Indiana University Libraries Digital Projects & Services

Omeka.net is a free digital library system with a rigid structure, but through perseverance and discipline the limitations may become possibilities. Since not everyone can afford to host a digital collection on their server, the cost effective solution is Omeka.net. By focusing on creative planning and manipulation, the strict boundaries can be made into a more interactive experience for the user. The restrictions inherent in Omeka.net can lead to creative responses, and I will share some of my creative responses from ravenquill.omeka.net that can be implemented into any omeka.net site.

On November 2, 2012, colleagues from Indiana University, New York University, Temple University, Ohio State University, University of Houston, the Digital Library Federation, and THATCamp hosted a Digital Humanities & Libraries THATCamp as a pre-conference to the Digital Library Federation Forum held in Denver, Colorado with just over seventy participants. The organizers were largely inspired by the fact that academic libraries- their staff, content, and services- have a long history of supporting digital humanities (DH) initiatives. Often these initiatives are concerned with digital representation of content, discovery, preservation, and analysis — activities that are essential to a library’s mission. We felt that the DH and Libraries THATCamp would provide a venue to further explore on-going conversations about strategic partnerships and services libraries are uniquely situated to offer to the digital humanities arena, moving away from a support model to a truly collaborative framework in which librarians foster and contribute to DH as experts and scholars in their own right.

The outcome of these vibrant discussions resulted in what we, as organizers, hope would equip us with ways — through anecdotes, new collaborations and partnerships, and shining examples — to better define and promote our unique roles as information professionals. We are particularly interested in: re-visiting or establishing relevant services to foster digital research; securing administrative and organizational support; and shaping outreach endeavors in ways that will grow the community of scholars, students and library professionals in sustainable ways. As an organizer and attendee, I will share several themes and issues that emerged from the THATCamp sessions–themes and issues that we face here at the IUB Libraries as we undergo strategic planning and promoting new services like the Scholars' Commons. I am looking forward to spending a chunk of time exploring and discussing the issues before us so please stop by or tune in ready to chat or tweet.

A particular challenge in the text recognition of historical document images is the considerable amount of “image noise” that can arise during the whole life cycle of a document from printing and storage to the usage and scanning of the document. Historical documents suffer from several different kinds of noise such as geometric distortions, bleed-through, textured papers, stamp, stain, and so forth. Noise will affect and complicate the different stages of document image analysis including enhancement, segmentation, layout analysis and recognition. This talk will cover the description of different stages of document image analysis and challenges and opportunities in image processing and analysis of historical documents. I will particularly explain about the software that I developed in the IMPACT project for correction of arbitrary geometric artefacts in historical documents. Such distortions appear as arbitrary warping, fold, and page curl and have detrimental effects on OCR and print-on-demand quality.

When introduced with forethought and preparation, primary sources can help young students form a tangible link from the immediate present to the remote past. We will discuss our experience introducing elementary school children to medieval illuminated manuscripts and their production, using examples of digital surrogates from the Lilly Library collections which are freely available in the Digital Scriptorium database.

The Digital Scriptorium (DS) is a non-commercial online image database of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, or manuscripts made in the tradition of books before printing. DS unites scattered resources from a consortium of many libraries into a union catalog for teaching and scholarly research in medieval and Renaissance studies. It provides unprecedented access to illuminated and textual manuscripts through digital cataloging records, supported by high resolution images and retrievable by various topic searches. DS enables users from the most casual to the most specialized to study the rare and valuable materials of academic, research, and public libraries. It makes available collections that are often restricted from public access and includes not only recognized masterpieces but also understudied manuscripts that have been previously overlooked for exhibition or publication.

The Lilly Library became a contributing member of the Digital Scriptorium in 2011. Since that time, we have contributed over 100 images and records to the database.

This presentation showcases the explorations of the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries in using CSS media queries to offer mobile-ready access to online digital collections, from TEI-encoded e-texts like Indiana Authors and Their Books to online exhibits like War of 1812 in the Collections of the Lilly Library. Included are the process to decide which features to offer, the media query technique, and testing methods for various mobile devices.

As the role of academic libraries evolves to include research data curation and management services, librarians on Indiana University campuses have developed a university-wide suite of data services. We will provide a brief overview of the drivers for these services, discuss general best practices for research data management, provide an overview of our consultation services (for metadata, data preservation, and funding agency data management plans), and describe campus-specific resources. Faculty from regional campuses are especially encouraged to attend this event.

The William V.S. Tubman Photograph Collection was the first to pilot DLP’s Photocat web application and an early collection ingested into ICO. The IU Liberian Collections (IULC) learned many lessons between its first 2004 encounter with the Tubman albums in the damp library of an abandoned country mansion in Liberia and their becoming publicly available world-wide via ICO in 2011. Funded by grants from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme and Africana Librarians Council/Title VI Librarians/CAMP, the IULC worked with numerous IU Libraries and SLIS staff, students and faculty. The Lingle Craig Preservation Laboratory, IU Archives and the the African Studies Collection made very important contributions, but the Digital Library Program had the greatest impact on the project through their digital library infrastructure and related tools. The presentation will review the project’s seven-year history, focusing on lessons learned as an early adopter regarding project workflow and dealing with the design and content of metadata.

The Avalon Media System Project (formerly Variations on Video) is a three-year IMLS-funded, multi-institutional effort to develop an open-source system that will enable libraries and archives to easily manage, distribute, and provide controlled online access to their video and audio collections in support of teaching, learning, and research. Led by Indiana University and Northwestern University, Avalon is being developed in collaboration with numerous other institutions. This presentation will give an overview of the project, a demo of the first release of the software, a summary of IU pilot projects, and an overview of coming functionality in future releases.

We will provide a brief history of the development of the Scholars' Commons, along with an introduction and progress report on the cross-training taking place between the Reference Services Department and the Services Team in Library Technologies and Digital Libraries.

IUB Libraries’ subscription to Shared Shelf, an image and media management software for hosting and cataloging locally owned images, is an exciting development for visual disciplines--but many decisions need to be made in order to effective deploy this tool. This presentation will discuss the collaborations and processes implemented for establishing sustainable policies and workflows. Our ultimate goal is to promote and integrate interdisciplinary image use, and we will discuss our backwards-design approach, including implementing a pilot project, evaluating legacy data, and establishing partnerships to reach out to faculty across campus.

Major research universities are grappling with their response to the deluge of scientific data in its big data and long tail data forms. The latter consist of many diverse and heterogeneous sets, the data are collected via diverse and specialized methods, and are stored in a variety of formats and places. University libraries and their institutional repositories have traditionally been able to handle scientific output. But long-tail scientific data introduce substantial challenges to a traditional document-based repository through its vast heterogeneity, size, and its demands for meaningful discovery and in the case of large data sets, place-based use.

In this presentation we will provide a brief overview of the NSF-funded project "Sustainable Environment - Actionable Data" (SEAD), which addresses the challenges of long-tail scientific data with the focus on sustainability science. We will provide an overview of this project and of its discovery and preservation component, called SEAD Virtual Archive. This component is being developed by the Data to Insight Center team at Indiana University in collaboration with IU and UIUC libraries. We will describe main features and our ongoing work on SEAD Virtual Archive and discuss the value and importance of partnerships between data research centers, such as D2I, and the libraries.