Stew of the month: November 2016

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.

Student digitization assistants scanned 85 historical French pamphlets, totaling 718 pages, which Eric Cartier uploaded to the Internet Archive.

Cartier uploaded nine born-digital UMD Graduate Catalogs, totaling 7,218 pages, to the Internet Archive. This completes the 2001-2016 run.

Cartier and DCMR student assistants received and inspected 199 audio recordings from the Contemporary Music Project, 59 videos from the Jackson R. Bryer Interview Collection, and 15 videos from the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners America archives. These projects were funded by the DIC FY17 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.

Stew of the month: June 2015

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 and Conversion Activities

The following outsourced projects were digitized during FY15 (not including smaller patron requests); these projects were funded through the DIC project proposal process:

Internet Archive (SCUA, SPCA, McKeldin): 820 volumes, 123,365 pages, $18,619

Includes the following serial titles or genres of works, plus additional works: Mason and Root tunebooks, French pamphlets, Swing, NBC Chimes, Radio Stars, Radio Digest, Radio Doings, The Keynoter, Mid-Atlantic Archivist, Mid-Atlantic Archivist Conference programs, Biennial Reports (Maryland Agriculture College), Maryland Agriculture Experiment Station Annual Reports, UMD Media Guides, AFL-CIO Proceedings, The Lather, miscellaneous university publications, Werk, Notizie degli scavi di antichità, US Department of the Treasury publications, Reliable Poultry Journal, The Union Signal, Izvi︠e︡stīi︠a︡ Imperatorskago russkago geograficheskago obshchestva.

AFL-CIO News (oversize, bound) (SCUA): 12,874 pages, $7,080.70

Schedule of Classes (oversize, bound) (SCUA): 3,251 pages, $1,788.05

Schedule of Classes (microfilm) (SCUA): 15,282 pages, $3,265.40

Hebraica (books and serials) (McKeldin): 75,859 pages, $14,379.39

WAMU (1/4″ open audio reels), Godfrey (wire recordings)(SCUA): 154 reels, 39 wires, $12,179.87

Liz Lerman Dance Exchange Archives (VHS tapes) (SCPA): 98 tapes, $8,279.29

Library Media Services deteriorating films (16mm film) (LMS): 40,070 feet, 42 films, $16,028

Diamondback Photo Morgue (SCUA): 7,532 photos, $5,646

Tentative FY15 Totals: 230,631 pages, 7,532 photos, 154 reels, 39 wires, 98 VHS tapes, 42 films=$87,265.70

On June 11 Babak Hamidzadeh, Robin Pike, Liz Caringola, Judi Kidd, and Doug McElrath (SCUA) met with Linda Tompkins-Baldwin of Digital Maryland to share information about our respective projects and to discuss future collaboration. As a result of that meeting, Liz, Robin, and Doug will be speaking about the newspapers project at a series of regional meetings this summer to discuss cultural heritage issues, state initiatives, and opportunities for collaboration.

Judi Kidd and Eric arranged for the setup of sturdy new shelving in Hornbake 4210V, the purpose of which is to hold audiovisual equipment. Eric and digitization assistants Rachel Dook and Caroline Hayden arranged carts, boxes, and equipment. Work on this project will continue this summer, with the goal of creating an inventory of audiovisual equipment that may be used in digitization activities on campus.

Alice Prael is reviewing analytics data on our Digital Collections to determine the most popular holdings and how our patrons are finding them. This research will help inform future decisions on digital projects and how we can best promote them.

Software Development

In partnership with WAC and the Discovery group, the website search tabs have been modified to begin submitting searches to the WorldCat Discovery interface.

The Persian Digital Humanities website, implemented using our Hippo CMS based Exhibit template, is now available.  The UMD Libraries are hosting the website on behalf of the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies.  We are also exploring, along with MITH, additional collaborations with the Roshan Institute in the areas of digitization, text mining, and social media and web archiving.

Initial development of the new online student application submission form and supervisor database is completed and the application has been put into production. Student submissions are already being received and Human Resources and student supervisors are providing feedback for requested changes which we will review and install before the Fall semester.

As part of standing up a DSpace instance for the Maryland Shared Open Access Repository (MD-SOAR) we created a GitHub based code repository forked from the core DSpace code repository.  The production instance came online using DSpace version 5.1 with customizations to the XMLUI/Mirage2 interface for the MD-SOAR theme and for institutional branding based on each top-level community per participating institution.

DSS has entered into a partnership with the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) with DSS providing software development services and open data expertise in support of their mission to accelerate scientific discovery at the interface of human and ecological systems.  Development is underway on a new Integrated Discovery Platform for automating the ingest and cataloging of socio-environmental data.

