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SMTL @ DUL

In my first six weeks at DUL (Duke University Libraries), I’m deciphering acronyms, even beyond those I absorbed at IBM, Toshiba, and LexisNexis, which is to say, a whole new lexicon.

Within the DST (Digital Strategies and Technology) organization, my ITS (Information Technology Services) team consists of three departments, located in the PBR complex (Perkins Bostock Rubenstein, not Pabst Blue Ribbon).

  • Core Services supports > 100 tools and platforms, deploys and maintains > 600 systems and workstations, and sets up all the specialized equipment you see throughout the libraries
  • Software Services develops state of the art applications such as the RDR (Research Data Repository)
  • LSIS (Library Systems & Integration Support) is preparing for the evolution to a new LSP (Library Services Platform) called FOLIO in collaboration with OLF (Open Library Foundation), Index Data, and EBSCO (Elton B. Stephens Co.)

We work in conjunction with Duke’s OIT (Office of Information Technology), and with many external organizations, such as SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), OLE (Open Library Environment), OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), ABCDEFG (no, I’m getting carried away…).

Unlike the commercial sector, we’re intent on collaboration rather than competition. I’m excited to be a part of TRLN (Triangle Research Library Network), and the Ivy Plus Libraries partnership of 13 leading academic libraries who sponsor the BorrowDirect initiative.

This is such a fun place to work! We have a staff yoga class given by Lindsey Crawford of Global Breath Studio, and I figured out how to use the meescan app , to check out an actual book, from which I learned from Smitten Kitchen that chaat masala is great on popcorn. Last night I was thrilled to attend the Durham Literacy Center’s event sponsored by DUL, with author Therese Anne Fowler.

Now if I could catch the PR1; bus which traverses the full mile between my office and parking….

SMTL (So Much To Learn)!

Laura Cappelletti
New Director – ITS @ DUL

Shiny New Chrome!

Chrome bumper and grill

In 2008, Google released their free web browser, Chrome.  It’s improved speed and features led to quick adoption by users, and by the middle of 2012, Chrome had become the world’s most popular browser. Recent data puts it at over 55% market share [StatCounter].

As smartphones and tablets took off, Google decided to build an “operating system free” computer based around the Chrome browser – the first official Chromebook launched in mid-2011.  The idea was that since everyone is doing their work on the web anyway (assuming your work==Google Docs), then there wasn’t a need for most users to have a “full” operating system – especially since full operating systems require maintenance patches and security updates.  Their price-point didn’t hurt either – while some models now top-out over $1000, many Chromebooks come in under $300.Acer Chromebook

We purchased one of the cheaper models recently to do some testing and see if it might work for any DUL use-cases.  The specific model was an Acer Chromebook 14, priced at $250.  It has a 14” screen at full HD resolution, a metal body to protect against bumps and bruises, and it promises up to 12 hours of battery life.  Where we’d usually look at CPU and memory specs, these tend to be less important on a Chromebook — you’re basically just surfing the web, so you shouldn’t need a high-end (pricey) CPU nor a lot of memory.  At least that’s the theory.

But what can it do?

Basic websurfing, check!  Google Docs, check!  Mail.duke.edu for work-email, check!  Duke.box.com, check!  LibGuides, LibCal, Basecamp, Jira, Slack, Evernote … check!

LastPass even works to hold all the highly-complex, fully secure passwords that you use on all those sites (you do you complex passwords, don’t you?).

Not surprisingly, if you do a lot of your day-to-day work inside a browser, then a Chromebook can easily handle that.  For a lot of office workers, a Chromebook may very well get the job done – sitting in a meeting, typing notes into Evernote; checking email while you’re waiting for a meeting; popping into Slack to send someone a quick note.  All those work perfectly fine.

What about the non-web stuff I do?

Microsoft Word and Excel, well, kinda sorta.  You can upload them to Google Docs and then access them through the usual Google Docs web interface.  Of course, you can then share them as Google Docs with other people, but to get them back into “real” Microsoft Word requires an extra step.

Aleph, umm, no.  SAP for your budgets, umm, no. Those apps simply won’t run on the ChromeOS.  At least not directly.

