Evaluate and apply information technologies.
| Course: | LIS 676 – Creating Digital Libraries |
| Instructor: | Stanislava Gardasevic |
| Semester Completed: | Spring 2019 |
| Assignment Description: | LIS 676 Syllabus |
| Artifact: | Women’s Suffrage Movement Digital Library |
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Reflection
Of all the artifacts I have produced during this program, this is the one that I am most proud of. Of all the classes I took, this is the one that had the most impact on my path in this program and my future career as a librarian. I took LIS 676 Creating Digital Libraries in the Spring of 2019, my first semester in the program. I came into the class knowing next to nothing about librarianship or the many different career paths that were available to me. I had a strong background in technology because of my previous degrees (please refer to my C.V. for more information) and the opportunity to learn new technologies really appealed to me, so I really thought it would just be a fun elective class. I had an image of myself as an academic librarian working at the reference desk and was planning to focus my course choices on that career path. I had no idea how much this one class would change everything for me.
The objective of SLO4 is Technologies in which we learn to “evaluate and apply information technologies”. At first glance it appears that there are only two parts to this SLO: “evaluate” and “apply” but I feel that there are really three parts— “learn, evaluate, and apply”. First you must learn about the available technologies before you can evaluate them to determine what will suit your needs best for the project at hand. After you have determined what technologies exist and have evaluated them for their relevancy, cost, and ease of use, then you need to learn how to use the selected technology. In class we learned about the different Content Management Systems (CMS) available for creating a digital library and the criteria we needed to examine prior to selecting one, such as cost, functionality, and support (Cervone, 2006). The instructor chose Omeka S because it was open-source and it was a new version that would eventually take the place of Omeka Classic. Open-source meant that it was free, and cost is important not only to non-profit institutions, like libraries, but also to grad students. It also meant that there would be online help forums for navigating the problems that were sure to arise. Additionally, since it was a fairly new version it was advantageous for us to learn a new and emerging technology. The final artifact for this course was an individually created digital library centered around a topic of our choosing, built in Omeka S, and integrated with other tools and technologies.
I chose the Women’s Suffrage Movement as my topic for a couple of reasons. First of all, I have always had an interest in the topic. I completed a Women’s Studies minor during my undergraduate degree and have remained fascinated by this period of history ever since, even more so with the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment on August 18, 2020. Also, we were encouraged to select a topic that would have an abundance of items that were in the public domain and I knew I would be able to find a variety of different types of items for this topic, such as video, images, etc. I did not need to create items for my digital library from scratch, but instead found items in other digital libraries, imported the object and metadata, and cited the original digital library as the source. The metadata was probably the biggest challenge for me, because I was learning it in LIS 605 Creating Metadata at the same time I was trying to implement it in LIS 676. I created more work for myself because my metadata was truly terrible for about the first 50 items I added. I ended up having to go back at the end and correct it, so the format and terms were consistent across all my objects. It was little things that became really frustrating, such as classing some objects as “Still Image” and others as “StillImage”. Later when I would want to group items to make them more discoverable the inconsistencies in my metadata became a real issue. It added a lot of time to the project at the end when I had to go back and fix them all. I learned how important it is to define your vocabulary in the beginning and stick to it.
I gained practical experience with metadata standards and the back end of creating a digital library during this project. I also acquired a solid theoretical foundation in the usability of digital libraries and the design principles that create a better user experience, such as searchability, image quality, and ability to download (Green & Courtney, 2015). I learned how to evaluate existing digital libraries and I also used various existing digital libraries while searching for items for my own digital collection. This showed me first-hand how important web design concepts and search organization are and inspired me to implement what I found to be best practices in my own site design. We were encouraged to use HTML and CSS to create a friendlier user interface, which was a challenge because Omeka S does not give you access to their design code. Prior to this project, my experience with HTML was limited and I had never worked with CSS. I compensated for this lack by utilizing HTML/CSS web tutorials to give myself a basic understanding of the structure and syntax. I found myself spending more frustrated hours than I care to admit trying out code that did not work the way I wanted it to before I was able to achieve the end result I wanted. I also incorporated other tools, such as contact boxes and timelines, to create a more interactive user experience.
Creating my digital library was a lot of work, compounded by my then lack of knowledge of metadata standards, web design, and HTML/CSS programming, but it was the most rewarding project I have completed. Looking at my digital library now, I am still extremely proud of it. I think I would make the collection pages more interesting by adding some images as well as adding some additional items to round out some of the smaller areas of the collection, like African American women. I have learned a lot more about metadata, web design, and HTML/CSS since my first semester and probably would not need to spend quite so long on some aspects of the project if I created the same thing now. However, I did not mind the extra work. I enjoyed every aspect of the process, even the mistakes I made. I did not know before this class that being a digital librarian was a real job and during the creation of this digital library, I learned that I really enjoyed this type of work. Now that I am at the end of my program, I have taken four SLO4 classes in my quest to learn more about being a digital librarian. Additionally, I was recently offered a student position digitizing and creating metadata for audio and video materials in the Hawaiian Collection in Hamilton Library and am excited to put my classroom knowledge to work in a real-world environment.
Digital libraries are even more important now than they were when I first created my artifact. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced everyone into an online environment. Prior to the pandemic many special collections had not been digitized and were for in-person use only. That is no longer an option if librarians and archivists wish for their collections to be seen and used. Many libraries are either closed or at severely reduced capacity and travel is unsafe with rising infection numbers. Digitizing those collections will present challenges, such as copyright issues (Cox, 2020), but will allow continued use and access, with the added benefit that the information will be more easily findable than before. This pandemic cannot last forever but the improvements we make to information access now will have lasting effects on how our users connect to and with our resources.
References
Cervone, H. F. (2006). Some considerations when selecting digital library software. OCLC Systems & Services: International Digital Library Perspectives, 22(2), 107–110. https://doi.org/10.1108/10650750610663987
Cox, C. (2020, June 5). Changed, changed utterly. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/06/05/academic-libraries-will-change-significant-ways-result-pandemic-opinion
Green, H. E., & Courtney, A. (2015). Beyond the scanned image: A needs assessment of scholarly users of digital collections. College & Research Libraries, 76(5), 690–707. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.76.5.690
Mandi Hull 