Stew of the month: June 2017

Welcome to a new issue of Stew of the Month, a monthly blog from Digital Systems and Stewardship (DSS) at the University of Maryland Libraries. This blog provides news and updates from the DSS Division. We welcome comments, feedback and ideas for improving our products and services.

Digitization Activities

Historic Maryland Newspapers Project

The Historic Maryland Newspapers Project was presented to librarians, archivists, and educators, at the June 14 Maryland Newspapers Conference, held in June at Goucher College. Robin Pike, Rebecca Wack, and Doug McElrath (SCUA) represented UMD Libraries. Robin Pike and Rebecca Wack spoke at length about using Chronicling America as a research tool, digitizing newspapers from microfilm, and creating a freely available and fully searchable Maryland Newspaper Repository. The conference yielded fresh partnership opportunities for the project and provided statewide exposure for HMNP’s efforts.

Rebecca coordinated with the digitization vendor and shipped three more batches (belair, cumberland, delmar). She received batch annapolis, the first batch, back from the vendor and has begun QR with the students.

Synergies Among African American History and Culture (AADHum)

Scott Pennington continued to work with MITH fellows to select materials for digitization, to be shipped to the vendor in July; they have selected over 13,000 pages from the AFL-CIO records in SCUA. In coordination with Stephanie Smith at the David C. Driskell Center, the project has also selected interviews and lectures on audio tape.

Other Digitization Activities

Robin Pike began working with Vin Novara (SCPA) on a National Endowment for the Humanities Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant application to digitize videotapes from the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange collection, a collection documenting a regional dance group. She also began working with Laura Schnitker (SCUA) on a Council on Library and Information Resources Recordings at Risk grant application to digitize audiotapes from the National Federation of Community Broadcaster’s collection, a collection of radio programming from non-commercial stations across the country.

Robin submitted estimates and project details to vendors to receive digitization quotes for the FY18 Digitization Initiatives Committee funded projects. She also solidified details of the selected projects and completed the project plans.

Eric Cartier and digitization assistant Jonathan Lin collaborated with a PhD student and a Communications Department professor to digitize a rare three-inch open reel audio tape from the Arab American National Museum collection. The PhD student is collecting speeches for her work on the Recovering Democracy Archives project. The three-inch reel was notable not only for its size, but because the content didn’t match the descriptive metadata, and there were separate recordings on both the left and the right channel. See the student’s tweet for an action shot.

Digitization assistant Brahm Persaud transferred two open reel audio tapes for a researcher who is producing a documentary about the year 1968 in the United States. The documentary is set to air on Netflix in 2018.

Numerous digitization assistants, including Becca Mena, Shiyun Chen, and Karina Hagelin, continue to digitize materials for modules in the forthcoming Labor in America exhibit.

Digital  Programs and Initiatives

New Additions to DRUM

More than 300 theses and dissertations from the spring 2017 semester have recently been deposited in DRUM bringing the total to 12,766. Fifty percent of the students requested embargoes for an overall average of 41% for all theses and dissertations since 2006. Subject librarians interested in receiving a breakdown of embargoes for their departments can contact Terry Owen.

Software Development

ArchivesSpace – Began preparing for the upgrade to ArchivesSpace 2.0 in anticipation of the 2.1 release which contains the overhauled Public User Interface which will eventually replace the ArchivesUM interface to our finding aids.

Fedora Content Repository – We completed our design for the content and indexing model to support OCR text, based the Web Annotation Protocol, which will provide full text search and display of newspapers and more.  We have started the loading, testing, and promotion process and anticipate releasing it to Archelon and to the UMD Student Newspapers public interface in August.

Hippo – Released version 10.2.5-2 containing: 1) New search/browse interface for the Top Textbooks program with real-time lookup of textbooks available on reserve in Aleph; and 2) Context sensitive linking from Database Finder to Subject Specialists; when browsing Subjects or viewing a database detail page, we add the Subject Specialists matching the current Subjects, for example see Aerospace Engineering.

USMAI (University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions) Library Consortium

The CLAS team responded to 126 Aleph Rx submissions and 40 e-resource requests from across the consortium’s libraries in June.

Sustainable Collection Services (SCS)

Linda Seguin completed the SCS extracts for all 17 USMAI libraries. The extracts will now be processed by the SCS ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) team for loading into their GreenGlass application. This will be made easier due to the quality and consistency of the extracts. Said the ETL Team, “I’d like to pass on a thank you and kudos for whoever made the exports for each USMAI library. Each file was pristine, predictably named, and easy to work with.”

Aleph Annual Maintenance Activities

On an annual basis, CLAS performs two maintenance activities to keep the Aleph database neat and tidy. The first, is the process of transitioning Aleph budgets to the new fiscal year – known around here as “Fiscal Year End Closeout“. Joseph Koivisto completed this process for all USMAI libraries during the last week of June, saving each library from needing to manually close out last year’s budgets and create new budgets for this year. The second activity is our annual “patron purge“, which removes patron records and corresponding transactions that have been expired for at least three years. This process began in June and will be completed in early July.

