12/19/11

Steering Committee Minutes December 12

1.HaithiTrust and Portico
  • Portico needs to do an overlap analysis of our holdings in order for us to negotiate effectively for lowest possible price. It is assumed that because we have so much content already “insured” in EJC, that we will be able to negotiate for a lower than list price. Director’s supplied names of campus contacts who can run an ISSN list of local holdings appropriate for this purpose.
  • HT will be contacted again in an effort to get a firmer ball park estimate
2.Operating Committee and ConStor funds
  • The OH5 VP’s needed more time to consider our request for diversion of funds from ConStor to Portico and/or HathiTrust. After closer estimates come in from Portico and HT, more information will be presented.
3.OH5 Library Directors Meeting in January
  • The directors will hold the quarterly meeting in late January. Location will be Wooster.
  • Topics for the meeting will include concluding the current NGL grant; determining specifics for inclusion in NGL2.0; reviewing draft language for new grant proposal for Mark and Alan; scheduling conference call for spring semester and greeting Cathi
4.Technical Infrastructure
  • A conference call meeting will be scheduled for January
  • The newspaper project RFI has gone out
  • The subcommittee working on Omeka needs to have a call in January and should have a draft of the portal project ready for review
5.Staff Development
  • Intermediate training for the DRC has been conducted at Denison and will be repeated at other schools as necessary
6.Campus Updates
  • Den – approved their final 4 projects including 3 student journal projects and an archival collection of the Homestead
  • Ken – has a new video archive project underway and has a call out for proposals for their remaining funds
  • OWU – approved on new proposal and is considering a second. May use some funds for extensions of existing grants

12/8/11

HASTAC

Last week, Josh Finnell, Jessica Clemons, and I presented a digital poster, Integrating Digital Collections in the Liberal Arts Curriculum at the HASTAC Conference in Ann Arbor. This blog post is a short description of our experience at the conference and presenting our poster.

Josh:
At her keynote address, Cathy Davidson distributed pencils and notecards to the audience and asked everyone to write down the skills we think students need to succeed in the 21st century. She then asked us to talk with a neighbor about what we wrote down. Even though she didn’t say it, everyone worked on the first step alone. This isolated approach to thinking and learning is very much a standard of an older model of education. As Davidson points out, we are more likely to retain information when we work collaboratively. Hence, the audience was more likely to retain our conversation with our neighbor than what we wrote down on a notecard. Davidson’s point is that our institutions should foster collaboration and stimulate learning.

With Davidson’s keynote, in conjunction Dan Atkins and Siva Vaidhyanathan, the theme of scholarly communication was the umbrella topic of the conference. So it was with great pleasure to share the ways in which the colleges of the Ohio 5 have been fostering collaboration and stimulating learning through the Next Generation Libraries Grant. The conference was an excellent confluence of scientists, professors, administrators, digital humanists, technologists, and librarians. However, though a cross-section of the academic community was represented, most of the attendees and presenters spoke from the position of R1 research institutions. Our poster presentation Integrating Digital Collections in the Liberal Arts Curriculum gave us the opportunity to showcase the ways in which smaller institutions can also contribute to the conversation of digital humanities

Jessica:
I was pleasantly surprised about the interest regarding our project. Many people saw librarians as necessary collaborators in digital projects and were pleased to have that presence at the conference. While sometimes left out of the conversations, library involvement in digital projects are essential from several perspectives, especially preservation. I spoke about the COW farmer oral history collection and had someone ask me for tips regarding interviewing. She was very interested in my work in the classroom helping students prepare to interview people they had never met before.

I was able to attend several lightning talk series that had a holistic approach to innovative uses of technology. Faculty and students are researching in new ways. Assessment of digital projects is not the same as evaluating the standard research paper of essays. Seeing how all of these pieces fit together will help me develop new proposals for digital collections.

Catalina:
The theme of Digital Scholarly Community at the HASTAC conference was seen in both the key notes addresses, concurrent sessions, and poster demonstrations. The keynotes provided a detailed look how traditional academic fields are changed (and in the case of Josh Greenberg new fields emerge) by the application of digital tools. The concurrent lightening sessions and posters brought together innovative projects from the social sciences, humanities, arts, and sciences united by their use of the digital. These quick sessions presented new and often groundbreaking ways scholars are gathering, mining, sharing, creating and representing data.

Our poster was one of few that focused on student involvement in digital scholarly communication. While the collections we've created as part of the NGL are not as cutting edge as much of what we saw at HASTAC, we were able to convey the importance of our work by discussing the classroom and how the NGL is contributing to curriculum and student scholarship. In addition, there was interest in our poster for the practical approach to creating digital collections we outlined, as opposed to other presentations focused only on the results. Overall HASTAC offered us a great opportunity to see what other digital projects are coming, while presenting our own perspective on what we have accomplished at The Ohio Five.

12/6/11

A Look at the Book: Text and Reading Culture from Manuscripts to Print to E-Readers

This event at Kenyon will use material digitized as part of the NGL grant.

The students of Used Books: Medieval Manuscripts (aka ARHS 374) invite you to an exhibition and reception in the Lee L. Meier / Quentin J. Draudt Curatorial Classroom in Gund Gallery on Thursday, December 8 from 5:00-6:00pm.

With funding initially received from a Mellon Next Generation Libraries grant, Professor Sarah Blick and Special Collections Librarian Ethan A. Henderson created this class to give students the opportunity to study and work with original and digitized leaves of manuscripts dating from the 11th to the 21st century. Come see the exhibit and ask these student curators about dirty books, palimpsests, glossing, chained books, illuminations, punctus flexus, manicules, and many other fascinating aspects of manuscript studies.

The Classroom/Exhibit will also be open on Thursday from 3-8pm and Friday from 1-7pm.

