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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Waiting for midnight

Birthday Breakfast

I wish I wasn't so hooked on "Serial"

This show hasn't replaced "This American Life" for me, but it has become what I had always hoped TAL would - seemingly unending.  I am riveted.  http://serialpodcast.org/

Lexical distance between European languages

http://flowingdata.com/2014/01/14/lexical-distance-between-european-languages/


Michele Pollard
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Sketching and Experience Design

Check out this video on YouTube:

http://youtu.be/xx1WveKV7aE


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10 jQuery snippets every designer should know

10 jQuery snippets every designer should know

Webdesigner Depot

jQuery is used on thousands upon thousands of web pages. It's one of the most common libraries to insert into pages, and it makes DOM manipulation a snap.

Of course, part of jQuery's popularity is its simplicity. It seems we can do almost anything we like with this powerful library.

For all the options open to us, there are some snippets we tend to come back to time and time again. Today I'd like to give you 10 snippets that everyone, newbies to gurus, will use time and time again.

1) Back to top button

// Back To Top
$('a.top').click(function(){
$('html, body').animate({scrollTop : 0},800);
return false;
});

//Create an anchor tag
<a class="top" href="#">Back to top</a>

As you can see using the animate and scrollTop functions in jQuery we don't need a plugin to create a simple scroll to top animation.

By changing the scrollTop value we can change where we want the scrollbar to land, in my case I used a value of 0 because I want it to go to the very top of our page, but if I wanted an offset of 100px I could just type 100px in the function.

So all we are really doing is animating the body of our document throughout the course of 800ms until it scrolls all the way to the top of the document.

 

2) Checking if images are loaded

$('img').load(function() {
console.log('image load successful');
});

Sometimes you need to check if your images are fully loaded in order to continue with your scripts, this three line jQuery snippet can do that for you easily.

You can also check if one particular image has loaded by replacing the img tag with an ID or class.

 

3) Fix broken images automatically

$('img').error(function(){
$(this).attr('src', 'img/broken.png');
});

Occasionally we have times when we have broken image links on our website and replacing them one by one isn't easy, so adding this simple piece of code can save you a lot of headaches.

Even if you don't have any broken links adding this doesn't do any harm.

 

4 – Toggle Class on hover

$('.btn').hover(function(){
$(this).addClass('hover');
}, function(){
$(this).removeClass('hover');
}
);

We usually want to change the visual of a clickable element on our page when the user hovers over and this jQuery snippet does just that, it adds a class to your element when the user is hovering and when the user stops it removes the class, so all you need to do is add the necessary styles in your CSS file.

 

5 – Disabling input fields

$('input[type="submit"]').attr("disabled", true);

On occasion you may want the submit button of a form or even one of its text inputs to be disabled until the user has performed a certain action (checking the "I've read the terms" checkbox for example) and this line of code accomplishes that; it adds the disabled attribute to your input so you can enable it when you want to.

To do that all you need to do is run the removeAttr function on the input with disabled as the parameter:

$('input[type="submit"]').removeAttr("disabled");

 

6 – Stop the loading of links

$('a.no-link').click(function(e){
e.preventDefault();
});

Sometimes we don't want links to go to a certain page or even reload it, we want them to do something else like trigger some other script and in that case this piece of code will do the trick of preventing the default action.

 

7 – Toggle Fade/Slide

// Fade
$( ".btn" ).click(function() {
$( ".element" ).fadeToggle("slow");
});

// Toggle
$( ".btn" ).click(function() {
$( ".element" ).slideToggle("slow");
});

Slides and Fades are something we use plenty in our animations using jQuery, sometimes we just want to show an element when we click something and for that the fadeIn and slideDown methods are perfect, but if we want that element to appear on the first click and then disappear on the second this piece of code will work just fine.

 

8 – Simple Accordion

// Close all Panels
$('#accordion').find('.content').hide();
// Accordion
$('#accordion').find('.accordion-header').click(function(){
var next = $(this).next();
next.slideToggle('fast');
$('.content').not(next).slideUp('fast');
return false;
});

By adding this script all you really need to on your page is the necessary HTML go get this working.

As you can see in this snippet I firstly closed all the panels in our accordion and then on the click event I made the content that is linked to that header slide toggle , and all the other ones slide up. It's a simple method for a quick accordion.

