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/ 

Best practices for Event Communities (EC)

Best practices for Event Communities (EC)

1.      Before you create the community – ask these questions:

What is the goal for putting the EC in Digital Commons?

                                                            i.      To meet grant requirements (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/rocreformtrail/)

                                                             ii.      Archive a past conference (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/g2/ or http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/lib2lms/)

                                                           iii.      Provide ongoing support (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/divconf/) this conference has been hosted through Digital Commons for 5 years now. DC is so embedded into this conference that I have been made a member of the DivConf committee

                                                           iv.      Manage the conference through DC – including submissions, links to registration, maps, evaluations, proceedings, social media etc.  (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/dcglug/)

So, depending on what level of involvement you are looking for, you might just set up a site, publish a schedule – with or without in-depth abstracts, follow-up after the conference to solicit presentations, vet submissions through DC, publish a proceedings booklet, and/or add photos and videos afterwards. We have all of those different types of conferences within Digital Commons at Brockport. But here, specifically are the things I did for DCGLUG.

I knew I wanted the DCGLUG site to be as robust as possible. I collaborated with another librarian to create the banner, which then was used on promotional material as well as at the top of the site. The introductory text changed several times throughout the conference lifespan. It originally contained links for submission of proposals, along with descriptions of what the sessions would look like. It later contained links to registration, pre-conference events, accommodations, directions, etc. For the most part, I commented them out (see attached) when I wanted to eliminate them from view. Post conference it was updated to give a summary of the day, and a link to next year’s conference.

One of the things my CSR (Lauren) will tell you is that I hate to make people drill down to get to content, so it’s important to me to have as much information appear on the landing page as possible. In the beginning, you had to drill down for everything (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/divconf/2012/). But in the DCGLUG, the schedule is available on the landing page, and the pdf icon tells you immediately whether the presentation is there. (The pdf icon is something your CSR will have to add for you).  I also wanted to add a Twitter feed to the sidebar to capture moments of the conference. Once I decided on a #, I let Lauren know and she added it. I believe there are two options for a Twitter feed, your CSR can explain the difference – we always use this one. Since I really wanted to capture and preserve as much of the day as possible, one of my colleagues (Jennifer Kegler) and I took photos throughout the day, and another colleague (Ken Wierzbowski) volunteered to video capture it.  Jennifer uploaded her photos to the library’s Flickr account, and I combined the best of her collection with mine and asked Lauren to create an image gallery (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/dcglug_images/), which I then pulled from to make the content carousel (Configuration option on your event community page).

For the videos, Ken and I both have Kaltura Media Space accounts through Brockport’s subscription. He was able to upload the video he took to there, and I was able to go in and create the embeddable link, and add it to the page using Embedly. 

Adding content to and removing content from Blackboard

There is a Library Student Employees group in Blackboard, containing information for all LSE (payroll and other procedures), as well as a directory specific to Digital Commons student employees. Right now I am using that to add theses for KDW to work with. I started adding thesis content one by one, but discovered I could zip multiple files to add at once. Unfortunately, it didn't allow me to extract the files the way I thought it would. Talking to Reddy, I found out that if I am going to upload zipped content, I need to do it through the Content Collection sidebar group - the GROUP-BRO-LITS-DMLSTUEMP. From there, you go to Upload (Zip package). Uploading it here allows the files to be unpacked, as well. From there you go to where you want your content to live, create the folder and within the folder choose Build Content - item. Pick a name and from there navigate to Browser, Organizational Content. You can choose multiple files to move to your new folder.

Also, when you want to delete content from Blackboard, you have to delete it using the Content Collection area. If you just delete it in the specific Content area, it remains in the Collection. Deleting it using the Collection is a 2 step process, though. Your maker in the Content area will show Invalid File, and you'll have to delete that, as well.