Converting to a Digital Age

We live in an age where technology abounds and new innovations are sprouting up daily. The OSU Library has evolved alongside this rapid growth in tech and made strides in the digitization of resources and the adoption of new technology.

But while much of the physical technology is only accessible if you’re on campus, the library’s digital resources are available anywhere. One of the most interesting and unique digital resources is the library’s Digital Collections.

The Digital Collections house a cornucopia of historical information that one may not be able to find elsewhere. The information in these collections range from political buttons to stories of Oklahoma’s farming history.

These collections are incredibly important because they shed light on artifacts that otherwise may only be seen by a few eyes. For example, had the Dr. Bill F. & Jean Kelso Collection of Ancient Coins not been photographed and archived in the Digital Collections, the ancient coins could have remained tucked away in a case in the library, rarely seen except for those who could travel to view them in person.

Another benefit to digitizing these archival materials is that it prevents further wear and tear on the original materials. Preserving them digitally allows more people to explore the documents, photos or objects without the risk of harm that comes from handling the physical item.

“One of our primary goals is to retain the original as long as possible,” OSU archivist David Peters said. “The less use you have, the longer it will last. Digital copies make it easier for the patron to use and require less wear and tear on the original."

I recently had the opportunity to explore the Secrets of the Century collection with David and multimedia producer Nina Thornton. This collection contains letters written in 1941 during the Oklahoma A&M 50^th anniversary celebration. The letters, written by students, faculty and staff, were placed in a time capsule that was buried in the south wall of the Edmon Low Library. After the capsule was opened in 1991, the handwritten letters were scanned and transcribed. Now anyone can get online and check out this slice of history in the Digital Collections!

While the letters themselves are interesting, what I found more compelling were the feelings behind the letters. They were written as the United States was on the cusp of World War II, just days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and many of the letters convey messages of hope for the future. These letters taught me something I could never learn in a history textbook. They provide readers with a window into the thoughts and feelings of people who lived through one of the most notable events of history.

Yet these letters are just one of the dozens of unique collections through which readers may browse. A wealth of knowledge awaits anyone who sits down for even 30 minutes with this resource.

If you ever have questions about the material found in a particular collection or just want to dig a little deeper into a topic, the knowledgeable staff in the Oklahoma State University Archives are available to answer your questions.

There is so much history to explore in the Digital Collections. I encourage anyone and everyone to check them out. See what you can discover today!

Posted by Jenny Berry, electronic communications intern

Learning about Agriculture Data and Databases

In June, I attended a conference called Driving Innovation through Data in Agriculture. It was an enjoyable and interesting experience, combining researchers and librarians onsite at the National Agricultural Library (NAL). There were several things that I brought back with me for further discussion. One of them was that I learned quite a bit about the different agriculture specific databases that the USDA manages. They are all public and provide different specialty products and can be accessed through the National Agricultural Library website. The NAL is responsible for building an integrated portfolio of knowledge products that can be used by the general public, researchers and those working in agriculture.

The Long-Term Agroecosystem Research Data Overview (LTAR) database publishes the data and information generated through the Long-Term Agroecosystem Research (LTAR) Network, a partnership of 18 research sites across the United States. They focus on building knowledge that will make agriculture sustainable and examining the environmental impacts of farming practices. The data generated is “Common Observatory Data” or CORe observational data and research data from management studies with crops and livestock. It compares current practices to experimental practices to determine the effects of the changes. Available data types from LTAR include site photographs, weather and aerial images for the research stations as well as data sets and reports published by LTAR. It has an average of 50 years of historical data. LTAR maintains the data to be sure that it is FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable. It is hosted at the Ag Data Commons repository and the Geospatial Platform. The Ag Data Commons is the central registry for USDA data and provides links to any data that is housed outside of the repository, including data that is first uploaded to agency sites and provides citable DOI’s for each dataset. The Geospatial Platform provides curation for GIS data but is cross referenced and linked with both Ag Data Commons and Data.gov, the government’s one stop shop for all government sponsored data.

Some of the other specialized USDA data bases include the Life Cycle Assessment Commons, USDA Food Composition Database, the i5 Workspace@NAL, which is a community specializing in arthropod genomes and research and Dr. Duke’s Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Databases. Less specialized databases include the NAL catalog which covers the entire NAL collection, AGRICOLA, PubAg and NAL Digital Collections, which includes all the full text digitized materials of NAL.

I hope researchers, faculty and students will explore some of these. I would be interested to hear about any projects that utilize them. We here in the library are discussing the use of these specialized databases versus the more popular, general use ones. Feel free to post any examples and please, contact me or any of our friendly librarians if you need more information.

post by Kay Bjornen, Research Data Initiatives Librarian

Amplified Oklahoma

This year, we have delved into technologies that can produce new learning and research experiences for the future-focused library, but we haven’t yet included the integration of history in this innovation dialogue.

