Hi, I'm Shane Coleman, manager of data curation in University Libraries. And today I'm going
to discuss a map project of mine and how I'm using it to teach students about the
value of preserving maps as a part of World Preservation Day. Maps have become a critical
part of our everyday lives. We use maps for travel, navigation, real estate, construction, weather,
and mining. We use maps so frequently, it's easy to forget the innate skill, both artistic
and scientific, that's required to create a map. But the convenience of mapping technology
cannot replace the knowledge that has been acquired and could be lost without the preservation
of our historical maps. A simple look at the collection and Newman Library provides
a glimpse of the value our historical map collections have. For instance, historical,
geological and vegetation maps can help us to observe impacts of climate change. Historical
flood plain maps help us to monitor the water table and plan for future developments. Historical
parcel maps can help prevent property disputes. However important or trivial, the purpose of these
artifacts may seem, they provide insight that would otherwise be difficult to discern without
them. In an effort to provide an experiential learning opportunity, as well as preserve
and make more accessible the maps in the Newman collection, I developed an internship
for geography students looking field experience credit. During their internship, students
are required to help catalog, create metadata, and assess for digitization maps from the
physical collection. Once maps are digitized, students use Esri Mapping Software to geo reference
and upload maps to our Esri GeoHub site. The due referencing process allows us to visualize
our maps with a spatial reference within the GeoHub environment. Additionally, by
using the GeoHub platform for hosting, opposed to a traditional repository, we're able
to provide patrons with a map product that is prepared for use in mapping software or
can be used as a digital reference to the map. With continued support from the Geography
Department and University Libraries, we hope to make the entire Neumann map collection available
digitally. Thanks for watching my video and happy World Digital Preservation Day.
Hi, my name is Kira Dietz and I am the Assistant Director of Special Collections and University
Archives at Virginia Tech University Libraries. Today I'm going to tell you a little bit about
the history of women at Virginia Tech, which is a digital project that we have created
to provide access and ultimately preservation for the history of women at our University. So
a little bit about this project, starting around 2015 an ad hoc group was formed to
talk about the kind of history that the University had surrounding women's roles, whether
it was then as students, staff, faculty, alumni, or community members. Between 2015
and 2018, the makeup of our committee changed quite a bit, but we were able to work on a
variety of projects. These included researching and exploring materials in the University Archives
and manuscript collections, recording oral histories and working with VT stories to
record oral histories from important women figures, developing timelines and identifying key
points in Virginia Tech women's history, and processing manuscript collections and digitizing
items for a project site. In March 2019, as part of Women's History Month, we launched
our project, the History of Women at Virginia Tech. And basically, our goal was to provide
access to digitized resources that talk about different aspects of women's history, women's
history on campus. Primarily right now we have photographs, we have newspaper clippings, we
have digitized reports and documents, we have excerpts from the Board of Visitors
minutes. And most of these have some contextualizing information that you can look at along with
the items themselves. We're particularly proud of our timeline, which is interactive
and includes information about a lot of firsts as well as other significant women's history
on campus. So the first time we had a woman working on staff was in 1910, for example. Some
of our points also include documents and there is often a link to it so that you can
read the entire document and the contexts that goes along with it. And so far we have a
handful, well multiple handfuls of items in here. And this has been an ongoing project
for several years and it is continuing to grow, especially as we move to 2021. So
our project to date, the digital site is live and it contains more than 75 items. We're
currently working on integrating oral histories into the site. We're working on additional
research and digitization to add more materials, right now our focus is on some of the student papers
and Board of Visitors minutes. And we're currently developing events and programming
for 2021 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the admission of women to what was then VPI
and what we now call Virginia Tech. Of course, this system all, in addition to providing
access, our goal is to ultimately have metadata that we can preserve with the items in a
more advanced preservation system, probably a little further down the road as the project
progresses and we maybe move to some new structures and new infrastructure down the
road.
For this talk, I'm going to discuss some work I've been doing with Alex, to create
a plan to preserve DH projects. This is an abbreviated version of a talk we prepared
for the Digital Library Forum next week. Digital Humanities projects can contain a wide variety
of content, data, code, and more. And every project is different and can pose a new challenge. We
currently have about a dozen hosted an active DH projects in the library. With this in
mind, Alex and I set out to come up with some basic strategies for preservation that we
could then apply to different projects. We decided to approach this, by breaking down
the projects into different components so it could be packaged, and then reproduced
or emulated. We wanted to create a workflow that preserve the content of a project at minimum
while also maintaining the integrity. Our ultimate goals were to identify some preservation
best practices that could then be applied across a variety of DH projects. We wanted
to minimize the workload to a reasonable number of hours per project, and of course,
we wanted to create a preservation package suitable for reproducibility or emulation. So
our strategy was first to look at existing and hosted active projects and to identify
a test case. We then wanted to define the different project components in their file
types and also locate any available metadata and create new metadata if necessary. We then
wanted to look at what documentation existed and think about what other documentation
would be needed to reproduce the project. And ultimately, we wanted to restart the whole
process on another project. The project we ultimately chose is Redlining Virginia. This
is an online exhibit built in Omeka from LaDale Winling in the history department.
