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
Rebecca Wack will be joining the project as the new Digital Projects Librarian, the project manager for this project, starting on January 9.
Robin Pike and Doug McElrath (SCUA) hosted members of the Historic Maryland Newspapers Project Advisory Board, and affiliated members, on November 17. The team discussed the progress of the first two grants, the plans for title digitization in the third grant, ideas for educational outreach and other programming, and collaborative ideas or statewide events to promote the digitized newspapers in Chronicling America.
Coming out of this conversation, Pike worked with GA David Durden on a short-term project to identify educational opportunities for integration in K-12 and higher education curriculums in the state, genealogical tutorials, and other opportunities. This work will be used by the new Digital Projects Librarian as she begins to structure the outreach initiatives for the project.
Pike received half of the microfilm from the Maryland State Archives, but some of the microfilm was slightly deteriorated. Pike is working with the microfilm duplication vendor to see if the film is too deteriorated to be reproduced and digitized, in which case, the project will select a backup title. The microfilm duplication vendor is working on the sample before they proceed with the first batch of film duplication.
Students Kerry Huller and Sara Horn continued to collate metadata for the titles selected.
McElrath (SCUA), Judi Kidd, and Amy Wickner (SCUA) completed their research of title copyright and found that none of the titles selected were ever registered for copyright, meaning that we can include them in this project.
Synergies Among Digital Humanities and African American History and Culture
Scott Pennington worked with Jen Eidson (SCUA) and Catherine Knight Steele (MITH) to begin selection of materials for the full project, beginning with processed parts of the collection. The project’s primary difficulty is knowing where to search in the unprocessed parts of the collection for materials relevant to this project, and that much of these unprocessed materials are stored in an off-site location.
Other Digitization Activities
Pike met with Mary Dulaney, the Libraries’ new Director of Development, to discuss digitization project and initiative fundraising priorities for the next few years.
Pike consulted with several staff members from The Phillips Collection on a grant they submitted to the Institute of Museum and Library Services to digitize the archival collections relating to their art collections and ingest these records into a new repository. If the grant is successful, Pike will also serve as Lead Project Advisor, providing her expertise on mass-digitization projects.
Liz Caringola (SCUA) finalized the FY16 Diamondback project; the files were sent to DPI and SSDR for ingest into Fedora 4.
Pike worked with Laura Schnitker (SCUA) and Joanne Archer (SCUA) to deliver over 150 tapes from the Maryland Public Television archives collection to a vendor for digitization. Pike worked with Kelley O’Neal (HSSL), Amy Wasserstrom, Kirsten Gaffke (SCUA), Carla Montori, Bryan Draper, and Meg Garnett, and GA Jenna Zimmerman (Preservation) to prepare and coordinate a courier shipment of general collection maps and Prange posters to a vendor. Pike worked with Linda Sarigol (LMS), Bria Parker (MSD), and Joanne Archer (SCUA) to send a large shipment of films from LMS and SCUA to the digitization vendor. All of these projects were funded through the DIC FY17 digitization project proposal process.
Digital Programs and Initiatives
Kate Dohe and GA David Durden presented an overview of Research Data Services to the University Library Council at their November meeting.
Software Development
Fedora 4 Content Repository – Began upgrade to version 4.7. This release represents a significant change to Fedora’s underlying persistence implementation. The initial Diamondback Newspaper Collection load will take place into production on 4.7 once it has been promoted.
Annual Staffing Request – Release 1.0 re-rescheduled for December 5 for managers to begin entering their staffing requests for FY18. We will then work on completing the administrative functionality for release in January.
Student Applications – Development of the application submission interface is nearing completion and will be moving into user testing in December.
Hippo – Initial development on the version 10 upgrade is nearing completion and we have started work on the promotion processing. Hippo 10 is expected to be promoted to the staging site for user testing in December.
Hippo implementation of new Libi – Development continues on the backend Box/Hippo/Solr integration component. The Libi Advisory Team has requested a hold on interface development while they review the proposed new information architecture with Libraries’ stakeholders; resumption is excepted to take place in February.
Reciprocal Borrowing – See our blog post for information on this new project.
Administrative Tracking Tools – As part of our software services program DSS is continuing its partnership with the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) with a collaboration to cleanup the codebase and enhance the functionality of SESYNC’s Administrative Tracking Tool.
USMAI (University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions) Library Consortium
Support to USMAI
The CLAS team responded to 82 Aleph Rx submissions and 29 e-resource requests from across the consortium’s libraries in November.
Loyola Notre Dame Library
Work continued on the project to migrate LNDL from Voyager to Aleph. The majority of work focused on completing analysis, mapping, and clean-up of LNDL’s bibliographic data and beginning to load that data into USMAI’s Aleph development environment. A full load of bibliographic data is anticipated for completion in early December.
Additionally, initial testing of circulation rules and related scheduled jobs was performed. Their OPAC presence has also been set up in the development environment.
The migration is scheduled for completion in the first half of January.
MD-SOAR
MD-SOAR was upgraded to version 5.6 of DSpace in November.
Additionally, several interface changes are in development based on recommendations from usability testing by USMAI’s User Experience subgroup. Once development is completed, these will be released to MD-SOAR partners for review before moving the changes to MD-SOAR.
Joseph Koivisto implemented a new Google Tag Manager script to capture the institution name for bitstream downloads that originate within MD-SOAR, which will help with instituion-specific reporting.
Conferences, workshops and professional development
Kate Dohe, Joseph Koivisto, Trevor Munoz, and Robin Pike attended the Digital Library Federation Forum and Digital Preservation 2016 in Milwaukee, WI from November 7-10, 2016. Dohe, Munoz, and Pike also gave presentations, which can be found in the Open Science Framework repository.
Kate Dohe attended and presented at the Charleston Conference in Charleston, SC from November 2-4.
Heidi Hanson attended the 2016 LITA Forum in Fort Worth, TX from November 17-20, 2016.
Visits
Eric Cartier met with Shannon Willis, the Digital Projects Lab Manager at the University of North Texas, to give her a tour of the Hornbake Digitization Center and to share documentation.