Created Content Committee meeting: September 24, 2013

Conference Call

Members present: Howard Carter (Southern Illinois University Carbondale), Paul Go (Illinois Institute of Technology), Margaret Heller (Loyola University Chicago), Benn Joseph (Northwestern University), David Levinson (Lake Forest College), Mary Rose (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), Anne Shelley (Illinois State University), Adam Strohm, Chair (Newberry Library).

Members absent: Julia Thompson (Western Illinois University).

CARLI staff present: Amy Maroso and Elizabeth Clarage (CARLI staff liaisons).

  1. Confirmed David as minutes taker.
  2. August minutes approved with corrections.

Committee Projects

Featured image 

2-3 members are writing up entries for the first time. Spreadsheet online is being updated.. If any changes are needed to the instructions, Amy said to feel free to edit that. If you want to do an image of the week, make an entry in the spreadsheet with your name.

Google Analytics

A few blogs are linking to some CONTENTdm items, mainly in UIC collections. Much is repetitive from month to month in the reports. The “Chicago Past” blog shows up every quarter as a driver of traffic. Unexpectedly, traffic is coming from a new page located in Russia. Margaret discussed using OpenRefine to do the analysis, and will write up the instructions for using that. OpenRefine easily makes facets and counts the instances automatically.

Digitized Book of the Month

Elizabeth posted the instructions, but they are written for the blog posting method previously used by the Collections Working Group. Amy will update the instructions to reflect how the Created Content Committee will be posting on the web page.

Web 2.0

Adam will check in with Julia about these tasks, which are continuing from DCUG.

Listing of CARLI Non-CONTENTdm digital collections

The committee discussed Amy’s mockup of this in CONTENTdm. Reactions favored a listing of each institution’s digital collections portal page, rather than trying to detail each institution’s individual collections. Amy will make a submission form for institutions to submit their portal pages.

 
Assessment Forum at IACRL (late March, Oak Brook)

Adam, Margaret, Benn and Paul will work on devising a presentation. If anyone has ideas, please contact the above group.

Yearbook and Newspaper Digitization

At the August meeting, there had been mention of starting an RFP for the newspaper digitization project. Amy said she hasn’t heard from Susan about it, but she will let us know. If anyone in the group has any vendor experience in this area, contact Amy. Benn related Northwestern’s experience with newspaper digitization by Newsbank. The agreement restricts free access to alumni and on-campus only. Newsbank has the right to sell access for others. 

Elizabeth has sent documentation around for the yearbook digitization. Amy will create a survey to be given to the CARLI governing members The survey will be brief, but question which option--newspapers or yearbooks--each library would like to digitize.

New Items

Committee discussed the possibility of doing webcasts on web 2.0 topics or digital collections promotion or assessment, aiming for a webinar in Spring 2014. If everyone over the next month thinks about timing and subject matter, we can discuss it at the next meeting.

Podcasts: logistics of serving this from CARLi to iTunes U would need to be examined. Amy will look into what those might be.

Enabling opportunities among CARLI institutions for resource sharing or collaborative grant proposals: the CARLI digital collections email list could be used for this. We could spark discussion on this, or someone could look into grant opportunities and post them to this list. Everybody on CCC should make sure they’re subscribed to this list, and see if they can generate interest by posting grant opportunities there.

Other Business

The committee needs to make a white paper or similar end product. Suitable topics will be discussed at the next meeting.

The Newberry has a Civil War transcription project going online later in the week. They are using Omeka’s Scripto plugin to crowdsource aspects of this project.