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Volume 24 Issue 4 Introduction: From the Guest Editor
Get PDFToday it’s hard to imagine life without a smartphone, but broadcast television, travel to the moon, MARC records, personal computers, email, the Internet, online library catalogs, cell phones, video on demand, virtual reality, and digital archive collections all came about in one human generation.
Throughout that generation of disruptive and innovative technologies, librarians have served the public good by providing the conceptual skills to organize and describe information and provide or facilitate access to it. Moreover, libraries, through cooperatives and information sharing agreements, have made possible the construction of massive data systems that serve our nation’s needs with respect to heritage content, contemporary awareness and future planning.
And that’s the foundation of this special issue of the OLA Quarterly on digital repositories and data harvests. In this issue, experts from Oregon’s libraries, Larry Landis (OSU), Mark Dahl and Zachariah Selley (Lewis & Clark), Sarah Seymore (UO), Becca Evans (SOU), Julia Simic (UO) and Ryan Wick (OSU), Beth Dehn (Oregon Heritage Commission), and Ross Fuqua and Arlene Weible (Oregon State Library) describe their work to develop important collections that have been or will be harvested and shared broadly with users throughout the world. These aren’t siloed collections that live solely in a local database or on one institution’s server. These are world-class collections, shared globally to enrich human existence
Leveraging Cataloging and Collection Development Expertise to Improve OER Discovery
Get PDFWhile there is ongoing improvement in some of the larger open educational resources (OER) search engines, librarians sending emails to listservs asking “anyone know of OER on this topic?” and keeping old-fashioned reading lists of valuable OER are common occurrences. Compared to searching for books in a library catalog or scholarly articles in a research database, finding OER wherever they may be is challenging even for librarians, not to mention instructional faculty. The reason is technical: subpar and variable metadata in OER search engines leads to difficulties searching, capturing, and sharing data across repositories. In other words, the current lack of robust, descriptive metadata for OER results in fewer access points. Thus, OER are comparatively hard to find.
Bibliographic control for purposes of information storage and retrieval is something librarians are experts in, but we have not shared our methods with the Open Education community yet. So far, the majority of library advocates for OER have been reference and instruction librarians, as well as library directors. This is great, and we need them to continue to champion OER creation and adoption, but the Open Education movement needs technical services librarians to step forward and apply their cataloging and systems administration expertise to streamline access to the sprawling landscape of OER content; our profession would do well to share our collection development expertise as well. To this end, Clare Sobotka, Reference Assistant at Linn-Benton Community College (LBCC), Holly Wheeler, Library Cataloging and Metadata Specialist at Mt. Hood Community College (MHCC), and Heather White, Library Technical Services & OER Coordinator, along with their colleagues, have started to experiment with creating collection development policies and MARC records for OER. Ultimately, they hope for the development of a metadata schema that is shared between the Open Education and library communities and is mapped to MARC and RDA, to improve both catalog records and OER search engines across the web
Writing African American History Into Wikipedia
Get PDFAs the world’s largest information database, Wikipedia is a familiar resource for many people. Given the ubiquity of Wikipedia articles on various topics, it has become a first stop for conducting online searches. However, there is a gap of information within Wikipedia related to African American history, and addressing Wikipedia’s well-documented racial bias should be a priority for librarians and archivists (“Racial bias on Wikipedia,” 2019). In February of 2019, Oregon State University Libraries and Press hosted a Wikipedia Editathon, “Writing African American History into Wikipedia.”
