Just as it impacted so many people and organizations this spring, Covid-19 has fundamentally changed how the CDRH team works with each other day to day. In mid-March, carrying houseplants and microfilm readers and in some cases entire desktop computers, we vacated the CDRH and set up home workstations. Despite the new circumstances, we’ve been as busy as ever! Here’s a rundown of some of the activities we’ve been working on from our new locations this spring and summer, along with some gratuitous pet photos.
Focus on Student Employees
Our first task was to make sure that students who work in the CDRH as library employees and on behalf of UCARE / FYRE programs would have everything they need to continue from home. We wanted them to be able to continue contributing to projects and learning, but also to have a source of steady income in an uncertain time. Laura, Kaci, Michelle and others spent considerable time identifying materials and tasks which the students could spend their time on, while Karin, Greg, and Jessica created how-to documents and helped students install software such as GitHub and Oxygen on their personal machines.
We finally took this time to sit down and create two tutorials we’ve wanted for years. Every time a new student starts, the dev team helps them install software and explains the basics. Now, we have two handy guides which we can use in the future whether we’re remote or onsite, at least for the installation part!
Meanwhile, Laura has been busy finding materials for student employees from all over the library to work on. Many students who worked in areas like access services, preservation, etc, were unable to report to work once campus was closed down. Instead of shelving books or helping patrons, now those students are flying through documents in transcribe.unl.edu. They’re transcribing so fast that we may be in danger of running out of materials for them to work on! Not the worst kind of problem to have.
Nebraskaland Digital Archive Launch!
We are very proud to announce the launch of the Nebraskaland Digital Archive, now available at https://nebraskaland.unl.edu/. This archive displays contents from the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission published under various titles since 1926. Currently the first fifty years are available and more issues will be added as they are completed. The digital archive was a massive undertaking and it felt good after years of work to unveil it. A huge congratulations to all the staff and students, past and present, who poured hours and hours into scans, OCR, markup, and proofreading into this site.
You can read more about the Nebraskaland Digital Archive launch and the partnership between the CDRH and the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission:
- Lincoln Journal Star, ” ‘I was impaled by a stump’ and thousands of other stories – online archive unleashes 50 years of Nebraskaland’s wild history”
- Nebraskaland, “Digital archive features first 50 years of Nebraskaland magazine”
While Nebraskaland was a fairly standard digitization project for us, it has a couple interesting features.
First, because it is a printed collection we were able to use Optical Character Recognition to create text content for searching. Many of our projects deal with handwritten materials and besides the Nebraska Newspapers project, we don’t typically rely on OCR only for searching.
Secondly, because Nebraskaland has imperfect text and minimal TEI markup, it was much more difficult to split each file, representing an issue of the magazine, into separate pages. We had to create some overrides for our data ingest script, but fortunately were able to figure out a system to split out pages without too much trouble!
Finally, we spent some time looking into alternatives to the previous lightbox galleries we’ve used in the past. We have an assortment of lightboxes scattered across our sites, as sometimes we have needed those with particular features like adding HTML to the captions, but we have had trouble finding a solution that had flexibility in how it is called and how it creates galleries while also being accessible technology. For Nebraskaland, our big issue was that many of the lightboxes would not display as large of an image as we wanted for the two page spreads. After some digging around and testing options out, we came across fancybox. It was delightfully easy to integrate (we didn’t even need to change our HTML generation scripts!), accessible, mobile friendly, and allowed easy browsing of large displays. We’re hoping that we can start using fancybox for future projects as well.
African Poets and Poetry in the News Data Entry
One of our biggest undertakings this winter was work for the African Poetry Digital Portal project, which we were wrapping up just as we moved off campus in March. Lorna Dawes and a graduate student have been gathering data in spreadsheets for quite some time, tracking poets and biographical information, news items about the poets’ activities, poet works, and relevant events. Spreadsheets are not an ideal way to do this type of data gathering, since the sheets are so interconnected that it’s very difficult to keep information normalized while also entering data quickly.
