http://journal.code4lib.org/issues/issues/issue35
Table of Contents
Editorial: Introspection as Activism, or, Getting Our
Houses in Order
Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Those of us in libraries like to trace our history to
Alexandria or to the French governmental system of record-keeping, but the
construction of the modern GLAM world is far more recent, almost as new as
coding. It has evolved almost as rapidly. And its future is on
us, whether we choose to passively accept a status quo others build or to act
and grow and develop ourselves and our workplaces.
Bridging Technologies to Efficiently Arrange and Describe
Digital
Archives: the Bentley Historical Library’s
ArchivesSpace-Archivematica-DSpace Workflow Integration Project
Max Eckard, Dallas Pillen, Mike Shallcross
In recent
years, ArchivesSpace and Archivematica have emerged as two of the most exciting
open source platforms for working with digital archives. The former manages
accessions and collections and provides a framework for entering descriptive,
administrative, rights, and other metadata. The latter ingests digital content
and prepares information packages for long-term preservation and access. In
October 2016, the Bentley Historical Library wrapped up a two-year, $355,000
grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to partner with the University of
Michigan Library on the integration of these two systems in an end-to-end
workflow that will include the automated deposit of content into a DSpace
repository. This article provides context of the project and offers an in-depth
exploration of the project’s key development tasks, all of which were provided
by Artefactual Systems, the developers of Archivematica (code available at https://github.com/artefactual-labs/appraisal-tab).
The Devil’s Shoehorn: A case study of EAD to
ArchivesSpace migration at a large university
Dave Mayo, Kate Bowers
A band of archivists and IT professionals at Harvard took
on a project to convert nearly two million descriptions of archival collection
components from marked-up text into the ArchivesSpace archival metadata
management system. Starting in the
mid-1990s, Harvard was an alpha implementer of EAD, an SGML (later XML) text
markup language for electronic inventories, indexes, and finding aids that
archivists use to wend their way through the sometimes quirky filing systems
that bureaucracies establish for their records or the utter chaos in which some
individuals keep their personal archives. These pathfinder documents, designed to cope with messy reality, can
themselves be difficult to classify.
Portions of them are rigorously structured, while other parts are
narrative. Early documents predate the
establishment of the standard; many feature idiosyncratic encoding that had
been through several machine conversions, while others were freshly encoded and
fairly consistent. In this paper, we
will cover the practical and technical challenges involved in preparing a large (900MiB) corpus of XML for ingest into an open-source
archival information system (ArchivesSpace). This case study will give an
overview of the project, discuss problem discovery and problem solving, and
address the technical challenges, analysis, solutions, and decisions and
provide information on the tools produced and lessons learned. The authors of this piece are Kate Bowers,
Collections Services Archivist for Metadata, Systems, and Standards at the
Harvard University Archive, and Dave Mayo, a Digital Library Software Engineer
for Harvard’s Library and Technology Services.
Kate was heavily involved in both metadata analysis and later problem
solving, while Dave was the sole full-time developer assigned to the migration
project.
Participatory Design Methods for Collaboration and
Communication
Tara Wood, Cate Kompare
Website redesigns can be contentious and fraught in any
type of organization, and libraries are no exception. Coming to consensus on
priorities and design decisions is nearly impossible, as different groups
compete to ensure their subject or specialty area is represented. To keep
projects on track and on time, libraries may give a few staff members the
authority to make all of the decisions, while keeping user research limited to
a small number of usability tests. While these tactics are sometimes necessary, at best they
can leave many feeling left out of the process, and at worst, can result in
major oversights in the final design. Participatory design methods can bring users and
stakeholders into the design process and ultimately lead to a better design and
less friction in the project. The authors share their experience and lessons
learned using participatory design techniques in a website redesign project at
a large, multi-location academic library, and how these techniques facilitated
communication, shaped design decisions, and kept a complex, difficult project
on track.
Python, Google Sheets, and the Thesaurus for Graphic
Materials for Efficient Metadata Project Workflows
Jeremy Bartczak, Ivey Glendon
In 2017, the University of Virginia (U.Va.) will launch a
two year initiative to celebrate the bicentennial anniversary of the
University’s founding in 1819. The U.Va. Library is participating in this event
by digitizing some 20,000 photographs and negatives that document student life
on the U.Va. grounds in the 1960s and 1970s. Metadata librarians and archivists are well-versed in the
challenges associated with generating digital content and accompanying
description within the context of limited resources. This paper describes how
technology and new approaches to metadata design have enabled the University of
Virginia’s Metadata Analysis and Design Department to rapidly and successfully
generate accurate description for these digital objects. Python’s pandas module
improves efficiency by cleaning and repurposing data recorded at digitization,
while the lxml module builds MODS XML programmatically from CSV tables. A
simplified technique for subject heading selection and assignment in Google
Sheets provides a collaborative environment for streamlined metadata creation
and data quality control.
