Vision for Water Resources of New York State and the Great Lakes collection

Vision for Water Resources of New York State and the Great Lakes collection:

The Studies on Water Resources of New York State and the Great Lakes  community in Digital Commons @Brockport seeks to be the major resource for scientists and other researchers in this field. It is modeled after the Cornell ILR Digital Commons, which houses all types of documents pertaining to Industrial and Labor Relations in NYS.

The Water Resources community currently has 2 collections. The first and largest collection consists of 80+ Technical Reports. These were funded by grants from Soil and Water Conservation Districts across NY, and written primarily by Dr. Makarewicz and graduate students from Environmental Science and Biology. These reports were to: a) determine the sources and locations of pollution in local waterways, b) recommend best practices for watershed management, and c) provide follow up monitoring to assess successes and report areas still in need of improvement. A second, smaller collection consists of relevant journal articles virtually gathered from Environmental Science and Biology faculty publications, as well as newspaper and newsletter clippings.

I propose adding a third collection to this community, government documents from our print collection. Here is the plan I would use:

1.      With the assistance of Dr. Joseph Makarewicz, identify essential government documents from our print collection.

2.      Using student help, determine which of these already exist online.

a.      If a document exists in a government database, then add only metadata and a link out to the document. It could then be potentially weeded from our collection.

b.      If a document is not found to be online, set aside to be scanned at a later date. It could then be added to the repository, and potentially weeded from our collection.

Why is this an important part of our repository?

1.      The College at Brockport has a long history of supporting Lake Ontario Research. This community supports that initiative.

2.      2013 is the next cycle year for Intensive Monitoring of Lake Ontario. There have been attempts in the past to develop a repository where existing data could be searched and new data deposited. This has never been successful, according to Dr. Makarewicz, because there has never been a library willing to take a leadership role in maintaining and updating such a repository.

3.      In many ways, this community represents the body of scholarly work produced by Dr. Joseph Makarewicz, a Distinguished Service Professor Department of Environmental Science and Biology, who will soon be approaching retirement. To be able to provide an archive for his work, especially the grey literature that may otherwise disappear, is one of the important purposes of a scholarly repository.

4.      Finally, this community has begun to garner attention on a national level, through our repository provider, bepress. They have expressed an interest in sharing this community as an outstanding example of a repository extending their outreach beyond the doors of their local institution. Such attention will serve to drive more traffic to our site, and bring more attention to The College.

Notes from the 2018 site-wide update

OCT 17, 2018  |  10:36AM PDT
Angeline Hong replied:

Hi Kim,

Great questions and thanks again for your phone call! I am recapping our conversation in this reply.

1a. I think what you are currently doing (re-grouping departments to their new communities) sounds good. I mentioned that you can create new communities to reflect the new school names if you are concerned about the URLs.

1b. I recommended collecting the two Computational Science articles into the Earth Science publication so that it retains the download counts. Then, you can exclude the publication and School of Science and Mathematics community from the Collections page. You can also include a note in the introductory text pointing visitors to the new Earth Science collection.

For the old Science and Math school community, one option is I can delete this community. Or, you can keep this community and similarly exclude it from the Collections page and add a note in the introductory text pointing visitors to the new community. I would recommend excluding the publication rather than hiding it, as hiding will prevent updating of the series which you may need to do if you ever need to revise the articles. You can find these options in the “Community Visibility” or “Series Visibility” section in the Configuration page.

2. All the publications grouped under CMST Institute except for one just need to be updated so the sidebar link is removed. (I will run a site-wide update at the end of the day, so you do not need to update them.) The Lesson Plans series still has the CMST sidebar link in the Configurations, and this will need to be removed from the Configurations.

3. From your second email, the download counts will be reflected in the new communities. The new grouping and downloads may not be reflected in the Dashboard and readership map automatically, but should after a few days.

4. After changing the grouping, you may need to update at the publication, community, and site levels. You provided feedback (thank you!) that the language the system uses after updating the grouping isn’t clear when or where to update. I have noted your feedback on a feature request for including language that makes it more clear and obvious when to update.

5a. We discussed the Department of Health Science community and how this has become two new departments, the Department of Healthcare Studies and the Department of Public Health and Health Education. For the Faculty Publications, we discussed collecting or re-uploading the single work in the Public Health and Health Education Faculty Publications series into the “Health Science Faculty Publications” series. Then, you can rename the Health Science Faculty Publications to use the department name, note the department change in the introductory text, and exclude the other series. If you re-upload the article rather than collecting it, then I can also delete the Public Health and Health Education Faculty Publications series.

