Discovery Tools and Local Metadata Requirements in Academic Libraries

As the second decade of the twenty-first century commences, academic librarians who work to promote collection access must not only contend with a vast array of content available in a wide range of formats, but they must also ensure that new technologies developed to accommodate user search behaviors yield satisfactory outcomes. Next generation discovery tools are designed to streamline the search process and facilitate better search results by incorporating metadata from proprietary and local collections, then by providing relevancy-ranked results. This paper investigates the implications of discovery tool use for accessing materials housed in institutional repositories and special collections, in particular, how the discovery of these materials depends on local metadata creation practices. This paper surveys current research pertaining to metadata quality issues that may put unique local collections at risk for being overlooked in meta-search relevancy rankings, and considers ways in which academic libraries can address this issue as well as areas for future research

An Overview of Planning and Implementing Large-Scale Digitization

This document outlines the steps and considerations for planning and implementing a large-scale digitization project. This document was given to the participants who attended the Nevada Statewide Large-Scale Digitization Workshop on May 18, 2018 held at UNLV Libraries

A Clean Sweep: The Tools and Processes of a Successful Metadata Migration

pre-printIn 2016, the University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library migrated digital asset management systems from CONTENTdm, a vendor provided solution from OCLC, to Solphal, a homegrown system utilizing several open source tools. During the migration, issues with metadata led to a large-scale metadata cleanup and standardization project, enhancing discovery in our new system. This article discusses the method used to determine which system would best meet our needs, methods for metadata migration, issues observed during migration, metadata management capabilities of the new system, and future plans for post-migration metadata cleanup and remediation to ensure that our metadata is consistent with best practices

Regional Aggregation and Discovery of Digital Collections: The Mountain West Digital Library

book chapterThe Mountain West Digital Library (MWDL) is a digital collaborative of over 180 partners from five states in the U.S. West, sharing free access to over 775 digital collections with over 950,000 resources. Partners of the MWDL work together on providing regional discovery via an online portal at mwdl.org and facilitating, on behalf of the region, the on-ramp to national discovery via the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) portal at dp .la. MWDL was organized around these common goals: • Establish a distributed digitization and hosting infrastructure to support memory institutions in sharing their digital collections • Increase public access to digital collections materials through aggregation and discovery via open search portals • Promote interoperability of metadata via common standards and enhancements • Share expertise and training This chapter describes how these goals have been met for MWDL partners, through a coordinated network of distributed repositories supporting collections and a central harvesting system for searching. Key to the success of regional discovery has been the establishment of common standards and practices, along with the development of useful data enhancement practices, also described below. How MWDL has adapted over its years of growth and adoption of changing technologies, and particularly how it has served the emergence of the new national digital library, are also discussed. Finally, future directions for collaborative discovery are suggested, with notes about the challenges ahead

Trustworthy repositories: Audit and certification (TRAC) Cline Library internal audit, spring 2014

Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TRAC) is a recommended practice developed by the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems. The TRAC international standard (ISO 16363:2012) provides institutions with guidelines for performing internal audits to evaluate the trustworthiness of digital repositories, and creates a structure to support external certification of repositories. TRAC establishes criteria, evidence, best practices and controls that digital repositories can use to assess their activities in the areas of organizational infrastructure, digital object management, and technical infrastructure and risk management. The Cline Library at Northern Arizona University has undertaken an internal audit based on TRAC in order to evaluate the policies, procedures and workflows of the existing digital archives and to prepare for the development and implementation of the proposed institutional repository. The following document provides an overview of the results and recommendations produced by this internal audit

Volume 31, Number 4, December 2011 OLAC Newsletter

Digitized December 2011 issue of the OLAC Newsletter

Do you hear what I see? Assessing accessibility of Digital Commons and CONTENTdm

This article discusses the accessibility of two content management systems, Berkeley Electronic Press’ Digital Commons and OCLC’s CONTENTdm, widely used in libraries to host institutional repository and digital collections content. Based on observations by a visually-impaired student who used the JAWS screen reader to view the design and display of digital objects in both systems, we provide a general overview of the accessibility of each system. We discuss potential suggestions for accessibility-related improvements, and we offer ideas for library administrators of these systems about how to maximize the back-end configurations for accessibility

The Path of Least Resistance: Optimizing Metadata Practices Through User Assessment

As part of a multi-faceted research project examining user engagement with various types of descriptive metadata to improve metadata services, Utah State University Libraries Cataloging and Metadata Services unit investigated user search behavior in library catalog (MARC) records, Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids, and most recently in digital collection metadata. The authors used web log analysis to determine how users interacted with CONTENTdm, categories of search terms used, and where search terms were found in a record. Key findings included that navigation through CONTENTdm using clickable queries (links) is a prominent user search pattern, dates are an important faceting tool and date ranges as a clickable link are heavily used, users demonstrated a more engaged research pattern when searching with geographic terms, and subject and transcription metadata fields match user search terms at a significant rate and are likely to be high drivers of search results

Time, Money and Effort: A Practical Approach to Digital Content Management

As libraries and archives continue to convert mass quantities of collections to digital form, we are faced with ensuring long term accessibility to these digital assets. This article addresses the process one institution undertook to evaluate the digital content management and preservation landscape to plan for future growth and expansion of its digital program