Making Life Easier

Several activities were undertaken for specific campuses to automate processes. Bowie State’s lost and fine notifications were configured so that they would be emailed automatically to patrons. Work is underway to receive regular loads of Morgan State patrons, removing the need for their library staff to enter new patrons manually. The ordering process was streamlined for Bowie State by setting up a YBP Gobi loader for them.

Staffing

David Durden began work as the Data Services Librarian in DPI on June 26. David received his Masters of Library and Information Science from the University of Maryland in 2017 and a Masters of Arts in Musicology from Brandeis University in 2014. He was previously the graduate assistant for DPI and DCMR where he took on key data management roles as research lead for the Libraries’ VIVO pilot and administrative duties for REDCap. Welcome back, David!

Sydney Schneider, an undergraduate English major, and Rayanne Weigel, pursuing a dual major in English and Journalism, began working on the HMNP project in June. With digitization efforts well underway, the HMNP is lucky to have such enthusiastic new members to the team.

Sydney Schneider also began working as a digitization assistant in the Hornbake Digitization Center.

Conferences, workshops and professional development

Eric Cartier, Kate Dohe, and Joseph Koivisto helped to coordinate the third annual Libraries Research and Innovative Practice Forum, held in McKeldin Library on June 8. Many members of DSS delivered presentations including Eric Cartier, David Dahl, Kate Dohe, Peter Eichman, Heidi Hanson, Joseph Koivisto, Terry Owen, Robin Pike, Rebecca Wack, Ben Wallberg, Joshua Westgard. Many of these presentations are available in DRUM.

Kate Dohe attended the CLIR/EDUCAUSE Leading Change Institute in Washington, DC from June 11-17. A successor to the highly regarded Frye Leadership Institute, LCI brings together librarians, information technologists, and others who seek to further develop their skills for the benefit of higher education.

Stew of the month: May 2017

Welcome to a new issue of Stew of the Month, a monthly blog from Digital Systems and Stewardship (DSS) at the University of Maryland Libraries. This blog provides news and updates from the DSS Division. We welcome comments, feedback and ideas for improving our products and services.

Digitization Activities

Historic Maryland Newspapers Project

The Library of Congress has accepted the sample batch for the Historic Maryland Newspaper Project, and the project is marching forward with digitization for the first two full batches–over 20,000 pages of newsprint in progress with the digitization vendor.

Title research for future HMNP representation is underway, with an eye towards representing underserved, minority, and immigrant communities across the state. So far, evidence of papers representing African-American, Polish, German, and Jewish interests have been located, though whether the physical newspapers or microfilm remains intact and accessible for digitization remains has yet to be examined

Synergies Among African American History and Culture (AADHum)

While waiting on the first large shipment to return from the vendor, the AADHum team has been working on selections for the second shipment. Coordinating with SCUA and MITH’s team, we have begun selecting materials for the early July shipment for batch two. Materials proposed for digitization include Labor’s involvement with busing in the early 1970s and school desegregation from areas as diverse as Boston, Massachusetts to Montgomery, Alabama.

Other Digitization Activities

Manager, Robin Pike met with collection managers to begin the FY18 vendor digitization project funded by the Digitization Initiatives Committee (DIC). She presented the project progress and FY18 budget at the May 24 Library Assembly meeting.

Digitization Projects Assistant Cecilia Franck began quality review work of the first batch of the FY17 Diamondback Digitization Project, the second annual project phase. This project is funded by a UMD Launch campaign and the DIC project proposal process.

Digitization assistant Shiyun Chen finished scanning documents related to the writing of the Japanese Constitution, from the Charles L. Kades papers. The documents are now available in the Internet Archive to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the constitution’s enactment. More information about the 70th anniversary can be found on the Prange Collection blog.

For the upcoming Irmgard Bartenieff/Institute of Movement Studies exhibit in Special Collections in Performing Arts, digitization assistant Becca Mena digitized oversize charcoal sketches, which had been flattened and stabilized by Preservation and Conservation staff, and digitization assistants Jonathan Lin and Shiyun transferred 36 reel-to-reel audio tapes.

All digitization assistants continued to digitize high-resolution scanning of photographs and posters for the upcoming Labor in America exhibit for Special Collections and University Archives.

Digital  Programs and Initiatives

Josh Westgard participated in a Fedora sprint focusing on building import/export functionality for Fedora systems. The tools developed in this sprint provide a way to serialize content from a Fedora repository onto disk, to verify the accuracy and completeness of the serialization, and to import previously serialized content back into Fedora. A particular focus during this sprint was a feature to package exports in BagIt bags, including bags that conform to the profile of Academic Preservation Trust, of which the Libraries are a member. This feature will allow the Libraries to package assets in our Fedora repository in a self-contained way for transmission to off-site preservation storage, and to restore that content losslessly in the future.

Software Development

ArchivesSpace – Released several new features requested by Special Collections and University Archives, including Single-Sign-On using the campus directory, a new payments module, and improved search results display.

AutoNumber – This small web application is used by digitization staff to assign unique file names and numbers to digitized files.  We have migrated this app to Ruby on Rails in this 1.0 release of the new codebase.

