Notes: Scholars Portal Update

Last modified by Andrea Kosavic on 2024-02-10, 23:53

This year, we're trying something new at Scholars Portal Day: shared session notes. An official note-taker will take notes throughout the session. If you have a spotdocs account, you can feel free to add your own notes to the page as well! If you don't have an account, contribute by leaving a comment below.

Scholars Portal Dataverse: Platform and Service Development Update
Meghan Goodchild, Research Data Management Systems Librarian

  • OCUL has offered Dataverse since 2012.
  • In May, Dataverse was upgraded to 4.8.6 which brought performance enhancements and bug fixes. 
  • At the request of the community, OCUL has developed enhanced Dataverse usage reports. See: 
  • 3 new Dataverse videos have been created, along with an updated FAQ:  youtube.com/user/ScholarsPortal and learn.scholarsportal.info/all-guides/dataverse/
  • SP has been collaborating with Dataverse North to create training materials.
  • The Dataverse Internationalization nitiative has been working towards code internationalization. The focus is on developing bilingual interface and help materials in French.
  • Dataverse has received funding for the CANARIE RDM program grant, which is led by Scholars Portal with support from CARL and Portage. Monies fund 18 months of development which include scalability (robust platform, high volume traffic and large file handling, leverage OLRC), authentication/identity management (Shibboleth login and ORCID integration), and a Data Curation Tool (improve data curation workflows - user can edit DDI metadata and with interoperability with other elements). 
  • SP/UTL is developing partnerships to develop Dataverse as national repository service. Currently developing training materials and metadata standards.  
  • Upcoming deliverables in Q1/Q2 2019 would be a fully bilingual Dataverse release and CANARIE project first deliverables.

Archivematica-Dataverse Integration
Grant Hurley, Digital Preservation Librarian and Meghan Goodchild, Research Data Management Systems Librarian

OCUL sponsored work with Artefactual Systems to integrate Dataverse to support long term preservation. Public release happened in November 2018 with v. 1.8 of Archivematica.

Development was intentionally modular. The preservation process begins with a preserver who has access to a linked Archivematica instance. Preserver makes a decision about what they wish to preserve, an AIP is created (with augmented preservation-level metadata) and deposited in Archivematica. Processing choices are available and configureable for users. 

A video is available to see the Archivematica-Database integration in action!

SP will be hosting a public Archivematica sandbox in January and will be asking for feedback. Documentation has been created, and the OCUL community is invited to explore.

Permafrost

DuraCloud

DuraCloud is a set of software components that allows for more effective oversight/management of preservation copies stored in cloud environments. 

The OLRC project provides much-needed storage capacity. Now users have  interact with the OLRC:

  • Easier integrations with data repositories, Archive-IT, etc.
  • Integrates with Archivematica
  • Usable upload/download tools
  • Stronger management and reporting tools

SP, UTL and COPPUL received an 18 month CANARIE Grant to further develop DuraCloud. Primary goal is to de-couple DuraCloud from Amazon Web services, which will benefit the broader community.

Implementing Linked Data in OCUL Scholars Portal 
Wei Zhao, Senior Metadata Librarian, Scholars Portal and Jayanthy Chengan, Senior Software Developer, Scholars Portal

Linked Data allows one to  semantically connect related data together so that the data can be reused, connected, and integrated in a machine readable format.

Library community embraces this new tech: WorldCat and LoC offer linked data services. British library was first to make available linked data platform. 

UofT has a pilot project to link their catalogue to DBPedia.

Staff from early 2017 SP team started developing a strategy. SP staff participating in linked-data communities and conferences to exchange ideas. OCUL BOD offered funding to purchase semantic license in MarkLogic. Most SP offerings are based on MarkLogic - the database supports semantic triples as well as relational data.

Ontology Driven Entity Extraction feature is amazing, as it automatically identifies elements in free text. 

Embarking on Modeling Journals Entitlement as Linked Data which will allow:

  • Manage entitlement better.
  • Track the perpetual access information.
  • Track the history of the entitlement changes.
  • Track the title transfers.
  • Generate the report as needed.
  • Export the entitlement data to member institutions’ ERM or ILS systems.

Next pilot linked data project is building linkages between SP collections which reside on separate siloed databases: Books, Journals, Geoportal, odesi, Dataverse.

Using Semantic Functions in MarcLogic, we'll be able to link these siloed projects together. An example of the affordances is the linking of books with their book reviews. Currently, the data model and ontologies for this initiative are under review and finalization.

EBook Platform
Update by Bartek Kawula

  • Went live after July 1st this year - Phase 1 is completed.
  • Underwent a UX review with a lot of great feedback that results.
  • Since July 121,234+ items have been loaded.
  • Are now able to load not only MARC data but can also take in publisher supplied metadata which is richer. 
  • Have been able to tackle duplicate issues, contine to investigate better way of cleaning this up. 
  • RSS feeds are available which provide corresponding MARC records for each library.
  • Admin tool offers rich information, i.e. DRM info: SUPO - single user, SUPO Plus - single user, can't download, copy or print
  • The SP team will be providing information about downloads interface, including MARC records, Counter Data and other reports.
  • In 2019, will be working on new loading workflows, reloading Internet Archive Data, Preservation (TDR status), Recommendations services for the platform, and Data Analytics.

A total reads/downloads slide was showed, as well as top 12 books in November, with Marijuana and the Cannabinoids having the most reads.

Scholars Portal – Brief Updates
Amy Greenberg, Acting Co-Director

ACE received an upgrade this year and hit a numbers milestone of 15K titles in the collection. SP realized that ACE turnaround times were getting longer. Most of the content in ACE is driven by user requests at various institutions and SP was having challenges meeting demand in a timely way. 

ACE turnaround challenges included unpredictable request volume, erasing needed in marginalia, the staffing model, and technical changes at Internet Archive and SP Books. Mitigation strategies have been developed, including using ILL or purchasing a book when heavy erasing is needed. Social media campaigns were developed to ask folks to not mark up library books, and implementing more flexible student staffing models. As a result, turnaround times have been reduced by almost 50%.

This was a big year for Open Journal Systems hosting. OCUL supports 125 journals with 31K published articles at 10 OCUL institutions. Migration of all the journals to OJS 3.x has been completed over this past year.

New websites have been developed: Permafrost, TDR and Ask a Librarian.

Collaborative Futures has also kept SP very busy. Considerations include: SFX hosting, ensuring that SP collections are discoverable in the new platform, OUR licensing information, and new ways of sharing resources.

SP has welcomed 3 new faces over the past year: 

  • Sohaib Anwar, Systems Support Specialist
  • Victoria Lubitch, Data & GIS Programmer/Analyst
  • Carlos McGregor, Systems Support Specialist