Steering Committee Minutes 7/26/12

Technical Infrastructure Committee

• Alan reports no activity-- he'll be trying to set up an August meeting

Staff Development Committee

• Catalina trying to get more promotional videos in the pipeline-- contact her with your possibilities!
• An Omeka workshop is being planned for Aug. 16th; the Steering committee approved bringing in a presenter from Cleveland State. Update: the Omeka Workshop will be August 20th

Campus updates

• Each campus is "plugging away" at current projects
• Oberlin is almost ready to load 1500+ citations to faculty publications, reviews, and presentations for the time period 2007-2011 in its Oberlin SHARES repository
• Oberlin has digitized (with Art Museum grant funding) the complete 60-year run of the Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin.  It will be loaded soon using the DSPACE IP zoom interface that will also be used for our newspaper project

Draft of precis for new grant

• A new draft of a precis for another grant to expand our work into "digital scholarship" support was reviewed; Mark C. will work up another version

Update on OhioLINK LAC meeting

• 4 most supported strategic priorities: 1) Next generation purchasing arrangements, 2) Discovery Layer implementation, 3) ebook strategies, 4) strategic vision for OL budget
• 4 most supported operational goals: 1) IT support financing structure, 2) assessment, 3) communication strategy, 4) DRC direction forward

NGL Summer Institute

A group of library staff members discusses Lessons Learned in during the NGL grant

Attendees enjoy cupcakes as a thank you for all their work on grant projects

Thanks to everyone who came to Wooster last week for the Summer Institute. A video of the lightning talk presentations is now up thanks to Steve Flynn. 
More photos from the day are on the NGL Flickr page.

NGL Summer Institute 2012

This year's Summer Institute will reflect on everything we have accomplished with Next Generation Library grant at The Five Colleges of Ohio.  Our program will include lightening talks on the digital projects undertaken as part of the NGL grant and focus groups to assess how this grant went, how to sustain our projects and what to include in our next grant.  The day will conclude with a celebration of everyone who has helped make this grant so successful.  All library staff and faculty are invited to attend as well as students who worked on NGL projects.

Thursday June 14th, 10am-3pm The College of Wooster

10-10:15 Welcome (Scheide Music Center)
10:15-11:15 NGL Projects Lightning Talk Presentations
11:30-12:30 Presentations Continued
12:30-1:45 Lunch (Andrews Library)
1:45-2:30 Focus Groups (Andrews Library)
2:30-3 Cupcakes and closing remarks

If you plan to attend please register at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2012nglsummer

Promoting the DRC through Digital I.S. submission at the College of Wooster

2012 was the first year that Independent Study (IS) submission by College of Wooster seniors turned digital. How did we get the entire graduating class to digitally submit their thesis to the DRC?

The Course Catalog had already required students to submit a digital copy of their IS to the Libraries since 2005, but typically less than half of seniors would comply, and even if they did, digital preservation was an afterthought. Two developments, (1) the launch of our DSpace DRC instance, and (2) the construction of the Collaborative Research Environment (CoRE) this year, a renovated space in the first floor of Andrews Library, provided the political and technological impetus needed to move IS into the digital age.

We created a Senior Independent Study Thesis collection in the DRC. In close collaboration with faculty and administration, we designed an input form that was as easy as possible for seniors to use, while also meeting the metadata standards of the College. For example, the administration’s desire for all students to submit a digital abstract led us to make the abstract field required. Student ease of use was another concern. Without Shibboleth and LDAP authentication, technologies that would allow students to login using their existing email credentials, we created a single login and password account that all seniors would use. Despite shortening the input form over many design iterations, we created a concise PDF handout and screencast that walked the student through the process. We even created a giant “Submit your IS” tootsie roll graphic for the DRC front page, inspired by the College’s tradition of handing tootie rolls to every senior who turns in their IS.

On the policy front, Mark Christel, Director of the College of Wooster Libraries, worked closely with the faculty’s Educational Policy Committee (EPC) to craft a submission, access and copyright policy and license agreement that delicately balanced the desire to make student work open access and discoverable, with the need to protect privacy, ownership and prepublication rights. The following emerged:

I represent that the Independent Study (I.S.) project is my own original work, and does not, to the best of my knowledge, infringe upon anyone else's copyright.

I grant The College of Wooster and its designated employees a non-exclusive, perpetual, and royalty-free license to archive and provide unrestricted access to my I.S. project, in whole or in part, in any medium, to The College of Wooster community. I also authorize the Provost the right to distribute copies of my I.S. project to other individuals. I understand that I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of my I.S. project.

In addition, exceptions to the policy were proposed for students needing to embargo access to their IS due to pending publication. The faculty unanimously approved the policy in their March 5 meeting.

To enforce the above policy, the Libraries’ Digital Scholarship and Services department worked closely with the Registrar’s office. We created a private Google Docs spreadsheet that dynamically updated the list of seniors who had turned in their digital IS. If a student tried to turn in their bound copy to the registrar, they first checked their name against the Google Doc. A negative match would have them prompt the student to make a digital submission first. This way, no student would slip through IS submission cracks. In addition, all library staff and Research Help Desk students were provided with IS submission training, ensuring that anyone could answer a senior's basic questions about the process.

To engage the campus community, we installed an IS countdown page on the TVs in the CoRE.

As a result of the Libraries strong collaboration with the faculty, administration and the Registrar’s office, not only did all seniors submit a digital copy of their IS to the DRC, now anyone on campus can access a digital copy of Senior ISs from 2012 going forward. Students and faculty can browse and read past ISs to gather ideas for gaps in research, outside researchers could possibly cite them, and the Libraries strengthens its role as the center for the digital preservation and dissemination of original undergraduate research.


-Stephen X. Flynn
Emerging Technologies Librarian
The College of Wooster

Digital Frontiers Conference

The University of N. Texas has announced a Digital Frontiers Conference and THATcamp.

April TIC meeting

Notes have been posted on the TIC blog

Steering Committee Minutes April 12th

1) We've rescheduled the April 26th call to the 19th

2) Technical Infrastructure Committee update
•Meeting today at Wooster
•Have received a newspaper sample back and will hopefully make a final choice about scanning soon

3) Staff Development Committee update
•Planning a Summer Institute for June
•Working on the best way to create faculty videos

4) Campus updates
•Wooster
Has a new grant proposal to digitize images of women participating in sports, recreation, and physical education at throughout the history of the College.
Looking forward to the visit by Lisa Spiro and her workshop for Ohio5 staff for more information see the Events Page

•Kenyon
Approved a new proposal for a student poetry journal

•OWU
Working on the Virgil project as well as other projects.
Planning the Char Booth workshop

•Denison
Had a piece on the local news about the library's special collections

•Oberlin
Nothing to report

5) OhioLINK
•Talking about patron initiated recall with Innovative, technically this is hard. OhioLINK is working on coming up with a detailed spec of what they want to give to Innovative to decide if this is doable or not.
•Independent colleges are meeting with 2 year colleges to finalize report on reformatting of the task force
•Denison and others are having trouble with pick-ups and deliveries. Until the new service starts drivers are quitting and delivery maybe skipped at some schools- but the new service is starting soon.


6) CONStor
•Thanks to Ellen for her most recent report and her excellent work on this project. The project is going well though shelving still needs to be disposed of.

7) Summon
•Michael sent the full OhioLINK central catalog to Summon, not sure how long processing will take but hopefully it will be ingested soon.

8) CONSort
•Still have a conflict with batch loading records stopping the system. Mary and Michael will set up a way to run a test to quantify this problem then begin looking for solution.