4/27/11

Tools To Know About: Library Success


This week's tool is Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. This wiki gathers and organizes information about successful library programs and promotes knowledge and best practices that are often only distributed locally.

The information in the wiki comes from all types of libraries around the world and covers every topic that a librarian might encounter. Library Success has some content but also serves as a directory to available resources. Many pages point to institutional best practices, local experiences, and relevant blogs. While some pages have more information than others, Library Success is a fast and easy way to find resources on a topic. And it can be a way to share your local success stories too.

4/21/11

Save the Date

The NGL Summer Institute for all Five Colleges library staff will be on Monday June 20th at Kenyon College. More information will be made available as the Staff Development Committee continues to plan the event, but please be sure to keep this day open.

4/20/11

Tools To Know About: NGL 12 Steps to a Digital Collection


This week's tool is an internal Five Colleges tool, 12 Steps to a Digital Collection.

For a while now, our local project page has had a visual tool to track the progress of collections. This guide adds an in-depth explanation and how to guide for each of those steps. Each collection is unique and some have more steps than others, but in general, these 12 steps layout how an NGL project should progress.

(The links above go to the internal site, for public versions of the same thing see the public 12 step guide and public local projects page.)

Steering Committee Minutes April 14

1. Technical Infrastructure Committee
  • Has set up a page for issue tracking page for the DRC implementation. This will include information on what Matt is working on.
  • Committee has received a request from OWU for a proposed photography purchase including a digital camera, copy stand, lighting, and peripherals.

2. Staff Development Committee
  • Training event will be at Kenyon on Monday June 20th. Will be working over next several weeks on details
  • Will consider if this group would plan staff development on broader issues outside of digitization parameters.
  • It may be time to have some member of the committee rotate off if they need to.

3. Campus updates
  • Denison: Grant for digitization of the back issues of 2 student journals, Classics Journal Ephermis and the Religion Journal Episteme. In addition to digitizing back issues the grant will set-up templates for both journals going forward as digital open access journals.

  • Kenyon: Kenyon has only small amount of money remaining. Will be issuing call for new proposals

  • Oberlin: King - Crane commission web-site will launch soon. Will be interesting interface with a Java based interactive map to show locations in the Middle East. Drawing on resources outside the college. Have brought in some material from Stanford and by bring in material from other archives including the Library of Congress. Looking for all of the petitions from the members of local communities to the commission.

    Oberlin has hired a replacement for Digital Photography position. Her name is Sarah Richardson.

  • Ohio Wesleyan: Positive experience with Matt and Catalina last week. Copyright issues on media law podcasts. Had a group showing of podcasts to address what the possible copyright issues might be. After this meeting OWU feeling much better about Copyright issues.

    Submitted request for equipment.

  • Wooster: Advertising for an emerging technologies librarian

4.Catalina’s Time Report
  • Time report is shared.
  • Alan encourages other institutions to lay out an agenda for Catalina so she can balance out her time.

5. Summon
  • Summon will assign a link implementer to work with each of us. Some one who is acquainted with OhioLINK issues.
  • Summon has page which allows tracking of e-mail on issues.
  • Question on plan for Summon implementers from each campus to have a conference call or face-to-face meeting. Currently on such meeting is planned. This will be referred to Michael. Alan will notify Michael.

6. Any other business?
  • Interim report has been sent to Mellon. So far there has been no response.
  • By tomorrow all colleges should have wish lists ready for vendors, Proquest, Readex and Gale. We should have information on pricing back by May 1st.


Full minutes at NGL Site

4/13/11

Tools To Know About: Digital Oral History Tools

This week's tool is the Oral History Association's collection of resources for recording digital oral histories.

These resources are designed to help answer the many questions that come up when creating recordings for a library or archive. It goes over recording devices, cables, storage medium, how to adjust levels, and general tips for good recording. The Oral History Association also has a glossary for digital audio recording.

Two NGL projects are currently capturing oral histories, Writing Our Story: An Analysis of Black Student Protests at Denison University and Collecting and Digitizing Farmer Interviews in Wayne County, Ohio from The College of Wooster. When purchasing recorders for the Wooster project, we created a list of recommendations from Five Colleges staff and links to external reviews. If you need to purchase audio recording equipment it's a great place to start.

4/6/11

Tools To Know About: Seeing Standards


Seeing Standards: A Visualization of the Metadata Universe is an illustration of various standards and schema used in the cultural heritage sector created by Jenn Riley and Devin Becker from Indiana University Libraries.

Seeing Standards provides a visual display of how metadata schema and concepts are related. In addition to the colorful poster, Seeing Standards has a list of 105 major cultural heritage standards with information about what each is used for. Next time you hear a metadata reference you don't know, check Seeing Standards for a quick explanation.