Stew of the month: January 2020

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

Digitization Activities

Historic Maryland Newspapers Project

Pam McClanahan and Robin Pike worked with Doug McElrath (SCUA), as well as Jane Zhu, to complete and submit a grant application to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a fifth phase of the Historic Maryland Newspapers Project.

Pam sent another completed newspaper batch to Library of Congress. The student assistants continued to help with quality control on batches, social media posts, and updating the digitized newspaper survey for the state.

Pam completed outreach for the newspaper project this month as well giving a presentation on the Historic Maryland Newspaper Project and using Chronicling America for family history research to a genealogy group at Enoch Pratt Free Library on January 18. She also met with Professor Randy Ontiveros from the English Department to brainstorm ways to incorporate the newspaper project into his Literary Maryland course. Pam will be providing information on the newspapers during the Civil War time period and Prof. Ontiveros will be having students compare the political debates in the newspapers.

Hornbake Digitization Center

Through January, Rebecca Wack continued to refine procedures for new equipment and technology, such as the digital camera and copy stand setup. She worked with Robin Pike to train her on processes for her impending departure.

Robin will be the point of contact for in-house digitization in the near future until we hire a replacement. She will be holding office hours in Hornbake 4210W from 3-4 most Wednesdays. Please contact her if you would like to meet about a current or future project, if you have any concerns, or if you have other needs.

Due to changing student schedules in the Spring 2020 semester, the Hornbake Digitization will be open Tuesday-Friday, 10-3 (we will now be closed on Monday and open on Wednesday).

In January, the main student project was completing the second batch of items to be digitized for the SCUA annual exhibit, which will be on voting rights. Students also completed patron requests which included both audio and image requests.

Other Digitization Projects

Robin discussed modified analog media digitization request workflows with USRS to support ILL and course reserve requests in a more streamlined manner. Juana Godinez will continue to digitize analog video and film for these requests.

Robin and assistant Liz Holdzkom finalized the ingest of FY19 MPT files to Sharestream, which required the assistance of USS. SCUA will perform metadata enhancement on these files (over 400) before they will be ingested into Digital Collections.

Liz H. reviewed the pilot batch of the Liz Lerman files, which passed QC. The vendor proceeded with the first full batch. She also continued the review of the FY19 Diamondback Newspaper project. Formatting changes in the printed newspaper caused problems with the automated zoning of articles and OCR in the latest batch, which has caused several batches of rework. The current batch appears to be much improved.

In collaboration with Neil Frau-Cortes, Robin sent out the FY20 Hebraica project to the digitization vendor. In collaboration with Liz Caringola, Robin sent out the FY20 Student Newspaper project to the digitization vendor, as well. Two more projects will be sent out in February; these were deferred due to delays in acquiring and finalizing the vendor statement of work for the procurement contract.

Software Development

Releases

Search – Released the new Beta version for the experimental new Search Tool (Bento), which is a discovery interface connecting library patrons to many of the University Libraries’ research tools including WorldCat UMD, Database Finder, and LibGuides.  The Search has been announced to Libraries staff and soft released with a link on the Libraries’ Website home page.

Under Development

Archelon – began implementation of MVP Milestone 3: Authority Control and Controlled Vocabulary.  Manage and edit either blacklists or whitelists for controlled vocabulary. Support rightsstatements.org copyright options for materials.

Hippo CMS (now rebranded as BloomReach Experience Manager) – completed work on upgrade to version 13, and released it to stakeholders for testing; production release is scheduled for late February

Fedora Content Repository – Contributed one developer to a one week Fedora 6 Implementation Sprint; worked on improvements to the WebAC implementation for access control to collections

Drupal 8 – began training on how to use and develop for Drupal 8, in preparation for an eventual plan to migrate both Libi and Libraries’ Website to Drupal.

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

The CLAS team responded to 98 Aleph Rx submissions and 18 e-resource requests from across the consortium’s libraries in January. A lot of good work was, and continues to be, done to help clean up the data in our systems, tighten system security, and adjust system configurations to match the operations of our member libraries.

USMAI Member Portal updates

With over 150 users signed up, the new USMAI Member Portal is going strong. Have you signed up yet? If not, create an account now! If you already have an account, we encourage you to take a moment and fill out your profile. There is a field for “Expertise”, which will help us build a directory of experts across all USMAI libraries. Add your expertise today!

Legacy Staff Site Decommission

Now that the Member Portal is up and running with all content moved, we will be decommissioning the legacy USMAI Staff Site. The site is scheduled to be taken offline after February 28th. In preparation, CLAS team members have been working to fix links that connect back to the staff site. There are a lot, but we’re whittling away at the list.

Data Warehouse Reporting Environment

Are you using the new USMAI Data Warehouse Reporting Environment (a.k.a. “Jaspersoft”) to run your own reports yet? If not, check out the Data Warehouse page in the Member Portal to get started. CLAS holds weekly online sessions on Fridays at 1pm to ask questions and share experiences. Details are in the Member Portal.

MD-SOAR

With the renewal of MD-SOAR up for consideration this June, CLAS has been supporting efforts to assess the current state of the shared repository platform. Joseph Koivisto has been working on some interesting “mashups” of Google Analytics and Solr data to get at some of the requested data points. It will be interesting to see the results!

Staffing

We said farewell to Rebecca Wack, Digitization Services Librarian on January 24. Rebecca will be beginning work as the Manager, Digital Imaging Unit for the New York Public Library. She will be managing people and projects for their large, still-image digitization initiatives. Since January 2017, Rebecca has served in two positions in the Libraries. She began as the Digital Projects Librarian, managing primarily the Historic Maryland Newspapers Project, a grant-funded project, where her largest impact for the project was creating a prominent social media presence and working with other state partner grant awardees, the Library of Congress, and the National Endowment for the Humanities on joint social media initiatives. For the past year-and-a-half, Rebecca has worked as the Digitization Services Librarian, managing students and projects in Hornbake Digitization Center.