Digitization of Modulus (student yearbook) Now Complete Through 1980

Rose-Hulman Modulus Yearbooks

The digitization process of the Modulus, the student yearbook for Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, is moving along at a swift pace due our diligent student worker.  Elizabeth is producing high quality scans at a very fast pace.

We have scanned and put online all yearbooks through 1980.  1982, 1985 and 1987 are already online.  1981 and 1983 are scanned and 1984 is on the works.  We hope to have the 1980s finished by the end of the month and the remaining 10 completed by the end of the school year.

We are able to conduct this process much faster than in the past because we are only doing one scan, a high resolution TIFF from which the OCR feature in CONTENTdm does a decent job importing the text.

http://www.rose-hulman.edu/Archives/modulus.html

The Small College Librarian – Part 2 – So Many Jobs, So Little Time

See other parts -
The Small College Librarian – Part 1 – Introduction

The Small College Librarian – Part 3 – Multitasking
One challenge that most librarians at small colleges face is the need to juggle multiple duties at one time.  At some colleges, like mine, we must do the job of several librarians at once.  This juggling act can vary from library to library, but I will lay out the scenario at Rose-Hulman as an extreme example.  With four staff members that provide traditional library services and two others that are a part of the library but provide other services, we all wear multiple hats.

Position: Library director
Duties: Manage library policy, staffing, budget, conduct reference duties including two nights a week and occasional Sunday evenings (shared), conduct bibliographic instruction to classes on demand (shared), cataloging, collection development for print collection, serve on institute committees.

Position: Reference and Electronic Services Librarian (me)
Duties: Conduct reference duties including two nights a week and occasional Sunday evenings (shared), conduct bibliographic instructions to classes on demand (shared), manage the library website, manage LibGuides, manage holdings in EBSCO AtoZ database, manage EZproxy, evaluate and make recommendations on all electronic resources, negotiate licensing terms for electronic resources, manage subscription to all databases (not including journals), library computer technology management, manage access to all electronic resources, manager of Digital Archives Project.

Position: Associate Institute Librarian & Technical Services/Interlibrary Loan Librarian
Duties: Coordinate interlibrary loan requests (internal and external), technical services, manage journals, acquisitions, collection development.

Position: Circulation Coordinator

Duties: Coordinate circulation department, manage reserve materials, supervise student workers, administrative support, budget tracking, supply ordering, ready reference, stack maintenance.

A lot of work is done by four staff members.  The two other positions that the library director manages but are not directly related to traditional library operations are:

Position: Instructional Technology Analyst
Duties: Coordinate classroom requests, provide equipment loans, video duplication and production, installation and maintenance of various equipment, facilitate video conferencing needs, budgeting and planning equipment needs, supervise student work force.

Position: Project Manager – Digital Resource Center and Training Center
Duties: Provides assistance with high-level presentation preparation, web page creation, video digitizing and streaming and graphic, slide and text scanning, as well as other technologies to enhance the institute’s ability to provide the best learning and teaching experience possible.

As you can see by my position the library director’s position alone, we both juggle various jobs throughout the day.  Individually, each duty may not get the level of attention we would like it.  Flexibility is key in doing the job well as a whole.  I may set an agenda for the day, week, month, or longer, but that agenda can be sidetracked very easily.  The shorter amount of time (such as a day) I set to accomplish something, the less likely it will be accomplished in that amount of time depending on what it is.  For instance, I may decide on a particular day that I would like to finish updateing X number of EBSCO AtoZ records.  During that day, I may have unexpected heavy reference demand, I may get called by several vendors wanting to chat, I may have to conduct a bibliographic instruction class, I may have to attend to computer issues that need to be remedied, I may be alerted to electronic resources that are not accessible for some reason, and I often have to spend some time during the day working with my Digital Archives project student workers who need help or need to have work checked over.

Lets break this down into major groupings.
1)  Reference and information literacy
2)  Information resources awareness.
3)  Information resources management
4)  Digital Archives Project
5)  Library technology management
6)  Professional development activities

It’s a juggling act, one that must be done carefully in order to do the whole well even if each component is not done to the fullest capacity I would like.  At Rose-Hulman, our departing seniors conduct a survey about their four years here and the library always gets high rankings.  They are most satisfied with our service and least satisfied with the facility and immediately available resources.  The former is being addressed and the latter continues to be a struggle.  In my next installment, I will discuss multitasking – the good, the bad, and the necessary.

This Week’s Agenda

http://thisthatotherthing.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/this-week’s-agenda
Yep, have to work on MLK Day.  But that gives me a jump on the week.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
•    Post Part 2 to my blog series “The Small College Librarian.”  Part 2 is titled “So Many Jobs, So Little Time”
•    Work with Office of Institutional Planning and Assessment to complete online survey for students use of Web 2.0 services
•    Work with student worker to continue adding yearbooks. – Will upload 1960, 1961, 1964, and probably 1966 which she started scanning.
•    Setup new scanner when it arrives (hopefully today).
•    Create new LibGuide
•    Work on updating AtoZ records (Hopefully will be able to finish A – C tab.
•    Look into evaluations of Serials Solutions Products

This Week’s Agenda – 11/16/2009

This next week and a half  looks overwhelming, but if I think if I work steadily throughout the week and put in some evening hours, I’ll be OK.

• Learn how to use MarcEdit so I can load two sets of Knovel updates
• Complete Application for Review of Research Involving Human Participation
• Grade final projects for College & Life Skills Class and submit quarter grades
• Attend video conference “Cut the Cord: Connecting to Our Mobile Users” at IUPUI on Wednesday
• Write blog about IOLUG conference
• Try to find a replacement for Digital Archives Project (my graduate student got a graduate assistantship and has to quit the project).
• Work on library facebook page and work with staff on ideas for it.
• Staff meeting on Friday
• Recreate IOLUG presentation in PowerPoint and post online (most of it was demonstrated live).
• Work on student survey questions for Library 2.0 research project

• Plenty of other things not listed of lesser importance

Editing OCR Transcript Field in CONTENTdm

Are you a user of CONTENTdm 5.x?  Have you fooled around with the OCR feature for TIFF images?  If you have not or have and found it frustrating, here are some tips.  First, it works best with text with basic, easy to read fonts; the larger the better.  Like most OCR software, the smaller the font the more likely there will be mistakes in the OCR text.  The same goes for fancy fonts.  We scanned a yearbook from 1901 that used this font that was similar to Old English and we had to make corrections on almost every line.  But even with good clear text, there are bound to be issues and sometimes images can be interpreted as text and so a string of strange characters will be entered into the transcript field.

Here is the BIG TIP!! If you are building a compound object of many pages such as a yearbook and using the OCR feature, edit the transcript fields for each page while still in the CONTENTdm Project Client BEFORE uploading the object and its files.  This method is much faster than editoing the transcript fields once it has been uploaded.  I have found this out the hard way.  I uploaded about 5 yearbooks and then had my students find each page in the web administrator module.  This is very inefficient as you have to first search for the page, then open and edit it, and then close it.  All this is a slow process for each page.  A much quicker way is to do it right in the CONTENTdm Project Client, after you have built the object, but before you upload it.  You can edit one page right after another much faster.