This Tuesday April 14th, come to the Bass Library instruction room L01 to join colleagues from the library and around campus to discuss Marshall Breeding’s excellent white paper, The Future of Library Resource Discovery.
We will discuss the paper’s findings as well as the current and future discovery environments at Yale University.
Hope to see you at 3:30pm in Bass on 4/14 for what will be an interesting discussion!
Library IT recently archived all issues of the LIT newsletter for this academic year (Fall 2014 – Spring 2015) in Eli Scholar, Yale’s scholarly publishing platform.
Issues from the 2013-2014 academic year will be archived shortly. All future issues of the LIT Newsletter will be published in Eli Scholar going forward.
Visit our Eli Scholar page:
elischolar.library.yale.edu/yul_litnews/
and check out some of the other publications available in Eli Scholar:
YUL Annual Report (merged with Nota Bene in 2014)
As the Quicksearch beta project moves towards becoming a production-level service, there’s been a good deal of activity in Orbis and Morris related to data cleanup.
As found with the Yufind project, the exposure of metadata in discovery systems is a double-edged sword: more metadata can be made visible, accessible and usable- but this also means that typos, outdated cataloging standards, and changing policies will surface.
Much of the cleanup work in Orbis has been done in the Catalog Management team, and led by Arcadia Falcone, Discovery Metadata Librarian.
Here’s a post on format mapping in Quicksearch by Arcadia, and most of this presentation to Tech Services discusses the additional cleanup work done by CMT.
This work is doubly important, since it not only optimizes and tidies the metadata presented in Quicksearch beta but also prepares our catalog metadata in Orbis for a future migration to a new ILS.
The LIT Newsletter for Tuesday March 17th 2015 is up! The LIT Newsletter will be published every 2 weeks and emailed to Yulib. You can find this week’s newsletter here.
The next issue of the LIT Newsletter will be published Tuesday March 31st 2015.
In an effort to provide a unified interface for all Yale Library collections, Library IT has embarked on a wide scale project to migrate over sixty individual digital collections to a single Hydra / Fedora repository (findit.library.yale.edu).
The first collection that was successfully migrated is the Drama School Collection, consisting of 850 posters and photographs highlighting over 80 years of theater performed at Yale.
Other collection that are expected to be available in the coming months include the Lewis – Walpole Library digital collection, Chinese Rare Books at Yale, Yale Silk Roads, China Christian Colleges and Universities Image Database, Yale Medical Library Bookplates collection and Birren Collection of Books on Color.
For questions about this project please contact George Ouellette.
Earlier this year, Yale ITS acquired Adobe Connect, a video conferencing service. Over the fall 2014 semester, Library IT tested Adobe Connect with the equipment in several library conference rooms on campus (see blog announcements here and here).
We began this testing to ensure that library staff persons at every library location are able to maintain their meeting schedules easily, regardless of their physical location, particularly in advance of staff moving to 344 Winchester. We are pleased to announce that the testing was successful, and that Adobe Connect can be used effectively in these rooms for video conferencing.
Adobe Connect is supported centrally through Yale ITS; for help with Adobe Connect please visit this page or contact the central ITS Help Desk.
Get started by logging in to Adobe Connect using your email address and NetId password: http://greet.yale.edu
Detailed instructions are here.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: before using Adobe Connect for your virtual meeting, please do a 10-minute test of the setup in the room you are using. Contact Jenn Nolte and Reon Keller if you need help with the initial setup.
Always add 5-10 minutes for set up in advance of your virtual meeting!
Adobe Connect Features:
Audio and video
Text Chat
Screen sharing
Layouts for different meeting types, plus additional layout customization
File upload
Polling
Send invitations to a meeting in Outlook
Meeting recording (turned off by default)
Conference/meeting rooms tested:
Required equipment in conference rooms for Adobe Connect to work:
Video camera (most conference rooms will have this, contact Workstation Support if you don’t see this equipment)
Monitor
Microphone (built into the above; this is also available – contact Workstation Support for details)
Desktop computer
Please email Jenn Nolte and Reon Keller if you have any questions!
More on the Hydra ingest workflow from Library IT and MSSA:
Enterprise Systems and Services in Library IT and MSSA staff also do preparation work on files prior to ingest into the Hydra digital repository.
ESS runs ingest and digital QC of files, and MSSA runs visual QC as well as sorting printed copies of Yale and LC call numbers.
