A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation

This volume is devoted to the broad topic of distributed digital preservation, a still-emerging field of practice for the cultural memory arena. Replication and distribution hold out the promise of indefinite preservation of materials without degradation, but establishing effective organizational and technical processes to enable this form of digital preservation is daunting. Institutions need practical examples of how this task can be accomplished in manageable, low-cost ways."--P. [4] of cove

Establishing a Shared Vision for an Integrated Approach to Collections and Scholarly Communications

Over the past decade, the University Libraries\u27 Digital Collections have grown from an assemblage of discrete projects into two distinct programs that curate, manage, and publish digitized and born-digital materials online for educational and scholarly uses by Grand Valley State University\u27s community and the wider public. As these collections have grown, the support for creating, sharing, and preserving these materials has expanded from the Special Collections & University Archives into Systems and Technology Services, Knowledge Access and Resource Management Services, and Scholarly Communications, which manages the Libraries\u27 other Digital Collection program, consisting of the Institutional Repository (IR) and a suite of library publishing services. While cross-departmental collaborations have been fruitful, the library staff and faculty responsible for these separate Digital Collection programs are exploring structural evolution that will unify their parallel efforts in order to support a more holistic Digital Collections program that is sustainable and effective into the future. This report summarizes the findings of the group\u27s inquiry, which included reviews of the tasks, skills, and operations of the team, a review of digital collection programs at peer institutions, and review of aspirational digital collection programs. It includes recommendations for moving forward, near future next steps, and opportunities and challenges to consider as we progress

MTagger Guerilla Test of the MTagger Pop-up Tagging Window

The goal for this test was to determine if the Tagging window should incorporate the flexibility to navigate to the user’s personal MTagger account after applying tags to a webpage.Usability Grouphttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107002/1/MTagger_Guerilla.pd

MTagger Cognitive Walkthrough and Heuristic Evaluation

The goal for these evaluations was to reveal a preliminary set of issues pertaining to the usability, functionality and aesthetics of MTagger and to facilitate prioritizing further benchmarks.MTagger is an online social bookmarking tool using “tags” within MLibrary at the University of Michigan. The cognitive walkthrough was deployed as an arrow evaluation of this interface’s ability to facilitate learning and problem solving; the heuristic evaluation was an exhaustive evaluation of this interface’s features to determine a broad range of issues related to usability.Usability Grouphttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107005/1/MTagger_InitialEval.pd

MTagger User Interviews

Interviews were conducted to gather feedback about user behavior and expectations concerning MTagger and other social tagging tools in order to improve and expand upon existing features in the MTagger interface.Usability Grouphttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107000/1/MTagger_Interviews.pd

MTagger Usability Evaluation - Comparative Evaluation

Usability interns researched popular platforms that are currently providing online bookmarking and tagging services. Attention was paid to how these sites handle issues known to exist in MTagger as well as how these tools provide users with features that go beyond MTagger’s current implementation.Usability Grouphttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107001/1/MTagger_ComparitiveEvaluation.pd

Providing the ETDs of Today for the Researchers of Tomorrow

Presentation for the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) 2012 Fall Meeting. This presentation discusses the early findings from an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded project hosted by the University of North Texas (UNT) that is researching and documenting a range of life cycle curation and preservation practices for Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Constraining Torus Models for AGNs Using X-Ray Observations

In Unification Models, Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are believed to be surrounded by an axisymmetric structure of dust and gas, which greatly influences their observed properties according to the direction from which they are observed. The main aim of this work is to constrain the properties of this obscuring material using X-Ray observations. The distribution of column densities observed by Chandra in the Chandra Deep Field South is used to determine geometrical constraints for already proposed torus models. It is found that the best torus model is given by a classical `donut shape' with an exponential angular dependency of the density profile. The opening angle is strongly constrained by the observed column densities. Other proposed torus models are clearly rejected by the X-Ray observations.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, submitted to A&

Modular Curation for ETD Repositories

This paper discusses the Lifecycle Management of ETDs project led by the University of North Texas (UNT) and funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). This paper explains the research methodology the project took to evaluate these various tools, IRs and related submission systems; share findings; and discuss how these findings have solidified implementation improvements for the above mentioned curation technologies (Clam, AV, JHOVE/JHOVE2, DROID & FITS)