APIs and the Library: What, Why?

APIs (Application Programming Interface): What are they? Why are they? Introduction to APIs and their role in the Librar

APIs and the Library: What, Why?

APIs (Application Programming Interface): What are they? Why are they? Introduction to APIs and their role in the Librar

Avro: Overview and Implications for Metadata Processing

Poster presented at 2018 Code4Lib conference in Washington, D.C

Improving Our Reference Data, or How We Killed the Hash Mark

All responsible academic libraries record their reference transactions. It is good practice to know how many patrons have been helped at your service points. For years we have participated in this record keeping with hash marks on paper, painstaking tallying, and manual spreadsheet entry for the purpose of saying, “we helped X patrons during Y month”. But, like most things academic, reference runs on its own calendar and requires more sophisticated tools to truly investigate and evaluate. To generate more useful reference statistics, we created a simple, online tool for recording reference interactions. The tool is accessible anywhere reference is taking place, generating normalized data in a centralized, backed up database. This design allows for more nuanced and granular analysis, in addition to streamlining the reporting process at a later date. Development of the tool has been iterative, soliciting feedback from primary users, including graduate students and librarians. A key part of this process was our decision to build a tool as opposed to purchasing a pre-made one. Our need to better understand our reference staffing needs was key, and a variety of commercial tools tout this ability. However, the barriers to developing such a tool in-house have dramatically lowered, making the creation of web-based tools more common. Similarly, the tool itself uses existing library infrastructure, as it is a simple web form and hooks into an existing database, so infrastructure changes were nil. With a custom-built tool, we have total control over its functionality and reporting. This presentation will discuss the full development and implementation of the new reference statistics tool, along with the data we have collected and the trends we have observed from the first six months of its use

Digital Humanities in Ten Pages or Less! Engaging Students with Digital Texts through Sustainable Collaboration

Digital Humanities projects are somewhat new to many librarians, particularly those who are liaisons to faculty who are venturing into this area. Because of this “newness,” many librarians are unsure of their role in engaging with faculty or other librarian colleagues who are working with digital collections and editions, text mining, or other applications of technology to humanities scholarship. A digital humanities project need not be intimidating. Opportunities are nascent in everyday projects and technologies. Through the example of a digital humanities project integrated into a senior-level writing intensive course for English majors, this session will offer attendees a working definition of digital humanities, provide ideas for collaborating with faculty to introduce digital humanities projects into the curriculum, offer data on student engagement with digital texts, and demonstrate that digital humanities projects can be approachable, manageable and fruitful for student learning. Creating a sustainable collaboration by looking for complementary skill sets among your colleagues can lead to opportunities growing out of your job responsibilities. This project developed from two collaborations: one between the liaison and the digital publishing librarian and the other from an ongoing instructional collaboration between the liaison and a faculty member. The problem/question for investigation was two-fold and emerged from the digitization of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s publication, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892), for a visiting National Library of Medicine exhibit. The liaison was interested in investigating student perceptions and attitudes towards reading literary texts online, while the digital publishing librarian was looking to improve a library-developed eReader and the experience of reading online. The faculty member, in turn, has been engaged for many years in expanding uses and understandings of new digital technologies and media in a traditional academic discipline. The approach was to join forces with the faculty member, who was offering a senior seminar in Digital Humanities for English majors. Working collaboratively with the faculty member the librarians developed an instructional unit within the course, which introduced the evolution of digital literary texts. They provided the students with an assignment using a digitized text, and collected blog postings and a survey to examine for evidence of attitudes towards reading digitized literary texts and feedback for improving the eReader and Python-based TextAnalysis tool. Attendees will hear the perspectives of the faculty member, liaison librarian and digital publishing librarian on the collaboration process and the value of this course-integrated digital humanities project for student learning. Survey results and analysis of blogs will offer insight into student attitudes towards reading online literary texts, which will contribute to a growing body of research on college students and their perspectives on reading electronic texts (Keller 2012; Rose 2011; Hernon et al. 2007). The presentation will engage the audience through interactive polling via mobile devices, using survey questions related to digital humanities and online reading. Attendees will take away ideas for collaborating with faculty through a practical and useful example of a digital humanities project that will demonstrate the benefits of collaboration, illustrating that simple analysis tools can yield meaningful results

Growing Up Fast: Using Vagrant to Prototype New Infrastructure

The library established a task force with the university archive to preserve and provide access to the archive’s digital objects. The archive said: ‘here’s 60 terabytes.’ We (the librarians) thought: ‘our 2 terabyte, single server infrastructure won’t work.’ So, we sketched out one that met the archive’s requirements and aligned with trusted digital repository best practices. Given limited resources to build out this infrastructure, we turned to virtual machines. Our presentation will outline how prototyping with Vagrant and virtual machines allowed us to put a theoretical infrastructure through the wringer, improving the design and leading to a confident deployment

Imagining an Ecosystem: Selecting a Digital Collections Platform for the Library

This presentation was delivered at the event, Converge and Ingest: Learning About Digital Preservation , organized by Wayne State University\u27s National Student Digital Alliance (NDSA) student chapter. Focusing on the research of a new digital collections platform, this presentation touched on some available open-source options, and what functionality and infrastructure is needed to manage, preserve, and provide access to digital collections