2019-2020 MADS Annual Report

Owned by Holly Tomren
Aug 18, 2020
10 min read

Key Accomplishments and Activities

  • CIP Partnership Program

    • After years of delays, we were finally able to begin our partnership with the Library of Congress to provide original pre-publication cataloging for all Temple University Press titles. From December 2019 to June 2020, we cataloged 19 titles, and we created 11 associated name authority records and submitted one subject heading proposal.

  • Digital Collections

    • Due to the move to Charles Library as well as the Covid-19 pandemic, our digitization unit was not fully staffed for much of the year, and for nearly half of the year, we did not have access to scanning equipment. Therefore, our scanning and cataloging statistics are significantly down this year compared to previous years. In the third quarter of the year (Jan.-Mar. 2020), we were back up to our full complement of student workers, continuing to adjust our workflows to the new digitization space, and were able to resume regular production levels, until the pandemic shut us down again.

    • Analytics demonstrate that the usage of our digital collections is significantly higher this year. During the pandemic closure, staff and student workers dedicated time to metadata enrichment and cleanup efforts, which we believe significantly improved access and discovery of digital collections. We believe the higher use of digital collections during this time also demonstrates the value of digital collections to scholarship, especially in a remote learning environment.

    • Continued to make progress scanning material for Bulletin Photographs, Oak Lane Day School, Temple News, Temple Yearbooks, Sci-fi Corpus Project, and YWCA materials for the In Her Own Right project.

  • PA Digital

    • One of the primary activities of the PA Digital project this year was to replace our old aggregator software (DPLAH) with a new DPLA aggregation solution. Initially, we implemented Combine, which was developed by the Michigan Service Hub. We were able to use Combine for one harvest, but found it was unsustainable for our development team. Temple LTD staff developed an alternate solution using tools we already use for other in-house applications, such as Airflow and Amazon S3. As we had named our new front-end interface “Funnel Cake,” we gave the new back-end technology the name “Shoo-Fly Pie” to keep with the Pennsylvania food theme. With our new aggregator up and running, we began reprocessing contributor collections to move them from the old aggregator to the new one, a process that will continue through October 2020. MADS staff were able to work closely with LTD on this project and gained a great deal of knowledge about code development and deployment. We were also able put into practice previous training in order to use XSLT to create customized metadata transformations for each PA Digital contributor, as well as creating a new metadata application profile, resulting in more granular and better quality aggregated metadata that we were able to share with DPLA.

    • The PA Digital team at Temple hosted a meeting of the PA Digital Executive Board and other stakeholders to engage in a strategic planning process to build more sustainability for the project.

    • We created new Primary Source Sets, including William Penn and the Early Quakers, History of Railroads in Pennsylvania, and Glass Plate Negatives. Two sets this year focused on an early grade audience, as one of our graduate student workers was able to bring expertise in Early Childhood Education.

    • We investigated the feasibility of a State Portal, which would provide a Pennsylvania-specific landing page and discovery environment for PA Digital resources, outside of the DPLA. As part of this work, we conducted an environmental scan of other DPLA hubs who have their own portals, and we conducted a collections gap analysis to determine PA Digital collecting strengths and weaknesses. After surveying PA Digital contributors, we determined that there was not high enough interest in this to move forward at this time. 

    • PA Digital hosted numerous workshops and events this year, primarily developed by the Rights subgroup and addressing issues and questions around copyright.

      • Copyright open office hours sessions

      • Copyright and Oral Histories

      • Determining the Undetermined: “Other” Rights Statements

    • PA Digital team members continued to serve on nationwide DPLA Working Groups:

      • Assessment: Rachel Appel (Co-chair)

      • Metadata: Leanne Finnigal (Co-chair)

      • Outreach: Stefanie Ramsay (Chair)

      • Rights: Gabe Galson

      • Technology: Chad Nelson

  • Move to Charles Library

    • MADS staff worked very hard on the move to Charles Library and were highly involved in the move in several ways:

      • Stefanie and Michael coordinated the move of all digitization equipment, including the specialized Quartz scanner, which required working with the vendor and was incredibly difficult and complicated.

      • Catalogers completed all ASRS “triage” before move. This included 11,574 books that could not be loaded into the ASRS because they were not in Alma. We also worked closely with Acquisitions and Access Services to handle rejected books in other scenarios (45,902 total books) in order to facilitate complete loading of the ASRS before the library opened. We cataloged a total of approximately 2500 retrospective titles this year both during and after the move.

      • We performed quality control on the ASRS loading throughout the move and also regularly afterwards, in order to detect missing items that were “found” during the move, as well as to ensure ongoing synchronization between the ASRS database and Alma. 

      • We created item records for all new kiosk equipment (laptops and battery packs) as well as for over 1000 microfilm reels of the Philadelphia Bulletin so that they could be loaded into the ASRS.

