ACADEMIC ASSEMBLY OF LIBRARIANS
GENERAL ASSEMBLY
TUESDAY, January 12, 2016
2:00PM
Paley Library, Digital Scholarship Center
MINUTES

Attending: Jenifer Baldwin, Doreva Belfiore, Steven Bell, Brian Boling, Anastasia Chiu, Mark Darby, Kristina DeVoe, Matt Ducmanas, Fobazi Ettarh, Lauri Fennell, Erin Finerty, Leanne Finnigan, Andrea Goldstein, Josue Hurtado, Margaret Janz (recording), Noa Kaumeheiwa, Delphine Khanna, Karen Kohn, Molly Larkin, Rebecca Lloyd, Joe Lucia, Jill Luedke, Jessica Lydon, Chad Nelson, Katy Rawdon, Fred Rowland (chair), Cynthia Schwarz, Caitlin Shanley, Matt Shoemaker, Margery Sly, Sandi Thomson, Kim Tully, Diane Turner, Nancy Turner, Elise Warshavsky.

1. Approval of September and November 2015 General Assembly minutes (M. Janz)
   Some typing errors were noted for the November 2015 minutes and both sets were approved pending those corrections.

2. New staff introduction (D. Khanna)
   Elise Warshavsky joins us as the Digital Projects and Services Librarian in Digital Library Initiatives. She will be helping with DPLA and various other projects, including Hydra. She has her MLIS from North Carolina Chapel Hill. She’s studied in England and Spain and worked for the Presidential Historical Society and the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art. She has a background in photography and has built some photo databases. She has no dogs or cats but is an avid gardener.
3. Dean’s Report (J. Lucia)
   Building update. There is now a hole in the ground where the new library is going to go. Last week the bid documents went out for early site work. Excavations will begin soon. Much of the work will be the preparation and security of the site. Drilling is expected to start in March and lower level foundational work is anticipated to begin in mid-April. The main contract bid will go out the first week of February and the signing is expected the first week of May. Proper construction will be starting in early May. By this time next year, there should be substantial work above ground.The 80% construction designs came in in November. The 95% designs will be due at the end of January. The budget has been stabilized. There have been some positive developments that are due to some better and less expensive engineering.They’ve started looking at furniture and equipment and that process will become more public in the coming months.

   We will need to start moving in May and be in the new building by August first. If we’re not in by then, we have to wait another year because we can’t shut down the library during the school year.

   Hiring update. The Scholarly Communication Specialist has been hired and Annie Johnson will be joining us in February. The search for the Web Services Librarian failed. They’ll be rewriting it as an MLS-preferred position. Soon they’ll be posting for the Director of Library Technology and starting the search for a new developer in DLI. There are 2 positions at the Health Sciences Library that have interviews soon.

   Budget requests documents just came in. There is no official state budget yet which is problematic. There’s a very large potential cut to materials if the state budget doesn’t come in. Brian Schoolar has done a great job getting us into a secure place if that happens. We’re asking for a 4% materials budget increase and an increase for the Press. We’re also propsing a Digitla Content Fee to help with the increasing costs of digital resources. This fee would be similar to the technology fee students pay.

4. Update on Resident Librarians (A. Chiu and F. Ettarh)
   Begin with some clarification about their positions. Some staff have been confused. Both are doing a two-year residency in the library. Residencies are term positons for professions who have their degrees. Internships, in contrast, are term positions most often held by those still pursuing their degrees. There is more information about residency programs on the ACRL website and they have started a blog about their own experiences at Temple Libraries: https://sites.temple.edu/libraryresidentscorner/.For their first year in their residencies, they are rotating around different departments in the Libraries but soon they will be starting a capstone project that they’ll work on from September to August 2017. They’re hoping to start organizing in early summer so they encourage input and suggestions for projects – even if they did not do a rotation in your department.

5. DPLA Update (D. Khanna and D. Belfiore)

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is a nation-wide portal of digital objects. The DPLA aggregates digital objects (like  images, photographs, text, maps, audio and video) shared by libraries and archives’ special collections all across the United States. They are currently seeking objects like the ones that we have in our ContentDM Digital Library here at Temple.

DPLA has a service hub model where each state or regional service hub aggregates the content for all the institutions it represents to provide a single content feed to DPLA. The goal is to get all 50 states covered. Currently 24 are represented.

The benefits for Temple’s involvement in this initiative include discoverability of our materials, collaboration cross-institutionally for digitalization, and the re-use of objects in apps and APIs, which means fewer silos of content.

Temple got involved largely thanks to Joe Lucia, who helped set up the original planning group in August 2014. In the Spring and Summer of 2015, Temple and Penn State developed and built a PA DPLA aggregator. Our application to be Pennsylvania’s service hub was then prepared and submitted. Our application was accepted in August 2015. In the fall 2015, Temple began the orientation and metadata review with DPLA staff. Currently, we’re working on a lot of metadata clean up and Pennsylvania’s data is scheduled to go live on the DPLA website in Spring 2016.

The aggregator that Penn State and Temple developed is based on Hydra/Fedora which is open source. The code for the alligator is available on GitHub. The aggregator harvests metadata and exposes it via OAI-PMH, a data-sharing standard. It makes it must easier to harvest, clean, and edit metadata by providing a user friendly and human readable interface.

We plan to submit 131,637 records to DPLA after the first harvest. The majority of the records come from academic institutions, but there are records from public, special, K-12, and other institutions as well. The top five contributing institutions are Temple, Villanova, University of Scranton, University of Pennsylvania, and the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Most of the funding for our involvement in DPLA comes from two LSTA grants through IMLS. There was also seed funding from the Free Library of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania State University, Temple, and the University of Pennsylvania. The funding supports 1 FTE project manager hosted at Temple. This was initially filled through Doreva and Leanne Finnegan’s time, and is now divided between Doreva and Elise Warshavsky. The funding also supports other staff members time, including Kate Lynch, Chad Nelson, Leanne, and Delphine. It also supports other expensive like travel and server hosting. PALCI acts as the fiscal agent for the project.

There are many working groups for this initiative, and most are cross-institutional and represent a large number of volunteer hours. The Founders Group consists of the people who were at the original meeting and act as proto-governance structure. The Aggregator group works on software and infrastructure. There are also Developers and Metadata groups.

Institutions that have digital files but do not have repository capabilities will have content hosting support from POWER Library and is free for Pennsylvania institutions. For organizations that have not started digitizing materials or haven’t done much digitizing can receive a Scribe scanner from the State Library of Pennsylvania.

In the next few months, the plans are to go live on dp.la, as well assist several new instituions to onboard their metadata for Summer 2016, help current contributors add more records, improve project branding and online presence with the help of Rachel Cox, and attend DPLAFest Conference as a new service hub. Additionally plan to assess initial differences in digital object discoverability pre- and post-DPLA exposure, increase communication and outreach efforts, develop more robust governance structure, and manage grants and funding paperwork.

Questions from the assembly:

So far it seems like most of the contributors are from Eastern Pennsylvania. What are the plans to get more participation from Western PA? Intent is to expand to the west. There had been some support and interest but some institutions are not ready with content or are having some internal reorganization that is slowing the process.

What are the plans for linked data with DPLA? DPLA wants to do this but it is very difficult. They’re working through it incrementally.

6. Old Business
   None
7. New Business
   None

Adjournment at 3:07pm.