The Texas Digital Library is compiling documentation and information about the TDL organization and its services into a comprehensive guidebook for new and prospective members, as well as for long-time partners in the consortium.

To assure that this document is both useful and complete, we are enlisting the help of our members by releasing a draft of the document and soliciting feedback on what needs to be added, dropped, or changed.

Download the document here:  TDL Member Guide (Draft)

The TDL Guide is intended to provide essential information about membership in the Texas Digital Library – information that will (a) assure that new and existing members get the most out of their membership in the consortium and (b) inform prospective members about what it means to belong to TDL. Currently, the TDL Guide includes the following:

• General information about the TDL and membership in the consortium
• Information about TDL technical infrastructure
• Descriptions of all TDL services and projects
• Information on how to claim and set up TDL services
• A quick reference guide with important phone numbers and “how-to” information
• Copies of TDL marketing flyers, including a brochure for faculty

Please feel free to download the draft of the TDL Guide and provide any feedback to info@tdl.org using the subject line “TDL Guide.” You may also contact TDL program coordinator Ryan Steans by phone at 512-495-4403.

The deadline for feedback is Friday, September 10.

The prioritized list of features is the result of a weeks-long process undertaken by Vireo Users Group members, who submitted ballots indicating desired feature requests and enhancements. The steering committee for the group compiled and examined the ballots to develop the “top 20” list.

Read more about the process and next steps on the VUG website. You can see the list of prioritized features here.

In part, Sprint 7 continued work from the previous development sprint to move all PresNet work into a hosted software suite called JIRA Studio, which will improve the efficiency and transparency of TDL development and support work. (You can read about PresNet Sprint 6 in a previous story.)

Another key component of Sprint 7, however, was work to ready the current iteration of PresNet for deployment. During the sprint, the TDL development team documented deployment instructions, in preparation for a launch of PresNet in a production environment at the end of August 2010.

Currently, the TDL Preservation Network has the capability to package and deliver TDL-hosted assets (such as blogs, wikis, journals, and repository content) to the Texas Advanced Computing Center, which then replicates the archived assets at its geographically dispersed partner institutions.

Additional development work on PresNet will continue in Fall 2010.

For more information about the TDL Preservation Network, including details on Sprint 7 and previous sprints, visit the TDL Wiki.

The Shibboleth Users List will provide a forum for members to communicate changes they make to the identity provider modules, including upgrades or modifications to the release of attributes to TDL. Users can also use the list to ask questions or share tips and other information. The list will be monitored by Paul Caskey of the LEARN Shibboleth Federation, as well as by technical personnel at the TDL.

Anyone joining the TDL Shibboleth Users List can e-mail the TDL at info@tdl.org.

About Shibboleth

The Texas Digital Library uses Shibboleth, an Internet2 federated identity architecture, to manage authentication of users who access TDL services. Shibboleth is a distributed authentication software that enables federated identity management adnc ross-domain single sign-on, meaning that users within the Shibboleth Federation can log in to TDL services using their own existing university credentials. For more information about Shibboleth, and the TDL Shibboleth architecture, please visit the TDL Wiki.

The article provides nice historical background on the birth of the open-access journal “movement,” beginning with the formation of the Public Library of Science and the launch of the NIH’s PubMed Central in 2000. It also summarizes various perspectives on open-access research, including opinions of publishers, scientists, and libraries.

In addition to the article itself, a podcast is available that includes an interview with the author.

(Via Digital and Scholarly.)

But this poster from the UK’s  Open University, presented at Open Repositories 2010, tells a different story. According to its creators, a successful institutional repository can indeed be built through advocacy and active management. The Open University repository regularly gets around 60% of the peer-reviewed research output of the university through a combination of departmental and individual outreach and some technical know-how.

Read the poster and abstract here. And for more, see this post on the Open Access Archivangelism blog.

Two other classes will also be offered on August 25 and 26. The full course schedule for these two days is below. You may also visit TDL.org/training for additional information.

August 25, 2010

Online Scholarly Journals Using OJS (9 AM – 4 PM)

August 26, 2010

Online Conference Management with OCS (9 AM – 4 PM)

Intro to DSpace (9 AM-4 PM)

To register for classes, visit the registration page hosted by Baylor University.

The above image of medical students at their microscopes is one of hundreds in the UT Southwestern Library archives. (Photo courtesy of UT Southwestern Medical Center Library.)

– A photograph of tent facilities for sick soldiers during the 1918 influenza epidemic.

– A portrait of the first five African American doctors admitted to practice at St. Paul Hospital (or to any Dallas hospital staff) in 1943.

– An image of the first open-heart surgery performed in Dallas, at Parkland Hospital in 1956.