User and System Support

On May 29, 2015, User and Systems Support migrated the Windows infrastructure from the Libraries’ LIBLAN active directory to DivIT’s AD.UMD.EDU active directory. The migration was successful and only had few a problems, which we were expecting. When changing a complete infrastructure that’s been in place for approximately 15 years, there will be hidden problems. User and Systems Support quickly resolved all problems.

The migration to DivIT’s AD.UMD.EDU active directory solved a few issues.  First, by migrating to the new active directory, staff no longer have to keep two passwords. The password used for email, timesheets, VPN, and other university resources is now the same password used for logging into the Windows workstations. Secondly, the LIBLAN domain was only created because of a need of the Libraries that DivIT didn’t provide at that time. Now, DivIT has their own stable active directory which contains accounts every librarian, staff, and student that’s on campus. And, their active directory security policies have been reviewed by IT auditors. There is no longer a need for the Libraries to create duplicate accounts or spend time copying the same security polices as DivIT.

Along with the change of passwords, there were other changes that were a result of the migration.  All network staff printers were renamed, and all printers were installed on every computer so staff now sees every network staff printer in their printer list. The new naming convention for the staff printers changed from department/unit name to BLDG_FL_PR# (Building_Floor number_Printer number). All the printers were labeled to match the same names as the printers shown on the staff workstations printer list. This change to the network printers allows for greater flexibility. Staff no longer need to contact the DSS Helpdesk to have a network printer installed. Printers do not need to be renamed if a department’s name changes. And it allows staff that float around the ability to print no matter where they are.

Also, because of the new security policies, staff can no longer have admin rights to their workstation. Anything that requires admin rights in ordered to be installed, now must be installed by User and System Support. Likewise, because of audited securitiy policies, DivIT does not create generic accounts in their active directory. So, departments can no longer have a generic account for their students to share. Each student must have their own username and password to be able to log into the workstations.

The entire domain migration took part in 3 major steps using scripts—premigration, ADmigration, and postmigration.  These scripts made it possible for USS to automate the process as much as possible, eliminating the need to touch all staff Windows desktop computers. The scripts didn’t run automatically on Windows laptops because most would either be away from campus, using wireless (which has its own problems), or simply turned off.  And also, the method of removing and adding Mac desktops and laptops to the new domain used an entirely different process.

The goal of the premigration script was to copy user data to try to make the migration as painless as possible. Since some of the user data could only be accessed when staff were logged in, this script had to be initiated by the staff before the migration. When initiated, the script copied over Firefox configurations, Internet Explorer Favorites, and Chrome configurations to a server. It also copied over the Microsoft Outlook configurations and data from a few specialized applications.

On Friday, May 29, 2015, DSS remotely pushed the ADmigration script to every staff Windows desktop that was powered on and had network connectivity. The script kicked off a 3 step process that rebooted the computers after each step was completed. These steps automatically removed the computers off the LIBLAN domain, renamed the computers to meet DivIT naming conventions, and added the computers to the AD.UMD.EDU domain, ready for the staff to login on Monday. It took weeks of planning, testing, and work to do these 3 steps without any human intervention at all. Each and every USS staff and student employee contributed in some way on this project.

The postmigration script was automatically ran when the staff logged into the computer for the first time. This script copied all the user data that was copied from the premigration script, and placed them in their correct locations on the computer. However, as with any process that involves so many computers, not all the scripts or steps ran successfully on every computer. Some staff didn’t have the opportunity to run the premigration script, and some desktops were able to run all 3 steps of the ADmigration scriptes. These machines had to be migrated individually by USS staff. The week following the migration was used to individually migrate all Windows laptops and Mac laptops/desktops.

The Library staff cooperated wonderfully throughout the migration.  By them doing the premigration steps, the number of potential problems were significantly reduced. And the staff that did have problems, they were patient and gave User and Systems Support staff the necessary time to resolve the issue. If not for the cooperation of the staff, the migration could have been unsuccessful with many frustrated staff.

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

Support to USMAI

The CLAS team responded to 75 Aleph Rx submission and 28 e-resource requests from across the consortium’s libraries in June. This included projects like configuring EZproxy for UM HS/HSL’s investigation of Callisto and modifying loan rules for SU’s iPad checkout service.

Fiscal Year End Closeout

June brings the end of one fiscal year and the beginning of the next. The CLAS team assisted USMAI campuses with the fiscal year transition, closing out FY2015 budgets, creating FY2016 budgets, and rolling encumbered orders from the old budget to the new budget.

