaborative learners can annotate locally and globally on pages and share among group members, where each annotation fosters the initiation of a thread of discussion. Therefore, knowledge transfer can be achieved in the process of social interaction associated with shared annotations.Item Collection Development for an Institutional Repository through Collaborations between Departments(2013-03-26) Randtke, Wilhelmina; Detweiler, Brian; St. Mary's UniversityPoster presentation: St. Mary’s University School of Law’s Sarita Kenedy East Law Library recently launched an institutional repository. The School of Law and law library had no preexisting digital collections. In order to quickly acquire appropriate content, the law library focused on locating born digital materials, such as School of Law publications, which had not previously been formally archived. The law library also attempted to identify digitization performed as part of routine library operations, and to assess digitized material for long term archiving. The law library was able to quickly and efficiently build an online collection for the repository by collecting preexisting born digital material, and assessing for inclusion material provided digitally to professors after conversion from legacy formats such as microfilm, and audiotape. This poster presents on how interdepartmental collaborations provided the framework to populate a digital collection in the absence of resources or equipment dedicated specifically to digitization.Item Collection Size Descriptions as Archival Data: The Spectrum of physdesc(2014-03-25) Buchanan, Sarah; Li, Haoyang; University of Texas at AustinThis poster presents insight into the functional vocabulary with which repositories describe the physical extent of their collections. The structured standard Encoded Archival Description (EAD) has provided repositories with a XML basis for representing archival finding aids since its creation and adoption during the 1990s. As one measure of its widespread adoption by collecting repositories, consider that the nationwide corpus of ArchiveGrid currently comprises over 120,000 EAD documents. The public database Texas Archival Resources Online similarly facilitates discovery of historical collections by displaying the contributions of EAD-structured finding aids from Texas repositories. The current version of EAD consists of 146 elements – an EAD tag and its formal element name – which provide the basis for these structured descriptions of collections. In this research we focus on one component of collection description, the tag, and report on the range of format types that appear in Texas collections. Beyond the colloquial names of box, photograph, and painting exist many outlier terms which present unique challenges and opportunities. The variation within the tag may be painless to the human reader during display, yet becomes problematic during natural language processing which requires normalization of collection sizes in order to perform statistical analysis. Through the one element of Physical Description, repositories are charged with summarizing both the materiality and the quantity of the items contained in an entire collection. These descriptions speak to the physical form and enumerative values of all information artifacts in the collection through the use of four optional subelements: dimension, extent, genre characteristic, and physical facet. We demonstrate the effect of having relative leeway in terms of data structure requirements built into the formal definition of this element. Because "the information may be presented as plain text," the end result of this definition is a dataset with wide internal variation that could impede the goal of assessing such collections through actionable data and its reuse in a broader context, such as by repository or region. With the third EAD Revision currently in gamma release (and set to replace EAD 2002 this spring), we consider our study in parallel with the following two developments: the continuation of the element as an unstructured option, and the creation of a new element which will formally adopt, rename, and add a fifth subelement to the four optionals listed above. In addition to version compatibility, EAD developers and adopters should facilitate integration of the legacy data corpus alongside data requirements to meet the dual goals of analysis and discovery. The Visualizing Archival Data / Augmented Processing Table project, of which this study is a part, aims to understand how such finding aid data can reveal the quality and granularity of collection arrangements, and through this, the layers of historical evidence that are made available to researchers seeking resources on specific topics, people, and organizations.Item Conceptualizing and implementing a webinar series: lessons learned from the Mountain West Digital Library Webinar Series(2014-03-14) Cummings, Rebekah; University of UtahWebinars are a low-cost and efficient training model that allow librarians to disseminate valuable information, connect with colleagues, and build and expand their communities beyond geographic and institutional boundaries. Yet, while many information specialists attend webinars on a regular basis, the task of hosting a webinar series may seem like a daunting and opaque challenge, even for enthusiastic