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CRRA Update Spring 2015

CRRA Update
Spring 2015
(March, April, May)
please see the PDF for
the more visually rich version

In this issue:

CRRA Symposium and Annual Meeting, June 1-2 at Catholic Theological Union, Chicago
From the Board
Committee Briefs
DAC Committee Brief
Membership Committee Brief
Tech Corner
Successes in ICON Ingestion
News from Our Members
Ximena Valdivia, Barry University Presents on CRRA to the Florida Chapter of ATLA and the Catholic Library Association Annual Meeting in Orlando
CUA Archives
The Boston College Jesuit Bibliography: The New Summervogel
Announcements from Georgetown
Collection Highlights
Collection Highlights: Liturgical Art Collection
USD Symposium
CRRA Website Statistics: First Quarter 2015 (January 1-March 31)
Heads Up
Jennifer Younger, Pat Lawton and Megan Bernal, DePaul University, will discuss digitizing and archiving Catholic newspapers at the Catholic Media Conference
Laverna Saunders, Rob Behary, Tom White (Duquesne), and Pat Lawton (CRRA) will present Digitizing Catholic Newspapers: Visions and Process
Gumberg Library at Duquesne University seeks a Digital Scholarship Librarian
Save the Date! June 1-2, 2015. 10

 CRRA Symposium and Annual Meeting, June 1-2 at Catholic Theological Union, Chicago

We look forward to welcoming colleagues, presenters and panelists to the symposium and annual meeting. Rev. Mark Francis, CSV, a noted liturgical theologian, will open the symposium with observations about liturgy and worship from the perspective of the worshippers and set the stage for the following presentations and panels.

New this year! We are setting up live streaming of the presentations and panels. Stay tuned. As soon as the arrangements are completed, we will send out an announcement on session names, times and how to connect to the live streamed sessions.

If you missed the registration due date and wish to attend in person, please contact Lisa Gonzalez directly to make arrangements. Contact Lisa Gonzalez or Jennifer Younger with questions or comments.

From the Board
Diane Parr Walker, chair, University of Notre Dame

 With the cheers of new graduates ringing in my ears, it is a pleasure to wind down the academic year by writing to my colleagues in CRRA. I am reminded of the cyclical nature of all organizations as the Board and committees turn their attention to planning goals for the coming year. Not surprisingly, the Board focuses on securing the resources needed to carry out our mission. Next year, in conjunction with the Development Committee, we will complete work begun this year to develop a strategic multi-year financial plan, identify opportunities for expanded member leadership, and develop a funding and sustainability plan for creating the directory, digitizing, and archiving Catholic newspapers. Steve Connaghan, vice-chair/chair-elect will lead a discussion for your input on next year’s priorities during the CRRA Symposium and Annual Meeting, and the committees will finish their discussions too in early June. The Board will adopt the annual strategic plan and budget at its last meeting mid-June.

Thank you for completing the recent survey about current collecting, digitizing and archiving activities relating to Catholic newspapers. The Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU) and the Association of Catholic Diocesan Archivists (ACDA) distributed the survey on our behalf. We are pleased to see responses coming in from colleagues at seventy-eight Catholic libraries and archives. At the same time, the Catholic Press Association of the United States and Canada sent a similar survey to its membership which includes diocesan and national newspaper publishers. Some of them make current issues accessible from their websites and their responses too will be useful in understanding the current landscape of access to Catholic newspapers. As the Board continues to discuss and support the plans from the Catholic Newspapers Committee and the Digitizing Partners to digitize selected Catholic newspapers it is encouraging to know that eighty percent of all survey respondents (libraries, archives and publishers) want to know more about a collaborative digital project to implement a searchable digital archive of Catholic newspapers.

Collaboration with other associations assists their work as well as our work. I’m pleased to note our participation in the conferences of other associations, mentioned in CRRA in the News.

It has been my privilege to serve as chair this last year. I look forward to continuing to work on your behalf for CRRA this next year as past chair, along with the board and with Steve Connaghan as he takes over as board chair.

Committee Briefs

DAC Committee Brief
Demian Katz, chair, Villanova University

The Digital Access Committee (DAC) has been working with several member institutions to harvest and ingest content into the portal, including Boston College, University of Dayton, Marquette University, and Loyola Marymount, just to name a few. Thanks to all of you for continuing to grow the Catholic portal!

