Digital Repositories Update - February & March 2022
Here’s the latest on our digital repository projects.
Annual Meeting
We’re extending the call for proposals for the Annual Digital Repositories Meeting. CSU library faculty, staff, and students are invited to submit proposals until the end of business on Friday, April 15.
As in previous years, the 2022 Annual Meeting (to be held online June 1-2) will be an opportunity to showcase the great work being done on individual campuses as well as systemwide to further various institutional repository, digital archives, digital publishing, and scholarly communication objectives. We take a very broad view of each of these areas and welcome proposals that encompass non-traditional approaches.
Digital Repositories Committee
Please review the call for committee members and consider volunteering for the DRC!
We have a lot of folks rotating off the steering committee and the two working groups this year. We need to replace one at-large member, one chair-elect, approximately four folks from the Metadata Working Group (MWG), and three from the Digital Archives Working Group (DAWG).
Contact Carmen Mitchell if you have any questions.
Metadata Working Group
Melissa Seelye has continued work on the Field of the Month Initiative to provide guidance to campuses on metadata cleanup for Scholarworks. The first co-working meeting with project managers was held on February 3.
The Work Forms Task Force is wrapping up its proposed changes to the ScholarWorks submission forms. This includes the addition of new forms for projects and presentations, automatically setting the value of certain fields based on values in other fields, and allowing for separate versions of each form for managers and end-users, among a slew of other changes. Latest changes are available for review on the demo system.
The DRC will be discussing next steps for implementing the proposed work form changes – and the accompanying data clean-up tasks that will be needed – in April.
Digital Archives Working Group
DAWG has completed the DAMS Self Evaluation Toolkit Report. The goal of this initiative was to measure campus interest and readiness for a transition to a shared digital archives system.
DAWG has also been wrapping up an assessment of Hyrax (testing a San Marcos-hosted instance) using the CSU DAMS Performance Evaluation Tool for Digital Collections to determine whether Samvera meets the backend and frontend functional requirements for a shared digital archives system. The final report is currently in draft form and under review by DAWG, with an anticipated completion date in April.
Digital Archives Pilot
Working closely with DAWG and MWG, the DRC has put together a report outlining a pilot project for a new Hyrax-based digital archives system. The pilot, which will run through this summer, is intended to design and road test a shared system and inform the requirements and timeline for a full implementation of a digital archives repository.
Campuses interested in volunteering for the pilot should respond to the email David sent out to the listserv by April 15. MWG is also looking for volunteers to help with the metadata assessment component of the project.
We’ll be discussing the pilot project and volunteer opportunities at the open forum on Friday, April 1.
ScholarWorks
We’ve upgraded ScholarWorks to Hyrax 2.9, which provides several fixes and performance improvements, especially with the IIIF viewer for multimedia files.
We’ve also implemented a date facet and completed the automation of embargo and split work / file visibility tasks, as well as completed testing on the new advanced search feature, which will be rolled out at the same time as the new work forms.
Bryan has been developing several features for the new campus landing pages, including featured works and navigation for collections per campus. He’s also been working on functionality to mint Handles for collections.
Finally, we’ve been completing a number of development tasks to support the new work forms and preparing the code base and import scripts for the new digital archives pilot project.