12/1/11

Steering Committee Minutes December 1

1) Technical Infrastructure Committee update
  • Newspaper taskforce is assembled and RFI is about ready to send out to vendors.  Alan and Catalina will send out ASAP.
2) Staff Development Committee update
  • Catalina announced a DRC collection curator training session next Friday at Denison.  An additional session(s) will be planned for other institutions
3) Campus updates
  • Oberlin -- some Shansi archives project leaders will present on the project at a conference at Queens University, Kington, Ont. next May.
  • Kenyon -- spending on current projects appears to be low, evaluating the situation.
  • OWU -- next date for proposal submission is December 9th; they are expecting two new proposals; $15,000 of $50,000 not yet allocated, may consider adding to newspaper digitization funds
  • Denison -- nothing new
  • Wooster -- new Pol. Sci proposal to store videos; discussions about storing some of all of 8000+ Art Museum digital objects
4) other business
  • at yesterday's OH5 Operating Cttee meeting they we're yet prepared to fully discuss possibilities to repurpose CONSTOR funding for Hathitrust or Portico.  CONSTOR funds will not be freed up until 2013
  • the directors discussed Hathitrust and Portico features and costs; Amy, Mark, and Mary talked with John Magill about our Hathitrust and Portico interests
  • Ray gave an OhioLINK update: 1) no word yet on Chancellor finding one-time funding to make initial EJC payments in January, 2) news sources are starting to report that a small 2-year capital budget bill is in the works, 3) Chancellor Petro wants all statewide ejournal and database agreements maintained, 4) an OL taskforce on ejournal funding formulas will be set up soon, 5) in January LACCC will revert to it's earlier smaller size; Ray will cycle off and Mark Christel will replace him as the independent college rep.

11/30/11

Steering Committee Minutes November 10

1) Technical Infrastructure Committee update
Looking at Newspaper Request for Information and will soon establish a Newspaper Committee. Once the committee is formed will start contacting vendors.

2) Staff Development Committee update
Reviewed survey results from the Technical Services Workshop. Part of the feedback was requests to have groups meet regularly and stay in communication.
The Committee funded two requests for money to go to conferences. A small amount to a student who did a poster on one collection and larger amount to staff members presenting on the entire NGL project at the HASTAC Conference.

3) Campus updates
  • Kenyon- Approve another grant, and working on getting 2 or 3 more
  • OWU- Nothing New
  • Denison- 4 new grants coming up, 3 are related to digitizing student journals, the 4th is related to the Denison Homestead
  • Oberlin- has a gathering of faculty to show off the Shansi collection
  • Wooster- Focusing on student thesis collection right now

11/16/11

Faculty Preview Oberlin's Shansi Project

Oberlin College recently hosted An Introduction to the “Shansi: Oberlin and Asia” Digitization Project, an event for faculty to learn more about the OC Archives' Shansi Collection and the NGL project that is putting a significant sampling of the collection online.

OC Faculty members Bonnie Cheng and Ann Sherif 
OC Archivist Ken Grossi










The event included

  • An overview of the archives of Oberlin Shansi and associated personal papers, documenting the activities of Oberlin Shansi and the Ming Hsien School in early twentieth-century East Asia.
  • Examples of selected photographs, films, texts, correspondence, maps, objects and ephemera available electronically for the first time.
  • Discussion of the ways the collection, both online and in the College Archives, will be useful in your teaching and research.
  • Presentations by Eric Estes, Carl Jacobson, Ken Grossi, Anne Salsich, Ann Sherif, and Bonnie Cheng of the new digital collection, and objects from the Archives on display.
The Shansi project is creating a collection of digital objects that document Oberlin's early contact with Asia. The project is expected to be completed for use by students and researchers in January 2012.

11/7/11

Omeka server administrators continue planning

Notes from today's conference call are posted on the Technical Infrastructure Committee site.

11/2/11

NITLE Digital Scholarship webinar

Sign up for the free 11/11/11 1 hour NITLE digital scholarship webinar (or view the recorded version later).  Some of us heard webinar participants speak the Hope College workshop last month and they are quite good.

Steering Committee Minutes October 13

1) Technical Infrastructure Committee update
  • There is a newspaper document prepared for the newspaper project proposal.
  • Omeka server is up, the Omeka committee are testing it out now.
  • The team is looking at the Cleveland history project from Cleveland State and Mark Tebeau to see if we can replicate the idea with our local information--in Oberlin, Granville, Gambier, etc. A project like this will bring. Some public exposure and possible ways to share student research.
  • Matt is working on map interface and an IR-setting up the technical side for each school.
2) Staff Development Committee update
Technical service workshop will be on Monday, October 17 at Denison. About 30 people expected to attend.

3) Campus updates
  • Oberlin--nothing new
  • Kenyon -- 2 potential projects/proposals in the works. We are reviewing our budget as well.
  • OWU--2 projects completed the 12 steps. 2 others still in the works.
  • Denison-- working on existing projects and expanding student journals
  • Wooster - waiting for several new proposals. One new project in the works. YouTube political commercial project.
4) Any other business
Presidents meeting: We think it is important to underscore the value of OhioLINK to education and higher Ed. Talk about what we, Ohio Five, have contributed to OhioLINK as a group over time and in recent years. Talk about the importance of long term sustainability of OhioLINK as an asset to Ohio and the education Ohio institutions offer.

10/28/11

Steering Committee Minutes -- Oct. 27, 2011


Steering Committee Conference Call Minutes October 27, 2011
  --note taker: Alan Boyd

Technical Infrastructure Committee update
• Report from Alan – Omeka server is set up; local project administrators are being given access to experiment.  There will be a conference call in a week or so to discuss setting up the site and using it for real exhibits.
• Newspaper project details are in; Alan and Catalina will work it up as a draft request for information to send to vendors.

Staff Development Committee update
• Report from Amy - Technical Services workshop was well attended and useful (see earlier blog entry for agenda); afternoon small discussion groups for Serials, Cataloging, and Acquisitions were particularly well commented on.  Catalina reported that the feedback frequently mentioned getting the OH5 committees functioning again in these areas.
• This discussion broadened into the area of III's Sierra "early implementers" offer, and their Electronic Resources Module (ERM).  Michael and Alan will pursue an additional deal with III and we'll consider using OH5 CONSORT reserve $$ to fund on the CONSORT side.  Oberlin is close to having the go ahead from their VP/Finance too.  ERM, which is otherwise a quite expensive module, would be relatively inexpensive under the "appreciation points" deal III is offering right now along with a Sierra commitment. 

