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.