We chose this for a few reasons. First of all, it's a smaller project with about a
110 items, making it a bit easier for us to get a handle on what work we're dealing
with. LaDale had already uploaded many of the data files into VTechData and there was also
some exhibit photos, some exhibit photos from the physical exhibit in VTechWorks. We
felt that with all of these existing pieces, this project would be reasonable to be reconstructed
or migrated. First, we located all of the project components and collected as much existing
metadata and documentation as you could and compiled it and the Team Drive. With everything
in one spot Alex filled out the preservation profile and I updated the project-level metadata using
our digital exhibits metadata application profile. And then Alex did a whole bunch
of work with the file formats and metadata schemas to ultimately test out each component and
then document it. And then we documented all of this together to reuse on future projects. Ultimately,
the outcomes at this point have been our preservation package and documentation. And
we also found that while we knew there would be a lot of pieces from the website itself, there
are also a lot of things to consider outside of the site for preservation. We found that
this was a very manual process and we cannot automate everything, due to the variety of
content. And then we found that because of this, we know, if we know what is needed
from the researchers early on, we can get, we can ask for those things in an organized
format. This should help ease the process for future projects as we'll know what's needed.
Our immediate next step is to work up with Metadata Services and Digital Libraries to ensure
we have the required metadata for ingest into the DLP and then consider any feedback. We'll
also be testing this workflow on another one of our DH projects sometime next spring. And
then finally, you want to look at developing more concrete levels of DH preservation.
Thank you.
Good afternoon everyone. I am Alex Kinnaman the Digital Preservation Coordinator at Virginia
Tech University Libraries. And today I'm going to give you a brief overview of the
CoreTrustSeal repository certification and why it establishes trust in digital libraries. Everything
has a specification or standard, and for digital repositories we have repository certifications. Undergoing
an internal audit or a full certification has the same benefits. First, repository
certifications measure the trustworthiness of a repository. We want to build trust with our
content creators and our users by proving that we have met all of the certification
criteria. Secondly, all of the documentation we create and make public promotes transparency, which
further builds trust. Finally, in the process of trying to meet the criteria, we are continuously
evaluating our methods, tools, techniques, and policies to meet best practice standards. The
ultimate goal here is sustainability. We want to build a robust, sustainable platform
and methodology that will support all of our content. And this is important to the
libraries because it's what we do, but it's also important to our users who want to know
that their content will be available and persistent in the long-term. One repository
certification example is the CoreTrustSeal. The certification was developed in 2017 after the
World Data System and the Data Seal of Approval merge their respective criteria, which exclusively
focused on evaluating data repositories, to a single certification designed to certify
all open repositories. It's considered the first level of repository certification and
includes 16 requirements that cover everything from governance and organization to digital
object management and technical infrastructure and information security. And you can find out more
information at that link. So the exciting news from us is that we have officially begun
the process of developing a CoreTrustSeal application. This application will be in
collaboration with our external preservation storage service provider, the Academic Preservation
Trust, who will cover the costs and will support reviewing our documentation and
application. This application is especially important for us because it will be developed in
tandem with the DLP, which will strengthen the Platform by establishing new policies, helping
us to identify any gaps, and allow for the testing of various services so that we can
provide evidence that the services actually do what we say they do. This will also help
the libraries to further establish trust with our stakeholders and users. And a huge
shout out and thank you to data services, particularly Jon Petters, for the internal CoreTrustSeal
audit on VTechData, which we will be heavily referencing. Just to clarify, we will be evaluating
the Digital Library Platform, which means that the individual repositories and library
catalog are not in the scope, but it does include any content that is deposited into
the DLP. This is an overview of the DLP infrastructure stolen shamelessly from James Tuttle, and we will
be evaluating all of it. The preservation components, the microservices and metadata
repository, the access services, and our storage providers. So it's an extremely
comprehensive certification and we are very excited to take this step forward. In the
theme of Digits for Good, I just wanted to quickly thank everyone for all of the work
that will go into this application, and acknowledge how much work has already gone
into developing content and services, including, but certainly not limited to this list of
folks. Thank you so much for listening and feel free to get in touch with any comments
or questions.