Supporting Oral Histories in Islandora
Marcus Emmanuel Barnes, Natkeeran Ledchumykanthan, Kim
Pham, and Kirsta Stapelfeldt
Since 2014, the University of Toronto Scarborough
Library’s Digital Scholarship Unit (DSU) has been working on an Islandora-based
solution for creating and stewarding oral histories (the Oral Histories
solution pack). Although regular updates regarding the status of this work have
been presented at Open Repositories conferences, this is the first article to
describe the goals and features associated with this codebase, as well as the
roadmap for development. An Islandora-based approach is appropriate for
addressing the challenges of Oral History, an interdisciplinary methodology with
complex notions of authorship and audience that both brings a corresponding
complexity of use cases and roots Oral Histories projects in the ever-emergent
technical and preservation challenges associated with multimedia and born
digital assets. By leveraging Islandora, those embarking on Oral Histories
projects benefit from existing community-supported code. By writing and
maintaining the Oral Histories solution pack, the library seeks to build on
common ground for those supporting Oral Histories projects and encourage a
sustainable solution and feature set.
Building a Scalable and Flexible Library Data Dashboard
Nathan Mealey
Data dashboards provide libraries with the means to
demonstrate their ongoing activities and usage in an engaging and communicative
fashion. Yet, due to the number of service platforms used by
libraries, and the wide-ranging technical specifications they entail, bringing
all of this content together in a sustainable way is a significant challenge. This article describes Portland State University’s
project to design and build a data dashboard based on a scalable and flexible
infrastructure that would enable them to present data in a visually compelling
and dynamic interface.
What’s New? Deploying a Library New Titles Page with
Minimal Programming
John Meyerhofer
With a new titles web page, a library has a place to show
faculty, students, and staff the items they are purchasing for their community. However, many times heavy programing knowledge and/or a
LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) or APIs separate a library’s data from
making a new titles web page a reality. Without IT staff, a new titles page can
become nearly impossible or not worth the effort. Here we will demonstrate how
a small liberal arts college took its acquisition data and combined it with a
Google Sheet, HTML, and a little JavaScript to create a new titles web page
that was dynamic and engaging to its users.
OPRM: Challenges to Including Open Peer Review in Open
Access Repositories
Pandelis Perakakis, Agnes Ponsati, Isabel Bernal, Carles
Sierra, Nardine Osman, Concha Mosquera-de-Arancibia, Emilio Lorenzo
The peer
review system is the norm for many publications. It involves an editor and
several experts in the field providing comments for a submitted article. The
reviewer remains anonymous to the author, with only the editor knowing the
reviewer´s identity. This model is now being challenged and open peer review
(OPR) models are viewed as the new frontier of the review process. OPR is a
term that encompasses diverse variations in the traditional review process.
Examples of this are modifications in the way in which authors and reviewers
are aware of each other’s identity (open identities), the visibility of the
reviews carried out (open reviews) or the opening up of the review to the
academic community (open participation). We present the project for the
implementation of an Open Peer Review Module in two major Spanish repositories,
DIGITAL.CSIC and e-IEO, together with some promising initial results and
challenges in the take-up process. The OPR module, designed for integration
with DSpace repositories, enables any scholar to provide a qualitative and
quantitative evaluation of any research object hosted in these repositories.
Adopting a Distributed Model for Data Services
Casey Gibbs, Marcos Hernandez, Pongracz Sennyey
This
article describes how the Saint Edward’s University Library implemented a
distributed model for the Institutional Repository. Based on Cloud Based platforms and APIs, the Library has
created an Institutional Repository that is scaleable and modular, considerably
lowering its implementation and maintenance costs, while lowering its technical
complexity.
Developing an online platform for gamified library
instruction
Jared Cowing
Gamification is a concept that has been catching fire for
a while now in education, particularly in libraries. This article describes a
pilot effort to create an online gamified platform for use in the Woodbury
University Library’s information literacy course. The objectives of this
project were both to increase student engagement and learning, and to serve as
an opportunity for myself to further develop my web development skills. The
platform was developed using the CodeIgniter web framework and consisted of
several homework exercises ranging from a top-down two-dimensional library
exploration game to a tutorial on cleaning up machine-generated APA citations. This article details the project’s planning and
development process, the gamification concepts that helped guide the
conceptualization of each exercise, reflections on the platform’s
implementation in four course sections, and aspirations for the future of the
project. It is hoped that this article will serve as an example of the
opportunities–and challenges–that await both librarians and instructors who
wish to add coding to their existing skill set.
