Code4Lib Day 1: Morning Notes

Was trying to do too many things this morning, so sorry if the notes are not complete.

ARCHITECTING ScholarSphere: How We Built a Repository App That Doesn’t Feel Like Yet Another Janky Old Repository App

• Dan Coughlin, Penn State University
• Mike Giarlo, Penn State University

Presentation Slides

Trying to make it less confusing without exposing what system it’s using.

Simple Metadata Management

• building metadata widgets
• required: title, creator, keyword, rights
• hide most non-required, have ‘more’ link for rest
• limited to a set numbers, with tooltip
• use jQuery autocomplete to suggest authority vocabulary

Dashboard

• list of uploaded files
• list of files have access to

Background Jobs

• I got lost here talking about rescue jobs, sorry
• has tracebacks for

Permissions Widget

• set visibility
• share with specific people

Version Control

• can restore previous versions

Social Features

• not in initial requirements
• profile
• contributions – “trophies”
• activity – follow/following

8 months to develop, but spent 2 months just doing usability and responding to feedback.

Available on GitHub.

Pitfall! Working with Legacy Born Digital Materials in Special Collections

• Donald Mennerich, The New York Public Library
• Mark A. Matienzo, Yale University Library

Presentation Slides

Disk Images Process

• process
• stream – digitized analog magnetic signal
• sector – stream decoded using algorithm(s)
• object
• physical – entirety of device
• logical

Pitfalls

• formats mean different things
• communities of practice use different kinds of container formats
• no single solution

Quest for Access

• delivery format
• what allowed to be done with material
• need usability testing

Pitfalls

• no ideal single model
• decisions through the life cycle have an impact on access
• capacities of institution

Collection

• faculty papers – 162 floppies
• goal: “recover” backup into something useful with minimal changes, repeatable process
• Vita Russo Papers
• goal: preserve original, describe and arrange, access

Conclusions

• Time consuming
• acknowledge researchers
• need to work on communities of practice

Hacking the DPLA

• Nate Hill, Chattanooga Public Library, nathanielhill AT gmail.com
• Sam Klein, Wikipedia

A rally to get involved.

It’s an API, and a community.

Examples

• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Minnesota Digital

Events

• Digital Public Library of America Appfest
• Launch at Boston Public Library April 18-19

Documentation and API Creator is on GitHub.

EAD without XSLT: A Practical New Approach to Web-Based Finding Aids

• Trevor Thornton, New York Public Library

Side note: EAD = Encoded Archival Description — a way of describing archival collection.

Project Goals

• enable multiple presentations of the same data
• support dynamic web apps
• cross-collection search with component-level specificity in results, and faceting on common access points

Archives Data Management Application

• system using Ruby on Rails + MySQL + Solr
• based on existing infrastructure
• stick with what they know
• didn’t need to do anything more complex
• key functionality: data import, search index, API

Core Models

• collection: collection as we know it, may also be single volume
• component: some collections at item level, some not
• description: some data has descriptive attributes
• access term

I just felt like I was copying the slides at this point, so I’ll try to get a link to the presentation slides instead.

The Avalon Media System: A Next Generation Hydra Head For Audio and Video Delivery

• Michael Klein, Senior Software Developer, Northwestern University LIbrary, michael.klein AT northwestern DOT edu
• Nathan Rogers, Programmer/Analyst, Indiana University

Demo!

• can upload from computer, but also shared dropbox
• forced to enter some metadata

Avalon

• is a stack
• media streaming server

Content Processing

• with Matterhorn
• workflow pipeline – batch/unattended ingest – uploading one delimited file with names of files that should be related
• pingbacks for status updates
• caching of key metadata/images

Stream Security

• support different types of streaming (for desktop & mobile) and authentication
• use authentication tokens
• half is media ID, add another half, whole thing is auth token

Lunch Time