2015 Texas Conference of Digital Libraries

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/2249.1/68403

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REVEAL: Read and View English and American Literature
(2015-04-28) Law, Kristin; University of Texas at Austin; Harry Ransom Center
While the Harry Ransom Center holds a vast collection of manuscripts, rare books, photographs, and works of art, our digital collections website displays only a fraction of these treasures. This past year we launched a one-year initiative designed to expand access to our archival collections by dramatically increasing the number of items available for online viewing. The REVEAL project (REad and View English and American Literature) entails digitizing entire manuscript collections, reusing descriptive metadata from finding aids, and delivering this content online through CONTENTdm. When the project is completed in the spring of 2015, we expect to have created over 20,000 images from 25 literary manuscript collections, which will nearly double the number of images available to our online researchers. The collections were drawn from our extensive British and American literature holdings, and include work from authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Joseph Conrad, Zane Grey, Violet Hunt, Washington Irving, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Oscar Wilde. Materials range from loose manuscripts to correspondence, bound volumes, photographs, scrapbooks, galley proofs, and even a few unusual items. In the past, our digital collections were often created by carefully selecting items and manually producing descriptive metadata. The REVEAL project instead developed a workflow for large-scale digitization of complete collections, building upon previous cataloging work. In this presentation we will discuss our process for re-formatting finding aids into metadata and we will describe our workflows for mass digitization and processing of image files. By sharing the outcomes of challenges we encountered and lessons learned along the way, we hope to provide ideas for other institutions who may be considering undertaking similar initiatives.
Teaching Digital Curation: Access and Preservation
(2015-04-28) Plumer, Danielle; Texas State Library and Archives Commission
Digital curation is a broad concept. Many institutions focus on the preservation aspect of the curation lifecycle; others lean toward access and use. This presentation will describe graduate courses addressing both aspects of curation, including the development of a sequence of courses at the University of North Texas College of Information as part of the iCAMP project (http://icamp.unt.edu) and a course on "Digital Public History" offered at Texas State University in Fall 2014. It will argue that a closer relationship between access and preservation must be explored in education as in practice to support the complete spectrum of digital curation.
Digitization Project Rubric
(2015-04-28) Rankins, Derek; McIntosh, Marcia; University of North Texas
The ability to accurately estimate the completion of a digitization project is highly valuable when working with multiple collections, stakeholders, and deadlines. Unfortunately, when encountering a wide variety of objects in differing quantities, any estimate generated can tend more towards intuition than be based on an accurate knowledge of digitization speeds or workflow capacity. The Project Completion Rubric developed at the University of North Texas Digital Projects Unit attempts to provide these more realistic pieces for estimating project completion. This presentation will discuss the first phase of the rubric’s creation: estimating digitization.
Archiving in the Cloud: Tackling Security, Scale and Savings
(2015-04-28) Corley, Alex; Amazon Web Services
With an ever-increasing volume of digital records and compliance requirements, digital archiving is shifting from a more routine approach to delivering strategic value across public sector organizations. Mission critical programs across government, education and nonprofits are looking for ways to keep data content (scientific, video, photography, historic, courts, libraries) intact and provide evidence of events that transpired for mission critical evidentiary based objectives or for research programs that must be accessed to drive scientific breakthroughs. This session will provide a technical overview of digital archiving on the cloud and highlight how organizations like the State of Michigan, University of AZ, UT Austin Library and others are using the cloud for long term digital preservation and some specific examples of how and why this has optimized their environments.
Elements of Successful Online Journal Publishing
(2015-04-28) Wackerman, Dillon; Reynolds, Phil; Stephen F. Austin State University
At the Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) at Stephen F. Austin State University (SFASU), we have discovered that there are many complex details to launching a successful online journal-publishing program. In our lead role at SFASU, we have streamlined implementation to make this a relatively straightforward process for the journal managers and editors. Most of the journal editors with whom we currently work are experienced authors and reviewers, but they rely upon us to assist them with the design, implementation and editorial processes. Following this, we have found it beneficial to provide comprehensive and personalized customer support and training. Some of these complex details that need our active support include layout and design, management, training and the creation of policies and procedures. Through practical experience, the CDS has learned how to guide the process and decisions and take an active role in the success of the online journal-publishing program.