5b. For the student work (honors theses, master’s theses), we discussed renaming the publication so it includes the years the department were active and it will be clear the old department is no longer active. You could then re-group these publications into a new department community. You could also call it “Health Science Honors Theses (Archival)” Or “Archived Health Science Honors Theses”.

I also took a look around and found these two works from Iowa State University about academic restructuring in institutional repositories that may be of interest:
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/digirep_conf/1/
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/digirep_conf/2/

At the end of today I will run a site-wide update. This will not affect any submissions that are queued for update, but will update any grouping/introductory text/configuration changes. This should be complete by tomorrow and I will let you know when it is done. Please let me know if you have any further questions or if I can clarify anything.

P.S. I had the pleasure of meeting Mary Jo Orzech earlier this week and I hope she enjoyed her time in California. It was lovely getting to meet someone from The College at Brockport!

Angeline Hong
bepress
Consulting Services
510-570-3344
https://www.bepress.com/products/digital-commons/resources/
https://www.bepress.com/products/expert-gallery-suite/resources/

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OCT 17, 2018  |  07:01AM PDT
Original message
Kim wrote:

Hi Angeline,
We are doing an extensive site update to reflect two major events that have occurred at Brockport in the last few years.
1. Our college reorganized from six schools/colleges to three. Since Schools were a major community division, there were many departments that had to be moved. Any suggestions on how to deal with this? I probably should have asked in advance, instead of when I was halfway through. Here is what I have done so far:
a. The School of Arts and Sciences is new, and contains all of the old School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and well as the departments from the School of Science and Mathematics. I regrouped all the SciMath departments into the new school, and kept the URL from the old AHSS school and repurposed it for the new Arts and Sciences school.
b. What I am left with in the old Science and Math school is one department that no longer exists - Computational Science. How do I best deal with that? The two articles in that series belong to a faculty who is now housed in Earth Science. I could redirect them there, but should I then hide the old department and the old school?
2. Our college website crashed and had to be rebuilt from scratch, and they used a new URL naming protocol when they did it. That meant many of the links in our sidebar didn't work anymore. One such example is the CMST Institute - see our collection here: https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/cmst_institute/. The web team has never created a new page for it, so I removed the sidebar link from the community page, but it contains 12 collections that inherited that sidebar link, and I can't seem to find where I go to remove the dead link from them. Perhaps that is something you have to do?
Thanks,

Planning for the future

Perhaps it's time for a Digital Commons reboot. That is to say, what is the direction the DC should take in the next academic year and beyond? Where are our energies best expended? How will Digital Commons be managed after I leave, and ideally as we prepare for the future while I am here!

Here are some parking lot items:

1. Update and post the policies 
1. What do we need policies for?
2. Where should we host the policies?
3. Who needs to approve them?
2. Do a site review
1. Are the pages current?
2. Deans?
3. Names of schools?
4. Names of chairs
5. URLs for the department website
6. Are there collections without any content?
7. Are there collections that should be updated - more content could be added?
3. What languishing submissions do we have? Deal with those.
4. Check filters on collections - especially Masters Theses - should change Within All Publications to Within (the specific collection). Otherwise, Senior Honor Theses for that department could show up. 

Ideas for using a GA for SC2 unit

Charlie, Mary Jo and I brainstormed some ideas about how the Scholarly Communications & Special Collections unit would benefit from a GA. I think it is important to say upfront that we do not see this person as mitigating our need for a fully staffed unit, including a Scholarly Communications Assistant, but rather an opportunity for us to provide useful skills to a graduate student while delving deeper into areas that are important to develop, but which we don’t have time to fully do all the legwork on ourselves. Some examples:

1.       Digital Commons (DC)–

a.       do an annual site inventory with an eye towards applying best practices such as SEO, metadata, organization, and collection content

b.       do the repetitive work on established collections that are updated periodically (ex. Annual conferences, some journals)

c.       check copyright and publisher permissions for faculty article submissions

d.       under the supervision of the Archivist, add archival content to DC

2.       Digital Publishing

a.       Assist with the SUNY Brockport eBook platform in a variety of ways – preparing books for publication (i.e. Gilgamesh, which we have been working on combining, formatting and converting 27 Word files into one book for 18 months now because we can’t find time to just continuously work on it), writing promotional pieces, etc.

b.       Help with celebratory event planning for author and new books

c.       Work with DC journals

3.       Events and Workshops

a.       Depending on the major and special talents of the GA, they could help host workshops on various topics (data visualization, O365, digital identity management, personal archiving, or other topics relating to Scholarly Communications and Special Collections).

b.       Assist with event planning for annual or biannual Celebration of Scholarship.

c.       Assist other areas in the library with events or conferences, as needed.

