2017-08-22 Yale & Duke Meetup: IT Initiatives at Beinecke & Rubenstein

Date

22 Aug 2017 9:00am - 3:00pm

Rubenstein 249 (Carpenter Conference Room, seats 40)

Duke Hosts: Sean Aery (Old Account) (Unlicensed) & Molly Bragg

Yale Attendees

• Dave Hicking (Head of Technology, Beinecke Library)
• Rebecca Hirsch (Head, Beinecke Library Digital Services Unit)

Duke Attendees (24)

• Mike Adamo (Deactivated)

• Sean Aery (Old Account) (Unlicensed)

• Andy Armacost

• Molly Bragg
• Craig Breaden (Unlicensed)
• Meg Brown

• Jim Coble (Unlicensed)

• Michael Daul (old account) (Unlicensed)
• Maggie Dickson (old account) (Unlicensed)
• Moira Downey (Deactivated)
• Ayse Durmaz
• Farrell (old account) (Unlicensed)
• Val Gillispie
• Zeke Graves (old account)
• Erin Hammeke (Unlicensed)
• Katie Henningsen
• Noah Huffman (Unlicensed)
• Susan Ivey (Deactivated)
• Cory Lown (Deactivated)
• Alex Marsh
• Tim McGeary (Unlicensed)
• Sarah Schmidt
• Will Sexton
• Paul Wilshire

CC: Ginny Boyer (Deactivated); David Chandek-Stark; Jim Tuttle (Deactivated)

Goals

• Host a series of discussions around Duke & Yale's approaches to digitization, digital collections, digital exhibits, and archival finding aids.
• Explore mutual interests and challenges.

Notes / Key Takeaways from Discussions with Yale

• Yale & Duke are both using a Fedora 3 Hydra stack; both unable to transition smoothly to Fedora 4 / Hyrax right now.
• Yale's inability to upgrade is primarily due to volume; 3M images, adding 100K/yr. Stored in Fedora (not external datastream as Duke has done); Yale awaiting an upcoming Fedora API to aid upgrade.
• Both Yale & Duke mid-transition for DCs: moving legacy digital collections into Samvera.
• Yale's legacy DC platform is VuFind (homepage; example item); will retire it once migration complete; target Jan 2018 b/c campus IT taking away their VuFind Solr index.
• Yale's new DC platform: Samvera/Blacklight (homepage)
• Yale uses Samvera software only for discovery/access; they use Preservica to meet digital preservation needs.
• Yale grappling with how to get FindIT Samvera app to appear as a cohesive platform for digital collections.
• Yale: no image server / viewer architecture yet for FindIT but they're interested in Open Seadragon / Universal Viewer.
• AV & accessibility: Yale does use OHMS but concerned not sufficient for accessibility; grappling with expense of vendor-provided captions, interested in how we do this work.
• Kissinger digital collection landing page is in Drupal
• Yale's Samvera/Blacklight has three kinds of objects, e.g. IA bookreader; Basic image view; Kissinger-type folder
• Yale metadata profiles determine up-front; process EAD → MODS → ingest into FindIT

Yale Samvera Features of Interest to Duke

• Full-text indexing & search. Example search (note "snippet of keyword in context"). Example item (click "Show plain text")
• Souped-up finding aids representation in Samvera UI for Kissinger Papers. Example w/series tree nav sidebar. Series view; Yale didn't indicate whether they felt this was sustainable beyond the Kissinger Papers or whether they would still do it once ASpace PUI launches.
• Breadcrumbs in search results view ("Contained In"): Example

Finding Aids: Yale & Duke Compare/Contrast

• Yale & Duke both ArchivesSpace partners; both running aging finding aids public UI apps, with intention to replace with something using ASpace data directly.
• Yale's legacy finding aids (homepage; example)
• Yale's Dev ASpace Public UI (homepage; results; component); expect to go live Jan 2018; SAME target month for migration to FindIT (Samvera) for digital collections.
• Working w/Harvard but haven't had much add'l community involvement. Yale interested in Duke potentially contributing/using that project. Yale also curious if Duke might instead favor Stanford's ArcLight project for finding aid UI (TBD)
• Yale has a local ingest tool called Ladybird
• Yale aims to mimic reading room experience; not store additional metadata in Samvera that doesn't exist in finding aid; just do folders; concerns about keeping metadata in sync between finding aid & repo UI
• Ideally would like ability to separate out items later on if they need to re-itemize; Yale/Duke similar experience w/Fedora modeling inflexibility.
• Rubenstein staff love Yale's context filetree nav for finding aid series-context. See also the series breadcrumbs.
• Yale ASpace UI more tightly integrated w/Aeon… if not for Aeon piece could've launched sooner. 
• Yale manages barcodes in ASpace; much better for Aeon requests for specific containers in collections… Duke does barcodes in ILS instead; that has stunted ability to integrate w/Aeon granularly.
• Yale - if less than 10 boxes the archival colls don’t get a record in ASpace… only a Voyager catalog record

• The Kissinger collection is all Yale has at present with repository/finding aid linkage; the rest they're unsure what they'll do.
• Yale was interested in Duke's ASpace ID / Samvera cross-referencing, embedded DDR viewer in finding aid; links to finding aid from DDR 

• 2-3 IT staff in Beinecke; no programmers; depend a lot on Yale Library IT
• Much of Digital Exhibits outsourced
• UX assessment nowhere near level at Duke

• Quicksearch / Bento Box app
• Voyager for catalog UI
• Scholarly publications: Yale uses Bepress

Agenda

All meetings in Rubenstein 249 (Carpenter Conference Rm)