Acer ChromebookBut just as many of you currently “remote” into your work computer from home, e.g., you _can_ use a Chromebook to “remote” into other machines, including “virtual” machines that we can set up to run standard Windows applications.  There’s an extra step or two in the process to reserve a remote system and connect to it.  But if you’re in a job where just a small amount of your work needs “real” Windows applications, there still might be some opportunity to leverage Chromebooks as a cheaper alternative to a laptop.

Final Thoughts:

I’m curious to see where (or not) Chromebooks might fit into the DUL technology landscape.  Their price is certainly budget-friendly, and since Google automatically updates and patches them, they could reduce IT staff effort.  But there are clearly issues we need to investigate.  Some of them seem solvable, at least technically.  But it’s not clear that the solution will be usable in day-to-day work.Google Chrome logo

If you’re interested in trying one out, please contact me!

 

“We have so much time and so little to do. Strike that; reverse it.”

We are an ambitious organization, and that is a wonderful trait which directs our motivations and intentions towards good service to our users and community.  But what happens when we realize that we have so much to accomplish in a short period of time?  It can either cripple us or make us excited and frantic, like Willa Wonka’s reaction when he reveals to Charlie that he has won the contest.   Within the Libraries, there are so many great ideas and valuable projects worth doing that it creates competition for the time and people available.

Image for multitasking

In the summer and early fall of 2017, the ITS leadership team developed a roadmap document for valuable projects we believed were established priorities for the Libraries requiring ITS resources.  The visualization was intended to be an indication of just how much was in the queue rather than a timeline of scheduling and completing projects.  Moreover, the visualization indicates how much operations and maintenance consume the capacity to do new projects, eventually and completely overwhelming opportunity for new projects.  It served its purpose of showing how even a subset of projects can look daunting, but it also only reveals a glimpse of the preparation, effort, and actual work it takes to manage multiple projects in a portfolio.  It also lacks information about the projects that are not in the roadmap or what the process should be to shift priorities when a new initiative is created, how to react to unexpected opportunities for funding, or a when a grant proposal is awarded.  Most importantly, it lacks the detail about the people involved in the projects, the most important part of project management.

ITS major projects 3+ year roadmap
ITS major projects 3+ year roadmap

The realignment of the Libraries announced this spring gave me the opportunity to reconsider staff strengths and roles in the face of the priorities already documented, and specifically I wanted to consider a new way of managing the streams of projects within the portfolio being created.  Project management, regardless of the methodology, creates a culture, and, at its best, creates an inclusive, open, collaborative, and cooperative culture.  My ultimate goal for the new Digital Strategies and Technology division is to create opportunity for that culture to develop throughout the Libraries, led by the example of DST.

Digital Strategies and Technology organizational chart
Digital Strategies and Technology organizational chart

At its foundation, it is important to establish that no one department owns any project completely.  Leadership may come from one department, while project staff will come from another, and stakeholders may come from one or more other departments throughout the Libraries.  Starting off with three streams of project leadership, Library Systems (Karen Newbery), Web Experience (Tom Crichlow), and Application Development (Cory Lown), provides the Libraries new pathways to envisage how ideas can become successful and completed projects.  We hope creating these three streams will ease the engagement for stakeholders with project leaders, as well as create a reasonable pipeline and queue for evaluating and prioritizing prospective projects and ideas.

image for team work

Project leadership requires executive support and broad awareness of the strategic priorities across the Libraries.  The new position of Director of ITS will oversee the portfolio of projects from ensuring that project timelines are properly defined, ITS staff are assigned to the right projects based on their strengths and capacity, expectation management with project stakeholders, as well as advocating for resources, changes to priority, and on going and consistent communication.  Because the project leaders do not have their own teams, ITS and DUL staff will have the opportunity to work with different leaders for various projects.  Balancing a limited number of project team staff across three (or more) parallel projects will require detailed planning, agility, and effective communication that we are searching for in the new Director of ITS.

Beyond the organizational changes, the Digital Strategies and Technology Leadership Team has begun to develop definitions and guidelines to help new projects start off strong.  Over the next couple of months, we will publish a wiki that documents what we believe are critical elements for the strong foundation of projects.  There will be definitions of projects roles, setting expectations from the start of roles and responsibilities, a template for a project charter that the project sponsor, project leader, stakeholders, and team can use to set the initial agreement for the project, and a guide for setting timelines and sprint planning so that project team members can manage their time within the project and with respect to other projects or priorities.

