Digital library services news – summer 2020

Welcome!  As summer draws to a close, it’s time to highlight hot news in digital library services.

Featuring contributions from: Cathy Aster, Hannah Frost, Dinah Handel, Amy Hodge, Michael Olson, and Sarah Seestone. 

First Spanish-English exhibit published | Primera exposición publicada en español-inglés
The first Spanish-English Spotlight at Stanford exhibit has been published, The Maria Jesús Casado García-Sampedro Piano Roll Collection. Jerry McBride, Archive of Recorded Sound Head Librarian, worked closely with researcher Esther Burgos-Bordonau, Ph.D. to create the exhibit. Adan Griego, Curator for Latin American, Iberian & Mexican American Collections provided key Spanish translations for the Spotlight application. If you’re considering creation of an exhibit in a language in addition to English and Spanish, Spotlight can support: Albanian, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian and Portuguese-Brazilian.

Newly Renamed Service: The Born Digital Preservation Lab (BDPL)
DLSS Digitization Services is pleased to announce that the Born-Digital / Forensics Lab has been renamed to the Born Digital Preservation Lab (BDPL). We have removed the word “forensics” and replaced it with “preservation” as this more accurately describes our lab’s function of preserving and providing access to born digital collection materials. We are excited to launch the new academic year with the new name as we continue to tackle the challenging and rewarding work of digital preservation in archives.

Enhancements to Search all (Bento search)
Search all has been greatly improved and enhanced over the last month. Additional metadata has been added to the Catalog and Articles+ search results. Catalog results now include the author, imprint, and direct links to online resources. Hooray! Articles+ results include author, an abstract and improvements to the publisher statement. Accessibility issues were addressed including updates to HTML headings, and added context and elements to help a screen reader user quickly navigate the site.

Equally exciting is the addition of two new search result boxes for Guides and Exhibits. Big thanks to the DLSS Access team – including Camille Villa, Jennifer Vine, Jessie Keck, Jack Reed, and Chris Beer. Thanks also to Mark Matienzo who ensured the work was prioritized before the start of Fall quarter. If you have questions or comments, please submit feedback or contact Sarah Seestone (seestone@stanford.edu).

Digitization for Fall Course Support
The 20-21 academic year will be unlike any other at Stanford Libraries. In particular, DLSS Digitization Services has developed a new component of their service to digitize materials for Course Reserves in support of online teaching. To develop this new service, a working group was formed and has been meeting regularly since mid-July, collaborating to develop policies and procedures to digitize library materials. Reserves and Branch staff received training to ticket requests in JIRA, and digitization is already underway as the beginning of the fall quarter nears. To learn more about the service, visit the Digitization for Course E-Reserves consul page.

Expanded discovery for Spotlight at Stanford exhibits
We’re pleased to announce expanded discovery for Spotlight at Stanford exhibits is now available via library.stanford.edu and searchworks.stanford.edu. Our colleagues on the DLSS Access Team have recently added an Exhibits tile to the Bento search options, adding another discovery point for Spotlight at Stanford. This digital library blog post provides examples with screenshots of how this new discovery works – please check it out!

DOIs Up!
Requests for Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) have been on a sharp rise over the past four months (see above chart). The Stanford Libraries DOI service, launched two years ago through our membership in DataCite, offers these identifiers for content in the Stanford Digital Repository and other digital materials hosted at Stanford. Since the initial launch, we have directly served several campus groups, including SimTK and OpenNeuro, in addition to fulfilling ad hoc requests by members of the Stanford community.

Why the sudden uptick? Maybe a surge in data sharing or publishing practices induced by quarantine. We’ve received DOI requests for a social science dataset, an honors thesis, research data produced at SLAC, GIS data, software, and course handouts for grant writing guidance.  Looking forward to 2021, we anticipate broadly expanding the service when we integrate the DataCite API to automatically generate DOIs for Stanford Digital Repository content. For more information about the SUL DOI service, check out doi.stanford.edu.

Dates and Timezones in Born-Digital Collections
In the Born Digital Preservation Lab, we utilize a mix of software to survey, arrange and describe our born-digital collection materials. We primarily use open source software aimed at libraries, such as BitCurator, to do these tasks, but we also license a commercial software application called Forensic Toolkit (FTK). FTK is software for Windows that allows us to image and interact with digital materials through a graphical user interface. This summer, two staff members attended a training workshop on FTK. One key takeaway was how to determine a Windows computer’s timezone settings.

A computer’s timezone settings are critical in determining the original creation and modification dates for born-digital documents. Timezone is usually set automatically by the operating system, but it can also be manually modified by a user. When we have acquired a collection of content files and the associated Windows computer, the FTK’s Registry Viewer application can determine the timezone and daylight savings time offsets that were in force when a document was created or modified. This nifty method of documenting the timezone in born-digital collections will be extremely useful in cases where we have the accompanying computer’s Window’s registry files.

Update: Goal to accession 600 TB backlog of media content achieved!
In the Spring newsletter, we shared a graph showing the significant progress the Stanford Media Preservation Lab (SMPL) team has made in recent months to accession our backlog of digitized AV content into the Stanford Digital Repository. As projected, this work was completed this summer. Now, after six years of concerted effort, we have effectively eliminated our backlog. All 600 TB of material generated and processed in our labs is stored in SUL’s managed preservation environment. This content represents approximately 50% of the SDR’s current volume of data stored. 

Thanks to Ben Albritton, Michael Angeletti, Andrew Berger,  Nathan Coy, and especially Geoff Willard for their work over the years in this effort.

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