Category: Presentations

LIT and partners Tech Talk | Wednesday May 18th 2016

Jenn Nolte

Next Wednesday May 18th, from 2:30pm-3:30pm in Bass L06, join Library IT and partners in our monthly discussion of tech-related projects around the Library and beyond.

Our agenda includes:

  • Adding/migrating collections to Findit (George Ouellette)
  • Tour of Software at Yale (ITS web site) (Beatrice Richardson)
  • Google Cultural Institute (Jenn Nolte)
  • ArchivesSpace updates (Matthew Gorham)

For those who cannot join us in person, the session will be streamed via Adobe Connect:

http://greet.yale.edu/littechtalk/ [sign in as a guest]

Slides and recordings of the Tech Talk sessions will be archived in https://yale.box.com/LITTechTalkArchives 

See you there!

Library IT Tech Talk scheduled for Wednesday March 16th

Jenn Nolte

The LIT Tech talk for March starts Wednesday from 3-4:15pm in Bass L01.

The agenda is a follows:

  • Spotlight on LIT staff: Workstation & Technology Services 
  • Sgi DMF Project (Bob Rice)
  • Electronic Resources at YUL (Angela Sidman)
  • III integration with Quicksearch (Yue Ji)

For those who cannot join us in person, the session will be streamed via Adobe Connect here:

http://greet.yale.edu/littechtalk/ [sign in as a guest]

Slides and recordings of the Tech Talk sessions will be archived here:

https://yale.box.com/LITTechTalkArchives

Questions, comments, or suggestions for future topics should be sent to Jenn Nolte (jennifer.nolte@yale.edu).

November 17th: LIT Tech Talk, SearchFest!

Jenn Nolte

Library IT is pleased to host two events for library staff on November 17th, 2015. Read on for more information!

November LIT Tech Talk:

The Tech Talk for November will be held at 11am on Tuesday November 17th in Bass L01.

Continuing to follow up on a request for more information on who does what in LIT, this month we will turn the spotlight on the Digital Library & Programming Group.

The tentative agenda is:

  • Spotlight on LIT staff: Digital Library & Programming
  • Digital Collections Search and Discovery at Yale Library

SearchFest:

The last SearchFest! session before Quicksearch’s public debut on the Library front door in January will be held on November 17th at 12:30pm in Bass L06.

The goals of SearchFest!:

  • test out existing Orbis or Morris search strategies in our new unified discovery interface, Quicksearch.
  • demonstrate the features and functionality that are unique to Quicksearch
  • review the timeline for Quicksearch’s transition to production in January 2016
  • answer any questions from staff about how to use Quicksearch in either instruction or daily work

As with the first SearchFest!, there will also be pizza served at the beginning of each session.

To register for the November 17th session, click here – 8 spots left!

SearchFest! sessions for October and November

Jenn Nolte

There will be two more SearchFest! sessions scheduled for the fall semester.

The goals of SearchFest!:

  • test out existing Orbis or Morris search strategies in our new unified discovery interface, Quicksearch.
  • demonstrate the features and functionality that are unique to Quicksearch
  • review the timeline for Quicksearch’s transition to production in January 2016
  • answer any questions from staff about how to use Quicksearch in either instruction or daily work

As with the first SearchFest!, there will also be pizza served at the beginning of each session.

To register for the October 8th session, click here.

To register for the November 17th session, click here.

See you at SearchFest!

Learn about discovery interfaces at YUL with Rediscover Discovery

Jenn Nolte

Last year, after the successful upgrade of our Articles+ e-resource discovery service and the beginning of the public beta phase of our Quicksearch unified discovery interface, library staff held an information session called Rediscovery Discovery, where we demonstrated features, functionality and sample search strategies in the Articles+ discovery interface and debuted the Quicksearch discovery interface.

This year, we will hold Rediscover Discovery again, covering Articles+ but with more focus Quicksearch. We will also introduce the digital collections search currently in development.

Rediscover Discovery is primarily aimed at instruction and public services staff, but is open to anyone who’d like to attend. Please register for each session as space is limited!

There will be two information sessions:

  • Tuesday August 18th, 10-11am in Bass L06 A&B register
  • Thursday August 20th, 2:30-3:30pm in 17 Hillhouse L07 register

See you at Rediscover Discovery!

SearchFest! sessions for August and October

Jenn Nolte

Based on the success of the first SearchFest! event held in Bass L06 on Thursday July 9th, there will be two more sessions scheduled for the fall semester.

The goals of SearchFest!:

  • test out existing Orbis or Morris search strategies in our new unified discovery interface, Quicksearch.
  • demonstrate the features and functionality that are unique to Quicksearch
  • review the timeline for Quicksearch’s transition to production in January 2016
  • answer any questions from staff about how to use Quicksearch in either instruction or daily work

As with the first SearchFest!, there will also be pizza served at the beginning of each session.

To register for the August 18th session, click here.

To register for the October 8th session, click here.

See you at SearchFest!

LIbrary IT Tech Talks, April 9, 11-12 in Bass L01

Jenn Nolte

Yale Library IT invites you to our April Tech Talk Lightning Round. We will give a brief five-minute update on the topics below, followed by a ten-minute question and answer period. These talks are meant to be an informal way for IT staff to share information about initiatives and projects, while giving library staff the majority of the time for their questions and feedback.  You are free to ask about any aspect of the initiative or project and not just what we elect to highlight.