These images, and hundreds of others housed in the collections at UT Southwestern Medical Center Library, document the history of medicine in Dallas. Up to now, the images have only been available to researchers and patrons who visit the library’s physical facilities, but thanks to a grant from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM), the photographs will soon be available online.

TDL DSpace as Preservation Tool

The Library received a $25,000 Historic Preservation and Digitization Award from the NN/LM South Central Region to create a digital photo repository entitled Dallas Medical Images, 1890-1975. While the images will be made publicly available through CONTENTdm, UT Southwestern Medical Center is using its Texas Digital Library DSpace repository as a preservation tool for the collection, fulfilling a key component of the grant application and the goals of the project.

According to Matt Zimmerman, principal investigator for the Dallas Medical History 1890-1975  project, the Library has several goals: (1) to make the images more widely accessible by getting them online, (2) to promote the wider holdings of the UT Southwestern Medical Center Library, and (3) to preserve the images digitally

“CONTENTdm is the public face,” says Zimmerman, “but the other important goal is long-term storage and preservation. Without having the DSpace repository and the upcoming Preservation Network behind it, we wouldn’t be able to do the preservation part of the project.”

The DSpace repository, hosted by the Texas Digital Library, will serve as an archive for uncompressed master images that are digitized during the course of the project. Those images in turn will be preserved in the TDL Preservation Network, which will send all TDL-hosted digital contents to the Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT Austin. TACC, in turn, will replicate the files at its geographically dispersed partner institutions.

A Rich Medical History in Photographs

The image repository will be available to the public via a CONTENTdm instance hosted by OCLC. It will contain some 500 photos that illustrate the history of medicine in Dallas between 1890 and 1975. UT Southwestern and its partner institutions have been key players in the development of medicine in the Metroplex: its St. Paul Hospital and affiliate Parkland Memorial are the two longest-operating hospitals in Dallas, and Parkland famously treated not only John F. Kennedy, but also Lee Harvey Oswald before they died. The UT Southwestern Library holds approximately 7,000 photos in its Historical Archives and its History of Medicine Collection, from which the digital repository collection will be drawn.

The grant project represented an opportunity for UT Southwestern to begin digitizing its collections, according to Zimmerman. Previously the library had digitized a small collection of apothecary jar photos but lacked the infrastructure to do large-scale digitization. The grant will cover the purchase of a scanner and other materials to undertake the project.

Additionally, UT Southwestern’s membership in the Texas Digital Library provided the institution with the ability to preserve their digital assets and to demonstrate as much in its grant application.

“It was great to be able to say that long-term preservation was being facilitated by being part of the TDL,” Zimmerman says.

Along with the digital repository, the grant-funded project will create a special Web exhibit of approximately 50 “high-interest” photos that will appear on the library’s website.

The project began in July 2010 and concludes within nine months. For more about UT Southwestern Library, please visit the library’s website at http://www.utsouthwestern.edu/libraryinternal/.

This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Contract No. N01-LM-6-3505 with the Houston Academy of Medicine – Texas Medical Center Library.

You can read the newsletter in either HTML or PDF format.

The July/August 2010 issue includes the following

• A message from the TDL co-directors about changes in the management of Shibboleth federated authentication
• A feature story on an exciting grant-funded digitization project just underway at UT Southwestern Medical Center Library
• An update on TDL software development efforts
• News about a digital photo collection licensed by Texas Tech Libraries
• An account of Texas A&M Libraries’ effort to catalog some 2,300 ETDs
• Information about the launch of a new Technical Interest Group
• Details on upcoming training opportunities with the TDL

For suggestions about content for the TDL Update, please contact Kristi Park at kristi.park@austin.utexas.edu.

Anyone wishing to be added to the distribution list for the newsletter, please contact the TDL program coordinator at info@tdl.org.

During the roughly two-week development period that began July 21, the team transferred all code, documentation, and other material related to the development of the TDL Preservation Network into JIRA Studio, a hosted software tool that facilitates more efficient software development.

Among its advantages, JIRA Studio includes a number of features that correspond with the scrum development methodology that the TDL team uses, including virtual “story cards” and a “scrum board” for tracking the development process. According to developer Joe Devries who led the sprint review, these features will make remote collaboration among members of the development and production teams in Austin, College Station, and Lubbock much easier.

JIRA Studio also includes a code repository and code review features, as well as a documentation wiki. And because it is remotely hosted, the burden of maintaining these features is taken off of TDL staff.

Additionally, all bugs and feature requests related to TDL technologies will be logged in JIRA Studio and will be publicly viewable by TDL members. A further announcement will be made when public viewing of the JIRA backlog is operational.

Although the sprint was internally focused, the move to JIRA Studio should have significant benefits to work on PresNet and other development projects, as it makes development more efficient and collaboration easier.  And because members will be able to check on the status of requests and bug fixes, it will also make the development process more transparent.