So far we have collected 2,884,363 files in 48,743 folders and the files are currently stored on disk totaling 49 TB.
The LIT Newsletter for Tuesday February 17th 2015 is up! The LIT Newsletter will be published every 2 weeks and emailed to Yulib. You can find this week’s newsletter here.
The next issue of the LIT Newsletter will be published Tuesday March 3rd 2015.
To support front line/public services and troubleshooting staff after the debut of Quicksearch beta on the Library Front Door, Library IT has created an FAQ document, in case any problems are reported through these typical channels.
Additionally, Library IT has held five informational/demo sessions staff on Quicksearch beta to date, in both Bass and Hillhouse. We’ve gotten really great feedback from these sessions, and we encourage all staff to let us know if you have questions, comments, or other feedback on the Quicksearch beta project.
Many staff have found it useful to use Quicksearch beta as they do their daily work. Again, please be encouraged to click here and share your thoughts with the implementation team.
We are beginning to focus more now on information sessions targeted at different groups. Representatives from the Quicksearch beta implementation team will be visiting a Tech Services department meeting next month, and hope to do more information sessions for other departments and groups.
Look for more documentation, tips and other information on Quicksearch beta in the coming weeks!
Please email Kalee Sprague (kalee.sprague@yale.edu ) or Jenn Nolte (jennifer.nolte@yale.edu ) for questions about the info sessions, or to request a visit to your group or department.
Earlier last month, members of Yale Library IT as well as colleagues from around campus and from other institutions attended Hydra Camp at Yale.
The group Data Curation Experts held the week long training in the Bass Library Instruction room L01. The training wrapped up on Friday March 13th with an Advanced Blacklight Workshop.
Some members of Yale Library IT who attended share their reflections below:
Eric James
I’m working on Findit, Kissinger, and the future Sufia/Spotlight instances
Kalee Sprague
I work on two Hydra/Blacklight related projects: the Blacklight-based Quicksearch unified search project and the Findit Hydra/Blacklight project
Lakeisha Robinson
I’ve worked on three Hydra/Blacklight projects: Findit, Quicksearch and Kissinger.
Tracy MacMath
I work on the Findit Hydra/Blacklight (Kissinger) project, and will soon be working on the Blacklight-based Quicksearch unified search project.
Jenn Nolte
I do external (non-development) work on the Quicksearch beta project, which is powered by Blacklight.
Eric James
I don’t know if I can name 3 things, but one is I found it helpful how Mark Bussey shared his personal process working with Hydra.
Kalee Sprague
Three things I liked about HydraCamp include:
The introduction to how RDF will fit into the new Fedora4 environment was very useful, especially the examples Drew Myers from WGBH gave showing their work converting PBCore to RDF. This provided an early road map for our own conversion from XML based Fedroa3 to RDF based Fedora4.
Demos of some of the new Blacklight plugins gave me some interesting ideas for things that could be done in the future in both the Quicksearch and Findit interfaces, including a date slider and gallery view.
I really liked the connections that we made with our colleagues at other institutions that are doing similar implementations; it’s always easier to solve problems if you have good contacts at other institutions, and HydraCamp really strengthens those ties.
Lakeisha Robinson
Here are the things I liked most about HydraCamp:
Recommendations for easier upgrades.
Suggestions for tools to aid in efficient workflow practices.
Clarity on certain pieces of code.
Tracy MacMath
HydraCamp helped me better understand the Hydra stack and how each component interacts with the others.
It was also good to learn a little about databases in Hydra/Fedora, especially how they differ from the relational databases I’ve worked with in the past.
Finally, it was nice to see Hydra/Blacklight/Sufia implementations from other institutions and learn about the Hydra/Blacklight communities. These are great resources, especially since we’ll be upgrading soon.
Jenn Nolte
I did not attend the whole HydraCamp, just the Blacklight session on Friday. To go through the motions of setting up a virtual machine and getting a Blacklight project up and running was really helpful (and fun!). It isn’t the type of thing I get to work on often and it puts a larger context around the work I do to collaborate with my colleagues in LIT.
Lakeisha Robinson
In general, I did like the HydraCamp this year and I think it helped a lot.
Tracy MacMath
I found HydraCamp to be particularly valuable because I am new to Hydra (and digital repository development in general).