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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.