Today, I'd like to talk about digital preservation and social justice. Preserving collections, whether
digital or analog, is never a neutral activity. The basic activities of digital preservation
are collecting, maintaining, and providing access to digital information. Although we strive
to keep our activities as apolitical as possible, they are far from neutral activities, primarily
because we cannot preserve everything. Whenever we make decisions to save some things and
not others, we must ask the question, whose histories, cultures, and values are we preserving
and whose are we allowing to fade away? Memory is a product of construction supported by
the documents, photos, or other paraphernalia that we collect, maintain, and repeatedly
access. The construction of collective memory as a process whereby we select and assemble
certain images and the present and locate them within certain contexts that are identified
with the past. In digital preservation, it is often literal images that we preserve
and provide access to. These form the raw materials for the construction of collective
memories, which are projected on the past contexts. What institutional, regional or
other collective memories are we constructing and reinforcing? What we keep and how it
is kept is not only relevant for the construction of collective or institutional memory by
professionals and galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Digital preservation also matters
because we work at an institution of higher education. The documents, images, texts, et
cetera, that we preserve and provide access to, are an important component and the production
of knowledge, because they provide the evidence from which knowledge is produced. Knowledge infrastructures are
the tools, frameworks, and systems that we use every day to obtain, produce, and communicate
knowledge. Historically, only certain people could access and use knowledge infrastructures. Today,
we strive to build and support open access, open source, and open data frameworks and infrastructures. But
many of these access points are beyond the reach of a large percentage of the population. If
knowledge is power, to whom are we providing access to that knowledge and who can benefit
from that power? Digital preservation cannot be without context. And the University Libraries at
Virginia Tech, nearly every unit and team is involved with preserving, maintaining,
and/or providing access to digital information. We maintain knowledge infrastructures, contribute
to the production of knowledge at Virginia Tech, and help to construct collective memories
about the past. Insofar as we collaborate to preserve digital information, we must perpetually
ask ourselves, what are we really preserving and for whom. I hope you've seen from this presentation
that you don't have to be a social justice warrior to make a positive difference vis-a-vis
digital preservation.
Hello, World. I am Wen, Digital Collections Librarian. Voice from Google. Today I am going to briefly introduce
the Southwest Virginia Digital Archive. Our temporary Digital Library, the Southwest
Virginia Digital Archive is managed by the Digital Imaging and Preservation Services
team. And the Digital Imaging and Preservation Services team provides metadata, digital
access, and digital preservation services to campus partners in the Southwest Virginia
region for the open access art, science, and cultural heritage materials without acquiring
the physical collections from our partners. Southwest Virginia Digital Archive is built on the
Omeka. We use Omeka for more than just an exhibit platform delivering content to end
users. We also use it as a repository to contain our partners digital objects utilizing
it as an ingestion tool. And also as a public facing website providing collaboration information
for the prospective institution partners. Information can be found on the website, such as collection
policy, metadata, and digital preservation information. Our regional partners include
Barter Theatre, Montgomery Museum, Tauben Museum of Art, Salem Fire Department, Christ
Episcopal Church, Town of Crew, Reynolds Homestead, and Reynolda House Museum of American
Art. Our campus partners collections include geosciences, entomology, Oris Glisson Historic
Costume and Textile Collection, Squires Theatre, and Leonard J. Currie slides from Special
Collections. Here are some numbers for an overview. The collections on our platform growing
from six items in 2018 to 2,745 items from 24 collections, 14 of which are sub-collections, and
with an additional 3,945 items ready to be uploaded whenever the new platform is ready. Lastly,
have fun at the virtual exhibit we created: bit.ly/vt-vr . This virtual exhibit feature
collections from our Virginia Tech campus partners and regional partners including
Special Collections and University Archives, Department of Entomology, Department of Geosciences, Taubman
Museum of Art, Reynolds Homestead, and Reynolda House Museum of American Art. The Exhibit
contains photographs, slides, journals, paintings, 3D geology minerals, and a variety of 3D insects from
the collections mentioned. For best experience, please use desktop or laptop computer to
interact with the items displayed in the virtual exhibit. Thank you.
