Category: Collaborations

Project update: Digital collections search interface

Michael Friscia

Central ITS will be conducting the first of three load tests on the enhanced interface for digital collections on Friday July 17th between 1:30pm and 5pm. They will use a service called LoadRunner which determines the breaking point of an application by emulating real use by a number of concurrent users. The second two tests will take place between July 27 and July 30. I will follow up once these dates and times are confirmed.

These tests on the enhanced interface for digital collections are not expected to impact the current digital collections interface. Library IT will be monitoring the current digital collections interface on 7/17 for service disruptions.

I write to you regarding some testing on the enhanced interface for digital collections that may impact our current digital collections discovery service (http://findit.library.yale.edu). The enhanced interface for digital collections is a version of this digital collections discovery service, with features, functionality and security developed for use with more restricted digital materials. Like our unified discovery service,Quicksearch, both the digital collections interface and the enhanced version are powered by Blacklight.
Curious about what’s in the Yale University Library digital collections search? Here’s some clocks made by Paul Revere. We also have fire insurance maps of Seymour, CT– and much more! You can learn more about the Library’s discovery services (Articles+, Quicksearch and digital collections search) at the Rediscover Discovery forum in August (Tues 18th and Thurs 20th). More information on that coming soon.

If you have questions about this work, or notice any issues with http://findit.library.yale.edu, please let me know.

 

Mike Friscia

On behalf of the FindIT Project Implementation team:

Osman Din

Eric James

Tracy MacMath

Anju Meenattoor

Bob Rice

Lakeisha Robinson

Steelsen Smith

Kalee Sprague

Minutes from the 6/15 UXAC

Steve Wieda

Decisions from the 6/15/2015 User Experience Advisory Committee meeting:

  • A list has been compiled to determine the next steps for the Subject Specialists pages.  The Committee will consider:
    • Including links to the staff directory
    • Indication that the departments being searched are academic departments and not library departments
    • Including a chat widget
    • Inclusion of special collections staff and archivists
    • Inclusion of degree programs from professional schools
  • A collaborative session to explore ways to present Quicksearch in instruction will be planned for the first week of August.
  • The LibCal project will be postponed to roll out in January; the LibAnswers project will be moved forward to start in July.
  • Exhibition-related information on the website will be inventoried, analytics will be reported, and a proposal for increasing exposure of exhibition-related information will be produced.

For more information, see the full meeting minutes available on the UXAC’s SharePoint site.

Yale Joins the IIIF Consortium

Michael Friscia

On Tuesday [June 16], eleven world-leading institutions agreed to form the IIIF Consortium, a member organization dedicated to sustaining and advancing the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). The consortium will support the work of IIIF by pooling and allocating funding from members for exposing content via IIIF; doing outreach, training, and advocacy to grow the community; maintaining and elaborating on the IIIF technical specifications; providing catalytic support for IIIF-compatible software development; helping coordinate the IIIF community, and more.

[Read more]

Library IT and LSF Complete GFA LAS Overhaul

Raymond Frohlich

Since the inception of the Library Shelving Facility (LSF), staff rely on GFA‘s Library Archival System (LAS) for inventory and storage management of both local and in transit items. Staff from Library IT and the LSF, in conjunction with GFA, have successfully completed both an upgrade and migration of the LAS application. Thanks to Mike DiMassa, Gary Burcheski, and staff at LSF for their participation in the planning and testing phases of the project.

For the original project announcement see here.

DPLA joins the Hydra Partners

Michael Friscia

We are delighted to announce that the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has become the latest formal Hydra Partner.  In their Letter of Intent Mark Matienzo, DPLA’s Director of Technology, writes of their “upcoming major Hydra project, generously funded by the IMLS, and in partnership with Stanford University and Duraspace, [which] focuses on developing an improved set of tools for content management, publishing, and aggregation for the network of DPLA Hubs. This, and other projects, will allow us to make contributions to other core components of the Hydra stack, including but not limited to Blacklight, ActiveTriples, and support for protocols like IIIF and ResourceSync. We are also interested in continuing to contribute our metadata expertise to the Hydra community to ensure interoperability across our communities.”

