A Day in the Life the Metadata Librarian for the Mountain West Digital Library [feedly]

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A Day in the Life the Metadata Librarian for the Mountain West Digital Library
// Digital Public Library of America

Anna Neatrour is the Digital Metadata Librarian at the Mountain West Digital Library. In that capacity she works with libraries across the western states to support description and discovery of digital collections.

In this post, Anna describes one of her typical days as a metadata librarian aggregating data on a regional level and as a Service Hub with DPLA.

What does a Metadata Librarian do? The over ten million records in the Digital Public Library of America represent the work of countless people collecting, digitizing, and describing unique cultural heritage items. Mountain West Digital Library provides access to over 900,000 records, or about 10% of DPLA's total collection. So, what does it take to be a metadata services librarian at a large DPLA service hub? Let's find out.

8:30-10:30. Evaluate New Collections

I evaluate new collections from partners throughout Utah, Idaho, Montana, Arizona, and Nevada, and harvest their metadata into the Mountain West Digital Library. The MWDL has a well-established Metadata Application Profile, and I check new collections for conformance with the MWDL community's shared expectations for descriptive metadata. Sometimes there are adjustments a local collection manager will need to make to field mappings, or values in the metadata that need to be revised or added. MWDL runs on ExLibris' Primo discovery system, and we harvest collections through OAI-PMH. This means that I spend time checking OAI streams prior to harvesting a new collection. For a new repository I'll send the collection manager a detailed report with information about what to fix. For long-term, established partners of MWDL, I'll fire off e-mails with quick suggestions.

10:30-12:00. MWDL Staff Meeting

Once a week, our team checks in about current projects, technical troubleshooting, and the status of new collections we are adding.

12:30-1:30. Web Page Updates for New Collections

I've been working recently on harvesting new collections from the University of Idaho Digital Library, which has a wonderfully eclectic collection of materials that covers a variety of topics including jazz history, forestry, and much more.

There's some great graphic design in the Vandal Football Program Covers Collection, like this one which proclaims "Mashed Idahoes Comin' Up!"

Football Program. Idaho – Arizona State, 09/28/1957, Goodwin Stadium, Phoenix (Arizona). Courtesy of University of Idaho Library via Mountain West Digital Library.

 

The International Jazz Collections at the University of Idaho are a unique resource, and many of the digitized materials from those collections are available in the DPLA, like this photo of Joe Williams and Count Basie from the Leonard Feather Jazz Collection.

Joe Williams and Count Basie, 1960. Courtesy of the University of Idaho Library via Mountain West Digital Library.

 

We've also added great collections from the Arizona Memory Project, including the Petrified Forest Historic Photographs collection that adds to our existing materials on national parks and recreation in the region. My favorite item in this collection is photograph of Albert Einstein touring the park, a detail of which can be seen above in the header image for this post.

One of the things I enjoy the most about harvesting new collections into MWDL is seeing how the information available on a particular topic gets augmented and expanded as more items are digitized. For example, many MWDL partners have photos and documents that tell the story of the Saltair Resort on the shores of the Great Salt Lake.

We have many older photos documenting the history of the resort, but we recently added a selection of color photos from 1965, during the time period after the resort was abandoned, but before it was later destroyed by arson.

Saltair Pavilion, 1965. Bolam, Harry. Courtesy of Utah Valley University Library via the Mountain West Digital Library.

 

All of these collections from MWDL then combine to help researchers find even more resources on these topic in DPLA.

2:00-3:00. Virtual Meeting or Training Support

I enjoy working with librarians from different institutions across our multi-state region, which means meeting online. The meetings might center on the activities of a MWDL Task Force or time with a librarian needing support.

3:00-4:00 Technical Troubleshooting

I check harvested collections after they are imported/ingested into Primo and troubleshoot any issues when necessary. This means checking the PNX (Primo Normalized XML) records in our discovery system to make sure that the harvested metadata will display correctly, and also be available for DPLA to harvest.

4:00-5:30 PLPP Partner Support

MWDL is one of the four service hubs working on the Public Libraries Partnerships Project, and while we support all our partners, we are spending extra time helping public librarians who are new to digitization get their first collections online!

Sharing the digital collections regionally at mwdl.org and nationally through DPLA is extremely rewarding. The next time you find a cool digital item in DPLA, thank your local metadata librarian!

Featured image: Detail of Dr. and Mrs. Albert Einstein visit Rainbow Forest, date unknown. Courtesy of the National Park Service (AZ) via the Arizona Memory Project and Mountain West Digital Library. 

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 All written content on this blog is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. All images found on this blog are available under the specific license(s) attributed to them, unless otherwise noted.

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Inspirational Bible Verse

1 Corinthians 13:4-6: Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
http://bit.ly/RHkNba

Digitization grant will help Oak Park library share Hemingway artifacts - Chicago Tribune

http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/oak-park-river-forest-forest-park/ct-oak-park-hemingway-grant-met-20150108-story.html


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Web Archive Management at NYARC: An NDSR Project Update [feedly]

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Web Archive Management at NYARC: An NDSR Project Update
// The Signal: Digital Preservation

The following is a guest post by Karl-Rainer Blumenthal, National Digital Stewardship Resident at the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC).

