Category: Announcements

LibraryIT acquires New Relic performance management service

LibraryIT recently purchased a license for the performance management and monitoring service New Relic. We will be using the New Relic APM-Application Performance Management application to monitor and improve performance of the new Hydra/Blacklight complex (aka Findit and Quicksearch beta).  This is a SaaS, cloud-based service for monitoring applications and their underlying infrastructure as well as the programs themselves.

New Relic does do some usage monitoring, much in the vein of Google Analytics, but the particulars of installation and setup of this service will allow the Information Architecture Group in LibraryIT and others to specifically target performance issues like page loads and search result returns. New Relic will be a great help in assessing the health and responsiveness of the critical servers, applications and  which run the Library’s key services.

Hydra Project Milestone: Automation

The Digital Library & Programming group is pleased to announce that we’ve hit a major milestone the development of the Hydra digital repository system at YUL. Communication and syncing between repository system components became fully automated at the end of September 2014. This automation applies not just to work on the infrastructure built for the Kissinger papers, but for all Ladybird/Hydra interaction.

Automation like this allows metadata and objects to travel within the Hydra system without intervention, which in turn allows Library IT to focus more intensely on structural and workflow development. As a Project Hydra partner, Yale is now in the position to share this work with the Project Hydra community, and empower those members to scale up their own repository ingest services.

Yale ITS to hold Tech Summit this month, Library IT to present

Join us for the inaugural Yale Technology Summit, a day-long program of conversations with Yale faculty, students, and staff working with innovative and cutting-edge technologies. The event, coordinated by Yale Information Technology Services, is free and open to all members of the Yale community.

Library and Library IT presentations at this event include:

  • Library Development for Digital Repositories: What is this Hydra Fedora stuff?
    In response to a fragmented digital collections environment developed over many years using many systems, the Yale Library has launched a project to unify digital collections within a single open source software framework using Hydra/Fedora. Michael Dula, the Library CTO, will talk about the decision to go open source with Hydra and Fedora as the underlying technologies. Topics will include Yale’s contributions to the open source Hydra community, a demonstration of initial projects, and future development plans and possibilities. 
  • Quicksearch: Universal Search at the University Library
    The Library offers several search interfaces: Orbis and MORRIS search the Library and Law Library catalogs, Articles+ for articles, journals and newspapers, and several digitized collection searches. The many search interfaces present a challenge to our patrons, who have to select the correct search depending on the material they need. The Library will combine several of these search interfaces into one unified ‘Quicksearch’, which over time will become a comprehensive search interface for the majority of Library resources. The Quicksearch poster session will highlight progress on the project so far. We will also provide laptops so Summit Participants can try the new search for themselves.

  • Humanities Data Mining in the Library
    In response to increased scholarly demand, Yale University Library is helping humanists make sense of large amounts of digital data. In this presentation, we will highlight recent projects based on Yale-digitized data, data from large commercial vendors, and data from the Library of Congress. We’ll address 1) working with digitized collections that are subject to license & copyright, 2) thinking about both explicit metadata and latent structure in large digital collections, and 3) moving beyond text to consider machine vision and computational image analysis.

  • Preservation and Access Challenges of Born-Digital Materials
    We will provide an introduction to the scope of born-digital materials at Sterling Memorial Library and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and in particular will discuss the innovative ways staff at the Yale libraries are collaborating with colleagues on different initiatives, including a digital forensics lab devoted to the capture of born-digital materials, an emulation service that can provide online access to vintage computing environments via a web browser, and a vision for digital preservation to ensure that collection materials we capture today will remain usable in the future.

Watch the conversation on #YaleTechSummit2014 on Twitter!

via 2014 Tech Summit | Yale ITS