Lightning Round #1

Monday October 03, 2022

From 4:00pm to 4:30pm

Join us for a series of 10-minute lightning talks!

This photo shows my family home! How to make annotations of cultural heritage objects more accessible through IIIF (Murielle Cornut, Julian A. Raemy)

The photo archive of the Swiss Society for Folklore Studies (SSFS) contains images on topics of everyday life, tradition and identity, forms of work and living, ranging in date from the late 19th century through the later part of the 20th century. Since the digitised photographic collections became available online in 2018, people knowledgeable about the archives' resources have come forward. Identifying people in historical photographs is important for preserving material culture but it is also a challenging endeavour. Users may still be able to identify archival material but sound ecosystems to facilitate online annotation of digital surrogates are lacking and thus users have to fall back on more traditional means of communication, such as email.

Annotations with IIIF makes it easier to add context and commentary to cultural heritage objects in an interoperable manner. This ten-minute lightning session will cover how image annotations work with IIIF and how users can leverage it to identify people in historical image collections. Particular attention is paid to the artefactual nature of photography such as handwritten information, texture, colour as well as possible damages that can assist in the process of dating and identifying.

How do we analyse or evaluate this kind of image information?
What new interpretations emerge when users are able to annotate digital surrogates of photographs?

We suggest an interdisciplinary perspective in the context of the Participatory Knowledge Practices in Analogue and Digital Image Archives (PIA) - https://project.participatory-archives.ch/ - that is useful for analysing the existing software and making annotations of historical photography accessible.

Connecting data for the public good: Dryad2Dataverse Open Source Software (Eugene Barsky and Paul Lesack)

In the research world, data sharing is more important than ever. UBC’s primary research data repository is located at Borealis Dataverse. While it contains a large portion of UBC’s research data output, it doesn’t capture it all. The Dryad data repository is also popular with both researchers and publishers, especially in the life sciences. UBC has recently entered into an institutional partnership that allows researchers to deposit data into the Dryad data repository at no charge. However, Borealis Dataverse and Dryad aren’t connected. So, a search in UBC’s primary data repository would miss a large portion of UBC-authored data.

UBC Library’s Research Commons’ new software pipeline, dryad2dataverse solves this problem, making UBC’s data collection more consolidated, findable, and user-friendly. At its simplest, dryad2dataverse is a standalone program that automatically copies data (and keeps it up-to-date) from Dryad into Dataverse. This means that much of UBC’s research holdings are now available in one place. Therefore, anything deposited into Dryad benefits from Borealis' large number of connections, such as being findable in UBC Library’s Summon Catalogue, UBC’s Open Collections, and Canada’s Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR) national-research data-search tools. This includes geospatial searches using Geodisy, the geospatial data-search tool, connected to Borealis, also developed at the UBC Research Commons.

Most importantly, this requires no effort from researchers who have deposited information into Dryad, making the institutional partnership more valuable. In this short presentation, we would expand and explain this open source software development.

Ingesting knowledge: Learning from and getting involved with the digital preservation community (Kate Cawthorn)

Implementing a new digital preservation service can seem overwhelming. Not only do digital preservation activities impact workflows within a wide variety of library and archives activities, there are also a number of technical skills that staff may need to acquire. Fortunately, there is a welcoming and highly knowledgeable network of digital preservation professionals at the regional, national, and international level.

In this lightning talk presentation, I will discuss ways that library and archives staff who are new to digital preservation can learn from and get involved with the existing digital preservation community in order to address institutional digital preservation needs and goals. The presentation will include an overview of Canadian and international digital preservation organizations and communities of practice, staff training and development opportunities, and where to find community created resources such as assessment models, digital preservation frameworks, and format sustainability information. Finally, I will share key lessons that the digital preservation team at the University of Calgary Libraries and Cultural Resources (LCR) have learned from our involvement with the digital preservation community during the initial stages of developing and implementing a new digital preservation service.