Friday, December 11, 2015

Brockport Bookshelf

Thank you for your kind words. Neither the Systems Librarian or the Catalog Librarian are here today, and the process was a collaboration between the three of us. I’ll try and give you the overview of the process, and if anything doesn’t make sense you can ask specific questions that I’ll refer to Ken or Debby.

Over the years, Debby (our cataloger) has added a field in the 610 field (see example below)
61020
|a State University of New York College at Brockport |v Faculty publications |y 2000-
to indicate an item is a Faculty publication. Ken (our Systems guy) would then run a report in ALEPH for Debby of those bib records. I’m unsure, without talking to Debby, whether she crosswalked the data, using something like MarcXML or if she worked with the data in an Excel spreadsheet, choosing the records and fields she needed, and then added them to a batch upload spreadsheet. I believe that Debby also massaged the metadata at that point, adding where the item could be purchased, if available. I’ve attached a small portion of a batch spreadsheet to give you an idea of the metadata fields we use.
1.       We started the project during the summer, a slower time for Debby. Once the big upload was done, it just became part of her cataloging process to add them individually throughout the year as we acquired a new one.
2.       We started with the most recent 10 years, and did batch uploads to make it manageable
3.       We used the image that we had in our catalog, I want to say these came from Syndetics for the most part, but I won’t say that there aren’t some from Amazon or Google books, as well
4.       The Bookshelf is housed in a Book Gallery, and though you can add the full text, it isn’t required.

An important thing to consider is whether you will have just one big bookshelf for the whole college, or if you wish to (also) have departmental bookshelves. The bookshelf idea here was born out of my desire to get representation from each department in the IR. Faculty in the humanities tend to write more books or book chapters, rather than individual articles. So we added a metadata field called department; we gave bepress a list of the departments and they created a dropdown box for us. So all books were initially uploaded to the Brockport Bookshelf collection. As a department accumulated >3 books (preferably 5), I had bepress create a department bookshelf, and we “collected” them using the Collection feature and creating a filter based on Department is …. In that way, we were able to have representation from every department across campus within our first year.

Regarding the Honors theses: the Honors College has digitized theses dating back from 2008. They shared access to the drive they are in, and I have tracked down email addresses and contacted each student individually – using an email template. If I had access to the email addresses, I would just do a mail merge. Getting ahold of them is the hardest part. Once that is accomplished, very few have turned me down. I convert their response to a pdf and store that (either as a unshown supplemental file in Digital Commons, or in a folder in the Honors College drive).  This is what the email looks like:

Dear <Honor Student>,

My name is Kim Myers, and I am the Digital Repository Specialist for The College at Brockport. We recently began an institutional repository, and are adding Senior Honor theses, as time and permissions allow. The Honors Program has a collection online at: http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/honors/. May I have your permission to digitize and add yours to this collection? I would then send you the link, and you would then receive monthly reports of how many downloads your thesis has received. If you are interested, please let me know what email address you would like associated with the thesis – where you would like to receive the reports.

I hope this helps, in a non-overwhelming way. Feel free to ask any follow-up questions you have!

Dear Kim,

I am contacting you at the recommendation of my bepress CSR, but also because I am familiar with all the great work you have done with Brockport's IR.  Early on I was inspired by your "Brockport Bookshelf" and eventually wanted to do something similar for my own IR.

The time has come to move forward with this project, which I will actually be handing off to one of our catalog librarians.  So I need to prepare a workflow.  I was wondering if you might be willing to share the workflow you use, and any other tips that you think might be useful.

Here are some specific questions (which may see very basic, but I am very technically challenged and am learning as I go along):

1)   I liked the incorporation of some info from the MARC record.  Did you do that manually from each bib record, or did you use some sort of script? Are there standard scripts "out there" or would I need to create my own?  (Well, find some one who can - way beyond my expertise)
2)  where does the image of the book come from?
3) we are only putting up metadata, not book content.  I noticed you don't have a download but tin, or anything that says "this item not available for download"  Was that a custom request that bepress did for you?

Another question, unrelated to Bookshelf:
How did you get so many students to deposit their honors theses?  I present at the Honors colloquium and summer research  seminars, and get very little response.

Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to read this.  I appreciate any guidance, advice, suggestions, or examples you wish to share.  Congratulations on such a successful IR.  You are an inspiration!

Have a  good day.

Lisa Villa

--
Lisa Villa '90
Digital Scholarship Librarian
Dinand Library
College of the Holy Cross
Worcester, MA 01610



From: Ellen Neuhaus [mailto:ellen.neuhaus@uni.edu
Hello Kim,

I recently attended the bepress webinar "Creative Staffing Solutions for Institutional Repositories" that you gave on November 13, 2014.  My institution (University of Northern Iowa) is developing a Digital Commons institutional repository, UNI ScholarWorks.  We are at the very beginning stages of the implementations; we are still waiting for the site to be built. I have started to identify a few seed projects for the repository.  I am interested in developing a Faculty Book Gallery.  

I have gone into the YBP GOBI system and identified several hundred books written by UNI authors and have saved the records to a folder.  

Can you provide me with information about your Faculty Book Gallery?
  • What fields did you use for the metadata template?
  • Where did you get the book cover image - did you request permission for use in your repository?
  • Where did you get the book description?
  • Did you include "Table of Contents"?
I interested in any information you can provide that would be helpful in setting up the Faculty Book Gallery.

II’ve attached a small section of a batch revision spreadsheet, which shows our metadata. We have about 1700 faculty publications in total, and the 365 newest are currently in the repository. We do batch uploads, use all the information we have in ALEPH, and our Collection Management/Head Cataloger then tweaks the information to include links to where the book can be bought. We also include links to the catalog record on a metadata page, but since we changed discovery systems from AquaBrowser to Summon this summer, that has caused a few problems. (Apparently, Summon doesn’t have permanent URIs for each book, so none of the Summon links work, and I’ll have to change them back to link to the ALEPH catalog.) You can link to the cover image, if you have Syndetics. There is a spot on the batch spreadsheet for that.
Other things to consider – upload to one, gather to many? I find that it is always a bit of a challenge when starting out, especially with theses and book collections in knowing whether to upload to one central collection, and create separate departmental collections or vice versa. We decided to upload all books to the Brockport Bookshelf collection, and then as soon as we got 4 or 5 books from a department to have bepress create a departmental collection, which we then used a filter to gather them there, as well. That was one of our goals in building the collection to begin with – to get representation from every department on campus in our IR. (Conversely, theses are uploaded by department, and then gathered to a central collection.) We also looked for opportunities to be able to add the full text of books, as well. We have 25 right now that are FT, and they have been downloaded more than 15K times.
That’s all that really comes to mind, but I am happy to answer any other questions that you may think of.
All the best,

Kim L Myers
Digital Repository Specialist
2014 bepress IR All Star
44K, Drake Memorial Library
The College at Brockport, State University of New York


No comments:

Post a Comment