Cataloging and Metadata Commons^™

The Invisible Default: Examining Representation In Digital Collections, Kaylee P. Alexander, Dorothy Terry, Jasmine Kirby, Rachel Jane Wittmann, Anna Neatrour

Libraries Faculty & Staff Publications

This mixed-method study investigates the representation of race and ethnicity within the J. Willard Marriott Digital Library at the University of Utah. The digital collections analyzed in this study come from the Marriott Library’s Special Collections, which represent only a fraction of the library’s physical material (less than 1 percent), albeit those most public facing. Using a team-based approach with librarians from various disciplines and areas of expertise, this project yielded dynamic analysis and conversation combined with heavy contemplation. These investigations are informed by contemporary efforts in librarianship focused on inclusive cataloging, reparative metadata, and addressing archival silences. By employing …

The Invisible Influencer In Information Infrastructure, Herbert Van De Sompel, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The UPS Prototype was a proof-of-concept web portal built in preparation for the Universal Preprint Service Meeting held in October 1999 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The portal provided search functionality for a set of metadata records that had been aggregated from a range of repositories that hosted preprints, working papers, and technical reports. Every search result was overlaid with a dynamically generated menu, called an SFX-menu, that provided a selection of value-adding links for the described scholarly work. The meeting eventually led to the Open Archives Initiative and its Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), which remains widely used in …

Digital Preservation Practices And Use Of Digital Library By Postgraduate Students In Selected Universities In South-West, Nigeria., Mary Oluwabukola Akinlolu, Olalekan Abiola Awujoola Phd, Yinka Joba Olawale

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Digital libraries are established to meet the demands of students who are ever in need of information that must be current, updated and available at a go, to satisfy their academic needs. However, in spite of the benefits accrued to the use of digital library, postgraduate students, hardly make meaningful use of digital libraries. The study therefore investigates digital preservation practices and use of digital library by postgraduate students in selected universities in South-west, Nigeria. The study adopted a descriptive survey research design. The population of the study comprised 29,017 postgraduate students and 363 library personnel in 12 universities in …

Wikimedia And Beyond: Linked Data Projects In Minnesota, Greta Bahnemann, Theresa Berger, Bri Krumwiede, Sara Ring, Heidi J. Southworth

Library Services Publications

How many linked data conference sessions have you attended where the benefits of linked data to libraries were discussed, with the ultimate goal of leading to better visibility for libraries? These sessions likely mentioned research initiatives at large, well-resourced institutions such as the Library of Congress and OCLC Research. But then the post-conference reality sets in and linked data applications in the real world seem almost unattainable. Join us to learn about some of the more approachable and practical implementations of linked data in libraries. We have discovered that one of the best ways to learn about the impact of …

Digital Library Of Georgia (June 2023), Mandy L. Mastrovita

Georgia Library Quarterly

New collections from the Digital Library of Georgia, Summer 2023

Linked Data, Wikidata And Their Implementations, Sai Deng

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

An introductory session on linked data, wikidata and related implementations delivered to participating students for a National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) Major Collaborative Archives Initiative Grant led by Dr. Rosalind J. Beiler in History and Dr. Amy Giroux in Center for Humanities and Digital Research at the University of Central Florida.

Digital Library Of Georgia (December 2022), Mandy L. Mastrovita

Georgia Library Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Digital Library Of Georgia (September 2022), Mandy L. Mastrovita

Georgia Library Quarterly

No abstract provided.

How Disillusioned Debate Documentarians Discovered The Silver Lining, Gypsy Moody, Chuck Hodgin

Library Faculty Scholarship

Belmont University was chosen to host the final presidential debate of the 2020 election. Undeterred by even the COVID-19 pandemic, administration was determined to forge ahead with holding this historic event at Belmont. They formed a committee to document the event and archive its materials. As IR managers, we thanked our lucky stars for this huge opportunity and potential spotlight for our relatively unheralded IR. We were tasked with writing a scalable preservation policy and collecting and archiving physical and digital Debate materials. Unfortunately, our pursuit of these goals revealed that the university had some work to do before we …

Digital Library Of Georgia (June 2022), Mandy L. Mastrovita, Donald Summerlin, Camie Williams, Deborah Hakes

Georgia Library Quarterly

New Digital Library of Georgia collections completed in Q2 of 2022

News – Digital Library Of Georgia, Mandy L. Mastrovita

Georgia Library Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Spark A Conversation On Metadata Inclusiveness, Sai Deng