webinar participants. In this poster session, Rebekah Cummings, Outreach Librarian at the Mountain West Digital Library, will demystify the process of implementing a successful webinar series including content creation, recruiting guest speakers, software selection, promotion, hosting the webinar, and follow-up. This session will include practical advice on how to host a webinar or webinar series, the costs and benefits associated with hosting webinars, and lessons learned from the Mountain West Digital Library’s Webinar Series.Item Content Management Systems and 3D Models: Creation, Interaction and Display(2014-03-25) Wackerman, Dillon; Thompson, Ashley; Stephen F. Austin State UniversityThis presentation will explore methods of creating and displaying 3D images in relation to Content Management Systems and online collections. Examining the creation of 3D models through various platforms, we will discuss the interaction and feasibility for implementation of several common 3D formats. The online display of 3D models has been in use for several years, most notably in archaeological reconstruction projects and more recently in digital imaging within the field of medical science. For this presentation, a 3D model is a visual representation that can be manipulated with various tools, which enable it to be turned, rotated and magnified among other functions. Apart from large-scale examples, the use of such models has yet to be fully utilized for the online display of cultural heritage objects and in particular within Content Management Systems such as CONTENTdm and Digital Commons. The 3D file formats that this presentation will address necessarily carry over into the display of 3D models. Discussion will then also consider the relationship between these file formats and external or internal methods of display. This presentation will also address recent developments in the area of 3D model representation and how subsequent applications may change.Item Designing a Griotte for the Global Village: Increasing the Evidentiary Value of Oral Histories for Use in Digital Libraries(2011-10-21) Dunn, Rhonda ThayerA griotte in West African culture is a female professional storyteller, responsible for preserving a tribe's history and genealogy by relaying its folklore in oral and musical recitations. Similarly, Griotte is an interdisciplinary project that seeks to foster collaboration between tradition bearers, subject experts, and computer specialists in an effort to build high quality digital oral history collections. To accomplish this objective, this project preserves the primary strength of oral history, namely its ability to disclose "our" intangible culture, and addresses its primary criticism, namely its dubious reliability due to reliance on human memory and integrity. For a theoretical foundation and a systematic model, William Moss's work on the evidentiary value of historical sources is employed. Using his work as a conceptual framework, along with Semantic Web technologies (e.g. Topic Maps and ontologies), a demonstrator system is developed to provide digital oral history tools to a "sample" of the target audience(s). This demonstrator system is evaluated via two methods: 1) a case study conducted to employ the system in the actual building of a digital oral history collection (this step also created sample data for the following assessment), and 2) a survey which involved a task-based evaluation of the demonstrator system. The results of the survey indicate that integrating oral histories with documentary evidence increases the evidentiary value of oral histories. Furthermore, the results imply that individuals are more likely to use oral histories in their work if their evidentiary value is increased. The contributions of this research ? primarily in the area of organizing metadata on the World Wide Web ? and considerations for future research are also provided.Item Developing a Common Submission System for ETDs in the Texas Digital Library(2007-05-30) Mikeal, Adam; Brace, Tim; Texas A&M University; University of Texas at AustinThe Texas Digital Library (TDL) is a consortium of universities organized to provide a single digital infrastructure for the scholarly activities of Texas universities. The four current Association of Research Libraries (ARL) universities and their systems comprise more than 40 campuses, 375,000 students, 30,000 faculty, and 100,000 staff; while non-ARL institutions represent another sizable addition in both students and faculty. TDL's principal collection is currently its federated collection of ETDs from three of the major institutions; The University of Texas, Texas A&M University, and Texas Tech University. Since the ARL institutions in Texas alone produce over 4,000 ETDs per year, the growth potential for a single state-wide repository is significant. To facilitate the creation of this federated collection, the schools agreed upon a common metadata standard represented by a MODS XML schema. Although this creates a baseline for metadata consistency, there exists ambiguity within the interpretation of the schema that creates usability and interoperability challenges. Name resolution issues are not addressed by the schema, and certain descriptive metadata elements need consistency in format and level of significance so that common repository functionality