New Frankenstein Archive Debuts for Halloween

I'm still gathering my thoughts after DPLA fest, but I wanted to share some information today about the new Shelley-Godwin Archive, which I'm sure is going to be a great platform for humanities research.

You can read more about the project on the NEH post "Bringing Frankenstein to Life" which also links to press coverage from the New York Times and Washington Post. There's also an extensive article out from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

One of the things that caught my attention was the data model that the Shelley-Godwin archive was built on. SharedCanvas shows the potential for linked data with cultural heritage objects, as it allows users to define an annotated resource along with associated comments. Here are some other implementations of the SharedCanvas model.

Announcement of Million Dollar Grant at DPLAfest

Hello digital library friends! Anna, Sandra, and I got back on Saturday from the first annual DPLAfest in Boston, and I am bursting with news that affects our regional digital libraries.

The one that I will blog about today is the announcement of a new $1,000,000 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant to train public librarians in digital technologies. Under the grant, service hubs -- like the Mountain West Digital Library -- will collaborate with DPLA to build new curriculum and hands-on resources for public libraries to expand their digital capacities.

Announcement of $1,000,000 grant at the DPLAfest reception

What does this money mean for us in the Mountain West? It may be too early to say, but I see it as a chance for MWDL to train public librarians in digitizing their physical materials, creating online exhibits, and using DPLA/MWDL as a research resource. Public libraries have far better access to the general public than academic libraries and can facilitate access to our online historic treasures to audiences that don't realize they exist.

A big thank you to Bill and Melinda Gates for all the good you do!

Looking forward to Boston

The idea of a national digital library has been in the air for years, a repository where our combined digital cultural treasures can be accessed in one location. Still in the nascent stages, the Digital Public Library of America has taken on this role. This week we are going to celebrate this tremendous accomplishment with hundreds of librarians, archivists, and curators at DPLAfest in Boston! 

As I'm sure many of you know, the Mountain West Digital Library has been selected as one of six service hubs for DPLA. That means that our collection of 800,000 items is sent up to DPLA through the magic of OAI harvesting and is combined with the collections of six other hubs as well as individual contributing institutions like HathiTrust and the Smithsonian.

I for one can't wait to swap stories with representatives from the other hubs, celebrate with my fellow librarians, and discuss issues like copyright, metadata, and open access.   Really, can ANY of you imagine a better way to spend your work week?

OpenRefine and Metadata

One of the many great things I took away from the recent MWDL workshop on Linked Data was an introduction to OpenRefine. Aside from the great activities in using OpenRefine and Mulgara to clean up data, create URIs, and generate RDF files, OpenRefine looks like a great (and free) resource for most digital metadata librarians to use when faced with general metadata clean up issues.

Open Refine used to be known as Google Refine, so there you can find different information available under both names if you are searching for documentation.

Here are some resources I've been looking at recently:

Using OpenRefine to create clean-up scripts

Here's an entertaining screencast from Free Your Metadata.

Resources listed on a Google Refine Blog 

There's also an OpenRefine Google Group

The GitHub page for OpenRefine has a variety of resources, use cases, and tutorials listed.

You can easily export a CONTENTdm collection into an excel or .csv file and open it in Open Refine, but I've been curious about taking advantage of some of the harvested MWDL metadata that DPLA offers for download.

When will all our data look like this?

Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/

The Lennox and Catherine Tierney Photo Collection

Like a good book, a thorough, well-documented, and rich collection of photographs tells a story and transports the viewer to a different world. One such collection is the Lennox and Catherine Tierney Photo Collection from the University of Utah.

Lennox Tierney is Professor Emeritus at the University of Utah’s Department of Art and Art History and is one of the most influential figures in Japanese art, architecture, and cultural history. From the 1940's when Tierney served in the U.S. Navy as the Arts and Monuments Commissioner under General Douglas MacArthur until nearly the present day, Lennox Tierney has captured Japanese culture heritage in photographs.