Hippo – Released version 10.2.5-0, which contained security and bug fixes, and 10.2.5-1 which contained two major new features: 1) Database Finder has removed the Categories/Sub-Categories for browse/search and added Subjects which are aligned with the Subject Specialists. Also, databases are maintained directly in Hippo CMS and are no longer synchronized from Metalib. 2)  UMD Student Newspapers is available as a soft release (staff review only for now) and being prepared for public release by University Archives staff.  This interface provides access to digitized issues of the Diamondback (1910-1971).

USMAI (University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions) Library Consortium

The CLAS team responded to 123 Aleph Rx submissions and 30 e-resource requests from across the consortium’s libraries in May.

LNDL EZproxy/Shibboleth Transition

The switch to Shibboleth authentication and USMAI-hosted EZproxy for Loyola Notre Dame Library (LNDL) was completed on May 25th. The switch to Shibboleth authentication allows LNDL patrons to login in to e-resources and OPAC services with their campus credentials. The move to USMAI-hosted EZproxy enables LNDL staff to focus on other local priorities.

Sustainable Collection Services

USMAI has selected OCLC’s Sustainable Collection Services (SCS) to analyze and coordinate print collection management. The service uses a web-based application called GreenGlass to facilitate the analysis. This involves extracting data from Aleph to load into GreenGlass. CLAS has been working with OCLC and staff at USMAI libraries to create specifications for the data extract for each USMAI library. The extract process is now underway and scheduled for completion in mid-June.

Report on USMAI Communication and Collaboration Platforms

Following the collection of data through surveys, interviews, and focus groups in the fall of 2016, CLAS has submitted an analysis of USMAI’s communication and collaboration platforms. Proposed actions based on the analysis include (1) consolidating USMAI’s web platforms into a unified web portal, (2) revising the information architecture for public and staff web content, (3) creating new areas of content, including materials for orienting new staff at USMAI libraries, (4) establishing an informal communication channel for the consortium, and (5) identifying recommended tools to facilitate USMAI communication and collaboration. The report has been shared with USMAI library directors. In early FY18, CLAS will begin investigating technical solutions for a unified web portal.

Staffing

Cecilia Franck, DCMR Digitization Projects Assistant, won the “Outstanding Student Assistant” award, particularly for her phenomenal work on the Diamondback Digitization Project and other vendor digitization projects.

DCMR hired two new student assistants. Rayanne Weigel and Sydney Schneider will be assisting with metadata collation and batch quality review for the HMNP.

DPI graduate assistants David Durden and Caitlin Carter graduated with their Masters in Library Science from the College of Information Studies. We are grateful to both of them for their exceptional contributions to the department over the past two years. Caitlin has accepted a full-time librarian position with another university, and we wish her luck in her future endeavors.

We are pleased to announce that David Durden will (re)join DPI as the Data Services Librarian in June.

Conferences, workshops and professional development

Joseph Koivisto attended the Maryland & Delaware Library Associations Joint Annual Conference on May 11. He co-presented a poster on MD-SOAR with representatives from other MD-SOAR partners. Robin Pike also presented at the conference on May 12, in collaboration with Molly Olney-Zide, the project manager for the Delaware Digital Newspaper Project. They presented a one-hour workshop about the National Digital Newspaper Program, the two statewide projects, and how to use Chronicling America. Kate Dohe co-taught the workshop “Starting with ‘Yes, And…’: Improv Fundamentals for Collaboration in Libraries” with Erin Pappas, Arts and Humanities Librarian at the University of Virginia.

Linda Seguin attended the ELUNA 2017 Conference and Ex Libris Technical Seminar from May 8-12 in Chicago.

Stew of the month: April 2017

Welcome to a new issue of Stew of the Month, a monthly blog from Digital Systems and Stewardship (DSS) at the University of Maryland Libraries. This blog provides news and updates from the DSS Division. We welcome comments, feedback and ideas for improving our products and services.

Digitization Activities

Historic Maryland Newspapers Project

On April 18, the Historic Maryland Newspaper Project participated in UMD’s first annual Social Justice Day. Presenting a poster titled “‘Women of Today’ An Overview of Women in Historic Maryland Newspapers,” project manager Rebecca Wack and student assistant Alex Carolan spoke with conference attendants about the HMNP, Chronicling America, and the value of viewing history through the eyes of those who lived it.

Synergies Among African American History and Culture (AADHum)

The AADHum project’s first large shipment is off to the vendor. Scott Pennington, Justin Hosbey, and Will Thomas from MITH coordinated with Stephanie Smith from Driskell to get almost 13,000 pages out the door. These materials will return and be available for MITH DH Incubators in the Fall. Some of the interesting highlights from the shipped materials include documentation of Black Trade Union Conferences from the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the AFL-CIO National Urban Coalition’s materials around riots in the late 1960s.

Other Digitization Activities

In a partnership with MSPAL and the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (LIMS), DCMR has been awarded a Bay Area Video Coalition Preservation Access grant for the digitization of VHS and BETA tapes from the LIMS collection. The tapes have been in storage for years and cover a wide range of materials, everything from movement choirs to lectures. Digitization of the tapes will afford researchers a unique look into the history of the Laban/Bartenieff Institute.