We look forward to sharing these ideas soon and continuing the conversations about the best ways to fulfill our ambitions and strategic directions together.

The Art of Revolution

 

Model for Monument to the Third International, Vladimir Tatlin

Russia has been back in the news of late for a variety of reasons, some, perhaps, more interesting than others. Last year marked the centennial of the 1917 Russian Revolution, arguably one of the foundational events of the 20th century. The 1917 Revolution was the beginning of enormous upheaval that touched all parts of Russian life. While much of this tumult was undeniably and grotesquely violent, some real beauty and lasting works of art emerged from the maelstrom. New forms of visual art and architecture, rooted in a utopian vision for the new, modern society, briefly flourished. One of the most visible of these movements, begun in the years immediately preceding the onset of revolution, was Constructivism.

 

As first articulated by Vladimir Tatlin, Constructivism as a philosophy held that art should be ‘constructed’; that is to say, art shouldn’t be created as an expression of beauty, but rather to represent the world and should be used for a social purpose. Artists like Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Naum Gabo, and Alexander Rodchenko worked in conversation with the output of the Cubists and Futurists (along with their Russian Suprematist compatriots, like Kazimir Malevich), distilling everyday objects to their most basic forms and materials.

Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, El Lissitzky, 1919

As the Revolution proceeded, artists of all kinds were rapidly brought on board to help create art that would propagate the Bolshevik cause. Perhaps one of El Lissitzky’s most well-known works, “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge”, is illustrative of this phenomenon. It uses the new, abstract, constructed forms to convey the image of the Red Army (the Bolsheviks) penetrating and defeating the White Army (the anti-Bolsheviks). Alexander Rodchenko’s similarly well-known “Books” poster, an advertisement for the Lengiz Publishing House, is another informative example, blending the use of geometric forms and bright colors with advertising for a  publishing house that produced materials important to the Soviet cause.

 

Lengiz, Alexander Rodchenko, 1924

Constructivism (and its close kin, Suprematism) would go on to have an enormous impact on Russian and Soviet propaganda and other political materials throughout the existence of the Soviet Union. The Duke Digital Repository has an impressive collection of Russian political posters, spanning almost the entire history of the Soviet Union, from the 1917 Revolution on through to the Perestroika of the 1980s. The collection contains posters and placards emphasizing the benefits of Communism, the achievements of the Soviet Union under Communism, and finally the potential dangers inherent in the reconstruction and openness that characterized the period under Mikhail Gorbachev.  I wanted to use this blog post to highlight a few of my favorites below, some of which bear evidence of this broader art historical legacy.

 

Literacy, the road to Communism, 1920
Easter. Contrast of joyous Easter of Long Ago with Serious Workers of Com.[mmunist] Russia, 1930
Member of a Religious Sect Is Fooling the People, 1925
Young Leninists are the children of Il’ich, 1924
Female workers and peasants, make your way to the voting booth! Under the red banner, in the same ranks as the men, we inspire fear in the bourgeoisie!, 1925

 

Learn from the Past, Organize for the Future

This Friday and Saturday, March 23 – 24, veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, contemporary activists from the Movement for Black Lives, scholars, librarians, educators, and students are gathering in Durham for the culminating events of the SNCC Digital Gateway Project. We hope you can be there too.

The SNCC Legacy Project, the Center for Documentary Studies, and Duke University Libraries joined forces over four years ago to create the SNCC Digital Gateway, where those who made the history are central to telling the story. Now as the project nears completion, we’re reflecting on the collaboration and celebrating the good work.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—the only youth-led national civil rights group—organized a grassroots movement in the 1960s that empowered Black communities and transformed the nation. Veteran SNCC activists have been collaborating with Duke University to build the SNCC Digital Gateway, a website told from the perspective of the activists themselves that documents SNCC’s work building democracy from the ground up and makes those experiences, thinking, and strategies accessible for the generations to come.

