Links to notes, resources, and schedule: http://bit.ly/dplafest2016-hackathon
Have ideas for how you would mashup cultural heritage data, build new visualizations, find new ways to explore collections? Join us to get hands-on and creative with DPLA data, no matter what your technical expertise is. Not only will you learn about different ways to access and reuse DPLA data and content, but we’ll also be giving intros, tips, and tutorials for ways you can access and build with open data from the National Archives, Europeana, New York Public Library, and Historypin. If you have data skills or datasets you want to share, this will be a great place to do that as well, as we’ll be help each other to get small prototypes off the ground. The hackathon will continue on through the next two days at DPLAfest, and participants will have a chance to show off what they’ve built/played with/hacked together in short lightning sessions on Friday afternoon’s developer showcase.
Please note that registration for DPLAfest is required to attend this pre-fest portion of the hackathon.
DPLA Executive Director Dan Cohen, representatives from our host organizations, and major DPLA funders will welcome members of the public to DPLAfest 2016.
Video from this session is available at https://dp.la/info/get-involved/dplafest/april-2016/media/videos/.
It goes without saying that libraries have undergone significant change over the past fifteen years. What does their future hold? What new technologies, cultural trends, and other factors will shape their development? These topics and more are the subject of this fascinating conversation with library leaders and thinkers.
Empire State Digital Network (ESDN), the New York state service hub for DPLA, is administered by the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) in partnership with eight regional library councils collectively working as the Empire State Library Network. Together, these partners collaborate to contribute digital resources from hundreds of New York collecting institutions to DPLA. Through these partnerships, ESDN is able to add material from all sorts of institutions including large research universities and tiny historical societies with all volunteer staffs.
ESDN was not an existing portal or repository before forming as a statewide service hub. Instead, the hub is built on a network of regionally based consortial partners to facilitate contribution to DPLA. Liaisons and digital collection administrators from the hub’s regional partners will participate on a panel to discuss the business of contributing to DPLA from their various contexts and platforms. Panelists will discuss their experience working with ESDN to coordinate contribution workflows, permissions, metadata guidelines, metadata mapping, and other outreach activities to member organizations through a distributed hub network.
Whether your digital project is still in the works or has been around for years, keeping and growing a target audience for your resources is a constant challenge. There are fundamental, nonintrusive steps you can take, however, that will not only help you gain a greater knowledge of your stakeholders but also assist you in shaping your content to reflect their needs.
Geovisualization is a set of tools and techniques which allow users to analyze geospatial data through the use of interactive visualization. While such visualization helps users uncover information and insights otherwise undiscoverable, geovisualization focuses on knowledge discovery by combining layers of information over geographic and locational components. It has great potential for libraries and museums to use in historic and genealogy research. Many libraries have documents and records that contain addresses or traces of geographic information, but lack the means of presenting that information in a visually usable form. This workshop will provide participants with hands-on experiences in extracting geographic information from text, creating GeoJSon files to represent the geographic features, and visualizing the information via Google Maps using Google Maps JavaScript API.
Many of us want to create and sustain engaging projects to meet goals of our institutions but don't know where to start or struggle to control existing projects. Join leaders from the National Archives, Smithsonian Institution, and the Folger Shakespeare Library for a workshop to answer questions about how we use technology to engage our communities, specifically for transcription and tagging activities. We plan to share triumphs and failures to help others build similar programs. We will also discuss quality assurance for transcription, sustainability of engagement, and challenges from the public. In this session, participants will have the opportunity to see our platforms and learn about different projects at the three institutions. Participants will close the session with a hands-on exercise implementing the tactics we use to create a campaign around material in DPLA.
Links to notes, resources, and schedule: http://bit.ly/dplafest2016-hackathon
This hackathon session is intended for informal collaboration, with a very brief introductory information about the DPLA API and logistics related to the hackathon. For an in-depth introduction to DPLA's API, as well as those for other cultural heritage data sources, please join the hackathon session on Wednesday afternoon.
Join us for a session dedicated to the state of writing in the digital age. What does it mean to write a book, digital or print or both? What new technologies and processes are re-defining the role of the author? Panelists will touch upon these questions and more during this exciting discussion between three prominent contemporary authors.
In this session, you’ll be introduced to an innovative and collaborative model used by librarian-teacher cohorts in a current IMLS project, School Librarians Advancing STEM Learning (2014-2017). Learn how librarians are working with science and mathematics teachers to build inquiry and literacy aligned to CCSS and NGSS standards in STEM classrooms through the integration of primary sources and open educational resources (OER). Using OER is a key vehicle for educators to create and remix relevant and shareable curriculum, across classrooms, districts, and states.
DPLA Service Hubs in single states around the country have often worked with cultural heritage institutions physically located within 50 or 100 miles of the Hub. What happens when digitization and aggregation must be provided across the larger regions and states in the West? This session looks at issues that have emerged as collaboration is stretched across hundreds of miles, different cultures, and topographical impediments. Existing and potential new Service Hubs in the West are working towards responding to these challenges by discovering different models for collaboration -- in service provision, funding, and governance.
Visit any of these stations around the Jefferson building where Library of Congress docents will share with DPLAfest participants stories and background information about the architectural details and exhibits on display.
Join us for a conversational discussion with technologists from both inside and outside of the library industry. Panelists will discuss all aspects of technology, including hardware and software, that are likely to impact libraries and similar industries. There will also be time allocated for questions from, and discussion with, the audience.
This panel will give an update on exciting research and advocacy efforts happening in the area of ebooks: ReadersFirst, Charlotte Initiative, and Open eBooks.
Readers First is an international organization of nearly 300 libraries representing 200 million readers dedicated to ensuring that library users have the same open, easy and free access to e-books that they have come to rely on with physical books. Towards the end of achieving a better ebook experience, Reader’s First advocates for the following: search and browse a single comprehensive catalog with all of a library’s offerings at once; the ability to place holds, check-out items, view availability, manage fines and receive communications within individual library catalogs or in the venue the library believes will serve them best; Download e-books that are compatible with ALL readers.
The Charlotte Initiative is a Mellon funded two-year research and planning grant, based at UNC Charlotte, that will produce recommendations for the licensing and acquisition of electronic resources, particularly eBooks. Working groups will be convened to discuss, define, and investigate the impact on institutions of three principles for eBook licenses: unlimited simultaneous users, No Digital Rights Management (DRM) either contractual or technical, irrevocable perpetual access and archival rights.
Open eBooks is a new initiative and ereader app that will make thousands of popular, topselling eBooks available to children in need for free, is launching today. The initiative is designed to address the challenge of providing digital reading materials to children living in low income households. A coalition of literacy, library, publishing and technology partners joined together to make the Open eBooks program possible. The initiative’s partners Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), First Book, and The New York Public Library (NYPL), with content support from digital books distributor Baker & Taylor created the app, curated the eBook collection, and developed a system for distribution and use. They received financial support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and content contributions from major publishers.
