While New Year’s day came and went with very little fanfare at my house (well, if you don’t count our Star Wars marathon), I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t take the time to mark the passing of the new year, with a look ahead to the future.  And I think it is fitting, then, […]

The Code4Lib community has produced an increasingly impressive collection of open source software over the last decade, but much of this creative work remains out of reach for large portions of the library community. Do the relatively privileged institutions represented by a majority of Code4Lib participants have a professional responsibility to support the adoption of their innovations? Drawing from old and new software packaging and distribution approaches (from freeware to Docker), we propose extending the open source software values of collaboration and transparency to include the wide and affordable distribution of software.

We believe this will not only simplify the process of sharing our applications within the library community, but also make it possible for less well-resourced institutions to actually use our software. We identify areas of need, present our experiences with the users of our own open source projects, discuss our attempts to go beyond open source, propose a preliminary set of technology availability performance indicators for evaluating software availability, and make an argument for the internal value of supporting and encouraging a vibrant library software ecosystem.

The Internet Archive is a great boon to smaller libraries that may not have the resources to host their own digital materials. However, individual items uploaded to the Internet Archive are hard to treat as a collection. Full text searching can only be done within an item. It can be difficult to direct patrons to local resources. Since 2010, the University of Mary Washington has uploaded over two thousand digitized university publications, including the student newspaper and the yearbook, to the Internet Archive. Taken together, these represent almost 100 years of UMW history. Using Apache Lucy, we built a search interface, Eagle Explorer, that treats our Internet Archive collection as a cohesive whole. Patrons can use Eagle Explorer to full-text search within the collection and to filter by date and publication. This article will describe how we created Eagle Explorer, the challenges we encountered, and its reception from the campus community.

When developing local collections, librarians and archivists often create detailed metadata which then gets stored in collection-specific silos. At times, the metadata could be used to augment other collections but the software does not provide native support for object relationship update and augmentation. This article describes a project updating author metadata in one collection using a local reconciliation service generated from another collection’s authority records. Because the Goddard Library is on the cusp of a migration from Fedora 3 to Fedora 4, this article addresses the challenges in updating Fedora 3 and ways Fedora 4’s architecture will allow for easier updates.

This article introduces Peripleo, a prototype spatiotemporal search and visualization tool. Peripleo enables users to explore the geographic, temporal and thematic composition of distributed digital collections in their entirety, and then to progressively filter and drill down to explore individual records. We provide an overview of Peripleo’s features, and present the underlying technical architecture. Furthermore, we discuss how datasets that differ vastly in terms of size, content type and theme can be made uniformly accessible through a set of lightweight metadata conventions we term “connectivity through common references”. Our current demo installation links approximately half a million records from 25 datasets. These datasets originate from a spectrum of sources, ranging from the small personal photo collection with 35 records, to the large institutional database with 134.000 objects. The product of research in the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Pelagios 3 project, Peripleo is Open Source software.

Archivists have developed a consensus that forensic disk imaging is the easiest and most effective way to preserve the authenticity and integrity of born-digital materials. Yet, disk imaging also has the potential to conflict with the needs of institutional archives – particularly those governed by public records laws. An alternative possibility is to systematically employ digital forensics tools during accession to acquire a limited amount of contextual metadata from filesystems. This paper will discuss the development of a desktop application that enables records creators to transfer digital records while employing basic digital forensics tools records’ native computing environment to gather record-events from NTFS filesystems.

This article explains how the University of Nebraska Kearney Calvin T. Ryan Library improved their social media strategy by using an RSS 2.0 feed to update and sync social media tools and create a slideshow on the library’s home page. An example of how to code a well-formed RSS 2.0 feed with XML is given, in addition to PHP, HTML, and JQuery utilized to automate the library home page slideshow.

This paper focuses on modifications to an institutional repository system using the open source DSpace software to support playback of digital videos embedded within item pages. The changes were made in response to the formation and quick startup of an event capture group within the library that was charged with creating and editing video recordings of library events and speakers.

This paper specifically discusses the selection of video formats, changes to the visual theme of the repository to allow embedded playback and captioning support, and modifications and bug fixes to the file downloading subsystem to enable skip-ahead playback of videos via byte-range requests.

This paper also describes workflows for transcoding videos in the required formats, creating captions, and depositing videos into the repository.