The Sweet Smell (and Taste) of Success: Incentivizing ORCID iD Sign-Ups Among Faculty and Graduate Students
(2015-04-28) Chan-Park, Christina; Peterson-Lugo, Billie; Baylor University
ORCID identifiers (ORCID iDs) are a persistent unique identifier for researchers and scholars and enable the automation of links to research objects such as publications, grants, presentations, data, patents and more -- a DOI for researchers and scholars. ORCID iDs also help research offices oversee the research activities of campus scholars. However, in order to reap the benefits of having a unique identifier, most scholars must sign up individually for a free ORCID iD. As ORCID iDs become the de rigueur id, institutions have an increased need for a record of their researchers’ ORCID iDs, and many who have the resources have joined as institutional members which allows them both to assign ORCID iDs and to mine information from the ORCID registry. For example, in 2014 personnel at the Texas A&M libraries implemented a system, using the Vireo electronic theses and dissertations software, to mint ORCID iDs for more than 10,000 graduate students. They also assign ORCID iDs to any faculty who request one. (http://tinyurl.com/mdbr8x5) The Baylor University Libraries do not have the resources to take on the assignment of ORCID iDs at this level. However, we know Baylor researchers are encountering the need to establish ORCID iDs when they submit articles for publication or apply for grants. We also see value in new researchers (graduate students) establishing ORCID iDs early in their research careers. Consequently, personnel in the Baylor University Libraries developed a cost-effective, low-tech ORCID iD campaign with input from ORCID. The campaign had two projected outcomes: * Raise awareness of ORCID iDs and their benefits with Baylor faculty and graduate students; and * Have at least 300 Baylor faculty or graduate students (10% of the research population) establish their ORCID iDs. We believe that the concepts and processes we used for our ORCID campaign can be transferred to other institutions that face comparable resource challenges. This 24x7 presentation will cover the processes (and incentives) we used during our Spring 2015 campaign to entice faculty and graduate students to obtain ORCID iDs and to help them add content to their ORCID accounts. In addition, we will analyze the perceived success of the campaign and discuss our plans and ideas to keep the momentum going.
Chronicling Space Shuttle Columbia through Digital Archives
(2015-04-28) Marsh, Corrie; Stephen F. Austin State University
Twelve years ago, on February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over East Texas and Louisiana. This presentation will highlight how the Stephen F. Austin State University community was a key member of the search and recovery operations following the disaster. The Center for Digital Scholarship created digital documentation for the remembrances of University participants. Research, geospatial mapping, first responder accounts, artwork, images, and personal commentaries have been captured digitally to provide lasting resources for the study of the NASA Space Shuttle Program that ended in 2011.
Putting the Puzzle Pieces Together: Forming UH Libraries Digital Preservation Landscape
(2015-04-28) Thompson, Santi; Krewer, Andrew; Wu, Annie; Manning, Mary; Spragg, Rob; University of Houston
As more institutions digitize rare and unique materials and acquire born digital objects, the need for a robust and sustainable digital preservation program is critical for long-term access to this content. In the summer of 2014, the University of Houston Libraries established a Digital Preservation Task Force to create a digital preservation policy and identify strategies, actions, and tools needed to preserve digital assets maintained by UH Libraries. This presentation will outline the digital preservation policy tool kit being used by the task force to generate a digital preservation policy and develop a digital preservation system. A substantial portion of the presentation will focus on the creation of the digital preservation policy for UH Libraries. The task force selected the Action Plan for Developing a Digital Preservation Program as a model to draft the policy. Conforming to the OAIS Reference Model and the Trusted Digital Repository guidelines, this document guides institutions through the creation of a high-level framework for digital preservation, drafting local digital preservation policies and procedures, and identifying resources needed to sustain a digital preservation program. Presenters will describe how they used this tool to generate digital preservation documentation and will share portions of their work to date. Additionally, the presentation will focus on the methods used to identify potential digital information systems to assist with the preservation process. Presenters will outline the process of selecting three potential systems to evaluate and share the task forces results from testing one system. The presentation will conclude with recommendations from the task force and a discussion on how others can apply the methods used by UH Libraries to implement a digital preservation solution for their materials.
