Digital Repositories Update - Summer 2021

Created by David Walker
Last updated: Sept 01, 2021
2 min read

With the Fall term kicking off across the CSU, here’s a quick recap of this summer’s digital repositories projects.

Digital Repositories Committee

We’ve got some new members on the DRC! 

Dana Ospina and Katie Lage have joined the steering committee as at-large members.  Alyssa Loera has begun a second tour of duty on the steering committee, this time as Vice Chair. Mark Stover, Mark Bilby, and Lana Woods rotated off the committee in June.

Lia Ryland completed her term as chair of the Metadata Working Group, and Brianne Hagen and Elyse Fox also rotated off.  Melissa Seelye has taken over as MWG chair, and Pam Kruger and Ryan Rush have joined the working group this summer.

Eric Milenkiewicz is now heading up the Digital Archives Working Group, with Stephen Kutay agreeing to return, along with new members Ariel Hahn and Jamie Zeffery.  Erik Beck has rotated off of DAWG.

We want to thank all new and returning members for volunteering their time and energy for these important systemwide efforts.  We also want to thank all of the members who have rotated off the committee for their hard work, valuable ideas, and contributions over the past couple of years.

2021 Annual Meeting

On July 13-14, we held a well-attended virtual conference, hosted by Fresno, covering a wide array of digital library topics, including presentations from folks across the CSU on:

  • Digital archives and new digital initiatives in special collections

  • CSUN Thesis Digitization project

  • Assessing scholarly communication programs

  • LibGuides Open Review Discussion Sessions (LORDS) project

  • The CSU Japanese American Digitization Project

  • Implementing a Harvard-style green OA policy

Additionally, there was an update from the Chancellor’s Office and break-out sessions for the Metadata and Digital Archives working groups.

An outline of the agenda and recordings of each session are available on Confluence.  Special thanks to Fresno for providing registration and webinar support, and Carmen and the planning committee for putting together an informative meeting.

ScholarWorks

Infrastructure

In June and August, we completed server upgrades for both DSpace and ScholarWorks to improve security and capacity for both systems.  Notch8 will continue working on infrastructure initiatives in the coming months, including some performance and scaling improvements to Fedora.

Development

A good chunk of our time at the Chancellor's Office is always taken up with minor improvements, troubleshooting, and data clean-up tasks for ScholarWorks.  This summer we ran a number of batch metadata changes for campuses, updated college and department lists, enabled SWORD submissions from Proquest ETD Administrator for four campuses, made it so that sub-collections sort alphabetically, developed code to allow separate controlled vocabularies for the same field in different work forms, and many other tasks.

Our major development focus, however, has been a number of customizations to the submission forms, including composite author fields, rich-text-formatting for the abstract and title fields, pull-down menus for date fields, and a three-tiered discipline field / facet.  We’re now in the final testing phase of that project.  Anyone interested in trying out these new features can do so on the demo server.

Open Forum

Finally, just a reminder that the monthly Digital Repositories Open Forum resumes this Friday.