DPLAfest 2017

Join us for the kick off of DPLAfest 2017! This will include remarks from DPLA Board of Director's Chair Amy Ryan, Chicago Public Library's Commissioner Brian Bannon, and DPLA Executive Director Dan Cohen. 
This session will also include a panel discussion, "Telling the Stories of Who we Are" with three members of the DPLA and library community: Nell Taylor of Chicago's Read/Write Library, Jennifer Brier from University of Ilinois at Chicago, and Luis Herrera, City Librarian for the City and County of San Francisco. 

 

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.

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting, with generous support from IMLS and in collaboration with Pop Up Archive, has created more than 71,000 transcripts of historic public broadcasting recordings using the open source Kaldi speech-to-text software. During this panel at DPLAfest, we will launch a game called FixIt to crowdsource correction of speech-to-text generated transcripts. Panelists will also discuss potential computational linguistic tools and methodologies to enhance discoverability of digital media collections. The session will demonstrate the results of 1) our work with HiPSTAS at University of Texas-Austin, who have conducted soundwave analysis and pattern recognition on a sampling of content in the archive, 2) the output and of the speech-to-text tools including name, topic and location recognition, as well as the implementation of this data to aid in search and discovery, and 3) methodologies and workflows around crowdsourcing the correction of transcripts.

This presentation will focus on the results of a recently conducted survey of public libraries about their digitization activities, including their knowledge of and participation in DPLA. The results will be presented by library type from very small to very large. The fascinating results look at the state of digitization in public and state libraries including staffing levels, digitization by type, training, preservation and much more.  

This session provides an update on the RightsStatements.org project and extensive look at its implementation at Hubs and contributing institutions across the DPLA Network. Updates on the RightsStatements.org project will include recent developments in the project's governance, sustainability, and growth. Panelists, representing a geographically diverse selection of rights standardization projects from digital collections across the DPLA Network, will compare and contrast how each approached the work and its challenges. Each featured organization differs in operating structures and content types held, making their approach different by necessity. Each is also at a different stage in the implementation process, providing attendees with an array of opportunities for education and inquiry. Panelists will discuss metadata choices, development of training, and engagement with contributors. This session is open at all who would like to learn more about rights standardization projects from those who are on the front lines of implementing them.

This session will feature a handful of short 5-minute presentations about interesting projects and updates from members of the DPLA Community. Presentations include:

What You Told Us About Analytics
There is growing interest among GLAM institutions to improve the collection, analysis, and use of analytics data. Understanding current practices of peer institutions can help improve local practices and move our communities toward development and adoption of interoperable standards and shared tools. The DPLA recently surveyed Hubs about current practices and needs surrounding metadata quality analysis and usage analytics. We'll share preliminary results and next steps.

REPOX Redux: A Plan for Improvement
Many DPLA members use REPOX to aggregate content for harvesting. The program is finicky, out-of-date (the last update was October 2013), unsupported, and lacks important basic features. To resolve these problems, members of the Big Sky Country Digital Network (BSCDN) and the Empire State Digital Network (ESDN) propose making some much-needed improvements and updates to REPOX. The team will develop more robust logging and integrate the NCDHC DPLA OAI Aggregation Tools into REPOX, for example. In addition to presenting modifications and a features list, the team will be putting out a call to the DPLA community for other requests for other features and code contributions. The project will exist in a public space on GitHub and use the existing REPOX code base (also on GitHub) as a starting point. The team will begin the project in January 2017 and demonstrate their progress in this lightning talk.

IIIF Implementation
This talk will provide a brief introduction to IIIF and highlight the experiences of IIIF implementers. 

Seeing the Scene
Local community networks are the basis for what become "scenes". Music scenes, arts scenes and literary scenes among others are important parts of community identity, and foster a feeling of belonging and distinction. In previous decades, communication within a scene was based on locally produced print information sources such as newsletters, zines, pamphlets, handbills etc. These sources are now found in various archives, and are an important record of a scene's life. In today's age, communication is enabled via the Internet and social media. The open access Chicago Music Scene Web archive at Northwestern U is an experiment to discover if a scene can be represented in online archives with information gained via web harvesting. Attendees will see how important and easy it is to "see the scene" using web harvesting techniques. 

https://archive-it.org/collections/7253

TagTeam - Social Tagging in an Open Infrastructure
TagTeam is an open-source tagging platform with the power to move a tagging project from a folksonomy to an ontology. It’s an open infrastructure that supports interoperability and resource aggregation, developed by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. This session will provide an overview of TagTeam and how it supports social tagging, controlled vocabularies, open infrastructures, and interoperability. To demonstrate how TagTeam works in practice, the session will briefly review the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) as an ongoing use case. The presentation will also touch on TagTeam’s future goals.

