I reflect on my 10+ year tenure with the Code4Lib Journal. Ponder the work of our editors and authors. And come out the other side ready for 10 more years.

A design system is crucial for sustaining both the continuity and the advancement of a website’s design. But it’s hard to create such a system when content, technology, and staff are constantly changing. This is the situation faced by the Digital team at the New York Public Library. When those are the conditions of the problem, the design system needs to be modular, distributed, and standardized, so that it can withstand constant change and provide a reliable foundation. NYPL’s design system has gone through three major iterations, each a step towards the best way to manage design principles across an abundance of heterogeneous content and many contributors who brought different skills to the team and department at different times. Starting from an abstracted framework that provided a template for future systems, then a specific component system for a new project, and finally a system of interoperable components and layouts, NYPL’s Digital team continues to grow and adapt its digital design resource.

Going beyond author, title, subject and notes, there are many new (or newly-revitalized) fields and subfields in the MARC 21 format that support more structured data and could be beneficial to users if exposed in a discovery interface. In this article, we describe how the Orbis Cascade Alliance has implemented display, search and faceting for several of these fields and subfields in our Primo discovery interface. We discuss problems and challenges we encountered, both Primo-specific and those that would apply in any search interface.

As a DPLA regional service hub, Mountain West Digital Library harvests metadata from 16 member repositories representing over 70 partners throughout the Western US and hosts over 950,000 records in its portal. The collections harvested range in size from a handful of records to many thousands, presenting both quality control and efficiency issues. To assist members in auditing records for metadata required by the MWDL Metadata Application Profile before harvesting, MWDL hosts a metadata auditing tool adapted from North Carolina Digital Heritage Center’s original DPLA OAI Aggregation Tools project, available on GitHub. The tool uses XSL tests of the OAI-PMH stream from a repository to check conformance of incoming data with the MWDL Metadata Application Profile. Use of the tool enables student workers and non-professionals to perform large-scale metadata auditing even if they have no prior knowledge of application profiles or metadata auditing workflows.

In the spring of 2018, we further adapted and extended this tool to audit collections coming from a new member, Oregon Digital. The OAI-PMH provision from Oregon Digital’s Samvera repository is configured differently than that of the CONTENTdm repositories used by existing MWDL members, requiring adaptation of the tool. We also extended the tool by adding the Dublin Core Facet Viewer, which gives the ability to view and analyze values used in both required and recommended fields by frequency.

Use of this tool enhances metadata completeness, correctness, and consistency. This article will discuss the technical challenges of project, offer code samples, and offer ideas for further updates.

To provide access to the digitized collections without breaking any copyright laws, Leiden University Library built a copyright module for their Islandora-based repository. The project was not just about building a technical solution, but also addressed policy, metadata, and workflows. A fine-grained system of access rights was set up, distinguishing conditions based on metadata, IP address, authentication and user role.

The Michigan State University Libraries Digital Repository relies primarily on MODS descriptive metadata to convey meaning to users and to improve discoverability and access to the libraries’ unique information resources. Because the repository relies on this metadata for so much of its functionality, it’s important that records are of consistently high quality. While creating a metadata guidelines document was an important step in assuring higher-quality metadata, the volume of MODS records made it impossible to evaluate metadata quality without some form of automated quality assessment. After considering several possible tools, an XML Schema with embedded Schematron rules was ultimately chosen for its customizability and capabilities. The two tools complement each other well: XML Schemas provide a concise method of dictating the structure of XML documents and Schematron adds more robust capabilities for writing detailed rules and checking the content of XML elements and attributes. By adding the use of this Schema to our metadata creation workflow, we’re able to catch and correct errors before metadata is entered into the repository.

In this paper we present a retrospective of a 2.5 year project to migrate a major digital repository system from one open source software platform to another. After more than a decade on DSpace, Oregon State University’s institutional repository was in dire need of a variety of new functionalities. For reasons described in the paper, we deemed it appropriate to migrate our repository to a Samvera platform. The project faced many of the challenges one would expect (slipping deadlines, messy metadata) and many that one might hope never to experience (exceptional amounts of turnover and uncertainty in personnel, software, and community). We talk through our experiences working through the three major phases of this project, using the structure of the Greek Tragedy as a way to reflect (with Stasimon) on these three phases (Episode). We then conclude the paper with the Exodus, wherein we speak at a high level of the lessons learned in the project including Patience, Process, and Perseverance, and why these are key to technical projects broadly. We hope our migration story will be helpful to developers and repository managers as a map of development hurdles and an aspiration of success.

Many organizations struggle with technological change. Often, the challenges faced are due to fear of change from stakeholders within the institution. Users grow accustomed to certain user interfaces, to processes associated with a specific system, and they can be frustrated when they have to revisit how they interact with a system, especially one that they use on a daily basis. This article will discuss how to acknowledge the fears associated with technological change and will suggest communication tactics and strategies to ease transitions. Specific scenarios and examples from the author’s experiences will be included.

Machine learning algorithms and technologies are becoming a regular part of daily life – including life in the libraries. Through this article, I hope to:

* To introduce the reader to the basic terminology and concepts of machine learning
* To make the reader consider the potential ethical and privacy issues that libraries will face as machine learning permeates society
* To demonstrate hypothetical possibilities for applying machine learning to circulation and collections data using TensorFlow/Keras and open datasets

Through these goals, it is my hope that this article will inspire a larger, ongoing conversation about the utility and dangers of machine learning in the library (and concurrently society as a whole). In addition, the tripartite division of the article is meant to make the material accessible to readers with different levels of technical proficiency. In approaching the first two goals, the discussion is focused on high level terms and concepts, and it includes specific public cases of machine learning (ab)use that are of broad interest. For the third goal, the discussion becomes more technical and is geared towards those interested in exploring practical machine learning applications in the library.

Both HEVC (ISO/IEC 23008–2) video compression and the HEIF (ISO/IEC 23008-12) wrapper format are relatively new and evolving standards. Though attention has been given to their recent adoption as a JPEG replacement for more efficient local still image use on consumer electronic devices, the standards are written to encompass far broader potential application. This study examines current HEVC and HEIF tools, and the standards’ possible value in the context of digital still image archiving in cultural heritage repositories.

Fondren Library at Rice University has numerous study rooms which are very popular with students. Study rooms, and equipment, have future inventory needs which require a visual calendar for reservation. Traditionally libraries’ manage reservations through a booking module in an Integrated Library System (ILS), but most, if not all, booking modules lack a visual calendar which allows patrons to pick out a place and time to create a reservation. The IT department at Fondren library was able to overcome this limitation by modifying the open source Booked Scheduling software so that it did all of the front end work for the ILS, while still allowing the ILS to manage the use of the rooms.

At the American University of Sharjah, our Databases by title and by subject pages are the 3rd and 4th most visited pages on our website. When we changed our ILS from Millennium to OCLC’s WorldShare Management Services (WMS), our previous automations which kept our Databases A-Z pages up-to-date were no longer usable and needed to be replaced. Using APIs, a Perl script, and LibGuides’ database management interface, we developed a workflow that pulls database metadata from WMS Collection Manager into a clean public-facing A-Z list. This article will discuss the details of how this process works, the advantages it provides, and the continuing issues we are facing.