will operate intuitively across the collection. It was determined that a common ingestion point for ETDs was needed to collect metadata in a consistent, authoritative manner. A working group was formed that consisted of representatives from five universities, and a state-wide survey of the state of ETDs was conducted, with varied levels of engagement with ETDs reported. Many issues were identified, including policy questions such as open access publishing, copyright considerations and the collection of release authorizations, the role of infrastructure development such as a Shibboleth federation for authentication, and interoperability with third-party publishers such as UMI. ETD workflows at six schools were analyzed, and a meta-workflow was identified with three stages: ingest, verification, and publication. It was decided that Shibboleth would be used for authentication and identity management within the application. This paper reports on the results of the survey, and describes the system and submission workflow that was developed as a consequence. A functional prototype of the ingest stage has been built, and a full prototype with Shibboleth integration is slated for completion in June of 2007. Demonstrators of the application are expected to be deployed in fall of 2007 at three schools.Item Did We Scan That Book Twice?: Weeding the Texas Tech Dark Digital Archive(2014-03-25) Winkler, Heidi; Texas Tech UniversityThe Texas Tech University Libraries' digital collections began in 2004 with the intent to digitize as many books as possible in the name of open access. By the fall of 2013, that mission had been revised to focus on the preservation of materials unique to Texas Tech. We decided it was not in the institution’s best interest to devote resources to files in our digital dark archive that did not meet this mission. Using the HathiTrust catalog as our guide, we set out on an online trek to discover just how many digitized books being preserved on our servers were, in fact, distinct items not held elsewhere. Along the way, we tackled questions of to what do we provide access on our DSpace versus archiving on our servers and just how unique is "unique"? Weeding a digital resources library requires a different process of consideration than the weeding of a physical library. Further, we used this project to refine our digital archiving and preservation practices, the most important of which was the establishment of an archive change log.Item Digital Collaboration: Effective Partnerships & Repository Management(Texas Digital Library, 2012-05-25) Tarver, Hannah; Moore, Jeremy; University of North TexasThe UNT Libraries Digital Projects Unit regularly collaborates with other departments, campus entities, and external institutions. We currently have over two hundred partners of various kinds contributing to the more than 260,000 digital objects in our system. Our presentation will discuss procedures and techniques that can help to streamline collaborative projects, and outline some of the concerns that institutions may want to keep in mind when starting similar projects. We will focus on providing suggestions to help others have more successful collaborative digital projects including: considerations at the initial point of contact, managing the practical aspects of the process to make digitization run smoothly, and the benefits of collaborative projects for participants and the users that access their digital items.Item Digital Collections Units as Learning Labs(2016-05-25) Boeke, Cindy; Southern Methodist UniversityAs Digital Humanities and Digital Scholarship (DH/DS) become increasingly popular in many academic departments, digital collections can be used as teaching tools and/or the basis of projects for both undergraduate and graduate courses. SMU’s Norwick Center for Digital Services (nCDS) has created a variety of educational opportunities that are linked to curricular needs, including an MLS practicum, DH/DS practicum, digitization tours, lab demonstrations, and graduate seminars. We have a long-standing practicum program with the two local library schools. Over the past six years, we have trained 31 MLS students and graduates how to digitize special collections, create metadata, and upload items into CUL Digital Collections. Several of them are now employed as digital librarians throughout the area. More recently, we added a Digital Humanities Practicum that is helping SMU and local graduate students and professors with their DH/DS career development. nCDS staff teach the students digitization, metadata creation, and digital collections development using CUL Digital Collections. Over the past seven years, nCDS has provided guided tours of our digital photography studio and digitization/metadata lab that include background overviews on CUL Digital Collections and the digital library profession. Tours are given to a wide range of audiences, including potential donors, writers, community organizations, scholars, staff, and myriad people who are interested in the digitization of special collections. More recently, we have added an educational component, which incorporates lab demonstrations that match specific course needs. Our 30-minute nCDS Digital Services Tour, divided into three stations, gives students an overview of digital photography, digitization/metadata