PRESENTATIONS

This training introduced the large-scale approach to describing multi-page digital compound objects. It was developed to disambiguate and clarify the new approach of describing compound objects in Project client/ContentDm. The training focused on important metadata fields, provided practical examples and instructed student assistants and staff how to apply the new rules consistently across all collections. The training session was followed by hands-on activities and discussion.

With the rise of digitizing archival collections across academic and public libraries, more librarians are getting involved in project management, but not all of them have expertise or relevant background in digitization or managing projects. In this 60-minute webinar, you’ll gain tips and strategies for managing digitization projects (see details).

The webinar is designed to help professionals relatively new to digitization and project management as it outlines some similarities and key differences between managing in-house digitization projects vs outsourcing large-scale digitization projects. It compares and contrasts important project components such as technology selection, forming and training a team, developing an efficient workflow, and establishing working relations with vendors from three different perspectives: smaller scale projects, larger scale projects and outsourced projects. Georgieva shares her recent experience, explores challenges related to these types of projects, and discusses ways to overcome them. The webinar wraps up with advice how to keep all projects successful regardless of potential technological or workflow hiccups.

This is a practical workshop based on the presenter’s experience and backed up with real examples from an institution with large-scale digitization capacity and multiple successfully completed grant-funded and internally funded digitization projects.

Metadata remediation is inevitable – at some point or another all institutions need to clean-up legacy metadata of their digital collections so it conforms to new standards and to updated metadata application profile, or simply to prepare it for migration. Optimized metadata is vital for improved search experience and easy discovery of digital objects. This session will demonstrate how Excel can be a very handy tool for manipulating and cleaning up exported non-MARC metadata from ContentDM. The presenter will manipulate a metadata spreadsheet from a real digital collection demonstrating the following:

(1) Data remediation using some advanced Excel functions that allow cleaning up at scale

- Data Filter

- TRIM

- CONCATENATE

- TEXTJOIN (insert module with VBA code)

- Duplicate Values (look up and remove)

- INDEX and MATCH

- Find and Replace

- MID, LEFT, RIGHT (break text/numeric string)

- CHAR(10) insert line break

- remove end punctuation [;]

- Date clean up (clean messed up copy-pasted dates)

(2) Mapping old fields to new fields

Attendees will learn the fundamentals of data remediation and some helpful Excel functions. They will add some practical skills in their toolbox and will leave the session with confidence that they can immediately apply their new skills in real-life projects. The metadata file is uploaded at http://bit.ly/CIMAdataSession and distributed among attendees. They are welcome to bring laptops to get their feet wet and play with the data, testing out some of the demoed Excel functions. Alternatively, attendees are welcome to simply watch how stress-free metadata clean up can be.

Overview of the metadata role in resource description, resource discovery and website faceting. The presentation discusses metadata consistency, granularity and types (descriptive, administrative and structural) with emphasis on technical and preservation metadata. The presentation introduces Dublin Core element set as well as other popular metadata schemas and their applications. The presentation also outlines the benefits of metadata reuse and the significant role of the Metadata application profile in structuring, normalizing, disambiguating and making metadata consistent and interoperable. Additionally, it points out the significance of using controlled vocabularies and their role in disambiguating words, synonym control and consistency across collections. Introduces types of controlled vocabularies and their applications, followed by examples of some issues related to inconsistency and redundancy when applying metadata using the large-scale digitization approach.

The 90-min workshop covers the main website components and some fundamental tools for static web design. The session has a practical component with hands-on activities – during that part the participants can actively build a custom WordPress website. (see details)

The session is divided as follows:

Part I (45 min) features 20 min presentation of basic web design concepts, tools and technologies and 25 min demo of the back-end of 2 static WordPress websites (free and paid versions)

Part II (45 min) features hands-on guided activities to design a new WordPress website from scratch

Attendees will learn web design fundamentals and some important practical skills. The session aims to spark creativity and inspiration, and the hands-on activities will teach the attendees how to design a custom static WordPress website. They will also learn tips and tricks how to get out of the framed templates and customize them according to their taste/needs by applying HTML and CSS coding.

What Will You Learn

- basic web design concepts such as navigation, information architecture, user experience

- project needs assessment

- graphic design and graphic layout

- fundamental tools for web design

- main web design technologies

- WordPress

How You Will Learn – presentation | demonstration | hands-on activities

The presentation is a brief update on ongoing metadata remediation projects, procedures and workflows. It discusses some patterns emerging from data clean-up and possible ways for streamlining the process by developing more efficient workflows.

Crash course on web design for librarians that builds fundamental web design and web development skills and introduces free technologies to make sleek websites (details).

This session demonstrated how easy it is to do web design of a static WordPress-driven website. Attendees learned the fundamentals of web design and added practical skills in their toolbox.

Some of the topics covered are: web design basics such as navigation, information architecture, user experience, project needs assessment, graphic design and graphic layout. Additionally, attendees got familiar with a popular tool WordPress (a content management system; its the free version and the paid options; also options with and without clients’ hosting and domain). Lastly, they learned tips and tricks how to get out of the framed templates and customize them according to their taste/needs by applying some HTML and CSS coding.

Lightning talk part of the 2018 NDSA Forum Opening Plenary (followed by a poster session) about the role of the digital librarian and how it relates to digital preservation.

