[InetBib] Code4Lib Journal -- Issue 35

[Péter Király via InetBib <inetbib@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The new issue of the Code4Lib Journal is now available:

http://journal.code4lib.org/issues/issues/issue35

*Table of Contents*

Editorial: Introspection as Activism, or, Getting Our Houses in Order
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12232
Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Those of us in libraries like to trace our history to Alexandria or to
the French governmental system of record-keeping, but the construction
of the modern GLAM world is far more recent, almost as new as coding.
It has evolved almost as rapidly. And its future is on us, whether we
choose to passively accept a status quo others build or to act and
grow and develop ourselves and our workplaces.

Bridging Technologies to Efficiently Arrange and Describe Digital
Archives: the Bentley Historical Library’s
ArchivesSpace-Archivematica-DSpace Workflow Integration Project
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12105
Max Eckard, Dallas Pillen, Mike Shallcross
In recent years, ArchivesSpace and Archivematica have emerged as two
of the most exciting open source platforms for working with digital
archives. The former manages accessions and collections and provides a
framework for entering descriptive, administrative, rights, and other
metadata. The latter ingests digital content and prepares information
packages for long-term preservation and access. In October 2016, the
Bentley Historical Library wrapped up a two-year, $355,000 grant from
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to partner with the University of
Michigan Library on the integration of these two systems in an
end-to-end workflow that will include the automated deposit of content
into a DSpace repository. This article provides context of the project
and offers an in-depth exploration of the project’s key development
tasks, all of which were provided by Artefactual Systems, the
developers of Archivematica (code available at
https://github.com/artefactual-labs/appraisal-tab).

The Devil’s Shoehorn: A case study of EAD to ArchivesSpace migration
at a large university
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12239
Dave Mayo, Kate Bowers
A band of archivists and IT professionals at Harvard took on a project
to convert nearly two million descriptions of archival collection
components from marked-up text into the ArchivesSpace archival
metadata management system.  Starting in the mid-1990s, Harvard was an
alpha implementer of EAD, an SGML (later XML) text markup language for
electronic inventories, indexes, and finding aids that archivists use
to wend their way through the sometimes quirky filing systems that
bureaucracies establish for their records or the utter chaos in which
some individuals keep their personal archives.  These pathfinder
documents, designed to cope with messy reality, can themselves be
difficult to classify.  Portions of them are rigorously structured,
while other parts are narrative.  Early documents predate the
establishment of the standard; many feature idiosyncratic encoding
that had been through several machine conversions, while others were
freshly encoded and fairly consistent.  In this paper, we will cover
the practical and technical challenges involved in preparing a large
(900MiB) corpus of XML for ingest into an open-source archival
information system (ArchivesSpace). This case study will give an
overview of the project, discuss problem discovery and problem
solving, and address the technical challenges, analysis, solutions,
and decisions and provide information on the tools produced and
lessons learned.  The authors of this piece are Kate Bowers,
Collections Services Archivist for Metadata, Systems, and Standards at
the Harvard University Archive, and Dave Mayo, a Digital Library
Software Engineer for Harvard’s Library and Technology Services.  Kate
was heavily involved in both metadata analysis and later problem
solving, while Dave was the sole full-time developer assigned to the
migration project.

Participatory Design Methods for Collaboration and Communication
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12127
Tara Wood, Cate Kompare
Website redesigns can be contentious and fraught in any type of
organization, and libraries are no exception. Coming to consensus on
priorities and design decisions is nearly impossible, as different
groups compete to ensure their subject or specialty area is
represented. To keep projects on track and on time, libraries may give
a few staff members the authority to make all of the decisions, while
keeping user research limited to a small number of usability tests.
While these tactics are sometimes necessary, at best they can leave
many feeling left out of the process, and at worst, can result in
major oversights in the final design.

Participatory design methods can bring users and stakeholders into the
design process and ultimately lead to a better design and less
friction in the project. The authors share their experience and
lessons learned using participatory design techniques in a website
redesign project at a large, multi-location academic library, and how
these techniques facilitated communication, shaped design decisions,
and kept a complex, difficult project on track.

Python, Google Sheets, and the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials for
Efficient Metadata Project Workflows
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12182
Jeremy Bartczak, Ivey Glendon
In 2017, the University of Virginia (U.Va.) will launch a two year
initiative to celebrate the bicentennial anniversary of the
University’s founding in 1819. The U.Va. Library is participating in
this event by digitizing some 20,000 photographs and negatives that
document student life on the U.Va. grounds in the 1960s and 1970s.
Metadata librarians and archivists are well-versed in the challenges
associated with generating digital content and accompanying
description within the context of limited resources. This paper
describes how technology and new approaches to metadata design have
enabled the University of Virginia’s Metadata Analysis and Design
Department to rapidly and successfully generate accurate description
for these digital objects. Python’s pandas module improves efficiency
by cleaning and repurposing data recorded at digitization, while the
lxml module builds MODS XML programmatically from CSV tables. A
simplified technique for subject heading selection and assignment in
Google Sheets provides a collaborative environment for streamlined
metadata creation and data quality control.

