TIC meeting April 2012

Notes by Steven Flynn...


Campus updates

Kenyon. First round of projects completion. Medieval manuscript project is done. Holocaust is digitized and complete but possibly want to publish to DRC or omeka. Islam collection having some problems with professor getting back to us. Chemistry project is on sabbatical, stalled. Mcgalla video history project, adding stuff to restricted collection, working with Cleveland public school teachers who have login to DRC, minimal metadata at this point. Approved 2 other projects. Digitize back issues of literary journal, HIKA. "community within" project working with view share to create a data set and send back to dspace interface, using I frame to create a custom front page for collection. Japanese language collection: faculty staff member no longer at Kenyon. Honors thesis being submitted, found some bugs and Catalina helped to fix the license text issues. 

OWU. Based atlases. Hard drive was intercepted by 3rd party but eventually forwarded to student with images in tact and data. Arberium, more metadata, students ended up scanning 1400 specimens. Japanese language collection, professional artifact photographer (?) is that Japanese? Food project, student editing oral histories. Photos of southwest, gonna be done next week. Virgil project. Tombs of the unknown, going to Tanzania to take photos of tombs, need to check up. Potters for peace, video files of faculty members making pots. IR, updates coming later.

Check with college secretary of the about some real political campaign ads made by students, needs to be contextualized?

Oberlin. Geology collection, waiting on maps thing with ohiolink in order to have the map up and running. Biggest issue with real time updating of collection. XML DOM transformations require greater level of permissions. We could use a static map instead for demonstration purposes. Artist book project, student did 1 week of work didn't backup and the hard drive crashed, will retake the shots. Borges, ethnography.  Contact group for students that want to do omeka project, one student has lofty goals for omeka. paleontology collection is stuck due to sabbatical, hopefully will restart in the summer. Music pedagogy videos collection bogged down, but should pick up. Musical iconography collection-- about 3/4 of work is done. New version of IR with RSS feeds. Shansi collection is done. Didn't get hoped for NEH grant to put jazz albums in DRC, still looking at smaller book scanner. Oberlin is moving to hosted contentdm and creating a single digital portal for digital collections.

Denison. Costume collection nothing more until summer, *OMEKA* collaboration with Denison? Herbarium collection is done, adding a few things, creating a collectors collection, with biographical information about the collectors. Homestead collection put off to summer, it's a collection of digitizing archives from student run farm, will start in May. Earth materials rock collection, mostly done this summer. Writing our stories collection is on test, in the process of renaming files (current macro must have at least 8 characters in file name). Journal collection, Josh has Excile, Ephilmarus and Episteme loaded in, back issues for now but all new issues will be uploaded too. No work on IR so far, except the theme is set up.

Newspaper

METS ALTO, 

We want PDF to be single issue.

TIFFs will be dark archived

We can compare differences in how students reacted to different events in 60s and 70s.

Migration. 

Omeka. Should migrate costume collection to Omeka and merge with Denison. Catalina proposing moving to ohio5.org. Will work its Steve xi and Michael Upfold.

Funding. Institutions have the option to move some of their local funds to other outlays like newspaper.

Training and documentation with staff. Any ideas or needs for training of staff let Catalina know.

Matt's redesign of Denison and Wooster.

XML issues with needing hosting, proposes to use iframes and DRC hosting for map themes.

ContentDM migration, needs VPN access to Denison but there's a hold up.

There will be a meeting to discuss Wooster and Denison themes.

NITLE symposium, digital humanities, Alan needs talking points.

Omeka admin. group meeting 1/26/12

The Omeka administrative group met via Google Hangout to catch up on progress, such as it was.

• most institutions haven't had time to work with the system much over the holidays
• Catalina found the portal page she'd lost off the system and will continue to work on that; she'll bring others in to help and give feedback as needed.
• Oberlin is planning to have a student start on an NGL related exhibit in early February
• Marsha B. had developed for Oberlin some ver 1.0 how-to powerpoints-- Alan will post those for others to take a look at
• Steve will run a chron job to back up the Omeka files (zipped and tarred) on the Bluehost cloud.  We'll do this weekly for the time being. 
• We reminded ourselves not to create additional Omeka super user accounts.

TIC call 1/13/12

A brief summary of topics discussed at the 1/13/12 committee conference call:

• Catalina noted good progress on the "DRC in a box" concept she's working on for OhioLINK
• Matt Rolf's finished working on a google map interface; OL staff will assist us in moving this into production soon; Denison and Oberlin have a current need to use this interface
• Matt will next be working on the newspaper and page turning interface based on Miami U.'s student newspaper collection interface
• CONTENTdm collection migration is also on Matt's agenda
• We decided that we won't convert the "Mega Metadata Spreadsheet" into some type of database format tool, but we will review what collections' metadata is listed and add representative metadata applications from our projects.
• Catalina reported on DRC collection admin training at Denison-- she'll recyle this for Oberlin in February.  Others are welcome to attend at Oberlin or Catalina can set up another session too.
• Newspaper digitization vendor responses are in; Alan will get the workgroup on a call soon
• Omeka workgroup will have a conference call in late January.

Omeka server administrators' conference call

Brief notes from the local Omeka administrators' organizational conference call today...

• Xi will work on some design options for the overall homepage-- we'll run those by the Steering Committee before we commit to anything on the homepage
• Xi will also work on a Google document for administrators to share resources, procedures, etc.
• Steve is working on a chron job to give us some automatic backups on the Bluehost site-- no rush need on this at our current state of development
• Experiments, test collections, exhibits are already to be found at: http://www.ohio5.info/omeka/
• Steve got OAI harvesting working, but it seems that CSV file importing of metadata together with using the "drop box" for loading digital files is probably the most efficient method.
• Catalina will experiment with using Omeka as the grant project portal
• Meghan hopes to experiment with video files-- Steve's not pleased that Quicktime is the only mp3 player available right now

Omeka server support conference call

We had a conference call today to begin the process of explore the OH5 Omeka instance we've set up for all to use.  See this TIC webpage for the current listing of staff who'll be the main contacts for the immediate future.  We'll track who's working which which plug-ins at this site too.

