This session will feature a series of five minute presentations about interesting projects and updates from members of the DPLA Community. Presentations include:
Exposing DPLA usage stats through Google Data Studio
The DPLA aggregation model promises to provide more exposure to digital collections from a variety of institutions. But it also presents a challenge: how do we track and understand the full picture of usage of digital content, from the local repository on up through statewide aggregators, DPLA, and potentially other websites through re-use?
California Digital Library (CDL) has found one potential solution to this problem in Google Data Studio: a free tool for pulling Google Analytics and other data into a dynamic, interactive dashboard. This lightning talk will quickly introduce the concept of Google Data Studio and show the visualizations we have been able to create using the DPLA stats account.
Getting Quickly to a New Kind of Search on JSTOR
JSTOR Labs, an experimental product development group at JSTOR, has been working on a new form of search, in which users can upload their own document and search using that. Scholars can upload near-finished manuscripts as a way to complete a literature review, and students can enter the few pages of a work-in-progress paper to find scholarship they'll need to finish it. In this Lightning Round, we will demonstrate this new tool and the technology that powers it, as well as step through the "design thinking" and rapid prototyping processes that led to its development.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library Field Notes Project: digitizing archival material through institutional collaboration
The importance of field notes is well known to researchers and historians as they offer insight to expeditions, the habitats observed, and even the scientists themselves. However, since scientists may change institutional affiliation throughout their careers, their field notes aren’t always retained by a single repository. This makes it difficult for current researchers to access primary material produced by a single scientist or expedition. The Biodiversity Heritage Library Field Notes Project is a two-year collaborative effort to digitize field notes and make them freely available through the Biodiversity Heritage Library. This lightning round introduces the project, briefly explores some of the challenges we've come across, and highlights milestones we've reached so far.
Listening to War: Uncovering Wisconsin’s Wartime Oral Histories
The Recollection Wisconsin DPLA Service Hub is nearing the end of a year-long project to find and inventory oral history recordings documenting life during wartime, held by libraries, archives, and historical societies throughout Wisconsin. This statewide planning project, supported by an NEH grant, will result in a comprehensive plan to digitize, preserve and provide access to hidden, at-risk audiovisual resources. This lightning talk will report on the project's methodology, findings so far and next steps. Service Hubs and other collaborative digital library programs can take away ideas for leveraging project-based grants to expand and enhance their work.
Professional Opinion vs User Directed Digitization, Round 1
Cultural heritage institutions in the DPLA vary in their methods of digitizing one of the most unique historical objects: scrapbooks. The University of North Texas Digital Projects Unit seeks to clarify the expectations of its users by asking them how they would like to see scrapbooks represented in a digital space in digital libraries. In this lightning talk, we will share results of a web survey of DPLA partner’s methods and representation practices of scrapbooks and plans for usability studies on students, members of the public, and librarians. The final results of this study will include recommendations on how to preserve these artifacts digitally with users in mind.
Putting Principles Into Practice: Articulating DPLA's Shared Values
The DPLA team recently collaborated on a values statement that clearly articulates our principles and how they play out in practice. Recognizing that these values reflect both the current status and what we hope to achieve more effectively, we see this as a framework for our goals, our behaviors, and our day-to-day work. We'll share our process for creating the values statement, how we expect it to shape our work going forward, and how it has served to further a shared culture during a time of change in the team.
RE:VIVE Bringing together the world of archives and electronic music
RE:VIVE, an initiative by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision is using the power of electronic and progressive dance music to engage new audiences and raise the awareness of archives, their rich collections the creative inspiration they contain. RE:VIVE works with artists and record labels to produce new releases that are composed solely out of thematically curated archival material and inspired by the historical context of said curations. This lightning talk will show how the electronic music community can be an extremely valuable and insightful partner for heritage institutions world wide and can catalyze re-use of open content and contribution to the growing cultural commons.
Repurposing the API for Public Interfaces
Service hubs like the Empire State Digital Network, the service hub for NY State, represent a second generation of DPLA service hubs - hubs that act as a metadata conduit between providers and DPLA, but offer no public-facing interface or reporting capabilities for adminstrative partners. This has proved to be a problem for some of these hubs. Many new hubs coming online now face similar problems. ESDN has been thinking about how to put DPLA API data to use as a solution. We'll go over some of the solutions we tried and what our thinking is now.