Supporting Oral Histories in Islandora
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12176
Marcus Emmanuel Barnes, Natkeeran Ledchumykanthan, Kim Pham, and
Kirsta Stapelfeldt
Since 2014, the University of Toronto Scarborough Library’s Digital
Scholarship Unit (DSU) has been working on an Islandora-based solution
for creating and stewarding oral histories (the Oral Histories
solution pack). Although regular updates regarding the status of this
work have been presented at Open Repositories conferences, this is the
first article to describe the goals and features associated with this
codebase, as well as the roadmap for development. An Islandora-based
approach is appropriate for addressing the challenges of Oral History,
an interdisciplinary methodology with complex notions of authorship
and audience that both brings a corresponding complexity of use cases
and roots Oral Histories projects in the ever-emergent technical and
preservation challenges associated with multimedia and born digital
assets. By leveraging Islandora, those embarking on Oral Histories
projects benefit from existing community-supported code. By writing
and maintaining the Oral Histories solution pack, the library seeks to
build on common ground for those supporting Oral Histories projects
and encourage a sustainable solution and feature set.

Building a Scalable and Flexible Library Data Dashboard
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12152
Nathan Mealey
Data dashboards provide libraries with the means to demonstrate their
ongoing activities and usage in an engaging and communicative fashion.
Yet, due to the number of service platforms used by libraries, and the
wide-ranging technical specifications they entail, bringing all of
this content together in a sustainable way is a significant challenge.
This article describes Portland State University’s project to design
and build a data dashboard based on a scalable and flexible
infrastructure that would enable them to present data in a visually
compelling and dynamic interface.

What’s New? Deploying a Library New Titles Page with Minimal Programming
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12199
John Meyerhofer
With a new titles web page, a library has a place to show faculty,
students, and staff the items they are purchasing for their community.
However, many times heavy programing knowledge and/or a LAMP stack
(Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) or APIs separate a library’s data from
making a new titles web page a reality. Without IT staff, a new titles
page can become nearly impossible or not worth the effort. Here we
will demonstrate how a small liberal arts college took its acquisition
data and combined it with a Google Sheet, HTML, and a little
JavaScript to create a new titles web page that was dynamic and
engaging to its users.

OPRM: Challenges to Including Open Peer Review in Open Access Repositories
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12171
Pandelis Perakakis, Agnes Ponsati, Isabel Bernal, Carles Sierra,
Nardine Osman, Concha Mosquera-de-Arancibia, Emilio Lorenzo
The peer review system is the norm for many publications. It involves
an editor and several experts in the field providing comments for a
submitted article. The reviewer remains anonymous to the author, with
only the editor knowing the reviewer´s identity. This model is now
being challenged and open peer review (OPR) models are viewed as the
new frontier of the review process. OPR is a term that encompasses
diverse variations in the traditional review process. Examples of this
are modifications in the way in which authors and reviewers are aware
of each other’s identity (open identities), the visibility of the
reviews carried out (open reviews) or the opening up of the review to
the academic community (open participation). We present the project
for the implementation of an Open Peer Review Module in two major
Spanish repositories, DIGITAL.CSIC and e-IEO, together with some
promising initial results and challenges in the take-up process. The
OPR module, designed for integration with DSpace repositories, enables
any scholar to provide a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of
any research object hosted in these repositories.

Adopting a Distributed Model for Data Services
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12191
Casey Gibbs, Marcos Hernandez, Pongracz Sennyey
This article describes how the Saint Edward’s University Library
implemented a distributed model for the Institutional Repository.
Based on Cloud Based platforms and APIs, the Library has created an
Institutional Repository that is scaleable and modular, considerably
lowering its implementation and maintenance costs, while lowering its
technical complexity.

Developing an online platform for gamified library instruction
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12122
Jared Cowing
Gamification is a concept that has been catching fire for a while now
in education, particularly in libraries. This article describes a
pilot effort to create an online gamified platform for use in the
Woodbury University Library’s information literacy course. The
objectives of this project were both to increase student engagement
and learning, and to serve as an opportunity for myself to further
develop my web development skills. The platform was developed using
the CodeIgniter web framework and consisted of several homework
exercises ranging from a top-down two-dimensional library exploration
game to a tutorial on cleaning up machine-generated APA citations.
This article details the project’s planning and development process,
the gamification concepts that helped guide the conceptualization of
each exercise, reflections on the platform’s implementation in four
course sections, and aspirations for the future of the project. It is
hoped that this article will serve as an example of the
opportunities–and challenges–that await both librarians and
instructors who wish to add coding to their existing skill set.

Sincerely,
Péter Király

-- 
Péter Király
software developer
GWDG, Göttingen - Europeana - eXtensible Catalog - The Code4Lib Journal
http://linkedin.com/in/peterkiraly