CRRA Update
March/April 2013

• From the Board: Janice Welburn, chair, announcing CRRA as a nonprofit corporation
• From the Membership Committee: Evelyn Minick , chair, welcomes Mount St. Mary’s University
• Member News: Congratulations to Joe Lucia (Villanova), Morgan McIntosh Hodgetts (DePaul) and Maria Mazzenga (Catholic University)
• Feature Article: Indexing and displaying Encoded Archival Description files in the Catholic portal
• Committee Updates: From the Collections Committee on Treasures from the Catholic Research Resources Alliance: Women Religious; Newspapers Task Force on Survey of Member Holdings
• From the CRRA: Annual plan update and Member holdings in the portal
• CRRA in the News: Thanks to Diane Maher (University of San Diego)
• Portal Tech Tip: Using the comments feature
• Upcoming events: Catholic Legacies in Victoria (May 28-29, 2013)

Greetings CRRA community,

We have been working on updating the blog and are in the process of adding new information in an effort to make it more user-friendly.  With this in mind, we felt it might be helpful to share our findings, what we learned about WordPress, with you, as you may find the information useful now or at some point in the future.  Feel free to share this information with colleagues, family and friends.

This month's update includes:

• From the Board: Janice Welburn, chair, on Becoming a nonprofit federally tax-exempt corporation
• Member News:  Villanova wins ACRL Excellence in Libraries Award!; Congratulations to Carol Johnson, Bob Skinner, and Stephanie Clark; CRRA in the Spotlight
• Feature Article: Learning more about our collection through selecting materials for CRRA, by Lisa Gonzalez, Catholic Theological Union
• Committee Updates:  From The Collections Committee on Updating the collection policy; the Digital Access Committee on EAD records, the website, and more; and the Newspapers Task Force on the List of Catholic Newspapers Online
• Grant opportunities: CLIR Hidden Collections proposals due March 22, 2013
• Upcoming events: The CRRA Annual Meeting (July 2)

The Catholic Pamphlets collection at the University of Notre Dame contains a wide variety of pamphlets, booklets, and other documents pertaining to Catholicism or the Church in some way. The collection is located at the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Hesburgh Library, and is currently undergoing digitization. These publications were intended to educate a particular audience regarding issues relevant to the Church. While the University of Notre Dame’s collection does not include any entries before the nineteenth century, there is evidence of similar pamphlets being published at least since the time of the Reformation in Europe. With the invention of the printing press, pamphlets became a convenient means to disseminate ideas to a wide audience. Such publications were produced by both Protestant and Catholic sources in an attempt to influence readers with respect to religious and social issues (Edwards).

Example Pamphlet

Through my experimentation with Google Analytics, it has proven to be a rather useful tool for tracking usage patterns for the Catholic Portal. However, it is only effective if one knows where to look for information. To that end, I have compiled a quick guide about where to find the answers to all sorts of questions about website usage. While I use the Catholic Portal for these examples, the instructions here should be applicable for any site set up to use Google Analytics.

This text documents the technical support required to keep the "Catholic Portal" running smoothly. In a nutshell, it falls into three categories:

1. assisting CRRA members in making their metadata available
2. harvesting and indexing member metadata
3. maintaining the Portal's software

FROM THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS Janice Welburn, Chair

Last year, we adopted an inspiring vision describing what we want to achieve and an ambitious, actionable plan for getting there.  In this context, members, committees and the Board develop an annual strategic plan. The Board met on December 12, 2012 at Lauinger Library, Georgetown University. Committee chairs joined us for a discussion of goals and current activities for this year, which we all agreed was informative and helpful in creating a broad understanding of how the goals and activities of each group fit into the overall directions. 

Might we have documents as rich and colorful as a letter from Kurt Vonnegut, as found in the Vault?
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault.html
Perhaps thismight be our new challenge:  to post to this blog new, interesting treasures form across our collections. Volunteers?  --pat

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Max Tolomei and I cordially invite you to attend a sneak preview of the updated and soon-to-be-releasted CRRA website. Max and I have been working to move the CRRA website’s content into the open source content management system, Concrete5, and re-evaluating the organization and function of the website as a whole. Using Concrete5 will bring our site into the 21^st century, making it possible to dynamically update content, and allowing members to easily collaborate and share project information in a variety of ways.

