 Good morning. Thank you for joining us. I'm Jillian Cuellar and my colleagues and I are going to be discussing the Los Angeles Aqueduct digital platform a two-year multifaceted project that brought together the expertise of UCLA archivist librarians technologists students and faculty I'm going to briefly discuss the purpose and intentions of the project and later discuss some lasting outcomes My colleagues Jen Weintraub former digital librarian at UCLA Jasmine Jones former LA ADP project manager at UCLA and Andrew Gomez history PhD candidate at UCLA are then going to discuss their roles in the project The LA ADP project was conceived in late 2012 when I was approached by Lauren Bond a Los Angeles based artist Who leads the metabolic studio and who also serves on the board of directors of the Annenberg Foundation? Lauren asked if I would serve as a consultant for a project that would facilitate online access to primary sources that document the history and impact of the Los Angeles aqueduct Having recently assumed my position as head of the Center for Primary Research and Training at UCLA library special collections I suggested to Lauren that in addition to digitizing resources and putting them online We also recruit graduate students in the CFPRT to conduct original research that would contextualize the LA aqueduct Through the lens of their particular subject expertise The CFPRT is a program within UCLA library special collections that introduces students to archives and rare materials in order to better prepare them to effectively use primary sources in their future research and teaching careers in The past this has primarily been accomplished by training students to process archival collections and catalog rare books and manuscripts Though that training method has been very effective I was excited by the new possibilities that emerging disciplines such as digital humanities present for engaging students with special collections in the library Situating the aqueduct project in the CFPRT gave us the opportunity to meet students in the digital spaces where scholarship is increasingly taking place We were also able to introduce students to the diverse work that contemporary archives and library professionals undertake Such as processing, digitization, metadata creation, collection building, curatorial work, and community engagement At the same time we were able to give them the opportunity to develop or enhance their abilities in core 21st century academic skills such as collaboration and project management, digital presentation and visualization, and understanding digital information structures in order to conduct successful online research As Jasmine will discuss, we were even able to use the project to train them to conduct risk assessment and teach them about fair use Both highly pertinent skills for any contemporary researcher From the outset Jasmine and I intentionally defined a loose parameters for their work particularly for those engaged in original research projects Our aim was to inspire students to create new scholarship as well as to envision the future of scholarship both as researchers and as future faculty So we were thrilled when our call for ambitious and imaginative proposals resulted in some truly remarkable work One of these projects, a poetry project conceived of by a PhD candidate in English, was so extraordinary that he was awarded the 2014 primary source award for research by the Center for Research Libraries If you stick around after our talk you can pick up a copy of the chat book that special collections produced as a more traditional record of that project Another wildly successful project was our digital humanities team project, which Andrew will be discussing momentarily The 17 scholars who contributed to the LAADP are now intimately familiar with the resources that special collections offers to research and teaching And for our part UCLA special collections now has a deeper understanding of how students from various disciplines approach digital library projects We are confident that this will help us strategize about how to most effectively partner with them on such projects going forward Besides engaging students with primary sources in new ways, the project also enabled special collections to establish better working relationships with our colleagues across UCLA library The special collections directed the project We relied heavily on the expertise of librarians and technologists in the digital library program as well as metadata specialists in the cataloging and metadata center and oral historians in the Center for Oral History Research Their skills and experience informed our work and helped guide our students work as Jen and Jasmine will make clear our partnership with the digital library program in particular was essential to the success of the project At the start of the LAADP special collections had no documented procedures or workflows to support digitization or digital scholarship projects Realizing this Jasmine and I had as a stated goal of the project that one of our outcomes would be a comprehensive Documentation package that would formalize the processes that undergird digital work such as creating work plans Meditated guidelines and quality control workflows These procedures and workflows are now explicitly documented and they will serve as the foundation for all other digital projects going forward I'm going to touch on this in a bit more before the session before the session ends Beyond the library the aqueduct project enabled us to explore points of intersection between our work and UCLA faculty in the Center for Digital Humanities the Institute of the environment and sustainability and in academic departments