2008 Texas Conference on Digital Libraries

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/2249.1/56864

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    ETD Management in the Texas Digital Library
    (2008-06-09) Brace, Tim; Mikeal, Adam; Paz, Jay; Phillips, Scott; McFarland, Mark; Leggett, John; Texas A&M University; University of Texas at Austin; Texas Digital Library
    One of the earliest TDL initiatives was a federated collection of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) from across the state. There are currently four schools contributing over 4000 ETDs per year, and with 16 participating member schools in TDL, this number is continually increasing. A diverse set of content contributors introduces problems of inconsistent metadata and incompatible storage and access methods, making it difficult to offer effective tools and services. This situation drove the decision to create a common system for managing the entire life-cycle of ETDs, from the point of ingestion to final publication. ETD management fits nicely with the other services offered by TDL, and a single point of ingestion is appealing for both technical and economic reasons. In 2007, we reported on the status of the functional system prototype. Much progress has been made toward implementation of this system, starting with the majority of the development, and leading to the demonstrator event that is currently taking place in spring 2008 at Texas A&M University and the University of Texas. This presentation discusses the ETD management system from a functional point-of-view, starting with the student interface for ETD submission (the ingestion point into the repository), and then covering the administrative interface used by university staff members for managing the iterative verification workflow. Finally, we will discuss the requirements for moving forward into a production environment. These include testing and scaling the system to handle the large numbers of users dispersed over a significant geographic area (Texas is the third-highest producer of PhDs in the United States). Rough timelines will be discussed for deployment, first at Texas A&M and the University of Texas, then as the system is gradually expanded through a program of beta testers, and finally into open enrollment.
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    Embedding A Digital Repository within the Texas A&M University Library Web Services
    (2008-06-09) Leggett, John; Tarpley, Jeremy; Ponsford, Bennett; Phillips, Scott; Mikeal, Adam; Maslov, Alexey; Messinger, Tina; Armstrong, Tommy; Creel, James; Texas A&M University; Texas Digital Library
    The development and deployment of the Manakin theme for the digital repository at Texas A&M University provides an informative case study in embedding DSpace repositories within an institutional web presence. Last year, the Texas A&M University Libraries began a redesign of the existing web interface in accordance with a new institution-wide branding initiative. A collaborative effort between administrators, designers, and developers has yielded a look and feel for the institutional repository that integrates seamlessly with the library's and university's other web services while providing the unique functionalities required by various and diverse collections. The use of Manakin themes ensured that the development process was modular and employed well-established web development techniques and technologies. The design of the digital repository theme began with consultations between library designers and TAMU branding authorities. The designers used Photoshop to produce mock-up pages for primary use cases with colors, fonts, and graphics that adhered to the institutional branding mandates while satisfying usability heuristics. These designs underwent iterative refinement with comments from administrators and developers. When all parties were satisfied, the design team translated the images into HTML and CSS mock-ups for web browser rendering. Designers handed off the HTML code to the Manakin theme developers, who coded XSL to produce such HTML from XML DRI data generated from the repository. Developers coded additional Javascript to implement the UI vision of the designers. Developers produced two Manakin themes of different specificity - A theme for the repository in general, and one that specifically applied to the Geologic Atlas of the United States map collection. That theme, known as "Geofolios," employs the Yahoo! Maps API and Google Earth overlays to allow patrons to browse the collection in the context of manipulable maps indicating the geographic context of the folios. In summary, embedding the digital repository in the institutional web presence required no more effort than other XML-based content would have. The pre-development design process and use of XSL transforms are standard practices in institutional web development. Manakin's ability to apply themes to specific content enabled a neat separation of development between the Geofolios theme and the general theme. THe augmentation of additional collections with customized interfaces in the future would be a similarly modular activity. Importantly, the use of Manakin themes provides a seamless integration between the repository and the library's existing web presence, reducing patrons' cognitive overhead in navigating between the repository and other services.
