2018 Presentation Voting Results

In this presentation, drawing from real-world examples in our day-to-day lives (from burrito shops to public-restroom paper towel dispensers), we will demonstrate how to tease apart the threads of an unfamiliar system using limited evidence. We'll identify the opportunities to observe and derive insight from unfamiliar systems, and we'll form a broad framework for thinking about systems -- both new ones and those that are familiar to us. Part field guide, part collection of lateral-thinking exercises, this presentation will encourage audience members to look at systems in a new light, to observe the effects of systems design, and to work backward and forward to understand the underlying systems more completely. These skills are directly transferrable to our day-to-day work; by better understanding systems in the wider world, we can gain new insights into our own systems. The audience will come away from this talk with a renewed recognition of and appreciation for systems, a framework for understanding systems and system design choices, and a thirst for puzzling through the systems they encounter both in their work and in the world at large."

- De-identification of patron data, including strategies and the risks involved with several de-identification methods - Technical processes and structures for building and maintaining a data warehouse - Data and privacy policies and governance at the organizational level - Auditing what data is being collected by the library, from system logs to paper forms

The talk will address how these issues impact libraries with both limited and extensive resources in their efforts to balance data analytical needs and patron privacy. "

After discussing our initial use of spreadsheets, the problems they solved, and the problems they caused, we will introduce our metadata schema and demonstrate how we use it for validation. Particularly important, we will discuss how we maintain and update the schema over time, and how its use has strengthened our preservation workflows. "

Many libraries are preparing their catalogs for linked data by inserting URIs into MARC records. This is such an important step towards linked data that the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) formed a Task Group on URIs in MARC. This presentation shares the methods and results of a pilot project with two goals: 1) assess the viability and scalability of adding URIs to MARC using a) SirsiDynix Symphony APIs, and b) MarcEdit; and 2) engage all 22 members of the Acquisitions & Discovery department in a linked data project that creates a dataset ripe for further linked data experimentation while teaching the importance of URIs in an linked data environment. This project also ties into a larger plan for linked data experimentation and learning at NCSU libraries."

Developing a Framework for Measuring Reuse of Digital Objects, the IMLS-funded project (LG-73-17-0002-17) by the Digital Library Federation Assessment Interest Group (DLF-AIG), seeks to conduct a needs assessment of the Digital Library community to determine desired functionality for a future reuse assessment toolkit. The end product of the grant project will consist of well-defined functional requirements and use cases, which will serve as the building blocks that will drive the future development of an assessment toolkit.

In addition to providing more information on the goals and methods of the grant project, this presentation will: define and offer popular types of digital library reuse; share the results of the project thus far, which includes data analysis from (a) a survey identifying how cultural heritage organizations currently assess digital library reuse, barriers to assessing reuse, and community priorities for potential solutions and next steps together; and (b) in-person and virtual focus groups sessions designed to explore issues regarding reuse. The presentation will conclude with the team’s current understanding of the functional requirements needed for a toolkit focused on assessing the reuse of digital library items and invite the CODE4LIB community’s feedback. "

We will present on different possible paths to take to decommissioning and otherwise greatly reducing the maintenance burden of past projects. Within this context we will talk about the ways we have approached portfolio management for individuals and our department with an eye towards identifying candidate applications, initiatives, and services for sunsetting. We will also talk about how the approaches we have taken to reducing our maintenance burden have changed the way we approach new projects. "

But -- questions about how to parse them come up so often in the Code4lib community for a reason. When you start working with them, you realize: call numbers are like MARC concentrate, in a way. Like someone distilled everything that we love and hate about MARC into one tiny, wonderful, horrible package. They appear so simple -- they are ""just"" strings, after all! But they're hand-crafted, hand-encoded strings. They're strings structured based on implicit sets of rules, which people sometimes overextend or even flat-out break in application. Real-world sets of them always seem to end up comprising this unholy mixture of formats that conform to various standards, including localizations, with varying degrees of accuracy. Code that handles all the idiosyncrasies in one context invariably ends up being highly specific and difficult to reuse in a different context, collection, or project.