Over the past five years, a diverse array of government agencies and private foundations has awarded grant funding to the Digital Public Library of America. Despite differing missions, these organizations have recognized DPLA’s potential with support for planning, human resources, hub development, and special initiatives tackling issues such as education and rights statements. During this session, a small group of DPLA funders will discuss how this landmark project responds to their respective missions and priorities. Session attendees will learn more about grant-funded projects undertaken by DPLA and partners, as well as funding opportunities for future work that may leverage or enhance DPLA. A Q&A will follow brief presentations from each funder.
DPLA, Stanford University and DuraSpace are partnering to extend the existing Hydra project codebase and its vibrant and growing community to build, bundle, and promote a feature-rich, robust, flexible platform for digital collections. The project's components including development of best of breed repository platform, a hosted service for the repository, and a suite of metadata aggregation tools designed to support institutions like DPLA's Hubs. This presentation will provide an overview of the project and insight into its design phase, including what we've learned through the process of gathering requirements through surveys, individual interviews, and focus groups.
DPLAfest is in Washington, D.C. this year, with a new presidential Administration coming to town in less than a year, and a broad array of our information policy issues on the table. How can the DPLA community have an impact on our priority issues of concern such as copyright, funding for libraries and allied fields, digital preservation, and key DPLA application domains such as education and research? Come join two senior staffers of the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) to develop your understanding and ask questions.
This session includes the nuts and bolts of policy: What really happens inside the black box of D.C. political machinery? The transition to a new Administration will be used as the framework for explication, concluding with plans and thoughts for the months ahead. What should be done?
In this workshop, we'll be exploring the GIF in its natural habitat: the internet. But first, some background: What are GIFs? How did they develop? How do you say “GIF”? In this workshop, we’ll explore how to use GIFs, when they’re most successful, the challenges associated with using them, and how to make, find, and use them yourself. We’ll talk about the ins and outs of some content sources, including resources in the DPLA, and review a few apps and programs you can use to make and share them yourself. And then, with some audience input, we’ll be demonstrating how to make a GIF using open source images to tell a joke, punctuate a thought, or convey an emotion. A picture is worth a thousand words? Well, a GIF is worth a million.
Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of the best technology to use to create GIFs and the social circumstances in which they’re most effective. They’ll be empowered to experiment with GIFs on their own, whether that means using a tool like NYPL’s Stereogranimator or going all out with Photoshop. And they’ll receive a worksheet summarizing some key takeaways and resources to use in their adventures.
Proposed Schedule:
10 minutes - What are GIFs?
15 minutes - How do GIFs work on social media?
10 minutes - Where can you find content for GIFs?
35 minutes - Let’s make a GIF! With audience input!
10 minutes - Let’s brainstorm some other GIFs!
15 minutes - Audience Q&A
Umbra: Building a Subject-based Portal for Searching African American History
The urgency of representing African American history and culture as fully as possible drives Umbra: Search African American History (umbrasearch.org), a freely available search tool that brings together the most extensive digital collection dedicated to African American history and culture from US archives, museums, and cultural heritage institutions. As a discovery platform and call to action, Umbra enables the creation of new works—curricula, scholarship, art of all kinds—that illuminate parts of our history that have not been broadly accessible. Through partnerships, open data, and technology, Umbra is working against centuries of loss and erasure to expand the historical record for students, scholars, and the general public. Currently, over 400,000 digital items are made available from over 500 institutions, many of these drawn from the DPLA’s own aggregated collections using the Open API Codex. This presentation explores the process of pulling together disparate digital resources, including but not limited to DPLA; the processes and challenges of identifying and delivering relevant content; the technologies employed; and the relationships built along that way that make this work possible. Attendees should expect to learn about our own work in building and sustaining this important subject-based portal and to feel inspired to explore other opportunities to build subject-based pathways to discovery.
A Peek in the Portal: The University of North Texas The Portal to Texas History
This presentation with offer a brief look into the digital collections added to The University of North Texas’ The Portal to Texas History in the last year. Examples include projects completed through our Rescuing Texas History Mini-Grant program for 2014, The Barbara Jordan Archives Collection, and the Texas Historical Commission’s Historic Building Negatives Collection among others.
3D Scanning for Small Budgets: How Local Libraries and Museums will Play a Role in Creating a 3D Digital Library
Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) University Library has been digitizing and providing access to community and cultural heritage collections since 2006. Varying formats include: audio, video, photographs, slides, negatives, and text (bound, loose). The library provides access to these collections using CONTENTdm. As 3D technologies become increasingly popular in libraries and museums, IUPUI University Library is exploring the workflows and processes as they relate to 3D artifacts. This presentation will demonstrate Creaform’s Go!Scan 3D scanner while discussing collection digitization for small museums. Presenter will share insight on: key terms and features, access of 3D objects in a CONTENTdm collection, and share costs of 3D scanning.
Library ebook stakeholders convened at DPLAfest 2015 to collaborate and address the challenges ebooks present to libraries. What does the library ebook ecosystem look like one year later? What progress have we made, and where can we continue to disrupt? During this session, we will discuss the goals and states of both library-owned platforms and consortial solutions, innovative technologies, and the possibility of a "national ebook platform."
Washington, DC is abuzz with studies, hearings, legislation, judiciary rulings—all on digital copyright. Orphan works, proposals for extended collective licensing (ECL), stronger application of notice and takedown schemes, and continued focus on mass digitization remain probable options that may be considered by Congress which will affect preservation of the cultural record, innovation, research endeavors, and new forms of creativity. How can we ensure that DPLA and other digital libraries can continue to flourish when content filtering and heightened anti-piracy schemes seem to be of most interest to Congress? What solutions are good for society, and what proposals must we fight against?
Two copyright policy experts will discuss the conversations happening in Congress and in federal agencies as well as judiciary rulings related to fair use, gate-keeping, digital preservation and access to works. They will examine what tools currently exist to address digital concerns and how they can be effectively utilized.The Living Knowledge Network and the Knowledge Quarter are two unique clusters that are supporting the digital research network nationally in the UK and in London. Head of Strategy Liz White will explore how these clusters are helping to open up the British Library as an organisation informing our knowledge sharing capabilities.