IMLS funds collaborative development of “Hydra-in-a-Box”

Michael Friscia

Digital Public Library of America – Boston, MA

Grant Program: National Leadership Grants

Category: National Digital Platform

Award Amount: $1,999,897; Matching Amount: $2,000,686

 

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), Stanford University, and DuraSpace will foster a greatly expanded network of open-access, content-hosting “hubs” that will enable discovery and interoperability, as well as the reuse of digital resources by people from this country and around the world. At the core of this transformative network are advanced digital repositories that not only empower local institutions with new asset management capabilities, but also connect their data and collections. Currently, DPLA’s hubs, libraries, archives, and museums more broadly use aging, legacy software that was never intended or designed for use in an interconnected way, or for contemporary web needs. The three partners will engage in a major development of the community-driven open source Hydra project to provide these hubs with a new all-in-one solution, which will also allow countless other institutions to easily join the national digital platform.

 

http://www.imls.gov/news/2015_lb21_nlg_march_announcement.aspx

 

Royal Library Presents Chronos

Michael Friscia

The Royal Library (National Library of Denmark and Copenhagen University Library) recently released a new Hydra application named Chronos.

Details of the project can be found here: http://www.kb.dk/en/nb/afdelinger/db/index.html

The project spanned a little over two years during which the bulk of the work  was in establishing policies for long term digital preservation and then setting a strategic plan based on the policies.

The work then segued into the cost models to support the newly developed policies and strategic plan. Using a shared set of principle and guidelines from Collaboration to Clarify the Cost of Curation (http://www.4cproject.eu/), they developed a sustainable cost model for long term preservation of their digital assets.

Once they had policies, strategies and costs established, they moved their work into a more detailed level and focused on the metadata requirements for preservation. The focus was on event data to be stored in PREMIS and structure data to be stored in METS. This led to much more detailed discussions related to the discovery of the digital assets for public discovery as well as metadata required for creating internal reports for performing tasks related to digital preservation.

Once this work was complete, they moved into the process of specifications for the system. They selected Hydra as the best approach for digitally preserving millions of documents. The planning process started in June 2014 and continued through the end of October 2014. This past December work begun on the new system and the week of March 16, 2015 they will release videos and additional information to the Hydra community.

Indiana University and Northwestern University Libraries Receive Mellon Grant for Avalon

Michael Friscia

Hydra community:

I’m pleased to be able to announce that the Indiana University Libraries, in partnership with Northwestern University Library, have received a $750,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support work on the Avalon Media System project through January 2017.

This funding will help to support the following activities: 1) developing additional features and functionality for Avalon to better meet needs of collection managers and users; 2) conducting studies of use of audio and video collections by researchers in humanities disciplines to help ensure future support for scholarly use; 3) integrating the Spotlight exhibit tool with Avalon to allow librarians, archivists, and scholars to showcase and provide additional context for media items and collections; 4) developing and implementing a community-funded business and governance model to sustain ongoing support and development for Avalon; and 5) deploying Avalon in a hosted software-as-a-service model for use by institutions that need the functionality of Avalon but would prefer to utilize a cloud-based software-as-a-service option rather than support a locally hosted instance.

I’d like to offer thanks to the Hydra community for building and maintaining a solid technical foundation that enables systems such as Avalon to be built and to members of the Hydra community who have assisted with Avalon’s development by providing feedback on requirements and implementation experiences.

More information is available in a press release from Indiana University at http://news.indiana.edu/releases/iu/2015/03/mellon-grants-digital-preservation.shtml

Best,
Jon

—

Jon Dunn

Interim Assistant Dean for Library Technologies

Indiana University Bloomington Libraries

Indiana University and Northwestern University Release Avalon 3.3

Michael Friscia

Indiana University and Northwestern University are pleased to announce Avalon Media System 3.3. Release 3.3 adds the following capabilities:

  • MARC metadata Import
  • Ingestion of pre-transcoded derivatives with multiple quality levels
  • Script for recovering disk space taken up by temporary Matterhorn files
  • UI Improvements and Bug fixes

Users of Avalon 3.2 can take advantage of these new features by Upgrading Avalon 3.2 to Avalon 3.3.

For a more comprehensive list of changes, see the 3.3 release notes.

