Just about this time last week I was attending the CRRA All-Members Meeting in Philadelphia (March 29-30, 2011). This posting documents the experience.

The Meeting began Tuesday afternoon, March 29, at Villanova University where attendees were treated to a number of show & tell presentations describing the digital library goings-on of the Falvey Library. Joseph Lucia began by listing a number of well-articulated reasons why open source software is akin to the values of librarianship. Most notably, he alluded to the Second Enclosure and the very real threats to the public commons. Other presentations outlined local digitization efforts using Tesseract, their institutional repository implementation, scholarly publishing with Open Journal System, and their newly released digital library software called VUDL. I am continually impressed with the work being done by the folks at Villanova. Administration has a vision, a plan, and puts the plan into practice. "We do things for the sake of scholarship... We collaborate and find partners." This approach to digital librarianship seems to me to be the best long-term strategy and ensures sustainability. It is not so much about getting more money but instead about setting priorities and allocating resources accordingly.

This posting describes a process for iteratively studying usability issues against the "Catholic Portal" with the expectation that it will be applied by each institutional member of the Digital Access Committee within the current calendar year. The posting is divided into the following sections:

• why do usability
• expectations of institutional Committee members
• locally required resources
• doing the work
  • work with the Committee to refine the questions
  • practice with the technology
  • schedule testers
  • do studies
  • evaluate results
  • return results to Committee
• summary and conclusion

This document is also available as a PDF document for printing, a second PDF document designed as a set of slides, and just for fun, an EPUB file for your mobile device.

This posting lists the results of a usability study done against the "Catholic Portal".

In a previous posting called "Usability testing" (dated February 14, 2011) a set of eight usability questions was outlined. Since then Team Catholic Portal here at Notre Dame facilitated six usability studies made up of five graduate students and one faculty member. These participants were scholars in philosophy and theology. We used the simple facilitator/note-taker approach. We employed usability software (Silverback), but didn't use it to evaluate our results. Using our notes as well as professional judgement, we evaluated the results and came up with the following prioritized list of things to be addressed with the Portal's interface:

At our March 30 All-members meeting in Philadelphia http://bit.ly/CRRA_SJU , we will take a look at where we've been and where we are going.  The strategic draft plan:  Goals for 2011/2012 will guide our discussion.  You can have a sneak preview here:  http://bit.ly/DraftPlan2012.

--Pat

Please mark your calendars for the

March 30 All-Members Meeting and

Dear CRRA members and friends,

Are you interested in learning more about Catholic digital scholarship and innovations in text mining and visualization to facilitate knowledge discovery within the Catholic portal?  Please join us virtually or in person this Thursday, Feb. 24 from 1:00 to 5:00 pm EST (noon Central, 10am Pacific).  For event details, see http://bit.ly/hWMU5j.

As we move the "Portal's" sandbox implementation into production we plan on doing some usability testing. Below are the question we will be asking:

1. Identify the library or archive holding the papers of Dorothy Day.
2. Find a record whose author is Graham Greene. Create an account, then add the Graham Greene record to your favorites, tagging it as "ggreene."
3. Locate resources, including primary resources, on the Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice.
4. Find a set of records on the topic of "Catholic social action." Choose 1-3 from the retrieved set and email them to yourself for future reference.
5. Locate materials on the topic of sermons and the Lutheran church.
6. Who owns "Our Sunday Visitor Records"? What telephone number would you call in order to schedule a time to visit the collection?
7. Which library has the most French-language materials in the "Portal"?
8. What is the most frequently used word in the pamphlet owned by Notre Dame entitled "Pastoral instruction for the application of the Decree of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council on the Means of Social Communication"? (hint: see the record with the call number BV 4319).
9. How would you describe the overall scope of the collection?

Wish us luck.

Visitor Information

February 24-25, 2011 ND/CRRA Digital Humanities Forum

I have begun to create a data warehouse for CRRA (VuFind) Web server log files. This posting introduces the topic.

The problem

There is an understandable need/desire to know how well the "Catholic Portal" is operating. But for the life of me I was not able to enumerate metrics defining success. On the other hand, Pat Lawton had no problem listing quite a few. Here are most of her suggestions:

I have created a set of really simple movies demonstrating the features and functions of the "Catholic Portal" -- http://bit.ly/eCls8b Enjoy!?

Digital Humanities Forum
and Workshops
February 24-25, 2011

sponsored by
Hesburgh Libraries, the Center for Research Computing (CRC), and the
Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA)

Without undue difficulty I have been able to harvest metadata from a ContentDM site via OAI-PMH, index the data in Solr, and successfully search & retrieve this metadata in VuFind all for the "Catholic Portal". This posting outlines how I did this and why it is important.

Background

We look forward to seeing many of you in San Diego for our upcoming meeting.  Full details follow and are on the web at http://tinyurl.com/crra-jan2011.

Portal development is a focal point for this meeting.  Many milestones have been met and Eric will demonstrate new portal functionality including Web 2.0 features of VuFind, an EAD indexing and display tool, and text mining techniques to facilitate discovery and creation of new knowledge.

This is a simple annotated list of links used as an outline for a presentation to the CRRA in San Diego:

1. CRRA website - The good ol' look & feel but wrapped around new content and functionality. ("Thank you, Eric Frierson!")
2. Web 2.0 - All the Web 2.0 links (cite this, email this, favorite this) that did not work previously now function correctly.
3. EAD viewer - It is now possible to view EAD files locally or from the originating institution.
4. Item-level indexing - The content of EAD files is indexed at the item level making for finer-grained searching.
5. PDF display - Records linking to digitized versions of books now enable a person to get the full text. Examples include content from the St. Michael's and the University of Notre Dame
6. Text mining - After extracting the full text from the PDF documents, it is possible to apply concordancing techniques to the full text for analysis.
7. Automated updating - The "Portal" can be updated automatically by harvesting metadata from member institutions, massaging it for the Portal, and re-indexing it on a regular basis.
8. Use statistics - Rudimentary Web server log file analysis as well as Google Analytics reports illustrate how the Portal is being used.
9. Blog - A running commentary on what's happening with Portal development.

Today I did a bit of simple log file analysis against the Portal's Apache log file. Specifically, I wanted to extract the queries people have been using.

Naturally, I wrote a program to do this work -- parse.pl. It is rather brain-dead and certainly not 100 percent accurate, but it goes generate a report of some value.

This message outlines an upcoming event tentatively called the Notre Dame/CRRA Forum on Digital Humanities:

    Who: Anybody and everybody across the University
   What: A set of presentations and workshops on
         digital humanities
   When: Thursday afternoon (February 24) and Friday
         morning (February 25)
  Where: (probably) Geddes Hall
    Why: Because it is about more than find and
         access, it is also about use and
         understanding

The Hesburgh Libraries, the Center for Research Computing (CRC), and the Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA) are jointly sponsoring a set of presentations and workshops on the digital humanities Thursday afternoon (February 24) and Friday morning (February 25). While all of the details have yet to be ironed out, we expect there to be at least two presenters on Thursday:

CRRA is getting some press ...  DePaul University Rinn Law Library for their recent blogpost “Catholic Research Resources Alliance Helps Locate Canon Law Titles” http://depaullaw.typepad.com/library/2010/09/catholic-research-resources-alliance-helps-locate-canon-law-titles.html

DePaul is the CRRA's newest member and we welcome and thank you!

Thanks to the good work done by Eric Frierson of St. Edwards University, the "sandbox" of "Catholic Portal" now sports the look & feel of our public view: