2014 Breakout I (Tuesday)

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Islandora

Institutions that are live w/Examples

  • Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries [1]
    • Hosts Islandora 6 repositories on Drupal 6; migrating to Drupal 7
  • Florida State University ([2])
  • Grinnell [3]

Question about new installation: additional resources aside from documentation Additional resources:

  • Islandora Google Group [4]
  • series of cookbooks with Chef for one-click installation of Islandora [5]
    • Could use Vagrant and virtual box
  • New release of Islandora expected soon
  • Lyrasis is asked to review the documentation and will do sanity checks on the documentation
  • Should see improvements to documentation soon

Hosted solutions available to purchase:

  • Lyrasis [6]
  • DiscoveryGarden [7]
  • Cherry Hill Co. (coming soon) [8]

What's the learning curve with Drupal - easier/harder than Hydra?

  • Drupal 7 is easier to learn than Drupal 6
  • Recommend the Using Drupal / O'Reilly Book [9]
    • Useful to understand theming / design
  • Drupal may be more widely-held skill set than Ruby on Rails (in which Hydra is based)
  • Though at least one school's Islandora developer started with Islandora without a PHP/Drupal background
  • DrupalCon - first week in June, Austin TX in 2014
  • Islandora Camp ([10])

Setup difficulty?

  • Documentation for setting up Solr / Gsearch - some confusion between v. 6 & 7 documentation
  • Would be better for things to be more grouped together

Using Islandora for Media Streaming

  • Video streaming: streams in HTML5 / used to use Flash in Islandora 6
  • Every video gets an Mp4; audio files use Mp3
  • How are storing the original videos? In Fedora. Note: objects do not have to be stored in Fedora
  • Can still think of Fedora as the repository - include all master files and metadata. if need to migrate out of Fedora in the future, could simply retain master files and metdata.
  • Media Streaming installed on Drupal server
    • FlowPlayer; jwplayer available for Islandora 7
  • Grinnel contracted with Discovery Garden to create generic content solution pack that allowed the creation of an object that held multiple types of files (pdf images, audio, video). Traded the ability to stream for the ability to create a compound object. Now need to do additional work to standardize for Islandora 7.
  • Binary object created by Discovery Garden - for download.
  • Islandora has several solution packs for multiple file types (video, audio, compound, large images, small images). Colorado use case involved oral history (video, audio, text documents together) which should be possible to use with the compound solution packs.

Versioning problems encountered:

  • For each object - new folder is created? Can turn off versioning based upon file type; do version the metadata, but not the actual master files themselves.
  • Could also use Fedora as a registry - not store the objects themselves because of versioning and performance/scaling issues.

How to handle updates to metadata?

  • Checkbox to version or not.
  • METS-like XML schema as a container (FOXML). When version -it adds it in to FOXML; Islandora only displays the most recent version


Note about custom modules:

  • Custom modules can be difficult to get community support. out-of-house development makes it difficult to join back with the larger community and core code.

Long-term preservation:

  • MetaArchive - locked server, dark archive. May be module available for checksum generator and checksum checker - runs checksum on ingest and periodically check them.
  • DuraCloud - application on top of Amazon storage run by DuraSpace
  • Premise - preservation metadata system that helps record whenever records are touched or changed for audit trail.

What happened to Hylandora?

  • Came down to the content model: Islandora and Hydra were too divergent.

Reasons to go with Islandora over Hydra:

  • Just depends on the skill set available
  • Both Hydra and Islandora have active communities

Issues:

  • Upgrades can be painful / difficult in both Hydra and Islandora


What kinds of content is appropriate for Islandora?

  • Good for special collections and ETDs, images from Athletic departments and ContentDM
  • Crossover with Content Management systems, emphasize a policy on what should be included for long-term preservation
  • Grinnell - small liberal arts college; emphasize promoting a place for faculty and students to store their research (undergraduate papers, faculty white papers/publication, data sets, digital humanities, videos of performances, audio of music performances, preserving websites (difficult with Islandora 6 vs. 7, which has a WARCIVE module)
    • Don't want to necessarily limit to a library-only thing; include instructional designers, academic affairs, art gallery, history,
  • Florida: modules: large images, small image, pdf and books. Books module - good for yearbooks. Want to use it for ETDs and research.
    • Workflow module - has been useful. Similar to DSpace workflow for ETDs. When we ingest objects and they're not ready to be published - can work with metadata, wait to publish and not be visible to the public until they are ready to publish.


Access Controls/Embargoes, Harvesting, and Statistics

  • Access controls for data: Fedora use XacMole (sp)? to set permissions. can set embargoes for ETDs. IP embargo module. Could extend to the bitstream level. Pretty easy to do without breaking anything.
  • OAI:PMH module - might not like how the Dublin Core looks out of the box - can use MODS out of the box to do the MODS to DC transform. Needs additional work to pass the 2.0 specification. Module that includes a REST API that will return data on various levels if requesting just specific items.
  • How to handle statistics? e.g., what are the counts for objects per creation date.
    • Perl script that will lookup the size of the collection, how many objects - on Github
    • Google Analytics module in 7

Relevance Search & Ranking

Metadata Harvesting Normalization & Enrichement @ Scale

  • Seeing same tools that were brought forth and then not hearing anything else about them.
  • Conversations with folk about normalizing and enriching metadata.
  • Lets hear about tools and things they are working on.
  • Particular processes.

VuFind Update

Telecommunicating Support Group

@mjgiarlo


BIBFRAME

Notes are based off the Tweets made by the group during the discussion:

Questions

  • What will workflows will look like after Linked Data and BIBFRAME are actually pushed out?
  • How to best use controlled vocabularies, including various/local controlled vocabularies, in linked data work?
  • Will the protectiveness of quality by catalogers become thing of past?

Pros

  • Good thing about RDF, semantic metadata structure is that is creates a good skeleton that can last through system changes.
  • Talked about OpenRefine, Freebase, Linked Data/Semantic Web examples
  • Shout out for the Open Metadata Registry - http://metadataregistry.org/
  • RDFa allows multiple property values inline- more details than http://schema.org , starts to approach MARC richness

Concerns

  • Wariness of simplicity (particularly of Dublin Core) due to the possibility of overloading elements, thus blocking interoperability with other schemas.
  • There is the possible issue of every library creating their own ontologies, thus reinventing the wheel.
  • Discussion of how long-term cataloging employees will handle this linked data 'revolution', how to best oversee these changes with catalogers dragging their feet.

Archivespace

User Experience

Blame @erinrwhite for cruddy notes.

Coral facilitates. Her question for the group is, how can we overcome the focus on library experience and focus instead on user experience?

what's your problem?

Introductions. Common problems:

  • "Just make a web page!"
  • "I can figure this weird arcane and overly complicated thing out. Why can't anyone else?"
  • Convincing stakeholders that design isn't print design, doesn't need to be the same for everyone and isn't static.
  • Redesign by committee, have mercy!
  • Getting ready for a redesign
  • Publishing/learning about UX research. Who's going through IRB, who's publishing this stuff?
  • Devaluation of UX work in library, funding or mandate
  • UX not being built into organizational policies etc.
  • How can we scale up UX above and beyond one-project research? Expanding to include more projects beyond the website?
  • How can we convince our organizations to not recreate the org chart with the website?
  • Trying to create a UX position that is beyond web librarian
  • Not just testing sites with librarians (!)
  • What about user experience for back-of-house software?
  • I'm a web team of one. Help?
  • "Put the MARC view back in the catalog!"
  • Do we really need to default to advanced search? Battling the exceptions vs the average user?
  • Taking a guerrilla approach to UX research
  • Not a lot of staff in digital area
  • Moving from a culture of complaint to a culture of...fixing

A couple folks here working in organizations that have UX and assessment built into the culture. Thanks in advance for your knowledge, y'all!

themes

We broke into sub-groups:

  • Making time
  • Changing culture
  • Beyond the website

Worldcat Search API

Help beta test early release of the new WorldCat Search API


Spotlight: Exhibits, Curated Collections and Blacklight

Tools for Instruction

LMS Integration, Guide on the side, LibGuides, etc.

Participants:

(Horrible) Notes from session: First: the group and the conversation was very diverse so here tis for what it's worth: We know we need to automate some of the information literacy tasks Some of us talked about how their institution was using Guide on the Side There was also a bit of conversation about *other* types of IL instruction tools (like clickers for voting/in class participation,(board) games, mobile/e-mail app that allows for voting) And a conversation about how libraries are now pressured to tie in IL (or any instruction) to retention and how we can track those outcomes without losing privacy

Code4lib Conference Documentation

We discussed the ways in which the lack of historical data make proposing to host the conference difficult. Code4libbers must convince their employer to take on financial responsibility. This does not mean the host pays. In fact, each conference has had a surplus. But a corporate institution is needed to sign the contracts with the venues and services used by the conference. Employers need convincing that the event will not be a huge cost nor a burden on the business office. To convince the administrators, a historical record of past conferences would be immensely helpful.

We discussed several data points that would be useful. Some of these include

  • expected and final budgets
  • total attendance
  • hotel room reservation block size and % of expected size actually used
  • food costs, food expectations and % of food actually consumed
  • etc.

We plan to begin storing these kinds of data on the code4lib wiki for future planners to use.

Some other documentation that we also plan to add to the wiki:

  • Conference Planning Committee Post-mortem (Raleigh group already started this trend with the "Lessons Learned" post)
  • explanation of what it's like to work with a 3rd party event planner (Concentra), such as:
    • how money flows between attendees, sponsors, host, awardees, and concentra
    • what are the benefits of working with a 3rd party planner?
  • examples of MOUs between multiple host institutions

Some action items:

  • finish documenting this year's conference (Tim et al.)
  • attempt to collect historical budgets if they still exist (Josh & Rosy)
  • organize existing data on the wiki (?)

VuFind Update

Sorry for the delay

We had a lovely gathering of VuFind veterans with a few new comers stopping by to hear what VuFind is all about. New comer and VuFind developer Chris Hallberg headed the meeting, a strong term for sitting there and listening to all the exciting news from our awesome collaborators.

We started with some spoilers from Julia Bauder's Visualization Talk, a feature of VuFind in active development. Then we went over the short-term plans for VuFind, looking at our GitHub's pull requests, heard an update from Tom on data normalization.

John Sarnowski of the ResCarta Foundation came by to see how VuFind has change since he looked at it a few years ago as the front of his project. Looking forward to a possible collaboration here. Joe talked about his excitement over console tools and his frustration with licensing, hoping to see these in the VuFind core soon! We heard about the OLE timeline and wrapped with Julia talking about her success with ebsco.

Thanks for coming by! See you all in Portland!