such as history and English a Cadre of enthusiastic faculty served as advisors and many of them participated in our capstone symposium that brought together Humanities at humanists and scientists to consider the role of the humanities and environmental sustainability These newly founded relationships have facilitated greater campus awareness of the valuable resources that UCLA library and its staff offers to scholarship Beyond UCLA campus we had a fantastic opportunity to collaborate with our colleagues at other cultural heritage institutions across the region Six other institutions were also awarded funds to digitize their holdings related to the LA aqueduct And we invited them to contribute their descriptive metadata and in some cases digital objects to the platform Integrating their resources into the LA ADP allows us to provide the research community with unprecedented centralized access to thousands of archival materials relevant to water history in southern, California I'm going to stop here and turn it over to my colleagues who are going to discuss their work in more detail But I'll return at the end to offer some concluding thoughts and facilitate questions. Thank you So I will discuss some of the technological New technology that we created and worked with for this project Just to give you some context when this project arrived at UCLA UCLA digital library had developed over about eight years a homegrown digital content management system Which we were extremely happy with and which enabled us to develop over 250 collections Some small some large mostly digitized material and many of them from Lubbers special collections however, this was not a scalable situation and we had over with hundreds of thousands of Digital objects, and we were just we had just agreed to move to an island or a repository And we knew that using island aura, which is Drupal on top of fedora using solar as well would enable us to help the LA ADP collection in a With their goals So using Drupal was a good way to enable experiments and digital scholarship along with creating a different interface for these collections So we were aiming to try to create a new interface for our UCLA's collections, but not silo them in their own Experience and not we wanted them to be connected to our other digital library collections Because of the time frame and our inexperience with Drupal and the need for efficient development We content we contracted with a Drupal development firm and got to work and that was extremely helpful so the first Issue we had was that we were previously or still in our homegrown system We use a zoomify for JPEG 2000 for zooming technologies Which is a very hardy, but somewhat out-of-date Technology that wasn't working anymore with her workflow, and we knew that when we moved to island or we would be using JPEG 2000 so we're really excited to develop To enable open-sea dragon, which allows us to zoom in to the JPEG 2000s for the images when you see them on In the Drupal site and we also tried using several PDF viewers for the UCLA material that was digitized for this website but we eventually went with a one that we created on our own with the Consultants and a primary goal unfortunately had to be that we were trying to avoid We're trying to make downloading the PDFs a little less easy and the reason for that was what we talked about yesterday What brister kale talked about we wanted to respect some of the copyright holders and their materials But we wanted to provide access to them as well Many many of these materials were we were unsure about the copyright or in copyright and Jasmine's going to talk a little bit more About the risk management issues around that so our new PDF you were enables viewing and Zooming but not necessarily easy downloading and the images started in The object started in Drupal, but all of the UCLA materials then were ingested into fedora like the like the rest of our collections will be and Total items from all seven institutions were 3,800 Images and PDFs So now I want to take a moment and talk a little bit about the metadata issues The archival metadata issues the archival metadata for the objects initially were taken from the finding aid at the folder level There was no subject description. No date normalization. No subject or name authorities So that made searching them as is not very efficient But with the digital in the digital library, we were used to already doing a lot of item level metadata Creating mods records normalizing dates and in addition over the course of the project We decided to add geographic coordinates to enable map browsing So we added there was a lot of value added metadata and jason's going to talk about how she built capacity to enable that For our partners The six other institutions we first thought that they could use we could you harvest their OAI metadata Many of them use content EM and we thought that would be really easy But because of the metadata cleanup we they a lot of them gave us spreadsheets and the metadata was adjusted and Cleaned up so that we could have better searching and browsing. They also included links to the thumbnails and but for many of our partners if the Searching becomes a portal and then you link to their interfaces. So they retain credit and We get to see some other resources that they have For the Eastern California Museum. We hosted the images and ingested into fedora because they didn't have their own working content management system so the the the whole project was really Integrated together the aqueduct site is one way to view all the materials about the Los Angeles aqueduct And it contains three interfaces keyword browse and a map view the UCLA resources also wind up in fedora