Over 20 SNCC veterans, members of the Durham chapter of BYP100, phillip agnew of Dream Defenders, Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, co-director of Highlander Center for Research and Education, local activists, educators, students, and more are coming together this weekend to reflect on the creation of the SNCC Digital Gateway and to explore how grassroots organizing work of the past can inform today’s struggles for justice and democracy.

Events on Friday, March 23, taking place in the Richard White Lecture Hall at Duke University, will focus on the partnership between SNCC veterans and the academy and the nuts and bolts of doing collaborative digital humanities work. Then on Saturday, March 24, participants will gather at the Walker Complex at North Carolina Central University to explore how SNCC’s organizing can inform today’s struggles and strategize about electoral politics and power, grassroots organizing, controlling the public narrative, coalition building, and more.

You can find more information about closing events here. Don’t miss this chance to learn from and interact with those who were organizing in the sixties and those who are organizing today. Bring yourselves. Bring others. It’s free, and you’re invited.

Snow Daze: Winter Weather Survival Tips

Snow is a major event here in North Carolina, and the University and Library were operating accordingly under a “severe weather policy” last week due to 6-12 inches of frozen precipitation. While essential services continued undeterred, most of the Library’s staff and patrons were asked to stay home until conditions had improved enough to safely commute to and navigate the campus. In celebration of last week’s storm, here are some handy tips for surviving and enjoying the winter weather–illustrated entirely with images from Duke Digital Collections!

  1. Stock up on your favorite vices and indulgences before the storm hits.

2. Be sure to bundle and layer up your clothing to stay warm in the frigid outdoor temperatures.

3. Plan some fun outdoor activities to keep malaise and torpor from settling in.

4. Never underestimate the importance of a good winter hat.

5. While snowed in, don’t let your personal hygiene slip too far.

6. Despite the inconveniences brought on by the weather, don’t forget to see the beauty and uniquity around you.

7. If all else fails, escape to sunnier climes.

8. Be thankful that Spring is on the way!

The images in this post are taken from the following digitized collections:  J. Walter Thompson Ford Motor Co. Advertisements, Ad*Access, William Gedney Photographs and Writings, Paul Kwilecki PhotographsW. Duke, Sons & Co. Advertising Materials, and Americans in the Land of Lenin: Documentary Photographs of Early Soviet Russia.

Stay warm!

Metadata Year-in-Review

As 2017 comes to a close and we gear up for the new year, I’ve spent some time reflecting on the past twelve months. Because we set ambitious goals and are usually looking forward, not back, we can often feel defeated by all the work we haven’t gotten done. So I was pleasantly surprised when my perusal of the past year’s metadata work surfaced a good deal of impressive work. Here are a few of the highlights:

Development and Dissemination of the DDR MAP

Perhaps our biggest achievement of the year was the development of the DDR’s very first formally documented metadata application profile, the DDR MAP. A metadata application profile defines the metadata elements and properties your system uses, documenting predicates, obligations & requirements, and input guidelines. Having a documented and shared metadata application profile promotes healthy metadata practices and facilitates communication.

In addition to the generalized DDR MAP, we also developed a Research Data Metadata Profile and a Digital Collections Metadata Profile for those specific collecting areas.

Rights Management Metadata

It’s been written about on this blog a couple of times already (here and here) but I think it bears repeating: this year we rolled out a new rights management metadata strategy that employs the application of either a Creative Commons or RightsStatement.org URI to all DDR resources, as well as the option of applying an additional free text rights note to provide context:

We feel great about finally being able to communicate the rights statuses of DDR resources in a clear and consistent way to our end-users (and ourselves!).

Programmatic Linking to Catalog Records

Sometimes a resource in the DDR also has a record in the library catalog, and sometimes that record contains description that is either not easily accommodated by the DDR MAP, or it is not desirable to include it in the repository metadata record for a particular reason. It wasn’t in the cards to develop a synchronization or feed of the MARC metadata, but we were able to implement a solution wherein we store the identifier for the catalog record on the resource in the repository, and then use that identifier to construct and display a link back to the catalog record.

And Lots of Other Cool Stuff

There were a lot of other cool metadata developments this year, including building out our ability to represent relationships between related items in the DDR, developing policies regarding the storage and display of identifiers, and a fancy new structural metadata solution for representing the hierarchical structure of born digital archives. We also got to work on some amazing new and revamped digital collections!