creation, and digital collections. We have also conducted a three-hour graduate seminar, where students were taught concepts relating to copyright, digital collections development, digital photography/digitization, metadata creation, digital preservation, and information architecture. The practicums, tours, demonstrations, and seminars are a team effort, involving all members of the nCDS staff. The most important result we are achieving is a much closer relationship with the campus and local community. We see great potential to increase such activities in the future.Item Digital Initiatives at the University of North Texas Libraries(2007-05-30) Hartman, Cathy Nelson; University of North TexasItem A Digital Repository for the World of Physical Culture(2012-05-25) Caldwell, Lesley; Sipes, Brent; H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports; University of Texas at AustinThe H.J. Lutcher Stark Center is a burgeoning special collection library, archive, and museum that celebrates the world of physical culture and sports. The collection includes hundreds of thousands of cataloged -- and mostly uncatalogued items -- ranging from historical nutrition texts to decades old weightlifting equipment. Led by scholar-athletes Jan and Terry Todd, the Stark Center opened its doors in 2008. One of the largest donors to the Stark Center was Ottley Coulter who is recognized as the first historian of bodybuilding. A circus strongman, writer, and one of the founding fathers of weightlifting in the United States, Coulter was a hobbyist collector saving thousands of newspaper clippings, correspondence, and weightlifting publications. The Todds met Coulter in 1964, and eventually acquired his personal collection in 1975. Housing the Coulter collection and other rare materials, the Stark Center’s collection is the largest of its kind and the staff recognized the need to make their collection accessible to researchers unable to travel to their University of Texas location. The presentation will begin with the assessment process we went through when selecting our software solution. As a new institution with one dedicated librarian and no in-house technical staff, we had to consider our limited funding and staff size in our planning. Ultimately we chose to go with the open-source solution DSpace. Next the presentation will cover the steps necessary to create a digital repository, from testing and training to data transfer. With that we will share the issues we faced throughout the development cycle. For example, though Ottley Coulter was a collector, he was not a librarian. The items in his collection are briefly labeled if labeled at all. Hence, issues with controlled vocabulary stemmed from the fractured and chaotic nature of the Coulter clippings. Features of the presentation will include our transfer of 3,500 files from File Maker Pro into DSpace, the benefits and limits of optical character recognition (OCR) for archival documents, our rationale for and design of a one-page external submission form, and a tour of our DSpace collection. Our presentation will give insight into the struggles and successes of setting up a new library and establishing best practices for building an information repository in a start-up institution. The platform that DSpace provides for organizing rare materials and making them accessible to sport historians across the world is something Ottley Coulter could never have imagined when he started clipping newspaper stories one-hundred years ago.Item Emerging Trends and Evolving Issues in Open Access and Scholarly Communications(2015-04-27) Alemneh, Daniel; Helge, Kris; Priyanto, Ida Fajar; Tmava, Ahmet Meti; University of North Texas; Tarrant County CollegeThe manner in which scholarly research is conducted is changing rapidly. As researchers continue to produce and share a wide variety of research outputs and scholarly contributions, in new ways, understanding of the factors influencing adoption, how they are being used, their implications for research practices and policy remains limited. This presentation will provide an overview of emerging trends in scholarly communication and the roles of diverse stakeholders ranging from individual researchers, scholars, and library and information professionals to institutions, publishers and professional societies. In light of the increasingly global Open Access movement and the evolving landscape of Scholarly Communication, the panelist will share their preliminary findings of their doctoral researches and further speculate the implication of open educational resources on copyrights, access, and preservation at global level.Item Finding Roots, Gems, and Inspiration: Understanding Ultimate Use of Digital Materials(2014-03-14) Thompson, Santi; Reilly, Michele; University of Houston; Central Washington UniversityThe University of Houston Digital Library (UHDL) is the point of virtual access for digitized cultural, historical and research materials for the university’s libraries. UHDL developed a "digital cart” system (DCS) that allow users to download high resolution images from its collections. The DCS records important information supplied by the user regarding the ultimate use of the downloaded images. Until now, no formal analysis of the transaction log for the DCS has been completed. This research is significant