Campus updates
• OWU – 4 recently approved projects have been formally accepted by faculty and listed on our projects page.
• Other institutions--- nothing new, but continuing project work

OhioLINK update
• Ray reported that the OL Library Advisory Coord. Ctte is leaning toward their "model #2" option which trims several packages to come up with the $4 million shortfall.  The option to cut one big package is still on the table though.

OH5 Academic Officers meeting
• Mark reported that the deans and provosts are all solid in their support of OhioLINK.  All library directors will be meeting with their deans/provosts and presidents to update them on the urgency of the OhioLINK situation prior to the presidents' meeting with Chancellor, Jim Petro, the second week of Nov.  Ray will attend this meeting to supply any detailed information on the OhioLINK situation that the presidents or chancellor may ask for.


10/25/11

Getting started in Digital Humanities projects

Here's a link summarizing many of the resources several of us heard about recently at the GLCA digital humanities workshop at Hope College.

10/20/11

Omeka Server Support--Conference Call

See the TIC blog posting for a summary of todays call.

9/29/11

Technical Services Workshop October 17th

The fall Technical Services Workshop will be held on October 17th at Denison University. All interested staff are welcome to attend, though the day is designed for staff who are working in Technical Services. If you plan to attend let the Staff Development representative at your school know.

The Five Colleges of Ohio Technical Services Workshop
October 17th Burton-Morgan building, Denison University

The Ohio Five Technical Services Workshop is designed to bring staff together to address issues in this changing field. From this workshop we hope participants will find more ways to collaborate between schools, share current practices, and learn about new trends.

Agenda
9:45-10:00 Arrive and enjoy a full breakfast
10:00-10:15 Welcome and overview
10:15-11 Summon for Technical Services
11:15-12 Electronic Resources overview
12-12:15 CONstor Update
12:15-1:30 Oriental Buffet Lunch and Special Interest Lunch Tables
1:30-3 Sharing “Best” Practices (select one: Cataloging, Serials or Acquisitions)
3-3:15 Doorprize drawing and wrap up

For more info see the Full Agenda

Steering Committee Minutes September 22nd

Steering Committee Conference Call Minutes September 22nd, 2011

Technical Infrastructure Committee update
• Report from Alan – OWU has ordered new equipment, from line in grant budget. He hasn't tallied the totals for this line to see who has how much remaining. He volunteered to do so and send out a message to everyone.
• Newspaper project still needs more detailed info from some institutions
• Seeking volunteers to do a pilot video project (short video about a digital collection that could be used as promotional material with other faculty). This needs a faculty volunteer who has worked on a project.

Staff Development Committee update
• Planning the Technical Services Workshop for October 17th
• Professional development opportunitites:
-GLCA workshop on Digital Humanites (Hope College, Oct 7-8)
-OhioLINK Digital Preservation workshop (Columbus, Oct. 24-25)

Campus updates
• OWU –final decisions today or tomorrow on next submissions (received five)
-completed projects: Digital Resources for the Teaching of the History of the Book abd Contemporary Issues in Media Law Podcasts
• KEN – have another call for projects
• DEN – need additional help with costume project and have hired student workers
• WOO – two projects in the works − Working on the Independent Study database
• OBE – working on ongoing projects

9/16/11

OH5 Omeka server project

Notes from a conference call among staff planning to implement a shared Omeka server for digital exibitions support have been posted on the Technical Infrastructure Committee blog

9/13/11

Oberlin Ethnographic Collection talk at Illinois State Museum

Linda Grimm, OC Emerita Professor of Anthropology, gave a talk last week at the Illinois State Museum touching on her NGL project.  Prof. Grimm is working in collaboration with Assistant Prof. Amy Margaris and student research assistant Geneva Dampare on creating an expanded website to facilitate coursework with the digital collection.

9/2/11

New Promotional Flyer from OC Archives

The Oberlin College Archives have created a promotional flyer on their digital collections, include two location collections developed under the grant.

8/29/11

Staff Development Committee Notes August 25

Staff Development Committee Conference Call Notes on August 25, 2011

1. Welcome to our new committee member, Chris Casey from Denison!

2. Review of Summer Institute 2011
  • Overall positive feedback!
  • Some things to keep in mind for the next event, add moderator for panels etc
3. Review of DRC Admin Training
  • Funded by Staff Development Committee but organized by TIC, great training
4. Technical Services Fall Workshop
  • Came out from directors' meeting
  • Possible date/time Denison on October 17th- will confirm next week
  • Kenyon and Denison are sharing technical service. Schools will take this opportunity to look at more ways to work collaboratively, learn new trends, have conversation and share best practice in cataloging; As several OWU technical service people have retried, they might be able to work with other schools and figure out ways to collaborate; Technical service staff from all schools are encouraged to attend.
  • OWU folks like the format of "Reorganize staff and work" of Summer Institute ( open discussion )
  • Planning will continue after committee members have spoken to Tech Services staff about what they want to see and what will be useful
5. Advanced Digital Imaging workshop for TIC
  • color correction, preservation etc
  • staff dev will fund the workshop
6. Assessment
  • start thinking about how we will do this
  • remind staff that there is a survey set up for students to take
  • faculty input
  • we have good assessment evidence ( staff dev events feedback etc), will help other folks to put together the assessment.
7. Faculty Workshops
  • start thinking about it
  • do we fund them to go to external outlets or internal ones?
  • Food for thoughts: bring IT folks to talk about pedagogical tools, workshop + lunch bag
  • Identify local needs, set aside money for each school to meet the needs of faculty
  • Carol suggests Ray to come to talk about OA at OWU.
  • Denison will possibly hold faculty workshop that shows off thier digitization tools and talks about digital projects
  • Will start with OWU and Denison, then evaulate before having workshops at the other campuses