Looking Ahead

Of course, we are setting ambitious goals for the coming year as well – plans to upgrade our current Dspace repository, DukeSpace, and implement the new RT2 connector to Elements, will involve substantial metadata work, and the current project to build a Hyrax-based repository for research data presents and opportunity for us to revisit and improve our Research Data Metadata Profile. And ideally we will be able to make some real headway tackling the problem of identity management – leveraging unique identifiers for people (ORCIDs, for example), rather than relying on name strings, which is inherently error prone.

And there is a whole slew of interesting metadata work for the Digital Collections program slated for 2018 , including adding enhanced homiletic metadata to the Duke Chapel Recordings digital collection.

Institutional multispectral imaging (MSI) survey results

Over the last year and a half, we’ve blogged quite a bit about our exploration of multispectral imaging (MSI) here at Duke Libraries. We’ve written about the hardware and software that we acquired in 2016 and about our collaboration and training to help us learn how to use this new equipment. We’ve shared examples from our experiments with MSI on various material and ink types and talked about how MSI can help inform conservation treatment and help uncover faded or hidden text.

Periodically, we’ve also mentioned our Duke MSI group. This group is a cross-departmental team of individuals that each bring to the table critical expertise to ensure that our MSI projects run smoothly and effectively. This past year, our team has created various best practices and workflows, tackled equipment and software hurdles, determined current resource capacity, imaged a number of materials from Duke’s collections, and documented data modeling scenarios. We’re really excited about and proud of the work that we’ve accomplished together.

Many times, though, we’ve talked about how helpful it would be to talk with other institutions that are doing MSI, particularly cultural heritage institutions and academic libraries, in order to learn how they develop their skills and organize their services. Luckily, the University of Manchester, an institution that has the same MSI system as ours, expressed interest in collaborating with us to our shared vendor R. B. Toth Associates. We had a very informative conference call with them in May 2017, during which we discussed their program, services, and technical details. We also shared documentation after the call, which has helped us refine our project request procedures and our deliverables that we provide to the requesters at the end of projects.

Since that collaboration proved so beneficial, we thought it would be helpful to reach out to other institutions that undertake MSI projects. Though it is difficult to determine exact numbers online, it is clear that very few cultural heritage organizations and academic libraries host their own MSI system. Therefore, we teamed up with R. B. Toth Associates again to determine what other institutions they’d worked with that may be interested in collaborating. They shared six institutions worldwide, and we created a brief online survey about the topics that we’d discussed with the University of Manchester, which included organization and staffing, time devoted to MSI, prioritization, project deliverables, and data modeling and access. Five of the six institutions thought that the survey applied to their current MSI setup and therefore completed the survey, and all six expressed some level of interest in future collaboration. The institutions that completed the survey are the Library of Congress, the Museums of New Mexico-Conservation, the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, KU Leuven Libraries, and the University of Copenhagen.

Out of the institutions that we’ve spoken with or surveyed (six in total, including the University of Manchester), we can determine that three have permanent MSI systems (the Library of Congress, the Museums of New Mexico, and University of Manchester). One institution’s survey results were unclear about owning its own system, and the other two institutions noted that they use MSI systems on an ad-hoc, project by project basis. One of those institutions indicated that they are in the initial stages of considering the purchase of a permanent system, and the institution that declined taking the survey stated that it was because they did not own their own system due to costs. Some institutions charge a fee for MSI projects, while others don’t. One institution that currently does not charge expressed interest in creating a cost recovery model.

In terms of the institutions that own a permanent MSI system, the Library of Congress is the only that has one full time employee devoted solely to MSI. The Museums of New Mexico have one employee that serves as the main PI for MSI, though the entire Conservation department is trained on the equipment and software. Their department devotes approximately 20 hours per week to MSI depending on the project. The University of Manchester has two imagers that devote one day per month to imaging, and process intermittently. The other institutions without permanent systems use a combination of trained staff, scholars, imaging scientists, object handlers and conservators, metadata and data managers, imaging technicians, and project managers based on specific project needs.