A prime example of how the OSU Library is taking on the task of combining past and future is the "Amplified Oklahoma" podcast.

"Amplified Oklahoma", which was launched in May 2016, is an academic podcast produced by students and faculty members in the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program. It tells stories of Oklahoma people, places and cultures. The production of interviews and videos over these topics is an innovative way of spreading information about Oklahoma history using modern methods of distribution.

"Amplified Oklahoma" is largely student-involved in its operations. The library interns develop content for the podcasts based on what the OOHRP collections have to offer on the designated topic. Once a topic has been selected, they audit related interviews, write the script and edit the audio selections to make the final podcast.

Themes for the podcast generally follow topics that are prominent at the time they are published. For instance, a podcast about tornadoes and their effect on Oklahoma was sent out in May, the month when the state’s most notable storms have taken place. This method allows the library to participate in pertinent dialogue and present interesting, relevant material that will pull the audience back to the OSU Library collections.

By making material interactive and digestible, the OSU Library aspires to increase student engagement in the OOHRP department. They have found the most successful way to connect students with historic information is to place it in front of them and make it easily accessible through digital collections.

It is important for libraries of the future to have a program like the "Amplified Oklahoma" podcast because historians have the difficult task of keeping historical topics relevant in the fast-paced, futuristic conversations of the 21st century. It is uncommon for today’s students to actively search for history, so "Amplified Oklahoma" makes learning easier by allowing effortless listening of podcasts on interesting topics.

"Amplified Oklahoma" podcasts can currently be found on SoundCloud, Itunes and Stitcher.

Brewster Kahle’s TED Talk: Let’s One Up the Greeks

Brewster Kahle is founder and director of the Internet Archive, a free service which steadfastly archives World Wide Web documents. Kahle is building a truly huge digital library — every book ever published, every movie ever released, all the strata of web history … It’s all free to the public — unless someone else gets to it first.

Environmental Scan Presentation

Library employees may find the slides used for the Environmental Scan work group presentation on May 7 at U:LibraryFutures\ or the Library's intranet. 

Comments and questions on these notes can be added to the comments section below.

The work group also recommends the following links: 
Research Games (Texas A&M): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-hmcx99Kks 
University of Arizona Video Contest: http://www.library.arizona.edu/video-contest 
My Hunt Library Photos (NCSU): http://d.lib.ncsu.edu/myhuntlibrary

“Open Conversations about Open Access” Day Two

Contributed by Nicole Sump-Crethar

Near the end of the conference we heard from the Dean of Libraries at the University of Kansas, Lorraine Harricombe. She shared the process on the KU campus for creating a campus-wide open access policy and adoption of the institutional repository. Over two years the library worked closely with the Provost’s office and faculty council to write and adopt an open access policy that encourages authors to maintain at least some of their copyright and deposit their work into the institutional repository at KU, known as KU ScholarWorks.

The conference wrapped up with a panel discussion made up of Kevin Droegemeier, the OU VP of Research, and Jerry Malayer from the OSU Center for Veterinary Health Sciences. The discussion ranged across all the topics covered in the conference, but focused largely on bringing OU and OSU together to work on addressing the need for more robust and fully supported institutional repositories as well as open access policies for our campuses and better support for our researchers and authors when they want to use or publish open access resources.

The conference was wonderful and the conversation has only started. Many questions still need to be answered. If you are interested in Nicole’s notes from the conference she would be glad to share them. Just let her know.

What opportunities do you see for collaboration across the state? What does OSU have to offer that is unique?

“Open Conversations about Open Access” Day One Continues

Contributed by Nicole Sump-Crethar

Continued from “Open Conversations about Open Access” Welcome & Opening Remarks
The other speakers were wonderful too. We heard from Jennifer Lin from the Public Library of Science (PLoS). She talked about Article Level Metric or ALMs which allow authors to see (at varying degrees of granularity)

• how often their article is viewed and/or downloaded,
• which countries the readers are from,
• comments, tweets,
• citations, referring URLs
• and more.

ALMs are a great way to convince faculty of the benefits of OA in terms of widening their audience. These sentiments were echoed by University of Kansas Professor, Marc Greenburg.

Some speakers touched on the idea of copyright in the world of Open Access. Michael Carroll, American University Law Professor, evangelized on the necessity of authors maintaining at least some of their rights to the articles they write. Publishers often ask authors to give all of their copyright to the publisher. By holding on to some of their rights authors can share their work freely and deposit their work in the university’s institutional repository.

Carroll also talked about the Creative Commons license which allows the original author to maintain their copyright but gives others permission to repost and use their work as long as the author receives credit or attribution.

