Z652 Digital Libraries, Fall 2023, Section 3874

9:10 - 11:45 Friday Myles Brand Hall (I) 232
Instructor: Associate Professor John A. Walsh, jawalsh@indiana.edu, Luddy Hall 2132.
Office Hours: See https://fantastical.app/jawalsh-r1Wz/office-hours to view availability and make an appointment.
John’s demo CollectionBuilder Sites: Rock Show, Rock Show repository, Comic Book Paratexts

Associate Instructor: Alex Wingate, alewinga@iu.edu
Office Hours: Fridays 2:30pm - 4:00pm and by appointment on Zoom (click Zoom link in Alex’s profile)
Alex’s demo CollectionBuilder site: Las Novelitas, Alex’s demo CollectionBuilder Repository

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General Information

Course Description

In this course students learn to conceptualize, plan, and build digital libraries. In the process of doing that, we will learn about digitization of text and image documents, metadata, and various digital library-related technologies, standards, systems, and software.

Course Goal

By the end of the semester students will will be able to digitize a collection of non-digital content (e.g., letters, pamphlets, photographs, audio tapes) and develop a digital library populated with the digitized content, associated metadata, and contextualizing information.

Learning Outcomes

• Students will select appropriate digitization standards and best practices for different media types and compose project-specific digitization guidelines for a specific collection.
• Students will select appropriate metadata standards and best practices for different types of content and intellectual domains and compose project-specific metadata guidelines for a specific collection.
• Students will demonstrate expertise with the open source digital collections systems (CollectionBuilder, Omeka) by building a digital collection within one of these systems.
• Through written text and online exhibitions, students will describe, introduce, and explain the significance of a collection.
• Students will perform a number of specific technical tasks related to digital collection development. For example, students will be able to:
  • apply XML schemas to create valid XML metadata files;
  • to apply XSLT style sheets to convert from one metadata format to another;
  • execute Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) commands to retrieve metadata records from OAI data providers;
  • perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on a set of image files.

Texts

Our two textbooks are:

• Witten, Bainbridge, and Nichols’ How to Build a Digital Library (2010), available online through IUCAT at http://kg6ek7cq2b.search.serialssolutions.com/?V=1.0&L=KG6EK7CQ2B&S=JCs&C=TC0000298940&T=marc
• Miller’s Metadata for Digital Collections (2022). Miller’s book should be on reserve by September 1st. See IUCAT: http://www.iucat.iu.edu/catalog/10090471.

Tools

We will be using the following tools, software, frameworks:

• Visual Studio Code
• Oxygen XML Editor
  • Available to IU students, faculty and staff through https://iuware.iu.edu
• CollectionBuilder
• Adobe Acrobat
  • Available to IU students, faculty and staff through https://iuware.iu.edu
• tesseract-ocr
• ImageMagick

Additional Resources

• Markdown Cheat Sheet
• W3Schools CSS tutorial
• W3Schools CSS element reference
• W3Schools HTML tutorial
• W3Schools HTML element reference
• Butterick’s Practical Typography
• Linux/Mac Commandline Cheat Sheet (you’ll mostly need the directory commands)
• Windows Commandline Cheat Sheet by Stephen Edwards at Columbia University

IU Resources

• IT Training from UITS
• IU Libraries’ Digital Collections
• Wednesday Noon Digital Scholarship Series
• Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, especially see the events page.
• IU Metadata Discussion Group
• LinkedIn Learning tutorials available through https://one.iu.edu/: Lots of great tutorials on programming, XML, Web development, and other IT topics.
  • We will be using the command-line tools for exercises and assignments in this class. If you are not familiar with the MacOS/Windows/Linux command line, then I urge you to view some LinkedIn Learning tutorials on using the command line for your operating system.

External Resources

• Level Up workshops at Monroe County Public Library (MCPL)
• CLIR
• D-lib Magazine
• Digital Library Federation (DLF)

Sexual Harassment

As your instructor, one of my responsibilities is to create a positive learning environment for all students. Title IX and IU’s Sexual Misconduct Policy prohibit sexual misconduct in any form, including sexual harassment, sexual assault, stalking, and dating and domestic violence. If you have experienced sexual misconduct, or know someone who has, the University can help.

If you are seeking help and would like to speak to someone confidentially, you can make an appointment with:

The Sexual Assault Crisis Services (SACS) at (812) 855-8900 (counseling services) Confidential Victim Advocates (CVA) at (812) 856-2469 (advocacy and advice services) IU Health Center at (812) 855-4011 (health and medical services) It is also important that you know that Title IX and University policy require me to share any information brought to my attention about potential sexual misconduct, with the campus Deputy Title IX Coordinator or IU’s Title IX Coordinator. In that event, those individuals will work to ensure that appropriate measures are taken and resources are made available. Protecting student privacy is of utmost concern, and information will only be shared with those that need to know to ensure the University can respond and assist.

I encourage you to visit http://stopsexualviolence.iu.edu/index.html to learn more.