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/