My very first robot: Programming a Twitter bot to promote open access scholarship

Social media is now recognized as an important element in promoting scholarship available on institutional repository sites. To capitalize on the value-added by social media engagement, automated "bots" can be deployed to facilitate social media outreach with minimal administrative investment. In this presentation, I'll provide an overview of social media's value in the context of open access publishing. I will also walk through the steps of creating a Python-based Twitter bot, providing high-level concepts that will be understandable for non-programmers. I will also provide a narrative description of my experience building my first Twitter bot to help reveal the sometimes hidden labor that goes in to the development of behind-the-scenes programmatic tools

What if you could save the data?: Endangered Data Week & how libraries can protect public data

Presentation given at the Maryland Library Association annual conference (1-3 May 2019)Endangered data and information is not a new problem, but the sheer volume of data in the era of digitally-generated and -mediated data has accelerated the problem. Technology churn, political turnover, lack of preservation resources, and simple neglect have put huge amounts of federal, state and local data at risk for disappearing entirely Mr Joseph Koivisto will provide an overview of the Endangered Data Week initiative and show us what libraries can do to facilitate the preservation of public data for future generations of students, scientists, and researchers.Maryland Library Association, Government Information Interest Grou

Custom Analytics with Google Tag Manager: Assessing Usage Statistics on the MD-SOAR Platform

As usage metrics continue to attain an increasingly central role in library system assessment and analysis, librarians tasked with system selection, implementation, and support are driven to identify metric approaches that simultaneously require less technical complexity and greater levels of data granularity. Such approaches allow systems librarians to present evidence-based claims of platform usage behaviors while reducing the resources necessary to collect such information, thereby representing a novel approach to real-time user analysis as well as dual benefit in active and preventative cost reduction. As part of the DSpace implementation for the MD SOAR initiative, the Consortial Library Application Support (CLAS) division has begun test implementation of the Google Tag Manager analytic system in an attempt to collect custom analytical dimensions to track author- and university-specific download behaviors. Building on the work of Conrad , CLAS seeks to demonstrate that the GTM approach to custom analytics provides both granular metadata-based usage statistics in an approach that will prove extensible for additional statistical gathering in the future. This poster will discuss the methodology used to develop these custom tag approaches, the benefits of using the GTM model, and the risks and benefits associated with further implementation

Crowdsourcing as a Means of Authority Assessment and Enhancement for Cultural Heritage Description

As the rise of crowdsourcing represents a shift away from the conventional hallmarks of knowledge work – individual researchers asserting critical and interpretive authority over artifacts, corpora, and data sets – a question looms over one of the most jealously guarded domains of information description and classification: what is possible when crowdsourcing – a decentralized, constructivist research methodology – is brought to bear on cultural heritage authority records such as subject headings, controlled vocabularies, and thesauri? As an ancillary project of the larger Project Andvari initiative, an NEH-funded project to establish an aggregation portal for art and archives of the early medieval pre-Christian northern European periphery, the project team developed a crowdsourcing approach to both assess the value of and identify additional concepts for a linked open data iconographic thesaurus to be implemented for the future web-based platform. Through active collaboration with the British Museum, a crowdsourcing application was developed using the open-sourced PYBOSSA application as part of the larger MicroPasts initiative

Library systems: SaaS or Open Source?

Presentation at University of Maryland Libraries’ Environmental Scan session, 2 October 2019

Project Academic Knowledge: Using the Microsoft Academic API to evaluate institutional repository impact

Microsoft Academic (MA) is a publicly-accessible commercial discovery interface that supports creative reuse and evaluation of data through the implementation of accessible APIs. This presentation will provide an overview of both MA and its associated APIs, focusing on unique features that provide a competitive advantage over similar platforms. Additionally, this presentation will provide use case demonstrations of using MA-sourced data to evaluate citation data for MD-SOAR records. Technical requirements will be discussed at entry-level detail, allowing non-programmers to understand what is needed to get started using MA APIs