Piloting a Peer-Review Process for Trusted Digital Repositories
(2015-04-28) Waugh, Laura; Tarver, Hannah; Alemneh, Daniel; Krahmer, Ana; Phillips, Mark; University of North Texas
In 2014, the University of North Texas (UNT) and the University of Florida (UF) began a collaborative process to each complete a self-audit using the Trusted Repository Audit Checklist (TRAC) for their institutions’ digital repositories. In addition to the self-audit, each institution agreed to participate in a peer-review process for evaluating and scoring each other’s self-audit and supplied documentation. This presentation discusses the implementation of a peer-to-peer process for TRAC to build towards becoming a Trusted Digital Repository, documentation needed and resources available, and how this type of process supports future collaborations for achieving TRAC goals in digital libraries.
Zine Party! Collaborating across UT Libraries to Experiment with Methods, Workflows & Tools, Build Awareness of a Collection, and Teach Metadata Literacy
(2015-04-28) Hecker, Jennifer; Pad, Rebecca; Choate, Aaron; Cofield, Melanie; Schwartz, Laura; Marchock, Ann; University of Texas at Austin
Recent donations of two large collections of zines* to UT’s Fine Arts Library have highlighted the need to improve access to the zines and, at the same time, staff across the Libraries have become more and more interested in exploring new ways to think about describing resources, crowdsourcing, metadata literacy, community engagement, software development, and gamification. Identifying an opportunity to build awareness of the zine collection, and deepen student and community engagement with the Libraries, we created an event that would allow us to explore these topics, while also doing some PR for the zine collection. The resulting Zine Party! event kicked off with an overview of the world of zines, zine collections and zine librarianship around the country, and a primer on how UT Libraries catalogs zines, then introduced attendees to the xZINECOREx metadata schema and invited them to input catalog metadata using a gamified interface we adapted for local use. The diverse goals of the various collaborators came together in this event: the event provided an opportunity to ask questions related to public relations, community outreach and engagement, the Libraries’ desire to increase engagement with community software development models, and the incorporation of crowdsourcing into some of our metadata workflows. The profession as a whole has been abuzz with talk of educating the public about what we do as a path to building greater support for the missions of libraries, archives and museums, and we hope we have made a dent in this larger goal as well. Our panel will include representatives from each of the involved departments who will share their work on the project, and discuss their motivations and takeaways. *magazines made for love, not money
All In For the Bears: The History and Impact of the Baylor University Libraries Athletics Archive
(2015-04-27) Stuhr, Darryl; Ames, Eric
When members of the Digital Projects Group in Baylor’s Electronic Library first sat down with legendary football head coach Grant Teaff, they couldn't have predicted the scope and impact the resulting Baylor University Libraries Athletics Archive (BULAA) would have on preserving university history, raising funds and promoting morale with alumni. Darryl Stuhr – Assistant Director for Digital Projects – and Eric Ames – Curator of Digital Collections - will address the history of the project, its workflow and mechanics, and its impact on donors, Bears supporters and historians around the world. Attendees will gain insight on how to manage a multi-source digital collection, tips on selecting outsource service providers and soliciting support from nontraditional givers.
Voices from Small Places
(2015-04-27) Snowden, Kelley; Beisel, Perky; Reynolds, Linda; Stephen F. Austin State University
When the economic power of a small rural community declines, there’s still value in the social history that defines a place. Researchers at Stephen F. Austin State University help communities preserve and pass on what’s most important about the places they’ve called home. Voices from Small Places focuses on documenting and preserving the history of small places (population under 100) found throughout East Texas. It uses a unique combination of methods to create a multidimensional history including photovoice, oral history interviews, a site survey, and the development of a digital collection. Using these methods the history of these small communities is documented and made available to the public. In addition to providing information for research, by documenting the history of these small places and placing them back into the larger historical narrative, East Texas is better understood as a region.
