[CODE4LIB] Issue 51 of the Code4Lib Journal has been published.

[Edward M. Corrado]

Issue 51 of the Code4Lib Journal has been published. Many thanks to the
authors and the editorial committee!

The new issue is available at:
https://journal.code4lib.org/issues/issues/issue51

Here are the abstracts from this issue:

Issue 51, 2021-06-14
Editorial: Closer to 100 than to 1
<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/15971>

Edward M. Corrado

With the publication of Issue 51, the Code4Lib Journal is now closer to
Issue 100 than we are to Issue 1. Also, we are developing a name change
policy.
Adaptive Digital Library Services: Emergency Access Digitization at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign During the COVID-19 Pandemic
<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/15915>

Kyle R. Rimkus, Alex Dolski, Brynlee Emery, Rachael Johns, Patricia
Lampron, William Schlaack, Angela Waarala

This paper describes how the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Library provided access to circulating library materials during the 2020
COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, it details how the library adapted
existing staff roles and digital library infrastructure to offer on-demand
digitization of and limited online access to library collection items
requested by patrons working in a remote teaching and learning environment.
The paper also provides an overview of the technology used, details how
dedicated staff with strong local control of technology were able to scale
up a university-wide solution, reflects on lessons learned, and analyzes
nine months of usage data to shed light on library patrons’ changing needs
during the pandemic.
Assessing High-volume Transfers from Optical Media at NYPL
<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/15908>

Michelle Rothrock, Alison Rhonemus, and Nick Krabbenhoeft

NYPL’s workflow for transferring optical media to long-term storage was met
with a challenge: an acquisition of a collection containing thousands of
recordable CDs and DVDs. Many programs take a disk-by-disk approach to
imaging or transferring optical media, but to deal with a collection of
this size, NYPL developed a workflow using a Nimbie AutoLoader and a
customized version of KBNL’s open-source IROMLAB software to batch disks
for transfer. This workflow prioritized quantity, but, at the outset, it
was difficult to tell if every transfer was as accurate as it could be. We
discuss the process of evaluating the success of the mass transfer
workflow, and the improvements we made to identify and troubleshoot errors
that could occur during the transfer. A background of the institution and
other institutions’ approaches to similar projects is given, then an
in-depth discussion of the process of gathering and analyzing data. We
finish with a discussion of our takeaways from the project.
Better Together: Improving the Lives of Metadata Creators with Natural
Language Processing <https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/15946>

Paul Kelley

DC Public Library has long held digital copies of the full run of local
alternative weekly, Washington City Paper, but had no official status as a
rights grantor to enable use. That recently changed due to a full agreement
being reached with the publisher. One condition of that agreement, however,
was that issues become available with usable descriptive metadata and
subject access in time to celebrate the upcoming 40th anniversary of the
publication, which at that time was in six months.

One of the most time intensive tasks our metadata specialists work on is
assigning description to digital objects. This paper details how we applied
Python’s Natural Language Toolkit and OpenRefine’s reconciliation functions
to the collection’s OCR text to simplify subject selection for staff with
no background in programming.
Choose Your Own Educational Resource: Developing an Interactive OER Using
the Ink Scripting Language <https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/15721>

Stewart Baker

Learning games are games created with the purpose of educating, as well as
entertaining, players. This article describes the potential of interactive
fiction (IF), a type of text-based game, to serve as learning games. After
summarizing the basic concepts of interactive fiction and learning games,
the article describes common interactive fiction programming languages and
tools, including Ink, a simple markup language that can be used to create
choice based text games that play in a web browser. The final section of
the article includes code putting the concepts of Ink, interactive fiction,
and learning games into action using part of an interactive OER created by
the author in December of 2020.
Enhancing Print Journal Analysis for Shared Print Collections
<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/15649>

Dana Jemison, Lucy Liu, Anna Striker, Alison Wohlers, Jing Jiang, and Judy
Dobry

The Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST
<https://cdlib.org/west/about-west/west-membership/>), is a distributed
shared print journal repository program serving research libraries, college
and u

[CODE4LIB] Code4Lib Journal (C4LJ) Call for papers (51'st issue)

[Edward M. Corrado]

Call for Papers (and apologies for cross-posting):

The Code4Lib Journal (C4LJ) exists to foster community and share
information among those interested in the intersection of libraries,
technology, and the future.