Technology Selection for Texas - Beyond the Portal
The Texas State Libraries and Archives Commission has provided Texas Digital Library with a grant to partner with Houston Public Libraries and the University of North Texas' Portal to Texas History (the current hub for Texas) to develop a DPLA Service Hub. TDL surveyed a number of existing hubs across the country to learn about their experiences. Based upon peer feedback, the Texas Digital Library is currently implementing the Supplejack application from Digital New Zealand. This tool provides a GUI-based metadata aggregation and mapping service to visualize and simplify workflows for metadata managers. 

In this lightning talk, we will discuss our review of technologies and our selection of Supplejack as well as additional plans for development of a local discovery layer.

Improving Regional Metadata with the Western Name Authority File Project
In April 2016, the University of Utah received funding from IMLS for the Western Name Authority File project, a two-year planning grant designed to explore ways regional digital libraries can work together on issues of name authority control. This lightning talk will provide a brief overview of progress, which centered on collecting and evaluating baseline data from digital libraries in western states, collaboration with partner institutions, selecting a data model for the project, and testing tools and software to support shared creation and maintenance of a regional name authority file for personal names and corporate bodies. The talk will also explore how name authority control can improve discoverability for DPLA content providers in both local and regional aggregated digital library indexes.

The Indiana Memory DPLA Service Hub Approach: Metadata Aggregation on a Shoestring
Metadata mapping for a service hub is a complicated process. Learning about and negotiating the systems represented across a service hub to allow for aggregation can involve a wide variety of starting points and levels of expertise. In Indiana, a statewide service hub through the Indiana State Library has worked to create an approach to metadata aggregation for systems using CONTENTdm. For organizations not using CONTENTdm, Indiana University has also created a Metadata Mapping Tool that allows for spreadsheet-style data input that can be mapped to produce the XML feed that the IMDPLA needs to do its aggregating up to DPLA. Join us for a quick look at our approach to metadata aggregation as well as training for IMDPLA participants. We hope these comments will be helpful to existing or future DPLA Service Hubs.


Reaching Out to Potential DPLA Hub contributors: PA Digital's Communication Strategy and Plan 
As a hub, how do you develop a communication plan to reach out to potential new contributors in your community? And how do you keep current contributors engaged and up to date? Successful communication across different types of institutions and sectors requires some strategizing. PA Digital developed a plan to manage communication to the Pennsylvania community systematically, including social media, blog posts, email lists, webinars and in-person workshops. In this lightning talk we will give an overview of the development process of such a plan and some lessons learned from the implementation. The talk will include a URL to a template that we created based on our own spreadsheet. Attendees can use this resource as the basis for their own planning. 

 

After nearly 22 months of design and development, the Hydra-in-a-Box project partners -- the Digital Public LIbrary of America, DuraSpace, and Stanford University -- have made demonstrable progress to extend the Hydra project codebase and to develop next-generation repository and metadata aggregation solutions, incorporating the capabilities and affordances to support networked resources and services in a shared, sustainable, nationwide network.

This presentation offers the DPLA community an update on all aspects of the project. We will show: how the input (through user interviews conducted with DPLA community members and others) was incorporated into the process of designing the repository and aggregator products; how the larger repository community has helped to shape and develop the repository software; a demonstration of the repository application called Hyku, including the ease of deploying it to the cloud; a roadmap for application development in the final year of the IMLS-funded effort; and the plans for offering a Hydra-in-a-Box hosted service called HykuDirect. Hyku and the other Hydra-in-a-Box project outcomes allow a greater number of cultural heritage organizations to sustain scalable repositories and provides an easier path to having content aggregated by the Digital Public Library of America and connecting with other networked services.

This presentation will explore the process of evaluating, disrupting, and re-envisioning an evolving technology project because sometimes the most promising of ideas encounter real-world limitations. Yet, accepting that radical change is required opens up the possibility of finding new and better approaches to solving our common problems. The DPLA technology team has recently changed course in its project to overhaul our ingestion infrastructure, scaling back our use of LDP/triplestore models and technologies, and embracing those of big data and data science. Our new system is modular and optimized for distributed batch processing. Throughout the process, we engaged with critical questions relevant to anyone doing the difficult work of innovation.

Whether your institution is a hub, content partner, or exploring possibilities, the challenges of operating efficiently and effectively in a collaborative environment are undoubtedly familiar: How do we decide between best practices and “good enough?” How do we translate between the dialect of digital libraries and the languages of more traditional library environments? And how do we provide centralized infrastructure while still supporting local community projects? Thankfully, there are concrete and critical steps to take toward managing and sustaining these relationships to promote inclusion, professional literacy, and common purpose.

Join our presenters as they discuss collaborations between libraries across different professional sectors, including public, state, and academic institutions. Attendees will gain insight into the many issues that collaborations across sectors raise, and will leave with new tools for anticipating and managing these delicate but important relationships.