A tipping point from traditional to emergent digital technologies in the regular conduct of art historical scholarship threatens to leave unprepared institutions and their researchers alike in a "digital black hole." NYARC–the partnership of the Frick Art Reference Library, the Museum of Modern Art Library and the Brooklyn Museum Library & Archives–seeks to institute permanent and precedent-setting collecting programs for born-digital primary source materials that make this black hole significantly more gray.

Since the 2013 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for instance, NYARC has archived the web presences of its partner museums and those of prominent galleries, auction houses, artists, provenance researchers and others within their traditional collecting scopes. While working to define description standards and integrating access points with those of traditional resources, NYARC has further leveraged this leadership opportunity by designing this current National Digital Stewardship Residency project, which is to concurrently prepare their nascent collections for long-term management and preservation.

Archiving MoMA's many exhibit sites preserves them for future art historians, but only if critical elements aren't lost in the process.

Stewarding web archives to the future generations that will learn from them requires careful planning and policymaking. Sensitive preservation description and reliable storage and backup routines will ultimately determine the accessibility of these benchmarks of our online culture for future librarians, archivists, researchers and students. Before we can plan and prepare for the long term, however, it is incumbent upon those of us with responsibility to steward especially visually rich and complex cultural artifacts to assure their integrity at the point of collection–to assure their faithful rendition of the extent, behavior and appearance of visual information transmitted over this uniquely visual medium.

Quality assurance (QA)–the process of verifying and/or making the interventions necessary to improve the accuracy and integrity of archived web-based resources at the point of their collection–was therefore the logical place to begin defining long term stewardship needs.  As I quickly discovered, though, it also happens to be one of the slipperiest issues for even experienced web archivists. Like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, its success begins with having all of the right pieces, then requires fitting those pieces together in the correct order and sequence, and ultimately hinges on the degree to which our final product's 'look and feel' resembles that of our original vision.

Unless and until the technologies that we use to crawl and capture content from the live web can simply replicate every conceivable experience that any human browser may have online, we are compelled to decide which specific properties of equally sprawling and ephemeral web presences are of primary significance to our respective missions and patrons, and which therefore demand our most assiduous and resource-intensive pursuit.

Determining those priority areas and then finding the requisite time and manpower to do them justice is challenging enough to any web archiving operation. To a multi-institutional partnership sharing responsibility for aesthetically diverse but equally rich and complex web designs, it's enough to stop you right in your tracks. To keep NYARC's small army of graduate student QA technicians all moving in the same direction as efficiently as possible, and to sustain a model of their work beyond the end of their grant-funded terms, I've therefore spent the bulk of this first phase to my NDSR project building towards the following procedural reference guide. I now welcome the broader web archiving community to review, discuss and adapt this to their own use:

This living document will be updated to reflect technical and practical developments throughout and beyond the remainder of my residency. In the meantime, it will provide NYARC's decision-makers, and others who are designing permanent web archiving programs, an executive summary of the principles and technologies that influence the potential scopes of QA work. Its procedural guidelines walk our QA technicians through their regular assessment and documentation process. Perhaps most importantly, this roadmap directs them to the areas where they may make meaningful interventions, indicates where they alternatively must rely on help from our software service providers, Archive-It, and flags where future technical development still precludes any potential for improvement. Finally, it inventories the major problem areas and improvement strategies presently known to NYARC to make or break the whole process.

This iteration of NYARC's documentation is the product of expansive literature review, hands-on QA work, regular consultation and problem solving with interns and professional staff, and the generous advice of colleagues throughout the community. As such, it has prepared me not only for upcoming NDSR project phases focused on preservation metadata and archival storage, but also for a much longer career in digital preservation.

As any such project must, it hinges the success of any rapidly acquired technical knowledge or expertise to equally effective project management, communication and open documentation–skill sets that every emergent professional must cultivate in order to have a permanent role in the stewardship of our always tumultuous digital culture. I'm sure that this small documentation effort will provide NYARC, and similar partners in the field, with the tools to improve the quality of their web archives. Also, I sincerely hope that it provides a model of practice to sustain such improvements over radical and unforeseen technological changes–that it makes the digital black hole just a little more gray.

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Alfre Woodard Sizzle | MAKERS

Makers Profile

http://www.makers.com/alfre-woodard


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This Record Sleeve Turns Into a Wireless Touch DJ Controller: DJ Qbert and Novalia - Create Digital Music

This looks like a maker triumph. Super cool, functional, inexpensive to manufacture, lots of elbow grease.

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2015/01/dj-sleeve-turns-wireless-touch-controller-dj-qbert-djay/


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Bluetooth keyboard for my phone

Finally got a dedicated keyboard for my iPhone 6 Plus. It's a okay. Almost normal, I just want to be able to write anywhere and hold myself to that - so it works for that purpose. The most normal row on the keyboard is the middle one. The rows above and below seem one key off, or perhaps it's my bad typing habits. It will take some getting used to,but the iWerks bluetooth foldable keyboard it alright.


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