RSS 1.0Northeast Institutional Repository Day
ABOUT THIS COMMUNITY
A group of librarians from New England collaborated to organize the first-ever Northeast Institutional Repository Day (NIRD) on June 18, 2019. The fifth annual NIRD was held virtually on November 30-December 1, 2023. NIRD brings together all in the Northeast (and beyond) who manage or are interested in institutional repositories, digital collections, and digital preservation. We are platform agnostic. This site is a repository of conference materials and is hosted by the Lamar Soutter Library at UMass Chan Medical School.
NEW! In keeping with the collaborative and platform-agnostic spirit of the NIRD community, NIRD decided in August 2024 to host NIRD24 and all forthcoming conference content on Zenodo. Moving to Zenodo enables us to share the management of our repository without worrying about institutional affiliations or differences between our own IR platforms. Content from the 2019-2023 NIRD conferences will continue to be hosted and available from eScholarship@UMassChan.
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Northeast Institutional Repository Day 2023: Links Mentioned in PresentationsThis document, compiled by conference organizers, is a list of links to resources mentioned by attendees in the chat during the 5th annual Northeast Institutional Repository Day (NIRD23) conference, held virtually on Thursday, November 30, 2023 and Friday, December 1, 2023.
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Signs and Wonders: Integrating Multiple Systems to Digitize the Deaf Catholic ArchivesThe Archives and Distinctive Collections at the College of the Holy Cross is in the second half of a two-year CLIR "Digitizing Hidden Collections" grant project to preserve and provide access to key components of the Deaf Catholic Archives (DCA). Ideally, digital content would be accessible through both the institutional repository as well as the archival finding aids. Wonder how we did it? The project utilized three systems (Digital Commons, ArchivesSpace and Google) to efficiently upload thousands of items to our repository and link them to their respective finding aids. This presentation will discuss how we worked to build the repository structures and then developed workflows to create and populate an online collection that allows multiple access points for a large, complex, and growing archive. As this work continues, the next phase of the grant will use another tool to create exhibits using our IR, thus facilitating additional access, promotion and outreach efforts. These efforts, as well as the creation of metadata and description, will intentionally include input from members of the Deaf community here at Holy Cross and in partnership with others. Our experience offers suggestions for how to build out a large collection with several structures that require different technical treatments. We have already begun adapting them for other digitization projects. Though we used specific platforms, this presentation will demonstrate how different applications can be harnessed for a large, long-term project.
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Northeast Institutional Repository Day 2023: NIRD23 Program and ScheduleSchedule and program for the 5th annual Northeast Institutional Repository Day (NIRD) conference, held virtually on Thursday, November 30, 2023 (1:00-4:00 pm ET) and Friday, December 1, 2023 (10:00 am - 12:00 pm ET).
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Making Migration Less Mysterious: Developing a Migration Plan for ScholarWorks@UMassAmherstIn January 2023, after years of environmental scans, interviews with stakeholders and other IR managers, and platform investigations and pilots, the UMass Amherst Libraries made the decision to migrate its IR from bepress' Digital Commons to a combination of Janeway and Atmire-hosted DSpace 7.x. We all love a good migration presentation, but for most of us, migration remains a mysterious process that's difficult to envision. In this talk, I will walk through my process of creating a migration plan for our rather large and unwieldy IR -- from interviews with IR managers who have been through migration, the beginning stages of data cleanup and standardization, and the fun -- Excel column limits! Items uploaded multiple times!--discoveries made along the way. I will also discuss how the cleanup and discoveries are shaping our IR policies moving forward.
