Issue 52 of the Code4Lib Journal has been published.  Many thanks to the authors and the editorial committee!

The new issue is available at: https://journal.code4lib.org/issues/issues/issue52

Here are the abstracts from this issue:

Issue 52, 2021-09-22

Editorial : The Cost of Knowing Our Users<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16208>

Mark Swenson

Some musings on the difficulty of wanting to know our users’ secrets and simultaneously wanting to not know them.

Building and Maintaining Metadata Aggregation Workflows Using Apache Airflow<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16171>

Leanne Finnigan and Emily Toner

PA Digital is a Pennsylvania network that serves as the state’s service hub for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The group developed a homegrown aggregation system in 2014, used to harvest digital collection records from contributing institutions, validate and transform their metadata, and deliver aggregated records to the DPLA. Since our initial launch, PA Digital has expanded significantly, harvesting from an increasing number of contributors with a variety of repository systems. With each new system, our highly customized aggregator software became more complex and difficult to maintain. By 2018, PA Digital staff had determined that a new solution was needed. From 2019 to 2021, a cross-functional team implemented a more flexible and scalable approach to metadata aggregation for PA Digital, using Apache Airflow for workflow management and Solr/Blacklight for internal metadata review. In this article, we will outline how we use this group of applications and the new workflows adopted, which afford our metadata specialists more autonomy to contribute directly to the ongoing development of the aggregator. We will discuss how this work fits into our broader sustainability planning as a network and how the team leveraged shared expertise to build a more stable approach to maintenance.

Closing the Gap between FAIR Data Repositories and Hierarchical Data Formats<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16223>

Connor B. Bailey, Fedor F. Balakirev, and Lyudmila L. Balakireva

Many in the scientific community, particularly in publicly funded research, are pushing to adhere to more accessible data standards to maximize the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR) of scientific data, especially with the growing prevalence of machine learning augmented research. Online FAIR data repositories, such as the Open Science Framework (OSF), help facilitate the adoption of these standards by providing frameworks for storage, access, search, APIs, and other features that create organized hubs of scientific data. However, the wider acceptance of such repositories is hindered by the lack of support of hierarchical data formats, such as Technical Data Management Streaming (TDMS) and Hierarchical Data Format 5 (HDF5), that many researchers rely on to organize their datasets. Various tools and strategies should be used to allow hierarchical data formats, FAIR data repositories, and scientific organizations to work more seamlessly together. A pilot project at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) addresses the disconnect between them by integrating the OSF FAIR data repository with hierarchical data renderers, extending support for additional file types in their framework. The multifaceted interactive renderer displays a tree of metadata alongside a table and plot of the data channels in the file. This allows users to quickly and efficiently load large and complex data files directly in the OSF webapp. Users who are browsing files can quickly and intuitively see the files in the way they or their colleagues structured the hierarchical form and immediately grasp their contents. This solution helps bridge the gap between hierarchical data storage techniques and FAIR data repositories, making both of them more viable options for scientific institutions like LANL which have been put off by the lack of integration between them.

Conspectus: A Syllabi Analysis Platform for Leganto Data Sources<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/15995>

David Massey, Thomas Sødring

In recent years, higher education institutions have implemented electronic solutions for the management of syllabi, resulting in new and exciting opportunities within the area of large-scale syllabi analysis. This article details an information pipeline that can be used to harvest, enrich and use such information.

Core Concepts and Techniques for Library Metadata Analysis<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16078>

Stacie Traill and Martin Patrick

Metadata analysis is a growing need in libraries of all types and sizes, as demonstrated in many recent job postings. Data migration, transformation, enhancement, and remediation all require strong metadata analysis skills. But there is no well-defined body of knowledge or competencies list for library metadata analysis, leaving library staff with analysis-related responsibilities largely on their own to learn how to do the work effectively. In this paper, two experienced metadata analysts will share what they see as core knowledge areas and problem solving techniques for successful library metadata analysis. The paper will also discuss suggested tools, though the emphasis is intentionally not to prescribe specific tools, software, or programming languages, but rather to help readers recognize tools that will meet their analysis needs. The goal of the paper is to help library staff and their managers develop a shared understanding of the skill sets required to meet their library’s metadata analysis needs. It will also be useful to individuals interested in pursuing a career in library metadata analysis and wondering how to enhance their existing knowledge and skills for success in analysis work.

Digitization Decisions: Comparing OCR Software for Librarian and Archivist Use<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16132>

Leanne Olson and Veronica Berry

This paper is intended to help librarians and archivists who are involved in digitization work choose optical character recognition (OCR) software. The paper provides an introduction to OCR software for digitization projects, and shares the method we developed for easily evaluating the effectiveness of OCR software on resources we are digitizing.