Robin Pike began meeting with collection managers to plan the FY18 vendor-based digitization projects funded through the DIC project proposal process. The DIC funded 17 projects, and Pike will present on them at a future Library Assembly meeting.

Student digitization assistant Marisa Gilman inspected the quality of 1,002 digitization handwritten items from the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) research and education center. The sensitive material documented terrorist activities around the world throughout the 1980s. Eric Cartier uploaded 19 volumes of the CIO News periodical, spanning the late 1930s through the early 1950s, to the Internet Archive. Student digitization assistants Becca Mena and Marisa Gilman inspected the quality of 237 foreign maps from the general maps collection in McKeldin. Student digitization assistant Cecilia Franck inspected the quality of 23 videos and films that will be included in the upcoming Labor in America exhibit in Hornbake Library, and began inspection of the first of four batches of FY17 Diamondback newspapers. All of these projects were funded through the DIC project proposal process.

Digital  Programs and Initiatives

Terps Publish

On April 11, UMD Libraries hosted the inaugural Terps Publish event.

The student publisher roundtable, moderated by student leaders of The Left Bench, was attended by students from The Diamondback, Mitzpeh, Powerlines, and The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion, as well as individual students interested in founding a publication, and staff from UMD Libraries, the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, and University Marketing and Communications.

Many more students and staff attended the publications fair on the Portico, which took place immediately after the student roundtable.

Terps Publish, modeled on similar initiatives at Georgetown University, Ohio University, and Dartmouth, is a collaboration between DPI, University Archives, and Libraries Communications.

GA Update

GA David Durden continued working on the internal Libraries contracts inventory, and volunteered at the University Libraries tent for Maryland Day.

Software Development

ArchivesSpace – We are pleased to announce that ArchivesSpace, an archives information management system, has moved from being a hosted application to a core application with full development support available.  As part of this process the ArchivesSpace VM received some maintenance support and improvements.  We are also working on implementing new features requested by Special Collections and University Archives.

Hippo – Released version 10.2.4-0 which contains a number of minor fixes as well as a several vendor provided security updates for the CMS. Continued development of the new Libi; completed majority of the feature development for Database Finder for the UMD Student Newspapers public interface, which are both scheduled for release on June 5.

User and System Support

Windows 10

USS thanks everyone that was brave enough to volunteer to be early testers of Windows 10. When deploying a new OS, there will certainly be issues with the various applications staff use for their work. Getting the opportunity to see and resolve these issues has help us greatly for when we begin to deploy to the rest of the staff. Speaking about the deployment of Windows 10, we will begin the deployment to all staff tentatively starting the middle of May.  We will send an email to staff as soon as we know when we will begin. Also, we will send out emails with instructions that need to be done by staff, before the migration to Windows 10, to help the migration go as quick and painless as possible. Keep a lookout for more information to come from the Helpdesk.

Makerspace

The MakerSpace was open to the public on Maryland Day. Preston and Yitzy was there to host about 450 people between 10am-1pm. They had 3D printing and Oculus Rift demonstrations, as well as brief explanations about the mission of the Makerspace. They also handed out the very popular mini Testudo statue 3D prints.  After closing at 1pm, Preston noticed a young girl and her friend trying to look inside. The local 11th grade high school student was visually impaired. Preston spent 30 minutes with her in a 1-on-1 demonstration of the Makerspace. She was excited to have such an experience and was also thrilled to notice that the Makerspace has accessibility items. She was impressed with the large format keyboards and the touch screen PC!

Google Docs Phishing Scam

On May 3, 2017, the world was infected by a Google Docs phishing attack. The attack took control of user’s Gmail accounts to send out the spam link to user’s address books. Google was able to remove the weakness in Google Apps to stop the phishing attack within one hour of it starting. However, within that one hour, millions of accounts were compromised across the world.

Google believes the only thing accessed was users contact information, no other data was exposed. For those that clicked the approval to authorize “Google Docs” to read, send, and delete emails, there may be a fake Google Docs app in your account. If you haven’t already checked and deleted the fake app, please follow these instructions:

1. Go to https://myaccount.google.com/permissions and look to see if there is an application called “Google Docs”. That is not a legitimate application, and you should remove the application.
2. To remove the application, click the application name “Google Docs” and then the “REMOVE” button”
3.  DivIT working to remove the application automatically for all users.
4.  As this time we do not believe your password has been compromised, but if you are concerned you can change your password at password.umd.edu.

Please note,  If you are unsure as to the credibility of a message you receive, contact the sender by phone to verify.

USMAI (University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions) Library Consortium

Support to USMAI

The CLAS team responded to 87 Aleph Rx submissions and 27 e-resource requests from across the consortium’s libraries in April.

LNDL EZproxy/Shibboleth Transition

CLAS has been working with Loyola Notre Dame Library (LNDL) to move them to a USMAI-provided instance of EZproxy and also implement Shibboleth authentication for EZproxy and login to the Aleph OPAC. Shibboleth authentication work requires working with both campuses to authenticate EZproxy and PDS (the Ex Libris service that manages OPAC authentication) against their Shibboleth Identity Providers. For EZproxy, members of the CLAS team are reviewing LNDL’s existing EZproxy configuration and copying configurations (including stanzas for all of LNDL’s licensed e-resources) into the new EZproxy instance. The switchover is scheduled for May 25th. LNDL’s patrons will benefit from being able to use their campus logins for e-resource access and OPAC features rather than their library barcode.

