Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio

From trio to septet

Today the Digital Library Services staff page was updated. Wow. The department has grown from three full-time staff to seven in the past year.

The latest addition to our staff is Anne Shelley, a special projects librarian devoted to music and fine arts digital collection building. She started on July 1 and will spearhead work on the forthcoming Ignaz Pleyel digital collection, 200 works of historical sheet music by the famous 18^th century composer whose scores are housed as the Rita Benton Music Library. She will also work to develop Iowa Sounds, a collection of audio recordings ranging from musical performances to radio shows with Iowa ties. Anne holds a B.M. in Music from Iowa State University (2004) and a M.A. in Library and Information Science from the University of Iowa (2008).

Last month, Keo Hoang joined the department to provide support for and supervision of the growing Digital Initiatives Project Room as the department this fall welcomes a new cohort of Digital Librarianship Fellowship Students from the School of Library and Information Science. Late last year, Wendy Robertson joined DLS to help expand support of electronic scholarship, including developing an infrastructure to support locally published e-journals and establishing a repository and streamlined workflows for faculty publications such as e-books. Wendy’s expertise in data analysis has allowed DLS to take a big leap forward on those digital collections that have required batch loading, migrating from one system to another, and aggregating with other information resources. Also last year, Bobby Duncan joined DLS to assist with image processing and quality control. Founding members of Digital Library Services include digital initiatives librarian Mark Anderson and metadata librarian Jen Wolfe.

With double the staff—and with the help of several digital librarianship fellows—we are working hard to develop the Iowa Digital Library into a robust repository.

—Nicole Saylor
Head, Digital Library Services

Preparing for the deluge

As Iowa City braces itself for more flooding, library staff who aren’t busy with volunteer sandbagging for the city have been working on flood-proofing library basements, securing stored holdings and clearing away debris. Alas, these measures are insufficient in the case of the Music and Art Libraries, situated near the banks of the Iowa River. With these branches closed for the immediate future, those of us at Main Library have been making room to provide temporary office space for our displaced colleagues and their student assistants.

For DLS, the storms have brought a silver lining in the form of the early arrival of our new staff member Anne Shelley, formerly a graduate assistant at the Music Library. Thanks to the floods, Anne will be starting a few weeks early on her two-year appointment as a Digital Projects Librarian specializing in music collections. Stay tuned for more information on Anne and her work; in the meantime, enjoy these images of floods past from the Iowa Digital Library.

–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian, Digital Library Services

Flooding on Iowa River Drive, late 1800s. [Iowa City Town and Campus Scenes Digital Collection]

Riding the streetcar to N. Dubuque St. during the flood of 1918. [Irving Weber’s Iowa City Digital Collection]

Burlington St. Bridge during the flood of 1918. [Irving Weber’s Iowa City Digital Collection]

Delivering milk by canoe on N. Dubuque St. during the flood of 1929. [Irving Weber’s Iowa City Digital Collection]

Building a dike near the Student Union during the flood of 1947. [Iowa City Town and Campus Scenes Digital Collection]

Aerial view of UI athletic fields during the flood of 1993. [Geoscience Slides Digital Collection]

New staff member

Digital Library Services welcomes Keo Hoang as its new Digital Initiatives Support Specialist. Keo comes to DLS from Hardin Library for the Health Sciences and the Information Arcade, and he returns to the third floor of Main Library where he spent several years with Desktop Support.

Keo will be providing support for and supervision of the growing Digital Initiatives Project Room as the department this fall welcomes a new cohort of Digital Librarianship Fellowship Students from the School of Library and Information Science.

He is an avid gardener whose home is included in this year’s Project GREEN Garden Tour. Welcome, Keo!

–Mark F. Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian

Happy birthday. Love, Iowa

Looking at the “today in history” webpage from the Associated Press, I saw that today in 1854, the territories of Nebraska and Kansas were established. There have certainly been jokes made at the expense of our Midwestern neighbors, but instead, a shout out to them on their birthday. Below is a cartoon by Ding Darling from the Editorial Cartoons digital collection showing a nice gesture between Sioux City and Lincoln (however Omaha doesn’t seem too pleased about being left out):

I’m not entirely sure what the story was about the “Ashland Extension”, but I assume it had to do with extending rail service between the two cities. Related to this, and on a personal level, I’m excited by the talk of possibly seeing passenger rail service return to Iowa City, with 2 daily trains running to Chicago. Check out an article by Irving Weber describing the last time this was available:

–Mark F. Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian

Synchronized scanning

Scheduled to launch in the fall, the UI Women’s P.E. digital collection has quickly become a favorite work-in-progress around the DLS offices, allowing those of us spending the summer in the library to enjoy vicariously the biking, camping and canoeing activities of students past.

The synchronized swimmers of the Seals swim team series provide additional inspiration as we try to adopt a more coordinated approach to our scanning processes. Temporarily Fellow-free until the June school session starts, we’re using the extra time to refine our reformatting procedures, work on instructional documentation, and train new student assistants with a goal of creating more uniform and consistent digital objects. The improved efficiency will help support our plans to scale up digitization and “get into the flow” of the Libraries’ processes, mainstreaming our work into the cataloging and preservation departments. This goal of precision, speed, and a coordinated, team-based approach is one that we’re sure the Seals and their sister athletes would approve.

