Library Research & Innovative Practice Forum

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/16362

The Library Research & Innovative Practice Forum is an annual event in June featuring lightning talks, presentations, and poster sessions by UMD Libraries’ librarians and staff.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 123
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    Watergate: A Legacy
    (2024-10-10) Lewis, Irene M.; Hughes-Watkins, Lae'l; Mayfield, Catherine Dayrit
    Watergate: A Legacy is a presentation that looks into the political and cultural history of the Watergate scandal from the early 1970s in the United States and how it led the House of Representatives to initiate impeachment proceedings against President Richard M. Nixon in 1973. This presentation was given at the University of Maryland Libraires' Living Democracy Symposium held on October 10, 2024, at the College Park campus. The presentation examines how President Nixon and his administration undermined democracy, truth, and the rule of law through their activities to cover up the Watergate break-in and how public officials such as Maryland Representative Lawrence J. Hogan, Sr., other members of the House Judiciary Committee, members of the Senate Watergate Committee, the FBI, and many others worked hard to uphold justice in order to preserve democracy and the welfare of the country. Throughout the presentation, documents from Lawrence Joseph Hogan, Sr. papers held at the University of Maryland Archives are highlighted to illustrate the political and cultural impact this historic event had upon the American people during an era of great social and political change.
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    Plant Patent Portal Project
    (2024-06-21) Garcia, Jose Anza; Shanker, Stella; Budhathoki, Milan
    Our Plant Patent Portal (PPP) project is an interactive visualization of around 30,000 plant-related patents filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). We geocoded the original, aspatial data, converting it from a simple table with no spatial reference into a georeferenced, spatially aware layer of all of these patents. Each is symbolized as a point on a map based on where the inventor in question resides. To interactively visualize our data as well as get it online, we created an interactive dashboard using ArcGIS Experience Builder that combines maps with statistics and filtering options to promote data exploration and custom visualization. Our goal is twofold: create a tool for the general public to better understand the spatial distribution of plant patents granted by the USPTO, and to provide a much more intuitive and eye-catching way to present this dataset as opposed to the original tables.
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    Neglected, Found & Preserved: Architectural Drawings for the School of Architecture
    (2024-06-06) Draper, Bryan; Elliott, Kirsten; Frank, Cindy; Trim, Alexandra
    A set of 39 architectural drawings for the School of Architecture Building from 1969 was recovered from a faculty office. The drawings are diazotype prints and were bound along the left edge with strips of wood and bolts. Damage consisted of tears & losses to the paper support, fading of the image due to oxidation and extensive pressure-sensitive tape repairs that had deteriorated. This presentation discusses the history of these drawings, what damage they had sustained, how they were conserved and digitized, and their potential use in Architectural coursework now they are digitally accessible to UMD staff.
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    COVID19 Vaccine Mapper
    (2024-06) Shanker, Stella; Phuyal, Sakar; Budhathoki, Milan
    The COVID-19 Vaccine Mapper, developed by UMD Libraries' GIS and Data Service Center, maps out and highlights various aspects of COVID-19 vaccine development. Such aspects include the location of vaccine developers, the number of approved vaccines by country, and different vaccine delivery routes. Data is sourced from the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Dashboard and UNICEF’s COVID-19 Market Dashboard. The mapper, created with ArcGIS Experience Builder to join two ArcGIS dashboards, is divided into two pages: Vaccine Candidates and Vaccine Design. Vaccine Candidates provides a general outlook on the global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, while Vaccine Design details the specifications of the vaccines (intramuscular vs. oral delivery, DNA vs. mRNA, etc.). By analyzing changes in COVID-19 vaccine development across space and time, we can define patterns and quantify trends in the COVID-19 vaccine industry. Above:
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    3D Tour Project: Modeling McKeldin's Map Collection
    (2024-06) Garcia, Jose Anza; Shanker, Stella; Abban. John; Budhathoki, Milan
    At McKeldin library, we are lucky to have one of the largest map collections of any college library in the world. With over 350,000 print maps, including government maps provided through the Federal Depository Library Program, the collection's size and complexity can make it a daunting task to explore and find materials. To tackle this problem, the 3D Tour Project seeks to create a 3D model of McKeldin's map collection, which is located in the west wing of the 4th floor. Using cutting edge GIS software such as ArcGIS Pro, we have created a sample model of a row of the library's cabinets (including individual drawers), each of which has detailed information about the maps contained within. The project will, in the future, be available online and thus accessible to any visitor who wishes to find materials within the collection. Eventually, this project will be expanded to model the entire map collection area and will have more advanced capabilities added through JavaScript programming, including an ability to search through categories of materials.