 

9 – Make two divs the same height

$('.div').css('min-height', $('.main-div').height());

Sometimes you want two divs to have the same height no matter what content they have in them, this little snippet enables just that; in this case it sets the min-height which means that it can be bigger than the main div but never smaller. This is great for masonry like websites.

 

10 – Zebra stripped unordered list

$('li:odd').css('background', '#E8E8E8');

With this little snippet you can easily create zebra striped unordered lists, this places the background you define on every odd list item so that you can place the default one for the even ones in your CSS file. You can add this snippet to any type of markup, from tables to plain divs, anything you want to be zebra stripped.

 

Conclusion

These are the pieces of jQuery code I find myself using again and again in my projects. I hope you bookmark this page and come back whenever you need one of these snippets.

 

What jQuery snippets do you rely upon? Do you have better code for these scenarios? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, useful image via Shutterstock.

7 Breathtaking Ornamental Font Sets With 500+ Ornaments – only $12!

Source

Original Article: http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/35285/f/661066/s/362b0585/sc/4/l/0L0Swebdesignerdepot0N0C20A140C0A10C10A0Ejquery0Esnippets0Eevery0Edesigner0Eshould0Eknow0C/story01.htm

Michele Pollard 

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A Dive Into Plain JavaScript

A Dive Into Plain JavaScript

CSS-Tricks

I think jQuery provides so much benefit it still makes sense to use on projects of even modest scope and up. But knowing how to do the simple stuff without it is very good to know, and getting pretty easy these days as long as you "cut the mustard" first.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

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A Dive Into Plain JavaScript is a post from CSS-Tricks

Original Article: http://blog.adtile.me/2014/01/16/a-dive-into-plain-javascript/

Michele Pollard 

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How to learn more in 2014

How to learn more in 2014

Webdesigner Depot

Albert Einstein once said, "Any fool can know. The point is to understand." It's one thing to be aware of what's new in web design, quite another to be in the thick of it actually producing usable designs that solve problems.

To keep up in this industry, You need a heightened sense of curiousity and a desire to keep learning.

As a user-centered designer, I literally spend half of my days meeting with stakeholders, peers, and subject matter experts. Finding enough quiet time just to deliver what's expected of me consumes the remainder of my day. But this is the career I've chosen (I might argue it's chosen me) — I enjoy solving problems, love design, and am captivated by technology, so I'm not sure I ever had a choice to be honest. But for any of us, keeping our skills current as technology changes can be challenging.

As the Kano Model reminds us, today's delights rapidly transform into tomorrow's minimum expectations from users.

It's not easy keeping up. Factor in family life, hanging with friends, watching the big game, or whatever your guilty pleasure may be at the time, and you have a constant deluge of competing forces vying for whatever "me time" remains. And then there's that other thing called sleep that nobody has (yet) figured out how to achieve.

So what's your secret, or not so secret, weapon? What's in your go-to arsenal. How do you stay current? Do you read, watch videos, listen to podcasts, experiment with code, or a little of all of the above?

Let me start by sharing what has worked for me personally, and in turn invite you to reveal where you go when you need to stay up to date.

I'm aware that there are many resources out there that I have yet to try, such as Adobe TV, Code Academy, Tuts+, Code School, and others. So don't take offense if one of your favorites isn't on my personal go-to list. I intend to eventually check all those out, but you know what they say about good intentions.

Two of my longtime favorites are lynda.com and teamtreehouse.com depending on which side of my brain I'm using. Both offer courses for design and coding, but for my money (or my employer's money as they're footing the bill), I'm turning toward lynda.com for my creative, artistic right brain, while leaning on Treehouse for my left brained logical analytical side.

One of my favorites on lynda.com is Deke's Techniques, an ongoing collection of Photoshop and Illustrator projects that can be completed in ten minutes or less. But I also rely on lynda.com for full on courses, such as the nearly four-hour long Edge Animate Essential Training, which takes you from an overview of the interface all the way through publishing. Likewise, Luke Wroblewski's Web Form Design Best Practices really opened my eyes to why forms matter and some savvy techniques behind form design. I've also turned to lynda.com for more technical tutorials, such as iOS SDK Essential Training.