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This session introduces the context for metadata inclusiveness and presents some of the efforts the speaker has been involved with, including helped create the Inclusive Metadata & Conscious Editing Resources List as a member of the Sunshine State Digital Network (SSDN) Metadata Working Group, and organized “Embracing Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) in Library Cataloging” for the ALA Core Interest Group Week in Spring 2021. It focuses on describing cases, examples and other resources from the SSDN Resources List, so as to give librarians and staff members in Technical Services at the University Central Florida Libraries a better understanding and …

Automatic Metadata Extraction Incorporating Visual Features From Scanned Electronic Theses And Dissertations, Muntabir Hasan Choudhury, Himarsha R. Jayanetti, Jian Wu, William A. Ingram, Edward A. Fox

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) contain domain knowledge that can be used for many digital library tasks, such as analyzing citation networks and predicting research trends. Automatic metadata extraction is important to build scalable digital library search engines. Most existing methods are designed for born-digital documents, so they often fail to extract metadata from scanned documents such as ETDs. Traditional sequence tagging methods mainly rely on text-based features. In this paper, we propose a conditional random field (CRF) model that combines text-based and visual features. To verify the robustness of our model, we extended an existing corpus and created a …

News - Digital Library Of Georgia, Mandy L. Mastrovita

Georgia Library Quarterly

News from the Digital Library of Georgia from February-April 2020

A Heuristic Baseline Method For Metadata Extraction From Scanned Electronic Theses And Dissertations, Muntabir H. Choudhury, Jian Wu, William A. Ingam, Edward A. Fox

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Extracting metadata from scholarly papers is an important text mining problem. Widely used open-source tools such as GROBID are designed for born-digital scholarly papers but often fail for scanned documents, such as Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). Here we present a preliminary baseline work with a heuristic model to extract metadata from the cover pages of scanned ETDs. The process started with converting scanned pages into images and then text files by applying OCR tools. Then a series of carefully designed regular expressions for each field is applied, capturing patterns for seven metadata fields: titles, authors, years, degrees, academic programs, …

Digital Collection Assessment And Use, Tammy Troup

Bucknell Open Educational Resources

The Digital Collection Assessment and Use learning module introduces the use of the Digital Public Library of America (dp.la) API to assess descriptive metadata practices from the perspective of subject specialists. Subject experts are encouraged to use this toolkit to consider how their expertise can be used to support access to knowledge.

The learning module is published in the #DLFteach Toolkit: Lesson Plans for Digital Library Instruction. The openly available, peer-reviewed collection of lesson plans and concrete instructional strategies is the result of a project led by the professional development and resource sharing subgroup. This publication emerged from …

Creating A Reproducible Metadata Transformation Pipeline Using Technology Best Practices, Cara Key, Mike Waugh

Digital Initiatives Symposium

Over the course of two years, a team of librarians and programmers from LSU Libraries migrated the 186 collections of the Louisiana Digital Library from OCLC's CONTENTdm platform over to the open-source Islandora platform.

Early in the process, the team understood the value of creating a reproducible metadata transformation pipeline, because there were so many unknowns at the beginning of the process along with the certainty that mistakes would be made. This presentation will describe how the team used innovative and collaborative tools, such as Trello, Ansible, Vagrant, VirtualBox, git and GitHub to accomplish the task.

Introduction To Metadata For Digital Libraries, Elliot Williams

Library Articles, Papers, and Presentations

Slides from a workshop covering basic metadata practices and principles for digital libraries, including a variety of metadata schemas, as well as considerations for writing shareable and user-friendly metadata.

Utilizing Student Workers At The Digital Library Of Georgia, Mandy L. Mastrovita, Donnie Summerlin

Georgia Library Quarterly

Libraries and archives have become increasingly reliant on student employees to perform duties essential to the daily work of making cultural heritage materials accessible to patrons. This article details how students are recruited, trained, managed, and mentored from the perspective of supervisors at the Digital Library of Georgia. Topics discussed include hiring procedures, training techniques, work assigned to undergraduate and graduate students, the handling of archival materials, digital imaging, metadata, and social media. The article will also examine methods for creating a rewarding and educational work environment for students that promotes the library profession.

Big Data: Challenges And Opportunities For Digital Libraries, Richard Hacken

Faculty Publications

Presented as a Keynote Address to the International Conference on Computing in Engineering and the Sciences in Istanbul, Turkey, on July 30, 2015.