For more details on each of these new features, visit the What’s New in Avalon 3.3 wiki page: https://wiki.dlib.indiana.edu/display/VarVideo/What%27s+New+in+Avalon+3.3

Please feel free to try out Avalon 3.3 on our public test server (http://pawpaw.dlib.indiana.edu) before installation. Installation options include virtual machine image, manual installation, and source code installation. More information on all available options can be found on the Avalon web site’s Download page: http://www.avalonmediasystem.org/download

We welcome your feedback on Avalon 3.3 via the avalon-discuss-l discussion list. Join the discussion list at http://www.avalonmediasystem.org/connect

Best regards,

Jon

—

Jon Dunn
Interim Assistant Dean for Library Technologies

Indiana University Bloomington Libraries

Hydra update: Spotlight Latest Version with Screen Casts and Updated Screen Shots

Michael Friscia

Spotlight is a Hydra head we are currently investigating as part of an Academic Repository project with Central ITS. Here’s the one sentence pitch that defines Spotlight:

“Enable librarians, curators, and others who are responsible for digital collections to create attractive, feature-rich websites that highlight these collections.” – taken from GitHub

 

Recent Communication to the Hydra Community:

While we are long overdue for a community update on Spotlight, the team at Stanford (Jessie Keck, Chris Beer and Gary Geisler) has been heads down working hard for the past several months. As we near an end of our current development cycle we wanted to report on current status and goals, and share a view visuals.

The current round of development is focussed on three broad goals:
1. Building out an end-to-end, self-service workflow for creating a new Spotlight exhibit using items and collections in the Stanford Digital Repository. Because we have built Spotlight to be repository agnostic, the technical work to accomplish this goal is somewhat specific to Stanford’s digital library architecture. The code developed for this does not ship as part of Spotlight.  However, we hope that this can serve as an example and model for others to implement a repository-based self-service workflow for creating new exhibits.  We intend to document the workflow we’ve implemented for reference.
A demo of this workflow is now available on YouTube at:  http://youtu.be/ZyJ2wzzzunc
2. Enable the addition of items not stored in a formal repository system to a new or existing exhibit.   We refer to this feature set as “support for non-repository items”, although we likely want to re-label it.  This set of features is intended to make Spotlight useful for those institutions that don’t have a fully baked repository backend with which to integrate Spotlight, or for many good reasons may want to build exhibits from contents not stored in a repository.  It also includes the ability to augment any exhibit with non-repsitory items, for example a faculty member or curators local collection of images.  We have implemented two approaches:
  • Single image upload: Using a form an exhibit creator can upload a single image file from their local system and add a few simple metadata fields.  If exhibit-specific fields have been created for the exhibit these fields will also be available in the form. Upon submission, the single image and associated metadata is added to items available for building feature pages, and is indexed and available in search results and browse categories.
  • Bulk-add via CSV: A CSV template is provided to the exhibit creator to populate with a list of image URLs and associated metadata.  Upon submission of the CSV, the images are fetched over the web and copied, and indexed records are created for all items.  The bulk feature is pulling images in via the web, so exhibit creators can upload images to popular cloud services (box, dropbox, google drive, google images, flickr, etc.) or add any URI to a publicly available image.
This feature is nearly complete, and we’ll send a video demo out in the next few days.
3. Enhance the visual design and user experience to better support image-heavy exhibits.
The goal here has been to enhance the visual design to provide a more “museum-like” or visually oriented look and feel.  Our design team has developed a proposal for a variety of new elements and widgets to produce a more visual, immersive and interactive experience. The developers are just starting to implement these now, and certainly your feedback is welcome.  The initial design proposal can be seen here:
Of course there are a variety of tickets and features that we have added and will be adding that fall somewhat outside the scope of these high-level goals.  For example we have just recently added simple analytics for exhibits using the Google Analytics API – https://github.com/sul-dlss/spotlight/pull/942 .
We anticipate 2-3 weeks more of development on Spotlight and the next release will also include improved documentation and a project site (at something like spotlight.github.io – not claimed or built yet).
We’ll be back in touch soon with more frequent updates as we wind down this phase of development.
-Stu Snydman
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Stuart Snydman
Associate Director for Digital Strategy
Stanford University Libraries