8. Other webinars, conferences, etc we should know about?
GLCA

TIC meeting notes August 18th

Technical Infrastructure Committee meeting at Oberlin August 18th, 2011

Project updates
Members need to update our project info sheets - images are in there, if we need to update them.
Denison: Costume Collection- coming along nicely, it's almost ready to go; Looking Back Looking Forward- cleaning up metadata; Writing our Story- waiting on transcripts for; Herbarium- is in test and will be harvested into Production; have some journal projects coming.
Kenyon: Things are moving along - the test instance slowness issues have caused some delays, so we're a little behind.
Oberlin: King-Crane- in ContentDM; Geological Images- currently have photo cds, and are using software to extract the tifs; Shansi- coming along really well; Paleantology is having work done by a student over the summer; Borges- faculty member is working on rights; Music for Children- faculty is studying clips; Artist Books- going to happen in the fall once they get a book scanner; Anthropology- lot of work done this summer taking a relational database in MySQL and mapped it to ContentDM.; Musical Iconography- thinking of using the book scanner for this, in the fall; They're waiting on IIP; They have also been working on Web of Science export to DSpace for faculty publications.
Ohio Wesleyan - Media Law- done except OCLC record; History of the book- done except OCLC record; Chinese movie database- working on metadata; Real Estate Atlases- outsourced scanning, slightly stalled over summer; Herbarium- specimens needs to be selected and repaired, taking some time, but student has been working; Japanese skill builder program- working with IS rep for things in Blackboard.
Wooster Farmer's Oral History collection- up and ready to go!

Omeka
At this point, we have four schools using Omeka - OWU and Oberlin are hosting it locally; Wooster and Denison are using the hosted service. Built by the Zotero folks and Omeka is well supported. Should we looking at this consortially?
Quick best idea was - if someone can work with local IT and it's not too hard to get a server going, we could distribute support (admin functions) among several folks.
Or there are funds in the grant to pay for hosting or a server? A one-off application hosting in the cloud would be reasonably priced enough so as to be sustainable.
In the end, consensus seemed to be that a cloud-hosted solution (i.e. GoDaddy.com) may be the best way to go.

Matt's agenda
IR interface for everyone to use. Basically a cleaner version of the Oberlin scholarship theme; delayed to sometime this week; deliverable is a theme document.
Agreed upon the priority list as stated on the website.

Training
Digital Imaging nuts and bolts, will start working on this with Staff Development.
Newspaper Digitization
At the information gathering stage at this point, what state are our newspapers currently in?
Catalina will be putting together a consortial proposal on the "why?"
Developing a request for bids based on the content we find, in terms of outsourcing
METS ALTO - the standard for newspaper digitization; standard in ContentDM
Mark pointed out that we should make sure that the resulting image will work in multiple platforms

Portal site
Things we're hoping to provide - grant generated documentation, links to collections, perhaps a harvested collection or combination harvested collection
start to develop a document which could be a portal content draft
perhaps a blog? Suggestions?

Reminders
Update hardware list on TIC page with any equipment that was purchase with grant funds; Denison is cataloging equipment
Update project info sheets
Administer Student surveys

Promulgating results
Poster sessions- What does a presentation look like?

Next grant possible activities

Internet Archive digitization
Newspaper digitization
instructional technology integration
preserving data sets?

Steering Committee Minutes August 4th

Notes Ohio 5 Leadership Committee meeting at Ohio Wesleyan University August 4th 2011

Summon
Michael reports that Implementation is going fine. Denison has their load done, others should follow within days.

Publicity/Marketing Plans- A few staff members went to the summon training at BGSU. Kenyon asked Summon for Swag and got pens to hand out. The Summon community wiki has lots of stuff, if you are not doing individual branding. Location of Summon on the library web page is an issue at schools. Suggested we can copy and (give credit to) the BGSU LibGuide on Summon.

Suggestions for publicizing- letter to faculty and QR codes to promote mobile

CONStor
One issue is finding home for LPs- no one seems to want them and some covers are moldy

We are still considering if we can get items to the Internet Archive in California, who is taking books no one else wants. While this is being researched, the work schedule has been changed so recycling will be done last to give us the most time to make a deal to get stuff to them.

Gov Docs Consolidation
Ellen sent out a report recently.

For Agency docs we need to follow a different plan than with hearings. The Gov Docs Group ranked agencies and are want schools to be a center for those records, but doesn't expect a full agency collection or even transferring docs between schools. Instead, schools will wait until weeding takes place, then the institution with that agency as a focus can take what would have been weeded. Schools will review what they collect based on this strategy.

Sub-Committees
A year ago, sub-committees were abandoned for affinity groups. But that didn't work- only science and serials met. Committees have not met, the idea was that groups would meet when there was a need, but that hasn't happened much.

Plans going forward to create these committees:
Collection Development
Reference & Instructions
Gov Docs
Serials/Electronic Resources

Committees will meet for a day once a year where each committee would get together with planned activities, instruction, and time for discussion of current topics. From this meeting they could decide if they need to meet again because there is stuff to do. Committees will be Co-Chaired by the director and another staff member, ideally staff from the director's library.

Shared technical/collection services
OWU lost 3 staff members recently, 2 related to Tech Services. They are thinking about restructuring staff instead of filling those positions as they existed. The library is now much more open to being "nimble & quick" and radical ideas.

We can start by taking a good look at what we are doing now. Don't just talk to people but really look into what Kenyon and & Denison are doing and how that can be expanded. And look at what Wooster and OWU are doing to think about that. Talk to Acquisition People to find Best Practices to see what they are doing.

Propose having a day where it is just tech services where they get together and talk about what they are doing, so they hear what others are up to and there is less fear of change.

This is a place for efficiencies and cost savings. The presidents really want people to look at saving money so Susan encourages us to look into this.

NGL
Letter to Eugene Tobin reporting on the NGL grant budget, looks good.
We have $40,000 of this grant set aside for phase 1 of the newspaper digitization grant.