What are teachers and students looking for from digital collections and platforms? In this session, education project leaders from the National Archives, the Smithsonian, and the Digital Public Library of America will, through the lens of their individual projects, lead a discussion on the big questions of digital GLAM education outreach:
1. What is the value of education work for cultural institutions?
2. What is the value of this content to teachers and students? How do they use it?
3. What are the most important considerations when designing for this audience?
4. What does it mean to put control in teachers’ hands? What are the advantages?
5. What are some useful first steps for connecting education audiences with digital collections?
Don't fear the reaper: metadata harvesting, lessons learned, and looking ahead with Calisphere
Since 2014, the California Digital Library (CDL) has been piloting the use of a metadata harvesting infrastructure to aggregate unique collections from across the 10-campus University of California library system -- and libraries, archives, and museums throughout the state. These collections are now available through the newly redesigned Calisphere (http://calisphere.cdlib.org/) website in addition to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Our relatively new metadata harvesting infrastructure, which adapts DPLA's early code base, has made it easier for contributors to share collections. We're now able to aggregate a much larger range of resources than before: 400,000 objects are now available in Calisphere -- an immediate 70% increase in content from the previous site. However, there are challenges to scaling and streamlining our processes, from the point of staging collections for harvest, through to quality control checking results. This talk will highlight where we've been with metadata aggregation, and where we're planning to go. We'll discuss points of pain and lessons learned with the existing infrastructure. We'll report on an environmental scan we conducted to evaluate DPLA's Heiðrún stack, along with approaches developed by DigitalNZ and other large-scale aggregators. Last, we will discuss new requirements that we've developed, and directions that we are planning to take to improve on and ramp up our processes.
Creating shareable metadata in New York State and Beyond: The ESDN Metadata Working Group
Empire State Digital Network (ESDN), the New York state service hub for DPLA, is administered by the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) in partnership with eight other regional library councils collectively working as the Empire State Library Network. Together, these partners work to contribute digital resources from hundreds of New York institutions to DPLA. In order to improve discoverability of these resources in DPLA and other aggregated platforms, ESDN has convened a group of metadata professionals from throughout New York State. The aim of the group is to 1.) create documentation and best practices to help our partners create richer, more shareable metadata and 2.) host community events focusing on metadata cleanup and enrichment, and to document those events so that they can be easily replicated around New York State and the wider community. In this lightning talk, we will plan to provide an overview of group, our goals and objectives as well as the work we’ve completed so far and are planning for the rest of 2016.
Service Hub Strategies: Enabling collection building through consultation
The Recollection Wisconsin Service Hub is one of the newest hubs to join the DPLA network. One of our primary goals as a service hub is to grow the collections and diversity of contributing institutions from Wisconsin, and to do that on a relative shoestring. To that end, we have established a service approach that emphasizes training and consulting over digitization services. This lightning session will outline the consultation model in development by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, in partnership with Marquette University Library, and provide specific examples based on two pilot projects with a local historical society and medical college. We hope to expand the model to better position Wisconsin cultural heritage institutions, regardless of size or infrastructure, to make the riches of their collections accessible to a broad audience through DPLA.
With the 100th anniversary of the US entry in WWI next year, SI, LOC, and NARA are working together on a project to bring new WWI content to museums, teachers, and coders. The collaboration and content on this project are unique. Come learn about the WWI project, the collaboration, and the barriers that can slow organizations from working together.
On January 6, 2016, NYPL announced that out-of-copyright materials in NYPL Digital Collections are now available as high-resolution downloads. No permission required; no restrictions on use.
The release of more than 180,000 digitized items represents both a simplification and an enhancement of digital access to a trove of unique and rare materials: a removal of administration fees and processes from public domain content, and also improvements to interfaces — popular and technical — to the digital assets themselves. Online users of the NYPL Digital Collections website now find more prominent download links and filters highlighting restriction-free content; while more technically inclined users now benefit from updates to the Digital Collections API enabling bulk use and analysis, as well as data exports and utilities posted to NYPL's GitHub account. These changes are intended to facilitate sharing, research and reuse by scholars, artists, educators, technologists, publishers, and Internet users of all kinds.
To encourage novel uses of our digital resources, we also launched a call for applications for a new Remix Residency program, intended for digital creators to make transformative and creative uses of digital collections and data. To provide further inspiration for reuse, Labs also released several demonstration projects delving into specific collections, as well as a visual browsing tool allowing users to explore the public domain collections at scale. Taken together, these projects suggest just a few of the myriad investigations made possible by fully opening these collections. At this presentation, we’ll share the story of how we produced this release, including strategic, tactical, and impact design decisions -- and, most importantly, and how it’s been received so far.
Book digitization projects have existed for decades. As technology evolved, ebooks were created for various platforms and in myriad formats, forcing ebooks to live in silos based on how they could be accessed. In this panel, participants will discuss how they are working to break ebooks out of these silos. Panelists will begin by talking about the technology and projects that are making ebooks easier to access, especially on mobile devices. The panel will shift into a discussion about how DPLA hubs can work within their regional networks to unlock ebook content and make it openly accessible.
In 2015, the Knight Foundation funded the Culture in Transit project, a collaboration between the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO), Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) and Queens Public Library (QL) to bring mobile scanning equipment to smaller libraries, archives, museums, and the communities they serve. The project offers community members and smaller cultural institutions an opportunity to obtain digital copies of their materials using state-of-the-art equipment. Through community scanning events at branch libraries, Culture in Transit empowers NYC residents to take an active role in chronicling their local cultural heritage. Digitized materials are in turn added to the Queens and Brooklyn’s collections and made available via their online catalogs. At the same time, through METRO’s work with small cultural heritage institutions, hidden institutional collections are digitized and shared with the public through METRO’s online portal. All materials contributed as part of this project are being harvested by the Empire State Digital Network and will be included in the Digital Public Library of America. Our outreach-centered digitization model aims to democratize and diversify NYC’s historical record.
Project lead, Anne Karle-Zenith (METRO) and Queens Library lead, Natalie Milbrodt, will share some of the strategic and logistical thinking that has gone into the Culture in Transit program so far, and discuss the nature of the collaboration across its three partner institutions. They will share lessons learned by the Libraries about the real needs of private individuals in making the leap from a snapshot in a photo album to a record in the DPLA, as well as METRO’s efforts in identifying institutions that have appropriate collections who are also ready to work within the parameters of our on-site digitization model. This talk will be helpful for those interested in outreach and wondering how to establish partnerships between larger institutions capable of sharing digitization and metadata creation resources and smaller organizations in need of that help.
“Street Art Graphics” Digital Archive and “People’s History Archive”
This illustrated slide presentation provides an overview of two digital projects related to street-based stickers, posters, and ephemera from around the world. In 2015, as part of a four-year funded initiative, the Council of Independent Colleges selected St. Lawrence University’s “Street Art Graphics” digital archive (http://www.stlawu.edu/gallery/digitalcollections/streetartgraphics.php) as one of 47 projects across the country to be included in Artstor’s Shared Shelf Commons, a free, open access library of digital images and a Web-based service for cataloging and managing digital collections (http://www.sscommons.org/openlibrary/welcome.html). Items in the archive offer social and political commentary and critique on issues ranging from national/global economic crises, environmental degradation, racism, and sexism to surveillance and police brutality. The more recent Drupal-based “People’s History Archive” (http://peopleshistoryarchive.org/), currently under construction, grew out of a five-year Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities grant to St. Lawrence University entitled “Crossing Boundaries: Re-envisioning the Humanities in the 21st Century.” The goal of the project is to document the creative and complex ways people make use of public space. Contributors include undergraduate students, young alumni, and faculty who create mini-online interpretive exhibits using items from the “Street Art Graphics” digital archive and/or items contributors have selected themselves from off-campus research projects.
