As we wrap-up an eventful 2022, here’s the latest on our digital repository projects.
Annual meeting
The DRC has started planning the annual Digital Repositories meeting for next summer. With the new Digital Archives project getting underway, and the desire to allow as many CSU folks working in special collections as possible to attend, we are planning to hold the meeting online again this year. Keep an eye out for a call for presentations in January.
Digital Archives
Much of the work this Fall on the Digital Archives has been focused on setting up both the technical and project infrastructure needed to support a production Digital Archives system.
We’ll be taking a two-pronged approach to the project:
In January, we’ll be convening a meeting of the campuses using DSpace for their historical collections to begin preparing for the migration to the new Digital Archives, including a review, clean-up, and mapping of existing metadata.
At the same time, DAWG will continue to review the current test system to identify areas needing improvement, as well as road-testing a number of new potential features, including alternative IIIF viewers, a Newspaper viewer, and the Bulkrax batch upload tool.
David and Bryan have also been working with SoftServ (née Notch8) to prepare our AWS environment for the addition of the new Digital Archives system. That includes some refactoring of the shared code between ScholarWorks and the Digital Archives, some changes to the underlying storage, indexing, and digital preservation services within our infrastructure, and work toward setting up load-balancing and better video streaming. In January, we’ll be rolling into production upgrades to the Rails framework and several other software dependencies used by both systems.
ScholarWorks
Over the past few months, Bryan and David have completed further development and testing on the campus landing pages in ScholarWorks. That includes a new dynamic college and department listing, as well as a browsable collection list.
On the metadata front, we updated the submissions forms to use the latest Creative Commons licenses. Beginning in January, the degree name field will now be a controlled list, derived from the Chancellor Office degree database. We’ve also made major improvements to the display of harvested records, which will also go into production in January. And we continue to correct the author order on thousands of journal articles in ScholarWorks in order to improve indexing by Google Scholar.
The DRC has also begun a review of the ScholarWorks terms of service and deposit agreement, and will be completing work begun last year on a withdrawal policy. We’ll be looking for feedback on all of these documents at the February Open Forum.
Wishing everyone Happy Holidays! See you next year.