ArchivesDirect Pilot - Road-testing Archivematica hosting in DuraCloud
(2015-04-27) Mumma, Courtney; Rushing, Amy; Barrera-Gomez, Julianna; Artefactual Systems; University of Texas at San Antonio
UTSA Library was one of 9 pilot partners who tested Archivematica hosted in DuraCloud over several months in the Fall/Winter of 2014/2015. The purpose of the testing was to launch the first open-source, OAIS digital preservation service in March 2015. Pilot testers communicated via discussion lists and a group wiki, sharing their use cases and workflows. Artefactual and DuraSpace, the developers behind Archivematica and DuraCloud, respectively, offered training, workflow consulting, system support and enhancements, and scalability strategies. This panel will discuss the pilot from the administrative, processing and developer perspectives, with a focus on the UTSA experience and the changes that had to be made to the software to allow for large-scale processing and hosting.
Using Islandora for Open-Source Powered Digital Collections
(2015-04-27) Keswick, Tommy; The Cherry Hill Company
Islandora brings together the Fedora Repository Project, the Drupal content management system, and the Apache Solr search platform to enable librarians and other content managers to easily ingest and create collections with all types of digital assets. This presentation will demonstrate the features of Islandora that make it a compelling choice for building online digital collections. We will also highlight the potential for customizations through the open source architecture, including using Drupal for the administrative interface and Solr for search and indexing.
Hitting the Road towards a Greater Digital Destination: Evaluating and Testing DAMS at the University of Houston Libraries
(2015-04-27) Thompson, Santi; Wu, Annie; Weidner, Andrew; Watkins, Sean; Prilop, Valerie; Vacek, Rachel; University of Houston
Since 2009, the University of Houston (UH) Libraries has digitized tens of thousands of rare and unique items and made them available for research through its UH Digital Library (UHDL) based on CONTENTdm. Six years later, the need for a digital asset management system (DAMS) that can facilitate large scale digitization, provide innovative features for users, and offer more efficient workflows for librarians and staff has emerged. To address these needs, UH Libraries formed the DAMS Task Force in the summer of 2014. The group’s goal was to identify a system that can support the growing expectations of the UHDL. This presentation will focus on the two core activities, needs assessment and DAMS evaluation, that the task force completed. The key portions of the needs assessment include: the process of literature review on DAMS evaluation and migration; research on tools utilized by peer institutions; and library stakeholder interviews. The presentation will then cover how task force members compiled the results of the assessment to establish DAMS evaluation criteria. The evaluation process consisted of an environmental scan of possible DAMS to test, the creation of criteria to narrow the list of DAMS down for in-depth testing, and the comprehensive testing of the DSpace and Fedora systems. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of the task force’s results as well as the lessons learned from the research and evaluation process. It will also reflect on the important role that collaboration, project management, and strategic planning played in this team-based approach to DAMS selection.
Introducing the Expanding Dataverse
(2015-04-27) Castro, Eleni; Quigley, Elizabeth; Harvard University
The Dataverse Project started in 2006 at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science as an open source software application to share, cite and archive data. From its beginnings, Dataverse (then referred as the ‘Dataverse Network’) has provided a robust infrastructure for data stewards to host and archive data, while offering researchers an easy way to share and get credit for their data. Since then, there are now ten Dataverse repositories that share metadata with each other hosted in institutions around the world, which together serve more than 55,000 datasets with 750,000 data files (dataverse.org). These Dataverse repositories are using the Dataverse software in a variety of ways, from supporting existing large data archives to building institutional or public repositories. One of these Dataverse repositories is the Harvard Dataverse, that alone hosts more than 800 dataverses (containers of datasets) owned and managed by either researchers, research groups, organizations, departments or journals. The Harvard Dataverse has so far served more than a million downloads of its datasets, allowing researchers around the world to reuse the data, discover new findings, and extend or verify previous work. While the Dataverse project started from the social sciences for the social sciences, it has now expanded to benefit a wide range of disciplines and scientific domains (astronomy, life sciences, etc) leveraging our progress in the social science domain to define and enhance data publishing across all research communities. In particular, as part of the new Dataverse release (v4.0), we have evaluated the features needed in data publishing so data can be properly shared, found, accessed and reused. This presentation will provide some background information on the Dataverse's history and showcase the new features we have developed in version 4.0 for researchers.