Working Together to Promote Digitization, Access, and Education
Over the last 10 years, The Constitutional Sources Project (www.ConSource.org) has connected thousands of American citizens of all ages to our nation’s constitutional history by creating a comprehensive, easily searchable, and freely accessible digital library of historical sources related to the creation, ratification, and amendment of the United States Constitution. Our team not only curates important digital collections of historical materials, but also travels the country, working with judges, lawyers, law students, educators and the general public to ensure that the full story of our constitutional form of government is told. ConSource has worked with brick-and-mortar archives, libraries, digital projects and many others to digitize and curate content related to the creation, ratification, and amendment of the United States Constitution. Several of our current working projects, including digital collections on colonial charters and early state constitutions, and women and the constitution, will digitize and make freely available in digital form materials that have never before been digitized or curated into one comprehensive collection. ConSource has developed a successful digital partnership model that has been refined over time.
Providing Access to Audiovisual Cultural Heritage through the American Archive of Public Broadcasting
The American Archive of Public Broadcasting is an unprecedented initiative to preserve and make accessible significant historical content created by public media. Led by WGBH and The Library of Congress, the AAPB currently preserves 40,000 hours of digital content from nearly 100 stations across the U.S. Nearly 10,000 of these digitized programs have been made available in the AAPB Online Reading Room. The collection contains thousands of high quality regional and local programs documenting American communities during the last half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. This extraordinary collection includes local news and public affairs programs, local history productions that document the heritage of local communities, and programs dealing with education, environmental issues, music, art, literature, dance, poetry, religion, and even filmmaking on a local level.
Massachusetts, Minnesota and Texas…Academic and Public…Cowboys, Patriots and Vikings…
Three very different states - all with strong DPLA service hubs. How are they succeeding in their respective environments and what can other prospective service hubs learn from their experiences? This presentation will describe three models, their methods, and lessons learned over the years of conducting digitization programs.
The University of North Texas Libraries (UNT Libraries) has for almost a decade directed a program called Rescuing Texas History Mini-Grant Program (RTH) with the goal of helping local and state-level cultural heritage institutions and private owners digitize their holdings. RTH has allowed UNT Libraries to develop mutually-beneficial relationships with regional organizations, preserve and provide access to at-risk historical items, and develop a sustainable model for large-scale digitization initiatives.
The Boston Public Library offers statewide digitization services in partnership with Digital Commonwealth. These services were initially funded through LSTA grants but have since been moved onto more stable state funding. As one of the initial service hubs, Digital Commonwealth has built its service plan on a very high-touch, personable, and customizable model for digital project design, imaging, and metadata production. With over 250 partners from 160 municipalities, Digital Commonwealth has developed a strong relationship with the cultural heritage community in Massachusetts which has resulted in a sustainable level of support and positive momentum for future growth.
Hacking Hemingway: Cracking the Code to the Vault
“Hacking Hemingway: Cracking the Code to the Vault” is a digital history project funded by the Illinois Secretary of State and Illinois State Library that gives access to rare items from The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park and the Oak Park Public Library. By making these digital items available learners can now interact with Hemingway and the places and people that influenced his life and work. A major outcome of the grant is to create opportunities for the learner to become curator. The creation of the Illinois DPLA Hub will allow students from Oak Park and around the world to interact with never before seen Hemingway artifacts. In the presentation we will discuss examples and outcomes of student projects generated from the digital objects to be included in the Illinois Digital Archives and DPLA and the process of collaboration between institutions.
Virtual Creative Spaces
In this session, presenters John Stewart and Harry Costner, veteran teachers and caretakers of Lower Arlington Arts will demonstrate new ways for students to engage text and respond to literature, using examples from their virtual creativity courses, G Create and Teen Writer Society. Participants will engage in several model activities and student "missions" and learn how to establish virtual communities that foster exploration and creativity.
Is there something in the water? This presentation will share first-hand research results an ongoing investigation into the memory institution developer community in Europeana compared to the developer communities in the U.S.. Funding streams, cultural differences, absent high level standardization and differing public perceptions of heritage institutions all come into play here. Regretfully, a less collaborative and sustainable developer community in Europe stifles innovation, stretches already thin funding, and fails to catalyze the necessary standardizations and synergies that allow for smaller institutions to be on the same level as their bigger counterparts. Inspired by legacy FOSS initiatives like Apache, the inbox clogging Code4Lib list as well as newer groups like IIIF and Hydra, EuropeanaTech wants to better understand the developer ecosystem in the U.S.A. and explore how it can be cultured within Europeana and the EU.
Testing a Linked Data Fragments Server using DPLA Data
Based on Ruben Verborgh Linked Data Fragments server, this session is about the latest experiments on implementing a Linked Data Fragments server as an alternative to fully supported SPARQL endpoint. This semantic web system research uses Redis as the backend datastore cache with a server prototype in Python and an initial production server being developed in the Go language. This talk will illustrate the general approach, first demonstrated in Jeremy Nelson's Pycon Japan talk in October 2015 (http://intro2libsys.info/pycon-jp-2015/) , of incrementally improving and testing a linked data fragments server that provides RDF triples in JSON when queried by web clients. This talk will show how DPLA's JSON data is transformed into raw Redis protocol for extremely fast importing of data at scale into a Redis cluster. The talk will then show how by leveraging the flexibility, speed, and caching functionality of DPLA RDF data, Redis enables a linked data fragments caching and distributed server topology that scales while offering faster and more stable retrieval of RDF triples from a sample of DPLA's RDF data. This talk finishes by comparing the performance of a new Go language-based production server versus the Python prototype and future plans for this promising technology.
PCDM, IIIF, and Interoperability
The Portland Common Data Model (PCDM) provides a flexible vocabulary for describing repository content, and aims to allow tools and applications to work with data that have varying metadata standards and levels of complexity. The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) provides standard APIs for describing and delivering images, allowing implementers to develop feature-rich applications while still working with the technology of their choice, and enabling users to integrate content from multiple repositories into a single viewer. Beyond their focus on interoperability, these projects also share a pragmatic approach centered on use cases and community engagement. This talk will describe PCDM and IIIF, and draw lessons about how building community and staying grounded in real world use cases help create standards and tools that work.