ready for us to search them together with our other digital library resources and All in all this project enabled us to try some new technologies And work with special collections more deeply than we had before and support a really important teaching and learning project at UCLA So it was a win-win for everybody and now Jasmine is going to discuss Many other parts of the project. So my colleagues talked a little bit about the metadata creation that we had our students do and the risk Management that we also had our students do but I'm going to touch on a different component of the project But I'm happy to answer questions about later So I'd like to address the importance of building capacity among staff and student contributors as a key component of a scalable project management methodology I'll also speak to how I've seen it applied to the la adp and what we learned in general about project management and collaboration Since the la adp was the first project of its kind at UCLA library special collections There were many opportunities for us to not only experiment with diverse technical and content development But also enhance the capacity to do so within LSE and with various partners It was also an opportunity for us to grow our project management skills There was a steep project management learning curve And it took time for us to get a firm grasp of the style that worked for us in special collections and with the project Not surprisingly this was the most difficult part of the project and many of the challenges that we faced were tied to us learning How to do it better Despite these challenges, we were able to launch a robust platform Provide students with the opportunity to collaborate and contribute scholarship and digitization And it strengthened our collaborative relationships within and outside of the UCLA community Here are some of the things that we learned The first phase of the la adp extended from mid-May 2013 through June 2014 And was primarily interested in laying the groundwork for the second phase of the project The bulk of the materials now found on the site were digitized during this phase The first iteration of the site was built and launched with our website developer and on and off campus partnerships were being fostered The majority of these activities project conceptualization Development and implementation took place within the first six months of the project since the la adp Minimum viable product had to be launched on November 5th, 2013 the centenary of the aqueduct As you can imagine we learned and did a lot in these first six months, and this was the most important lesson So why doing you documentation to recall decisions made at previous meetings to revert back to one process from a new one That's not working for changes to the project team and many other reasons in The first six months of the la adp. We were powering through to launch Documenting our workflows and tasks was one of the key methods for keeping track of these decisions This was especially helpful when we had changes to our project team and needed to cover those open duties Also posting our documentation on the library wide wiki and ticket tracker allowed for transparency across department lines We tried to be very inclusive with our collaborators, and I'd like to put the emphasis on tried We were very successful, but it was still a process But we really wanted to ensure that project members weren't siloed by service provided a crucial characteristic of good project management Particularly when thinking about scalability is building capacity and confidence in collaborators So that they become effective and smart contributors to the project For example, I was initially solely responsible for a risk assessment and copyright determination for items that we wanted to publish on the la However, it was really important in order to scale up the project for me to hand that off to students During the second phase of the project. I trained a pair of students to undertake this risk assessment workflow in The beginning there was a lot of back-and-forth between us sessing out issues refining the workflow and me providing feedback on their assessments Eventually these students became so well versed in the collection and this workflow that they could anticipate my feedback and Would incorporate it into their assessments before it even came to me These students drafted around 20 risk assessment reports, which freed me up to focus on other activities As Jillian mentioned about our partnerships with students. We intentionally set loose parameters for their work specifically for the scholarship projects It was important for us to provide the students the independence to engage with the content so that they could be empowered to seek evaluate use and create scholarship in a way that was not constrained by our own holistic conceptualization of the ladp Building capacity and developing a scalable project is sometimes as easy as giving contributors the leeway to be creative and Providing them the resources they need while being the invisible but staunch supporter The mark of a successful project is not only usefulness and ease of use But also one that has helped to enhance the digital archival and other kinds of literacy of its partners No project should be developed in silos and all project members should be made to feel as though they are on one team For us that meant that I the project manager had a base understanding of digital library workflows that the folks in the digital library were privy to and Aspects of the platforms functional and content development and that our website developers knew what special collections is Obviously we can become experts in one another's work But