Ideas for the next grant:
Maybe include money to negotiate with publishers for rights to put Ohio 5 articles into our IRs
Internet Archives- Develop a plan where IA provides equipment and we provide students and stuff gets scanned
Archive it a service where copies of the school's webpage are saved- ideally you track certain parts of the website and see its change over time. We could add external websites for scholarly study.
Deeper Classroom activities- better interfaces, allowing easy student input,
CLIR or other postdoc- to work on getting digital collections into the classroom -need to work with instructional technologists

Staff Development

Faculty workshops need to be held. One idea Maybe give funds to buy journals or to use for professional development. Or have traveling exhibits, and open houses at archives or other places related to the digital projects. Get video presentations from faculty that have done projects.

Also now being planned Tech Services Day
Omeka
4 of the 5 schools are using Omeka, maybe we should host it for everyone at one location or buy the hosted service. Interest in purchasing the $1,000 hosted service. We can use grant money for the first year.

8/25/11

NGL Steering Committee Call Note Aug. 19, 2011

Technical Infrastructure Committee
  • Meeting 8/19/11 at Oberlin
  • Working on project updates
  • Looking into an Omeka shared server
  • Writing documentation and procedures
  • Investigating the outsourcing of the newspaper project
  • Setting goals for the last portion of the grant
Staff Development Committee
  • Planning a Technical Services Day as a staff development opportunity
  • Working on ideas for faculty workshops
  • Thinking about assessment for projects
  • Collecting statistics on how the projects got used in the curriculum from the faculty reports
  • Would like to gather info on how the projects have affected undergraduate research (ex. Anderson project OWU; undergraduate scholarly journals DEN)
Ray reported that OhioLINK wants to develop capacity for Open Access journals on a statewide central server

Mark reported that a group interested in developing a Latin American Journal will be meeting at DEN. The journal is called ISTMO (http://collaborations.denison.edu/istmo/ ) The journal covers Central American literature/cultural studies. It began in 2001 and is currently in its 22nd issue. Faculty at Wooster are very involved and the journal is hosted at Denison.

Campus Updates
  • OBE on the verge of launching the King-Crane Commission with a media blitz
  • WOO podcasts with regional dairy farmers (oral histories) are completed. Four potential new projects are in the works
  • OWU developing two new project ideas. Two existing projects are completed (media law and medieval manuscript projects)
  • DEN trying to complete all the current projects
  • KEN has nothing new started but are working on numerous existing projects
Grant update
  • Susan stated that there is enough money left in the grant to do about 5 more projects per campus.
  • We need to be 95% committed by the June 2012 Mellon board meeting.
  • Mellon wants a second proposal by March 2012

Collaborative newspaper project
  • Campuses need to post information about their “runs” on the summary web page or send them to Catalina
  • Technical Infrastructure committee is talking about the technical end of the project
  • Many faculty are interested
  • There is about $40K available for the project
Preliminary Grant extension conversation with Gene Tobin
  • Missionary project (proposed) is a large-scale digitization project and may send up “red flags” because Mellon has another large-scale digitization project and Mellon has very specific criteria on how they evaluate these kinds of projects. We would have to have clear and explicit assessment criteria.
  • The Internet Archive idea would go out three years and might cost $17K a year for 1 shift of student assistants to scan. We should explore what collections we might have that would fit the research component for the IA. A proposal for this would be much stronger if there is curriculum integration
Summon
  • Alan, Michael, and Gwen Evans(BGSU) and the Summon rep are having a meeting to work on issues relating to OL INN_Reach

Oberlin College Archives King-Crane Commission Digital Archival Collection

The Oberlin College Archives is pleased to announce the availability of The King-Crane Commission Digital Collection. Oberlin College President Henry Churchill King (1902-1927) led President Woodrow Wilson’s American Section of the Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey, known as the King-Crane Commission, following the end of World War I (June –August 1919).

As the fate of the territories of the Ottoman Empire was being negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference, the Commission was tasked with “acquainting itself as intimately as possible with the sentiments of the people of these regions with regard to the future administration of their affairs.” Although their report was suppressed at the Paris Peace Conference and subsequent treaties ultimately supported British and French colonial aspirations, this effort is nevertheless an important moment in US history--indeed in Oberlin's history.

In order to increase the study of the King-Crane Commission—within Oberlin’s classrooms and beyond, Maren Milligan, Visiting Assistant Professor of Middle East North African Studies in the Oberlin College Politics Department, and Oberlin College Archivist Ken Grossi applied for and received an Ohio Five Next Generation Library Mellon Grant to bring together in a single online digital collection materials relating to the work of the King-Crane Commission. The creation of this digital collection was a collaborative effort between Milligan and staff members of the Oberlin College Archives and the Oberlin College Library. Theodore Waddelow ’11 served as the Research Associate for the project.

The core materials of the collection consist of the King-Crane Commission Records filed in the Henry Churchill King Presidential Papers at the Oberlin College Archives. Other institutions provided materials to expand the research potential of the collection, including the Hoover Institute Archives at Stanford University – The Donald Brodie Papers, and The University of Illinois Archives – The Albert Lybyer Papers. The King-Crane Commission project team continues to work with other institutions, including the University of New Hampshire – William Yale Papers, and the Library of Congress – George Montgomery Papers, to locate materials to add to the digital collection.

However, perhaps more important than the papers of the Commission members are the petitions submitted by people of the region. The project team has sought to locate and curate the petitions submitted by various peoples of the region, thus restoring these lost voices.

The online digital collection includes an interactive map, tracing the route of the Commission’s work in the Middle East, and detailed instructions to assist researchers in navigating the collection of over 600 items. For further information about the King-Crane Commission and to view the collection (correspondence, reports, maps, photographs, petitions) please see the following url address -- http://www.oberlin.edu/library/digital/king-crane/.

Tools To Know About: Open Access Map


TakingITGlobal recently released an Open Access Map. This resource provides a searchable map and list that lets users locate Open Access Resources including repositories, policies, and journals.

If you look under Policies you'll see Oberlin's Open Access Policy listed and users can submit links so we can add our future Institutional Repositories to the list soon.

