Digital Repositories Update - September & October 2021

Created by David Walker
Oct 31, 2021
3 min read

Happy Halloween!  Here’s the latest on our digital repository projects.

Metadata Working Group

MWG has established a two-year alternating term co-chair arrangement. Nicole Shibata (Northridge) will serve as co-chair with Melissa Seelye (San Francisco) and focus on digital archives metadata, while Melissa continues work on ScholarWorks.

The group will focus on the following priorities for 21-22: 

  • Implement 20-21 recommendations for ScholarWorks metadata changes, providing guidance for corresponding cleanup of existing metadata. 

  • Focus on outstanding requests from the Trello board that are within our scope and identify those that are more appropriate for the new Work Forms Task Force. 

  • Make recommendations for enhanced collections-level metadata in ScholarWorks. 

  • Meet and collaboratively plan with DAWG.

MWG also kicked off a new “Field of the Month” initiative.  Each month for the next year, we will highlight one ScholarWorks field, rolling out revised help text on the work forms and guidance to campuses for required vs. optional metadata clean-up. These will be announced at each Open Forum (first Friday of each month) with Title being the inaugural field of the month for October/November. More details available on Melissa’s slide deck from the October Open Forum.

Digital Archives Working Group

DAWG has started compiling the results of the campus DAMS self-evaluation surveys and are using the DAMS performance evaluation toolkit to evaluate a Samvera test system hosted by San Marcos.  Both of these efforts will inform a report from DRC to COLD on considerations and next steps for a systemwide digital asset management system later this year. The group also drafted a charge to better define its role.

Publishing Interest Group

Publishing IG has been working on moving end-user documentation for publishing projects into the CSU Libraries website.  Once completed, this will provide a centralized location for documentation and information on several projects, including OJS, LibGuides Open Review Discussion Sessions (LORDS), and Open Access initiatives.

The group has also started an environmental scan of digital scholarship centers in the CSU, providing formal documentation about the state of digital scholarship support throughout the system in 2021. And, finally, the IG is addressing sustainability of the LORDS project through individual campuses and conference presentations.

Samvera Connect

This year, the Samvera community had another virtual conference.  Samvera Connect 2021 ran from October 18-21, and included updates from the various Samvera working groups, as well as several presentations and lightning talks from individual institutions.

Much of the focus on Hyrax was on the new Valkyrie module and testing non-Fedora 4 backends, in particular Postgres and Fedora 6.  A separate presentation focused on new features and performance enhancements in Fedora 6.  Perhaps of greatest importance to ScholarWorks were presentations on the new ORCID synchronization gem, which allows authors to synchronize work metadata between their ORCID profile and Hyrax, as well as updates on the new Analytics and Bulkrax modules, which are both getting closer to production use.

ScholarWorks

Notch8 has completed database maintenance work on Fedora, the last part of our year-long infrastructure upgrade project.

Development continues apace on ScholarWorks.  The customizations to the submission forms – including composite author fields, rich-text-formatting for the abstract, pull-down menus for date fields, and a three-tiered discipline field / facet – are all now in production.  The Chancellor’s Office is also implementing advanced search for the system, and has recently made some design changes to the home page and search results pages.

September and October also included a number of large metadata clean-up tasks for ScholarWorks, including correcting mangled data from the migration, separating abstracts from descriptive notes and separating degree names from degree level.  ISBNs, ISSNs, DOIs and other identifiers have now been separated out into individual fields.  Check out the Metadata Change Log for completed and upcoming data clean-up projects.