      • Following the move, we re-established digitization and cataloging workflows in the new space, working closely with other departments as needed.

      • Following the move, we were able to use the ASRS to request items with only brief catalog records in order to retrospectively catalog them more fully. This was much more difficult to do in Paley where it was often difficult to locate these items on the shelves. 

  • Covid-19 response

    • During the Covid-19 pandemic closure, we focused our efforts on discoverability of our resources, particularly online and digitized resources that could be accessed remotely. 

      • We performed a refresh of our Hathi Trust holdings in order to maximize the number of Temple-held items that could be accessed via Hathi Trust’s Emergency Temporary Access Service. The holdings refresh is a labor intensive process that is normally done once a year but hadn’t been done since 2018 because Hathi was revising their procedure. We also worked closely with LTD to ensure that these new temporary online resources were available in Library Search.

      • MADS staff and digitization student workers enriched metadata in CONTENTdm in order to improve access to digitized collections. We also worked with LTD and Communications & Marketing to try to improve visibility of digitized collections in Library Search and on the Library Website.

      • We loaded numerous new electronic resource records into Alma, thanks to temporary access agreements from vendors during the pandemic. We also corrected or removed thousands of broken links from our catalog and updated the coding of some URLs to optimize their discoverability. 

      • We completed a project to backfill Alma with records for Temple electronic theses and dissertations so that all of these could be easily found in Library Search.

      • We replaced numerous catalog records with more accurate records with proper encoding so that they would link out properly to Hathi Trust and Google Books. We also supplied missing identifiers for records to support this same linking in order to provide more online access options for users.

      • We worked with Acquisitions to support alternate purchase models during the library closure, including a limited program to purchase print resources on demand and mail them directly to patrons.

  • Ongoing Cataloging

    • Total cataloging for all libraries was 19,537 titles, which is only 1987 fewer titles than last year, and only slightly below our 20,000 benchmark, which is quite good considering 3.5 months of closure from March-June. However, this total does include approximately 3,000 replaced/enhanced records during the closure, so new cataloging alone was closer to 16,000.

    • Most types of cataloging were down somewhat from last year, but there was an increase in outsourced Non-Roman language cataloging, thanks to many items found during the move to Charles LIbrary. There were also small increases in music scores, sound recordings, streaming media, and realia.

    • We increased our cataloging of games for the LCDSS and created new documentation for cataloging procedures as well as genre terms for both tabletop games and video games. 

    • MADS staff cataloged Special Collections resources in the Beth Heinly Zine Collection, Richard W. Ellis Collection, Artists’ Books Collection and Luis Gonzáles del Valle Collection. 

    • Regular electronic resources loading was down from the previous year, but this was more than eclipsed by the large number of temporary access electronic resources that were loaded during the pandemic closure (over 150,000 titles).

  • Hathi Trust SciFi project with LCDSS

    • This year MADS worked on a cross-departmental project with LCDSS, SCRC, and LTD to make digitized books from the Paskow Science Fiction Collection available via Hathi Trust. The digitization team scanned several hundred books and kept track of title and page-level metadata. LTD worked with LCDSS to automate the generation of a digital object package complete with technical metadata and a manifest, based on the MADS spreadsheet. Matt Ducmanas identified corresponding MARC bibliographic records in Alma, added the digital object identifiers and normalized the records, then transmitted the MARC records to Hathi Trust. To date, 205 titles are now available in Hathi Trust. 

  • Marcive Comprehensive Notifications Pilot

    • We partnered with our authorities vendor, Marcive, to test their new Comprehensive Notifications Service (CNS) for one year. This was an outgrowth of last year’s backfile metadata enrichment, and it ensures that our entire Alma database gets updated on a regular basis and that access points stay current. Marcive sent us bibliographic record updates in a batch each quarter. For the first quarter, we performed extensive evaluation of the records before loading them into Alma, in order to compare what Marcive was able to provide that Alma’s built-in authority control did not. We noticed many headings changes that Marcive had caught that Alma had missed, and so we decided to proceed with loading these records back into our catalog. For the remainder of the year, we developed new workflows for sending, updating, and loading back CNS records. We decided to continue using this service and will be presenting about our experience at the ELUNA Learns virtual conference. 

  • CONTENTdm Linked Data Pilot

    • We were invited by OCLC to participate in their second major linked data project, which was to re-envision CONTENTdm in an entity-based linked data system. As long time users of CONTENTdm for Temple Digital Collections, we are interested in any future improvements to the system, and it was an opportunity for staff to gain practical hands-on experience with linked data. As part of the pilot, we worked with OCLC to select 3 collections to transform into linked data. We evaluated the resulting metadata and tested both back-end and front-end interfaces for interacting with the transformed data. The pilot will wrap up in Fall 2020.

