Hello, all.  Issue 54 of the Code4Lib Journal is now available at
https://journal.code4lib.org/issues/issue54


Please take a look!


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Editorial: On FOSS in Libraries
<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16820>

Andrew Darby

Some thoughts on the state of free and open source software in libraries.



Preservation and Visualization of the Rural Route Nomad Photo and Video
Collection <https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16626>

Alan Webber

This article documents the steps taken in a preservation of personal photos
project. The project encompasses the preservation and visualization of the
Rural Route Nomad photo and video collection, consisting of 14,058
born-digital objects from over a dozen different digital cameras during my
world travels from the end of 2008 through 2009. Work included
preservation, dataset generation, and visualization.



Predictable Book Shifting <https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16577>

Joshua Lambert

There are many methods to carry out a library book shift but those methods
allow for varying degrees of predictability. The Bookshift.py script, when
used in conjunction with accurate measurements of a library’s collection
and shelving, provides library staff with predictability, flexibility, and
the ability to shift in parallel. For every shelf, the script outputs a
phrase such as the following, “The last book from this shelf goes 12.3
in/cm into shelf 776.” While complicated shifts can still create surprises,
using Bookshift.py or similar methods typically make those surprises easy
to correct.



“You could use the API!”: A Crash Course in Working with the Alma APIs
using Postman <https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16597>

Rebecca Hyams and Tamara Pilko

While there are those within libraries that are able to take vendor APIs
and use them to power applications and innovative workflows in their
respective systems, there are those of us that may have heard of APIs but
have only the slightest idea of how to actually make use of them. Often
colleagues in various forums will mention that a task could be “just done
with the API” but provide little information to take us from “this is what
an API is” or “here’s the API documentation” to actually putting them to
use. Looking for a way to automate tasks in Alma, the authors of this
article both found themselves in such a position and then discovered
Postman, an API platform with a user-friendly interface that simplifies
sending API calls as well as using bulk and chained requests. This article
gives a basic primer in how to set up Postman, how to use it to work with
ExLibris’ Alma APIs, as well as the authors’ use cases in working with
electronic inventory and course reserves.



Archiving an Early Web-Based Journal: Addressing Issues of Workflow,
Authenticity, and Bibliodiversity
<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16696>

Nick Szydlowski, Rhonda Holberton, Erika Johnson

SWITCH is a journal of new media art that has been published in an
online-only format since 1995 by the CADRE Laboratory for New Media at San
José State University (SJSU). The journal is distinctive in its commitment
to presenting scholarship and criticism on new media art in a visual format
that reflects and enhances its engagement with the subject. This approach,
which includes the practice of redesigning the journal’s platform and
visual presentation for each issue, raises significant challenges for the
long-term preservation of the journal, as well as immediate issues related
to indexing and discovery. This article describes the initial stages of a
collaboration between the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library and the CADRE
Laboratory at SJSU to archive and index SWITCH and to host a copy of the
journal on SJSU’s institutional repository, SJSU ScholarWorks. It will
describe the process of harvesting the journal, share scripts used to
extract metadata and modify files to address accessibility and encoding
issues, and discuss an ongoing curricular project that engages CADRE
students in the process of augmenting metadata for SWITCH articles. The
process reflects the challenges of creating an authentic version of this
journal that is also discoverable and citable within the broader scholarly
communication environment. This effort is part of a growing
multi-institutional project to archive the new media art community in the
Bay Area in a 3D web exhibition format.



Annif Analyzer Shootout: Comparing text lemmatization methods for automated
subject indexing <https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16719>

Osma Suominen, Ilkka Koskenniemi



Automated text classification is an important function for many AI systems
relevant to libraries, including automated subject indexing and
classification. When implemented using the traditional natural language
processing (NLP) paradigm, one key part of the process is the normalization
of words using stemming or lemmatization, which reduces the amount of
linguistic variation and often improves the quality of classification. In
this paper, we compare the output of seven different text lemmatization
algorithms as well as two baseline methods. We measure how the choice of
method affects the quality of text classification using example corpora in
three languages. The experiments have been performed using the open source
Annif toolkit for automated subject indexing and classification, but should
generalize also to other NLP toolkits and similar text classification
tasks. The results show that lemmatization methods in most cases outperform
baseline methods in text classification particularly for Finnish and
Swedish text, but not English, where baseline methods are most effective.
The differences between lemmatization methods are quite small. The
systematic comparison will help optimize text classification pipelines and
inform the further development of the Annif toolkit to incorporate a wider
choice of normalization methods.