USMAI Events

CLAS team members were kept busy with several USMAI events in April. David Wilt attended the Annual Circ Meeting on April 28th and updated attendees on CLAS activities. Linda Seguin attended the Metadata Subgroup Forum on April 17th and presented on Aleph’s bibliographic loaders. Joseph Koivisto attended the Reporting & Analytics Subgroup’s Google Analytics training on April 27th and gave a lightning talk on the use of Google Tag Manager to assist in tracking additional metadata on bitstream downloads in MD-SOAR.

Staffing

Conferences, workshops and professional development

Terry Owen and Robin Pike presented at the Spring 2017 Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC) in Newark, NJ on April 21. Many MARAC presentations from previous conferences are available in DRUM.

Pike’s article “Funding a Future for Digital Collections at University of Maryland Libraries” was accepted for publication in the Journal of Digital Media Management. Pike also collaborated with Doug McElrath (SCUA) and Anna Kephart (Coordinator, Southern Maryland Studies Center, College of Southern Maryland) on a chapter submitted to the book Librarianship and Genealogy, pending publication in 2017.

Endangered Data Week

During the week of April 17-21, members of DSS, MITH, and the iSchool held events in conjunction with Endangered Data Week, an international event dedicated to raising discourse on threats to data security and preservation. These events included a interdisciplinary panel on the complex topic of endangered data for researchers, archivists, and conservators; a hands-on workshop dedicated to personal data archiving practices; and a hosted webinar on accessibility of government data and public accountability.

In a hands-on workshop about digital preservation tools and techniques, David Durden and Joshua Westgard, together with Joseph Koivisto and colleagues from MITH and the iSchool, introduced participants to the key concepts and strategies for ensuring the integrity of digital assets, techniques that are equally useful for institutions and individuals who have important digital content to protect from loss.

Event organizers, conveners, and contributors include Kate Dohe, David Durden, Joseph Koivisto, Adam Kriesberg, Purdom Lindblad, Trevor Muñoz, Kelley O’Neal, Josh Westgard, and Amy Wickner.

Stew of the month: March 2017

Welcome to a new issue of Stew of the Month, a monthly blog from Digital Systems and Stewardship (DSS) at the University of Maryland Libraries. This blog provides news and updates from the DSS Division. We welcome comments, feedback and ideas for improving our products and services.

Digitization Activities

Historic Maryland Newspapers Project

A sample batch was officially submitted to Library of Congress this month, and the first progress report of NDNP grant cycle 3 was submitted to NEH shortly thereafter. Once the sample is accepted, work will proceed on digitizing our first official batch of microfilm, which includes publications from Greenbelt, Frostburg, and Baltimore.

The Maryland Suffrage News, a Baltimore title dating back to 1912, has been added to this grant cycle. The microfilm is incomplete, with only a handful of issues of the weekly publication recorded between 1912 and 1920, but the opportunity to digitize such an important record of Maryland, and women’s, history could not be passed up.

Other Digitization Activities

Robin Pike and Vin Novara (SCPA) submitted a grant through the CLIR Recording at Risk program to digitize a pilot project from the Robert Sherman Collection, a portion of the “Woody’s Children” radio program.

Rebecca Wack worked with Novara on a Preservation Access Program application from the Bay Area Video Coalition to digitize a small pilot of the Laban/Bartineff Movement Studies Institute at a discounted rate.

Quality assurance continued on the FY17 Hebraica project, funded through the DIC project proposal process.

Eric Cartier worked with Don Manildi, IPAM curator, to digitize four open reel audio tapes on loan from a well-known American composer, who may donate her papers and collection to the UMD Libraries. The tapes were affected by severe sticky shed syndrome and could not be digitized on site so they were delivered to a vendor for assessment, treatment, and digitization.

Cartier worked with an audio equipment repair vendor to calibrate and maintain the Hornbake Digitization Center’s audio hardware including reel-to-reel decks, audiocassette decks, and digital audio tape (DAT) decks.

Digital  Programs and Initiatives

New Open Access Journal Launched

We’re pleased to announce that the International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion has recently launched. Published by the Information Policy & Access Center (iPAC) at the University of Maryland and hosted on the Libraries’ OJS instance, the journal presents wide-ranging and multidisciplinary perspectives on the intersection of equity, social justice, and information. Check out the recent articles here.

Software Development

Fedora Content Repository – We are working on the content and indexing model to support OCR text, initially for Student Newspapers, based the Web Annotation Protocol. Once complete we will be able to search full text of newspaper articles in Archelon and the UMD Student Newspapers public interface.  This feature could also support crowd-sourced transcriptions in the future.

Annual Staffing Request – Work continued on version 1.2 which features fiscal year rollover, allowing for all current requests to be archived for later viewing and reporting (read-only), and clearing out the tables of new requests for the next fiscal year.