We are now accepting proposals for publication in our 51'st issue. Don't
miss out on this opportunity to share your ideas and experiences. To be
included in the 51'st issue, which is scheduled for publication in mid June
2021, please submit articles, abstracts, or proposals at
https://journal.code4lib.org/submit-proposal or to jour...@code4lib.org by
Monday, March 15, 2021.  When submitting, please include the title or
subject of the proposal in the subject line of the email message.

C4LJ encourages creativity and flexibility, and the editors welcome
submissions across a broad variety of topics that support the mission of
the journal.  Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

* Practical applications of library technology (both actual and
hypothetical)
* Technology projects (failed, successful, or proposed), including how they
were done and the challenges faced
* Case studies
* Best practices
* Reviews
* Comparisons of third party software or libraries
* Analyses of library metadata for use with technology
* Project management and communication within the library environment
* Assessment and user studies

C4LJ strives to promote professional communication by minimizing the
barriers to publication.  While articles should be of a high quality, they
need not follow any formal structure.  Writers should aim for the middle
ground between blog posts and articles in traditional refereed journals.
Where appropriate, we encourage authors to submit code samples, algorithms,
and pseudo-code. For more information, visit C4LJ’s Article Guidelines or
browse articles from the earlier issues published on our website:
https://journal.code4lib.org.

Remember, for consideration for the 51'st issue, please send proposals,
abstracts, or draft articles to https://journal.code4lib.org/submit-proposal
no later than Monday, March 15, 2021.  (Use jour...@code4lib.org if sending
attachments.)

Send in a submission.  Your peers would like to hear what you are doing.


Code4Lib Journal Editorial Committee

Re: [CODE4LIB] Digital archive software package

[Edward M. Corrado]

Although it is advertised more for museums many archives use PastPerfect. It 
might work well for this researcher. Support is good and it is relatively 
inexpensive. 

http://www.museumsoftware.com/

Edward


--
Edward M. Corrado
ecorr...@ecorado.us

> On Aug 13, 2018, at 07:20, Jordan Hale  wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> A researcher contacted my colleagues seeking advice in locating a software 
> package that would provide archival management, metadata creation, indexing, 
> and annotation functionality for a digitized collection of several thousand 
> textual and photographic documents, with multi-user access and authentication 
> controls. We aren't aware of an all-in-one solution, as our internal 
> workflows involve Islandora, AtoM and more. Does anyone have any insight into 
> proprietary solutions so we can offer her some suggestions?
> 
> Many thanks,
> Jordan
> 
> Jordan Hale (they/them/theirs)
> Digital Repositories Librarian, University of Waterloo 
> Library<http://uwaterloo.ca/library>
> jordan.h...@uwaterloo.ca<mailto:jordan.h...@uwaterloo.ca> / 519 888 4567 
> x40135

Re: [CODE4LIB] Code4lib.org restored, Drupal site is now static site built in Jekyll

[Edward M. Corrado]

Ryan,

Thank you for your hard work on this. I just looked at the new site and
while I didn't look at it in detail, I thiink it looks great,

Thanks again,
Edward

On Mon, Jun 11, 2018 at 2:57 PM, Wick, Ryan David  wrote:

> https://code4lib.org/ is now restored with a static site version in
> Jekyll, https://jekyllrb.com/
>
> Code4Lib.org was running Drupal 7, and fell to the recent mega Drupal
> hack. Instead of trying to completely clean and rebuild that site in
> Drupal, and because there had already been talk of moving to a static site,
> I tried out the Jekyll Drupal 7 importer from the MySQL database, and it
> worked very well.
>
> After some cleanup, I have the Jekyll site deployed to code4lib.org, and
> the code on GitHub and ready for others to help with:
>
> https://github.com/code4lib/code4lib.org
>
> I've added several known issues, though I'm sure there are more and am
> hoping others can help find, add and fix them. The setup should be similar
> to the 2016-2018 conference websites, though this isn't hosted on GitHub
> Pages. Deploys are manual right now, by me, but I'm looking into other
> options.
>
> I think anyone in the Code4Lib GitHub org can review and merge a Pull
> Request, though if not let me know.
>
> All previously uploaded slides, notes and the logo files are in /files and
> existing links to those should mostly work.
>
> New content is welcome too, more instructions for that later but you can
> copy and change an existing post in _posts, updating the date and text.
>
> There's likely a better theme option than Minima but it worked to get
> started.
>
> I'll keep an eye on the GitHub repo but if you have any questions you can
> email me or find me in Slack.
>
> Thanks,
> Ryan Wick
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] mini-catalogs

[Edward M. Corrado]

Interesting idea. I have hear some special collections and arrives that do
something with printable finding aids although they serve a slightly
different purpose. I need to think about what the specific use case would
be, but it doesn't seem like it would be a ton of work to do this.

Incidentally, while not really the same idea, many years ago I investigated
using VUFind to do something like this. Obviously, it wasn't printable but
people could search just out multimedia collection and I also experimented
with doing this with the collection of educational resources. I changed
jobs before it was implemented, but in testing it seemed pretty usefully -
especially the multimedia collection since in out catalog at the time they
were hidden and being a residential campus, students liked to borrow ones
that were not only educational, but entertaining. Of course this was before
Netflix, et al. existed.

Edward

On Tue, Oct 24, 2017 at 7:56 AM, Eric Lease Morgan  wrote:

> I think a “kewl” (as well as cool) idea is the creation of mini-catalogs.
>
> Our libraries have large collection. That’s nice. But often the
> student/scholar only wants to look at a smaller subset of the collection.
> For example, they might want to look at only the books about painting.
> Alternatively, they might want to only look at items in a particular sub
> collection — a “special” collection. Unfortunately, and to the best of my
> knowledge, our library catalogs are not really amenable to such things.
>
> In order to facilitate greater use & understanding of these sub
> collections, I think it would be fun to:
>
>   1. dump all the MARC records describing a sub collection
>
>   2. generate a set of text files intended for printing,
>  and these text files would manifest a VERY traditional
>  library catalog [1]
>
>   3. generate a computer-searchable index designed to be
>  used by a hand-held device [2]
>
>   4. promote the use & availability of the outputs of
>  Steps #2 & #3
>
> What’s kewl is that the text files can be given away, printed, and even
> (“Gasp!”) written in. They require zero technology, and can last a long,
> long time. Heck, they are even portable and copies can be placed at the
> head of the collection(s). In days of old, librarians paid hundreds of
> dollars for these sorts of “catalogs”. They can still be valuable today.
>
> What’s more, the computer-searchable indexes and can be carried into the
> stacks and used like a Star Trek tricorder to home in and browse the
> collection(s). A bar code reader on the “tricorder” would be a helpful
> interface.
>
> Fun with the blending of newer and older library techniques?
>
> [1] example set of printed catalogs/indexes -
> http://dh.crc.nd.edu/sandbox/pamphlets2indexes/
> [2] example computer-searchable index - http://dh.crc.nd.edu/sandbox/
> pamphlets2analysis/search.cgi
>
> —
> Eric Morgan
> University of Notre Dame
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] Governance for Code4Lib

[Edward M. Corrado]

I would like to thank Bethany Nowviskie (from the CLIR/DLF side) and Bohyun
Kim (from the local planning committee side) for chiming in about it not
being necessary for  incorporation or greater formalization than already
exists in the [Code4Lib] community would be necessary for [CLIR/DLF]  to
extend our current fiscal sponsorship (of the conference, etc.) to the long
term."

