Digital Repositories Update - April, May & June 2022
Here’s the latest on our digital repository projects.
Annual meeting
The 2022 annual Digital Repositories meeting was held online on June 1-2, and included an impressive array of presentations from practitioners across the CSU, covering topics ranging from accessibility and digitization to collections focused on Black Californians, among many others.
The full agenda with links to recordings is available on Confluence. Special thanks to Carmen Mitchell and the planning committee for putting on such a successful program.
Digital Repositories Committee
The annual report for the Digital Repositories Committee is now available on Confluence. This was a productive year for the DRC and its two working groups, with significant work completed toward metadata remediation for ScholarWorks, planning and testing for the new Digital Archives, and hosting the annual meeting.
The committee would like to thank the following members who have completed their terms: Patrick Newell and Alyssa Loera, who served on the steering committee; Melissa Seelye, Nicole Shibata, Julie Dinkins, and Hema Ramachandran, who served on the Metadata Working Group, and Eric Milenkiewicz, Azalea Camacho, and Beth Blackwood, who served on the Digital Archives Working Group. Your hard work and facilitation is so appreciated!
Special thanks to Carmen Mitchell for chairing the DRC the past two and half years. Her work was instrumental in getting this important, new COLD committee off the ground. Andrew Weiss will be taking over as chair of the steering committee next year.
Digital Archives pilot
Since April, David has been leading a pilot project to test out a new Digital Archives system. Six campuses are participating in the pilot.
To date, the campuses have identified and exported collections to the Chancellor's Office from local campus systems, including CONTENTdm. The Chancellor’s Office has, in turn, developed migration scripts for these exports, and loaded the test collections into a pilot system. Over the summer, the campuses will be evaluating the pilot system, identifying any missing functionality or new enhancements.
The campuses have also exported a larger set of metadata from their local systems together with data mappings for assessment by the metadata task force, led by Nicole Shibata, with the goal of developing a preliminary metadata application profile for the Digital Archives.
ScholarWorks
The Chancellor’s Office has been busy finalizing work on the new submission forms for ScholarWorks, which will go into production at the end of next week.
This work focused on both expanding the number of forms -- with new forms tailored for student projects and presentations -- as well as simplifying all forms, making it easier for faculty and students to submit works themselves. New functionality includes support for campus-specific customizations and versions of each form designed especially for library staff.
It took nine months working with the libraries to reach consensus on these changes, and it will take another six months to clean-up the existing records to match the new metadata schemas and controlled vocabularies. But this work will improve the overall presentation and discovery of metadata in ScholarWorks.
In addition to the changes to the forms, the July update will also include an advanced search feature and new functionality to harvest collections from external repositories into ScholarWorks.