–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian, Digital Library Services

Unhappy graduation

An impending collision, June 3, 1905

The impending cataclysm, June 6, 1922

Good luck old man!, June 11, 1926

Those ticklish moments before the parachute opens, June 7, 1928

Question: how to tackle him to ensure an easy conquest?, June 5, 1929

They say the hardest part is to make a good landing, June 13, 1931

According to these early-20th-century editorial cartoons from our Ding Darling collection, graduation is a time of impending doom. But we’re sure the future is much brighter for our recent grads, especially for former DLS student assistant and newly-minted Master of Library Science Erin Sehorn-Elwell.

Entering the professional world will probably be less of a rude awakening for Erin and more of a well-deserved rest. For the past year that she’s been in our employment, just thinking about Erin’s schedule has made us feel tired. In addition to reformatting and cataloging up a storm in DLS, she’s also held part-time jobs in the Maps and Preservation departments, taught information literacy classes to undergrads, and served as president of the library school’s student organization, all while taking a full-time course load and raising a family. While we’re unhappy that she’s graduating and leaving us, we feel pleased that she’ll be moving on to bigger and better things (and also slightly relieved that she won’t be around to make us feel like comparative slackers).

Thanks to Erin for all her hard work, and good luck to all of 2008’s graduates.

–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian, Digital Library Services

Making tracks at Indy

Just returned from Indianapolis and Midwest Users Group Conference for CONTENTdm, the digital asset management software that we use to power the Iowa Digital Library. This was the third annual meeting, but really the first year that it’s been truly regional, attendance-wise. It was really positive to hear how numbers had grown in those three years. In ’06, there were 30 attendees, and 60 last year. This year, 101. It shows a growing user base that will hopefully have a greater influence on the system’s growth and development. More regional meetings are planned for this year including ones in the southeast and mid-Atlantic.

We received an update from Claire Cocco, CONTENTdm’s product manager on some exciting enhancements to expect later this year, and Glee Willis delivered a great keynote on day two, encouraging digital libraries to stretch the system through customizations in order to best serve information users, showing examples from some of the leaders in the CONTENTdm community.

I particularly enjoyed the University of Louisville’s session on using the MyMaps feature of Google Maps to add overlays as browse interfaces through which to enter cartographic resources in CONTENTdm. DLS’s own Wendy Robertson spoke at a presentation about workflows for migrating MARC catalog records to CONTENTdm, which was well received by the audience.

I participated on panels discussing digitizing scrapbooks and yearbooks and using CONTENTdm for art collections, and also brought along Jen Wolfe’s eye-catching poster depicting how DLS handles scrapbooks. Nicole Saylor served on the conference’s planning committee and Brian Thompson attended the meeting as a way to become more familiar with the system and its community of users. So, LIT was well represented.

There was even talk of an upper-Midwest CONTENTdm users group getting together later this year. It’s nice to see this kind of organization, but my hope is that CONTENTdm users can maintain a similar level of activity and working together between meetings, perhaps by blowing the dust off the user group wiki, which can help all levels of implementation make the best use of the system.

One of the most beneficial pieces of the meeting was meeting new people and talking about the different ways in which we’re using the system for digital library activities. We enjoyed some good food and a great record store in downtown Indianapolis (sorry Jen, never made it to Trader Joe’s), but now it’s back to work.

–Mark F. Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian

Iowa Digital Library now contains 100,000 items

The University of Iowa Digital Library now contains 100,000 items. To mark this milestonetemp, a 13th-century Bible manuscript page from the Special Collections Department of the UI Libraries has been scanned and uploaded to represent the transformation of information storage over the centuries, from handmade parchment to zeroes and ones.

“Digital versions of rare records and documents bring new attention to the physical artifacts that have made up human communication in the past,” said Matthew Brown, director of the UI Center for the Book. “The Iowa Digital Library is exactly the kind of teaching tool that alerts students to meanings of the medium, whether it be paper or stone, handwriting or typeface, engraving or photograph.”

“As scholarship increasingly moves online, it’s essential that we follow suit with our physical collections,” said Nicole Saylor, head of Digital Library Services. “By increasing accessibility to the UI’s rare and unique materials through digitization, the Libraries will continue to be relevant and vital participants in the University’s research and educational processes.”

See the full press release here.

IDL staff pick: “The president and the portrait” program, 1964

As the Iowa Digital Library approaches the 100,000-item mark, we’re celebrating this milestonetemp by highlighting some of our favorite items from the collections.

Title: The president and the portrait: a featured presentation of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Fine Arts Festival, Iowa Memorial Union, State University of Iowa, June 10-Aug. 5., 1964
Creator: unknown
Collection: Art Festival Programs

I like “The President and the Portrait” which is part of the Festival of Arts brochures. This gives a biographical and portrait history of the Presidents of the UI from 1862-1964. You can actually see photos or paintings of a lot of the guys who have UI buildings named after them!

–Dan E. Teets
Library Assistant, Central Technical Services

IDL staff pick: The Brownie Scouts in the Circus, 1949

As the Iowa Digital Library approaches the 100,000-item mark, we’re celebrating this milestonetemp by highlighting some of our favorite items from the collections.

Title: The Brownie Scouts in the Circus
Creator: Mildred Wirt Benson
Collection: Mildred Wirt Benson Digital Collection

Ghosts, kidnappers, thieves, and blackmailers abound in the novels of Nancy Drew author and UI alum Mildred Wirt Benson; our digital cover gallery features her intrepid teen sleuths battling a variety of these dark forces. But for me, the unintentionally terrifying dust jacket illustration from this 1949 title in Wirt’s Brownie Scouts series is the most spine-chilling — and definitely one of the most memorable — images from the collection.

–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian, Digital Library Services