DAC and the Liaisons Committee will be co-hosting a webinar in June on using an EAD-creation tool. Kevin Cawley (University of Notre Dame and DAC Member) has developed a Windows template for creating EAD files. With it you can save your EAD finding aids locally and upload them to the Catholic portal.  In this webinar, Kevin will demonstrate use of this free tool and answer questions.  Please plan to join us. We will send a “hold the date” email to all on this list once the date is confirmed.

Membership Committee Brief
Laverna Saunders, chair, Duquesne University (retired)

Our mission in CRRA - providing enduring global access to Catholic research resources in the Americas – is an extension of what we do at our respective institutions. In talking with prospective members, I have enjoyed sharing with them why Duquesne joined CRRA. We wanted to showcase the foundational works of our Spiritan Order and the Pittsburgh Catholic newspaper, making these digital resources accessible through the portal so scholars and students will find them. CRRA membership positions our university with other prestigious Catholic institutions. In addition, several librarians have contributed to CRRA by leading and serving on committees and by developing research tools such as LibGuides on Catholic topics.

I have also been privileged to look at CRRA’s programs through their eyes and am delighted to report that some members have already added Catholic Newspapers Online (CNO) to their library’s list of databases. CNO has grown to over 75 newspapers and if you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to make it available from your website.

The Membership Committee had a busy year in continuing relationships with fifteen prospective members, showcasing members and partners on the CRRA website through live links to web pages, and adding member testimonials to Join pages.  With my retirement, I am leaving the Membership Committee and the Board, but look forward to seeing many of you at the Symposium in June and staying connected to my CRRA colleagues.

Tech Corner

Successes in ICON Ingestion
Nick Casas, Project Coordinator for CRRA, Center for Research Libraries

 I would like to individually thank the Digitizing Partners who have contributed to the ICON (International Coalition on Newspapers) Database so far. Thanks to your data, date errors, duplicate records, and expansion of issue records have been discovered and corrected in the database. This allows us to keep track of issues that need to be digitized on a global scale and improve ICON across the board.

A thank you goes to our partners in Hartford, Connecticut – Karen Lesiak of St. Thomas Seminary, Roberta Tuttle from the offices of the Catholic Transcript, and Stephanie Gold, formerly of the Chancery Archives of the Archdiocese of Hartford. They have all given us newspaper data from one of our coveted areas in the Priority Papers including Catholic Transcript, Connecticut Catholic, Catholic Press, and the rare Catholic Standard (Hartford). We are grateful for your efforts!

Another thank you goes out to Dustin Booher of Catholic University of America. He has been working diligently with his cataloging team and with me to get CUA’s data into ICON. Dustin has helped contribute a huge chunk of issue data for the Monitor (San Francisco, 1878-1920). Great work!

Special thanks go out to Kate Feighery of the Archdiocese of New York who was absolutely essential in getting brand new newspaper data into ICON. Kate represented the Archives of the Archdiocese of New York in ICON extremely well. She contributed two brand new titles never before ingested into ICON: Catholic Review (New York, 1872-1898) and Catholic New York (1981- ). Kate also contributed to expanding further issue data for the Metropolitan Record and Catholic News. Center for Research Libraries (CRL) were pleased on these efforts to expand this ever growing database. See the accompanying illustrations of our brand new ICON records, or click on the images to be taken out to the records in ICON.

The pie graphs for “Organizations” states “100%,” which means the Archives of the Archdiocese of New York is the only institution represented in ICON. Basically, this is the very first time these two newspapers can be discovered in ICON to the world! Bravo, Kate!

Also, this is just a gentle reminder that in order to ingest newspaper data into ICON, we need both a publication skeleton and an issue skeleton of your newspaper data. The publication skeleton is basic metadata about a newspaper’s publication information such as frequencies, volume numbers, identifiers, etc. We are always looking to beef up this data in ICON records. We can only accept publication skeletons that contain one institution, although you may put as many newspapers as you want. The issues skeleton lists out your institution’s issue holdings by date. This allows ICON to populate the timeline and interactive calendar. We can only accept issues skeleton that contain one publication. You may download a blank publication skeleton or issues skeleton from the CRRA Portal under the Digitizing Partners page.

As always, I encourage anyone to email me if they are having trouble filling out any of the skeletons. As you can see above, there are many success stories completing skeletons and ingesting data into ICON, and we will definitely see more in the future!

News from Our Members

Ximena Valdivia, Barry University Presents on CRRA to the Florida Chapter of ATLA and the Catholic Library Association Annual Meeting in Orlando

Special thanks to Ximena Valdivia, manager of Barry University Archives and Special Collections, for introducing the Florida chapter of the American Theological Library Association and Catholic Library Association members to the CRRA, the Catholic portal, and the Catholic Newspapers Program. Ximena provided an excellent overview and demonstration of the portal and the newspapers program, giving participants a firsthand account from a member perspective. Thank you, Ximena and congratulations on a job well done!