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    Analyzing and Identifying Patterns of Temperature and Crime in Chicago
    (2024-06) Budhathoki, Milan; Murlidhar, Ashish; Hans, Abhimanyu; Benjamin, Alice; Harp, Ryan; Sharma, Ashish
    This study investigates the relationship between temperature and crime rates in Chicago over a 20-year period, both at the city level and at the granular census tract level to examine spatial and temporal correlations across different neighborhoods. Crime and temperature data were analyzed at the census tract level to examine spatial and temporal correlations. The study tested the hypothesis that certain crimes increase with warmer temperatures while others rise with colder temperatures, and that higher temperatures predict higher crime overall. Urban climate data from the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) and public crime data were compared to identify census tracts sensitive to seasonal temperature changes. Different crime types were found to correlate with a heat vulnerability index based on socioeconomic and health metrics. The findings aim to help law enforcement, urban planners, and stakeholders locate areas of heat stress and develop interventions to reduce violence and structured racism in the highly crime-prone neighborhood, with a focus on understanding trends at the census tract level. This novel investigation of the overlooked links between climate, geography, and crime can inform strategies to mitigate urban heat impacts on public safety across different communities.
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    Data Visualization: A New Way to See Historical Records in the AFL-CIO Archive
    (2024-06-06) Eidson, Jennifer Gathings; Fettig, Rosemarie
    In the outreach phase of the Advancing Workers’ Rights grant, a three-year project that digitized over 90,000 pages of records from the AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department, creating social media and blog posts about the newly-available materials resulted in a quest for different ways to represent the materials in a unique, interesting, and user-friendly way. This search led us to explore data visualizations, for which a broad spectrum of graphical representations of information and data is possible. Two archivists discuss how a collaboration between student assistants and SCUA staff resulted in the creation of a series of data visualizations - maps, word clouds, and timeline graphs - that transformed the metadata from the digitized materials into unique and useful graphics. The graphics provide a new point of entry into the collection by using freely available tools like DataWrapper and Voyant, and the existing capabilities of Excel. The dataset originally exported from ArchivesSpace for use in Archelon was used for this outreach project and provides an example of how existing datasets can be reused to analyze collection materials in new ways. After applying these methods and tools to the materials selected for digitization, about 30% of the AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department records, we will share additional visualizations that comprise the complete records of the collection for further comparison and analysis of this approach.
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    Who wrote this?? And who is an author, anyway? AI authors in the catalog
    (2024-06-05) Hovde, Sarah
    Over the last decade or so, generative processes have increasingly captured public attention, from the fever dream images of early neural nets to the more recent proliferation of chatbots and language models. A 2021 post on the PCCLIST cataloging listserv about a book "co-authored" by a transformer language model led to an almost week-long discussion over whether the AI was truly an author or just a tool. In the intervening years, AI-created books have proliferated on online bookselling and book rating platforms, and sometimes even library collections. Just as reference and instruction librarians have risen to the challenge of teaching about LLMs and chatbots, catalogers should be prepared to encounter and describe resources created by computational processes. This lightning talk will quickly review the history and current state of computer-generated texts, and touch on the evolution of the concept of authorship in cataloging standards. It will then bring these historical threads together to consider how catalogers can represent how computer-generated texts with current cataloging tools and standards, and speculate on some alternative options for the future.