                             Post-war Japanese bride during Lennox Tierney's service, 1949-1952

Over the years, Lennox Tierney donated his collection of 250,000 slides, film reels, and lecture videos to the Special Collections department at the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah, 11,00 of which are available online through the University of Utah website and the Mountain West Digital Library. http://www.lib.utah.edu/collections/Professor-Lennox-Tierney-project.php.

Visit the collection and enjoy your trip, no passport required.

Glowing praise for linked data

The results are in. Eighteen of our twenty participants have turned in their workshop surveys and these are the comments our workshop - and mostly our amazing presenters, Silvia and Cory - generated:

“Well done, UNLV!”

“Thank you. It was awesome!”

“I was very impressed with the knowledge, experience, and initiative of the instructors.”

“Presenters were very prepared, did a good job with a difficult topic.”

“Good job by everyone. This is a great introduction.”

“Thank you, Silvia and Cory! This was a very practical workshop!”

“Presenters and workshop were great -- I hope this is done again.”

“Thanks for a great opportunity!”

Truly, Silvia and Cory were wonderful. In one day, I went from a vague understanding of linked open data to a solid conceptual framework to actually creating linked open data. That's right. After a morning of talking about LOD, we cleaned real library records and transformed them into RDF triples ready for Web 3.0 consumption. 

Now, I'm not saying that I could go out and implement linked open data in my library tomorrow. But the important thing is that I get it now and could probably explain it reasonably well if called upon to do so. That is quite an accomplishment for one day. I'm not sure how MWDL is going to match this workshop, but stay tuned for more amazing training opportunities! 

What can linked open data do for you?

Today I started analyzing responses from a pre-survey for a Linked Open Data workshop that we are conducting this Wednesday (before you even ask, we're full). The responses to one question "What benefits of linked open data are you aware of?" elicited some great responses, including one person who said that linked open data "will make my hair more glossy and attractive." As awesome as that response is on its face, it also - perhaps subversively - pokes fun at the limitless potential and promises of linked open data.

More common responses included broader access, increased searchability, and better visibility of data. Personally, I've been tantalized in the past at the promise of semantic web capabilities and improved disambiguation between objects/people with the same name. Better hair aside, what does linked open data mean to you?

CONTENTdm and My Favorites

Here's a quick CONTENTdm tip to start off your week!

My Favorites is a useful feature in CONTENTdm, but it sometimes does not work consistently across all browsers and platforms. I have been able to save items to My Favorites in Internet Explorer on a PC for CONTENTdm 6.5. For viewing CONTENTdm collections on a Mac, I tend to prefer Google Chrome, but I've only been able to get My Favorites to work on Firefox on a Mac.

More Great Collections from Arizona Memory Project now available in MWDL

I have many collections on my to-do do list for MWDL ingestion, but the largest task that I've been working on has been the Arizona Memory Project. I still have a few more collections to add, but we have plenty of great collections available now. Just look at the growing list of partners we've added from Arizona!

Some of the collections that caught my attention in this latest round of additions include:

Sharlot Hall Museum Collections - great collections here include an audio collection, a military image collection, and a mining image collection.

We've also added collections from the University of Arizona Poetry Center, which includes a portraits of poets collection as well as an interesting collection of vintage Poetry Center Posters.

Here's an example of a Charles Simic poster from 1970. Click "View Item Record" to view the record in the Arizona Memory Project:

Charles Simic 3-4-1970, Publicity poster for a reading by poet Charles Simic on March 4, 1970 for the University of Arizona Poetry Center. View Item Record

MWDL Workshop filled in one week!

Only a few days after registration opened, the first MWDL Workshop is at maximum capacity. Because this is an all-day, hands-on training session, we only had 20 available seats, which were first offered to MWDL partners. The plan was to open up the registration to everyone after our partners had a chance to sign up, but apparently Linked Open Data is just too hot a topic for that plan. Thanks to our lucky 20 participants for being so quick on the draw. We look forward to exploring Linked Open Data with you on October 9th-10th!