Digitizing Sanborn fire insurance maps for a full color, publicly-accessible collection

Journal ArticleDescribes the digitization of 1300 full-color Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps at the University of Utah's Marriott Library. Issues of copyright, digitization specifications, digital asset management system (CONTENTdm), and web presentation are discussed

Aggregating distributed digital collections in the mountain west digital library with the CONTENTdm multi-site server

Journal ArticleThis paper describes the creation of the Mountain West Digital Library (MWDL), a cooperative regional program distributed throughout Utah and Nevada. Its metadata are aggregated at a single website. Six digitization centers at the largest universities in both states digitize their own collections and support partner institutions in their geographic regions. Each center runs a CONTENTdm server, and an aggregating server at the University of Utah harvests metadata into a single searchable index. Local control and identity of collections are hallmarks of the MWD

Microfilm, paper, and OCR: issues in newspaper digitization at the Utah digital newspapers program

Journal ArticleDescribes the issues surrounding digitizing newspapers from microfilm and paper in the Utah Digital Newspapers program. The paper also explores optical character recognition (OCR) accuracy and the problems of digital file storage of newspapers

Future leaders' views on organizational culture

ManuscriptResearch libraries will continue to be affected by rapid and transformative changes in information technology and the networked environment for the foreseeable future. The pace and direction of these changes will profoundly challenge libraries and their staffs to respond effectively. This paper presents the results of a survey that was designed to discern the perceptions and preferences of future library leaders related to organizational cultures in these times of precipitous change. The study finds that future leaders of academic libraries perceive a significant gap between their current and preferred organizational cultures, and that current organizational cultures limit their effectiveness

Future leaders' views on organizational culture

Journal ArticleResearch libraries will continue to be affected by rapid and transformative changes in information technology and the networked environment for the foreseeable future. The pace and direction of these changes will profoundly challenge libraries and their staffs to respond effectively. This paper presents the results of a survey that was designed to discern the perceptions and preferences of future library leaders related to organizational cultures in these times of precipitous change. The study finds that future leaders of academic libraries perceive a significant gap between their current and preferred organizational cultures and that current organizational cultures limit their effectiveness

Utah digital newspapers project

ManuscriptThe J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah has digitized 30,000 pages from three weekly Utah newspapers from the period of 1889 - 1922 and made the collections freely available on the Internet. This article describes a new method for digitizing historic newspapers, developed in a partnership between the University and two commercial organizations. Utilizing OCR and newspaper processing technology from iArchives Inc. and the CONTENTdm digital collections software suite, the new method recently prototyped by the University of Utah presents a viable and affordable digitization method to cultural heritage institutions nationwide. In particular, the process can be implemented incrementally, making it affordable for both small and large collections, and the technology supports many different digital formats, not just newspapers. The digitized newspapers are publicly accessible and may be searched full text or browsed by issue. With the recent award of a new grant another 100,000 pages from an expanded selection of newspapers are slated for digitization in 2003

Repository Analytics and Metrics Portal (RAMP) Workflow Documentation and Data Definition

The Repository Analytics & Metrics Portal (RAMP) is a web service that leverages Google Search Console (GSC) data to provide a set of baseline search engine performance metrics for a global, cross-platform group of institutional repositories (IR). Since launching in 2017, RAMP has grown from 3 to more than 50 participating repositories. The underlying data are unique in scope and size, and offer many opportunities for novel analyses of IR search engine performance. The data may be augmented to enable additional analyses including metadata mining and bibliometrics. In November 2019, the RAMP team released a publicly available subset of the RAMP dataset, consisting of daily GSC data for 35 participating repositories harvested between January 1 and May 31, 2019. The purpose of this article is to provide information and increased transparency about how RAMP data are harvested, processed, and audited for quality control. This article is also intended to serve as more extensive, complementary documentation for the published dataset and any published research findings that use RAMP data

Roles and Responsibilities of Deans and Directors in Digital Initiatives and Campus IRs

Three library deans will share their perspectives on developing organizations that can sustain digital initiatives and IR, and to assess those initiatives. Peggy Seiden will set the stage by discussing the organizational change, budgetary decisions and political work that allow college and university libraries to move forward with this work. Karen Schneider will talk about the political and practical opportunities facilitated by creating a culture of respect for numbers and assessment. Kenning Arlitsch will focus on the development of RAMP (Repository Analytics and Metrics Portal) as an example of a diagnostic tool whose aggregated dataset about IR use holds enormous research potential for the library community

Why So Many Repositories? Examining the limitations and possibilities of the IR landscape

Academic libraries fail to take advantage of the network effect because they manage too many digital repositories locally. While this argument applies to all manner of digital repositories, this article examines the fragmented environment of institutional repositories, in which effort and costs are duplicated, numerous software platforms and versions are managed simultaneously, metadata are applied inconsistently, users are served poorly, and libraries are unable to take advantage of collective data about content and users. In the meantime, commercial IR vendors and academic social networks have shown much greater success with cloud-based models. Collectively, the library profession has enough funding to create a national-level IR, but it lacks the willingness to abandon local control.Yeshttps://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=wjla2