It’s common misconception digital librarians are involved only in digitizing historic materials. In fact managing digital projects is only their visible role. Once it’s over, librarians embrace their new role of information architects directly engaged in the digital preservation process of archiving master files. The digital librarian is that unit in the prep process for digital preservation that ensures meticulously organized archival directories, easy navigation and smooth file retrieval. Part of session: Minute Madness (details)

Watch lightning talk here.

101 crash course on the fundamentals of digitizing archival collections from start to finish (details).

This introductory level presentation discusses the basics of digitizing collections from start to finish. The author reveals some secrets as well as tips and tricks for achieving efficiency and sustainability of digital projects. All libraries have unique collections that deserve to gain more publicity. This crash course targets librarians passionate to learn how to create efficient workflows and explains in details all steps involved in digitization – from selection, through preparation, digitization, object description (metadata) to publishing online.

The talk put emphasis on successful management of large-scale digitization projects with rigid deadlines, limited human resources, multiple production lines and dozens of milestones along the way. High productivity and project success were achieved by careful selection and advanced knowledge of user-friendly applications that allow granulation of tasks, setting deadlines, tracking progress, creating and managing checklists, assigning individual and/or group jobs to team members and simultaneous collaboration of all participants.

Advantages of using Trello over Basecamp from managerial perspective were outlined. Emphasis was placed on how the proper use of these free tools increased productivity and brought team collaboration to the next level, which resulted in successful and efficient project management.

The poster session is aimed at project managers seeking to learn how to successfully manage large-scale digitization projects using limited human resources and external digitization vendors to complete the work within the time frame and deliver a product with outstanding quality.

The attendees obtained practical project management skills to start applying immediately in their daily work. The project management techniques can be generalized to assist rapid project management action on the job for projects on a larger scale as well as on a smaller scale.

Presentation at the Digital Collections Department meeting summarizing the research of best practices, the decision-making process preceding the development of landing pages and the process of creating pages tailored for the UNLV Libraries Digital Collections.

It introduced the Nevada Digital Newspaper Project to Las Vegas genealogy researches and related the valuable digitization contribution from the state of Nevada to their ancestry tracking. Strong emphasis was put on selecting titles for digitization, digitized historic newspapers and the role of the Advisory board in this process.

The rich content of the redesigned and updated project website was also demonstrated at the presentation. It was promoted as the first resort for information about the project and recent progress updates.

The presentation serves as a report of the project accomplishments during my mandate as the Project Manager.

Location: Special Collections Division Meeting (UNLV Libraries)

Audience: Nevada Digital Newspaper Project stakeholders and Special Collections Division colleagues and management

Presentation of a comprehensive large-scale digitization plan for Eileen Brookman Papers Collection as part of the academic search for Visiting Digital Collections Librarian at the UNLV Libraries.

I’m delighted to announce that I was the successful candidate of the search and the position was offered to me.

Midterm project status updates for stakeholders. Reporting the overall project accomplishments in the past 12 months and reviewing the remaining workload until the end of the project cycle.

A presentation of the Nevada Digital Newspaper Project on the annual meeting with partners, vendors and advisory board in Carson City, NV. The presentation covers the overall project management and progress. Details about statistics, workflow, vendors, technologies, innovations and project challenges.

A presentation for the NDNP project stakeholders about project website updates, changes and new information architecture structure.

The presentation targeted at library users, project partners and stakeholders introduces the newly redesigned Nevada Digital Newspaper Project website. It discusses the redesign, the navigation, the hierarchical structure, and the new content.

The goal of this workshop was to help UNLV Digital Collections staff distinguish among the appropriate usage of the spatial fields and to start using them correctly while describing digitized photographs.

The discussed spatial fields are from UNLV Photograph collection:

• Spatial coverage

• Site name

• Address 1 (#, street)

• Address 2

Goals:

• To learn the specific usage guidelines for each of the fields

• To learn the specific CV used for each of the fields

• To distinguish among fields and avoid redundancy of metadata pieces

A presentation how to create a digital collection in ContentDm from start to finish.

ContentDm is a hosted digital asset management system for libraries. The presentation discusses all preparation work and actions to publish online a digital collection.

Some of the presentation talking points are:

• Creating a custom Metadata Application Profile with DublinCore schema

• Customizing ContentDm administration page with metadata fields and specific settings

• Customizing ContentDm faceting

• Customizing searchable metadata fields

• Interface design and configuration

• Navigation and information architecture

• Controlled vocabularies

A presentation after the completion of a proof of concept project that demonstrates the re-usability of data regardless its format and the metadata schema.

Using different tools and technologies the data was transformed from one format (pure data encoded in XML: MODS schema) to 3 different user-friendly stylish layouts for web publishing and printing.

The technologies employed for the transformation process were XInclude, XSLT: HTML5 and CSS3, XSL-FO: FO-Processor XEP.

The output resulted in two HTML webpages (one table based and one regular) and an elegantly designed PDF document for print.

Presentation of several different website designs created with CSS3.

Presentation of several different website designs created with Adobe Photoshop.

Presentation of Metadata Application Profile with local schema based on DublinCore element set.

The Metadata Application Profile reflects the peculiarities of a very specific digital collection. The local elements and the consistent custom-designed control vocabularies enhance the findability of the digital assets in that collection.