In this issue:
- Director’s Message: Opportunities at TCDL 2012
- TCDL 2012 Program focuses on connecting through digital services
- Member Story: History of Medicine Collections in the UTMB Digital Repository
- Tech Team Update: Upgrades, infrastructure work, Vireo planning
Director’s Message: Opportunities at TCDL 2012
TDL Colleagues:
TDL Director Mark McFarland
Here at TDL, we are gearing up for next month’s Texas Conference on Digital Libraries, and we are truly pleased to be offering a rich and rewarding conference program to our members and friends.
Among other things, we are looking forward to updating members and non-members alike on the status of various projects that TDL has in the works.
We’re particularly pleased to have James Hilton as our opening keynote speaker and to have him share more about the work of the Digital Preservation Network (DPN), a collaborative effort to create a nationwide preservation infrastructure that TDL has joined.
TCDL will also be enriched by the noteworthy projects that our members are undertaking at their respective institutions. This issue of the newsletter, for instance, features a story on the History of Medicine Collections being added to the UTMB Digital Repository.
Mira Greene, the Head of Digital Services at the Moody Medical Library at UTMB, will be sharing some of what her team learned through their collection-building process in a conference workshop. This is just one of many examples of the way TCDL brings our members together to share knowledge and advance the work of digital libraries in Texas.
I encourage you to take the time to learn more about TCDL 2012, through this newsletter and by visiting the conference website at http://conferences.tdl.org/TCDL/TCDL2012/.
We look forward to seeing you in Austin next month.
Sincerely,
Mark McFarland
TDL Director
TCDL 2012 program focuses on connecting through digital services
TCDL 2012 is less than one month away!
On May 24-25, the Texas Digital Library and the TCDL Planning will welcome members and non-members from around the state and beyond for two days of networking and knowledge-sharing at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center in Austin.
The conference program features two distinguished keynote speakers – James Hilton ( CIO at the University of Virginia and leader of the Digital Preservation Network project) and John P. Wilkin (Executive Director of HathiTrust) — as well as parallel tracks of presentations and panels on topics ranging from data management and preservation to promotion of digital resources to using wikis and other tools for scholarly communications.
This year’s program will also feature a Poster Session and Minute Madness, in which poster presenters will give quick, one-minute talks to entice attendees to view their posters. Additionally, the afternoon of Friday, May 25 is reserved for a slate of workshops and Birds of a Feather discussions.
To view the full program, visit the TCDL 2012 website. You can also get news and discuss the conference on Twitter at @TCDL2012.
More information about TCDL 2012
- If you haven’t registered for TCDL 2012, it’s not too late! Go HERE to register.
- Follow TCDL on Twitter: @TCDL2012
- Learn about our keynote speakers.
- Contact TDL at info@tdl.org.
Member Story: History of Medical Collections in the UTMB Repository
The Microscope Collection in UTMB’s Blocker History of Medicine Collections features about 100 instruments that represent the history of microscopy. The Ross Microscope (c. 1835), pictured above, is one of only 10 of this type made by Andrew Ross, a well-known London instrument maker. It is one of only five known left to exist. (Courtesy of the Blocker History of Medicine Collections, Moody Medical Library)
The Moody Medical Library at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) has added four medical history collections from the Truman G. Blocker Jr. History of Medicine Collections to its Texas Digital Library (TDL) repository.
These collections include historical postcards depicting U.S. hospitals; journals belonging to Greensville S. Dowell, a pioneer in Texas medical education; images related to the 1920 bubonic plague outbreak in Galveston, Texas; and photographs of UTMB’s collection of microscopes. These collections join UTMB’s electronic theses and dissertations at the TDL.
Building Expertise in Digital Collections
Brett Kirkpatrick, Associate Vice President of Academic Resources and Director of Libraries at UTMB, is putting the pieces in place to move forward with these and additional projects. He created a committee of staff to identify and prioritize collections that will be included in the repository.
According to Mira Greene, Head of Technical Services and Chair of the committee, “Every part of the library is represented on the committee. It includes Pat Ciejka, Administrative Director of Library Services; Robert Marlin, Archivist; and Patricia Callaway, Cataloger and Alex Bienkowski, Reference Librarian.”
Each collection has unique needs and demands flexible processes. Since the historical postcard collection had previously been digitized and metadata for the images already existed it was an obvious first choice. Greene worked with TDL staff to batch upload those items and associated XML metadata into the repository.
Next, the committee turned to a collection of materials that the library had in its possession related to a bubonic plague outbreak in Galveston, Texas, that occurred in 1920. According to Marlin, the bubonic plague collection was an ideal next step for a team new to digital collection building.
“It was small, it had a variety of materials and it was something manageable that was visually appealing,” he said.
By working with this smaller collection, the team created processes for digitization and metadata creation that would serve them well when selecting and building other digital collections.
Highlighting UTMB”s Unique Content
The Microscopy Collection is the centerpiece of the UTMB Institutional Repository. The Microscope Collection includes representative examples documenting the development of the microscopy from the 18th century through the early 20th century; it is considered one of the major microscopy collections owned by a U.S. academic institution.
The collection of approximately 100 microscopes includes several rare instruments, such as an 1835 Ross Microscope (pictured above), one of only five currently in existence. The collection got its start with the donation of more than 30 microscopes by Dr. John Bunyan in 1967. The collection has grown since then through donations from UTMB faculty.
For the microscope collection, Greene worked again with TDL to batch upload the images. Because no metadata existed for the collection, she added metadata in DSpace for each image.
More information:
- To view the Blocker History of Medicine Collections in the UTMB Institutional Repository, go to: http://repositories.tdl.org/utmb-ir.
- Additional materials and information about the Moody Library’s archival collections can be found on the Blocker History of Medicine Collections website
Tech Teams Update
The Tech Teams Update highlights the work of the TDL technical staff, which includes software development, systems administration, systems integration and analysis, and technical support staff.
- The team continued work re-architecting TDL Systems and applications and has begun setting up new online journals and conference sites in the latest versions of Open Journal Systems and Open Conferrence Systems.
-Legacy journals residing on http://journals.tdl.org/ will be scheduled for upgrade to the latest version of OJS at a future date.
- The development team has begun planning work for new Vireo development.
- In March, the TDL technical staff resolved 33 support requests that came through the TDL Helpdesk and other channels.