Before taking the site "live," we seek your input into how the site works for you and how it might be improved.

I have spent some time re-indexing EAD files for the "Catholic Portal", and you can see the fruits of these initial labors on line. The text below describes one solution to the indexing challenges. This is implementation is not the answer but rather a proposal.

The problem

The current process for indexing EAD files in the "Catholic Portal" is seen as causing more problems than offering solutions. By indexing things at the EAD's did level, too many search results are returned. These results, while unique, are too ambiguous and too similar in nature to be useful. Moreover, the current indexing process does not take advantage of an EAD file's rich metadata -- title, date, language, controlled vocabulary terms, biographical history, abstract, scope content notes, etc. Clearly, something has to change.

CRRA Update
October 2012

• Please Join Us for a Sneak Preview of the CRRA Updated Website
• CRRA Collections Spotlight: New Jersey Catholic Historical Commission Newsletter Digitization, by Alan Delozier (Seton Hall University)
• Re-indexing EAD Files, by Eric Morgan (ND)
• DePaul Hosts Catholic Research Resources Alliance Symposium, by Scott Walter, (DePaul University)
• Might be of interest: 2012 Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities & Computer Science

The August Update highlights the fall symposium, our newest member and CRRA liaisons.
Please mark your calendars for the upcoming CRRA/Depaul Symposium, and consider attending too the Loyola University Chicago Colloquium just days following the Symposium.

• Call for Posters for the CRRA/DePaul Fall Symposium – Deadline is Wednesday, September 19
• Announcing a Colloquium with John Padberg, S.J. Thursday, October 18, 2012, 3:30-5:30. Loyola University Chicago Lakeshore Campus
• The CRRA Welcomes Regis University (Denver, Colorado)
• Introducing CRRA Liaisons
• CRRA All Member Meeting Highlights (Anaheim)

The Catholic Research Resource Alliance (CRRA) and the symposium planning committee invite proposals for posters to be displayed at the 2012 CRRA symposium Nurturing the ‘Spirit of Perfect Charity’: Libraries and Archives at the Intersection of Service and Scholarship in Catholic Social Justice Studies at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, October 15-16, 2012.  The planning committee seeks posters that showcase innovative technologies, best practices, future trends, and unique research findings from librarians, archivists, and scholars.

Referees Pat Lawton (CRRA) and Megan Bernal (DePaul University) will choose the best poster and a prize will be awarded.

This posting muses on how to index and display Encoded Archival Description (EAD) files in the "Catholic Portal" of the Catholic Research Resources Alliance.

The Catholic Portal is essentially an index of two types of metadata: 1) records describing individual and discrete items, and 2) records describing collections of individual items. For the most part, the former metadata records are MARC records describing books. The later are EAD files describing the holdings of archives.

by Adam McGinn (July 17, 2012)

During the last two months, I had evaluated Archivists' Toolkit for use with the Catholic Portal project. Archivists' Toolkit is a program suitable for recording and managing archival metadata. The program stores metadata in either a remote or local SQL database, and also allows exporting to an XML file. The documentation for Archivists' Toolkit is quite helpful, though it is fairly comprehensive and it may be difficult to find how to do something specific. I am writing this document in the hope that it will help potential future users of Archivists' Toolkit here at Hesburgh Library.

Graphic design is definitely not my forte, but I think I have finally wrangled it as well as the overall look & feel of the "Catholic Portal".

"Skinning" Vufind is not terribly difficult. Using a sort of inheritance, the implementor creates a hierarchy of directories where Vufind will look for customized output views before falling back to a default theme coming with the distribution. I was having one heck of a time getting the search results to display correctly. After looking solutions in all the wrong places, I finally copied a version of the Blueprint theme's results.tpl file to my local themes directory. After tweaking it a bit, and after refreshing Vufind's cache and compile directories, things started to line up. As an extra bonus, things like Google, Internet Archive, and HathiTrust snippet views were also being displayed. The "book bag" feature now works as well. Whew!

The implementation of fulltext indexing in Vufind with Aperture is not difficult. This posting describes how I implemented it for the Catholic Research Resources Alliance.

About 800 of the 125,000 indexed records in the "Catholic Portal" are linked to full text through a URL in the MARC records' 856 field. The vast majority of these records come from the University of Toronto and the University of Notre Dame. The process of fulltext indexing is documented at vufind.org, but I'll clarify here.