Repository development at the BPL: January 2014 update

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Over the past few months, the development work on the new Digital Commonwealth repository at the Boston Public Library has focused on functionality for ingesting metadata records via the Open Access Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). This functionality enables Digital Commonwealth to include metadata created by institutions around the state in the central search interface, with links that point back to the original item hosted by the provider. (Digital Commonwealth currently harvests records from ten institutions and consortia, including the State Library of Massachusetts, NOBLE, SAILS, and C/W MARS to name a few.)

BPL development staff have been working closely with each OAI provider to tailor the ingest process to their preferred metadata format (Dublin Core, PBcore, MODS, etc.) as well as the system used by each institution to provide the records (CONTENTdm, Omeka, etc.) The crosswalking process, which converts the incoming metadata records into MODS, also involves a number of data standardization routines, including the transformation of date data into a facet-able and sortable date format based on W3C Date-Time Format, and the conversion of geographic subject/coverage data into hierarchical geographic subjects (state, county, city, etc.) and numeric latitude/longitude coordinates using data from the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names. Whenever possible, the ingest process also generates thumbnail images for each object which are then stored in the Digital Commonwealth repository, along with an archival copy of the original metadata record prior to crosswalking.

While all of this involves significant time and effort, the result will be more accurate and more complete metadata records from these providers, and a better search and discovery experience for users as well as better representation of the data within larger shared contexts such as DPLA.

So far the OAI harvesting has been restricted to a test platform. By late February the BPL expects to finish the work on the OAI feeds at which point the feeds will be added to the public repository site (https://search.digitalcommonwealth.org). The focus will then turn to migrating the last few remaining collections from the DSpace repository into the new repository, and integrating the informational content on the current Omeka site into the new design. While no official date has been set for when the new repository will replace the existing systems and be launched as the “official” Digital Commonwealth site, it is anticipated that this milestone will be completed sometime in March.

Digital Commonwealth Newsletter: January 2014

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All the latest news from the Digital Commonwealth of Massachusetts!

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Updates for January, 2014

 

Save the Date!! April 8, 2014

 

8th Annual Digital Commonwealth Conference

Hogan Center at Holy Cross in Worcester

 

This one-day conference features keynote addresses from two nationally known speakers: Melissa Levine and Liz Bishoff

 

Melissa Levine is the Lead Copyright Officer from the University of Michigan Library. She will speak about current copyright issues. 

 

Liz Bishoff, of the Bishoff Group, was previously the Executive Director of the Colorado Digitization Project. She will discuss statewide and regional digital collaborations and the need for sustainability planning.


Planned breakout session topics include audience engagement and crowdsourcing, conservation and digitization, online exhibits and lightning round presentations from Digital Commonwealth members. More details regarding sessions and pricing will be available in early February.
Repository update
The BPL has been busy working on adding OAI-PMH harvesting feeds from member sites to the new repository. In this latest blog post, read about the work being done and the anticipated completion dates: http://digitalcommonwealth.org/blog/?p=211.  
 
DPLA Plans Training Sessions
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is working with four content hubs, including Digital Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and planning a series of training sessions for public librarians. The goal is to help public librarians modernize their skills in a digital age, and in turn, communicate their work and their locales to the world.   
 
Digital Commonwealth and its partner organization, the Boston Public Library, will be announcing more details soon about the three upcoming training sessions.  Digital Commonwealth is delighted that Anna Fahey-Flynn, BPL’s Collaborative Library Services Manager, is helping to implement this exciting training program.

Member Projects: Blog Post Series

Two recent blog posts add to our series about member digitization projects. Both of these happen to focus on the challenges of creating metadata:

Lee Library Association’s Digitization Project

In a followup with Library  Trustee Mary Philpott, she discusses her experiences using the admin interface of the new repository at the BPL to create metadata for Lee Library’s digital objects: http://digitalcommonwealth.org/blog/?p=199

The Accidental Metadatalyst

Cara Marcus, Director of Library Services at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital, also examines metadata creation in this blog post, only in this instance using the Excel spreadsheet template provided by the BPL:  http://digitalcommonwealth.org/blog/?p=209
If you would like to highlight your institution and add your experiences to this ongoing series, please send details in an email to digitalcommonwealth@gmail.com
DPLA offices located at the Boston Public Library

In a recent blog post, Dan Cohen, Executive Director of the DPLA, describes the physical office space of the Digital Public Library of America within the Boston Public Library. Digital Commonwealth is glad to hear that its partner organization, the BPL, has been so welcoming to the DPLA!

 http://dp.la/info/2014/01/08/location-location-location/

 
 
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The Accidental Metadatalyst, by Cara Marcus

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This is a guest post presented by Cara Marcus, Director of Library Services, Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital

The Accidental Metadatalyst

When the Boston Public Library announced their grant to digitize local collections and preserve them in the Digital Commonwealth, it seemed like a great opportunity for my small library to create our digital archives. I had worked with teams from BPL on a number of other projects and workgroups, and looked forward to collaborating with their staff on this exciting project. Boston Public Library had state-of-the-art equipment and a whole team of experts, who would work with me every step of the way to provide guidance and counsel.

Joining the Digital Commonwealth was the easy part, but when Thomas Blake, Chrissy Rissmeyer, Danny Pucci, Bahadir Kavlakli, and Jake Sadow first visited my library in 2011 and told me I would be creating metadata, I wondered what I was getting into! While I had catalogued, indexed, abstracted, and classified for decades, I had never actually created metadata. No worries, they told me – I would be given a step-by-step template that would guide me in the process.

The template arrived in easy-to-understand MS Excel, with recommendations and notes for genres, extents and formats. Soon I was delving into a world of tools and standards like the Graphic Materials: Rules for Describing Original Items and Historical Collections and the Library of Congress Name Authority File. While the process took a great deal of time (about a year to create metadata for about 300 materials), the BPL Digital Commonwealth Team was with me every step of the way, answering my questions by phone, email and in person.

I found that completing the metadata was fun, exciting, challenging, and opened up a whole new world. And there were some things I just couldn’t verify, such as photographers from 1917. While most of my genres were photographic prints or book illustrations, I did have some others, such as oil paintings, certificates and architectural drawings, where I had to hunt for the correct metadata in databases.

After I finished and sent in the completed spreadsheet, I received an edited spreadsheet and detailed five page report from Danny, Nicole Shea, Amy Benson and Sarah Emily, where everything was mapped to unique identifiers for each book or image. Their expert advice and recommendations helped me to complete the metadata for over 8,000 fields and prepare the records for the “final send-off”. One of the highlights of the project was bringing the last three books to BPL and getting a guided tour of their impressive digitization lab, cameras and equipment.

Now as I eagerly await my collection to be posted on the Digital Commonwealth, I am already being contacted by researchers who have discovered books the BPL team had posted to the Internet Archives from the Faulkner Hospital Collection. Since these materials were posted in the fall of 2012, they have been downloaded almost 1,500 times. So, accidental metadatalyst or not, the collection has proved discoverable, thanks to the Boston Public Library Digital Commonwealth Team.