Some of the most valuable collections documenting the lives of marginalized people in the United States reside in spaces outside traditional academic and government institutions. They exist throughout the country as independently curated, highly valuable sites for remembering, and owned by the communities they document. Recent research in archival studies notes growth in community-based archives. These archives are independent, grassroots alternatives to mainstream repositories through which communities make collective decisions about what is of enduring value to them, shape collective memory of their own pasts, and control the means through which stories about their past are constructed. Such organizations are often created in response to minoritized communities being shut out of dominant historical narratives created by mainstream memory institutions.
This session will examine the impact of community-based archives from two different perspectives.
1. Building a Model for National Collaboration: A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland
In 2015, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) annual conference was held in Cleveland, a city reeling from several high-profile incidents of police violence against African-American residents. A group of archivists attending SAA responded to this by developing an unofficial conference service project to document incidents of police violence in Cleveland’s neighborhoods. The archivists partnered with a group of local activists to build a website for the digital archive (archivingpoliceviolence.org), collect oral histories in Cleveland neighborhoods, and create a model for ongoing support of the project, consisting of a national advisory board composed of professional archivists, and a local community archivist group composed of Cleveland activists and residents.
This presentation will come from the perspective of the community archivists, who will discuss their experiences in developing the archive in partnership with SAA members, the impact of the archive on the community, and future directions for the project.
2. Assessing the Impact of Community Archives
This session will provide an update on the DPLA Knight Foundation Planning Grant to learn more about the state of newspaper projects in the United States. We will also hear from states who have large newspaper digitization projects about some of their successes and challenges.
North Carolina
With over 400,000 pages and growing, the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center’s newspaper collection is the largest of its kind in the state. Despite this work, the Center could be buried under an onslaught of requests for more; in a recent survey, community newspapers are the second highest digitization priority for cultural heritage institutions in North Carolina. This presentation will discuss how the Center manages its distributed selection model, a recent content management system migration, and the ongoing challenges in meeting demand.
Georgia
The University of Georgia, home of the Digital Library of Georgia, has a long history of preserving and providing access to the state's newspaper heritage. Since 1953, the Georgia Newspaper Project has microfilmed more than 2500 titles, and it continues to film over 200 current newspapers on an ongoing basis. In 2007, the DLG debuted its first archive of digitized newspapers, and it now provides full-text access to over 700,000 newspaper pages. This presentation will discuss the demand for newspapers among our users, our selection criteria, our in-house digitization process, and future plans for expanding the collection.
What makes an image a "good" image? How can image quality be measured in a standards-compliant, repeatable fashion? Digitization is expensive; how can we make sure it is being performed correctly? Don Williams, Advisory Board Member for the FADGI Still Image Working Group, will provide an overview of the Federal Agency Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) for Still Imaging and the theory behind the metrics used to measure the quality of images created during cultural heritage digitization activities.
Peter Siegel of Digital Transitions Division of Cultural Heritage will demonstrate and discuss imaging solutions for producing Digital Preservation Objects (DPO) with very high FADGI and Metamorfoze scores. Golden Thread FADGI / Metamorfoze compliant targets and DICE analysis software used during cultural heritage imaging activities will be shown including a live demonstration of the analysis of device-level target with and without real objects.
Finally, Jim Studnicki of Creekside Digital will illustrate practical applications of the FADGI guidelines in still imaging projects for cultural heritage institutions, as well as FADGI's impact on project management in digitization efforts. Real-world examples of "preservation-class" (FADGI 3-Star and higher) cultural heritage imaging projects will be discussed and a few "tips and tricks" to achieve FADGI compliance will even be revealed!
The next generation of Omeka, Omeka S, has an explicit goal of increasing data exchange between Omeka S and other repositories holding cultural heritage data, especially institutional repository software like Fedora and DSpace. Integrating with DPLA -- especially facilitating the transfer of data in an Omeka S installation to DPLA -- is therefore a priority for the project. To further facilitate that transfer, Omeka S’s basic resource description template to be compliant with DPLA MAP 4.0.
Interact with project representatives and demo cool tools at the demo space. The demo space will be open all day. Participants include:
Digital Transitions Division of Cultural Heritage
DTDCH designs and manufactures its own camera bodies, lens panels, reprographic copystands, and accessories in the United States. Our diverse expertise in the areas of optical, mechanical, and software design provide us a virtually unlimited capacity to custom design solutions to meet specific needs. To find out more about DTDCH, visit http://dtdch.com/.
ReadersFirst
ReadersFirst is an organization of nearly 300 libraries representing 200 million readers dedicated to ensuring access to free and easy-to-use eBook content. To find out more about Readersfirst, visit http://www.readersfirst.org/.
Funders’ Information Table
Pick up literature, learn about current initiatives, and ask questions about opportunities available through a variety of funders, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NARA), the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Texthelp
Texthelp believes that everyone shares a fundamental need to be understood by others, and language is our passport to academic, social and professional success. This is what drives Texthelp to create smart, easy-to-use support technologies that enable citizens to read-and-write with confidence and develop digital skills in multiple languages.
SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context)
SNAC is addressing a longstanding research challenge: discovering, locating, and using distributed historical records. Scholars use these records as primary evidence for understanding the lives and work of historical persons and the events in which they participated. These records are held in archives and manuscript libraries, large and small, around the world. Scholars may need to search scores of different archives one by one, following clues, hunches, and leads to find the records relevant to their topic. Furthermore, descriptive practices may differ from one archive or library to another. The research is time consuming and inefficient: clues and leads may be easily overlooked and important resources undiscovered. The data needed to address this research challenge already exists in the guides, catalogs, and finding aids that archivists and librarians create to document and provide access to the archival resources. It is buried in isolated guides and finding aids that are stored in different, isolated systems.
Documenting Music Subcultures through Oral History
Oral history is a powerful tool for collecting and providing access to the stories of individuals and groups not traditionally included in the historical record. In this panel, Simmons MLIS graduate students will present on the process and considerations behind three unique oral history projects documenting music subculture groups: Open Signal, a Providence, RI artists collective concerned with the state of gender and race in experimental, electronic-based sound and art practices; the Phunky Bitches, a women's service and outreach organization for fans of the band Phish; and, the Otis Mountain Get Down, an annual music festival in the Adirondacks that encourages new and meaningful interactions with art, music, outdoors, and the local community. Presenters will share portions of their projects, and discuss various aspects of the oral history process, including technical components such as digital recording, editing, and archiving, and broader ethical and social considerations like privacy concerns, cultural sensitivity, and copyright.