8/19/11

Ohio Wesleyan University Enhanced Podcast Project

The enhanced podcast project was designed as a value-added technology component to JOUR 370 Media Law. In the fall 2010 Media Law students created multimedia that explain a case to their peers, involved significant peer review and was searchable on the open web. The projects are a resource to other Media Law students seeking deeper understanding of complex topics. Students were encouraged to seek out plaintiffs, defendants, witnesses and experts to contribute to the podcast, as well as implement other digital storytelling techniques. Students in the class completed 10 podcasts on topics ranging from fleeting expletives to net neutrality. Four of the podcasts are included in the Ohio Wesleyan University Digital Repository. The project will continue with future student work added to the repository based on quality and significance.

8/18/11

College of Wooster Libraries publishes oral histories of local farmers


With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Next Generation Libraries Grant, students taking Innovations in Agroecology taught by Dr. Matthew Mariola from the College of Wooster travelled throughout Wayne County, Ohio with digital audio recorders to interview local farmers, learning about their daily lives, their agricultural processes and their thoughts on hot issues in farming such as organic food, genetically modified crops, and government subsidies. A partnership with the College of Wooster Library's Digital Resource Commons (DRC) will ensure the long term digital preservation of these oral histories. We hope you find the work these students did as interesting as we did.

Link to Farmer Oral History Collection - http://drc.wooster.edu/handle/2374.COLLW/9

8/11/11

Tools To Know About: Video Converters

We have a couple NGL projects that include videos, and this week's tools are aimed at them. Currently the only player we have for the DRC requires flash files to stream them, and these tools are a few options to help convert video files into flash.

Adapter Mac & PC
This popular download is easy to use and has an impressive list of formats it opens and saves to, probably the best bet for simply converting your movie to the file type you want.

MediaCoder Mac & PC
For anyone who wants additional settings with converting, MediaCoder provides more control over transcoding parameters than the other freeware

iMove Mac Only
This popular and easy video editor that comes pre-installed on all new macs, can also be used to convert files. Just select Export using QuickTime from the Share menu and you'll be given a list of formats to save as.

Free Video Convertor- PC Only
If you need to edit your video on a PC, this tool combines basic editing function with a video converter

8/10/11

DRC Admin Training


Last week we held an advanced DRC training workshop for each school's DRC Admins. For anyone else that is interested, here's what we covered and links to the resources we used.
  • Files you use in config
    • Input-forms- for the field in the single item submission process
    • Item-submission- for the steps in the single item submission process
    • news-xmlui.xml- for static text on the landing page
    • xmlui.conf- for connecting themes to collections
    • dspace.cfg- for harvesting and authentication settings
  • Files in a theme
    • css- for the style of the collection
    • images- for any static images used in the collection
    • sitemap- for selecting the xsl and css files for each theme
    • messages.xml- for consistent text across all collections in your instance
    • xslt- for controlling the display of metadata and files
  • CSS for the DRC
    • For the Basics of CSS read Eric Meyer's CSS: The Definitive Guide
    • Look at the CSS your current theme is using or the DRC default CSS
    • Look at the very basic CSS for DSpace
    • Basics of web design
    • Create a new theme using the basic CSS
    • Edit the basic CSS to change the design of your theme. For design suggestions see Fresh styles for Web Designers by Curt Cloninger
  • Basics of XSLT
    • For an introduction read chapters 1 and 2 of XSLT and XPATH: A Guide to XML Transformations by James Robert Gardner and Zarella L. Rendon.
    • Start with the batch DSpace XML and build an XSLT stylesheet to display the information. Open the XML in your editor to view the elements, and in your browser to see the results of your transformation. Start with the blank XSLT and try to write accomplish each of the transformations in the final XSLT. Use the W3Schools XSLT Tutorial for help.
    • XML, Blank XSLT, Final XSLT
  • XSLT in action
    • The arrangement of DRC XSL stylesheets
    • Find the correct template and change the date displayed in the list view
    • Add a new metadata element to the simple view
    • Add an audio player to a theme, by copying the template from the mp3_embed theme

7/20/11

Tools To Know About: Folderizer

This short programs automates the organization of digital objects into folders. The DRC batch loader, and other load programs, require digital objects to be hierarchically arranged, with this program you can skip the annoying task of creating folders and move items into them. The program takes a directory of files and moves each one into its own folder, giving the folder the same name as the file.

On a windows machine, paste the code below into a text file and save as folderizer.bat in the folder with all the files. Then run it in the directory (right click it and hit "open").

@echo off
for %%a in (*.*) do (
md "%%~na" 2>nul
move "%%a" "%%~na"
)

Thanks to Kristen at Denison for the Folderizer. If you have any tools you'd like to share on this blog just let me know.

Edit: Here's a second folder program, this one just creates folders (nothing is put in them) and the folders are named with sequential numbers. Follow the directions for executing this the same way as the Folderizer.

@Echo off
set /a Name=1
md %Name%
:loop
set /a Name=%Name+1
md %Name%
IF %Name%==100 goto done
goto loop
:done

7/14/11

Steering Committee Minutes July 7

Technical Infrastructure Committee
  • Catalina reported that the OhioLINK ticketing system is up and running. College of Wooster, Denison and Kenyon still waiting for interface work to be done, but technical glitches have all been addressed.
  • Catalina reported that she and Matt are working on a DRC generic collection interface for scholarly repository.

Staff Development Committee
  • Amy told us that Committee members are working on survey results from the Summer Institute.

Campus Updates
  • Oberlin – 4 projects have been approved (one being slightly revised) – Artists’ books, Ethnographic collection, Music Education, and Music History – All $50,000 of Oberlin’s grant has now been committed. Bringing in a demo Zeutschel scanning unit the last week of July.
  • Kenyon – no update
  • Denison – has ordered a new Epson Perfection 10,000 scanner (ledger size)
  • Wooster – new Emerging Technologies Librarian has been hired, Stephen Flynn. He will attend the next DRMC meeting in July.
  • OWU – Japanese language project in full swing. Photography equipment has arrived, and a setup day is scheduled in August with Midwest Photo representative. Special Collections Reading Room construction has begun.