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 College
The 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.
Using Omeka and Neatline to Build an Interactive Campus Map
(2015-04-27) King, Max; Strohm, Adam; Illinois Institute of Technology
The Illinois Institute of Technology campus was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005, and contains a building, Mies van der Rohe's S.R. Crown Hall, that was named a National Historic Landmark in 2001. Our goal was to showcase the campus, its architecture, and the university’s history via a dynamic digital resource. This talk covers the conception, development, and design of the campus map site that was built using Omeka, along with the Neatline, Waypoints and Simile Timeline plugins, to allow users to explore the campus and see how it has changed over the institution’s 125 year history. We’ll discuss the entire arc of the project, including selecting software, identifying hardware needs, setting project goals, determining our audience, and working with university stakeholders. We’ll delve into our decision-making process regarding content selection and presentation, including the juggling act of designing for mobile mapping functionality without sacrificing desktop design. We’ll also discuss the challenge of building a site that can be developed iteratively, with an eye towards future enhancement and sustainability. Creating a digital resource of this nature is challenge enough in and of itself, but doing so as a two-person team of relative newcomers, at a university library without dedicated programmers on staff, ups the ante considerably. Attendees will leave this presentation not just with an understanding of our project, but with suggestions on how to approach challenging digital projects at their own institution.
“The sight of your letter pricks my heart through”: Digitizing the Brownings’ Correspondence at the Harry Ransom Center
(2015-04-27) Floyd, Susan; Harry Ransom Center; University of Texas at Austin
This presentation will hit upon several of the conference’s broad areas of concern, highlighting unexpected finds within these important collection materials, institutional partnerships, and “showing off a digital project.” It will include slides describing our digitization process, including identifying relevant collection items, developing a project workflow with Baylor, metadata and scanning trouble-shooting, and a consideration of intellectual and archival issues encountered during the project.
The Digital Dilemma: Examining the Practicality of Digital Forensics in Cultural Institutions
(2015-04-27) Kelley, Angelique; University of Texas at San Antonio
In today’s world, technology has become a vital component of our day-to-day lives; impacting everything from the pictures we take to the ways we communicate to the methods we use to safeguard important pieces of data. It should therefore come as no surprise that many cultural institutions, including galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, have been forced to adapt not only their collection policies but also their preservation methods to accommodate the ever-changing technologies and formats making their way into permanent collections. One technique that has been gaining popularity in recent years is digital forensics, a criminal science approach with a surprising correlation to the needs of cultural institutions with digital content. While digital forensics and cultural institutions share a common need for legal document authentication and controlled archival storage, the question remains: how practical are these techniques for collecting institutions outside of government archives? Is digital forensics to become accepted archival management practice, or are cultural institutions likely to continue their current practices for handling digital materials while still searching for a better solution? These questions will be explored through an analysis and comparison of BitCurator and Archivematica, common digital forensics software packages currently in use within many cultural institutions. This presentation will review personal experiences with these programs gained through a Fall 2014 internship with the University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries, Special Collections. This internship was undertaken as part of the internship and research writing requirements of the Certificate in Digital Curation program offered at the Johns Hopkins University. Additionally, assessments of current literature on the topic will be evaluated in order to give a big picture image of how digital forensics might be utilized, so that cultural institution personnel can better assess the practicality of digital forensics within any given collection.

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