If a PDF Falls in the Forest Will Anyone See It? Building a Library Ecosystem for Digital Materials
Libraries are spending enormous amounts of money, effort, and staff time to convert their holdings into publicly accessible digital assets. Often the value of these discrete digitized objects can be difficult to appreciate, however, without some supporting intellectual context and infrastructure, especially for a public audience. Context can be a crucial factor for many government documents since they are often perceived as arcane and dull artifacts of the past. The National Agricultural Library has over 30 thousand digitized documents that can be accessed by the public. But making digital materials accessible is not the same as making them meaningful. The library is working to make our digital holdings meaningful and engaging by creating an ecosystem where they can be understood and appreciated. This system aims to bring materials to life by showcasing them in contexts that are both visual and experiential. The three main components of our ecosystem are the general collection, digital exhibits, and a digital magazine. This presentation will demonstrate the vision for this system and these components and how they can work together to engage users.
The DPLA offers unprecedented opportunities for archives and special collections around the country to reach teachers, students, scholars and the general public. In “Using Large Digital Collections in Education: Meeting the Needs of Teachers and Students” (Digital Public Library of America, April 2015), Franky Abbott and Dan Cohen report that “DPLA’s value for education was two-fold: first as a one place to discover material from many collections, and second, because of this diversity, as a site with content to support local and underrepresented stories that students have not seen before.”
This presentation will report on two ongoing projects funded by the Boston Library Consortium (BLC) that encourage DPLA participation by member institutions and allow members to collaboratively digitize material on topics of hyper-local importance. The first project is a coalition of archives digitizing material to support the Boston Public School system’s new curriculum on school desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s. The goal is to form a robust research collection with materials from multiple institutions that will allow advanced students to delve deeply into the desegregation efforts of Boston’s African-American community and the after effects of Boston’s “busing” crisis. The other is a collaborative technical assistance project to support BLC members’ contributing digitized archival material to DPLA, in spite of wildly different infrastructure and internal practices and policies. In addition to describing the genesis, workflow and outcomes of each of these projects, the panelists will offer notes on their respective institutions’ hopes and plans for partnering with DPLA in sharing digital collections and developing curricular materials that serve their campuses and the wider community. After laying out these sample activities, the floor will be opened for what we hope will be a lively discussion of others’ experiences and wish lists related to DPLA’s potential role in education.
Developing and maintaining suitable curriculum for all aspects of digitization is a challenge for all DPLA Service Hubs. Thanks to the Public Library Partnerships Project (PLPP), a solid digitization curriculum is now available for all Hubs to use when training new partners. With guidance from Franky Abbott of the DPLA staff, program manager for the project, and funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, four DPLA Service Hubs recruited public librarians and supported them through full-day training, selection of materials, digitization, and metadata assignment for their first digital collection, along with creation of thematic regional and national exhibitions. Participating staff came from Digital Commonwealth (MA), Minnesota Digital Library, Digital Library of Georgia, and the Mountain West Digital Library participated, along with staff at the Montana Memory Project, a major regional repository in MWDL.
The curriculum modules, available at http://dp.la/info/about/projects/public-library-partnerships/, cover six phases of digitization:
--Planning for Digitization
--Selecting Content for a Digitization Project
--Understanding Copyright
--Using Metadata to Describe Digital Content
--Digital Reformatting and File Management
--Promoting Use of Your Digital Content
In January 2016, two students at Washington University in St. Louis began participating in an internship program through Wikipedia, using collections in the DPLA Missouri Hub as a basis for their research and writing. During the semester long course developed by Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Program:The_Wikipedia_Library/Library_Interns_(Spring_2016)), students will become familiar with Wikipedia editing practices, add references and citations based on original research using Missouri Hub collections, and draft articles on subjects covered in these collections. As well as helping students to develop marketable writing and research skills, the course will provide another outreach tool for Missouri Hub collections and widen the reach of these important materials. The course is also another collaborative outlet for Missouri Hub partners. To ensure the involvement of partner institutions, Missouri Hub organizations were asked to suggest collections that interns could highlight or that could be better documented on Wikipedia.
As the newly-formed Pennsylvania Digital Collections Project (PDCP) was preparing to become a DPLA Service Hub for the state of Pennsylvania, we developed a Hydra-based aggregator to begin ingesting digital content. We then went on to deploy it in production and release the code in open source on GitHub.
This workshop will aim to introduce the International Image Operability Framework (http://iiif.io), and explain the benefits of supporting this standard, which is being rapidly adopted by cultural organizations worldwide.
Take a deep dive into metadata and quality control. The session will start off with three perspectives on DPLA and data: Corey Harper of NYU will take a look at the DPLA data set as a whole using statistical analyses to highlight the relationship between data characteristics and usage and analyze patterns in the language of description. Next, Chris Stanton of the Empire State Digital Network will discuss the challenges of data quality control at a DPLA Service Hub, highlighting the strategies and tools currently employed as well as areas for improvement. Finally, Gretchen Gueguen of DPLA will discuss DPLA’s perspective on data quality in aggregation. The session will round out with a group discussion geared towards beginning to articulate a standard of quality for DPLA and its Hub network and to identify needs for best practices and tools to meet those standards.
Collection reporting with the collstool
As a pure aggregator using REPOX to provide NY state collections data to DPLA, the Empire State Digital Network staff had no real way to report on our collections to our providers. Enter the collstool, a Jekyll site hosted on github that takes an XML dump from REPOX and manipulates it to provide rudimentary reporting on Institutions and collections. I'll talk about the design decisions and tech limitations I encountered putting together the tool.
The New Innovation Hub at NARA
Learn about the Innovation Hub, a new project from the National Archives and Records Administration. Hear about our citizen scanning initiative and ways we are using crowd sourcing to improve access to our records. We have some great projects going on: a relationship with Wikipedia, collaborations with Latino Tech, volunteers, and educators, and we want to share what's happening.
Building Histories of the National Mall
How did they build that? The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and Museum's team that built the award-winning digital public history site, Histories of the National Mall, developed a guide that shares details each phase of creating website, (http://mallhistory.org/Guide). Voices of the project team are heard in specific sections they authored, which also demonstrate the range and breadth of the collaboration and cooperation that produced mallhistory.org. For organizations in the early planning stages of a project, this guide offers an open source and replicable example for history and cultural heritage professionals wanting a cost-effective solution for developing and delivering mobile content. The guide offers lessons learned and challenges we faced throughout the project’s development, and we discuss how we measured success for this specific project. "Building Histories of the National Mall" belongs to the long tradition of knowledge sharing at RRCHNM that encourages history and humanities professionals to be active designers and builders of their own digital projects, and for making processes as transparent as possible.
DPLA / Ada Lovelace Day events
Over the past year, fellow community rep Christina Harlowe and I made an attempt to create a distributed coding/building event around using DPLA content appropriate for Ada Lovelace day. (http://dpladalovelace.us). As sometimes happens, it didn't really take off. However, I think it is still an idea with potential, and want to publicize it and see if it has legs as a possibility for retrying in 2016.