Blind spots, gaps, and unexpected traffic: A (brief) history of the transition to Google Tag Manager and new approaches to improved MD-SOAR analytics

The transition to Google Tag Manager (GTM) seemed like an obvious choice for the MD-SOAR shared institutional repository: easier management of custom analytics tags, immediate integration with existing DSpace and Google Analytics infrastructure, and easy customization translating to better item-level statistics for participating campuses. However, now - more than a year post implementation - numerous issues with the GTM approach have been observed. In addition to breaking existing custom development that was implemented for recent DSpace releases, GTM was revealed to miscount metrics related to bitstream downloads and inbound web traffic from indexed search engines. This poster will provide an overview of problems observed with the Google Tag Manager implementation for the MD-SOAR DSpace instance and the custom tag development necessary to adequately address these problems. Furthermore, this poster will provide an overview of a newly formed partnership with the RAMP initiative headquartered at the University of Montana, a collaboration that hopes to support the development of a novel analytics approach that more accurately reflects platform and bitstream use. A comparatively assessment of gathered metrics will be provided

Peer to peer: Using a discussion group to introduce staff and faculty to emerging technologies

Poster presentation at 2018 Maryland Library Association Annual Conference, Cambridge, Maryland, 2-4 May 2018.Awareness of new and emerging technologies is vital to the continuing education of library staff and faculty in settings ranging from public libraries to national research libraries. However, the complex nature of new technologies and limitations of prior tech literacy can prove to be a stumbling block for even highly motivated library workers. While the challenges of investigating new technologies may seem insurmountable, the implementation of group-oriented knowledge sharing methodologies can greatly reduce barriers to learning while also creating a constructivist setting in which library workers can learn together. At the University of Maryland Libraries, a staff- and faculty-led discussion group has taken on this challenge by administering monthly sessions where staff, faculty, and students are welcome to join conversations about new and emerging trends in technologies and libraries. By hosting staff specialists and volunteer speakers, sessions present difficult technology topics in a comfortable, open format. Furthermore, tool demonstrations allow attendees to discovery new applications and platforms that may have meaningful impacts on their day-to-day work. This poster presents a brief history of the Emerging Technologies Discussion Group, highlighting the variety of topics presented over the seven years of its existence. Additionally, this poster presents the benefits of such a low-stress, low-barrier group format. Lastly, the poster provides useful tips for those interested in starting a similar group, including topics such as important administrative considerations and suggested formats for discussion- and tool-oriented events

Controlled Vocabulary Enhancement through Crowdsourcing: Project Andvari, Micropasts, and Public Quality Assurance

Proceedings paper published by Society of American Archivists. Presented at conference in 2015 in Cleveland, OH (http://www2.archivists.org/proceedings/research-forum/2015/agenda#papers). Published by SAA in 2016.This paper presents an experimental approach of using crowdsourcing to test controlled vocabularies for digital collections of cultural objects. For a digital humanities initiative project, Project Andvari, which is intended to create a digital portal of early medieval northern European artifacts, it was recognized that there was a need to develop a semantically structured iconographic thesaurus to describe the iconographic content of distributed artefactual collections from a variety of contributing institutions. This paper discusses a workflow of planning and development process of controlled vocabularies for the project and a testing process of the vocabularies to determine both the usability of controlled vocabularies and the feasibility of quality assurance approach. This paper demonstrates an applicability of crowdsourcing in developing controlled vocabularies

A Tale of Two Repositories: How Data Sources Affect Data Narratives

Presentation given at Show Me the Numbers: Storytelling with Data and Visualizations, a one-day conference of the Maryland Chapter of the Special Libraries Association hosted by the University of Maryland Libraries on October 12, 2017.Institutional, archival, and cultural heritage collections often rely upon quantitative measures to defend their continued existence and value. For digital repositories, interpreting and collecting user interaction data is a complex process that involves using third-party tools (such as Google Analytics) and local indices to collect and report use statistics. Data from one source, however, does not often corroborate data from another. These discrepancies are presented graphically to demonstrate the often unreliable relationships between sources and narratives