Although tools for parsing various types of call numbers exist, I haven't yet found one that really helps address this issue. So after wrestling with it for years on various projects, I finally decided to tackle it myself and roll my own library -- one that uses common, general patterns as defaults that are then easy to customize for a given situation. And, since I can't be the only weirdo out there who struggles with this, I wanted to share it with the community: both what I've done so far, which is open source and available on GitHub, and what I've learned.

The library is pycallnumber [1] -- a Python package that provides a toolset for modeling any string pattern via flexible, modular, composable, and extensible templates. Out of the box, it includes complete templates for Library of Congress, Dewey, and SuDocs call numbers along with template components for handling more generic data types such whole numbers, decimals, formatted numbers, date strings, alphabetical strings, and more. You can extend basic template types to create new types, build complex templates out of simpler pieces, or simply tweak existing templates to handle local variations on standard types using minimal code. It provides tools for parsing, normalizing, and operating on call numbers and call number ranges, any of which can be extended in your own call number subclasses if you need custom behavior.

[1] https://github.com/unt-libraries/pycallnumber"

After a recent review of our digital preservation policies and workflows our internal Digital Curation Working Group was able to determine what stages in the digital preservation lifecycle we needed to improve upon, and how a simple digital asset management system could fulfill most of the technical recommendations.

We have started development of an application that is focused on providing the basic DAMS functions of file tracking, checksum polling and reporting features that notify users of corrupt assets. Limiting the scope of the initial iteration of the development cycle allows for an earlier functional deployment that can address our immediate needs, while leaving open the possibility of expanding the tool’s features in later development cycles.

This talk will focus on the process we used to identify enhancements to our digital preservation strategy, and why we chose to build a new application rather than implement an existing open source solution. It will also include a technical overview of the resulting application which we intend to release as an open source tool available to the digital preservation community. "

The basis for the account-based recommendations begins with clusters of checked out items that the integrated library system records when items are checked out. Drawing on examples from “consumer data science” (e.g. Netflix) it is clear that large corpus data that receive millions of ratings daily are part of the strategy for creating compelling recommender algorithms. Topic metadata clusters, collected from transactional checkout data of items that are checked out together form the basis for generating a rule set. After nearly a year of data stream collection the system has collected over 250,000 rows of anonymized transactions representing checkouts with topic metadata. The research team used the data mining tool WEKA to run a machine learning process offline.

Chat transcripts were analyzed using methods from sentiment mining social media data and product reviews to build and test an automated sentiment analyzer. Anonymized transcripts were human-coded for sentiment to produce a gold standard dataset. Freely available natural language learning tools utilizing Python and Scikit-learn were then trained and tested on the dataset to develop an automated sentiment classifier. The classifier reported high levels of precision and accuracy in analyzing the test set of data, and the study revealed a number of fruitful paths to study in refining and implementing analysis into routine assessment activities. "

Technical debt can refer to many different things including, but not limited to: infrastructure, software, design/UX, documentation or code. I want to note that inevitably we will always take on some sort of technical debt, debt that we create, often unknowingly and usually while learning and working on a new project and debt that we’ve inherited. Technical debt, when taken on haphazardly and not managed, can shut down a team’s ability to move forward on a project. It is important to have ways of hammering through it, as well as having preventative measures in place to keep debt to a minimum and manageable for as long as possible.

The decisions that are made which result in technical debt should be made with a strategic engineering perspective. Addressing technical debt from a DevOps point-of-view and a Managerial point-of-view can have significantly different perspectives of the impact and detriment of technical debt, affecting when, how and what technical debt should be addressed and dealt with. "

In this talk, we present how we use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build a cloud platform to process digital library datasets and service logs, generate user activity reports, and explore more customized and granular insights. We also illustrate several AWS services we used and demonstrate our approaches to handle dataset - including our digital library dataset, open research data and service (e.g. DSpace, Samvera, and Fedora) logs.

Last, we share our experience on architecting cloud platform in AWS, design strategies and best practices to process digital library dataset and retrieve results in a cost-effectiveness way."

This brief interactive session is intended to:

• provide a very high-level overview of open data concepts and past successes
• present traditional and innovative examples of how libraries can participate in the open data/apps ecosystem
• bring librarian-technologists into the global open data conversation

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This presentation will highlight the capabilities of some of the existing Cloud IDE platforms such as Cloud9 and Codenvy and their applicability to library software projects. "

This presentation will discuss the motivations behind moving from XML based encodings to storing non-descriptive metadata such as PREMIS events and rights metadata as linked data and challenges behind implementing this, including results from performance tests. As an example, we will share a linked data model for PREMIS events and license information and make the case for repositories wanting to move towards an RDF based approach for preservation and other non-descriptive metadata. "

In this presentation, the UX test will be described along with the ways in which it guided the redesign process. How we got the students to help us out with very little publicity or effort on our part will also be explained. "

I've been experimenting with methods for auditing algorithms by assessing large results sets to determine patterns and screen for systemic problems and biases. In this presentation, I'll discuss the methods I've used for algorithmic audits, the potential impacts of algorithmic auditing on library operations, and auditing algorithms without violating the software's Terms of Service."

Who is funding research? Who is sharing research? How much of it is OA? What supporting research data is available? What kind of TDM licenses exist for content? What other activity is trackable beyond citation? How can we link up all of this ‘stuff’?

The answer is metadata, including persistent identifiers. Crossref now collects a lot more metadata than just bibliographic metadata and we’ve moved beyond simply DOI registration. We provide millions of item-level metadata records for free. Records that include information for text and data mining, funding sources, clinical trials, license rights, data links, relation types, and more.

We also makes these almost 100 million metadata records available for reuse without restriction through public Metadata APIs.

But challenges exist. This session will walk through how metadata collection and distribution has evolved, what insights we’ve gained, what resources and metadata we have available, how metadata can be retrieved using our public Metadata APIs, and how we hope to expand our resources to better collaborate with the library community. We’ll describe what metadata is available, how to get it, and what libraries are doing with it. What could you build on top of Crossref metadata? "

We approached this project by using Wikidata as the repository for all the data associated with the faculty members. We created entries (namely Items in Wikidata) for the selected group of faculty, their co-authors, and all their published articles with DOIs. To create entries for the articles, we used a tool that allows users to enter either a DOI, PMID or PMCID and generates the Items directly in Wikidata. We then used Scholia, an open source application, to generate the scholarly profiles. Scholia queries Wikidata and presents the user with aggregated and graphically-displayed information. It also enables us, for example, to learn more about our faculty members’ collaborators and scholarly interests. In addition to demonstrating our methods for contributing content to a structured linked data knowledge base, this presentation will share the potential benefits and challenges for libraries to consider. Libraries have both the expertise and data sources to take a leading role in contributing to and promoting open knowledge projects for their communities. "

In this presentation, the project team will introduce emerging themes, models and project impact through the lens of a single institutional use case."

This talk walks through the process Portico undertook to develop the criteria for making this choice, the decisions we reached, and why. "

In addition to publishing code assets, online code repositories provide a fantastic platform for publishing documentation resources. The ability to render markdown files allows for quick creation and editing of text. Presentation libraries such as Reveal.js or services such as GitPitch can publish dynamic slideshows from modular markdown components.

Publishing from an online git repository can provide a mechanism to tell the story of your open source project participation. Interactive documentation editing can be an excellent way to introduce colleagues to source code management practices. "

With a little bit of JavaScript magic, you can build a custom solution on top of the Google Apps your users use every day. Google Apps Script is a server-side implementation of JavaScript supporting API calls to Google Services.

This presentation will describe the Google Apps Script platform and the API’s available to the platform. This presentation will describe the various ways that your custom code can be deployed for a library audience (formula functions, document scripts, web service or domain add-ons). "

A project (which is part of a bigger initiative) was launched this year, for the sake of improved functionality, usability and accessibility of our libraries’ web presence. Among completed tasks were thoroughly review code, strengthen control flow, streamline operations, and standardize procedures. Meanwhile, a PHP validation engine was also researched, investigated, and put in use. The presentation will cover how the validation package fit into the picture, how operations are standardized, which together result in the made template for future creation, and possibly more."

Is it possible that the techniques and workflow that made Free-Programming-Books possible could be applied to million-item library catalogues? Will GitHub someday host a worldcat? This talk will run though the numbers and examine a few of the sticking points."

JSTOR, a not-for-profit digital library, is carrying out a year-long investigation, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, into community needs and practices for digitizing Arabic scholarly journals. This presentation will cover early findings from our exploration of the available digitization software packages and processes for Arabic content, and will outline some of the general policy and copyright challenges in building a digital collection of global scholarly content. During the Q&A session, attendees will have a chance to respond to the project findings, and the presenters especially hope that attendees will suggest other digitization projects and potential partners who might benefit from this research."

This session will highlight the core OSF architecture available for institutions, the challenges that it addresses, and how this infrastructure can specifically support the institutional research mission with a collaborative approach to bridging current gaps in today’s research lifecycle. We are particularly interested in receiving additional feedback on additional workflow challenges (perhaps institution-specific) from the community."

Major features and guiding principles of D2H are; Explicit metadata mapping configuration, no metadata will slip through the cracks Flexible configurations to normalize, transform, and crosswalk metadata Support for migrating both simple as well as compound objects by creating parent and children works in Hyrax Automate mediated deposits using workflows in Hyrax such as Review, Approv, and Publish works

The migration of ScholarsArchive aims to be completed in November 2017 using D2H, after which point we’ll reflect on the lessons learned and opportunities for improvements to the tool. "

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This talk will argue that the lxml Python package can be a beneficial place to start honing your webscraping skills because of how deeply those abilites can be extended for more complex tasks. lxml supports direct use of XPath queries and has ability to parse pure XML documents. XPath is a concise but readable system of describing XML paths for data access and extraction, and is supported in many other tools, such as the Oxygen XML Editor (https://www.oxygenxml.com/). These statements are described in terms of the XML schema, allow many to leverage their deep understanding of metadata and XML for immediately powerful results.

I will briefly introduce the XPath query language, an overview of how it is used within the lxml module, some straight forward template code for basic lookups, and suggested resources for getting started. While other scraping packages may need to remain as part of your toolbox, the combination of lxml with XPath can be an option that grows along with your data needs and help you avoid unnecessary package switching and wasted learning time. "

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The next step is an introduction to basic bibliographic instruction, followed by a gamified “scavenger hunt”-kind of exercise, which aims to gamify students’ ability to perform basic research: http://bit.ly/learnlib. The game is web-based and it can be played on any electronic devices from desktops to mobile devices. The game is followed by a short Google Form survey, which assesses learning outcomes and allows further work shall any knowledge gaps occur. The team relies on the constructivist theory of assisting patrons in building their knowledge in their own pace and on their own terms, rather than being lectured and guided by a librarian only. This proposal envisions half a day activities for participants to study the opportunities presented by 360 video camera and acquire the necessary skills to collect quickly useful footage and process it for the library needs. The second half of the day is allocated for learning Adobe Dreamweaver to manipulate the preexisting “templates” (HTML and jQuery code) for the game and adapt the content and the format to the needs of the participants’ libraries. "

In reviewing the GitHub README documents of four institutions including Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Tate, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, this session will review how museums have chosen to communicate their open data on GitHub and outline its usage. More information: https://medium.com/berkman-klein-center/framing-the-museum-github-repository-afcc55695129"

Originally developed in Drupal with substantial custom code, MHX has been maintained by Loyola Notre Dame Library (LNDL). With limited developer support, the maintenance for the site became increasingly difficult as standard modules needed to be updated for security concerns and custom modules needed to be reworked to accommodate these updates.

In the spring of 2017, LNDL technology staff investigated alternatives. After considering the pros and cons of various open source and licensed services, LNDL decided to migrate MHX to the Public Knowledge Project’s (PKP) Open Conference Systems (OCS). This open source solution operates on a standard LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) stack and has a community of developers focused on sustaining the service. It does exactly what we want – no need for custom code! If your library is interested in expanding its digital scholarship offerings to include conference support, or if your library offers its own library-focused conference, this technology might be exactly what you need. "

This is the story of how a frivolous convergence of holidays drove the implementation timeline of a significant user services project: My Library Account. This new tool will provide a single point of entry for UMass Amherst library patrons, using campus authentication, to their borrowed and requested materials, and current curricular support materials, across multiple data silos (ILS, ILL, EReserves, LibGuides). The unified data will also be provided as a web service, for easy integration into the campus LMS's and other offerings. Oh, yeah, and they'll be something in there for tracking the Easter Eggs you've found, too, if there's time...

Presentation will include lots of charts, diagrams, and photos of cute bunnies."