Aggregating and Accessing the \u27Daybooks of History\u27 with the Minnesota Digital Newspaper Hub

The emergence of a wide variety of digitization technologies and access platforms have created new opportunities for fast, low-cost newspaper digitization--and new risks for long-term preservation and intellectual access to those papers. This session will describe the Minnesota Digital Newspaper Hub, the Minnesota Historical Society\u27s long-range vision for aggregating, preserving, and providing access to Minnesota\u27s digitized and born-digital newspapers. We will also discuss approaches to digitizing and preserving your own community\u27s newspapers

Single Search with SOLR or what to do when everything goes to &@#$

All libraries periodically debut new technologies: a website redesign, new content management systems, subscribing to new databases, etc. Often these new technologies are welcomed and work well, but sometimes they fail to meet expectations...and occasionally they fail in a spectacular manner. Many libraries offer web-based search interfaces to digital resources, and current trends in search technologies are to index multiple material types in one platform and to provide a simple search box and a way for users to filter the results. The Minnesota Historical Society combined the separate search interfaces for some of our most popular records into a single, SOLR-based search platform. In the summer of 2015, the new search debuted to uniformly poor reviews from our users, and in the fall MNHS held a series of focus groups to get input on designing a new search. In this session, we will be sharing our experiences in the aftermath of this launch, including: Crisis management systems and styles Creating and using tools to ameliorate searchers\u27 frustration and to make a bad system usable Moving out of crisis mode: going forward with thought-out solutions and creating positive incremental changes Setting up and gathering feedback to improve the system Focus groups: what we learned about how users really prefer to search for historical research materials and genealogical records Best practices: proposed data points for building web interfaces to search across data silos and heterogeneous material types. Learning objectives: 1. Recognize technology projects with a potential for a bad debut and pre-plan for mitigating fallout. 2. Identify a set of concrete tools for handling the public side of tech crises. 3. Understand how to incorporate user input into search design as well as metadata issues to consider when incorporating vital records into a single search

Introduction to Controlled Vocabularies: Terminology for Art, Architecture, and Other Cultural Works

Book Review of Introduction to Controlled Vocabularies: Terminology for Art, Architecture, and Other Cultural Works, by Patricia Harpring. ISBN 9781606060186. Reviewed by Sarah Quimby

Using visual analytics to develop situation awareness in astrophysics

We present a novel collaborative visual analytics application for cognitively overloaded users in the astrophysics domain. The system was developed for scientists who need to analyze heterogeneous, complex data under time pressure, and make predictions and time-critical decisions rapidly and correctly under a constant influx of changing data. The Sunfall Data Taking system utilizes several novel visualization and analysis techniques to enable a team of geographically distributed domain specialists to effectively and remotely maneuver a custom-built instrument under challenging operational conditions. Sunfall Data Taking has been in production use for 2 years by a major international astrophysics collaboration (the largest data volume supernova search currently in operation), and has substantially improved the operational efficiency of its users. We describe the system design process by an interdisciplinary team, the system architecture and the results of an informal usability evaluation of the production system by domain experts in the context of Endsley's three levels of situation awareness

A renaissance in library metadata? The importance of community collaboration in a digital world

This article summarizes a presentation given by Sarah Bull as part of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) seminar ‘Setting the Standard’ in November 2015. Representing the library community at the wide-ranging seminar, Sarah was tasked with making the topic of library metadata an engaging and informative one for a largely publisher audience. With help from co-author Amanda Quimby, this article is an attempt to achieve the same aim! It covers the importance of library metadata and standards in the supply chain and also reflects on the role of the community in successful standards development and maintenance. Special emphasis is given to the importance of quality in e-book metadata and the need for publisher and library collaboration to improve discovery, usage and the student experience. The article details the University of Birmingham experience of e-book metadata from a workflow perspective to highlight the complex integration issues which remain between content procurement and discovery

Practical Linked Data: Learning How to Create and Use Linked Data in the Real World

Want to learn more about linked data? This session is intended for anyone interested in learning more about linked data, whether they are new to the subject or more advanced. We will begin by describing what linked data is. We then discuss our specific project and how we created linked data using the MCTC zine collection, the Anchor Archive Zine Thesaurus, the Open Metadata Registry and Open Refine. After that, we talk about what our group might do next, what we learned from the project, and show some other examples of projects that use linked data

Pure Money for a Sound Economy

At present, the world-economy is exceedingly fragile. Debt levels of nations peak. Monetary assets increase, too, and concentrate in the hands of few. In this paper, I show that a mechanism at the root of today’s monetary system entails an inherently fragile economy. I simulate the consequences of this mechanism within a macroeconomic model. I motivate a new monetary system that gives money the role it should have: to facilitate complex interactions in a stable environment

Third-Party Effects in Stakeholder Interviews

This paper examines the effect of having a third-party scientific expert present in stakeholder interviews. The study was conducted as part of a larger project on stakeholder engagement for natural resource management in the Verde Valley region of Arizona. We employed an experimental design, conducting stakeholder interviews both with and without an identified scientific expert present. Our sample consisted of 12 pairs of interviewees (24 total participants) who we matched based on their occupation, sex, and spatial proximity. For each pair, the scientific expert was present as a third party in one interview and absent in the other. We used a word-based coding strategy to code all interview responses for three known areas of sensitivity among the study population (risk, gatekeeping, and competence). We then performed both quantitative and qualitative analyses to compare responses across the two interview groups. We found that the presence of a scientific expert did not have a statistically significant effect on the mention of sensitive topics among stakeholders. However, our qualitative results show that the presence of a scientific expert had subtle influences on the ways that stakeholders discussed sensitive topics, particularly in placing emphasis on their own credibility and knowledge. Our findings indicate that researchers may be able to pursue collaborative, interdisciplinary research designs with multiple researchers present during interviews without concerns of strongly influencing data elicitation on sensitive topics. However, researchers should be cognizant of the subtle ways in which the presence of a third-party expert may influence the credibility claims and knowledge assertions made by respondents when a third-party expert is present during stakeholder interviews

A renaissance in library metadata? The importance of community collaboration in a digital world

This article summarizes a presentation given by Sarah Bull as part of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) seminar ‘Setting the Standard’ in November 2015. Representing the library community at the wide-ranging seminar, Sarah was tasked with making the topic of library metadata an engaging and informative one for a largely publisher audience. With help from co-author Amanda Quimby, this article is an attempt to achieve the same aim! It covers the importance of library metadata and standards in the supply chain and also reflects on the role of the community in successful standards development and maintenance. Special emphasis is given to the importance of quality in e-book metadata and the need for publisher and library collaboration to improve discovery, usage and the student experience. The article details the University of Birmingham experience of e-book metadata from a workflow perspective to highlight the complex integration issues which remain between content procurement and discovery