eventually we became better communicators and our meetings became faster Which I know is a goal of everybody's The ladp has helped to shift the culture of digital project development at LSE and has contributed to in-house documentation and workflows However, this shift could not have happened without serious consideration about how we fared through each project phase deliverable and activity The execution of a closeout was one of the most crucial parts of this project Jillian and I held closeout meetings with key project team members and stakeholders To get a sense of our collaborators experiences Identify areas of improvement and establish requirements and guidelines for future digital project work If you've never held closeout meetings for your projects, especially large ones with diverse collaborators I really encourage you to do so While the feedback shared was mostly unsurprising We received really valuable comments and solutions from our students for implementing digital scholarship projects and special collections I'm a big fan of the idea of pre-mortems, which is a pre-project parallel to the project closeout But I've never actually taken part of one I believe though that they could be really effective tools and an opportunity for partners to be serious about project conceptualization and infrastructure sustainability and risk planning In a pre-mortem the team imagines that their come their project has completely failed and Brainstorms the possible reasons why the probability of those reasons having occurred and solutions for how to mitigate those potentialities Of course pre-mortems cannot and should not be done for every project Deadlines the size and overall impact of a project may be limiting factors However, when thinking about scalability of a project, this would be an important exercise Especially if you consider risks with technical infrastructure and development So how do these lessons and recommendations speak to a scalable project management methodology? What we don't want to do is have to revamp our project management strategy every time we're dealing with diverse projects Projects all of them large or small straightforward or complex have the following needs Confident knowledgeable and invested collaborators consistent documentation and transparency and a project management strategy in Theory, it's pretty simple if you implement a standard digital project management workflow with templates examples and guidelines Then you can pick and choose among the documentation based on the size and complexity of your project At LSE we have done just that with the digital project toolkit that Jillian has mentioned and we'll talk about a little bit later The most important part of project scalability However, is ensuring that the project team feels capable and confident to contribute to the overall goals of the project The LEDP has provided LSE with the opportunity to engage Experimentally with the development of a curated digital platform that is at once a digital archive And a digital humanities project. It has facilitated new avenues for new students to develop archival literacy and creatively utilize primary source materials It has also allowed for us to develop documentation and establish firmer ground for future digital projects at LSE Most importantly, we learned about project management what good project management should do and how it can foster innovative projects Even as we move to new positions at other repositories The success of the LEDP project continues to inspire us to be ambitious and imaginative as we devise Methodologies to address new challenges that archives and libraries face in the digital present and future. Thank you Okay, so I'm going to talk a bit about the scholarship section of the platform Generally and then talk about some of the specific work I did for it as part of the capstone project last year So the idea behind the scholarship section was to have a variety of scholars from a wide variety of fields Talk about various aspects of the aqueduct's history And I think a big part of the reason this was so successful Was that the aqueduct is a sort of perfect topic for an interdisciplinary platform And you might think well, how interesting can an aqueduct be? But this story the story of the aqueduct is really the story of modern Los Angeles Los Angeles as we know it would not be possible unless we figured out how To provide a stable water source to the city a project. We're still clearly figuring out And so there are many different ways of going about looking at this topic. So as a historian, that's what I'm interested in I'm interested in how the aqueduct was built who built it and what communities have been affected by the construction of the aqueduct That's one component of it There's also a literary component in the sense that anybody who's ever seriously written about Southern, California has written about the aqueduct As a sort of symbol of understanding Los Angeles everyone from Kerry McWilliams to Joan Didion There's also a film studies component because Roman Polanski's Chinatown With Jack Nicholson is not so subtly about the construction of the aqueduct And then there's also an environmental component on top of all of that in two ways both the sort of long argument about the relationship between California and water and Specifically a story about the Owens Valley and pollution there because the water that we get from the aqueduct is diverted from the Owens Valley and One of the consequences of that is that we've transformed that region from an agricultural region To the sort of barren landscape that has produced some of the worst dust pollution in the United States So that's the starting point you have all these