MADS Annual Report 2017-2018

Owned by Holly Tomren
Last updated: Sept 18, 2018
8 min read

Name of Department/Unit/Team:
Metadata and Digitization Services


Goals 2017-2018:

  • Implement the Alma library management system, including developing new cataloging workflows and performing extensive data cleanup post-migration.
  • Continue retrospective cataloging of materials in Paley Stacks that were identified as missing barcodes, in order to make materials discoverable prior to move to ASRS.
  • Initiate process to become an E-CIP (Cataloging in Publication) partner with the Library of Congress for Temple University Press publications.
  • Participate in ongoing Blacklight & Website development, including metadata mappings and modeling.
  • PA Digital (LSTA4):
    • Increase the number of Pennsylvania records, collections, and institutions ingested into the DPLA.
    • Target K-12 educators to develop their awareness of PA Digital and the DPLA, and ensure we provide them materials in a format that is optimized for their needs.
    • Intensify our efforts to help institutions implement better rights statements in their records by providing one-on-one rights consultation services for institutions as well as supplementary training focused on the use of rightsstatements.org and other relevant resources.
    • Strengthen our communication and outreach plans with the goal of engaging more diverse cultural heritage institutions to participate in PA Digital.
    • Strengthen our partnerships with local partners and consortia.
  • Increase access to TU archival and cultural heritage content available online via ongoing digitization, and ingestion and description of digitized and born digital content via our digital collections portal.
  • Provide access to TU’s research resources, including rare and unique materials, via ongoing cataloging production.
  • Continue developing TU’s scholarly information ecosystem by adding more faculty profiles to Symplectic Elements.
  • Complete work on Future Proofing Civic Data project and produce white paper.


Key Accomplishments:

  • Our department saw significant organizational change this year. In December 2017, Holly Tomren became the new head of the Cataloging and Metadata Services (CAMS) department, a position that had been vacant since the retirement of Mark Darby in May 2017. In January 2018 we welcomed Stefanie Ramsay as new Digital Projects Librarian. In February 2018, Delphine Khanna departed as head of the Digital Library Initiatives (DLI) department. Finally, in April 2018, the former CAMS and DLI departments merged to become Metadata and Digitization Services (MADS). Staff have adapted well to our new department, and we look forward to increased opportunities for collaboration and alignment of metadata-related activities in TULUP.
  • During and following Alma migration, Carla Davis Cunningham, Matt Ducmanas, Leanne Finnigan, Myra Hom, Evelyn Lane, Molly Larkin, Yelena Lidskaya, and Celio Pichardo have been actively involved in learning the new system and optimizing our workflows, working closely with our colleagues in other departments to make TUL resources available and discoverable. We had to redesign key operational workflows, including day-to-day cataloging, batch cataloging from our shelf-ready vendor, outsourced cataloging for music scores and foreign language materials, e-resource batch loading and maintenance, authority control maintenance, WorldCat holdings, data exports for resource sharing and HathiTrust, resource withdrawal, database maintenance, and statistics gathering. Staff had to learn new skills, including the Drools query syntax, as well as different data models needed to use and understand the new system.
  • As members of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO), we increased our efforts to create descriptions and identifiers for people and organizations that are then added to the Library of Congress Name Authority File and the Virtual International Authority File. This year, Matt Ducmanas contributed over 100 authority records to the national database, establishing unique identities for many people and organizations significant to Philadelphia’s past and present, as represented in TUL’s collections. We are working on strategies to further increase our contributions to the Name Authority File in the future by training additional staff.
  • Despite the challenges in adjusting to Alma, cataloging production remained high, with approximately 20,000 titles cataloged, including approximately 400 original descriptions and nearly 2,000 retrospective descriptions of items found in the Paley Stacks without a barcode. The cataloging production totals represent a decrease of approximately 5,000 titles (20%) from two years ago, however this reflects TUL’s changing acquisitions patterns, which includes more online/streaming and DDA access models, as well as changes in how e-resources are handled in Alma, which in some cases require less intervention from our department. Cataloging turn-around time is swift (generally about one week from receipt to shelf) and the department has no cataloging backlog of new resources.
  • We worked closely with the Library Technology Development team on developing the Blacklight search interface, including refining metadata mappings and identifying opportunities for metadata cleanup and enrichment to improve discovery.
  • In addition to our ongoing workflows, we have also been working on several metadata cleanup projects, including re-organizing our e-resource portfolios following Alma migration, as well as cleanup of locations, material types, and other metadata elements that affect faceted discovery.
  • Resident Librarian Jasmine Clark started a rotation in our department in May 2018. From May-June 2018, she contributed to the PA Digital project, helped develop metadata profiles in Symplectic Elements, and worked with Matt Ducmanas on special collections cataloging.
  • We wrapped up our third year of the LSTA funded PA Digital project and started year four. Temple University acts as the home of the DPLA Service Hub for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and many MADS staff members contribute to the project, conducting metadata review with partner institutions, performing outreach statewide, and providing technology support for our aggregator software.
    • This year, we onboarded 35 new institutions whose collections comprised over 115,000 new digital objects (records) in the DPLA as well as additional collections from existing contributors. As of June 2018, our totals include 333,240 objects, 73 contributing institutions, and 448 collections since PA Digital went live in April 2016. This is a 54.3% increase in records from the prior fiscal year.
    • Stefanie Ramsay and Michael Carroll designed a new PA Digital website, including an infographic designed by Gabe Galson that helps contributors navigate standardized rights statements.
    • Temple’s PA Digital team gave 6 community webinars and workshops throughout the year and worked with educators to design four curated primary source sets from PA Digital resources, which will be available as K-12 instructional materials on the PA Digital website.
  • We successfully applied to be a sole source provider of the PA Digital service for our 5th LSTA grant via the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, with a grant award of $150,000, approximately double the amount of previous years.
  • Two large collections of content were digitized and made available: Frank G. Zahn Railroad Photograph Collection and the Jacob H. Gomborow Papers. Progress also continued on long-term digitization projects such as the George D. McDowell Philadelphia Evening Bulletin collection.
  • MADS staff, including our student employees, digitized over 49,000 objects, completed over 400 special digitization orders, and cataloged over 8,000 digital objects. There are now over 125,000 cataloged objects that are discoverable in CONTENTdm.
  • We continued to capture information about Temple University’s scholarly output in Symplectic Elements. Rachel Appel, Michael Carroll, and student workers (Alicia Pucci, John Smith, Sam Miller, Evron Hadley, and Edward Leinheiser) partnered with subject librarians and faculty to create over 700 faculty profiles this year from College of Public Health, College of Education, and College of Science and Technology, and started work with the School of Theater, Film, and Media Arts and Boyer College of Music and Dance.
  • In collaboration and coordination with SCRC staff, Phil D’Andrea and Michael Carroll captured 9,142,018 documents totaling 240.8GB of data through the Archive-It web archiving service. The captured seeds contain web materials that supplement the existing physical and digital Urban Archives, Philadelphia Dance Collection, and the Jewish Archives collections.
  • Rachel Appel and Delphine Khanna wrapped up work on the Knight-funded Future Proofing Civic Data research project, investigating the challenges of long-term preservation for open civic datasets. The project team interviewed over a dozen stakeholders about their use cases and needs and looked at several open civic data initiatives in Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, and the Pittsburgh area, to compare practices and examine real-life examples. The project team produced a white paper summarizing its findings, available at bitly.com/futureproofingcivicdata
  • Rachel Appel, Jasmine Clark, Matt Ducmanas, Leanne Finnigan, and Holly Tomren participated in a partnership with OCLC to test Project Passage, a linked data prototype for bibliographic metadata, based on a Wikidata platform.
  • We began the process of moving some documentation and task management to Confluence and JIRA.
  • MADS staff participated in several Library Strategic Steering Teams:
    • Collections Strategy: Holly Tomren (also subgroup: Physical Collections Working Group)
    • Research Data Services: Leanne Finnigan
    • Scholarly Communications: Rachel Appel