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Agility in Changing Institutional Repository PlatformsThe purpose of this presentation is that it is perfectly okay to instill flexibility to change an institutional repository (IR) platform that will improve the (IR) user experience. New to the IR landscape in 2019 this was the first IR at this academic institution. Even with an ambitious focus to make this a shiny IR resource it fell short in its mission. It was time to go back to the drawing board in 2022, post-Covid pandemic, to search the IR landscape for a new generation IR. The goal was to have an abundance of modern features in the IR that would survive past the expiration date of staleness. Agility to change is necessary and making the change in a timely matter can benefit both library users of the IR and the library staff overseeing the IR. After four years with an IR platform the change in 2023 to a new IR platform that became a successful launching pad for new IR experience.
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Increase Discoverability of IR Works by Utilizing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ToolsThe University of Notre Dame Law School utilizes Digital Commons to maintain its institutional repository, known as NDLScholarship, which is overseen by a small team within the Kresge Law Library at the Law School. Upon conducting a content review of the repository in collaboration with the Bepress consultant, it became evident that the SEO tools and features are overlooked. The new manager initiated a project to enhance the discoverability of the repository's content, leveraging Digital Commons' built-in SEO tools and features. This presentation intends to outline the team's approach, including the methods employed to gather and prioritize metadata, as well as the creation of descriptive page titles and introductory text to be incorporated at various structural levels such as the site homepage, community page, and individual publication items.
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Second Time's the Charm ... (sort of): Lessons Learned from Two Attempts to Migrate from DSpace 6.3 to DSpace 7.6Members from Cornell University Library's IT department share lessons learned from two attempts to migrate their DSpace 6.3 repository to the new DSpace 7.6 infrastructure. Learn about performance tuning, customizations, streamlined and secure access, containerization, and more!
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Kwalk: A Simple Program to Crosswalk Metadata for Repository UploadsUniversity of Chicago's Center for Digital Scholarship has been utilizing this program to better edit metadata for batch upload to Knowledge@UChicago. There are plans to share this software in the future as it is platform agnostic and has a potential wide range of use cases. Suppose you need to upload 1,000 items to TIND from a source like Lens.org or PLOS journals. You obtain informal metadata for the items by you or another person creating the spreadsheet from scratch, exporting the data, or web scraping each individual record. You might need to do the following after obtaining the data: Rename all the fields in the from the invented field names to TIND's field names; Add some fields that are missing; Leave out some fields you don't want; Combine several fields into one field; Modify the values of date formats or author names in a programmatic way; Generate syntactically correct upload URLs from a simple filename field. Kwalk is a program that lets us write a simple crosswalk that we can apply to each batch of metadata as we receive it and have multiple crosswalks for multiple projects as we work on them in an intermixed fashion. The program allows us to apply special functions to modify date formats, combine literal and field name text, generate uniform upload URLs, and much more.
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Curating Audiovisual Data in Data RepositoriesThis presentation reviews the practices of curating audiovisual data for submission into data repositories. As part of our Data Curation Network training program, we decided to write a primer on the topic of curating audiovisual data. Audiovisual materials are not a common form of research data in all fields, but is a burgeoning data type especially in the social sciences. Audiovisual data curation processes are not well documented, which motivated us to write a foundational and accessible guide for curators. We interviewed multiple experts in this field in order to learn more about their needs, challenges, and existing procedures. Our hope for this guide and presentation is to encourage further exploration of this fast developing topic. This presentation will cover our investigation of curation workflow, ethical issues, technical concerns, documentation, metadata, and special considerations.
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Surveying and Editing the Metadata of Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital ArchiveIn this talk, I will discuss my experience surveying and editing the metadata of a large crowdsourced public history archive. The Our Marathon collection includes nearly 8,000 items, with materials ranging from letters to collages to oral histories and other first-person accounts collected in the wake of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Along the way, collaborations were established between Northeastern University and the NPR radio station, WBUR, the Boston Globe, and the Boston Public Library. This archive bears some resemblance to other projects that used crowdsourced materials in response to a public trauma, such as the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank relating the experiences of Katrina and Rita. I added to and edited the Metadata Object Description Schema (or MODS) records from this collection, in order to clarify the copyright status, associated names and subjects of these materials, as well as the languages used in certain items, so as to improve discoverability for researchers viewing the collection through Northeastern University Library's Digital Repository Service. One of the biggest issues with these records initially was their lack of standardization and authorities, and in order to address these problems I needed to develop new ways of searching and surveying this collection. In working with this collection, I have realized that it presents some challenges that are perhaps unique to such a large, crowdsourced response to a shared trauma. Because this is a kind of memorial, with a goal of both community building and healing, it is important for users to be able to access this material on their own terms. Yet the large number of items in this collection require organization to allow for meaningful access.
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Approaching Accessibility For Your IRAccessibility standards are commonplace. While this progress is something to be championed, it can leave an institutional repository in a difficult situation. How do you uphold accessibility standards when you are not in creating the materials that are being added to your IR? This session will start by looking at the policy and potentially political considerations, as well as the practical aspects of implementing the policy. How do you implement the standards? What stake-holder buy in do you need? Is there technology that can help? Are you actually able to acquire the technology? Who is going to pay for the technology? Will AI truly save us all? And, because of the inevitable way that things like this usually go, how do you formulate Plans B-D just in case things do not go according to plan/take longer to implement? This presentation is coming from librarians who are currently working through this process and will outline what we've done so that others (hopefully) don't have to experience the same. Commiseration and comments from the audience will be highly encouraged.
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Rethinking Institutional RepositoriesOver the past twenty years, institutional repositories (IRs) have become commonplace across most colleges and universities. While IRs were originally conceived as a means to collect and disseminate faculty scholarship, in recent years it has become apparent that this may not be the most effective use case for the modern IR. In light of this changing landscape, how should IR managers think about the IR today? This session will provide an overview of the forthcoming book Rethinking Institutional Repositories, published by ACRL, which seeks to answer this question through contributions from IR managers at a wide range of institutions. The session will also briefly highlight several case studies from the book that provide practical suggestions for managing the modern IR, developing innovative projects and use cases for the IR, and using the IR as a means to highlight and showcase diverse voices and viewpoints and to provide an inclusive platform for all members of the community.
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Journey into the Third Dimension: Extending IRs to Support 3D Model DataFor the last 2 years, Florida State University Libraries' Technology and Digital Scholarship department has been exploring ways to incorporate 3D model data into DigiNole, FSU's digital repository built on the open source Islandora 7 platform. In August 2023 we finally reached a major milestone with a publicly viewable demo open for review and testing by internal stakeholders. This represents the culmination of much collaborative work between 3D modeling subject experts and developers, and a lot of hard lessons learned along the way that we are ready to share with others trodding a similar path. Join us for a summary of our journey into the unfamiliar realm of 3D modeling, and learn how you can extend your IR to handle 3D model data as well! This session covers the specific requirements for supporting 3D model data as scholarly research outputs stored in an institutional repository, and is aimed at an audience familiar with standard scholarly content in an institutional repository but with little to no prior knowledge of 3D modeling. Topics covered will include the production and use of scholarly 3D model data by students and faculty, unique metadata elements for 3D model data, how to create a 3D model test suite, tips for integrating a 3D model viewer like the Online 3D Viewer (https://3dviewer.net/) into your repository, an overview of the most popular 3D model file formats, and a discussion about the complexities of building a system that creates a consistent user experience for ingesting and displaying 3D models with surprisingly inconsistent data structures.
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Remediating Faculty Scholarship for Accessibility: An Approach with Microsoft Word Docs as Supplemental FilesThis presentation will cover our approach to accessibility for our institutional repository of faculty scholarship. Accessibility is a legal, moral, and ethical commitment for both our researchers and the readers of their research. Our IR includes Swarthmore-affiliated research by faculty and staff, including emeriti, with about one-third of the citations providing full text access to PDFs. These PDFs range from preprints to version of record, with some holding Creative Commons licenses and others scanned from print and posted with the written permission of publishers. This leaves us with a collection of widely varied documents with regards to scan quality and base accessibility. Our previous approach to accessibility involved remediating PDFs in Adobe Acrobat, which presented a variety of issues. It was difficult to ensure the accuracy of OCR processing, particularly for: documents in non-Roman languages; images and figures incorrectly processed as text; older scanned documents from archival sources; and scans of works from our collection with marginalia. Furthermore, if a document needed a correction after it was initially processed, we often needed to reprocess the entire document rather than being able to make a simple correction. Building on the work of our College’s Accessibility Working Group, we decided to take a new approach by creating accessible Word documents to live alongside our PDFs in our repository. Our presentation will cover how we display these accessible documents and cross-link them to our posted PDFs, as well as how this new workflow addresses the aforementioned issues that we weren’t able to remediate in our previous process. We will provide a range of examples from our work, including the documentation we created to address situations such as: what we do when we find typos in the original publications; navigating internal references to page numbers; and handling documents that use aesthetic formatting decisions rather than best practices for accessibility.
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JavaScript as Your Assistant: How to Populate Batch Spreadsheets FAST using CrossRef APIHave you ever felt that Excel spreadsheets and OpenRefine are not helpful anymore? Your metadata cleaning project is so messy, so complicated, and there isn’t a single tool out there to help you? Maybe what you really need is not a better tool, but something that is programmed to act like you? My presentation shares instructions and insights about how to program with Google Apps Script, CrossRef API, and OpenAlex API, so that Google Spreadsheets fills out on its own, if you provide DOIs. You don’t need programming knowledge, but access to Google Spreadsheet is necessary in order to use the source code I will share. At Denison, we archive faculty papers in Denison Digital Commons. To populate this collection, we use Google Spreadsheet with Google Apps Script that fetches metadata from CrossRef API. The custom source code in Google Apps Script finds a faculty paper if the paper has a DOI number. Then it fills out the spreadsheet. Here’s a quick demonstration that shows how the spreadsheet works: https://www.loom.com/share/71e4556f265145d0b3ac77337f2f38c1. CrossRef API and Open Alex API do similar things, but the data they offer and the way they offer are slightly different. We will also look at the differences and similarities, pros and cons between them.
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Long Term Interdisciplinary Research Collections in Digital CommonsSalve Regina University and McKillop library maintain an instance of Digital Commons as an Institutional Repository. Historically this repository has been used for housing student work such as theses and dissertations as well as Special Collections and Archives. Formats vary from pure text to images and sound. Recently the library was approached by faculty seeking to create an interdisciplinary collection focused on the Islands of Narraganset Bay. This is part of an ongoing multiyear project that involves students in Biology, Education and History researching these islands. The results will be housed in the Institutional Repository. The creation of this collection posed some challenges in organization since: the contributors would come from a variety of disciplines rather than being organized by class or department; the data would be in a variety of formats from text to audio visual; the metadata would be entered in by students rather than library staff. Discussion will focus on some of the challenges and opportunities of presenting findings in a variety of formats including audiovisual, data centric and images. Dr. Chace will focus on recruiting and training students from a variety of disciplines while Director Emsellem will discuss some of the challenges of integrating this ongoing project into our library including commitments of time and resources as well as organizational challenges. Finally Edward Iglesias will discuss the technical challenges involved with organization and display of such a collection including the use of Digital Commons Exhibits as a way of combining resources from disparate disciplines in a variety of formats.
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Red Hawks Soar!: Showcasing our Unique Collections to Engage the University Community and BeyondThe purpose of our presentation is to share our experiences in building relationships in order to create several unique and socially relevant collections in the Montclair State University Digital Commons. We will discuss issues related to community engagement, outreach and librarian liaison work undertaken to form new partnerships. During this process we learned how to adapt to change and how to find new ways to innovate, create and collaborate in order to demonstrate the value of the library, while promoting faculty research and our students scholarly activities, in support of the Strategic Plan of the University. In our presentation, we will discuss how we created Personas from the results of our research study to identify faculty members to use as a guide when evaluating services and outreach. We will address the process of promoting the repository to the campus community at large, and everything in between from the planning stages to the continued growth and sustainability of the repository. As this evolving culture of research is embraced throughout the University, the need for a vibrant, adaptable, and creative use of the repository becomes just as crucial as an IR’s archival capabilities, especially when impacting the University’s strategic vision and mission.
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U.S. Repository Network: Moving from Vision to ActionThe U.S. Repository Network is an initiative of SPARC with support from the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). In its “Modernizing the Global Repository Network Initiative,” COAR identified the need for assistance in breaking down institutional silos and developing a more cohesive approach and greater collaboration around repositories in the U.S. Through a Visiting Program Officer, SPARC engaged an expert group of library/repository professionals as well as the broader U.S. repository community to develop a strategic vision for U.S. repositories. The strategic vision is “an interoperable network of repositories is an essential component of our national research infrastructure, offering rapid and open access to research, and plays a crucial role in collective efforts to transform global research communications, leading to a more open, inclusive, and equitable system.” This strategic vision and its complimentary foundational characteristics guide the U.S. Repository Network (USRN) Action Plan, which is structured to advance the vision and to ensure the ongoing engagement and sustainability of the network. The presenter will briefly describe the vision development process, review the strategic vision itself, and discuss the current status of the action plan. The USRN is intended to be inclusive of all U.S. repositories, and the presenter will also discuss potential avenues for future engagement.
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The creation of an institutional repository migration checklistColorado School of Mines recently migrated from a consortial DSpace repository which was managed by a member library, to a commercial hosted DSpace repository, now called the Mines Repository. The presenters received administrative privileges in the new repository, and this added to the migration learning curve. The new repository host provided documentation and several communication channels concerning the migration. However, the library was not given an easy-to-read and follow checklist of action items as the migration moved forward. After searching the literature, not many articles were found to include a desired migration checklist related to repositories. As the presenters learned more about administering the new repository, they created a basic checklist to keep track of the moving parts of the migration process. For example, they wanted to be sure that digitized items and associated metadata migrated correctly. They also worked to ensure that hyperlinks, search features, specific administrative actions (e.g. editing records, creating collections), and integrations (e.g. SSO, DOIs) were progressing and working as expected. This checklist served as a visual reminder, showing what had been accomplished as well as items and processes that still required attention. The checklist was intended to be a living document; members of the Mines Repository Working Group were encouraged to add items to the list and to participate in testing. It is meant to be platform agnostic, and this could be adapted by other organizations considering a repository migration. We plan to show the major components of the checklist, and to request feedback from conference attendees.
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Zotero: Low-budget, high-power middleware for electronic theses and dissertation (ETD) repository workflowsZotero is powerful, free, and open source software that can be used to manage bibliographic collections. Traditionally, users leverage Zotero to manage their personal research collections, or use group libraries to share resources with their collaborators. As a part of its openness, Zotero supports import and export of metadata in no fewer than 15 formats. This flexibility, as well as paid features that allow for multiple users to contribute to shared Group Libraries of large or even unlimited sizes, make it well-suited for collaboratively preparing bulk deposits for repositories. Using a Zotero Lab License, Digital Scholarship staff at the Columbia University Libraries (CUL) have designed a novel workflow that allows partners across campus to submit batches of thesis and/or dissertation metadata and PDFs for deposit in Academic Commons, our institutional repository. This process is structured, but moderately complex, and relies on knowledge of Google Sheets, csv, RIS, python, OpenRefine, and, of course, Zotero. We have piloted this workflow with one partner, and plan to use it to manage additional ETD deposit workflows, including a trial with the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for all doctoral dissertations. In this lightning talk we plan to outline the workflow we developed, give a brief report of partner feedback thus far, and speak to our opinions about the long-term viability of this solution.