In the early fall of 2018, we began planning for the Wikipedia Editathon. Two librarians and one archivist, the authors of this article, formed a small team to decide on workflows and individual roles. The team initially discussed various ideas for an editathon theme, but quickly settled on African American history in the Pacific Northwest, which could be incorporated into OSU’s annual African American History Month activities in February. In addition, we all felt that Pacific Northwest African American history is not well known, even among residents of the Pacific Northwest, and so we focused on local history. None of the team members identify as African American, which made the first step, establishing partnerships, vitally important
DPLA in the Pacific Northwest: The Orbis Cascade Alliance Case
Get PDFThe Orbis Cascade Alliance’s journey to becoming a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Service Hub illustrates some important challenges and opportunities in the world of digital cultural heritage work. Released in 2013, DPLA brings together cultural heritage content on a national digital platform. Since 2014 the Alliance has moved towards DPLA membership as part of a broader strategy to aggregate its members’ digital cultural heritage collections and make them more discoverable. Competing strategies for making content discoverable, limited financial resources, and differences in missions between institutions have been obstacles as the Alliance has worked towards aggregated collections and DPLA membership. The DPLA has experienced recent growing pains as evidenced by a staff downsizing in November 2018 and the closing of a major Service Hub shortly thereafter. Though the Alliance membership has made extensive progress in metadata standardization and aggregation in preparation for a DPLA ingest, as of June 2019, Alliance DPLA activity is on hold until a new Program Manager for Unique and Local Content comes on board
Building and Navigating a Path to Collaborative Digital Platforms for Oregon’s Libraries: There are Many Ways to Get There
Get PDFOver the last several years, the State Library of Oregon has explored options and supported a variety of projects to promote collaboration among libraries to build and sustain Oregon digital collections. Activities such as hosted meetings, grant funding, and pilot projects have identified both opportunities and roadblocks to collaboration, especially for Oregon’s small public libraries. A clear and distinct path has proven to be somewhat elusive, and the journey itself has demonstrated that a one-size-fits-all solution is unlikely to emerge soon. Multiple pathways to a more robust digital collections platform may not only be inevitable but preferable, given the diversity among the travelers and the complexity of the map. This article will describe the State Library’s efforts to support digital collections in the state and what may be on the horizon for improving access and collaboration
Know How to Play the Accordion, but Don’t (and Other Things I Learned While Implementing a Discovery Layer: A Top Ten List)
Get PDFBetween May and November of 2018, Washington County Cooperative Library Services (WCCLS) implemented BiblioCore, a discovery service from BiblioCommons that would become the public interface for our existing Polaris catalog. We had a successful launch on November 14, with positive feedback from both staff and patrons. It was a highly visible project with a tight timeline. The project team was small—I was the solo cataloger and responsible for all the parts of the project that were cataloging related.
My office oversees the catalog in general, but each library manages the cataloging of their own items, so there were staff in all our libraries who needed to be kept up to speed on the changes brought by BiblioCore. That was also my responsibility.
Until the project was underway, I didn’t know what work would be required, but I discovered the knowledge I had gained on previous projects was tremendously useful. Additionally, earlier cleanup projects had improved the condition of our catalog in a way which made the implementation go much more smoothly than it might have otherwise. There were, of course, things I wish I had done differently, and a few solutions I had to come up with along the way that I will use again on future projects. Every discovery layer, migration, and catalog is different, but I hope some of what I learned can be useful to others, whether or not you work in technical services, have to plan projects, or are considering a discovery service.
And what better way to organize and share what I learned than in that most ancient of organizational systems, a top ten list
Even More on Frit-Core Beads
Get PDFThis article corrects the dating of a frit-core bead from Quebec reported in 2018, and reports three new find sites, two in North America and one in Europe. One of the American sites was occupied well past the 1560-1610 date range proposed for these beads, while the other is situated well to the south of all the others. The third site is in Rouen, France, where two different types were found with wasters from the production of drawn glass beads
“Esa euforia rusófila”: La opinión americana sobre la Unión Soviética durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial a partir de La consagración de la primavera de Alejo Carpentier.
No full textAbstract: In Chapter IV: 22-23 of La consagración de la primavera by Alejo Carpentier, the main character Enrique is in New York. It is January 1943. The Second World War has begun. In contrast to what happens in the Spanish Civil War in the novel, which is told in the first person by the protagonist, the Second World War is told by the press. While reading journals and newspapers, Enrique observes a strange phenomenon that the novel defines as ‘euforia rusófila”. A lot of novels, films and articles in newspapers portrays the ideological enemy as a sort of a close friend to the USA, and the Russian people as hard worker, as well as honest and brave people. Is it an invention of an imaginative novelist or this description stems from a realistic portrays by the author? To verify it, we analyzed the books, articles and films that was produced during the short time in which Enrique was in New York. This article tries to check how, against the official narrative of the history, Carpentier grasps this forgotten historical episode and expresses it in one of his most important novels.Resumen En el capítulo IV: 22-23 de La consagración de la primavera de Alejo Carpentier, el protagonista Enrique se encuentra en Nueva York. Es enero de 1943. La Segunda Guerra Mundial ha empezado. A diferencia de lo que ocurre en la Guerra Civil española, que es narrada en primera persona por el protagonista, la Segunda Guerra Mundial se cuenta a través de la prensa. Mientras lee los periódicos y las revistas, Enrique observa un extraño fenómeno que en la novela se denomina «euforia rusófila». El enemigo ideológico aparece como un aliado de los Estados Unidos, y la Unión Soviética como un pueblo trabajador, honesto y valiente. Esto se debe a la invención de un novelista ingenioso o esta descripción es un relato verosímil realizado por un autor riguroso? Para verificarlo, hemos analizado los libros, artículos y películas que fueron producidos durante la corta estancia de Enrique en Nueva York. Este artículo trata de comprobar cómo, contra el relato oficial de la historia, Carpentier toma un episodio histórico olvidado para construir una de sus novelas más importantes