It appears that most institutions image their own collections for MSI projects, though one respondent indicated that they also partner with other conservation institutions for their research needs. Prioritization processes for MSI projects vary institution to institution. The Library of Congress is the exception, because that department solely does MSI projects, and therefore requests do not need to be prioritized with other digitization requests. The Museums of New Mexico prioritize on a first come, first serve basis, as long as the project is a good fit for MSI. The University of Manchester also has a pre-project process with conservation staff to determine if the project is a good fit for MSI. KU Leuven Libraries prioritizes based on scope, indicating the priority is documentary heritage with a strong focus on illuminated manuscripts, but will service other research if time permits. Additional prioritization strategies include availability of trained staff and scholars.

The institutions have similar goals for MSI projects based on whether a project is internal (for conservation or acquisition purposes) or external (research requested). These include pure documentation, establishing a condition baseline, forensic examination and reconstruction, pre-purchase examination, collecting spectral responses for preservation, revealing undertext for transcription, and revealing undertext for text identification.

Deliverables and preservation copies vary by institution as well. Three of the institutions always include some type of a report with the files. KU Leuven provides multiple reports, including a technical report about infrastructure, an analysis report, and an imaging methodology. Two of the institutions provide the raw and processed images, two provide only the processed images (as jpegs or tiffs), and two state that the deliverables vary based on project. The University of Pennsylvania is the only institution that noted that it provides metadata, which often include transcriptions or descriptive and structural metadata and is packaged in a preservation-ready package. One respondent replied that they retain raw data offline, but place processed captures into a digital asset management system (presumably for online access), and another noted that some projects have arranged preservation of their data packages through third parties that offer dark or accessible digital repositories. Every institution retains some or all of their MSI data internally.

This is just a brief summary of what we learned through this process—we were lucky to receive a lot of data and comments! We are very pleased with and thankful for their willingness to share. As noted earlier, all have expressed an interest in some level of future collaboration, so we’re hopeful to build a network of institutions that can provide feedback and advice to one another for future MSI needs. To all of our fellow MSI institutions, we thank you again for your participation! Please let me know if I misrepresented any of your information. We received a lot of great qualitative responses, and though I did my best to communicate those correctly, I may have misunderstood some responses.

And Then There’s The Other Stuff… Meet FileTracker

The Duke Digital Repository is a pretty nice place if you’re a file in need of preservation and perhaps some access.  Provided you’re well-described and your organizational relationship to other files and collections is well understood, you could hardly hope for a better home.  But what if you’re not?  What if you’re an important digitized file with only collection-level description?  Or what if you’re digital reproduction of an 18th century encyclopedia created by a conservator to supplement traditional conservation methods?  It takes time to prepare materials for the repository.  We try our best to preserve the materials in the repository, but we also have to think about the other stuff.

We may apply different levels of preservation to materials depending on their source, uniqueness, cost to reproduce or reacquire, and other factors, but the baseline is knowing the objects we’re maintaining are the same objects we were given.  For that, we rely on fixity and checksums.  Unfortunately, it’s not easy to keep track of a couple of hundred terabytes of files from different collections, with different organizational schemes, different owners, and sometimes active intentional change.  The hard part isn’t only knowing what has changed, but providing that information to the owners and curators of the data so they can determine if those changes are intentional and desirable.  Seems like a lot, right?

We’re used some great tools from our colleagues, notably ACE Audit Control Environment, for scheduled fixity reporting.  We really wanted, though, to provide reporting to data owners that was tailored to they way they thought of their data to help reduce noise (with hundreds of terabytes there can be a lot of it!) and make it easier for them to identify unintentional changes.  So, we got work.

That work is named FileTracker.  FileTracker is a Rails application for tracking files and their fixity information.  It’s got a nice dashboard, too.

 

 

What we really needed, though, was a way to disentangle the work of the monitoring application from the work of stakeholder reporting.  The database that FileTracker generates makes it much easier to generate reports that contain the information that stakeholders want.  For instance, one stakeholder may want to know the number of files in each directory and the difference between the present number of files and the number of files at last audit.  We can also determine when files have been moved or renamed and not report those as missing files.

If you’d like to know more, see https://github.com/duke-libraries/file-tracker.