Research and Informatics Division, University Libraries

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2006 Blacksburg, Virginia, Roads and Buildings
Brooks, Edwin L. (2011-08-11)
Representation of two data sets that depicts an image of Blacksburg, VA., in 2006.
2013 NDLTD Survey of ETD Practices
McMillan, Gail; Stark, Shannon; Halbert, Martin (2013)
Our intention with this survey was to overcome the lack of baseline data about ETDs. Surprisingly, while ETDs have been available for over 15 years, no one has systematically collected general data about ETDs or the graduate programs that process them. Therefore, we set out to create a survey that would collect as much helpful information as possible regarding program planning, collection content and size, collection management, and assessment. We also hoped to identify current best practices as well as problem areas for all institutions to be aware of, and to chart the longitudinal progress of this growing responsibility.
About the Virginia Tech April 16, 2007, Condolence Archives of the University Libraries (2007-2011)
McMillan, Gail; Kennelly, Tamara (2012-04-17)
This document describes the history of the April 16, 2007, Condolence Archives collection, including the efforts by staff and volunteers to archive the tens of thousands of items donated to the university in response to the shootings.
Across the Miles: Engagement Across Distance
Walz, Anita R.; Gilbert, Charla; Cash, Debbie (2015-05-08)
This professional practice session covers expansion and redefinition of student and faculty-focused library services between Virginia Tech’s main campus in Blacksburg and the National Capital Region, located five hours away and in an entirely different context. A team of collaborators in a recently realigned department discuss their model for planning and initiating for change. In the Summer of 2014, Virginia Tech libraries were strategically realigned to better meet strategic directions and aspirations as documented in VT Libraries 2012-2018 Strategic Plan. One of these shifts included development of a new unit “Planning and Branch Operations” which includes many library operational duties, oversight of three branches, a research commons, and “planning and assessing the Libraries’ presence in the National Capital Region.” In line with the President’s “Strategic Plan: A Plan for a New Horizon. Envisioning Virginia Tech 2012-2018” http://www.president.vt.edu/strategic-plan/2012-plan/2012-strategic-plan.pdf library faculty and staff began to meet to discuss extending, enhancing, envisioning, and expanding library services within the National Capital Region. This resulted in a process to simultaneously gather information, improve problematic services with immediate impact, and plan mid- and long- term directions for extension and expansion of library services in the National Capital Region. This presentation tells the story of how a team of several individuals from Virginia Tech’s Blacksburg and National Capital Region-Falls Church campuses, in partnership with colleagues at various sites in the National Capital Region expanded offerings of the NCR-Resource Center, leveraged a new strategic focus on institutional expansion in Northern Virginia, partnered to provide multiple service-types from afar, and customized these services to address the unique needs of Virginia Tech faculty, staff, and students in the National Capital Region. Services developed and expanded as a result of this collaboration include, but are not limited to: improved collection circulation systems and procedures, establishment, extension and expansion of onsite or remotely-provided services (event capture, statistical consulting, data management training/planning . . . ), and increased collaboration with initiatives unique to the needs of VT faculty, staff, and students affiliated with the seven locations in Northern Virginia.
Altmetrics
McMillan, Gail (2013-08-07)
This is a brief introduction to the topic of "alternative metrics" for University Libraries.
Annual Report for 1995/1996
(Digital Library and Archives at Virginia Tech's University Libraries, 1996)
Archiving the Relaxed Consistency Web
Xie, Zhiwu; Van de Sompel, Herbert; Liu, Jinyang; van Reenen, Johann; Jordan, Ramiro (ACM, 2013)
The historical, cultural, and intellectual importance of archiving the web has been widely recognized. Today, all countries with high Internet penetration rate have established high-profile archiving initiatives to crawl and archive the fast-disappearing web content for long-term use. As web technologies evolve, established web archiving techniques face challenges. This paper focuses on the potential impact of the relaxed consistency web design on crawler driven web archiving. Relaxed consistent websites may disseminate, albeit ephemerally, inaccurate and even contradictory information. If captured and preserved in the web archives as historical records, such information will degrade the overall archival quality. To assess the extent of such quality degradation, we build a simplified feed-following application and simulate its operation with synthetic workloads. The results indicate that a non-trivial portion of a relaxed consistency web archive may contain observable inconsistency, and the inconsistency window may extend significantly longer than that observed at the data store. We discuss the nature of such quality degradation and propose a few possible remedies.
Are Repositories Impeding Big Data Reuse?
Xie, Zhiwu; Galad, Andrej; Chen, Yinlin; Fox, Edward A. (Virginia Tech, 2016-06-14)
In this intentionally provocative presentation, we question the scalability of popular digital repositories and whether they are suitable for big data reuse. Are the layers of API these repositories have painted over file system primitives necessary? How essential is it for the repository to insist on being the sole manager of the content, and arranging files in ways to prevent access other than from their own APIs? We explore these questions from the perspective of big data reuse, and describe controlled reuse experiments against Fedora 4 to evaluate the cost of these practices.
An Assessment of VTechData with respect to the CoreTrustSeal Repository Certification Requirements
Pisharoti, Naina; Petters, Jonathan L. (2019-02)
This report provides a brief internal assessment as to how well the current status of VTechData (“The Repository) meets the CoreTrustSeal repository certification requirements. VTechData has seen substantial development and improvements from when the first dataset was published in May of 2016 to the present day. However, this internal assessment shows that VTechData does not yet meet the CoreTrustSeal certification requirements.