Hippo – Continued development of the new Libi / Box / Solr integration; continued development of changes to Database Finder for maintaining databases directly in Hippo and for Subject reconciliation with Guides and the Subject Specialist directory; began implementation of the UMD Student Newspapers public interface.

USMAI (University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions) Library Consortium

Support to USMAI

The CLAS team responded to 127 Aleph Rx submissions and 26 e-resource requests from across the consortium’s libraries in March.

EBSCO Discovery Service URLs Modifications

EBSCO completed their modifications of the display of Aleph data in EDS. URLs from Aleph now only display if the item is available to a particular campus, and the proxy string is appended to all URLs that require it for off-campus access. This solution has been implemented for all USMAI libraries and will improve the user experience in EDS.

Sustainable Collection Services (SCS)

CLAS is working with USMAI on the implementation of OCLC’s Sustainable Collection Services, which will help USMAI libraries evaluate their collections within the context of the rest of USMAI and other peer institutions. CLAS helped SCS staff with an initial catalog data questionnaire and will be working to extract Aleph data for each USMAI library over the coming months.

New Bibliographic Loaders

CLAS developed a new loader to load new law collections for University of Maryland Law Library and University of Baltimore Law Library. Test loads are now being reviewed and will be implemented in production following acceptance.

Staffing

Kerry Huller, long-time assistant on the Historic Maryland Newspaper Project left the project for a new full-time job with the Library of Congress. Congratulations Kerry!

Welcome to Samir Lalvani and Akash Udani, who joined as Graduate Assistant software developers.

Conferences, workshops and professional development

Ingrid Alie attended the Computers in Libraries conference from March 28th to 30th.

David Dahl attended the ACRL 2017 Conference in Baltimore, MD from March 23rd to 25th.

Joseph Koivisto attended the ACRL 2017 Conference in Baltimore, MD from March 23rd to 25th.

Visits

On March 3, Cartier spoke with the Associate University Archivist at the University of California Berkeley about the UMD Libraries digitization operations: hardware, software, workflows, processes, and procedures. UCBerkeley Libraries’ staff are consulting digital librarians across the U.S. to learn more about best practices and how to improve their own institution’s digitization operations.

On March 9, Cartier guest-lectured at an audiovisual production event that fellow librarian Lealin Queen led in Library Media Services. There were few attendees, but the group conversation and computer demonstrations were beneficial.

On March 15, Pike and Laura Schnitker (SCUA) guest-lectured LBSC786 Library and Archives Preservation on the topic of the preservation of audiovisual media and broadcast collections.

Announcing Terps Publish 2017

We are pleased to announce an exciting new event at UMD—Terps Publish! Designed to showcase student publishing at UMD, this event will bring together student editors and writers from publications across the campus for a discussion of publishing issues, followed by a fair showcasing current publications.

All are invited to stop by the Portico Room (Room 2109) in McKeldin Library on Tuesday, April 11 from 3:30PM to 5:00PM to check out student publications at the fair, and enjoy free ice cream for visitors.

Representatives of student publications interested in participating are encouraged to register  by March 31, especially if they wish to have a table at the fair. Please feel free to pass along the invitation to student publication groups.

The members of the event planning team are Kate Dohe, Manager of Digital Programs & Initiatives, Terry Owen, Digital Scholarship Librarian, Eric Bartheld, Director of Communications for the UMD Libraries, Anne Turkos, University of Maryland Archivist, and student representatives from Stylus, Powerlines, and The Left Bench. Terps Publish is modeled on Hoyas Publish at Georgetown University, which Kate Dohe helped launch in collaboration with Georgetown University Press prior to joining the team at UMD.

For more information about this event visit the Terps Publish website or email terpspublish@umd.edu. Hope to see you there!

Stew of the month: February 2017

Welcome to a new issue of Stew of the Month, a monthly blog from Digital Systems and Stewardship (DSS) at the University of Maryland Libraries. This blog provides news and updates from the DSS Division. We welcome comments, feedback and ideas for improving our products and services.

Digitization Activities

Historic Maryland Newspapers Project

The HMNP will be launching multiple social media channels this month.  Rebecca Wack and student assistant Alex Carolan are rounding out strategies for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, highlighting interesting articles and advertisements from the over 200,000 pages of historic Maryland newspapers published on Chronicling America. The launch date is set for Monday, March 6. Be on the lookout for announcements once the pages are live and, of course, please like and share.

The sample batch has been received from the digitization vendor and quality review will be completed in short order. Student assistants have continued collation work for future digitization and, assuming the sample batch passes muster, the first official batch for NDNP Grant Cycle 3 will be shipped out for digitization.

Synergies Among African American History and Culture (AADHum)

The AADHUM project is focusing on the first of two larger shipments for digitization. Scott Pennington will prepare approximately 19,000 pages in early April, split evenly between materials from SCUA and the Driskell Center. Pennington is collaborating with Jen Eidson and Ben Blake (both SCUA), Justin Hosbey (Postdoctoral Associate at MITH) and Will Thomas (Graduate Assistant, MITH), to select materials useful for the project from the George Meany Memorial Archives. They have identified a rich group of materials from the Civil Rights era, and final selections will be made at the end of February and beginning of March.