different ways of looking at this problem And so the way the scholarship section worked was we would hire usually an individual graduate student to tackle this Set of problems from their disciplinary perspective My part of it was I was hired as part of the capstone project The idea was you hire a graduate student You hire three undergraduates to work together collaboratively to create a series of articles using digital tools on some theme of our choosing And so what we did was we did our primary research and decided to tell a social history of the history of the aqueduct a History of people who had been adversely affected by the construction of the aqueduct And so we made these five different articles that looked at various aspects of the aqueduct history And we used a wide range of tools to tell these stories. We use GIS We use story mapping long-form narrative zines oral history data visualization and archival method So the idea was to take the toolkit of a historian Look at these digital tools and think of how we can tell these stories in a more creative way And I think for undergraduates in particular It was a great experience in thinking differently about the library of thinking about the library just not just as a Repository of knowledge as an institution that's actively in the business of producing new knowledge in creative ways So to give you a couple of examples of what we made These are a few stills from a project we made on the st. Francis Dam collapse The st. Francis Dam was a storage reservoir in the San Francisco Canyon Which is about 40 miles northwest of Los Angeles and in 1928 the dam collapsed and billions of gallons of water flowed out And it ravaged all of the communities that lived along the San Francisco Canyon And so in terms of human life It's the second worst disaster in California history second only to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake And so what we wanted to do was to tell this story from the perspective of people who lived in this region largely laborers Migrant workers from Mexico and so on and so the sort of centerpiece of it was that top image We made this story map using story map JS We found in our research this really beautiful illustration of the canyon that the LA Times drew up a couple of days after the disaster And so we use that as our base layer And then what story map JS allows you to do is to then tell an interactive story on top of that map So what we did was we created we created in such a way We're going through it chronologically you start with a moment of collapse at 11 57 p.m And you start moving down the canyon and each point is Accentuated with a story that we found in our primary research of these people these stories of survival these stories of loss From the people who experienced it firsthand We also created a series of visualizations that analyzed the aftermath what was lost in this disaster and also Analyze the payout process because the city of Los Angeles was liable And so they had to pay families for loss of property and also for loss of family members Which gets into this gray area of how do you pay someone for the loss of a breadwinner and so on and so we did an analysis of that Another example was we did a project on the environmental hazards of the Owens Valley as I mentioned the Owens Valley has the worst dust pollution in the United States and so this was an article that was an overview of sort of contemporary battles between the city of Los Angeles and the Owens Valley and Trying to fix this problem in the Owens Valley So what we did was a major part of it was we worked with the regulatory agency the environmental agency in the Owens Valley that tracks Dust pollution and they created a custom data set for us that looked at 10 years of dust pollution using this metric called p.m 10 it's this particular type of dust particle that You can breathe in and go deep into your lungs and wreak all kinds of havoc on your respiratory system so the image on the right for instance was a Something we made using CartoDB which is a GIS application and what you can do is you can put data in it and run it through a time lapse So that particular map was what dust pollution looks like in the Owens Valley over one year so you run this time lapse for 20 seconds and every time one of those little circles pops up that's when one of the readings along the many Reading devices along the Owens Valley read that the pollution went over the state level or over the federal allowable limit of p.m 10 pollution so it was a creative way of taking sort of an old format an essay and adding to it and Adding to its diversity by using this environmental data and thinking differently about how you show what pollution looks like in this area And so what I would say then about what I think this project did both for undergraduates and for myself as a graduate student For undergraduates I think it was a wonderful way to get them working in special collections and with primary materials To get them to learn how to do primary research how to take notes how to compose a historical narrative and then to think creatively about What to do with that? Related to that I thought it was a great opportunity to treat undergraduates as collaborators When the project started I played a role sort of more akin to a teacher I'm so I'm teaching them how to do primary research teaching them how to use some of these tools But as the project went along in the summer they started to play a larger and larger role in the creative decisions of the project And so I think one of the big benefits of a project like this is that undergraduates feel a certain sense of ownership over these projects And so that's something I think they valued a great