This text first summarizes the major developments of the Digital Access and Information Architecture Department (DAIAD) from July 2005 through June 2006.
This section outlines the major developments and activities of the Department. These developments do not negate the ongoing maintenance and support the Department provides to the Libraries when it comes to digital library services and collections.
The hardware and software supporting the campus-wide search engine were upgraded. This was a joint effort between Rob Fox, Tom Lehman, and a number of people from OIT. This process required a significant amount of time and effort because it involved purchasing two computers substantially bigger than their predecessors, installation of new software, and its subsequent configuration, all under new policies and procedures mandated by OIT. As soon as this process is complete, the search engine will be seamlessly switched from the old hardware to the new hardware. This new implementation should be much faster and provide more room for growth.
In collaboration with a number of people from within the Libraries as well as outside the Libraries, a thing called the Catholic Research Resources Initiative was established at http://www.catholicresearch.net. The purpose of this "portal" application is to bring together significant, rare, and unique research materials from Catholic institutions across the United States to facilitate scholarship. The Department's role in the Initiative was to host the system's hardware and software infrastructure, to implement the system's graphic design, and to help articulate/maintain the system's metadata scheme.
Three significant infrastructure upgrades happened this past year, all lead by Rob Fox. First, the Libraries primary Web server was moved to the "glass house" at OIT. This process not only made the Web server more stable and responsive, it was also the first time the OIT had someone outside its department go through their newly outlined installation/security measures. Second, working again with OIT, the Libraries established a large amount of networked file space for several key applications, most of which are associated with the Institutional Digital Repository. It allows us to have an almost unlimited amount of storage space associated with a number of systems. Third, working closely with Library Systems, Rob is also installing a "computing cluster" which represents new way of making a group of computers act as one as well as provide means for redundancy in case of failure. All three of these upgrades are making the Libraries website infrastructure more reliable.
As a part of a Information Systems and Digital Access Division-wide process, the Institutional Digital Repository (IDR) was initiated. The primary purpose of this one-year pilot project is two-fold. First, the project is an experiment for exploring ways more cross-departmental work can happen across the Division. Second, the project is an attempt to investigate and demonstrate ways the Libraries can support the learning, teaching, and research missions of the University. To these ends Eric Morgan organized an initial group of eighteen (18) people from across the Division which has since grown to twenty-nine (29) people from across the Libraries. As a group "Team IDR" has to a large degree set-up, populated, and amalgamated various types of content from three distinct institutional repository applications (Dspace, DigiTool, and ETD-db) into a single holistic system through the use of MyLibrary. The Team has established relationships with the Kellogg Institute, the Institute of Latino Studies, the Computer Science Department, the Art Image Library, and the Office of the Provost to build collections of working papers, technical reports, digitized images, and examples of excellent undergraduate research. These collections have then been enhanced through the use of additional services such as search, browse, list who links to my page, list who looked at my page, create a list of my citations, etc. The status of the IDR can be gleaned from its website at http://www.library.nd.edu/idr/.
This is a fulfillment of last year's goals regarding working more holistically with the balance of the Division as well as implementing institutional repository software. This project consumed most of Eric Morgan's time as well as the much of the time of Elaine Savely and Rob Fox. So much so that other goals from last year did not get accomplished to the desired degree. Namely, the investigation into exploiting Web Services computing techniques as well as marketing and promoting library services and collections.
In a process spearheaded by Tom Lehman, the Department worked with sixteen other people across North America to write a manual for the open source system called MyLibrary. The first volume of this 200+ page book outlined issues relating to information architecture, user-centered design, usability studies, metadata schemes, and personnel issues for creating and maintaining digital library systems. The second volume described the nitty-gritty of getting MyLibrary up and running. The manual has taken on a life of its own and much of it will be republished and expanded as a LITA guide by the ALA press. The manual was written and formatted in an XML vocabulary called DocBook. The manual is online at http://dewey.library.nd.edu/mylibrary/manual/.
In the past year the Libraries became a LOCKSS Alliance member providing the Libraries with a larger degree of access to LOCKSS content. The Libraries also purchased and installed a new computer to host the LOCKSS service. The computer is much larger than any computer any other LOCKSS Alliance member has implemented, and Rob Fox worked very closely with the LOCKSS support group to install the necessary software. There is now very little chance the Libraries will run out of the necessary disc space or network bandwidth to mirror journal content. Next steps will be to establish more relationships with vendors, implement statistical methods within LOCKSS, and utilize LOCKSS more broadly to archive non-journal content.
Working with the Medieval Studies Librarian, Tom Lehman and Elaine Savely made the Libraries' list of medieval manuscript facsimiles accessible on the Web. This list, maintained in a Filemaker Pro database, itemizes titles, authors, locations, and descriptions of facsimiles. By exploiting the built-in Web server functionality of Filemaker the Department was able make the list searchable over the Internet at http://lib-266.library.nd.edu/index.html. The same process was applied to a collection of Southern Cone manuscripts for the Iberian and Latin American Studies Subject Librarian at http://lib-266.library.nd.edu/index_sc.html.
Working with Team Metalib, the Department helped create "Quick Searches" on subject pages of the extranet. Metalib is essentially a meta-search engine providing federated search functionality across multiple bibliographic databases. Metalib-friendly databases were identified and "cataloged" in the database-driven website application. A script was then written by Rob Fox that took a query supplied by the user and sent it to Metalib. Results are then returned in the look and feel of the Libraries' website. Configuring the list of underlying databases, deciding what databases to use in Quick Search, writing the end-user script, and configuring the output were all non-trivial tasks with many people across the Libraries involved.
Working with Marcy Simons, Diane Kennedy, Laurie McGowen, Jo Bessler, and Susanna King, Elaine Savely and Tom Lehman helped create an internal library newsletter using blogging software. The newsletter highlights personnel changes, community events, suggestions for working better together, and general information regarding the inner-workings of the Libraries. The Intranet continues to be a source of communication for the Libraries providing directory services, links to forms, descriptions of committees some complete with minutes, and reports of interest to all library employees.
During the Summer of 2005 Project Ockham (a National Science Foundation Grant) hired a Ph.D-level graduate student to implement a "find more like this one" service against sets of harvested metadata from across the Internet. The system collected metadata describing more than 430,000 items from the NSF Digital Library. It then automatically classified each item, provided links to similar items, provided a search interface to the entire set, and supplemented the interface with "Did you mean?" functionality through the use of a computer-generated dictionary/spell checker as well as a thesaurus. The site is available at http://mylibrary.ockham.org, and an article describing the implementation is available at http://dlib.org/dlib/october05/morgan/10morgan.html.
The Web Presence Improvement Team (WPIT) was initiated this year. Lead by Tom Lehman, the purpose of this group is to "do regular evaluations of the Libraries' website using standard website assessment tools, and to make changes to the website where the data shows there's a problem and testing shows the proposed change solves the problem." This Team will continue until October 2007 when an assessment of the Team's progress will be done. If deemed successful, the Team will continue, otherwise some other mechanism for continuous website improvement will be initiated.
Date created: 2006-07-26
Date updated: 2006-07-26
URL: http://www.library.nd.edu/daiad/annual-report-2005/
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