As I alluded to earlier, teamtreehouse.com is my home when I want to get my hands a little bit dirty. Although, still providing very high quality video tutorials like lynda.com, Treehouse's presentations carry a much more quirky vibe in the way they engage the viewer. Sometimes it comes across as a bit much for my taste, but the quality of the content is ultimately my main concern, which is very good. For example, to contrast their iOS Foundations tutorial to the equivalent on lynda.com, what I love about Treehouse are the code challenges and quizzes. What I've found, personally, is that I have a tendency to nod along while watching a tutorial, saying "yep I get it." But Treehouse presents code challenges throughout a tutorial that really test your knowledge, and it's usually at that point in time I realize I really didn't get it at all like I thought I had.

Treehouse has also gamified the learning experience for subscribers. You earn badges as you complete various tasks, tutorials, and adventures where you can see how you rank amongst your peers. For instance, I'm number 2 on my group standings amongst my collegues at work. The fact that I even know that proves the method behind their madness works on at least one of us. They also enable you to share your achievements via social media if you're into braggadocio, which I never realized before, but apparently I am.

Not to be outdone, Lynda offers certificates of course completion that you can print out or even email, although I'm not sure how much, if any, weight that carries with your current or potential employers contrary to what lynda.com may want you to believe.

In my opinion, you can have all the degrees or certificates or badges that you want, but in the end it comes down being able to produce something. And that's exactly why I love codepen.io. Codepen is a front-end sandbox whose motto is "Demo or it didn't happen" where people can view and rate your demos or even provide feedback.

I use Codepen on multiple fronts. First, it's a terrific source of HTML/CSS/JS inspiration. There's a ton of awesome demos that leave you thinking: I never knew that was even possible with CSS or HTML. How did they do that??

Second of all, it's a great way to reverse engineer something you like. Granted, it's not a tutorial site, but all of the code used for each demo is interactive where you can literally play with it and test out other people's work to learn what does what. Or if you prefer, like GitHub, you can fork it and extend someone else's demo in a new direction.

And last but certainly not least, it's just a great way to practice. It offers tons of resources you can tap into, such as CSS preprocessors like Sass, LESS, and Stylus. With the click of a checkbox you can also choose to write prefix-free code or normalize your CSS. Have an external stylesheet, script or even just something from another "pen" you'd like to link to? Not a problem. If you prefer, write your code using CoffeeScript or LiveScript. You can even link to an external library such as jQuery, Zepto, MooTools, YUI and others with the click on a button. Still not finding the one you want? No fear, you'll probably find it in the CDNJS library to which Codepen allows you to externally link. For what it's worth, I look at Codepen as the holy grail of front-end experimentation.

So let's see, I've got more video tutorials than I can handle, and I have my sandbox. What else could I want?

Well, one of my favorite passtimes is reading magazines, and two of my all-time favorites happen to be .NET Magazine and Web Designer, which both offer iPad subscriptions. In either publication, you'll find terrific interviews with insanely creative people and tons of amazing tutorials each month. I get excited with every new release to say the least.

Add in Chris Coyier's CSS-Tricks and Luke Wroblewski's lukew.com, and I'd argue that 24 hours isn't enough time in the day to fit all of this in, at least not for me.

So there you have it, my repository of "expert-ness" that I turn to for education, inspiration, experimentation, and general insight from people just like you all around the world.

 

Where do you get your knowledge and inspiration? How do you plan to increase your knowledge in 2014? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, learning image via Shutterstock.

Video Course: Website Wireframing with HTML5 & CSS3 – only $14!

Source

Original Article: http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/35285/f/661066/s/363454d2/sc/4/l/0L0Swebdesignerdepot0N0C20A140C0A10Chow0Eto0Elearn0Emore0Ein0E20A140C/story01.htm

Michele Pollard 

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Copyright 101 from BYU

Copyright 101 from BYU

Digitization 101

BYU Center for Teaching and Learning has a series called "Copyright 101". Below is the first video in the series, which shows the care that they took in creating this and they type of information that they are conveying.  You can view the entire series at http://copyright101.byu.edu/.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Original Article: http://hurstassociates.blogspot.com/2014/01/copyright-101-from-byu.html

Michele Pollard 

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I could get into this

DIY Moleskine!

 

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Cadence's Hastings Talent qualifier

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Location:Busted Nut Bar n' Grill

One for the record books

Wedding of Zachary and Candice Nunn 5/11/18. More pics for Google+ family/friends.

 

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