Category Archives: IR

After a successful conference this fall, the second Ohio IR Daywas held on April 17, 2015.

The morning began with introductions of the 30+ attendees, using many different systems and software for their IRs, both commercial and open source. As the keynote speaker, I presented about harvesting metadata from the OhioLINK ETD Center and its recent addition of ORCID identifiers, which is a big hit with the students as well as the institutions to help track research.

Next, the Lightening Round session covered a variety of topics and projects. Andrew Harris (Wright State University) discussed Issues between IR and Discovery Layers, which looked at delimiter problems between commas and semi-colons especially in the keyword field with EDS. He recommended periodically checking the information harvested from your IR on the other site since newer changes or updates may affect display even if it hasn’t been an issue before.

Greg Martin (Cedarville University) demonstrated their institutional use of Flipping Books, which they have used for campus journals, university publications, course catalogs, annual reports, the student newspaper, slide shows, campus MediaPLEX die cuts and other creative promotional materials, theater department programs, and even accredidation papers.

Amy Parsons (Otterbein University) explained Mapping between MARC to Dublin Core (DC), a task that is more complicated than one might originally think. Since MARC records combine various pieces of information and description into many fields and sometimes portions duplicated in multiple fields in a record. Unqualified DC, on the other hand, is very sparse and simple which means paring down MARC to 15 core elements.

Fran Rice (University of Dayton) showed their use of 360 Photography to enhance items in their institutional repository. Their library has a large collection of religious statues, in storage but of general interest to the community. By using a turntable and an automated process between camera and table, they transform the photos into flash files for user to drag and view on all sides.

Liz Richardson and Stephanie Gaskins (Kent State University) showed Using Digital Commons Submission Management to Manage Workflow, allowing them to help manage their 3rd shift student workers on projects. There is a lot of built-in functionality that is usable out-of-the-box.

Elisabeth Shook (Wright State University) wrapped up the round by showcasing the Dayton Literary Peace Prize which honors the message of peace through written word. Their institutional repository created a bibliography that included notes from Dr. Loranger. For each of the winners, they have book galleries as virtual collections of the writers’ complete works. As a list keeper myself of authors and books that I want to read, such a well cultivated resource is invaluable and a real find.

During the Birds of a Feather, several topics were set up around the room for small group discussion: Altmetrics, Statistics and Assessment, Harvesting Content, Ancillary Products (Enhancements to IR), and Time Savers. In the Harvesting Content group, we talked about harvesting into and from local IRs, along with the benefits and potential issues with both the content and the metadata.

The Ohio IR Day conference will be twice a year, allowing for more continual dialogue between institutions about IRs and sharing their experiences. I am already looking forward to the next this fall. Until then, check out the slides from the conferences for more information.