If you are interested in including the CRRA in your conference presentations, we are happy to assist and provide tri-fold color brochures.

CUA Archives

In early March, William J. Shepherd wrote a blog post called “The Archivist’s Nook: Introduction to American Catholic Archives.” In this post for The Catholic University of America’s University Libraries blog, Shepherd gives a fascinating overview to the events that led to efforts to establish Catholic Archives across America. Read the whole post here.

The Boston College Jesuit Bibliography: The New Summervogel
Chris Stasnyiak, New Sommervogel assistant editor, Boston College

The New Sommervogel (NSO) is a comprehensive online bibliography covering books, book chapters, journal articles and book reviews pertaining to the exponentially growing field of Jesuit Studies. In addition to basic bibliographic information, entries include (English) abstracts, detailed subject headings, direct links to items available in electronic format where available, and a link to an item’s WorldCat entry, which shows where it may be located. The database covers more than 1,600 periodicals and is updated regularly. Thanks to generous support of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College, it is offered as an open-access resource.

From its very beginnings in the sixteenth century the Society of Jesus has maintained a unique tradition of bibliographic recordkeeping of works by and about Jesuits, starting with Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s Bibliotheca Scriptorum Societatis Iesu (1643). The largest and most authoritative of these efforts is the nineteenth-century Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus by the Alsatian Jesuit Carlos Sommervogel. In the twentieth century, the Hungarian Jesuit László Polgár carried on this work at the Rome-based Jesuit Historical Institute. More recently the Catholic University of Leuven has also been collecting bibliographic citations about the Jesuits.

Continuing in this tradition with the tools of the digital humanities, the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College has begun work on The Boston College Jesuit Bibliography: The New Sommervogel. Edited by Robert A. Maryks, this rich online resource allows scholars to more rapidly familiarize themselves with Jesuit Studies, a field that has seen explosive growth in the past decade due to increased attention to previously understudied areas of the Society’s influence, such as Jesuit ethnohistory, mathematics, science, and theater. In 2013 alone, there were over 1,200 scholarly publications on the Jesuits. Given the field’s increasing popularity and the additional surge of interest in the Society due to Pope Francis’s pontificate, Jesuit Studies will likely remain a field of sustained growth for many years to come. We hope The New Sommervogel will be a central catalyst in this upward trajectory.

The database is set to officially launch in June 2015, where it can be accessed at http://www.brill.com/products/online-resources/new-sommervogel. If you have any questions about the New Sommervogel or would like to get involved in the project, please email assistant editor Chris Staysniak at [email protected].

Announcements from Georgetown

We recently received exciting news from Georgetown on recent developments. Congratulations and thank you for sharing your news!

From Georgetown:
-Our new, state-of-the-art Booth Family Center for Special Collections opened in late March: http://www.library.georgetown.edu/news/booth-family-center-special-collections-opens
-We’ve received a gift of the world's best private collection of items related to Wordsworth: http://www.library.georgetown.edu/news/gift-life%E2%80%99s-work

Collection Highlights

Collection Highlights: Liturgical Art Collection
Jency Liddell, CRRA Webmaster, University of Notre Dame

The CRRA website has a new rotating exhibit up on liturgical art. Please visit the CRRA website to see and enjoy the exhibit.

This exhibit features collections from three member institutions: the Ade Bethune Drawings at St. Catherine University, Religious Artifacts at Seton Hall University, and the Santo Collection at Regis University. These collections were selected because they represent many different facets of liturgical art. The exhibit was assembled in honor of the CRRA’s upcoming Symposium and Annual Meeting, “Bringing the created toward the Creator: Liturgical art and design since Vatican II,” which will take place on June 1-2 at Catholic Theological Union.

USD Symposium
Rose Fortier, CRRA Update Associate Editor, Marquette University

The Digital Initiatives Symposium at the University of San Diego was a day devoted to digital innovation in academic libraries. The Symposium had 175 attendees from all over the United States, as well as attendees from Mexico and Canada.

The symposium organizers did an excellent job of collecting a diverse set of presenters. The opening and closing keynote addresses were nicely bookended. Heather Joseph of SPARC opened the Symposium by discussing the Open Access movement, where it’s been and where it’s going. Kenneth Crews closed out the symposium with a discussion on copyright in libraries that was as thorough as it was enlightening. For a discussion on copyright, it was surprisingly upbeat. Kenneth Crews’ treatment of copyright, and especially fair use, was as encouraging as it was enlightening.