deal. And lastly, I would just say that this whole process of getting them to go through this Creation from research to publishing to presenting this work was a valuable experience for them And sort of was part of treating them as junior scholars and getting them that experience of producing this work And what goes into producing scholarly work? For me as a graduate student This is one of the most rewarding things I did in graduate school that I've done in graduate school And a lot of that was because it got me out of my comfort zone So one of the ways it did that was it broadened my concept of scholarship So as a historian I work in a book and article heavy field and so for me the challenge was to go into this thinking I'm going to use the same process. I'm going to do research the same way I'm going to do my lit review the same way and then at the end the difference is going to be I'm going to think Creatively about what to do with this. It's not just going to be text. It's going to be a digital project What does that look like? And so that was a great experience for me just thinking broadly about what scholarship is and what different forms it can take Related to that it was also a great exercise in writing to a broader public So often we write for our field we write for our subfield to be able to Contribute something that is part of this vital debate over the history of water in California and our relationship to water Was a very valuable experience and it's it's a way of doing public scholarship in a different way And lastly, I'll say for myself and I think for for all of the graduate students that participated in the scholarship section It was a great way of acquiring a different skill set many of us now I mean the generation of scholars that I'm a part of are being trained very broadly Some of us go into tenure-track jobs others go stay at universities But work in other units or work in libraries and others go into alternative academic jobs And this was a great place to acquire a different skill set And so for me it was a way to think about all kinds of issues that I usually don't think about to think about Design to think about aesthetic to think about project management to think about how to be an effective Collaborator and appease to different groups and so on I found that to be one of the most rewarding aspects of the project And so in general what I would say is that working on the project has sort of broadened my idea of what a historian is and what types of work Historian engages in and so now Jillian I'd like to conclude by offering some thoughts on creating effective partnerships within the library and across campus I think most contemporary library professionals have moved past the idea of the library as a service provider Rather, we are active collaborators and partners who besides making our rich collections accessible Also offer a wealth of skills and expertise to the research community I'd like to suggest two strategies to effectively demonstrate how the library is essential to research teaching and learning First we should not only welcome invitations from students and faculty to collaborate on their projects We should also invite students and faculty to collaborate on projects that we conceive of and design These projects should further the library's mission to support the university's research and teaching activities While also working to advance scholarship Ideally by giving all partners license for the kind of creative experimentation That perhaps our traditional work as scholars archivist in librarians may not always encourage The LA ADP project is an example of what library initiated projects can look like and we hope that it can serve as a model for our library's future work as well as the work of other academic libraries Second archivist and librarians should be well prepared to clearly convey to our potential partners How to successfully plan and implement digital library projects? So this is where our expertise lies where authorities on concepts concepts such as provenance digitization standards controlled vocabularies risk assessment and digital collection management We should be ready and able to communicate the value of these practices to potential partners in a language. They understand our Collaborators will not consider us equal partners unless they understand the value of the expertise that we contribute to the project as Jasmine and I mentioned a major outcome of the LA ADP project was the development of a comprehensive suite of tools Which we named the UCLA library special collections digital project toolkit The toolkit is designed to support a variety of digital projects that can occur in a special collections library This includes digital scholarship projects as well as boutique and large-scale digitization projects The toolkit is organized according to project stages and steps and is designed to be accessible to a range of potential collaborators and participants including faculty students and technologists all Of the toolkits templates guidelines and workflows are available for download from the UCLA special collections website And we encourage you and your colleagues to use these documents as a reference and a model at your own institution When planning and implementing digital projects The toolkit makes visible every step of the digital project lifecycle from establishing rules of collaboration To creating fair use statements and metadata guidelines to conducting assessment at the end of a project Codifying these processes in the toolkit Exploits the skills and expertise that archivist and librarians contribute to digital scholarship and Establishes common ground for productive and informed partnership Thank you