Technical Infrastructure Committee meeting summary 3/24/11

A summary of yesterday's TIC meeting has been posted.

Tools To Know About: Audacity

This week's tool is Audacity, a great resource for collections with audio files.

Audacity is an open source program for recording, editing, and transforming audio. This easy to use software can copy, mix, splice and apply effects to recordings in a variety of formats. In addition to functionality, Audacity is a great tool because of its easy to follow tutorials, so even novices can use this software with ease.

The Ohio 5 have a number of collections underway that involve audio files, many of them oral histories. With Audacity, the Oberlin based project Hispanic And Latin American Studies In The United States: Conversation Pieces has been able to improve the quality of oral histories originally recorded on cassette tapes in the field by reducing background noise.

In addition to professional use, Audacity can be great for personal projects too. Check out the tutorial on creating your own ringtone.

Steering Committee Conference Call 3/17

Notes for Steering Committee Conference Call
03/17/2011

1) Summon - Maryellen Sims - OLinks is not a full resolver, therefore we need to look at alternatives:
a. Trial at Wooster is going well using the 360Link resolver
b. Implementation Period can be extended for a reasonable amount of time. End of March is current cut-off, will extend that for 3 months.
c. 360Link resolver pricing: A question came up about an option for offsetting some of this cost with 360 CORE pro-rating for this year. Maryellen indicated that she would ask.
d. Maryellen will have trials of 360Link resolver turned on for all schools.
e. We need to determine what timeframe the payment needs to be made for the link resolver. Is there an option to pay after July 1st? Mark will draft language about the payment and send it out for comment.

2) TIC - Meeting next week at Denison with Matt Rolff in attendance.

3) Staff Development Committee - Phone call next week, summarizing data and working on summer plans, early April meeting planned. CWRU has a workshop on digital humanities on May 5th and has invited us to participate.

4) Cooperative Purchasing - Collection Development met at Wooster - will work with Readex, Gale, and ProQuest to try to get consortial deals for the Ohio5. Will send prioritized list to the vendors and ask for pricing depending on how many schools participate.

5) Campus Updates -
a. Wooster- purchasing planetary scanner.
b. Oberlin - King-Crane Commission project will be formally announced after Spring Break, new copy stand set-up in Archives with synchronized lights. Hoping to get opera and theatre people interested in costume collection.
c. Kenyon - nothing new.
d. OWU- deadline for next round of proposals is April 15th.
e. Denison - reviewing proposal on Humanities Journal digitization on Monday.

6) Monday's meeting - Let Amy know if you have other agenda items. Meeting 9:00 a.m. in Andrews at Wooster. Mark is starting an outline of the Mellon Report, will have it available for Monday. Need to determine what needs to go into it.

7) Other - Need to think about what the 2.5% decrease in the governor's budget and the collective response, this is not as bad as expected, but will require cuts. Strategic planning meeting at OhioLINK - there was tension between thoughts on retrenchment vs. bold new action, the strategic plan will need to strike a balance between these.

Tools To Know About: Copyright Calculators

An important part of any digital project is knowing what you are allowed to digitize. Copyright restrictions play an active role in deciding what collections libraries can put online and who can access those collections. A number of factors can be part of a library's decision to digitize or not such as fair use, educational use, or if the copyright owner will grant permission. But you don't have to worry about these factors when a work is in the public domain.

Works in the public domain have either had copyright expire, or copyright never applied to them. The trick is knowing what works are in the public domain and what are still under copyright. Today's tool is two resources that help you answer that questions.

Michael Brewer and the ALA Office for Information Technology Policy created a Digital Copyright Slider for determining what's in the public domain. More detailed information is presented in the Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States Chart by Peter Hirtle. These tools make looking up copyright status quick and easy

Do you have tools that you use for copyright reference with digital collections? Let us know in the comments.