Topics covered included the nexus of Digital Humanities and pedagogy, Open Access in a variety of situations, the creation of vastly different types of digital collections, institutional repositories, collaboration between the library and faculty in Digital Humanities projects, and much more. The symposium was only one day, but there was enough content packed in for three days, or so it seemed.

The symposium has an excellent website that details the presentations along with their abstracts. Highlights of the Symposium have been gathered together in the form of tweets, many of which are quite informative. Eventually, proceedings of the conference will be posted here as well.

There are already plans for the symposium to take place for a third year in 2016. If this past Digital Initiatives Symposium is anything to go on, the next one will be well worth the wait.

CRRA Website Statistics: First Quarter 2015 (January 1-March 31)
Pat Lawton, CRRA Digital Projects Librarian, University of Notre Dame

The biggest change from 2014 to 2015 is the number of pages viewed per session (up 9.82%) which suggests that users are finding more relevant content on the site, prompting the viewing of more pages on average. The rest of the statistics were mixed.

How often was the site visited?  Pages viewed?  

  • Total Sessions: 7,920 (-6.31% from 2014)
  • Total Pageviews: 26,060 (+2.89 % from 2014)
  • Total Pages per Session: 3.29 (+9.82% from 2014)
  • Average Session Duration: 00:02:35 (min.) (+5.77% from 2014)
  • Total Users: 6,544

What content is being viewed and searched?

The top three landing pages are unchanged from 2014: the Home Page, Catholic Newspapers Online, and The Catholic Portal continue to be the most popular pages. Noteworthy is the marked increase in views of Catholic Newspapers Online, up by 32.8%! This page continues to grow, thanks to our members and friends who share links to Catholic newspapers.

Another notable increase in use is the Join page, up 10.73% from this period 2014. Kudos to our Membership Committee for this uptick in apparent interest.

Are visitors searching?  For what are they searching?

A small percentage of visits (10.4%) included searches for content, with approximately 2:09 minutes on the site following the search (up 13.39%). Compared to first quarter 2014, visits with site searches dropped from 2,088 to 822 (down 60.63%). In the previous period, 24.7% of visits included site searches versus 10.4% in 2015.  However, search refinements, search depth, pageviews, and time on the site following the search all increased in 2015.

Top Ten Search Terms

Parish history (histories) continues to be the most commonly searched terms and taken together, this concept accounts for 39% of phrase searches, followed by:Catholic pamphlets, Catholic Church, Franciscans, Vincent de Paul Saint 1851-1660, Bilenge ya Mawinda, Novenas, African American(s), Canon law studies, and St. Clements Mission House.

Heads Up:

Jennifer Younger, Pat Lawton and Megan Bernal, DePaul University, will discuss digitizing and archiving Catholic newspapers at the Catholic Media Conference

This is the annual conference of the Catholic Press Association of the United States and Canada, which takes place this year June 24-26, 2015 in Buffalo, NY.

Laverna Saunders, Rob Behary, Tom White (Duquesne), and Pat Lawton (CRRA) will present Digitizing Catholic Newspapers: Visions and Process

at the Archivists for Congregations of Women Religious (ACWR) Triennial Meeting, Pittsburgh, on Aug 28, 2015.

Gumberg Library at Duquesne University seeks a Digital Scholarship Librarian

Duquesne University’s Gumberg Library seeks an innovative and collaborative professional for the newly created position of Digital Scholarship Librarian. The Digital Scholarship Librarian will incorporate support for digital scholarship into the library’s program of services that support teaching, learning and research, and will coordinate the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation filing process. S/he will work with colleagues to develop the library’s digital resources and represent the library in campus discussions of implementing an institutional repository. The Digital Scholarship Librarian will also participate in reference, outreach, information literacy instruction, collection development, and liaison activities. Must be able to meet the criteria for the library faculty rank process at or above the level of Librarian II.

For full description and to apply online visit: http://duq.edu/work-at-du/employment

Save the Date! June 1-2, 2015

The CRRA Symposium and Annual Meeting will be held June 1-2, 2015 at Catholic Theological Union (CTU), Chicago. Plan now to join in learning about the impact of Vatican II on liturgical art and design as visualized by a leading liturgical artist and what faculty, students, and others value most in the portal collections and Catholic Newspapers Online.

CRRA Update is an electronic newsletter distributed via email to provide members and friends with an update of CRRA activities. Please contact Pat at 574.631.1324 or email [email protected] with your questions, comments, or news to share.

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