Thoughts on impostor syndrome and participation in the Code4Lib community

By deciding what to digitize in special collections and archives, we choose what narratives to promote, what history to highlight, and what legacies to further. This paper details a new initiative at LSU Libraries to integrate diversity and inclusion goals into digitization policies. After reviewing examples of how digitization can be either beneficial or harmful to individuals represented in the historical record, the author uses Ibram Kendi’s definition of racist policy — that which leads to racial inequalities — as a starting point for exploring how digitization selection can help counteract histories of exclusion.

Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience of viewing computed-generated objects onto your view of the real world. Since the Pokemon Go craze in 2016, many libraries have tested the waters with AR programs. Some went on to the next step of developing their own AR content to enhance library services and marketing. While there are many AR applications that libraries can use for this purpose, it usually thwarts customers that they must install various AR mobile apps in order to enjoy these experiences on their own devices. This becomes the major hurdle of making AR more enjoyable and accessible at the library. What's more, libraries cannot share home-grown AR content across different platforms easily because of the technical barriers in various AR platforms. In this article, I would like to introduce a completely open source AR developing tool that allows library staff to create fast and efficient AR content with pure web solutions. It is standard and works on mobile devices with no installation required. I have created a basic AR experience with the tool for a regional Pacific Library Partnership conference and it proved to be a success in improving the accessibility and shareability of AR content.

Vandal Poem of the Day (VPOD) is a public poetry initiative led by the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL) at the University of Idaho Library. For four academic years VPOD has published contemporary poems daily in collaboration with award-winning poetry presses and journals. This article details the project’s genesis and history, focusing on two aspects of the project: 1) the customized WordPress site, CSS, and plugins that enable the layout, publication, and social media promotion of the poetry and 2) the innovative means we have developed for promoting the site using receipt printers. The latter portion includes details and code related to two different physical computing projects that use receipt printers–one using a Raspberry Pi and the other using a recycled library circulation printer– to print individual VPOD poems on demand.

An important software product for the Linked-Data for Production phase 2 grant from the Mellon foundation was the creation of a linked-data editor that professional cataloging staff would use to create original RDF descriptions of their collections. Using the Bibframe Editor from the Library of Congress as inspiration, the Stanford University Library-based software development team are actively building a React/Redux linked-data editor for use by a cohort of national, academic, and special libraries. A very popular combination for front-end Javascript applications, this article will explain how React and Redux are used with great success in the editor’s implementation of a domain-specific-language (DSL) called Profiles containing one or more resource templates that specify an HTML form-based user interface for cataloging using RDF.

In libraries, the relationship between textual descriptions of audiovisual material and access to that material is a primary concern, as users expect to have access to all the library’s resources—which increasingly include audiovisual content—through a simple and effective web interface. At UW-Oshkosh, library staff developed a unique site for its streaming video collection that would allow users to search for videos and browse collections on particular topics across each of the three vendors. In order to create more meaningful and topical collections, various programming tools and techniques were employed to identify geographical locations in vendor-supplied MARC records. This article describes three different methods for generating geographic terms for streaming videos using different Python libraries and evaluates them based on the number of terms generated, overlap in terms generated between the three methods, and the amount of cleanup needed to generate useful geographic terms.

Ability to collect time-specific lists of faculty publications has become increasingly important for academic departments. At OHSU publication lists had been retrieved manually by a librarian who conducted literature searches in bibliographic databases. These searches were complicated and time consuming, and the results were large and difficult to assess for accuracy.

The OHSU library has built an open web page that allows novices to make very sophisticated institution-specific queries. The tool frees up library staff, provides users with an easy way of retrieving reliable local publication information from PubMed, and gives an opportunity for more sophisticated users to modify the algorithm or dive into the data to better understand nuances from a strong jumping off point.

In July 2017, W3C published SHACL as the standard to validate RDF. Since then, data modellers have the possibility to provide validation services based on SHACL shapes together with their models, however there are considerations to be taken in account when creating them. This paper aims to list such considerations and shows an example of a validation pipeline to address them.

The Florida Academic Library Services Cooperative (FALSC) makes available digital library hosting free-of-charge to all institutions of Florida public higher education. 21 institutions participate in the Islandora digital library platform hosted through FALSC. Centralized digital library hosting through FALSC, or its predecessor consortium, has been available since 1994. Meanwhile, the RightsStatements.org standard, which provides a controlled vocabulary for indicating the copyright status of digital library material, was released in 2016. After the standard was released, participating libraries expressed interest in implementing RightsStatements.org for existing digital content. During Fall 2018 and Spring 2019, FALSC implemented RightsStatements.org values on Islandora sites. This article describes the process undertaken by FALSC, the lessons learned, and recommendations for libraries looking to implement RightsStatements.org values.