Assessment

Other
  • OhioLINK – Ray reported that the EJC migration is moving along. The process will be migration of all data, testing, then loading all Elsevier backfiles. The final switchover should happen by the end of August. OhioLINK has received its operating funds for the year and is paying for centrally funded databases.
  • Internet Archive – Oberlin has been approached about the possibility of becoming an Internet Archive scanning station. If Oberlin agrees to fund the labor, Internet Archive would provide a specifically designed scanner and software for high volume scanning. This is all still in the exploratory stage.

Tools To Know About: Brief Guidelines on Authority Control

A recent resource from North Carolina State University, Brief Guidelines on Authority Control Decision-Making answers your questions about the why, what and when of controlled vocabulary. This resource also goes over the basic architecture for setting up your own controlled vocabulary and provides a fairly complete list of authority control sources. If you're contemplating authority control for any of your digital collections, this page is a great place to start.

7/7/11

Steering Committee Minutes June 21

1. Technical Infrastructure Committee
  • Committee will be meeting in mid-Aug.
  • Catalina and Matt will be offering DRC admin. training on Aug. 2-3 at Denison
  • Catalina and Matt have just returned from a DSpace conference
  • Apparently all the issues with handles have been fixed, so we will be putting in a ticket to make all our DRC instances live.
  • Ray reported that LAC had expressed concerns about the DRC to John Magill at their meeting; John has resolved to work on this area.

2. Staff Development Committee
  • The group expressed appreciation to the Committee for yesterday’s wonderful Summer Institute at Kenyon.

3. Campus Updates
  • Wooster – they are short staffed as they have one librarian on maternity leave, another on research leave, another on medical leave following an injury, and another who has just been hired, but won’t begin until July 1. Otherwise, no new developments.
  • Denison – no update
  • OWU – a new director has been named. (Following the call, the official announcement that Catherine Cardwell, currently Assoc. Prof. and Coordinator of Library Instruction at BGSU, will begin as director at OWU on Jan. 2, 2012)
  • Oberlin – their latest call for proposals yielded four submissions, in Music Education, Artists Books, Music History, and Archaeology. Their campus committee will review these next week.
  • Kenyon – Joe Murphy will be heading up a new Center for Innovative Pedagogy, which will be located in the library.

4. Timeline Review
  • Mark thanked Susan Palmer for her review of the timeline and agreed with her summary of areas we were behind: faculty workshops, scholarly communications, student work, and assessment.
  • Ray suggested we talk with liaison librarians that are working with Mellon projects and raise the issue of assessment with them.
  • We agreed that it might be useful to start gathering all our assessment materials into a single area on the blog.
  • Alan gave an update on Oberlin’s work on scholarly communications and their faculty scholarship collection. He suggested that some of the other colleges might duplicate similar IRs in their instances, which might jumpstart our scholarly communications efforts.

6/23/11

Steering Committee Minutes June 9

Technical Infrastructure
Alan reported that the committee approved Denison purchasing a legal-size scanner. The dates have been established for two committee meetings in July and August to discuss technical issues and ideas for a follow up grant. The committee has also set August 2-3 for a two-day workshop on DSpace administration. Catalina and Matt will facilitate the workshop. There are still a variety of issues related to OhioLINK support for institutional instances in the DRC. A ticketing system has been set up to track responses to specific problems.

Staff Development Committee
Everything seems to be shaping up well for the June 20th workshop. Catalina and Matt are currently at the Open Repositories meeting in Austin and will also be attending the DSpace users meeting. Several staff from the Ohio Five attended the ACRL Scholarly Communications 101 Roadshow. Attendees thought that it was a very worthwhile experience.

Campus Updates
Ohio Wesleyan has chosen a new director. An announcement will be out about that soon. They’ve also accepted a Japanese language project. Oberlin has several proposals in the works. Wooster also has proposals in development, including one from their museum and another from their history department. They received a new planetary scanner and are testing it. They’ve also hired a new emerging technologies librarian. Denison has no new project in the works. They have identified space for their digitization set up.

Collaborative Projects
There is strong interest in a collaborative project involving campus and local newspapers. It was agreed that each campus would explore curricular interests in this area with their faculty to ensure that any collaborative digitization project would have a curricular component. It was agreed that summary information in this regard would be posted on a separate page of the website.

Future Grant
Susan will review the current grant proposal to get a sense of how we’re progressing. The question of the scholarly communications piece of the current grant was also raised and it was emphasized that campuses have flexibility in terms of how they address that issue. There was an extensive discussion of the possibility of a collaborative digitization project involving our missionary collections. It was agreed that this could be considered as a possibility for the next grant proposal. There might well be different focuses for the project on each campus and there would certainly need to be a strong curricular component to any such project.

Year-End Purchasing
Four of the five schools have decided about year-end purchases. The collaborative purchases will result in substantial savings. Mark expressed a need for the process of deciding about year-end purchases to be done earlier next year.

Library Committee Meeting
It was agreed that the library committee will meet sometime over the summer, a good part of the discussion would focus on the current and future NGL grant.

OhioLINK Meeting
Members of the group all expressed strong support for the idea that there needs to be fairer representation for the independent colleges on OhioLINK committees and also the Library Advisory Council. The current structure, which is dominated heavily by the original founding university members, is archaic.

Full Notes

6/22/11

Notes from Open Repsoitories


Recently Matt Rolf, Meghan Frazer and myself were able to attend Open Repositories 2011. The conference brought together librarians and developers working with Open Source repositories around the world to show off projects, talk about trends, and address the challenges of running an Open Repository. Rather than going into the techy details of this event here, if you're interested check out Meghan's notes.

Summer Institute Follow Up

Thanks to everyone who came to the summer institute Monday, and thanks to the Staff Development Committee for doing such a great job planning it. If you went to the Summer Institute and want to share your feed back please fill out the survey.

If you have notes or slides from the institute that you are willing to share please add a link to them in the comments, or send them to me and I can add them to the NGL site.

