Come listen to your fellow Library IT colleagues and partners present tech-related projects around the Library and beyond.
This month’s Tech Talks will be Wednesday, August 16th from 3pm-4pm in Bass L01 AB. This particular Tech Talk will be special since it will be run by the Library IT’s interns: Annissa Carter, Bryana Kilpatrick, and Jhoselyn Jara, who also plan to present.
The tentative agenda includes:
Quicksearch Advanced Search by Suzanne Lovejoy, Assistant Music Librarian Public Services
Creating a Living Poet’s Home, John Ashbey’s House presented by Monica Ong Reed, DH Lab
Library Help Desk ChatBot presented by Annissa Carter, Bryana Kilpatrick, and Jhoselyn Jara, LIT Summer Interns
For those who cannot join us in person, the session will be streamed via Zoom at:
Do you have content in blacklight? Do you have content in other silos? Would you like to create dynamic exhibits and/or collections? Would you like to manage content, display, search, and facets in a highly configurable online interface? If you answered yes to any of this, welcome to Spotlight!
“Spotlight is open source software that enables librarians, curators, and other content experts to easily build feature-rich websites that showcase collections and objects from a digital repository, uploaded items, or a combination of the two. Spotlight is a plug-in for Blacklight, an open source, Ruby on Rails Engine that provides a basic discovery interface for searching an Apache Solr index.”
Exhibit page content can be directly tweaked from the browser.
On August 9th and 10th the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) and Yale Library hosted the event “Spotlight on Spotlight”. We were pleased to have members of the Spotlight team here to give a full demonstration, Q&A, and developer unconference. Stu Snydman, Gary Geisler, and Chris Beer from Stanford, and Trey Pendragon from Princeton lead the sessions. The main demonstration Tuesday morning included a brief history, a review of the initial use cases, context surrounding the platform, and walk throughs of the application and its features. In the afternoon the Q&A session provided a further chance to answer questions collected from the morning presentation and a live conversation. On Wednesday developers stood up individual instances of the application, exercised its extensibility using the DPLA API to import content, and held further technical discussion. After attending the event Steve Weida, Yale Library Webmaster commented, “Spotlight is exciting technology and has matured at a very impressive pace. Along with our commitment to Omeka, Spotlight could play a key role in the future of the Library’s web presence.”
The Quicksearch Implementation team and Library IT are happy to announce that collections from the Findit digital repository are now available in Quicksearch!
You can view digital collections in Quicksearch by going to the library front door at http://web.library.yale.edu, or directly to the Quicksearch main page at http://search.library.yale.edu, and searching for a term like “Andy Warhol”.
Three result bento boxes now display, Books+, Articles+, and Digital Collections.
Clicking on the “See xxx results” link in the Digital Collections bento box, or the “Digital Collections” facet in the left hand menu, will bring you to the full Digital Collections page. The Digital Collections page provides facets that match the facet functionality in Findit. Clicking on a title link will bring you into the Findit interface.
In October we completed the ingest of digitized materials for the Henry Kissinger project into Hydra and as a result, checked off a major milestone for the project. Ingest began in September 2014 and overall took 249 days to complete where for many weeks the ingest process was running 24/7 and required close monitoring.
The ingest process involved first creating metadata records in Ladybird from the original EAD files for the Kissinger collection (MS 1981 and MS 2004). This amounted to 16,161 Ladybird objects. Then as each of the 85 hard drives returned from the vendor, each drive had its contents validated through an automated quality control process and then transferred to temporary, network accessible storage for a manual quality control process. Once the digital files passed the quality control phase, they were matched up with the Ladybird object to create the complex parent/child relationship, essentially combining the metadata record with the digital files. This was performed by using the file name from each TIF image and extracting parts of the name to match it to the Ladybird record. Once a match was made, we imported the TIF and associated OCR file into Ladybird to create the ingest package to send to Hydra. Each ingest package contained the original TIF image, OCR file, a derivative JP2 and a derivative JPG. In addition, five metadata files were also attached which make up the Hydra object.
After completing ingest into Hydra, we then performed two independent audits to confirm the quantities of files matched correctly and each file’s checksum matched the original checksum in addition to the checksums calculated along the way to ensure file integrity.
Combining the counts of files for both MS 1981 and MS 2004, this is the end result:
Total Folders
16,161
Folders with digitized content
15,710
PDF files
15,710
Folders containing Audio/Video
157
Total TIF Images
1,530,433
Total OCR Files
1,202,920
Total Ladybird objects
1,546,594
Total Files Ingested into Hydra
13,542,899
Approximate checksums calculated
39,268,398
Estimated size of collection
95 Terabytes
The following chart illustrates the growth by month from September 2014 through October 2015.
On Monday 9/21/2015, YUL’s digital collection discovery interface (findit.library.yale.edu) will go live with a new design modeled on the Quicksearch interface design. These coordinating designs let our users know that they are in the same Yale University Library web space and should expect similar functionality.
The new look and feel of digital collections search at YUL- main page (click the image to get a larger view):
Search results in the new design:
There will also be a few new features in the digital collections search added on Monday. These include:
an Access Restrictions facet, to limit by either open or restricted access
a Repository facet, to limit to and search within a specific repository at YUL
a Call Number facet, to limit to and search within call numbers assigned to items
Another feature coming soon (but not on Monday) is a date slider with a histogram visualization, which gives users the ability to limit by date range and see the frequency of hits in a given year. To see an example of a feature like this used elsewhere, click on this search of Articles+ and look to the lower left to see the date range and histogram.
As always, your feedback is welcomed and appreciated. Please use the feedback link on the bottom center of the digital collections search page (or just click here), and tell us your thoughts!
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&Bregister
Thursday August 20th, 2:30-3:30pm in 17 Hillhouse L07register
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.
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 mayimpact 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.
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.
The new page features Digital Collection Highlight pages for every collection, with rotating images from the collections. The collection page lists all the collections in the new Findit interface, and other major digitized collections in other interfaces such as the Yale Daily News Historical Archive. Over time these digitized collections will move to the Findit interface.
Collection owners can use these pages to describe the collection, acknowledge funding organizations, and link to information in the Orbis catalog or other related resources. For an example of an individual highlight page see the Day Missions Collection: Annual Reports.
