Stew of the Month, July 2023

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

Digital Collections

Historic Maryland Newspapers Project

Metadata collation continues on the final titles for Phase 5 of the Historic Maryland Newspapers Project. Student Assistant, Bridget Jamison is working on the Eastern Shore Whig and People’s Advocate. See HMNP content on our social channels @HistoricMDNews and check out this post on Instagram for National Picnic Month!

Advancing Workers Rights in the American South

The final batch of digitized materials has been received from the vendor for the CLIR AFL-CIO “Advancing Workers Rights in the American South” grant project, which UMD Libraries is collaborating on with Georgia State University. Student Assistant, Bridget Jamison is working on QC of the digital files.

Hornbake Digitization Center

Student Assistants, Charlotte Conant and Dan Isaacson are currently working on digitizing 20 rare books from the German Expressionism collection. They have finished digitizing all but two of the books. Once the project is complete the files will be loaded to Internet Archive. Charlotte Conant and Alex Trim digitized 24 band posters for an exhibit in the Performing Arts Library. HDC is still working on assessing and identifying AV equipment to be sent to Terrapin Trader.

Digital Programs and Initiatives

Digital Preservation

DPI continues to use APTrust and AWS S3 storage (provided through campus IT) as the primary backup locations for preservation of digital content. The next large batch of content to be sent to APTrust is the Advancing Workers’ Rights files, consisting of 2 terabytes of image and video files, representing 90,256 pages of archival content from the AFL-CIO archives, as well as 23 digitized films. These materials have been staged for ingest into both our preservation and access systems, with a target launch completion date of September 1, just in time for Labor Day.

The deliverables for this project also include hOCR files, which is a digital file format for storing both machine-recognized plain text representing the words on the page, together with pixel-coordinates indicating the location of each word in an image file. These are the raw materials that will eventually make it possible for us to enhance the interface for this collection with full-text search and hit-highlighting functionality.

Web Services

• Digital Collections migration – On August 22, we will be releasing the first phase of our new Digital Collections website. The site is being moved to our new content management system, and we’re making a number of improvements. This first phase will include a new homepage, Combined Search of collections, and a search interface for the collections that have migrated into our new repository, which will include thumbnail images in search results. After this, we’ll be working on moving the informational pages for individual collections and continuing to enhance the site.
• Calendar update project – We have set up and switched to a new public events calendar. With this calendar, we’ve streamlined the categories and added more location information to make browsing easier for site visitors, and have taken steps to help make entry of event details more standardized and internal statistical tracking easier.
• Website Analytics – we are working on setting up our account on Matomo, a privacy-focused website analytics platform. We will be creating instructional materials for Libraries personnel for getting usage information for the websites they work on.

IT & Facilities Operations

The DST and Facilities Helpdesk receive quite a few requests each month. Below are the number of opened and closed service requests our group received during July 2023.

• Helpdesk: 244 opened, 240 closed
• Facilities:   72 opened, 57 closed

Preparing Changes to Public-Use Computers for Fall 2023

Staff have been busy preparing our public-use computers for the Fall semester. Login screens have been updated for both Mac and Windows computers. As part of a pilot, we’ve added WEPA printer kiosks to a few libraries, so the corresponding print driver/software has been added to our workstations. The University now requires an “acceptable use” banner on all workstations; this had already been implemented on our Windows workstations and is now part of our Mac configuration too. We’ve had to remove a couple software packages due to changes in how they’re licensed (i.e., moved to a single user license).

Finally, thanks to staff in the Libraries’ Strategic Communications and Outreach Team for designing this great Windows login account picture!

Software Systems and Development

Completed

Systems – Worked with the vendor to complete a Sharestream version upgrade and security improvements; Upgraded the IBM Spectrum Protect Client for Aleph Oracle Backups; Completed security and maintenance upgrades for vCenter and ESXi hosts in the vSphere/ESXi cluster.

Open Data Website – Added new Internet Archive API code example

In Progress

Digital Collections – Continued work on an OAI-PMH server implementation for metadata harvesting for Archelon.

Digital Collections – Continued work on Plastron batch loader updates for Archelon in support of a handle persistence service and content for the Advancing Workers’ Rights project.

Digital Collections – Continued work on the new website implementation in Drupal.

Digital Collections – Began production development of the Scutes web application for WHCA Pool Reports curation and processing.

MD-SOAR – Continued upgrade to DSpace 7.

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

ILS Migration activities continue to occupy most of our work in July. In our weekly onboarding meetings with the vendor we are diving into data migration. If you would like more information about the onboarding calls, we have agendas, slide decks, and recordings on the USMAI Member Portal.

Migration Kickoff date is set for August 23, 2023! Members of USMAI staff, the Core Project Team and Campus Team Leads will participate in this important meeting where the Ex Libris Project Manager will lead a presentation that will go over what to expect during the implementation phase.

Personnel News

Welcome!

We’re pleased to welcome Alfred Lin as our new UX/UI Designer in Digital Programs and Initiatives! As a recent graduate from UMD’s Human-Computer Interaction Master’s program, Alfred brings notable prototyping, web design, accessibility, and user test/research experience and knowledge to the Libraries.