Digital Repositories Update - Winter 2024

Here’s the latest on our digital repository projects.

Annual meeting

We are looking for presentation proposals for the 2024 Digital Repositories Annual Meeting.  This year’s meeting will be a hybrid event on June 18, with the in-person meeting hosted by San Marcos. CSU library faculty, staff, and students are invited to submit proposals up until the end of business on March 31, 2024.

As in previous years, the 2024 Annual Meeting will be an opportunity for folks across the CSU to showcase the great work they are doing in digital repositories, digital publishing, and scholarly communication. We take a very broad view of each of these areas and welcome proposals that encompass non-traditional approaches.

ScholarWorks

We’ve recently upgraded both ScholarWorks and the Digital Archives to Hyrax 3.6.  Special thanks to Bryan for his tireless work in documenting and testing all of our customizations for this upgrade.  This and the next major release of Hyrax, version 4.0, are primarily focused on upgrading the underlying programming libraries used by ScholarWorks, and so won’t in themselves include many new features.  We’ll look to make the jump to Hyrax 4 next summer.

Going back to October, we’ve been tracking views and downloads in ScholarWorks using a custom-built stats tracker in place of Google Analytics. Over the winter break we loaded all of our historical usage statistics from DSpace and Google Analytics into the new statistics tracker – over 40 million unique data point, going back to 2013. The next steps in our development plan includes publicly displaying the view and download counts for each record in ScholarWorks.  We’ll also be soliciting feedback from the IR Working Group and campuses on what further statistics reports they would like to see.

Starting in February, we’ll be using the bi-monthly metadata co-working sessions to collectively clean-up and normalize specific metadata fields in ScholarWorks.  Previously, we’ve left each campus to initiate their own data clean-up tasks, with the co-working sessions serving as a space to ask questions and get help.  Going forward, David will give a brief presentation at the monthly open forum on the specific field we’ll be working on next, providing campuses with spreadsheets of their data from that field.  Staff can use those spreadsheets to clean-up the data for their campus.  At the following co-working session, volunteers will clean-up the data for any campus that hasn’t done so already, giving them the opportunity to review those changes before they are put in place.

Digital Archives

We’ve now completed the principal migration of the remaining collections in DSpace to the new Digital Archives.  David is just completing some final reconciliation work to bring over the last remaining items that had errors during the migration process, which we hope to have finished before March.

With the upgrade to Hyrax 3.6 complete, and the DSpace migration soon to be as well, we’ll be turning our attention in the coming months to new feature development and preparing for campus CONTENTdm and Islandora migrations to the Digital Archives.