Steve Flynn is trying to get the OAI Harvester plug-in to work so we can easily bring DRC content in to create Omeka exhibits.  Xi Chen will be testing out the loading of a tab-delimited file of metadata.  Bluehost creates daily and weekly backups that are constantly being overwritten, but  Steve will also work to develop a simple back up command so we can save the Omeka file snapshots elsewhere on our Bluehost site.

For the time being we hope each institution will create a test collection and exhibit.  Local Omeka administrators will begin to discuss next steps in an early November conference call.

OH5 Omeka server startup

Here are notes from today's phone conference exploring setting up a shared OH5 Omeka service (cf. omeka.org) on the Bluehost cloud-based web service.

• Alan Boyd (OBE), Xi Chen (OBE), Catalina Oyler (OH5), Steven Flynn (WOO), Meghan Frazer (KEN), and Robert Arnold (OWU) were on the call; Debby Andreadis (DEN) absent
• We will start by setting on OH5 instance of Omeka within which numerous individual Exhibits can be created for each institution
• Catalina and Xi will work to set up the OH5 Bluehost account.  Xi, Steven, and Robert (pending approval) will share the responsibilities as Technical Administrators, each able to respond to issues with the Bluehost server and the software components of the Omeka installation.
• At least one Omeka Project administrator will be designated on each campus as the main contact for training and support for projects to create various local exhibits-- Alan (initially-- OBE), Meghan (KEN), Steven (and possibly Marsha-- WOO), Debby (probably-- DEN), Emily (probably-- OWU); 
• Project Administrators will promote use of Omeka and should stay in touch with the online Omeka user community.
• Technical and Project administrators can meet as needed via phone conferences to coordinate use of the Omeka server
• The few established OH5 Omeka exhibits that are now hosted on other servers can be migrated to the shared server over time.

March 24, 2001 TIC meeting summary

All TIC members and Matt Rolf met at Denison.  Topics discussed included:

• Bottlenecks in OL and OARNET response to what seem like "simple" needs/fixes
  Meghan was somewhat hopeful that OL DRMC chair Gwen Evan's meeting w/OL and OARNET staff on this topic will be successful getting action on: 1) some form of OL staff "root" access to OARNET DSPACE servers and 2) quick implementation of a service request routing/monitoring system.  TIC will likely advise that Mark Christel send a letter of support on these issues after the immediate outcome of Gwen's meeting is clear.
  
• Review of Matt's current work agenda https://sites.google.com/site/oh5nextgenerationlibrary/Home/work-groups/digitization-group-1/interface-improvements
  Matt will be working through into "Medium Priority" items over the next few weeks
  
• Review of OhioLINK DRMC enhancement list
  Deferred until OL staff reviews numerous recommendations and ratings from OL DRC liaisons and comes up with a better consolidated list; OL is working on many of these enhancements to be implemented prior to an OL presentation at ALA this summer.         
• Reporting bugs for Matt
  Catalina and Matt will work up a method for the TIC to track interface bugs reported to Matt as well unsolved OL DRC bugs/requests we think others would be interested in knowing about.
  
• Quick Project Updates
  We went round the table on this--- we're all busy and no one reported any insurmountable problems
  
• Project documents: additional needs
  We all committed to paying attention to the local project page and keeping project tracking and and Project Info sheet up to dates.  Catalina will start linking resource documents for staff to each of the project tracking icons-- we'll all add examples as we can.  We'll also try to highlight exemplary projects dealing with different types of resources.  On the Project Info Sheets we'll document information on student worker/student classroom participation and on special interfaces used (e.g. photo gallery or book turning interfaces)
  
• TIC input for Staff Development workshops
  We suggest a keynote speaker on the topic metadata interaction within discovery layers e.g., the Electronic Landscape--- no specific names were mentioned, but NCSU and Oregon St. libraries were mentioned as likely institutions with leaders in this area.  We suggest that the rest of a summer workshop day be programmed with interactions among staff on topics popular in the survey and also on common issues arising from the current local projects.   We will work with Catalina to plan an "advanced metadata" workshop for a central location (or a couple locations) that includes all cataloging staff that might be included in metadata projects now or in the future.  We'll try to include  real hands-on work aimed at helping staff geared toward MARC records feel comfortable enhancing metadata for digital resources.
  
• Plans for cooperative outsourcing of digitizationWe discussed a variety of options for spending funds on collaboratively bid outsourcingeither in this phase of the grant or a phase2: digitizing yearbooks, student newspapers, honor theses, local newspapers, books published by our institutions or pre-1923 books published by our faculty.  
• Review grant activities
  We reviewed TIC-related goals that were written into the grant and concluded we were making satisfactory progress on all.
  
• Planning for the Project Portal
  We'll ask for input from Staff Dev. and the Steering committee and at future TIC meeting we'll outline the major components of the project's public portal.  We need to decide if we'll ask OL for a separate DSPACE instance that aggregates the local collections.  After defining the the major components of the public portal
  
• Metabuddy
  The Metabuddy idea is to develop a tool facilitate creation and coordination of metadata application profiles.  This would only be investigated during the current grant, but could be a significant compontent of a 2nd grant application.  We discussed various concepts of how this might work.  Catalina will see if contacts Alan made with OCLC research several years ago are still interested and try to gauge what progress has been made in this field in the interim.