I think this is very useful (and, at least for me, compelling) information

Edward


On Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 10:23 AM, Roy Tennant  wrote:

> Well then, I know how I will vote. Why fix what ain't broke? As I recall,
> that was our response to me calling the non-profit question back at the
> first Code4Lib Conference. Since there was no strong reason to become a
> non-profit at that time, we shrugged our shoulders and moved on. Since
> CLIR/DLF is fine with the way things are, then so am I.
> Roy
>
> On Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 10:06 AM, Bethany Nowviskie 
> wrote:
>
> > Hi, folks — this is just to clarify that, from the CLIR/DLF point of
> view,
> > no incorporation or greater formalization than already exists in the
> > community would be necessary for us to extend our current fiscal
> > sponsorship (of the conference, etc.) to the long term.
> >
> > Coral quoted it earlier, but here’s the relevant bit from the FCIG
> report:
> >
> > CLIR would not request any control over Code4Lib’s
> > organizational/"governance” processes, or that Code4Lib adopt CLIR’s or
> > DLF’s bylaws.
> > In terms of contact persons between Code4Lib and CLIR/DLF, CLIR expressed
> > familiarity with Code4Lib’s current operational processes, and indicated
> > that they would be fine with these processes continuing: "Single point of
> > contact, changing annually, and without a required connection to CLIR or
> > DLF is fine. In short, the practice of having local organizing committees
> > and rotating leadership over the conference and other activities that
> > currently exists in Code4Lib would be acceptable. We work with some other
> > groups who operate in this way, and were also comfortable taking on
> hosting
> > of the Code4Lib listserv recently, knowing and appreciating how
> grassroots
> > leadership happens in the community!"
> >
> > We’re not big on red tape, either, and I think — even though it can get
> > messy or stall out a little, sometimes! — decision-making, leadership,
> and
> > lazy consensus in C4L is a wonder to behold, not to be overly
> messed-with.
> >
> > Happy to answer any questions, when voting plans get to the right stage.
> I
> > understand a message from Galen on behalf of the FCIG is on its way. — B.
> >
> > Bethany Nowviskie
> > Director of the Digital Library Federation (DLF) at CLIR
> > Research Associate Professor of Digital Humanities, UVa
> > diglib.org | clir.org | ndsa.org<
> > http://ndsa.org> | nowviskie.org | she/her/hers
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> > Date:Tue, 25 Jul 2017 11:18:03 -0400
> > From:Esmé Cowles  escow...@ticklefish.org>>
> > Subject: Re: Governance for Code4Lib
> >
> > On Jul 25, 2017, at 10:58 AM, Eric Hellman  > hellman.net>> wrote:
> >
> > To follow up on Andromeda's calling the question, we need to do some
> > things in addition to the usual dieboldotron.
> >
> > 1. There's a point of fact that is still being disputed/discussed:
> whether
> > formalization is required by potential fiscal sponsor. It's
> straightforward
> > to answer this before any poll is conducted -  ask the potential fiscal
> > sponsors to weigh in on the question.
> >
> > Hasn't that been settled by Bohyun's message yesterday?
> >
> > On Jul 24, 2017, at 6:36 PM, Kim, Bohyun  mailto:
> > b...@hshsl.umaryland.edu>> wrote:
> >
> > Jonathan is right, Cary. I am on this year's LPC for the next year's C4L
> > conference at DC, and we are already working with DLF as a fiscal
> sponsor.
> > No legal entity status was required.
> >
> > Or is there some question that the requirements may be different for a
> > long-term fiscal sponsorship, as opposed to a one-time sponsorship?
> >
> > -Esmé
> >
>