Auditing an Institutional Data Repository With Respect to the CoreTrustSeal Certification Requirements
Petters, Jonathan L.; Pisharoti, Naina (2019-10-25)
J. Petters presented how Curation Services in Virginia Tech University Libraries used the CoreTrustSeal repository certification requirements to conduct a self audit of their institutional data repository VTechData. This presentation highlighted some of the issues faced by galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) in undergoing certification.
Becoming a Good Neighbor: Befriending Instructional Designers and Campus Distance Learning Folks
Walz, Anita R.; Metko, Stefanie (2016-04-21)
On our campus, a bridge connects the main library and the university group which operates the campus learning management system (LMS), trains faculty to use educational technologies, and collaborates directly with faculty who are exploring teaching online. Two librarians were tasked with developing a positive working relationship with the units in this group. This poster explores a handful of stories exhibiting the merits, lessons learned, and types of contributions librarians willing to collaborate directly with non-library educational technology departments might encounter. Including: building trust as an iterative process, learning from and together, connecting colleagues "across the bridge," new topics for instruction, influencing policy, addressing copyright and LMS, making the library visible via LMS, developing open educational resources, policy and politics, and so on.
Big Data Processing in the Cloud: a Hydra/Sufia Experience
Brittle, Collin; Xie, Zhiwu (2014-06-10)
Presentation video available at https://connectpro.helsinki.fi/p1txjdy74ts/ This presentation addresses the challenge of processing big data in a cloud-based data repository. Using the Hydra Project’s Hydra and Sufia ruby gems and working with the Hydra community, we created a special repository for the project, and set up background jobs. Our approach is to create the metadata with these jobs, which are distributed across multiple computing cores. This will allow us to scale our infrastructure out on an as-needed basis, and decouples automatic metadata creation from the response times seen by the user. While the metadata is not immediately available after ingestion, it does mean that the object is. By distributing the jobs, we can compute complex properties without impacting the repository server. Hydra and Sufia allowed us to get a head start by giving us a simple self deposit repository, complete with background jobs support via Redis and Resque.
Book summary: Planned Obsolescence by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Young, Philip (2012-09-18)
This is a 2-page summary of Kathleen Fitzpatrick's book Planned Obsolescence which was prepared for a Library Reading Group meeting on September 12, 2012. The summary also contains links to the projects and tools mentioned in the book.
Building a Community of Teachers: Designing Faculty Interest Groups to Build Pedagogical Expertise
Pressley, Lauren; Hall, Tracy Michelle; Walz, Anita R.; Moorefield-Lang, Heather; Henshaw, Neal; Miller, Rebecca K. (2014-03-06)
We explore the University Libraries program to develop instructional expertise within the department, with a focus on the development of a pedagogies interest group focused on understanding, reflecting on, and practicing new and emerging pedagogies in higher education. This poster presents how this model might be applied to other departments interested in facilitating this faculty-driven model of pedagogical development.
Choices by Design: Finding and Using Openly Licensed Resources
Walz, Anita R. (2014-10-20)
Many people find it difficult to know what they can and cannot use in public or other presentations because of Copyright law. When someone is flexible regarding the exact image or figure they want to use, finding and using openly licensed/Creative Commons licensed content is one alternative to navigating fair use and Copyright exemptions. This practical session covers very basic Copyright facts, addresses faculty/staff interests in using copyrighted material in a variety of settings, introduction to Creative Commons, how to attribute Creative Commons licensed works, finding openly-licensed works, and additional resources for finding further openly licensed resources.
Clustering
Xie, Zhiwu (2015-06-11)
This presentation is part of a panel presentation at Open Repository 2015, Fedora Technical Working Group - Assessment of Fedora 4.
Collaborative Batch Creation for Open Access E-Books: A Case Study
Young, Philip; Culbertson, Rebecca; McGrath, Kelley (Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 2012-09-24)
When the National Academies Press announced that more than 4,000 electronic books would be made freely available for download, many academic libraries expressed interest in obtaining MARC records for them. Using cataloging listservs, volunteers were recruited for a project to identify and upgrade bibliographic records for aggregation into a batch that could be easily loaded into catalogs. Project organization, documentation, quality control measures, and problems are described, as well as processes for adding new titles. The project’s implications for future efforts are assessed, as are the numerous challenges for network-level cataloging.
Content Selection, Preparation, and Management
McMillan, Gail; Howard, Rachel (Educopia Institute, 2010)
Here is a set of best practices for policies regarding the selection, preparation, and management of digital content for preservation purposes. Though the authors draw upon PLNs (Private LOCKSS Networks) in their featured examples, the chapter may be applied more broadly to many distributed digital preservation initiatives. As such, it will be of great use to librarians, curators, and archivists, as well as administrators, who are seeking to ready their collections for preservation.
Copyright in Research and Scholarship for Engineering Education Graduate Seminar
McMillan, Gail (2015-05-01)
Copyright in Research and Scholarship for the Engineering Education Graduate Seminar, May 1, 2015.
Copyright in Scholarship
McMillan, Gail (2012-11-05)
You can legitimately use someone else's work in your own when you know about copyright and you understand your rights as well as your responsibilities.

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