conference – Library IT News

Attending Ivies+ Discovery Day: July 25th 2016 at MIT

August 25, 2016 Jenn Nolte

The second annual Ivies+ Discovery Day took place at MIT in Cambridge, MA on July 25th 2016. Representatives from many of the Ivies+ libraries attended, including four librarians from Yale: Jenn Nolte, Sarah Tudesco, Angela Sidman and Kalee Sprague.

The day started off with a keynote address on discovery and serendipity from MIT Libraries Director Chris Bourg. Following that, Laura Morse from Harvard presented on updates from the Open Discovery Initiative, a NISO committee of which she is co-chair.

The later part of the morning then shifted into a ’round robin’ of 5 minute demonstrations followed by 5 minutes of Q&A from eleven Ivies+ institutions. Each institution’s demo focused on their own particular discovery landscape. Some were at the beginning stages of implementation, others showcased the enhancements they’ve rolled out since the first Ivies+ Discovery Day in April 2015. Angela Sidman and Jenn Nolte demonstrated Yale’s unified discovery service, Quicksearch– which wasn’t even publicly available at Discovery Day last year!

After a lunch break, 2 consecutive breakout sessions followed with simultaneous presentations. The topics and slides for these are up on the Ivies+ Discovery Day website. Of particular note were presentations on discovery-related work at Yale University Library:

The path to Unified Discovery at Yale: Past, Present and Future (Jenn Nolte)
Discovery @ Yale: A Google Analytics Story (Sarah Tudesco)

The day ended with a fun and interactive session involving all attendees, with the goal of articulating and prioritizing collaborative efforts among Ivies+ institutions with regard to discovery. Attendees were given sticky notes to write down ideas for collaboration, and each attendee also received five stickers to vote on the ideas they liked the most. The notes from that exercise are also linked on the Ivies+ Discovery Day website.

The second Ivies+ Discovery Day was fast-moving, full of great information and great colleagues from across the Ivies+ universe. We attendees from Yale were very grateful for the excellent job our colleagues at MIT did in organizing the event, and look forward to Ivies+ Discovery Day 2017!

Geo4LibCamp 2016

January 29, 2016February 28, 2016 Eric James

Hats off to Stanford for hosting Geo4LibCamp2016. This event brought together approximately 40 attendees from institutions across the United States including Miriam Olivares and Eric James from Yale. The focus of activities centered around the web application geoblacklight, the opengeoportal project, Esri software, open source geo-tools and the challenges of using these systems as a GIS platform. Key topics included the 1) development of the data schema as an index and source of linked data, 2) data and metadata workflow, 3) issues of provenance, authorship, enrichment, sharing, and rights, and 4) digital infrastructure. The community is enthusiastic and development is expected to continue at and between the represented institutions.

For more information:
https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/Geo4LibCamp+2016
http://geoblacklight.org
http://www.esri.com
http://opengeoportal.org

A Metadata Schema for Geospatial Resource Discovery Use Cases

LDCX 2015

March 27, 2015May 22, 2015 Eric James

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

Adobe Connect now available for virtual meetings

March 17, 2015May 22, 2015 Jenn Nolte

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:

Lewis Walpole
Sterling 315, 332, 409 and 511
BRBL conference rooms (check with Julie Dowe)
CSSSI
Medical
Divinity

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!

code4lib 2015

February 17, 2015May 22, 2015 Eric James

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.

ScholarSphere Conference at Yale University Library

December 16, 2014 Jenn Nolte

Yale University Library and Yale ITS are pleased to sponsor a conference and public lecture on ScholarSphere, a software project developed at Penn State University, based on the same open-source Hydra/Fedora framework in use at YUL.

Yale University Library and ITS are investigating the possible adoption of this solution to enable Yale faculty and researchers to self-archive their own digital content in a managed, secure repository for controlled or open dissemination as well as for their own use. Our speakers will talk about the ScholarSphere project both from a technical perspective and as a service model. More information on the ScholarSphere website here.

Speakers:

Patricia Hswe, Digital Content Strategist and Head, ScholarSphere User Services at Penn State University
Daniel Coughlin, Ph.D. Candidate at Penn State University

via Yale University Library News: ScholarSphere Conference Archives.