Quick Conference Report

I was fortunate to attend the Society of American Archivists Conference in DC this year and wanted to provide a short note on some of the more relevant parts of the conference. A number of the sessions were very informative. The most useful was on the new Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines for still images. In addition to providing a very detailed system for measuring the quality of scans, the guidelines include suggested best practices, and can be a great resource for some of our scanning projects. Another good presentation was about very large digital collections and how to assign metadata giving three different examples of outsourcing, using keyword searching, and grouping multiple objects with one set of metadata. I also got to hear about how web interfaces can be improved through sessions on user studies and better use of search engine optimization.

While the sessions were good, the best part was probably the networking. SAA is a small conference so I had the chance to meet archivists and librarians involved with an assortment of digital projects at the Online Archives of California, JSTOR, New York Public Library, and colleges and universities from across the country. It was really inspiring to learn about all the different digital efforts that are underway, but I can't wait until next year when I can brag about all the projects the Ohio 5 has accomplished!

Steering Cttee Update Aug. 19, 2010

Committee updates

a. Staff Development
Planning is underway for the ‘gadget days’ tentatively scheduled for Oct. 18 at Denison and Oct. 28 at Oberlin (October breaks for those schools, so better facilities and parking available). The committee is meeting by conference calls and details will soon follow re. the October events.
b. Technical Infrastructure – Alan is on vacation, so there’s nothing new to report at the moment.

Institution updates
a. Denison – Three projects have been approved and work began this summer. They are from Black Studies, Theater, and Women’s Studies. One more from Geosciences is in preparation. After the Denison Selection Committee re-convenes in early September, Scottie will send the letters and acceptance forms to current grant recipients.
b. Kenyon – Five projects have been approved. Letters and agreement forms were sent out to the grant recipients. All were signed and returned. Work will start with the Fall semester.
c. Oberlin – Two projects have been awarded grants, one processing the archives of former Oberlin President King who chaired a commission for U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, and the other from Geology wherein images of geological features will be processed. Work will begin after the semester starts. Ray will send the award letters and acceptance forms to recipients soon.
d. OWU – They are on track with a link for the grant on their home page. Two projects were done in 2009 as trial projects – 1) the “Krempley Gender Project” -- travel images from professor’s private collection will be used to elicit response from students in Humanities Classics 226 , selected by student (Krempley) as independent study project. 2)“Auxin Transport During Gravitropism and Phototropism using a GFP-based Biosensor“– to be used in Biology/Microbiology 120 (Intro to Cell Biology). Three summer “pilot” projects were approved in May by the NGL Campus Committee and are currently in process -- 1)“Tree Growth data for the Bohannan and Kraus Ecological Preserves” (Botany/Microbiology professor Laurel Anderson and liaison Deb Peoples) 4)”Contemporary Issues in Media Law Podcast”(Journalism professor Melinda Rhodes and liaison Kristine Kinzer) 5)”Digital Resources for the Teaching of the History of the Book” (English professor Patricia DeMarco and liaison Bernard Derr).
e. COW – The first proposal is almost ready for review. It is an oral history project from environmental studies regarding the history of dairy farms in the local area.
Update on the staffing survey
Catalina reported that few responses have been received, but she will send a reminder soon and follow through.

2-year timeline in grant proposal
Mark noted that we are behind schedule. See the timeline he sent via e-mail and see how we can move along more quickly. Catalina has discussed this at COW and she will meet shortly with Kenyon about it and the assessment plan. Note that a detailed assessment plan is part of our responsibility. Ron will work on getting this completed with Catalina’s help.
The Scholarly Communication component needs to be addressed. Oberlin has long been working on this, and Denison will start this Fall. Scottie meets with the Provost today and has invited Ray to give an open talk on the topic November 4th followed by a meeting of the Library Advisory Committee. Summer of 2010 was supposed to be focused on library staff and Summer of 2011 was to focus on faculty. The directors need to discuss how to move forward as a group on this topic.
Interim reports are due September 15th to Mark. LOOK at the timeline and prepare your report accordingly.
"Hardware and software" ($40,000) in grant budget - how do we want to spend this money?
We will ask Alan to discuss this on the next call. Ray will alert Alan about this.

About Scheduling

Next week I'll finish my introductory visits to each of the colleges, which means I'll have even more projects to start on. I'm trying to balance hours spent working for each school while still making sure that every project reaches a timely and successful outcome. For now I'm focusing on projects that are already underway or those with a timeline that starts this summer, but if you're ready to begin a project, want my input, or are just feeling a little neglected please don't hesitate to contact to me. Email is always best at caoyler@gmail.com.