This is an abstract of the speech:

Thanks to technological progress, thanks to the copious Internet, thanks to geometrically burgeoning social media and to quickly proliferating sensors, the flood of data available to us is surging larger and larger, faster and faster. Paradigms for management and analysis are at the core of data-driven businesses and institutions, fueling the velocity of scientific research and development. The phrase “Big Data” was itself coined by scientists as they manipulated exploding …

Work Smarter, Not Harder, Amy Jo Hunsaker

Library Faculty Presentations

Academic institutions’ digital collections often face the challenging issue of not having enough professionals to create metadata for the thousands of digital objects that exist in their collections. Anybody can scan, but not everyone is cut out for metadata creation. However, universities abound with intellectual and energetic pre-professionals, a.k.a. students. Instead of assigning student workers and volunteers to perform purely menial tasks, why not tap into their ability to learn and train them to do more “professional” jobs, such as metadata creation and website maintenance? With an entire campus filled with students eager to gain experience and willing to study, …

Institutional Repository And Archival Collaborations At Unlv Libraries: Who's In, Who's Out?, Tom D. Sommer

Library Faculty Presentations

The University Archives has become an integral part of an academic institution. It has met its role as the repository for the rich history of an institution. They have met the challenges of a changing environment at many points in their history. The most recent change being the addition of born-digital materials into their collections. However, there is an opportunity to collaborate with another unit within academic libraries. The introduction and growth of institutional repositories (IR) on college campuses has provided an opportunity for university archives. An IR’s goal is to preserve the intellectual output of an institution. This is …

Exposing Missing Links: From Contentdm Digital Collections To The Linked Open Data Cloud, Silvia B. Southwick

Library Faculty Presentations

Agenda

• Linked Data basic concepts
• UNLV Linked Data project
• Technologies
• Transforming metadata into linked data
• Next steps

Survival Of The Fittest: The Evolving Nature Of Metadata Creation For Digital Collections, Silvia B. Southwick, Amy Hunsaker

Library Faculty Presentations

The evolving nature of metadata is exemplified through a pictorial timeline that expands over a decade, identifying the development of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries digital collections, the context of their development, and the various factors that emerged later on that have influenced revisions of metadata decisions.

Transforming Digital Collections Into Linked Data: The Rise Of Missing Links, Silvia B. Southwick, Cory K. Lampert

Library Faculty Presentations

Goals

• Study the feasibility of developing a common process that would allow the conversion of our collection records into linked data preserving their original expressivity and richness
• Publish data from our collections in the Linked Open Data Cloud to improve discover-ability and connections with other related data sets on the Web

Linked Data Demystified: Practical Efforts To Transform Contentdm Metadata For The Linked Data Cloud, Silvia B. Southwick, Cory K. Lampert

Library Faculty Presentations

The library literature and events like the ALA Annual Conference have been inundated with presentations and articles on linked data. At UNLV Libraries, we understand the importance of linked data in helping to better service our users. We have designed and initiated a pilot project to apply linked data concepts to the practical task of transforming a sample set of our CONTENTdm digital collections data into future-oriented linked data. This presentation will outline rationale for beginning work in linked data and detail the phases we will undertake in the proof of concept project. We hope through this research experiment to …

Navigating To Success: Finding Your Way Through The Challenges Of Map Digitization, Cory K. Lampert, Katherine Rankin

Library Faculty Presentations

This presentation highlights the key steps and decision points essential to completing a successful map digitization project. Topics to be covered include: overcoming the challenges of scanning large-scale materials (including file sizes and encapsulation), descriptive metadata for map collections, copyright and privacy issues for geographic materials, adding geographic coordinates to map collections, image viewer and interface options for online maps, and methods to track the impact of map digitization with users. Using University of Nevada Las Vegas Libraries’ digital project Southern Nevada: History in Maps as a case study, the authors will discuss the challenges inherent in map digitization and …

Keeping Track Of Objects And Metadata At Unlv: From Material Selection Through Metadata Quality Control, Silvia B. Southwick, Jane Skoric

Library Faculty Presentations

Often times a large amount of time is spent in organizing materials and tracking workflow in digital collection projects. Time is a precious resource in most projects since they are constrained by a rigid schedule. This problem is exacerbated in collaborative environments where different people collaborate in various stages of the project. Silvia Southwick and Jane Skoric with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas will present effective and efficient simple tools to manage digital objects and metadata throughout the life cycle of a digital collection project. Using actual work processes, we will describe and demonstrate the tracking of physical and …

Engaging Your Campus In Utilizing Institutional Repositories, Marianne A. Buehler

Library Faculty Presentations

Essentials of IR Success
- Institutional repository (IR) best practices: engagement with administrators, faculty, staff, and students
- Acquisition of research scholarship, publications, theses/dissertations, and other research objects
- Successful marketing strategies, best practices for garnering IR content, and developing open access mandates

Metadata Dictionary Database: A Proposed Tool For Academic Library Metadata Management, Silvia B. Southwick, Cory Lampert

Library Faculty Presentations

Efficient management of metadata is critical for developing quality, sharable metadata. A variety of metadata challenges arise from metadata designed in a project-specific context versus taking a comprehensive metadata management approach applied across multiple digital collections in academic libraries.