 Welcome everybody. You are in the CNI virtual spring meeting. We're going to give this maybe one more minute to let folks trickle in before we get started with this afternoon's webinar. Okay, I see a few other folks are joining us now. We're about a minute and a half past the half hour, so I'm going to go ahead and get us started here. My name is Diane Goldenberg Hart from CNI. I'm so happy you could join us here today. I think we have a really interesting talk lined up for you. This afternoon we are joined by Christine Fruin and Kevin Kaczanski. Christine comes to us from ATLA and Kevin from Notch 8. They'll be presenting the presentation Collaboration in Community, creating the ATLA digital library for collecting and connecting in religion and theology. Before I hand it over to Kevin and Christine, I just want to remind everyone that this session is being recorded and we will be making it publicly available after the session. Also, just to let you know, attendee microphones are muted. We will be taking questions for Christine and Kevin. There's a little Q&A box. If you just click on the Q&A box at the bottom, you can type your question in there at any time. And also the chat box is open if you want to chat with any of the panelists at any time. And that will be open as well. You can opt to make that open as well to all attendees. And without further ado then, I'd like to hand it over to Christine and Kevin and thank them for being here. Over to you. All right. Thank you Diane and thank you everyone joining us this afternoon. We appreciate you taking time out of your day or perhaps it's morning depending on which time zone you're in. I shouldn't say afternoon because it is still morning in certain parts of the country. As Diane introduced, I am Christine Froon. I'm the Scholarly Communication and Digital Projects Manager at ATLA. And in case you are not familiar with what I'm going to start with today is an introduction to who ATLA is. Diane referred to us as ATLA. So we did used to be known as ATLA, but we are now ATLA as a word. And we were founded in 1946 as the American Theological Library Association, which is how most folks still identify us. We are a really unique organization in that we are both a member association for both librarians and libraries that are engaged or have collections that are targeted towards the study of religion and theology. But we are also an organization that is a content producer. We have a number of database products that we host and that we offer for subscription to libraries and other information organizations that have a need for that content. So as I said, last year, just a little over a year ago, we did change our name to ATLA as well as update our logo and brand to better reflect our growing presence, not only internationally, but also just kind of broadening our scope and focus as well as a major actor in scholarly communication and religion and theology. As I said, we do several products in addition to being a member organization. I mentioned the databases. We currently have over 800 individual and institutional members worldwide. It's also kind of why we moved away from the American Theological Library Association because we have such a growing international presence, collaboration and membership. Member programs is the side of the organization that I work in. And as I said, we mainly develop tools and services and professional development for our members. We also offer a number of grants and scholarships for our members to help them, you know, for like library students who might be going to school specifically to become a religious studies or theological librarian, but also grants to travel to our other activities that we want to support. We also offer consortia licensing to our members. Another, the last two things are items that I am primarily responsible for, which is our open access publishing program, which does both open access serials as well as books. So definitely check those out. It's a growing, growing program, as well as other digital projects and tools that support our member work. One of those digital projects that is really important to us in that is the focus of our talk today is our digital library. So why did ATLID decide to build a digital library? Why did we feel it was important for our members as well as for the more global study of religion and theology? Well, in 2015, we did conduct, which was before I started, I started with ATLID in 2017. We did a survey of our members, of those institutional individual members to kind of get a landscape sense of where they were in terms of their own digitization projects, preservation projects, as well as access to special collections and archives and religion and theology that had been or needed to be digitized. As a result of that survey, we decided that we needed to serve the needs of our members. We needed to develop some kind of collaborative and subject focused approach to the care and, excuse me, care and access to these collections, particularly for what really is the core of our members, which are these very small theological and religious studies libraries. Our members are typically the smallest of the small, sometimes FTEs as low as 50, 60. But it's amazing. And one of the things that I love about my job is I frequently go on member visits and get to see the really rich special collections that even these very small libraries have. One of the first steps we took is we did attempt to become a DPLA hub. However, that was not successful just because of where DPLAs kind of focus and attention was at that time. So instead, we kind of shifted focus a year later and decided, well, we'll just develop our own digital library. And we kind of identified what some of the goals would be in doing that. Of course, one of those primary goals was we wanted a sustainable platform solution, preferably one that was open source and that already had an established