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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End date: 2019Subject: search.filters.subject.Libraries

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Harvesting MARC Data with the WorldCat Search API
    (2018-06-14) Bradley, Benjamin
    The Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) hopes for a world where all content providers openly share their metadata with all discovery service providers, but we are still far from that world. While libraries depend more and more on publisher-provided metadata, libraries are often left with poor quality metadata or sometimes with no metadata at all. In this environment, librarians need to develop web-scale tools to provide web-scale discovery and access. In this lightning talk I will introduce a Python script I have been developing which uses the WorldCat Search API to batch search and download OCLC MARC records which I use to harvest metadata to supplement publisher-provided metadata or to transform the records into a KBART file for ingest.
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    My very first robot: Programming a Twitter bot to promote open access scholarship
    (2018-06-14) Koivisto, Joseph; Koivisto, Joseph
    Social media is now recognized as an important element in promoting scholarship available on institutional repository sites. To capitalize on the value-added by social media engagement, automated "bots" can be deployed to facilitate social media outreach with minimal administrative investment. In this presentation, I'll provide an overview of social media's value in the context of open access publishing. I will also walk through the steps of creating a Python-based Twitter bot, providing high-level concepts that will be understandable for non-programmers. I will also provide a narrative description of my experience building my first Twitter bot to help reveal the sometimes hidden labor that goes in to the development of behind-the-scenes programmatic tools.
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    Advocacy by Design: Moving Between Theory & Practice
    (2017-06-08) Lindblad, Purdom
    How can librarians, archivists, and digital practitioners practice an Ethic of Care, in explicitly anti-racist and anti-violent ways? How can libraries contribute to the infrastructures needed to define, scope, and practice care? This talk focuses on research practices to do the speculative work of imagining what the infrastructures of an Ethic of Care could and should be. Advocacy by Design (AbD) is a design framework for critical engagement centered on advocacy.  AbD articulates a series of principles—transparency, openness, polyvocalism (resisting one narrative, opening possibility of many points of view, many narratives around a single event), stewardship, etc.—and a series of applied techniques to realize these principles throughout the project’s cycle.  This talk will first describe the broad focus of Advocacy by Design, with a particular attention to how it is a framework to help prompt reflection and articulation of the purposes of the project (any project from system design to creating a working group to helping at the reference desk), then to outline what the principles are for Advocacy by Design, highlight several ‘elements’ for each principle for a few example projects—within the Library and liaison-collaboration with researchers; and finally point towards why the library might care about centering design, particularly AbD, in our work, from the ways we think about and invite users to the library, to discovery interfaces, and to collaborations in digital projects.
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    Identifying User Demographics in Digital Collections with Google Analytics
    (2016-06-08) Durden, David
    Usage statistics of digitized materials, when collected, can inform future project prioritization for increased access to materials. Demographic information collected through Google Analytics may provide insight into the behavior of users as they engage with digital collections. This presentation outlines some of the tactics used to analyze data collected by Google Analytics for the years 2013 through 2015 by answering questions such as, 'how are users getting to digital collections,' what searches are driving traffic,' and 'how do users navigate through digital collections'? Answers to these questions revealed additional demographic information including language barriers that prevent access to content, the popularity of particular subjects, changes in social media traffic both to and from digital collections, and popularity of device type and operating system among users.
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    Custom Analytics with Google Tag Manager: Assessing Usage Statistics on the MD-SOAR Platform
    (2016-06-08) Koivisto, Joseph
    As usage metrics continue to attain an increasingly central role in library system assessment and analysis, librarians tasked with system selection, implementation, and support are driven to identify metric approaches that simultaneously require less technical complexity and greater levels of data granularity. Such approaches allow systems librarians to present evidence-based claims of platform usage behaviors while reducing the resources necessary to collect such information, thereby representing a novel approach to real-time user analysis as well as dual benefit in active and preventative cost reduction. As part of the DSpace implementation for the MD SOAR initiative, the Consortial Library Application Support (CLAS) division has begun test implementation of the Google Tag Manager analytic system in an attempt to collect custom analytical dimensions to track author- and university-specific download behaviors. Building on the work of Conrad , CLAS seeks to demonstrate that the GTM approach to custom analytics provides both granular metadata-based usage statistics in an approach that will prove extensible for additional statistical gathering in the future. This poster will discuss the methodology used to develop these custom tag approaches, the benefits of using the GTM model, and the risks and benefits associated with further implementation.