New User Request Forms

In an effort to make the submission of Aleph user creation/deletion requests as simple and accurate as possible, the CLAS team has streamlined the input of information on the four user request forms (Circulation, Cataloging, Acquisitions, and Cross-Functional) and migrated the forms to a new survey platform (Wufoo). The new forms offer a number of hints when the requester hovers over corresponding fields. These hints along with the display of condition-specific fields should help guide requests.

Kuali OLE

CLAS continued work on OLE, meeting with USMAI testers to facilitate the consortium’s evaluation of OLE. The team also implemented an authentication method on their development server in order to test loading real data (i.e. patrons, financial, etc.) in OLE.

MD-SOAR

The Maryland Shared Open Access Repository moved into production status on June 15th. The repository is available and ready for participating campuses to begin loading repository items and collections.

Staffing

Student assistant turned C1 Jordan Lee’s last day was June 30. Jordan accepted a full-time position with the UMD College of Behavioral and Social Sciences (BSOS) Undergraduate Advising Office, where she worked as graduate administrative coordinator while earning her MLS. Congrats, Jordan!

Conferences, workshops and professional development

Heidi Hanson attended ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco as Chair of LITA’s Christian Larew Scholarship Committee.

Liz Caringola was accepted into the 2015-2016 cohort for the Advancing Professional Track Faculty Program sponsored by the ADVANCE Program for Inclusive Excellence and the Office of Faculty Affairs. This program provides access to knowledge regarding policies governing professional track faculty; offers knowledge through concrete examples and models; and expands participants’ on-campus peer networks.

On June 4, Liz Caringola moderated the session “Wikipedia: Helping Us Reach Users and Build Partnerships” at the Research and Innovation Forum. The panelists included Laura Cleary, Felicity Brown, Jen Eidson, Steve Henry, and Jessica Abbazio. Robin Pike presented “Managing Audiovisual Digitization,” Josh Westgard presented “CSV Validation for Metadata Wrangling,” Karl Nilsen presented “Comparing Data Production in Social Sciences, Area Studies, and Humanities Fields Using Terminology in Literature,” and Eric Cartier presented a poster titled “Establishing the In-House Internet Archive Digitization Workflow” at the UMD Libraries Research and Innovative Practice Forum on Thursday, June 4. Eric’s poster was also accepted for the Society of American Archivists Research Forum, part of the Annual Meeting in Cleveland, OH.

Liz Caringola and Josh Westgard from DSS and Amanda Hawk from SCUA judged projects for the National History Day competition held on campus June 15-16.

Eric and Dr. Laura Schnitker attended the Cultural Heritage Information Management Forum at The Catholic University of America on Friday, June 5, and delivered the presentation, “Saving College Radio,” during the morning session.

Visits

Robin Pike, Eric Cartier, and student assistants Audrey Lengel, Caroline Hayden, and Cecilia Franck visited the National Public Radio headquarters in Washington, DC on Thursday, June 11 to deliver files digitized over the past two years from the NPR Archives. Hannah Sommers, Director of the Research, Archives, and Data Strategy group provided a tour of the facility and operations.

Eric met with Jaime Mears, a recent iSchool graduate currently working as a National Digital Stewardship Residency resident for the DC Public Libraries, on Wednesday, June 24. Jaime’s task is to develop a personal digital archiving workstation for the public, so she and Eric spoke about all of the procedures, processes, and workflows that are the foundation of Hornbake Digitization Center (HDC) digitization operations and how they may translate to a public library setting.

Stew of the month: May 2015

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 and Conversion Activities

The Historic Maryland Newspapers Project sent two additional batches (approximately 10,000 newspaper pages each) to the digitization vendor in May. In those batches were pages from Der Deutsche Correspondent, the St. Mary’s Beacon, and the St. Mary’s Gazette, as well as the remaining pages of the Catoctin Clarion. Digitization of Der Deutsche Correspondent, a German-language newspaper published in Baltimore from 1841-1918, began during our first grant cycle for the years 1858-1913. In collaboration with the Maryland Historical Society, the remainder of the run through 1918 will be completed during this grant.  The combined runs of the St. Mary’s Beacon and Gazette (Leonardtown, MD) will span 1852-1922.

Liz Caringola and the HMNP students continue to add to the Historic Maryland Newspapers Project on Pinterest. Please follow us if you’re on Pinterest!

Digitization assistants digitized 130 UMD sports media guides and 125 more historical French pamphlets, which Eric Cartier batch-uploaded to the Internet Archive.