Hello, I'm Todd Ogle and this is Immersive Archaeology. The idea behind immersive archaeology
is to more rapidly make the sort of data that's being collected on archaeological
projects today accessible to collaborators as well as the public. This will involve
analytics techniques, the data collection in the field, corroboration with others, as
well as existing archives. There are multiple aspects to this. There's crowdsource corroboration
where today someone might post photos of a find and ask for feedback from their network for
help on identifying objects and artifacts. And we'd like to be able to do some of that work via
a system that is doing some corroboration for the archaeologist or the historian. A
part of this is going to involve more rapidly converting the sort of point cloud data that we gather
today through photogrammetry or laser scanning into a virtual environment. And
much more quickly than we typically do today, where it can take weeks to process this information and
make it available. The data that I'm sharing with you in this particular example is from
the Dig Hill 80 project from the Flanders region of Belgium. World War one site, which
was a rescue archaeology project in 2018. Using some of that data, we had been able to began
working on the process of making a environment available for virtual walk-throughs and sharing
of that information using the quickest and most freely available options possible. There
are lots of expensive tools involved in this pipeline. Our current priorities are to make
use of as much free and open-source software as possible to keep the costs down for this
type of activity, and to document how we do that and share those workflows with others. Right
now we're primarily looking at converting all these data sets into WebXR so that the
experiences are available online and across multiple types of devices. Thank you. Hi
everyone. My name is Maureen Saverot and I'm a 3D Imaging Specialist focusing in photogrammetry
for the Digital Imaging and Preservation Service in Newman Library. And today I'm
gonna talk to you a little bit about how the work I do every day works. So
photogrammetry is a process to create digital 3D duplicates of real-world objects. And
the way we do that is by taking dozens and dozens of images from hundreds of angles
to recreate the object from those 2D images. So we take all the data that's in those 2D images
to find all of the teeny tiny points, to recreate it as a 3D object. I use a motorized
platform now that takes images at every five degrees ish. And I use the camera at a couple
different heights to capture the whole of an object. So a set of images might look
something like this. This is a beetle taken from the upright in the flipped positions
that would later be brought together to make one beetle. Those images are brought into Agisoft
PhotoScan and then the software finds all of the relationships between those images
in sequence and creates what's called a sparse cloud. And I'll clean up that sparse
cloud and create a dense cloud. The dense cloud is a more tightly woven version of
the sparse cloud where I have approved kind of a field of dots. And then the software will
find even more dots within that field to create a preliminary pass at a mesh. So
then a meshes created. Mesh looks okay to, at a glance, but the geometry is a mess and
some tiny details are missing. So although in and recreate a cleaner version of the
mesh so that it can be use online for other applications. Some in-process photos of the
mesh being created and a new clean one. Mesh is brought into ZBrush. And from here we're
just trying to take as much detail as possible from that fancy mesh in Metashape to this mesh. Cleaning
up the original mesh from Metashape so that it's tight enough to project that detail. And
now the details restored onto our nice clean mesh. Color is brought in from the Metashape
file to create a new clean critter that's ready to be displayed online. So now we've
got a model that's ready to be used for anybody for education, easily accessible, and the
specimen is kept safe and it's box so that everyone can view it online. And that's about it.
Thank you very much for your time.
Ok. This is Jim Tuttle. I'm going to talk to you about digital preservation strategy
for the DLP. I have four slides, two minutes in one take, so it's probably going to be
ugly. Apologies. Alright. To start us off, this is the basic map of preservation activities
and their locations. We've got a primary site in the VT data center and Andrews and the
VT data center in Andrews and backups at Newman for assets that are preserved by the
DLP. They're replicated to the AWS East region in Virginia, where the DLP infrastructure
actually lives. And preservation content has replicated to Microsoft Azure in the
US west region in Oregon. Some of this content is additionally distributed to third party
digital preservation services. And Alex is working through the policy defining the services
and processes that support the service in coordination with Nathan, DI&PS, and Digital
Libraries. So you've seen this before. This is a, the center of this image is the heart
of the Digital Libraries platform, right? These are the services that we're talking about. They're
loosely coupled. They are independent. They can be used together or independently to
build digital preservation workflows that support varied digital preservation needs, like
persistent identifier, resolution, fixity, file format characterization and like. This is
going pretty well, I think. Okay. So mostly when we think about Digital Libraries Platform, we
think about this, this is the front page of one of the libraries. It is much more than
this. So access is important and we're working really hard to discover, to support discoverability
and user experiences that we want to provide for our users. But it's also much more than
this, right? It's all these other services and support digital preservation independent
of the access layer. So like I said, Alex ,Nathan, Digital Libraries are all working
to build up this documentation, these policies, procedures. And we're hoping that this all
comes together in a CoreTrustSeal certification that Alex and others are currently working on. And
it's also, there are also these, lots of other non-DLP processes designed to ensure
the system does what we think it's doing and enabling staff to independently verify that
the assets are being preserved as expected. And that, I believe is two minutes.