strong community investment. So we didn't want to go with something that was completely new. We wanted something that had been used by larger institutions, smaller institutions, and then it had a good core kind of development foundation in it as well. And that there was, you know, sustainable funding, you know, not wholly reliant upon grants as so many startups are. And that really had a community of support, not only in libraries, but collectors and developers. So that was goal number one. Goal number two is we wanted to make sure that our, you know, the end product was something that was standards compliant and interoperable. We want something that other libraries could interact with with their systems. Because one of our primary goals was that was was harvesting. So we wanted a system that was going to talk with other systems. And of course, the final goal, which is also really important, you know, okay, we build this thing, we get content in it. What are people going to do with it? And so we wanted to make sure that content was going to be discoverable, visible and accessible. Because what we are, what our kind of collection scope is our, you know, collections that are scholarly, historical and cultural significance to the study and teaching and learning of religion and theology. So with those goals in mind, and looking at what options and solutions were available at the time, we ended up in 2017 then selecting Sam Vera, the current iteration being hyrax as a platform and we partnered with Notch 8, which my co-presenter is representing today, partnered with Notch 8 to develop the Outlet Digital Library. So this is just a screenshot. I encourage you to go check it out. And the URL is up there. And actually my screenshot is probably a little out of date now. We've been doing kind of, we're still doing kind of some tweaking and things on it. But I encourage you to go check it, go check it out at this link. So how are we using, as I said, this was really an outgrowth of member needs. But we do certainly anticipate that folks other than our members worldwide are going to use what's, what is found in there. So how are we utilizing the digital library to serve our members and its, and its other users. So right now, primarily what we have been focused on is metadata harvesting. So therefore, folks have to have existing digital collections, through which we can harvest the metadata either through an OAI or a CSV. We are not currently hosting, I'm going to be talking about that in a little bit. But right now we are harvesting metadata that exists for digital collections. So these, these collections have to have to be digitized and be living somewhere that we can go out and grab the metadata. With Notch 8, I think Kevin will probably talk about this more. We have developed a harvesting tool that allows us to grab metadata out of things such as Internet Archive, Content DM, or Mecca, and others. And then if folks don't have one of those existing platforms, they can also give us their metadata through, through a CSV. We've spent a lot of time developing kind of our metadata standards and kind of educating our members on metadata best practices through this process. Our metadata harvesting program is free for ATLA member, ATLA member institutions. However, non-ATLA member institutions can also participate if they have, and we are encouraging folks, if you have wonderful digital collections in the areas of religion and theology that you want to up the discoverability and usage of, we encourage you to reach out to us. We charge a very, very nominal fee, very nominal fee for non-ATLA members to allow their metadata to be harvested, because we're really kind of using it also as kind of a recruitment tactic to say, well, if you only spend just a wee bit more, you can actually become a member institution of ATLA, and you get all of these other great benefits by being an ATLA member. So it's kind of a hook for us, and that's why we keep the, and that's why we keep the fee so low for non-members is to kind of also use it to increase our institutional member base. And again, as I said, the goal being to increase discoverability, visibility and accessibility of these existing digitized collections through a cross-collection search at our digital library. So, you know, we are all these, you know, cultural heritage institutions and libraries and other archives, you know, folks that are interested in religion and theology can search across multiple collections at once through this single platform. Some things that we've been working on is we have been developing triple IF, viewer capability within the site. This was, I'm going to talk a little bit about more about why we did that in a moment. We have faceted searching, and one of our goals is to perhaps improve that. But right now, we're driving, you know, since it's metadata only, and folks are seeing a thumbnail, and then if they actually want to go and interact with the full, you know, the full item, we're actually driving folks back to the original source, to the host of where those digital collections are. So we're also helping those institutions we've partnered with by driving their use of statistics up, which they may need to demonstrate to their own parent institutions to perhaps keep their digital library, their own digital collections going and funded. One of the things that has been really helpful for us is that we've been utilizing the digital library as a way of getting involved in some really exciting grant projects, particularly some clear grant project. Atla has been named recently as a collaborator on two clear grants. And there are also two clear grants that are in progress, which unfortunately due to the to the current global situation, probably my guess is those have been kind of temporarily been put on hold, and may not be submitted this year, but we are currently partners on two different clear