Stephanie Smith (Driskell Center) and Jovonne Bickerstaff (Postdoctoral Associate at MITH) have nearly completed the selection of materials from the Driskell Center. Metadata work is proceeding rapidly on those materials.

Other Digitization Activities

The Hornbake Digitization Center is home to a new oversize scanner, another Zeutschel OS12000. The scanning area is 23.4″x33.1″, an upgrade from the previous machine’s scanning area of 18″x24″, and the updated software has enhanced features that will automate processes and increase efficiency.

Robin Pike continued to work with the other members of the Digitization Initiatives Committee to solidify the FY18 project list and budget. The budget will be presented to RG on March 13.

Pike continued to work on the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Recordings at Risk grant with Vin Novara (SCPA).

Eric Cartier met with Jen Eidson and Ben Blake (both SCUA) on two occasions to prepare the digitization workflow for the forthcoming labor exhibit in Hornbake Library. Assistants are currently at work on the first of six modules.

In her role as “Lead Project Advisor,” Pike continued to meet with staff from The Phillips Collection to discuss next steps in preparing for their IMLS grant project, if the application is successful, including processing and describing content, and selecting metadata standards and thesauri. The project team also discussed contingency plans if the application is not successful to create a smaller project for their upcoming 100th anniversary in 2021.

Digital  Programs and Initiatives

Digital Collections

With the impending release of version 1.0 of the Archelon administrative application, February saw DPI fully engaged with loading to our Fedora repository the nearly 1 terabyte of Diamondback newspapers data (represented by more than 200,000 digital objects). Any undertaking of this size and complexity is bound to encounter new problems when operating at scale, and this project was no exception. While the system had performed well under light loads, with the attempt to load full production data, new problems were uncovered with the indexing service. Fortunately, SSDR and DPI staff collaborated to identify the source of the problems and tuned the configuration of our application to make it more efficient under heavier loads.  The ingest of all 3,503 issues of this first batch of Diamondback newspapers will be completed in early March.

New Additions to DRUM

Fifteen oral histories have recently been added to the Archive of Immigrant Voices in DRUM. Produced by students from the Center for Global Migration, the oral history project collects the stories of the experience of migration.

Save the Date!

In collaboration with Collection Strategies & Services, the spring 2017 speaker for the Future of the Research Library Speaker Series has been confirmed. Matt Barnes, Director of Sustainable Collection Services at OCLC is scheduled for Wednesday, 26 April from 3:00 pm to 4:30 pm in the Special Events Room.

GA Update

GA David Durden continued working on a library contracts inventory project, and conducted testing for the Archelon user interface.

Software Development

Archelon – Version 1.0 was released to staff, see our Archelon 1.0 Release post for more details.

Annual Staffing Request – Version 1.1 was released with the complete administrative functionality necessary for Resources Group and Business & Budget Services office to review all personnel requests submitted for FY18. We have also begun work on version 1.2 which features fiscal year rollover, allowing for all current requests to be archived for later viewing and reporting (read-only), and clearing out the tables of new requests for the next fiscal year.

Hippo – Continued development of the new Libi / Box / Solr integration; began changes to Database Finder for maintaining databases directly in Hippo and for Subject reconciliation with Guides and the Subject Specialist directory; begin design and planning for new Textbook Availability searchable database of textbooks available through the top textbooks reserves program.

User and System Support

February saw a jump in 3D print requests for campus departments. We printed a few dozen mini Testudo statues for a cultural exchange program, 2 large Testudo statues and a Jim Henson/Kermit statue for marketing gifts, and also an extra large Testudo statue for the Giving Day challenge trophy.

Andrew  Horbal and Preston Tobery gave a presentation on the J&SG MakerSpace at the February 14 Research & Learning Services Forum where they solicited feedback from librarians about their plans to develop training and documentation to help R&LS librarians incorporate J&SG Makerspace technologies into their instruction. Preston Tobery and Andrew Horbal received notification that the project that they submitted definitely will appear in the book 60 Makerspace Projects for Libraries as “3D Print a Bust of Yourself”. The book will be published by ALA Editions in the fall.

Windows 10 upgrade – In a few weeks, some library staff will have the opportunity to test drive Windows 10 to see if it works with their various applications.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Testing  — Continued configuration on the VDI solutions, we have tested some aspects of VMware Horizon and we will continue to test.

USMAI (University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions) Library Consortium

Support to USMAI

The CLAS team responded to 133 Aleph Rx submissions and 36 e-resource requests from across the consortium’s libraries in February.

EBSCO Discovery Service URLs Modifications

During the LNDL Migration, an issue was uncovered with the display of URLs originating from 856 and 956 fields in the Aleph data extract. For many USMAI EDS campuses, these URLs were not filtered to display only those associated with the particular campus. For instance, a URL for access at Towson would show up in Eastern Shore’s EDS instance. Additionally, these URLs did not have the off-campus proxy string appended, meaning they would only work for users on campus. Ingrid Alie worked with EBSCO to devise a solution that would filter these URLs to only display those URLs relevant to the specific campus and also add the proxy string dynamically. EBSCO is currently rolling out this solution.