I think it would be important to make sure we have a focus and plan specific activities once we knew the talents and interests of the GA.

Tidbit about bots and numbers

From a 2018 DC+SEUG presentation by Daniel Jolly and Holly Mabry:

The folks at bepress do a great job of eliminating bots from the usage numbers that we see for our institutions.  The information in the webinar I watched was that they were finding that 62% of ALL the activity they were recording on their end came from bots, spiders, and the like.  The other 38% consisted of real human users.  The stats that we see through the Digital Commons Dashboard only reflect those human-interaction numbers.  We don’t see the numbers for that other 62% on our end at all.  The numbers we see in the Dashboard are what Digital Commons identifies as real, legitimate human users.

Bindery options

Lulu - https://xpress.lulu.com/our-products - costs $10-20 - but probably not high quality.

Thesis on demand - https://www.thesisondemand.com/ - probably in the $50 range - they allow you to calculate the cost in advance, and using the parameters: 1 copy, 2 color pages, 50 b/w pages, print on the cover, buckram cover material, no accents in title, 60# white paper with no foldouts, no pockets and including the signature page my quote came to $48.55 plus tax and shipping. 

Please do not take these to be official endorsements, I have no personal experience with either company.

Update on dance thesis process

Hello thesis authors and thesis chairs,

I have an update on digital commons thesis submission guidelines and copyrights.  According to Kim Myers, the digital commons director, after publishing the work to digital commons, the thesis author has full agency and copyright to present a portion of the thesis or a development of the thesis as they wish.

The department and the college do not require a printed  copy of the thesis if the thesis is published in digital commons.

The department requires a printed watermark department copy if the author opts out of publishing their thesis to digital commons.

In terms of guidelines, Kim recommends the thesis author follow these  three steps in digital commons.

Go to:

1) Master Thesis Guidelines

2) Submission Guide

3) Submit Research

https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/dns_theses/

1) Master  Thesis Guidelines at

https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/dns_theses/thesis_guidelines.pdf

2) Submission Guide

http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/dns_theses/dns_thesisguide.pdf

3) Submit Research

https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/submit_research.html

Thesis chairs, the thesis author is required to write an abstract in digital commons. I recommend the chair review the abstract before the thesis author publish to digital commons.

The signature page is the gateway to publishing in digital commons. This page does not need to be printed on water mark paper.

Once the thesis has been submitted to digital commons by the author, the graduate director will  receive a confirmation email from digital commons. The graduate director will ask the thesis chair to review the submission in digital commons. Once the thesis chair has approved the submission in digital commons the thesis will be published to digital commons.

Creating file names in excel

When we send videos out to be digitized, we also send a spreadsheet with the file names for each. Our initial convention was Collection_Location_AuthorLName_DateOfForum, which might translate into a file name of WF_bro_Baxter_19870305. We have since dropped the Collection_Location segments. I am recording here the formula used to get Excel to generate the file name, as it is not commonly used every day. Here are the columns found on the spreadsheet when we begin:
Box#;LName;FName;Date of Appearance;Format;Barcode with a final generated column for FileName.

Step one is to create a duplicate Date of Appearance column that will convert the date into a text field. The formula for that is: =TEXT(D2,"yyyymmdd") where D2 contains the original Date of Appearance formatted as mm/dd/yyyy.

Step two is to use the formula: =CONCATENATE(B2,"_",E2) where B2 is the LName field and E2 is the properly formatted date field. The "_" is necessary to create the _ between the two.

Kudos to Kelly Deltoro-White for figuring this out on her own, as well!

An app to look at for working with photos

From ResearchBuzz 3/28/2018:

American Historical Association: Research Clutter: A New App Helps Create Order out of Disorder. "Tropy is a free, open-source desktop application designed to help researchers organize and describe the photos they take in archives in intuitive and useful ways. It allows users to group photos of research materials, annotate images, add metadata, export to other applications, and easily search their collections."

What I like about it - it allows you to create metadata for images, organize groups of photos, and export the metadata to other applications. It also makes the collection searchable. 

Where it's better than creating the metadata in Digital Commons - it allows you to pick any number of photos to add the same data.

What I don't like about it - it only works with .jpg files. 

How it could be useful here - perhaps it is something a student working in the archives could learn and try out. If it worked well, could it be a possible workshop idea for the DSC?

For more information: https://tropy.org/