Library Faculty/Staff Scholarship and Research

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/11

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Author: search.filters.author.Wallberg, Ben

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    Doing More, With More: Academic Libraries, Digital Services, and Revenue Generation
    (Ithaka S+R, 2019-01-24) Dohe, Kate; Hamidzadeh, Babak; Wallberg, Ben
    The axiom to “do more with less” in university research libraries is increasingly untenable, as budgets continue to shrink and demand for novel services continues to rise. The impacts of such existential uncertainties are self-evident and widely discussed in the literature--staff burnout, lowered morale and increased toxicity, weakened local collections, and limited capacity for ambitious and genuinely innovative work. In response to calls for entrepreneurial initiatives from campus and library leadership, the Digital Systems and Stewardship (DSS) division of the University of Maryland Libraries has been engaged since 2015 in developing a revenue generation program known as Digital Data Services. This initiative tackles the challenging financial landscape of higher education and furthers our institutional mission by offering fee-based technological services to the campus community, to affiliated partners, and to the commercial sector. Conceived of as a means to generate steady revenue to support and sustain library initiatives, the program currently represents a significant source of income for the Libraries DSS division after three years of growth, and is envisioned to contribute to other divisions in the Libraries, as well. More than standard cost recovery programs, the Digital Data Services program generates returns that can be reinvested in staffing or equipment for the Libraries, and DDS projects represent unique opportunities to cultivate talent and expand expertise to benefit other library initiatives. While a large-scale revenue generating program may initially appear contrary to traditional models of library services, this program has enabled the Libraries to expand both our capacity and aptitude to improve many of our mission-driven services over time.
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    Bootstrapping Digital Services: Developing Self-Supporting Service Models for Library Programs
    (2017-10-25) Wallberg, Ben; Dohe, Kate
    In a shifting financial landscape, starting and sustaining digital initiatives is challenging. In response to campus-wide calls for entrepreneurial initiatives, our library developed a self-sustaining revenue generation model for a variety of digital services. This program has enabled the Libraries to reinvest and ultimately expand our capacity and expertise.
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    Newspapers Re-Issued: Developing a custom IIIF based newspaper viewer at the University of Maryland Libraries
    (2017-03-07) Abdul Rasheed, Mohamed Mohideen; Eichman, Peter; Westgard, Joshua; Dohe, Kate; Tai, Xiaoyu; Wallberg, Ben
    Many institutions are creating archives of digital newspapers, yet it is notoriously challenging to deliver an engaging and uncomplicated end user interface for such content. At the University of Maryland Libraries, we have created a custom portal for our crowdfunded campus newspaper digitization project, which is scheduled to debut in the spring of 2017. Based on stakeholder feedback, our portal’s newspaper viewer needed to support four unique features: (1) keyword search highlighting from the main portal application, (2) intuitive image clipping, (3) article segmentation highlighting, and (4) side-by-side display of OCR text with the digitized image. After evaluation, we determined that IIIF would be the most appropriate framework to integrate into existing UMD repository systems. In order to deliver the requested features, we chose Loris and Mirador as our server and viewer applications, respectively, and developed customizations for each, which have in turn been contributed back to their respective communities. Furthermore, we developed a PCDM Manifest application to take metadata about each newspaper issue from our Fedora 4 repository, transform it, and deliver IIIF manifests. UMD Libraries has also created a proof-of-concept method for embedding ALTO XML text coordinates in a Solr index, in order to enable dynamic annotation generation within the viewer. This development work ultimately enables our metadata to be repurposed across application boundaries for novel representations of our digital and digitized newspapers.
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    High-Level Requirements for a Bit Preservation System University of Maryland Libraries
    (2013-10-04) Hamidzadeh, Babak; Knies, Jennie Levine; Wallberg, Ben
    The mission of the high-level requirements for a bit preservation system at the University of Maryland Libraries is to provide a plan for digital content management services in all phases of content’s lifecycle, including selection, creation, acquisition, and disposition.