I'm also tracking when I'm on the road, and you can see when I'll be visiting your school through the NGL calendar at https://sites.google.com/site/oh5nextgenerationlibrary/Home/calendar-1. If you want to add a visit to the calendar just let me know and we can set something up.

Steering Committee Update--August 3

• Staff development committee will meet this week to discuss the next event.
  
• Technical Infrastructure Committee is looking into project sharing venues or tools.
• Denison has a one additional proposal for a potential grant.
• We discussed posting the grant proposals on campus websites as well as on our NGL website. All agreed this was reasonable.
  
• We are working on interim reports for the Mellon Grant reviewing the time line and the activities over the first 8 months of the grant. These reports are due Sept 15 and should be sent to Mark and Susan.
  
• Catalina is preparing to send out the all staff survey. She would like all emails from each institution to track results.
• Constor update. The project is underway. Both Denison and Oberlin have made progress with decisions and boxing up materials for recycle or return to home institution.

July Update

Hard to believe, it's already been a month since I joined the Five Colleges! I want to thank everyone for making me feel welcome and helping me get rolling on the many projects going on. I've settled in at Oberlin now and have had successful day trips to visit Kenyon and Denison, and I hope to see Wooster and Wesleyan soon. A lot of my time in July was spent just learning how everything works here and familiarizing myself with past projects and new technology. But also have been working on three projects in particular.

The first is Denison's digitization of government documents about WWII Japanese American internment camps. This project began some time ago, and digital scans of 30 documents were created and saved, unfortunately, the project was never completed and the digital documents aren't publicly available. I'm currently sorting out what has been scanned, checking or creating a new OCR scan for full text searching, and setting up a home for them, probably in the DRC.

Another Denison project I'm working on is "Writing Our Story: An Analysis of Black Student Protest as Denison University." This NGL proposal already has scanning of documents underway, so I've focused on selecting metadata elements and setting up a process to easily record metadata.

At Oberlin I've been working on the institutional repository, the Oberlin Scholarship collection. This collection has been set up on the DRC and has had a number of test items added successfully, what I'm working on is finding a workflow for batch uploads and making improvements to the web design.

These projects received my attention in July as it was easy to join in what had already been started, and they are giving me a chance to become more familiar with the DRC and other tools I'll be using frequently. If anyone else has project they'd like me to get going on now, please let me know- I can be reached by email at caoyler@gmail.com or phone 440-775-6490.

Steering Committee Update -- July 15, 2010

a. Technical Infrastructure
Catalina is studying DSpace, local projects underway, the basic OhioLINK DRC metadata scheme, and project management and calendaring software. She visited Kenyon this week, and Denison is next week. Alan noted that Oberlin (and others in OhioLINK) have been testing DSpace 1.6, which has new batch editing for metadata capabilities, etc.

b. Staff Development
Catalina will create a draft the staff survey Surveymonkey; she’ll incorporate some related questions from a recent Web Junction survey. She and Amy will discuss this soon.

c. Denison has another grant application from the Geosciences and it is out for review.

d. Oberlin reported that ContentDM has a new module with loader flexibility for METS/ALTO newspaper uploads. METS/ALTO is the standard for national newspaper digitization projects which allows keyword and article level access. Kenyon is scanning their current issues of the student newspaper.

e. Mark asked whether we want to have 6-month interim reports, so preparing future reports won’t be so difficult. Susan agreed to do one for the budget. Each institution will prepare one for their activities. Committee chairs will prepare one. A bulleted list is sufficient and we’ll coordinate this with project tracking records that Catalina will keep. Mellon needs the next report from us in March, 2011.

Steering Committee Update: July 7, 2010

• We welcomed Catalina to her first Steering Committee conf. call. Alan reported that Catalina was reviewing project documentation and local project proposals, looking into project management software, and reviewing a lot of saved emails Alan passed on relating to services and ideas for the project that have come to his attention over the past 6 months. Kenyon and Denison have given some guidance on dates for Catalina's orientation to those campuses; Alan has encouraged the other campuses to suggest dates too and said there might be opportunities early on for her to visit other OhioLINK institutions' digitization setups.
  
• We're unsure who will be the interim OWU steering committee representative
  
• Oberlin is considering 3 local projects; others are in the works for a later round of committee deliberations
• Wooster has used local projects funding to hire Deardra Fuzzel as a 1/2 time Digitization services associate
• Denison has approved a 3rd local project; Kenyon has approved 4 projects; Ron will send the project proposals to Catalina for background; when all projects are formally accepted (see next item) we will post the proposals at the project's major documents site
• Drafts of a Project Approval letter to send to faculty and a Project Grant Acceptance for faculty to sign were discussed. Alan and Catalina will come up with revised wording about intellectual property.