  • Digital Preservation

    • Digital preservation was identified as a key priority for the Libraries this year.  We currently rely on the Isilon, a networked storage system supported by Temple ITS, for preservation. The Isilon contract was initially set to expire in 2020 which motivated us to explore alternative approaches that aligned with professional best practices. A working group formed in September 2019 to develop a charge and define short and long term goals for this complex work. In the Fall of 2020, the Isilon reached capacity, which affected the ability of staff to use the system. Group members focused first on cleaning up and organizing content on the Isilon before moving forward. When the group reconvened in the Spring of 2020, we defined a shared vision of digital preservation and planned a survey in order to review digital assets across the Libraries. The survey is intended to help us better understand the scope of content that requires preservation and the current cross-departmental practices of staff responsible for the management of this content. It is also a necessary step for the group to then evaluate potential preservation systems that will help us preserve digital assets for long-term access.

  • Web Archiving

    • We continued to use Archive-It to capture websites relevant to Temple University and Special Collections Research Center. In the Spring, we made additional efforts to capture local organizational responses to Covid-19. 

  • Discovery & Website

    • We continued to contribute metadata expertise to the Library Search and Library Website projects. This year, this includes improvements to the indexing of bound-with materials, transformation of some harmful subject headings, browse prototyping, and incorporation of HathiTrust links into the library catalog. 

  • NACO

    • We continued to participate in the Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO) of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging. While much of our NACO work is driven by local names found in Special Collections cataloging, this year we also performed NACO work for the original catalog records we created for Temple University Press via the CIP program. This year we created 71 new name authority records and 12 updated name authority records. 

  • SACO

    • We took some steps this year toward being able to contribute to the Subject Authority Cooperative Program (SACO) of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging. Being SACO members would allow us to create proposals for new or changed Library of Congress Subject Headings. Interested TULUP staff participated in a self-guided training program, viewing 14 online sessions, each consisting of multiple modules. While our progress was interrupted due to the pandemic closure and other priorities, we do plan to continue training and review of the SACO manual so that we can apply for SACO membership next year.  

  • Controlled Vocabulary Manager

    • Rachel Appel conducted interviews among TULUP metadata stakeholders across multiple departments, including MADS, Blockson, SCRC, Scholarly Communications, and LCDSS to determine interest in and need for a centralized system to manage local controlled vocabularies. Based on these interviews, Rachel created personas and prepared a final report, which we will use to inform our development of a Centralized Metadata Repository in the years to come. 

  • Elements

    • We continued to work with Temple ITS and the TUScholarShare team to support Symplectic Elements, Temple’s research information management system. Rachel Appel worked with the College of Public Health and Klein College of Media & Communication to populate and review faculty profiles, provide Elements training to ITS student workers, and to map Elements metadata types to the AROFA (Annual Reports of Faculty Activity) system.

  • Institutional Repository

    • MADS team members provided ongoing consultation regarding metadata mapping and application during both the soft and full launches of TU ScholarShare, and we advised on and tested the integration between ProQuest and Open Repository to automatically deliver electronic theses & dissertations (ETDs) to ScholarShare.

  • Strategic Steering Teams

    • Scholarly Communications: Rachel Appel

    • Communications & Outreach: Stefanie Ramsay

    • Collections Strategy: Holly Tomren

    • Community Engagement: Carla Davis Cunningham

Key Individual Accomplishments

  • Michael Carroll:
    TULUP Staff Recognition Award, 2019

  • Stefanie Ramsay:
    Samantha Abrams, Alexis Antracoli, Rachel Appel, Celia Caust-Ellenbogen, Sarah Denison, Sumitra Duncan, and Stefanie Ramsay (2019) Sowing the Seeds for More Usable Web Archives: A Usability Study of Archive-It. The American Archivist: Fall/Winter 2019, Vol. 82, No. 2, pp. 440-469. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc-82-02-19 

  • Rachel Appel:
    Clemens, Alison; Hagenmaier, Wendy; Meyerson, Jessica; and Appel, Rachel, "Participatory Archival Research and Development: The Born-Digital Access Initiative," Provenance, Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists 36 no. 1 (2020). https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/provenance/vol36/iss1/3 

  • Holly Tomren:
    Godby, Jean, Karen Smith-Yoshimura, Bruce Washburn, Kalan Davis, Karen Detling, Christine Fernsebner Eslao, Steven Folsom, Xiaoli Li, Marc McGee, Karen Miller, Honor Moody, Holly Tomren, and Craig Thomas. 2019. Creating Library Linked Data with Wikibase: Lessons Learned from Project Passage. Dublin, OH: OCLC Research. https://doi.org/10.25333/faq3-ax08