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    Energy Systems Laboratory:Building a Repository Collection and Planning for the Future
    (2008-06-09) Koenig, Jay; Haberl, Jeff S.; Gilman, Don; Hughes, Sherrie; Texas A&M University; Energy Systems Laboratory
    The Energy Systems Laboratory (ESL) is a division of the Texas Engineering Experiment Station and part of the Texas A&M University System. First established in 1939, the ESL maintains a testing laboratory on the Riverside Campus in Bryan, Texas, and offices on the main campus of Texas A&M. The group consists of five faculty members from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, as well as three faculty members from the Departments of Architecture and Construction Science. The lab currently employs approximately 120 staff members, including mechanical engineers, computer science graduates, lab technicians, support staff, and graduate and undergraduate students. The Lab focuses on energy-related research, energy efficiency, and emissions reduction, and has a total annual income for external research and testing exceeding $4.5 million. With energy research and policy at the forefront of public discussion, both academic and political, the urgency of making this research publicly available is very high. The Energy Systems Laboratory collection in the Texas A&M Digital Repository is unique in a number of ways. After first contacting the library in March 2005, the ESL became one of Texas A&M's earliest adopters of the repository. The collection is very diverse, and contains conference proceedings, published articles, technical reports, and electronic theses and dissertations produced by students affiliated with the ESL. The ESL is also the first repository client to take the initiative of assigning staff members to learn the batch loading process for themselves, both relieving library staff of the burden and allowing the collection to expand even more rapidly. The collection has also successfully made the transition, despite some challenges, from the original DSpace interface to the Manakin-themed repository now in place. After three years, the collection remains one of the largest collections in the system, continues to grow as more of the group's research and publications are added to the collection, and is held forth as a model collection to prospective repository clients in the Texas A&M community. This is a testament to the Energy Systems Laboratory's dedication to the building of their repository collection, and their clear understanding of the advantages of open access. This presentation will discuss the excellent working relationship built between the Energy System Laboratory and the library, and how much relationships can be fostered with other collections as the repository expands. It will also recount the events leading up to the ESL's original adoption of the repository, and will chronicle the evolution of the repository collection, the addition of new content, the transition and adaptation to new technology, the copyright and other challenges faced, and the group's future needs for additional tools and services.
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    Supporting a Research Agenda: Using Library Funds for Access to Datasets in Management and the Social Sciences
    (2008-06-09) Safley, Ellen; Venetis, Mary Jo; University of Texas at Dallas
    Over the past 8 years, the University of Texas at Dallas Libraries made a concerted effort to support the quantitative research of the faculty through the licensing of social and business datasets. For research efforts to be competitive, the faculty in the School of Management requested access to standard financial datasets so they could explore questions posed by larger, more established business programs. If the faculty was unable to use the same data resources and the same level of observation, their research would not be credible. Rather than purchase more monographs, the faculty provided a strong argument for using some funds to improve their research quality. While their use of journal collections was strong, the need for access to datasets was deemed essential for quantitative programs. Secondly, the School of Economics, Political and Policy Sciences wanted access to social and country macroeconomic data to support programs in geographic information systems, political science, criminology, and economics. In addition to supporting faculty and graduate student research, the students developed skills that could be used in their future work on real problems impacting cities and social organizations. Finally, a Data Librarian was added to the library staff to help customers gain access to the files and to market the products. The Librarian worked individually with faculty and students to find the appropriate files, gain access to various platforms, and show them how to extract and organize the datasets. WIthout someone in place, the resources would be underutilized. The Library developed the expertise to negotiate licenses to dataset resources. Since most datasets are licensed to commercial firms, the contracts are very different and extended negotiations can occur. In addition, how the datasets will be used and controlled requires cooperation from the Library and the Dean of the programs. The School of Management developed an internal committee of faculty members to reduce duplication of datasets, to create a priority for products, and to work with the Library to control the acquisition process. Rather than responding to individuals needs from faculty members, the Library deals directly with one representative from the committee. The success of the Data Services program elevates the quality of the work of the faculty and the University, provides a means for the Library to partner with them and to share the collective organizational expertise of the librarians, and recognizes what information is needed to research a problem in the 21st century. During the 2008, the Library received special recognition from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools for allocating funds to acquire and license datasets and for recognizing the need to provide information through a variety of means. In the future, the Library strives to incorporate the acquisition and storage of research datasets into its mission and to archive the research within the Texas Digital Library.