We tested three major OCR programs (Adobe Acrobat, ABBYY FineReader, Tesseract) for accuracy on three different digitized texts from our archives and special collections at the University of Western Ontario. Our test was divided into two parts: a word accuracy test (to determine how searchable the final documents were), and a test with a screen reader (to determine how accessible the final documents were). We share our findings from the tests and make recommendations for OCR work on digitized documents from archives and special collections.

Introducing SAGE: An Open-Source Solution for Customizable Discovery Across Collections<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/15740>

David B. Lowe, James Creel, Elizabeth German, Douglas Hahn, and Jeremy Huff

Digital libraries at research universities make use of a wide range of unique tools to enable the sharing of eclectic sets of texts, images, audio, video, and other digital objects. Presenting these assorted local treasures to the world can be a challenge, since text is often siloed with text, images with images, and so on, such that per type, there may be separate user experiences in a variety of unique discovery interfaces. One common tool that has been developed in recent years to potentially unite them all is the Apache Solr index. Texas A&M University (TAMU) Libraries has harnessed Solr for internal indexing for repositories like DSpace, Fedora, and Avalon. Impressed by frameworks like Blacklight at peer institutions, TAMU Libraries wrote an analogous set of tools in Java, and thus was born SAGE, the Solr AGgregation Engine, with two primary functions: 1) aggregating Solr indices or “cores,” from various local sources, and 2) presenting search facility to the user in a discovery interface.

Leveraging a Custom Python Script to Scrape Subject Headings for Journals<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16080>

Shelly R. McDavid, Eric McDavid, and Neil E. Das

In our current library fiscal climate with yearly inflationary cost increases of 2-6+% for many journals and journal package subscriptions, it is imperative that libraries strive to make our budgets go further to expand our suite of resources. As a result, most academic libraries annually undertake some form of electronic journal review, employing factors such as cost per use to inform budgetary decisions. In this paper we detail some tech savvy processes we created to leverage a Python script to automate journal subject heading generation within the OCLC’s WorldCat catalog, the MOBIUS (A Missouri Library Consortium) Catalog, and the VuFind Library Catalog, a now retired catalog for the CARLI (Consortium for Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois). We also describe the rationale for the inception of this project, the methodology we utilized, the current limitations, and details of our future work in automating our annual analysis of journal subject headings by use of an OCLC API.

On Two Proposed Metrics of Electronic Resource Use<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16087>

William Denton

There are many ways to look at electronic resource use, individually or aggregated. I propose two new metrics to help give a better understanding of comparative use across an online collection. Users per mille is a relative annual measure of how many users a platform had for every thousand potential users: this tells us how many people used a given platform. Interest factor is the average number of uses of a platform by people who used it more than once: this tells us how much people used a given platform. These two metrics are enough to give us good insight into collection use. Dividing each into quartiles allows a quadrant comparison of lows and highs on each metric, giving a quick view of platforms many people use a lot (the big expensive ones), many people use very little (a curious subset), a few people use a lot (very specific to a narrow subject) and a few people use very little (deserves attention). This helps understand collection use and informs collection management.

Using Low Code to Automate Public Service Workflows: Three Cases<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16096>

Dianna Morganti and Jess Williams

Public service librarians without coding experience or technical education may not always be aware of or consider automation to be an option to streamline their regular work tasks, but the new prevalence of enterprise-level low code solutions allows novices to take advantage of technology to make their work more efficient and effective. Low code applications apply a graphic user interface on top of a coding platform to make it easy for novices to leverage automation at work. This paper presents three cases of using low code solutions for automating public service problems using the prevalent Microsoft Power Automate application, available in many library workplaces that use the Microsoft Office ecosystem. From simplifying the communication and scheduling process for instruction classes to connecting our student workers’ hourly floor counts to our administrators’ dashboard of building occupancy, we’ve leveraged simple low code automation in a scalable and replicable manner. Pseudo-code examples provided.

An XML-Based Migration from Digital Commons to Open Journal Systems<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/15988>

Cara M. Key

The Oregon Library Association has produced its peer-reviewed journal, the OLA Quarterly (OLAQ), since 1995, and OLAQ was published in Digital Commons beginning in 2014. When the host institution undertook to move away from Bepress, their new repository solution was no longer a good match for OLAQ. Oregon State University and University of Oregon agreed to move the journal into their joint instance of Open Journal Systems (OJS), and a small team from OSU Libraries carried out the migration project. The OSU project team declined to use PKP’s existing migration plugin for a number of reasons, instead pursuing a metadata-centered migration pipeline from Digital Commons to OJS. We used custom XSLT to convert tabular data exported from Bepress into PKP’s Native XML schema, which we imported using the OJS Native XML Plugin. This approach provided a high degree of control over the journal’s metadata and a robust ability to test and make adjustments along the way. The article discusses the development of the transformation stylesheet, the metadata mapping and cleanup work involved, as well as advantages and limitations of using this migration strategy.