The details:

Tech Talk Lightning Round

When: April 9, 11:00am to 12:00pm

Where: Bass L01

Agenda:

Request fulfillment with Aeon, Steelsen Smith

As part of the Aeon expansion we are revisiting the way that requests are made for special collections. After gathering requirements from public services and technical services staff, as well as the requirements of the Fortunoff and Kissinger projects, we will be readying to debut forms that are able to aggregate requests from multiple sources and route them to the appropriate fulfillment tool. New features will include single form multi-item requesting, enhanced restrictions, and an exciting new format.

Kissinger Discovery Project, Lakeisha Robinson and Tracy MacMath

We will discuss the efforts of Library IT to bring the Kissinger Collection into Findit via the Hydra stack. We will give a brief overview of current functionality and what is new for this implementation (the context tree, a new image viewer, authentication and access control, full-text search), and also discuss how our digital collections will be standardized in Findit.

Dashboard for LibGuides, Katie Bauer

The User Experience Group, working with Sarah Tudesco, has created a dashboard for all library subject guides. The dashboard, created using Tableau, presents a small set of key metrics from Google Analytics in a brief visual display designed to convey how people use individual subject guides. We will work with  guide owners to help them take action based on the data. We have now joined the central ITS effort to use Tableau dashboards, and over the next year will create similar dashboards for all library digital interfaces.  Katie Bauer will show the dashboard, briefly describe the metrics and actions that might affect use, and discuss next steps in the project to create other dashboards. Yale Libguides Usage Dashboard – http://j.mp/yale_libguides

Legacy Digital Collection Migration, George Ouellette

As a part of a library wide initiative, Library IT and Metadata Services and Catalog Management are collaborating to migrate digital content from a variety of legacy systems into our Hydra/Fedora/Backlight infrastructure. We will discuss the process and workflow, the current status of collection migration and our schedule for future migrations.

We look forward to seeing you next week!

Emerging Tech Talk: the Future of Library Resource Discovery

Jenn Nolte

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!

LDCX 2015

Eric James

ldcx-250w

Approximately 70 people convened at Lathrop Library on the Stanford University campus to collaborate on the converging goals of the library, archive, and museum community at the 6th annual ldcx 2015 conference. While the schedule was ad-hoc, composed of lighting talks, plenary sessions, topic groups, and informal breakouts, the issues were well rooted in the themes of linked data models, discovery applications, and digital asset management. One of the long standing goals of the community has been bringing together individual and institutional efforts and this was very much manifest at the conference. There was a fruitful balance of sharing past achievement, making ongoing progress and planning for challenges to come. The Hydra stack has made its presence felt in almost every arena. Development is at a stage where best practices and design abstractions are emerging. Implementation of the Linked Data Platform (LDP), and the Portland Commons Data Model (PCDM) holds much promise as foundations of the future. Surprisingly there was very little coverage of Digital Preservation, but perhaps this a potential vacuum to be filled later. While is difficult to give adequate attention to everything covered, for more please check out:

Projecthydra
Spotlight
Geoblacklight
Arclight and next-gen archives
Mirador
Linked Data Platform
Portland Commons Data Model
IIIF Image and Presentation Specification
Sufia
Fedora 4
Avalon

code4lib 2015

Eric James

C4L-ajamie

450 people from around the world gathered in Portland Oregon last week for the 10th annual code4lib library technology conference.

On Monday, approximately 18 pre-conferences were held in half and and full day sessions mostly comprised of demos, tutorials and discussion groups. I attended a morning session on linked data lead by Tom Johnson of DPLA and Karen Estlund of the University of Oregon. As a developer, the demonstration of the ruby gem ActiveTriples was particularly interesting in its ability to quickly model content into RDF classes and properties that can seamlessly connect to fedora 4 persistence or any extensible back end.

In the afternoon I attended a GeoBlacklight demo lead by Jack Reed and Darren Hardy of Stanford. The Stanford GeoBlacklight is a leading map collection interface that allows for spacial search, presentation, and discovery based on the development of metadata schemas, conversion workflows, and interface presentation components. The workshop focused on using the VirtualBox virtual machine and Vagrant setup environment to bring up an instance of geoblacklight in minutes.

On Tuesday the conference proper started with a keynote by Selena Deckelman. Her talk focused on the importance of leading the coding community based on principles of inclusion of beginners and marginal groups. The presentations on Tuesday expanded on that theme with talks focused on users, teams, developers and experiences in dealing with library technology challenges.

The presentations of Wednesday were more technically focused. Thursday morning a closing keynote was given by Andromeda Yelton who encouraged building systems with tools designed to best satisfy the “wanderlust” behind user’s and patrons’s drive to discovery. In between the 20 minute presentations were 2 hour long lighting talk session comprised of 5 minutes talks by 12 people. I thought the keynotes nicely framed the conference, the lightning talks were a great way to digest and get a pulse on what people were working on. As a developer I was particularly interested the the presentation of tools providing facility, such as Kevin Clarke’s presentation of Packer, a dev-opts tool for deploying to virtual machines, and Stanford’s OEmbed service for offering embeddable links to their digital collections, and a presentation by Stanford’s Rob Sanderson and Naomi Dushay describing the experience attempting to integrate their ILS, digital collections, and discovery indexes.

On Thursday afternoon and Friday, I attended working groups focused on fedora 4, hydra’s support of fedora 4, content modeling, and the linked data platform. The discussions were vigorous, and it was a beneficial mental exercise to spin out the various content model concepts of collection/work/file, the distinction between the “aggregates” and “members” predicate, and how to use the LDP Direct and Indirect Containers to deal with assets, rights, and ordering proxies, although I’m afraid not much was resolved. But DPLA (Digital Public Library of America) appears very interested in furthering these concepts into usable models that may promise to be a great step forward in furthering metadata discovery and interoperability.

All in all worthwhile, keeping an eye on next year’s conference, venue TBD.