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    Using Rich-Media in Digitization Education: GLIFOS-media toolset projects at the School of Information
    (2008-06-09) Stewart, Quinn; Arias, Rodrigo; University of Texas at Austin; GLIFOS
    This presentation will examine the use of the GLIFOS-media toolset in 3 classes at the School of Information at The University of Texas, "Creating and Using Digital Media Collections", "Advanced Digitization: Creating Sustainable Collections" and "Understanding and Serving Users". Each of these courses involves students working with digitized materials to create rich-media access copies of the materials using XML-based tools created by GLIFOS. An ongoing problem for both tenured and tenure-track faculty at the School of Information is not only staying current with digital library technologies, but trying to teach and implement them in the classroom. As part of an IMLS-funded digitization curriculum, Dr. Grete Pasch and Quinn Stewart co-developed the "Creating and Using Digital Media Collections" course in the spring semester of 2006. This course utilized the Glifos-media toolset in creating an indexed, synchronized, searchable collection of 14 historic kinescope films from the Harry Ransom Center of "The Mike Wallace Interview" from 1957-58. Students of Dr. Gary Geisler did further work on the collection in spring 2007 and 2008, with the assistance of Quinn Stewart. Positive feedback from students, and successful interaction with the software developers led to the inclusion of the "Texas Legacy Project" in spring 2007. This project is a collection of over 200 video oral history interviews with Texas conservationists, maintained by the Conservation History Association of Texas. Students indexed the content and synchronized the transcript with the video for 12 of those interviews, using the gmCreator rich-media creation tool. They then created full-size access versions of the interviews, each with a table of contents, synchronized transcript, annotation page, and search page. Based upon student and end-user feedback, and experience gained using this "co-instructor" model with 10-15 students, Stewart approached Dr. Phil Doty and Dr. Luis Francisco-Revilla about incorporating the Texas Legacy Project into the core course "Understanding and Serving Users". Using a tutorial-based teaching method, Stewart guided 54 students through preparing approximately 75 hours of video content for public use using the GLIFOS-media toolset. The Information Technology Lab in the School was setup to support the students in the two classes, and a workflow to handle the student-generated files was created. Output from the two classes was cataloged into GLIFOS-media library, the rich media digital library component of the GLIFOS-media toolset. Students could then search both within each interview, as well as across all of the interviewers. The gmCreator tool was also used to add geographic information to each of these interviews, allowing the viewer to simultaneously view the rich media presentation as well as geographic information using Google Earth. The same tutorial-based teaching method was used in the "Advanced Digitization: Creating Sustainable Collections" course taught by Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa. The video digitization portion of this course involved digitizing Umatic videotapes from the UT Ex-Students Association Distinguished Alumni Awards ceremonies for inclusion into the GLIFOS-media library at the School of Information.
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    The Texas A&M University Libraries Bridge Group: First Year Report
    (2008-06-09) Goodwin, Susan; Weimer, Kathy; Koenig, Jay; Furubotton, Lisa; Jaros, Joe; McGeachin, Robert; Tucker, Sandy; Texas A&M University
    The Texas A&M University Libraries Bridge Group was formed in 2007 and charged to "support the developing infrastructure of the Texas A&M University's and TDL's Repositories" by increasing the awareness among library staff of the Texas A&M institutional repository and other Texas Digital Library services, and to promote, facilitate, and support their use by the academic community at Texas A&M. The group consists of faculty librarians from a diverse set of backgrounds and functional areas within the library. As background, the Libraries communication approach is decentralized, which relies on each subject librarian, in their role as liaison, to communicate services to their assigned departmental areas. This concept extends to the communication of the concepts of open access, scholarly communication, repositories and TDL services, so it is imperative that all librarians have a certain level of understanding of the issues. This report will chronicle the building of the group's two-part strategy; first, to educate themselves on the issues of repositories and scholarly communication and secondly, creating a plan for and conducting library wide educational initiatives. Further, the report will include an overview of the ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication, which was attended by two of the group's members in December 2007, and the impact of that conference on the direction and focus of the group.
