Lantern is a template and workflow for using Pandoc and GitHub to create and host multi-format open educational resources (OER) online. It applies minimal computing methods to OER publishing practices. The purpose is to minimize the technical footprint for digital publishing while maximizing control over the form, content, and distribution of OER texts. Lantern uses Markdown and YAML to capture an OER’s source content and metadata and Pandoc to transform it into HTML, PDF, EPUB, and DOCX formats. Pandoc’s options and arguments are pre-configured in a Bash script to simplify the process for users. Lantern is available as a template repository on GitHub. The template repository is set up to run Pandoc with GitHub Actions and serve output files on GitHub Pages for convenience; however, GitHub is not a required dependency. Lantern can be used on any modern computer to produce OER files that can be uploaded to any modern web server.

Themed web archive collections exist to make sense of archived web pages (mementos). Some collections contain hundreds of thousands of mementos. There are many collections about the same topic. Few collections on platforms like Archive-It include standardized metadata. Reviewing the documents in a single collection thus becomes an expensive proposition. Search engines help find individual documents but do not provide an overall understanding of each collection as a whole. Visitors need to be able to understand what individual collections contain so they can make decisions about individual collections and compare them to each other. The Dark and Stormy Archives (DSA) Project applies social media storytelling to a subset of a collection to facilitate collection understanding at a glance. As part of this work, we developed the DSA Toolkit, which helps archivists and visitors leverage this capability. As part of our recent International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) grant, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Old Dominion University (ODU) piloted the DSA toolkit with the National Library of Australia (NLA). Collectively we have made numerous improvements, from better handling of NLA mementos to native Linux installers to more approachable Web User Interfaces. Our goal is to make the DSA approachable for everyone so that end-users and archivists alike can apply social media storytelling to web archives.

Institutional Repositories (IR) exist in a variety of configurations and in various states of development across the country. Each organization with an IR has a workflow that can range from explicitly documented and codified sets of software and human workflows, to ad hoc assortments of methods for working with faculty to acquire, process and load items into a repository. The University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries has managed an IR called UNT Scholarly Works for the past decade but has until recently relied on ad hoc workflows. Over the past six months, we have worked to improve our processes in a way that is extensible and flexible while also providing a clear workflow for our staff to process submitted and harvested content. Our approach makes use of GitLab and its associated tools to track and communicate priorities for a multi-user team processing resources. We paired this Web-based management with a folder-based system for moving the deposited resources through a sequential set of processes that are necessary to describe, upload, and preserve the resource. This strategy can be used in a number of different applications and can serve as a set of building blocks that can be configured in different ways. This article will discuss which components of GitLab are used together as tools for tracking deposits from faculty as they move through different steps in the workflow. Likewise, the folder-based workflow queue will be presented and described as implemented at UNT, and examples for how we have used it in different situations will be presented.

A pandemic changes the world and changes libraries.

Unsatisfied with customization options for CONTENTdm, librarians at University of Idaho Library have been using a modern static web approach to creating digital exhibit websites that sit in front of the digital repository. This “skin” is designed to provide users with new pathways to discover and explore collection content and context. This article describes the concepts behind the approach and how it has developed into an open source, data-driven tool called CollectionBuilider-CONTENTdm. The authors outline the design decisions and principles guiding the development of CollectionBuilder, and detail how a version is used at the University of Idaho Library to collaboratively build digital collections and digital scholarship projects.

Libraries that publish scholarly journals, conference proceedings, or open educational resources can use static site generators in their digital publishing workflows. Northwestern University Libraries is using Jekyll and Bookdown, two open source static site generators, for its digital publishing service. This article discusses motivations for experimenting with static site generators and walks through the process for using these technologies for two publications.

Static website generators have seen a significant increase in popularity in recent years, offering many advantages over their dynamic counterparts. While these generators were typically used for blogs, they have grown in usage for other web-based projects, including documentation, conference websites, and image collections. However, because of their technical complexity, these tools can be inaccessible to content creators depending on their level of technical skill and comfort with web development technologies. Drawing from experience with a collaborative static website project, this article will provide an overview of static website generators, review different tools available for managing content, and explore workflows and best practices for collaborating with teams on static website projects.

The University of Houston (UH) Libraries made an institutional commitment in late 2015 to migrate the data for its digitized cultural heritage collections to open source systems for preservation and access: Hydra-in-a-Box, Archivematica, and ArchivesSpace. This article describes the work that the UH Libraries implementation team has completed to date, including open source tools for streamlining digital curation workflows, minting and resolving identifiers, and managing SKOS vocabularies. These systems, workflows, and tools, collectively known as the Bayou City Digital Asset Management System (BCDAMS), represent a novel effort to solve common issues in the digital curation lifecycle and may serve as a model for other institutions seeking to implement flexible and comprehensive systems for digital preservation and access.