Edit: The slides from Jim Ottaviani's keynote and breakout session are at the NGL site.

6/9/11

Possible Newspaper Digitization Project

A document has been set up in the Major Documents area to gather information to explore the possibility of a collaborative project to outsource the digitization of newspapers associated with our institutions

6/2/11

Tools To Know About: ReNamer

ReNamer is a tool that does exactly what its name implies, quickly and easily changes the name of files.

While the best digital workflows involve a consistent naming scheme when files are created, we can't always be perfect. When your workflow fails, ReNamer is there to efficiently standardize your file names and save you the tedious task of renaming them one at a time. A few NGL projects are using ReNamer now when batch loading objects that weren't saved with correct names. Currently ReNamer is only available for Windows, but there are similar (if not quite as good) options for macs.

5/27/11

NGL Summer Institute 2011

Registration is now open for the NGL Summer Institute at Kenyon College on June 20th. All library staff at The Five Colleges are encouraged to attend.

The 2011 Summer Institute is focused on bringing staff together to share experiences about the changing work of library staff. The day will consist of breakout sessions where staff can hear about the experiences of others and share their thoughts on a particular topic. Our keynote speaker, James Ottavaini, will talk about Institutional Repositories, a new part of the library world that all 5 Colleges will soon be hosting.

More information is at http://ngl.crowdvine.com/pages/2011_summer_workshop

or register at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/nglsummer2011

5/26/11

New Digital Humanities Blog Section

Anne Salsich has provided an initial blog entry on an NGL Digital Humanities News section of this site.  If anybody else would like to set up a separate blog discussion topic, please contact Alan Boyd

NGL Steering Committee Meeting 5/26/2011

Attending: Michael Upfold, Susan Palmer, Alan Boyd, Catalina Oyler, Deb Peoples, Amy Badertscher, Ray English (for last topic only), Carol Holliger and Mary Prophet



Technical Infrastructure Committee

  • Alan B. setting up a face-to-face meeting time in the summer and will schedule a 2nd meeting time for a conf. call as needed
  • Committee giving feedback to Catalina on issues they'd hope she try to gather more info on at the DSPACE users group meeting in early June
Draft of letter to OhioLINK with DRC concerns

  • Mark C. sent out a revised draft based on information provided by TIC concerning delays in our DPSACE grant work that we feel OL should address immediately.  Committee members gave him comments.  He'll try to finish another draft today for review, and will plan to send to John Magill tomorrow.
Staff Dev. Committee

  • Catalina has just sent out email calling for registration for the NGL Summer Institute.  The discussion panel leaders have be set and planning is going along well.
Campus updates

  • Denison: no update
  • Oberlin: new artists' books proposal just in; 3 or 4 others in the works for a mid-June deadline; could be enough that there will be competition for funding; Oberlin's looking at a new model of Zeutschel book scanner utilizing grant hardware/software funding
  • Kenyon: another call for proposals will go out soon; looking at Book-eye scanner utilizing grant hardware/software funding
  • OWU: Japanese language proposal approved, awaiting final signoffs
  • Wooster: a history proposal possibly in the works
Mellon-- timing of next grant proposal
  • Susan P. has just sent a email to Mellon asking specifically about timing on a follow-up grant.  When she hears back, she'll get a phone conference together with Mark C. and others to work up some talking points for our next Steering Committee call.
OhioLINK update
  • Ray E.said that another OL survey will be coming out very shortly covering local FY12 budgets and renewal priorities.  The survey will ask for one answer per institution.  Everything is on the table if there is no capital budget approved for OL by the fall. 

5/19/11

NGL Steering Committee Meeting 5/12/2011

NGL Steering Committee Meeting 5/12/2011

Attending: Michael Upfold, Susan Palmer, Alan Boyd, Catalina Oyler, Deb Peoples, Amy Badertscher, Ray English, Carol Holliger and Mary Prophet. Absent: Mark Christel.


  • Technical Infrastructure Committee

o Alan needs to set up a meeting for the committee.

o Catalina and Matt will attend the Open Repositories 2011 meeting in Austin, TX in June. This was approved by Alan, Mark and Susan.

o Matt quit is other position and will be looking for additional consulting roles to compliment his work for the Ohio Five.

  • Staff Development Committee

o Training event will be at Kenyon on Monday June 20th

o Keynote speaker will be Jim Ottaviani of Deep Blue at University of Michigan. He will focus on introducing us to intuitional repositories. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/about/index.html

o Workshops and panel topics—we are finalizing the topics and the program should be ready before our next call.

  • Campus updates

o Denison—Nothing to report

o Kenyon— Will be issuing call for new proposals this month.

o Oberlin—Will send out a call for proposals soon.

o Ohio Wesleyan—

§ The Japanese language Japanese language proposal was submitted to the OWU Steering Committee

§ Some of the photography equipment arrived.

o Wooster—

§ Wooster’s new planetary scanner will be up and running around May 20.

§ We have candidates for our Emerging Technologies Librarian position on campus now through next Wed.

  • Summon

o Representatives from Summon will be at Kenyon on Thursday May 12. (Right after our NGL Call)

o Olink issue may be Summon issue.

  • Review of summer plans for CONSTOR (Susan)

o We discussed the work load at CONStor and Ellen’s time.

o We do not want to place all of the work on Denison staff.

o We need work out ways to balance the work over the next year and a half.

  • Scholarly Comm. Road Show

o The Ohio Five added to the donation pool to cover lunch expenses for this meeting

o Encouragement of broad Ohio Five participation

§ This is an opportunity for folks to learn more about scholarly communication.

§ Encourage participation

  • Ray talked about the issues facing OhioLINK and the potential areas for impact on some of the resources we use.

o There will potentially be more pay to play options than in the past.

o There is uncertainty about Capital Funding and what impact that will have on OhioLINK.

  • Brief updates from Mark:

o I will try to get the letter out to John Magill about the DRMC in the next week.

o We have now received pricing from 2 of the 3 vendors on year-end purchases—still waiting for Gale (which is more complicated). We expect soon.