EMA: A specification for addressing encoded music on the web
Enhancing Music Notation Addressability was a one-year project that investigates methods for addressing arbitrary portions of encoded music notation on the web. By “addressing” we mean being able to refer to, or cite, a passage of music in order to make a statement about it. This could be considered a virtual equivalent of “circling” some music notation on a printed score. This short presentation will show the technical specification created by the EMA project. The specification aims at defining a scheme for addressing a selection of music notation regardless of its representation. The expression is based on simple units that are commonly represented by music notation systems for common western music notation, such as measure, staff, and beat. The expression is formulated as a URL, which makes it possible to target resources on the web.
Public digital preservation awareness through the Memory Lab at DC Public Library
As a 2015 National Digital Stewardship Residency project, DC Public Library has created a DIY personal archiving lab and educational program series. This is the first program of its kind in a U.S. public library and will open in February 2016. In the lab, patrons can transfer files from obsolete media; digitize video tapes, audiocassettes, photographs and documents; and learn how to care for the digital files they create. The program series includes classes on archiving social media, digital estate planning, and preservation best practices. This lightning talk will cover my research into public needs and attitudes around personal digital preservation, how the lab and classes were built to meet those, and initial outcomes and challenges and lessons learned in the process. I hope that DPLAfest attendees may be inspired to raise awareness about personal digital archiving through their own institutions. You can read more about the Memory Lab and my work on it at http://dclibrary.org/labs/memorylab and https://jaimemears.wordpress.com/.
Catholic, Crowdfunded, and Collaborative: A Unique Approach to Newspaper Digitization
Like other newspaper digitization programs, the Catholic Newspapers Program (CNP), initiated by the Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA), aims to provide access to newspapers, in this case to all Catholic newspapers published in North America, both newspapers in the public domain and in copyright. But the CNP takes a very different approach to implement its goal. In a collaboration between Reveal Digital, Digital Divide Data, CRRA, and CRRA’s 44 members and 25 digitizing partners, CNP has developed a cost model and project plan that focuses on five major cost elements including rights clearance, data conversion, hosting and delivery platform, project management and outreach. Unlike most newspaper digitization programs, CNP is not grant-funded, but crowdfunded. According to Peggy Glahn, Reveal Digital’s Program Director, the library crowdfunding model “challenges the traditional approach to scholarly publishing. It requires librarians to think more like active investors and publishers and less like consumers.” This presentation will focus on CNP’s unique funding model that challenges traditional approaches, on its inclusion of public domain and in-copyright newspapers and rights clearance, on CNP’s cost model, and finally on the project plan and collaboration with delivery partners.
This panel seeks to answer the deceptively simple question of the cost of digitization. When digitization projects vary by collection type, quality, and format, as well as project scope, institutional capacity, workflows, and long-term goals, it is not always clear how to estimate the cost of a specific project. How can you tell if you are spending too much on digitization? Should you consider strategies to reduce costs or increase efficiency? How do different approaches affect quality and sustainability?
This session is organized by Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives, a program of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).
Working with large collections of digitized historic newspapers provides a challenge and an opportunity for libraries and researchers. From analyzing articles transcribed through optical character recognition text (OCR) to hierarchical serial metadata, digitized newspapers provide new opportunities for researchers to explore how news traveled, was used and reused, and how it affected the communities it informed. For libraries, newspapers are complex, as serials and as compound objects, filled with poems, ads and articles on a single page. This session would include lessons learned from the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) about digital object standards, interface design, use of APIs and bulk data downloads and feedback from users such as genealogists and digital humanities researchers. The session will also provide information about the Chronicling America Historic Newspapers Data Challenge, a contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This opportunity challenges members of the public to produce creative web-based projects using the API developed by the Library of Congress to access the data in Chronicling America.
Since its initial release in 2008, Omeka has become a widely used tool for web publishing in libraries and cultural heritage organizations. In the intervening years, the product suite has grown from the single-site “Classic” version of Omeka, to include a hosted solution, Omeka.net, and now a new version, Omeka S, that is designed to meet the needs of medium to larger libraries and cultural heritage organization. This presentation will provide an overview of some of the most innovative and successful implementations of Omeka by cultural heritage institutions through the years and it will point to possible innovative work to come.
In this session, educators representing DPLA’s Education Advisory Committee and DPLA staff will give share their collaborative Primary Source Sets project. Through the presentation, they will explore the project’s goals and progress, the curation and design processes, lessons learned from use of the sets thus far, and future directions for primary source sets and engagement with educators. The session will include specific feedback about how educators have implemented the sets in the classroom at various levels as well as an explanation of the marketing strategy in place to grow their audience. At the end of the session, presenters will take questions from participants about the project.
How can engagement in law, policy, and practical work best be utilized for the benefit of DPLA’s projects and expansion? This presentation will provide a focused overview of recent developments in copyright law from both sides of the Atlantic relevant to digitization and access to digital materials (whether online, on library premises, or e-lending). This panel will consider key policy developments coming from the US, the EU and the international arena (WIPO) pointing to a promising momentum for the future of accessibility to digitized works. We will also consider the Copyright Review Management System (CRMS) as a practical path in the context of current law and policy and as a way we can push boundaries of knowledge. As an IMLS-funded cooperative effort, CRMS provided a methodology for identifying the copyright status of books in HathiTrust. Based at the University of Michigan Library, CRMS has worked for the past 8 years to develop a copyright determination framework with 16 partners in the US and Canada resulting in a forthcoming CRMS Toolkit and consideration by HathiTrust about future activity in copyright determination work.
This presentation discusses the development of digital curatorial workflows for managing, vetting and sharing indigenous community cultural heritage and intellectual property by the open source platforms Local Contexts (www.localcontexts.org) and Mukurtu CMS (www.mukurtu.org), working in collaboration with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress (www.loc.gov/folklife) and the Passamaquoddy Nation of Maine. Local Contexts (www.localcontexts.org) is a new initiative to support Native, First Nations, Aboriginal, and Indigenous communities in the management of their intellectual property (IP) and cultural heritage specifically within the digital environment. Combining both legal and educational components including the development of the Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels, Local Contexts has two objectives: One is to promote a new classificatory, curatorial and display paradigm for museums, libraries and archives that hold extensive collections of indigenous people’s cultural heritage by allowing information from and by the community of origin to be expressed in catalog records. The other objective is to enhance and legitimize indigenous decision-making and control over IP, especially in determining and culturally appropriate conditions for sharing historical and contemporary collections of material and digital culture.