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    Preservation of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin in the Digital Repository
    (2008-06-09) McGeachin, Rob; Texas A&M University
    The 'Bulletin of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station' is being digitized for preservation, archived in the Texas A&M University Digital Repository, and made accessible to a worldwide audience. This bulletin series, which began publication in 1888, covers a wide variety of agricultural research reports. Subjects include grain, forage, fruit, and nut crop varieties, animal production and feeding, veterinary medicine, agricultural engineering and innovation, agricultural economics, and other information of scientific and historical value. Many bulletins contain photographs and figures with historical significance, for example, some of the first crop dusting airplanes used in 1925, and early cotton picking machinery from the 1920's. Each page of the original print bulletin is scanned with an OpticBook 3600 book edge scanner and saved as an archival gray scale tagged image file format (TIFF) file at 400 dpi for text pages or 600 dpi for figure or illustration pages. The page images are combined into a PDF document of the pages and optical character recognition generated searchable full text. Dublin Core metadata records are created for each Bulletin and National Agricultural Library Thesaurus subject terms are added to the records. The TIFF files, PDF file, and metadata record for each Bulletin are uploaded to the Digital Repository operated by the Texas A&M University Libraries. In addition to the search functionality of the repository, the metadata records are harvestable by web crawlers and incorporated in many other web search indexes making them more discoverable worldwide. This digital content is also being created in support of a distributed effort among academic libraries to provide content for a National Digital Library for Agriculture.
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    NIH Public Access Policy: What It Means for Authors and for Universities
    (2008-06-09) Furrh, Jamie L.; University of North Texas
    Part of the 2008 Consolidated Appropriations Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed includes a provision requiring the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to make its voluntary Public Access Policy mandatory. This is a landmark achievement, as it is the first Open Access initiative to be mandated by U.S. government. As with anything that is implemented for the first time, there are some questions and concerns regarding how this new law will work, and the pieces that need to be in place for it to be successful. This presentation will provide a description of what the current NIH Public Access Policy is(1); a brief history of the policy from 2004 to present day(2); discuss how the policy effects research authors and the institutions they work at; consider the six options on institutional compliance as presented by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, Science Commons, and Association of Research Libraries White Paper(3); examine actions taken by other Universities regarding Open Access; explain the work currently underway by the University of North Texas Health Science Center to ensure compliance; and discuss the future of scholarly communication(4) as it relates to the ultimate goal of UNTHSC regarding Open Access and compliance with NIH policy. References: (1) Public Access Homepage, http://publicaccess.nih.gov/, Accessed 4/7/2008. (2) English, Ray and Joseph, Heather. The NIH mandate: An open access landmark; 69; http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/erlnews/backissues2008/february08/nihupdate.cfm. Accessed 4/7/2008. (3) Carroll, M. W. Complying with the national institutes of health public access policy: Copyright considerations and options. SPARC, Science Commons, ARL; February 2008; Accessed 4/7/2008. (4) Hahn, K. L., Talk about talking about new models of scholarly communication. JEP, Winter, 2008; 11, pp. 1-14, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0011.108.
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    The Digital Assembly Line: Renning an effective and efficent digital lab
    (2008-06-09) Perrin, Joy; Henry, Cynthia; Texas Tech University
    Over the past year and a half, the Texas Tech University Libraries Digital Lab has experienced a huge learning curve. When the digital lab was first developing, the focus was on learning the equipment, the digitization process, developing workflows, and striving for quality. The lab typically ran with only 3-7 students, matching individual students to individual projects. This allowed detailed knowledge of the digitization process to be documented and to establish workflows for a variety of different types of formats that could be produced from the lab. Quality was highly coveted, regardless of the lack for speed in the lab. At this point, the library administration brought in project management training. This helped to streamline how projects were planned and allowed employees to explore how a project would be implemented before actually beginning the project. As the digitization efforts of the library increased, the number of projects increased and therefore the demand on the lab increased as well. Consequently the digital lab needed to explore new ways in order to become more efficient: by using human resources more effectively and by matching equipment to the digitization needs of the library. The lab was able to effect change by increasing the number of students to 24-36 and by increasing the number of hours the lab was staffing individuals. The lab was then forced to look at how students were assigned to projects. Instead of matching an individual student to an individual project, the lab moved to a system that uses the priority matrix for digital projects set by the DLI Team to assign a portion of the number of hours in the lab to each project. At the same time, the lab looked into increasing the productivity level as workflows had been established for several formats and quality was replaced for quantity; concurrently the lab manager evaluated the equipment in the lab and was able to identify ways to streamline efficiency by increasing the number and speed of the computers in the lab. In conclusion, Texas Tech University Libraries Digital Lab was grown significantly over the last year. We have moved from exploring how to develop digital projects to a fully functioning effective digital assembly line.