Teaching AI when to care about gender
<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16718>

James Powell, Kari Sentz, Elizabeth Moyer, Martin Klein



Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a branch of Artificial Intelligence
(AI) concerned with solving language tasks by modeling large amounts of
textual data. Some NLP techniques use word embeddings which are semantic
models where machine learning (ML) is used to learn to cluster semantically
related words by learning about word co-occurrences in the original
training text. Unfortunately, these models tend to reflect or even
exaggerate biases that are present in the training corpus. Here we describe
the Word Embedding Navigator (WEN), which is a tool for exploring word
embedding models. We examine a specific potential use case for this tool:
interactive discovery and neutralization of gender bias in word embedding
models, and compare this human-in-the-loop approach to reducing bias in
word embeddings with a debiasing post-processing technique.



Ontology for Voice, Instruments, and Ensembles (OnVIE): Revisiting the
Medium of Performance Concept for Enhanced Discoverability
<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16608>

Kimmy Szeto



Medium of performance—instruments, voices, and devices—is a frequent
starting point in library users’ search for music resources. However,
content and encoding standards for library cataloging have not been
developed in a way that enables clear and consistent recording of medium of
performance information. Consequently, unless specially configured, library
discovery systems do not display medium of performance or provide this
access point. Despite efforts to address this issue in the past decade in
RDA, MARC, and the linked data environment, medium of performance
information continues to be imprecise, dispersed across multiple fields or
properties, and implied in other data elements. This article proposes
revised definitions for “part,” “medium,” “performer,” and “ensemble,”
along with a linked data model, the Ontology for Voice, Instruments, and
Ensembles (OnVIE), that captures precise and complete medium of performance
data reflecting music compositional practices, performance practices, and
publishing conventions. The result is an independent medium of performance
framework for recording searchable and machine-actionable metadata that can
be hooked on to established library metadata ontologies and is widely
applicable to printed and recorded classical, popular, jazz, and folk
music. The clarity, simplicity, and extensibility of this model enable
machine parsing so that the data can be searched, filtered, sorted, and
displayed in multiple, creative ways.



Simplifying ARK ID management for persistent access to digital objects
<https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16774>

Kyle Huynh, Natkeeran Ledchumykanthan, Kirsta Stapelfeldt, Irfan Rahman



This article will provide a brief overview of considerations made by the
UTSC Library in selecting a persistent identifier schema for digital
collections in a mid-sized Canadian library.  ARKs were selected for their
early support of digital object management, the low-cost/decentralized
capabilities of the ARK system, and the usefulness of ARK URLs during
system migration projects.  In the absence of a subscription to a
centralized resolver service for ARKs, the UTSC Library Digital Scholarship
Unit uses a PHP-based application for minting, binding, managing, and
tracking ARK IDs. This article will introduce the application’s
architecture and affordances, which may be useful to others in the library
community with similar use cases, as well as the approach to using ARKs
planned for an Islandora 2.x system.



Building CyprusArk a Web Content Management System for Small Museums
Collections Online <https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16722>

Avgoustinos Avgousti, Georgios Papaioannou, and Feliz Ribeiro Gouveia



This article introduces CyprusArk, a work-in-progress solution to the
problems that small museums in Cyprus have in providing online access to
their collections. CyprusArk is an open-source web content management
system for small museums’ online collections. Developed as part of
Avgousti’s Ph.D. thesis, based on qualitative data collected from six small
museums in Cyprus.


-- 
Andrew Darby
Head, Web & Application Development
University of Miami Libraries