In this project, the Passamaquoddy Nation is developing its own unique set of Local Contexts’ TK Labels within the innovative, open-source Mukurtu CMS platform (www.mukurtu.org) so that community members can annotate, narrate and share their content across platforms and institutions. The TK Labels will become part of the metadata for the Library of Congress’s recent preservation digitization recordings of the original wax cylinders of Passamaquoddy people documented by anthropologist Jesse Walter Fewkes in 1890; these are among the earliest known ethnographic field recordings in the world. Audience members are encouraged to participate in a discussion of various components of this initiative to develop new digital tools and methods for managing cultural heritage and intellectual property rights that center and prioritize Native communities cultural protocols for access and circulation.
EasyRDF and DPLA LOD (Patrick Murray-John)
This quick lightning talk will describe a project to use the EasyRDF PHP library for parsing data from DPLA. It's in early stages, and I'd like to hear feedback about how it might be used and what problems it could solve for developers. It also raises a question I'd like to hear responses to: To what extent do developers treat the JSON-LD as just JSON versus as the graph structure of RDF that it serializes.Mediachain is an open, shared data network for creative works. It makes cross-institutional collaboration and developer reuse of open cultural data simple. This presentation will discuss how shared blockchain infrastructure can foster innovation and realize the promise of open cultural data.
Putting your archive online fulfils the basic prerequisite of providing remote access, but the real benefit occurs when online visitors can use it to extract meaning from your content.
Recent surveys have estimated that approximately 80% of public libraries in the United States are rural and are often the only free internet and wireless access points in their areas. The DPLA offers free access to images, documents, educational tools, and a growing myriad of other digital resources that can benefit rural populations.
Nevada is the 7th largest state in size in the United States but only ranks 35th in population, with most of the population centered in two urban areas located 450 miles apart. Even so, over half of Nevada libraries are rural, and often located in rugged, difficult to access areas. These libraries can connect rural populations that are scattered across 110,000 square miles of wild terrain to our national digital library.
Efforts to bring Nevadans to the DPLA through talks, surveys, and direct correspondence can be used as a model for other DPLA regional representatives to follow when considering how to reach out to their own, unique rural libraries.
This session will offer strategies on how to educate and encourage rural librarians and staff to implement programs that will expose rural communities to the riches offered by the DPLA. Examples of ways to reach out to rural librarians to understand their needs without having to drive for hundreds of miles will also be offered. Finally, specific resources, projects, and apps associated with the DPLA that might most benefit rural populations will be discussed.During this session the Archival Description Working Group will give an update of their work to date and a preview of the recommendations that will be in the whitepaper they will release later in the summer. The presentation should offer an opportunity for DPLA community members interested in archival materials and other collection-based materials to engage in discussions of the unique challenges these materials present for aggregation.
The Public Interest Declassification Board (“the PIDB”) is an advisory committee established by Congress in 2000, in order to promote the fullest possible public access to a thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record of significant U.S. national security decisions and activities.
Although an independent committee outside of government, the PIDB’s work directly impacts policy development at the highest levels of the executive branch related to transparency and open government. It advises the President and other executive branch officials on policies deriving from Presidential Executive orders regarding the classification and declassification of national security information. The PIDB also advises the President and other executive branch officials on the identification, collection, review for declassification and release of declassified records and materials of archival value. In this regard, the PIDB’s mission directly supports that of the National Archives: to make access happen.
The presentation will include remarks from PIDB members and emeritus members on the history of the PIDB and its activities, insights into the PIDB’s recommendations to the President and a discussion of the substantial impact of the recommendations on policy development in the Executive Office of the President. Members will also share information about the current study the PIDB is undertaking concerning technological modernization of the classification and declassification system for long-term sustainability.
Digital preservation is an ongoing concern for almost every aspect of higher education. We are producing digital content at an alarming rate—more than can currently be stewarded. Libraries and IT organizations have to combine their strengths to seek out scalable, enterprise solutions that can handle born digital content—content that is enormous in scope, highly complex, and iterative by nature. The Academic Preservation Trust (aptrust.org) is a partnership that seeks to leverage leaders in the field of digital preservation in order to meet some of these challenges head on. As a strategic collaboration among 17 institutions and growing, we seek to address issues such as data security, trusted digital repository status, content management strategies, and enterprise IT solutions. The APTrust serves as a first node for the Digital Preservation Network and currently uses Amazon Web Services as its back end management solution. We hope to engage participants with fresh user stories of our successes and challenges over the last two years as well as enlist them in mapping out future directions that we can all share. This session will ask its audience to point to local success stories, gaps, and specific strategic growth areas for a wide variety of organizations and sectors both inside and outside higher education.
The Preservation Puzzle will highlight specific challenges that we have encountered with working with a wide variety of partners: Presidents; Provosts; CIOs; Deans; and Librarians. In doing so, we will be soliciting feedback and shared stories from among the audience in order to foster a more transparent approach to digital preservation. Highlighting some of the challenges will help participants recognize the strengths and weaknesses in their own organizations and allow for a conversation as to strategies and tactics that have proven or could prove successful in engaging such a disparate group of digital preservation stewards.
Zines are self-published, non-commercial, small-edition, generally periodical resources that often feature sub- or counter-cultural content and design choices. Zines are used as primary sources on social movements, social life, politics, art, music, and more. Currently, access to zines is distributed across a variety of data silos, such as library catalogs, finding aids, independent databases, spreadsheets, and text documents. Much of this data is created and maintained outside of traditional libraries by zine communities themselves, using available tools and ad-hoc standards or practices.
To enable global access to zines, a collaborative team of zine librarians, archivists, library catalogers, metadata specialists, and Web developers is working to build the Zine Union Catalog (ZUC), which will integrate digitized and digital content, bibliographic metadata, contextual resources, and access details in a single discovery platform for zine libraries and collections.
This presentation will first introduce the ZUC project, explaining how the team plans to: 1) aggregate heterogeneous data sources, 2) encourage broad participation in metadata creation with approachable resource description standards, 3) respond to evolving resource genres and research needs through extensible ontology/vocabulary development, and 4) balance the privacy concerns of zine creators with needs for authority control and collocation. In this section, audience members will learn how to effectively describe and build access to zine resources.
This presentation focuses on user interaction with the DPLA in the context of academic use. It reports the findings of a user study conducted with university students and faculty. The purpose of the study was to examine user navigation and the potential of using the DPLA in the context of teaching and learning activities in higher education. Twenty one participants were recruited from a variety of social sciences and humanities programs and included two faculty members, six undergraduates, and 13 graduate students. The study was exploratory in nature and adopted a qualitative research strategy with direct observations and interviews. During observation sessions, the participants were presented with two pre-defined scenarios and were asked to search for images, maps, and sound recordings that they could potentially use in class projects and papers. The participants also had an option of conducting two additional searches on the topics related to their academic interests. The observation sessions were recorded with Camtasia software. Interviews were conducted after observation sessions to record participants’ reactions about the nature of their experience with the DPLA and to explore the potential of using the DPLA for teaching and learning activities.