Tools To Know About: Google Forms

This week's tool to know about is from the suite of Google Docs. If you haven't used a Google Document or Google Spreadsheet I suggest you check them out. But today we'll look at a slightly less well-known tool, Google Forms.

Google Forms are a fast and easy way to collect information from a group. The simple interface lets you ask questions that can be answered by text, from a list, or even on a grid. The answers are then stored in a spreadsheet which you control the access to.

Google Forms are great for conducting surveys, but they can also be used for other purposes, like metadata. At Denison University the Costume Collection Project has students gather information about objects during a class then uses their Costume Form to have students submit the information into fields that correspond to Dublin Core elements. The result is a spreadsheet of metadata that can be used for batch uploading into the DRC.

Have you used Google Docs with your digital collections? Let us know in the comments.

Steering Committee Minutes

NGL Steering / OH5 Library Director’s Conference Call March 3, 2011

1. Technical Infrastructure Committee

• Next meeting scheduled for March 24; Matt will be at this meeting
• Matt’s tasks are on the NGL Google Site
• Committee has had requests for information re: equipment purchases

2. Staff Development Committee

• Has met twice generating ideas for the summer. Catalina will be sending out a survey to get feedback on what people would like to see happen.
• Ideas include “summer institutes” or faculty workshops focusing on big topics like scholarly communication/open access and process oriented/targeted workshops for staff.

3. Campus Updates

• All campuses reported that work is ongoing. OWU has another request for proposals due 4/15
• OBE has done a test load of IP-restricted art slides; OWU is discussing a digital collection of student and faculty art. KEN and DEN indicated similar projects may be on their horizon and as they develop we will look for collaborative possibilities.

4. Summon

• The Link Resolver issue: The Summon generated open url carries genre information. When information other than an article links is passed to OhioLINK it diverts it to a central catalog search. For example, what is defined by Summon as a “news” is interpreted by OL as "not an article” and results in bad/misleading information about an item displayed to the user. It is unclear exactly where the problem lies.
• The Core 360 issue and OLINKS: For OLINKS to work at all it has to know about the resource. When the table is submitted to OhioLINK, it has to include every single e-resource by journal title.
• The Mapping Issue: most schools are still working on the mapping issue. OBE opted to go with Summon default mapping and will tweak later. WOO and OWU intend to go with Ellen’s mapping suggestions (with some local tweaking) after the default instance. Oregon State University has made their mapping available; they have tweaked approximately 20% of the lines. Michael will share their document with us to see if there is anything there a school may want to incorporate.

5. OhioLINK Update

• Ray would like feedback from us on the draft strategic plan before the meeting March 11. The plan was constructed by LAC to document the major objectives OhioLINK should focus on while leadership and budgetary issues are unresolved.
• Jim Petro, the new chancellor, is a Denison alum. He has a good reputation among independent colleges and Ray suggested a meeting between Petro and the OH5 presidents to talk about OhioLINK.
• March 15 we’ll learn about the state budget; Fingerhut requested flat funding for OL; it’s not known what will actually happen. Still waiting for passage of a Capital bill. OL is ok until the 2012 renewals are due; if no capital bill, there will be serious issues.

Full minutes are at the NGL file cabinet.

Tools To Know About: Omeka

Omeka is a free tool designed for cultural institutions to create websites to share collections and tell narratives. Intended as a place to host digital collections it's structured like a repository with a hierarchical order and Dublin Core metadata, but it lets curators easily arrange objects into narrative collections with text and images.

The Five Colleges have used Omeka to showcase a few digital projects. At Oberlin the History of The Carnegie Library collection tells the story of the library building. While a Wooster student use Omeka to create a Costume Archive as part of a local NGL project. Ohio Wesleyan is also about to launch an Omeka site as the interface for the local NGL project Digital Resources for the Teaching of the History of the Book. Though it takes a bit of setup Omeka can be an easy way to create a graphical interface for your collections. Have you used Omeka or are you thinking about it? Let us know in the comments.