Goals 2018-2019 and Related Strategic Actions:

1. Designing and building a dramatically new library environment to serve as a catalyst for academic enterprise at Temple.

  • Participate in the move from Paley to Charles Library, adjusting our cataloging and digitization workflows accordingly, but especially by continuing retrospective cataloging and metadata enrichment efforts, to ensure as many resources as possible have adequate descriptions before they are moved into an automatic storage and retrieval system and become inaccessible by physical browsing.

2. Enriching the environment for learning and student success.

  • Improve discovery of TU resources by working with a vendor to enhance metadata for our entire Alma bibliographic database, including addition of data as well as cleanup of legacy data to improve faceted discovery as well as search and browse capabilities.
  • Improve discovery of library and archival resources as well as TU-related entities by continuing to provide metadata expertise to the Library’s Blacklight Search and Website Redesign projects.

3. Developing programs, services, and resources to enhance intellectual productivity, scholarly infrastructure, new modes of research and clinical care services.

  • Increase availability of digital cultural heritage objects in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania by continuing to onboard new digital collections and new contributors to the DPLA, and by increasing outreach efforts with a new Outreach and Curatorial team in the PA Digital project.
  • Increase digital literacy in Pennsylvania libraries by continuing to lead outreach efforts and provide educational content about rights management for digital collections.
  • Promote use of digital collections in K-12 education efforts by continuing to develop and share curated PA Digital Primary Source Sets, in partnership with local educators.

4. Exploring new opportunities in publishing and scholarly communication.

  • Improve exposure and discovery of TU Press publications by participating in the Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication program and creating original descriptions for these resources.
  • Improve exposure of TU scholarly output by continuing to create faculty profiles in Symplectic Elements and by participating in the implementation of and migration of content to the DSpace institutional repository.

5. Seeking partners in innovation and experimentation to add value to library programs and to identify new avenues for economic support.

  • Increase our capacity to onboard new contributors and new digital collections to the DPLA by working with Library Technology Development to rewrite our PA Digital aggregator software to make it more flexible and user-friendly.
  • With Penn Libraries, explore a partnership in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania between libraries and state data producers to inventory and develop capacity for long term stewardship of public data (Future Proofing Civic Data Phase II).

7. Serving as a repository of record for archival, rare, and unique materials and providing broad access to those collections.

  • Improve accessibility of TU digital content by implementing CONTENTdm responsive interface.
  • Continue to make new information resources available to our users through ongoing cataloging and digitization efforts, including exposing hidden collections and unique materials.
  • Assist in preserving Temple University web-based assets by continuing to collaborate with SCRC to add web content to the Temple University Special Collections archived websites collection in Archive-It, and by continuing to collaborate with SCRC to build metadata profiles and capture data for websites related to Temple University.

8. Building a world-class staff for leadership in the research library enterprise. 

  • Continue to build upon TUL-wide cooperative efforts by incorporating Health Sciences Libraries cataloging into regular cataloging workflows.
  • Increase participation in DPLA at the national level by taking on leadership roles in DPLA Working Groups, including Metadata, Assessment, and Outreach.