ProQuest Ebook Central

In alignment with ProQuest’s migration from EBL to their Ebook Central platform, Linda Seguin set up MARC record delivery for Ebook Central collections in WorldShare Collection Manager in order to add the new Ebook Central URLs to records in Aleph. The old EBL URLs (eblib.com) were removed from these records. During the process of loading the updated records, she was also able to overlay LC subject headings on approximately 8300 records that did not previously have any subject headings. This will improve discoverability of these resources in the OPAC and USMAI discovery layers. LNDL holdings were also added for DDA ebooks during this process.

MD-SOAR

In February, the USMAI Council of Library Directors voted to extend MD-SOAR beyond the end of its two-year pilot. The repository service has been extended for an additional three years with an option for renewal at that point in time. DSS looks forward to continuing this service for USMAI and its extended partners!

Repository Analytics and Metrics Portal (RAMP) Initiative

MD-SOAR, along with DRUM, is now a participant in the grant funded Repository Analytics and Metrics Portal initiative, spearheaded by Montana State University, ARL, University of New Mexico, and OCLC. The initiative seeks to identify methods for collecting more accurate use of institutional repositories, such as MD-SOAR. Thanks go to Joseph Koivisto for identifying this opportunity and working with the grant team on the initial configuration.

Staffing

Marisa Gilman and Brahm Persaud began work as Student Digitization Assistants in February for DCMR. Marisa is a junior in the new College of Information Studies undergraduate program, and Brahm is a graduate student in the iSchool with a focus of human-computer interaction.

Alex Carolan (undergraduate College of Journalism) and Pranati Sumedha (graduate School of Engineering) began working for the Historic Maryland Newspapers project.

Conferences, workshops and professional development

Along with Sharon Epps, Rebecca Kemp Goldfinger, and Kate Dohe of the Faculty Mentoring Committee, Eric Cartier organized a special Writing Group meeting on February 15, inviting librarian and poet Oliver Bendorf to lead a workshop titled “Agile Writing for Archivists and Librarians.”

Robin Pike, Doug McElrath (SCUA), and Anna Kephart (archivist at the Southern Maryland Studies Center at the College of Southern Maryland) proposed a chapter for Librarianship and Genealogy: Trends, Issues, Case Studies about the use of Chronicling America and other digital newspaper resources in genealogical research in the State of Maryland. The chapter proposal was accepted.

Kate Dohe was accepted as a participant in the 2017 cohort of the Leading Change Institute. The Institute, sponsored by CLIR and EDUCAUSE, will be held June 11–16, in Washington, DC.

Archelon 1.0 Release

We are pleased to announce the 1.0 release of Archelon, the new staff-only administrative interface for content in the UMD Libraries’ Fedora 4 repository. The Fedora 4 repository was released in production last August and Archelon is the first staff interface for content in Fedora 4.

The 1.0 release enables library staff in Special Collections and University Archives, Digital Conversion and Media Reformatting, Digital Programs and Initiatives, and other departments to search, browse, and download content in Fedora 4. In addition, a basic, embedded newspaper and image viewer is included in the 1.0 release. Archelon will be developed in an agile fashion, with many incremental releases over time, and upcoming releases will include more features in the newspaper viewer. Eventually, full content add/update capabilities will be available to users, beginning with version 2.0.

Digital Content in Archelon

The launch of Archelon coincides with the import of the digitized Diamondback student newspapers, which will be the first collection available on the new platform. Batch loading of 130,000 objects is currently underway, representing 3,500 issues spanning 1910 to 1971.  Working closely with stakeholders in Special Collections and University Archives, we have established that it is a priority to load content that is currently not available online, such as Katherine Anne Porter correspondence and Diamondback photos.  We will be working on loading this content through 2017 as well as migrating content from the existing Digital Collections repository.

Archelon’s Technology

Archelon 1.0 is built using Ruby on Rails and the Blacklight discovery interface.  The supporting infrastructure behind Archelon includes the previously released Fedora 4 repository and new additions of a Newspaper batch loader, IIIF image server using Loris, search/index service using Apache Solr 6,  and IIIF manifest server using pcdm-manifests.  The newspaper viewer is built using the Mirador IIIF image viewer.

What’s Up with the Name?

Archelon is named for the ancient genus of giant sea turtles Archelon, whose name means “ruler turtle” in Greek. Archelon lived approximately 80.5 million years ago in the shallow seas that covered most of North America at the time. It is the largest ever recorded species of turtle by size, and second largest by weight.

Acknowledgements

The Fedora 4 repository implementation team would like to thank everyone in Digital Systems and Stewardship and throughout the University Libraries whose technical and administrative support made this effort possible.

• Mohamed Abdul Rasheed, Software Developer
• Kate Dohe, Digital Programs and Initiatives Manager
• Peter Eichman, Senior Software Developer
• Bria Parker, Head of Discovery and Metadata Services
• Ben Wallberg, Manager, Software Systems Development and Research
• Joshua Westgard, Systems Librarian