Extracurricular activity

On a related note, I am going to be facilitating an extracurricular activity on Thursday afternoons at YouthBuild Charter School. We really don't know what form this will take -- It will depend on what the students are interested in -- but it's our vision to give them a way to put their year-culminating portfolio projects on the web, help them build simple websites to promote their businesses or passions, and reinforce computer skills. I am going to be creating a wiki as an example, and then linking it to and from this blog, so hopefully that will mean I will create more meaningful posts for this site as well -- Lead by example, right?

New Special Collections website

Well, I am still here! We recently launched a
new Special Collections website. So I may be not writing, but at least I am cranking! We have gotten through our first 60 batch of Owen Wister letters, and are working on creating our Digital Wisteriana / La Salliana concept. We've been spending a lot of time updating Wikipedia with information on the Wisters. Given that the Wisters' estate was on the La Salle campus, we are really poised to be an authority on the family. Many Google searches take you to another website that I am now in charge of -- Belfield and Wakefield: A Link to La Salle's Past. I recently took over this website from Dr. Jim Butler, who had made it with an honors English class in something like 1994. I think its going to be a wonderful opportunity to incorporate digital collections and things like internet based geneologies and such and breathe some life into a website that hasn't been updated in a while. I have changed the style sheet on this website to make it conform to the La Salle "brand" more and started incorporating some images from the Wister Special Collection, so please look for this to develop more over time.

Developments

We are cranking! It's amazing what a new budget year can do to a project. We have set up our digitization lab and are beginning to scan. The first project I have decided to tackle is the Wister family papers -- We are beginning with the letters of Owen Wister, author of the Virginian. I am busy developing my cataloging database, which we will be attempting to use METS and MODS, so my head is all over the LC website today. I will add some pictures soon.

Greenstone integration

When my puppy was just a few months old, we got a silly little card from our vet saying that "everyday is a new adventure." In spite of how corny this sounds, such is the same for a librarian trying to plan their first digital library project.

My project, I feel, has really taken on the shape and direction that I was initially lacking ever since our Director of Academic Computing suggested that whatever I choose should dovetail into Sakai. Whether we use Sakai or not is almost moot, at this point -- the real idea here is that our systems should be wide open and able to "talk" to our other systems. AC is working on that on their end; likewise, we should too.

So... I just learned yesterday about Greenstone's ability to integrate with DSpace. Apparently, you can develop in Greenstone and then transfer your collections and metadata to DSpace rather easily, and vice versa. You can use Greenstone as the frontend for DSpace, or you can scrap it entirely.

We are still looking for our "quick and dirty" UI to mount our collections soon -- This is looking like a highly likely route.

Further reading:

Computer Science Thesis from Virginia Tech, outlining an open XML schema for DSpace

New PACSCL website

I am fortunate to be La Salle's web liasion to the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collection Libraries. They have just launched a new dynamic website for member libraries to announce collections, exhibitions, lectures, etc. It is set up as a content management system, for member libraries to manage their own posts.

Check it out:
www.pacscl.org

And the prize goes to... DSpace!

At long last, I have settled on developing DSpace for La Salle. Everytime that I talk repositories to faculty, they want to start throwing teaching materials into it. I found an interesting paper that talks about the possible integrations of DSpace with Sakai, an alternative to Blackboard which I was asked to find out how my systems may integrate with. Also, I saw a posting yesterday that Fedora and DSpace have recently decided to try to identify some areas to work together. We still don't feel confident that we could develop Fedora here without a programmer, but we feel good about DSpace being within our skillsets. I still have a crush on Fedora, and would welcome the intersection of the two systems to allow me more opportunity to play with that system as well.

I had originally not considered DSpace, as I always thought that it was just for ETDs. People are using it differently than that, and as I started demoing CONTENTdm and asking users about their experiences, I started getting pointed to DSpace more and more, given our desire to manage diverse scholarly materials and didactic resources. The dealsealer was seeing how Australian National University migrated from CONTENTdm into DSpace and came up with something what I would be looking to create for our Special Collections: http://anulib.anu.edu.au/subjects/ap/digilib/.

We're still early enough in our digitization game here that I don't want to end up locking us into a proprietary database without getting a greater sense of the digital directions of the campus. The openness of the code and flexibility of metadata input/output will set us up for optimum interoperability with future systems. Also, DSpace runs on Dublin Core, which is far from intimidating, but also allows input of METS, which I think should allow for a fun challenge.

Now the preservation question... OCLC's digital archive service is still looking pretty good, as they are reasonably priced compared to other services. I also may be looking at using the money that I save on software acquisition to mount an argument for Sun Microsystems' Honeycomb or something along those lines. It is too onorous to throw manual digital preservation administration and data backup on top of a librarian's other duties -- Therefore, all redundancies and reporting will be automated and/or outsourced so that it is done efficiently and effectively.

DAM list

So, I keep using this blog more for the list of quick links at the right to cool digital libraries and less like a "web log." The bad librarian in me doesn't tag these entries anyway. I do think there is a shortage of comprehensive lists of systems, and I will do my best to keep this one up over time.