because little is known about the ultimate use of digital library materials. Current literature suggests that this problem is not uncommon among digital libraries around the world. Our analysis begins to fill a critical gap in the professional conversation on digital libraries by directly contributing to the small body of literature that is asking who uses digital libraries and for what purposes. This presentation will outline how researchers analyzed data from portions of the transaction logs from the DCS from 2010 to 2013. From this analysis, they will highlight some of the interesting and innovative ultimate uses by patrons. The researchers will discuss the study and offer audience members approaches for analyzing data to determine ultimate use and its ramifications inside and outside of the classroom.Item Fostering Collaboration through Digital Libraries in Latin America(2010-05-17) Sanchez, J. Alfredo; Universidad de las Americas PueblaResearch institutions in Latin America are geographically dispersed in about 20 countries with diverse levels of (under) development. Though collaborative projects have been undertaken both at national and international levels in diverse knowledge and activity domains, finding partners for joint multi-lateral initiatives is not always straightforward. Funding for joint projects that may be available from international agencies may remain unused sometimes because potential participants are not aware of the partnerships that may be established. In this talk I posit that digital libraries with open access repositories may become means for fostering collaboration within Latin American countries and also between Latin America and other regions of the world. I discuss specific projects aimed at inferring and visualizing implicit collaboration networks that may be the basis for promoting projects with participants from multiple institutions in diverse countries.Item Harvesting Quality: Evaluating Metadata for Digital Collections(2014-03-25) Biswas, Paromita; Western Carolina UniversityMetadata creation practices for digital library projects vary widely amongst libraries. Digital library projects often have to deal with multiple metadata creators, new formats and resources, and dynamic metadata standards for different communities (Park & Tosaka, 2010). As a result while accuracy and consistency in metadata are prioritized by field practitioners, metadata records created for specific digital projects may lack the quality needed to support successful end-user resource discovery and access. Park and Tosaka’s survey of metadata quality control in digital repositories and collections reveal that digital repositories often rely on periodic sampling or peer review of original metadata records as mechanisms for quality assurance (Park & Tosaka, 2010). This poster proposal presents another means of running quality checks on metadata created for digital projects based on Hunter Library’s experience with the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway tool used for harvesting metadata for digital collections into WorldCat. Hunter Library’s digital collections are described using Dublin Core in Contentdm and the Library has recently started harvesting its collections into WorldCat using Gateway. During harvesting the Gateway, by default, places the names of “creators” and “contributors” recorded in separate fields in the local metadata environment into one broad “Author” field for WorldCat users. A cursory review of this “Author” field in WorldCat for several harvested items from one of the library’s collections revealed an unexpected presence of corporate body names alongside personal names. Consequently this led to an evaluation of how the “creator” and “contributor” fields had been used in that collection. The “Frequency Analysis” feature in Gateway proved to be particularly useful in this evaluation since it provided a breakdown of each field in a particular collection by the values used in that field and the number of times they had been used. For example, a high frequency usage of a particular name indicated that the usage had not been a random mistake but had been consistent. A subsequent analysis of the library’s digital collections’ metadata using “Frequency Analysis” revealed that for some collections, the “contributor” field had been used to record entities whose roles, in relation to the item described, spanned from publisher, printer, editor, or recipient of letter. However, the library’s then current metadata schema had limited the definition of the “contributor” field to entities who had a direct but secondary role in the creation of an item like editors or illustrators. This discrepancy between the library’s metadata schema and the usage of the “contributor” field led to a redefinition of the role of the “contributor.” The schema now incorporates the plethora of roles that “contributors” could have in relation to an item and recommends that the role of each “contributor” be explained in the “description” field to account for the diversity of roles. Updating of the schema has thus promoted consistency in recording the “contributor” field across the library’s digital collections while also possibly benefitting users searching for an item by the various names associated with it.
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