To help them with their work, the dev team researched dozens of online database options. The dataset was large enough that most online free options were unavailable, and this project doesn’t have a budget to pay the pricey premiums asked by many services. Ultimately, after testing out some Rails gems, we installed Rails Admin to create a data entry and storage mechanism for Lorna and her team a little more “from scratch” than some of the other options.
We found Rails Admin relatively easy to set up from the programming side of things. It guesses pretty intelligently about the relationships it should be displaying based off of the models / database structure, and for the most part its display is fairly intuitive and customizable. Where it felt short was in displaying “has many through” relationships, which require the person entering the data to go through several more non-obvious steps than they would with any other fields.
Ultimately, we fell short of providing the African Poetics team with the data entry we hoped to create for them this spring, but we will be returning to the task soon. At the very least, should any other projects need data entry with simple relationships, we know that Rails Admin is an option. It certainly beats a similar Rails gem used in one of our sites, which leads me to my next point….
Updates to Existing Sites and Software
During the early weeks of working from home, Jessica was finally able to dedicate a bit of time to updating one of our sites, the Salmon Pueblo Archaeological Research Collection (SPARC). When it was first created, SPARC had a gem, Active Scaffold, to display the underlying database. This was ostensibly to allow archaeologists to edit the records after the site’s launch without developer assistance, but after a few years it was not being used for editing and was instead just preventing us from updating the site’s Rails version and other gems. As warnings about outdated gems mounted up, we decided we couldn’t wait for Active Scaffold to come out with a new release any longer and Jessica got the enviable task of pulling it. Jess loves removing outdated code and hunting through files for references to it, and revels in a code commit with more lines removed than added! Ultimately, pulling out Active Scaffold led to removing other gems like Devise it needed for user authentication, and then everything was updated to Rails 5 which meant moving around assets and replacing files which meant……well anyway, it took a day or two but SPARC is looking good and has a new lease on life!
We try to get to routine updates frequently. Greg works on server updates once a week across our dev servers. Jessica does minor Ruby and rails app updates at the beginning of each month (sooner, if there’s a critical vulnerability). However, a routine update is much different than something large scale like this, when you’re moving between major versions of Rails. I’m glad we were finally able to work it in this spring!
Whitman!
This was a big spring for The Walt Whitman Archive (WWA). First off, they will be launching a searchable version of their image gallery any day now! Karin worked with Kevin McMullen from the Whitman team to get the image metadata into Solr and redesigned the gallery with searching.
The Whitman Archive also officially launched the geography scrapbook! Whitman had a massive scrapbook to which he added all sorts of newspaper clippings, notes, and scribbles. The CDRH was only responsible for creating an image viewer to display the scrapbook, but the WWA team spent untold hours scanning, transcribing, and marking up the scrapbook before the dev team could do our part. The scrapbook was the dev team’s first foray into using the IIIF presentation specifications to power the Mirador viewer and we were impressed by how relatively easy it was to get running!
We also finished up work on the Leaves of Grass 1855 Variorum, a monumental NEH funded project in the works for a while now. The Variorum has every feature a Whitmaniac could possibly desire when analyzing Leaves of Grass, from printed copy variant displays to images to related manuscript text.
Working from massive TEI files encoded by Nicole Gray, the dev team took on some interesting strategies for this site because of the sheer page size and requirements. Greg set up lazy loading for the images, to try to keep the load time as reasonable as possible. Karin spent hours looking at existing variora, designing an interface, and then writing the XSLT to display many required features while keeping the variorum usable and intuitive. Jessica spent her time working on manipulating data (pulling together manuscripts, notebooks, and other materials to generate links to related content, etc) and creating image manifests and the page comparison and full text image viewers. Karin and Jessica also made sure to create the variorum in such a way that it can be regenerated with our Datura data manipulation software. Why make sure it works in Datura? Well….
