Strategic Actions, Goals and Accomplishments
Library & Technology Development - Metadata & Digitization Services
Key Activities and Accomplishments FY 17-18
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