Mark Morvant from OU’s Center for Teaching Excellence talked about open access course materials. Open Education Resources or OERs give faculty the freedom to customize their curriculum, because they aren’t dependent on a textbook. Additionally students are spared the punishing costs charged by some textbook publishers. Because using OERs is more work for faculty the Center for Teaching Excellence at OU is offering support and education for faculty who want to use open access materials for their classes.

How can the library help faculty adopt open access and protect their copyright?

“Open Conversations about Open Access” Welcome

Contributed by Nicole Sump-Crethar

The “Open Conversations about Open Access” conference started some exciting conversations. Rick Luce, Dean of Libraries at OU introduced the speakers for the conference as his “Open Access Dream Team.” In his introduction he included a little about his vision of Open Access.
Open access (sometimes abbreviated as OA) is “the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles. OA is also increasingly being provided to theses, scholarly monographs and book chapters,” according to Wikipedia. Luce went on to describe how OA should look to readers, authors and to the university.

• Readers should see OA as immediate, free, worldwide access.
• Authors should be able to protect their traditional rights.
• The university should see open access as an extension of their mission where works created at the university should be used for the greatest possible benefit and should stimulate innovation.

The first speaker on Thursday, Heather Joseph, the executive director for The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition or SPARC, kicked off the meeting with an overview of where open access started and how far it has come in terms of acceptance in the scholarly community and in national legislation and regulation. She described the situation we are already familiar with here at OSU. Budgets continue to shrink while costs continue to rise at a faster pace than inflation. Happily, recent legislation followed by some important regulations at the federal level are requiring researchers who receive funding from government agencies to make their research available to the public. In essence, if taxpayers fund the research, then taxpayers should have free and open access to that research.

Joseph also talked about the current state of OA publishing in terms of infrastructure and popularity. For example, the Directory of Open Access Journals offers 8,600 journals in nearly every discipline imaginable.

What are your perceptions of open access? What do you think the perception of open access is on our campus?

Repurposing Space-Q4

To what extent is there a process to ensure that less commonly held/unique volumes are preserved across the region (or state)? Should we?

What are we already doing related to the question?

If we wanted to consider starting this initiative or expanding what we are already doing, what do we want to learn about it from our future speakers? What questions do we want to ask during our upcoming speaker series?

Duckett and Vacek's Presentations-Nov. 13

Library employees may find the slides from Kim Duckett's Nov. 13 presentation to the staff and faculty on the staff drive at U:LibraryFutures\. You may find Rachel Vacek's presentation on slideshare. 

Comments and questions on the presentation can be added to the comments section below.

Slides for Miller and Schottlaender

Library employees may find the slides from Rush Miller's and Brian Schottlaender's Sept. 26 presentations to the staff and faculty on the staff drive at U:LibraryFutures\ or via Sharepoint. 

Comments and questions on the presentation can be added to the comments section below.

Redeploying Staff-Q3

To what extent have relevant special collections been satisfactorily cataloged, digitized and promoted to a large audience? Should we?

What are we already doing related to the question?

If we wanted to consider starting this initiative or expanding what we are already doing, what do we want to learn about it from our future speakers? What questions do we want to ask during our upcoming speaker series?

Digital Collections-Q4

To what extent has the library calculated what percentage of the physical collection could potentially be accessed through ebooks? Should we?

What are we already doing related to the question?

If we wanted to consider starting this initiative or expanding what we are already doing, what do we want to learn about it from our future speakers? What questions do we want to ask during our upcoming speaker series?

Digital Collections-Q3

To what extent is the library devoting a portion of its monograph budget toward a patron-driven acquisition for ebooks? Should we?

What are we already doing related to the question?

If we wanted to consider starting this initiative or expanding what we are already doing, what do we want to learn about it from our future speakers? What questions do we want to ask during our upcoming speaker series?

Digital Collections-Q2

To what extent is the library exploring usage of alternative modes of access to ebooks and digital resources, such as HathiTrust and Internet Archive? Should we?

What are we already doing related to the question?

If we wanted to consider starting this initiative or expanding what we are already doing, what do we want to learn about it from our future speakers? What questions do we want to ask during our upcoming speaker series?

Digital Collections-Q1

To what extent has the library adopted an “e-priority” policy, acquiring only the electronic version of a volume where one exists? Should we?

What are we already doing related to the question?

If we wanted to consider starting this initiative or expanding what we are already doing, what do we want to learn about it from our future speakers? What questions do we want to ask during our upcoming speaker series?

July 31-Slides

Library employees may find the slides from Raynna's July 31 presentation to the staff and faculty can be found on the staff drive at U:LibraryFutures\Raynna2012_07_31.pdf or via Sharepoint.

Comments and questions on the presentation can be added to the comments section below.