Eric Cartier and digitization assistants Ryan Jester and Massimo Petrozzi completed quality assurance inspections of 190 WAMU audio files and 39 Arthur Godfrey sound recordings, received in April and May, accordingly. Both projects were funded through the Digitization Initiatives Committee project proposal process. 

Digitization assistants Brin Winterbottom and Rachel Dook explored CD-ripping software and developed procedures for capturing born-digital audio content on optical discs in-house. They converted 200 CD-Rs from the WMUC Collection containing in-studio, live Third Rail Radio shows.

GAs Alice Prael and Amy Wickner (SCUA) have begun a case study to test the workflow using a one terabyte hard drive containing born-digital records of the National Labor College obtained from the George Meany Memorial AFL-CIO Archive. Although the disk imaging process moved smoothly, they now face challenges accessing the disk image. This is due to an issue connecting network drives in the BitCurator environment.  They hope to resolve the problem soon.

Digital  Programs and Initiatives

In addition to routine file preservation activities, Josh Westgard has been focused on the launch of additional instances of the single-table Solr-backed Hippo database system previously piloted with the SCPA Scores Database. Two additional databases using this system will lauch in June. Josh is also assisting with the MD-SOAR shared institutional repository by handling batch loads of existing content into the new system, and has been involved in a number of recent exploratory meetings regarding new collections and future projects, including an exciting collaboration with members of the Digital Humanities team from the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies on the creation of a TEI-encoded corpus of Persian texts. Stay tuned for more on this and other new intitiatives in future postings!

Karl Nilsen and the Research Data Services team began working with Ann Wylie, professor of geology, to curate and preserve a variety of data related to the identification of asbestos. Accurate identification of asbestos is not only a matter of basic research, but also an important factor in industrial regulation, health policy, and legal proceedings. The team is reviewing the structure and formatting of Dr. Wylie’s data files, examining publications related to these data for information that will aid curation, and creating data documentation files. To support long-term access, the team will create CSV versions of the original Excel spreadsheets. These data will be uploaded to DRUM as open data and contribute to public and private research on asbestos.

Software Development

Design and planning for the Responsive Web Design project continued with several rounds of feedback and improvements for  Static HTML Mockups between DSS and the Web Advisory Committee.  Coding for the new templates in Hippo is scheduled to begin over the summer, with the home page and subsite pages implemented first.

The improved Exhibit website templates have been completed and installed into production.  Dependencies between the existing Beyond the Battle: Bladensburg Rediscovered content, the new Hippo Exhibit code, and the new Unify 1.7 bootstrap template turned out to be more complex than anticipated but with some extra effort the new template has come together.  Content for the new exhibits is still under construction so look for these coming soon: from the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies the Persian Digital Humanities website and from Special Collections the Library of American Broadcasting Foundation website and new exhibit Alice 150 Years and Counting…The Legacy of Lewis Carroll.

Development of the new online student application submission form and supervisor database is nearing completion. In June we will be working with Human Resources and student supervisors to test the application, fix bugs, tweak the features, and release into production.

As part of standing up a DSpace instance for the Maryland Shared Open Access Repository (MD-SOAR) we created a GitHub based code repository forked form the core DSpace code repository.  The production instance will come online using DSpace version 5.1 with customizations to the XMLUI/Mirage2 interface for the MD-SOAR theme and for a institutional branding based on each top-level community per participating institution.

The Wufoo Connector enterprise integration tool for submitting WuFoo forms into SysAid and AlephRx has proven buggy in the production environment.  Given very light demand for the application and alternatives for existing forms we have deferred working on a bug fix and have the removed application from production use.  Since beginning work on the Wufoo Connector we have become aware of  existing tools for enterprise messaging, such as Apache Camel, so rather than fixing the bug we may abandon this custom code for an established framework.

DSS has entered into a partnership with the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) with DSS providing software development services and open data expertise in support of their mission to accelerate scientific discovery at the interface of human and ecological systems.  Development is underway on a new Integrated Discovery Platform for automating the ingest and cataloging of socio-environmental data.

User and System Support

On Tuesday, June 2nd, at the iSchool Alumni Chapter Annual Meeting,  USS staff gave demonstrations about the equipment in the John & Stella Grave’s Makerspace.Sandra Ayensu, Victoria Quartey and Preston Tobery were asked to provide demos on 3D printing, 3D scanning, Google Glass and the One Button Studio. They demonstrated the equipment for about 2 hours. Everyone in attendance was thrilled to see what the Libraries has to offer. Uche Enwesi was asked to be one of the panelists in the meeting. He spoke about libraries and how they are using Makerspaces to transform learning and impact education.

The John & Stella Grave’s Makerspace room was flooded the night before from heavy rain. Fortunately, none of the equipment was damage. Because of the flood, the demonstrations had to happen outside the John & Stella Grave’s Makerspace room. Victoria did the demonstration for 3D printing. Attendees were amazed by the way the printers worked and liked being able to hold some of the printed models in their hands to get a closer look. Preston offered a closer look at handheld 3D scanning with the Sense 3D scanner. Preston hooked up a large screen TV to show how the scanner works in real time while he scanned a few people. They were amazed that the scan could be completed in minutes and made available for 3D printing even quicker. Sandra displayed the Google Glass; attendees naturally gravitated towards this swanky eye wear and immediately asked questions. Questions asked were: can they be worn over glasses, are they still in production, and are there any hazards such as overheating? Many attendees tried on the Google Glass but had a hard time focusing on the screen. Once they adjusted, they were ready to roll! Some played games while others recorded videos and took pictures. Our staff explained that many students and faculty of the University borrow them for up to three days.  The most common question was, why is the Google Glass in the Libraries?  Our staff was able to respond that,“The Libraries in the twenty-first century are defying the odds by rebranding the stereotype of a typical Library to a haven where limitless possibilities of innovation occur.”

Uche, Victoria, Preston, and Sandra enjoyed the meeting. They were able to learn about other Makerspaces in the area. It was nice to hear the different experiences panelists went through with their Makerspace. They also learned that Makerspace aren’t limited to educational campuses but are being opened up in general public areas too. One notable experience came from an elementary school librarian. She mentioned that 3D printers did not mesh well for her environment because kids lacked patience to wait for 3D printjobs to finish. She had to create a new curriculum that was not centered on 3D printing, but still fun for the children.

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

Support to USMAI

The CLAS team responded to 84 Aleph Rx submissions and 25 e-resource requests from across the consortium’s libraries in May. These requests include interesting campus projects like restricting access to a specific Docutek e-reserve course at TU (using EZproxy) in support of a shared syllabus collection that is being built and helping integrate EZproxy with the product Callisto for HS/HSL. The team is also working on coordinating the transitioning of USMAI libraries’ budgets into the new fiscal year – an annual process known as “Fiscal Year End Closeout“.

Metalib migration

The migration of Metalib (the application behind ResearchPort) was completed on May 7th. This was a complicated move, which CLAS Systems Analyst Hans Breitenlohner successfully executed with minimal downtime to users. The suite of applications is now thriving in its new home!

Kuali OLE

The team continues to work with consortium members on their testing of OLE. Version 1.6 of OLE was officially released in late May. CLAS Systems Analyst David Steelman has updated the “OLE Sandbox” environment to this new version for testing.

As a possible complement to OLE, the team has been looking at a utility called the Business Intelligence Reporting Tool (“BIRT” for short), as a potential reporting tool to use alongside OLE. Keeping with the spirit of OLE, BIRT is an open source product.

MD-SOAR

The Maryland Shared Open Access Repository (MD-SOAR) continues to move closer to production. Work on theming and configuring the application will be complete in June and is still on schedule to hand over to individual institutions on June 15th for their use.

Staffing

The following DCMR students graduated this semester: Melissa Foge, Jordan Lee, Marlin Oliver, and Massimo Petrozzi. Melissa, Jordan, and Massimo will be working as C1s this summer. Marlin was recently hired by Sirius XM Satellite Radio.

SSDR says farewell to our Graduate Assistants Sakshi Jain and Rohit Arora.  Sakshi  has obtained her Masters in Information Management from the iSchool and Rohit his M.S. in Telecommunications Engineering from the ENTS program.

Conferences, workshops and professional development

David Steelman attended the Ex Libris Technical Seminar in Minneapolis on May 4th. He attended training on the Patron Directory Services (PDS) module, which is a key component of the authentication framework for USMAI libraries.

Heidi Hanson attended the ELUNA Conference from May 6th through 8th in Minneapolis.

David Dahl attended the Maryland/Delaware Library Associations 2015 Conference in Ocean City, MD from May 6th through 8th. He co-presented a poster entitled “That’s Not Relevant! Comparisons of Perceived Results Relevancy in Discovery Service Products”.

Publications

Graduate Assistants Alice Prael and Amy Wickner (SCUA) have written an article on their recent work with born digital workflows. “Getting to Know FRED: Introducing Workflows for Born Digital Content” was published in Practical Technology for Archives this month. They will also be presenting this paper at the semi-annual meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference in Roanoke, VA in October.