…because The Whitman Archive is getting a makeover! The happy news came in that the Whitman Archive received a 350K grant from the NEH to migrate the archive to a modern framework. To that end, as much as we can will be done with the CDRH’s Datura, Orchid, and Apium software. When creating the geography scrapbook and the variorum, we took care to make sure that they would be as easy as possible to get up and running in Ruby on Rails as well as running (for now) in their current Cocoon framework. We already spent several weeks of this summer making plans with the WWA for the initial work for this grant, and working with Kevin McMullen and Brett Barney to review mapping TEI documents to Elasticsearch, but fortunately we have a few years to figure everything out. Although it’s a daunting task, we are very excited to have this opportunity.
Open ONI
The Open Online Newspaper Initiative is always up to something, churning away in the background. Greg takes point on this project, and he has been busy corresponding with our maintainer partners at other institutions and helping work through installation issues that newcomers experience. We all pitch in where we can to tackle little issues and review pull requests. Some code was just merged a week ago improving logging and fixing accessibility bugs. Hopefully at some point we’ll have time to really sit down and focus on Open ONI again, but at least for now it’s nice to move a few issues through the pipeline.
Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project
Greg and Karin spent time this spring working with Michelle to set up the NEH and Council on Library and Information Resources(CLIR) Funded Genoa site according to stakeholder feedback. Genoa is being built in Mukurtu, software based on Drupal, whose goal is to be a resource for communities doing digital heritage work. There is a lot more to be said about Mukurtu, and perhaps at some point there will be a post dedicated to it. For now, we can only say that for a non-Drupal team, Mukurtu has been an interesting venture into that popular CMS, and Greg and Karin have been learning a lot about theming and configuration!
UNL Campus Archaeology
We got started last week on a portion of Effie Athanassopoulos’s project, UNL Campus Archaeology. Effie and a team of students have been creating 3D scans of objects found at excavations on and around UNL’s campuses and Lincoln, such as medicine bottles, dishware, and chamber pots! She has sought our involvement because, after trying software such as Omeka and Heurist, Effie is not satisfied with the types of information that she has been able to record and the display of 3D objects in the interface. Our job so far has been mostly research and testing. Karin has been working on looking at metadata schemes which could accommodate the types of data Effie would like to record for specific types of objects and evaluating if Omeka S will fill the requirements of the project. Greg is in charge of installing Omeka S, the level up of Omeka Classic, which has more functionality in terms of creating data types, vocabularies, etc. Jess has been evaluating 3D viewers and playing around with objects from Effie’s scans. The dev team doesn’t have a deep background in 3D — our first plunge into the area was on another anthropology project in 2018 for Keeping Data Alive — but we are optimistic that we can come up with a website Effie and her students can use to record data this fall!
Other Projects and News
Despite working here, once it’s all written down it’s hard to believe sometimes how much work the CDRH team manages to move forward on top of all the “scheduled” projects! The library and the CDRH are both carrying out strategic planning right now, and Karin serves on both of the strategic planning committees. She and Laura have also been working on the initial stages of the Nebraska Stories of Humanity project with Beth Dotan and Ari Kohen. Andy Pederson was just elected to the Library Personnel Association, where he will be representing staff concerns in committee. Andy has also been working hard on a number of new Nebraska Newspaper batches while taking on the difficult task of cancelling and rescheduling conferences. Greg has been spending his spare time here and there working on server documentation, automating tasks, and planning his attack on a database with 3D materials that needs rescuing. Laura and Kaci never stop — they supervise and assists students on half a dozen projects as well as continuing their own! Jess has been working on getting the Cornhusker Marching Band History project contents into the API to make them searchable, and occasionally is distracted by trying to name a project she and Brett Barney are looking into for poetry visualization.
As far as what’s up next, we’ve got half a dozen projects queued up for the rest of summer and early fall. We’re very grateful that these days, we have steady jobs and we can work from home nearly as effectively as we can from the office this summer. We don’t know entirely what this autumn will bring, but we hope to still be working away on the many exciting projects we have planned.