grants, one being one of the digitizing his hidden special collections archives grants with the Christ Church preservation trust in Philadelphia, which represents a number of very historical some of the earliest churches in America actually before America's formal founding. So they they were the grant recipient, and that they have really been spearheading a lot of the kind of brought help bring our digital library out of beta by part by us partnering with them on that grant and they are the impetus behind us getting the I triple F viewer capability because they needed that for for their to allow users to interact with all the historic records that they have digitized so that people can zoom in and read text and right now they're working on transcriptions of those texts as well. And that's kind of part of our future development that I'm going to be talking about later. Brooklyn College is part which is part of the CUNY system in New York. They were recently awarded recordings at risk grant, and they are digitizing sermons of a very famous Reverend at a Baptist church there in Brooklyn who was very involved in civil rights he was part of Dr. Martin Luther King's kind of band of folks and we're going to be working with them also to include the metadata for those recordings help them drive up the discoverability and usage of this of that very important collection so we're a partner with them as well. We've been doing besides you know these visible projects on with these grants. We've been doing a lot of other marketing. Through our own newsletter and blog. We've also been doing some webinars that have been highlighting new participants that have really unique collections. So we're always wanting to highlight the things that are in there and get notification out to the world of the kinds of unique things that they can find in our library. Kind of a service to our members because again this is a member program and ultimately you know we want to this to be an opportunity for our members to learn and to become skilled in digitization and metadata. So you know one of the things that we've I feel really you know proud of that we have spent an enormous amount of time my colleague Christy Karpinski, who is our digital project coordinator spent a lot of time working on our metadata guidelines and best practices. And this metadata application profile used by folks that participate in the at the digital library and she and I also worked on a collection policy as well as I drafted our MOU our memorandum of understanding that we execute all of this documentation is publicly available. We are happy if folks want to use us. You know as a model as they're looking at their own, you know, looking to develop their own documentation if you go to the digital library you'll find links to all of these various things that we use and if you can't find them you're always welcome to reach out to me I'm always happy to talk about, you know, documentation is kind of my jam. Being a lawyer in addition to being a librarian I love working on MOUs and policies and things so I'm always happy to talk with folks about that. We've also been doing a number of training and just providing other kinds of resources to help educate our members or really anyone that you know has interest in these things. So we have done a lib guide on digitization, and then we did a four part webinar webinar series which was recorded and is available through the outlet website for anyone to view. But they are really targeted towards our digital library, you know how to participate so how to kind of get started if you wanted to be a institution that had your metadata harvested by us. So we did a really great webinar just kind of on metadata and on metadata best practices, but then targeted it also towards kind of the standards that we have from metadata if you want to have your metadata harvested by us. And then I did a webinar on rights management. That one really is a more widely applicable one and I talked a lot about, you know copyright clearance when you are selecting items for digitization. And managing rights, once you've digitized things and helping kind of libraries navigate, you know, the permissions kind of minefield allow libraries confuse themselves on requiring permissions of themselves as being a rights holder when they really don't have any rights because of things are in public domain. And I cover a lot of that in the webinar that I did and then talk specifically about the rights field in the digital library and our utilization of rights statements.org, and kind of how folks can select the appropriate statement to include in that field in their metadata for inclusion in the digital library. And last in that series, another staff member of mine, Race Moncree, talked specifically about how do you use the digital library to support teaching and research, and did some examples of searches and such. It's a really great four part series and like I said it's publicly available through the ATLO website if you ever wanted to check those recordings out. So I am now going to turn it over to to my co-presenter Kevin we're going to do a quick switch of slides I'm going to stop sharing let him start sharing so just give us a few seconds while we while we quick do a switch here. Great thank you Christine can you just confirm that you're seeing that in full screen view. I can see it. Yes. So thank you and thank you for inviting me to co-present. I know that's because we're based in San Diego and that was originally a really convenient thing that I'm happy to still be a part of this. Notch 8 has been a partner on this like Christine said, going back a couple years now and we've helped develop work around various custom imports, but also several additional unique features that are pretty noteworthy to a fair application that we've been able to assist with here. Bulk racks is what's now known as bulk bulk racks as an importer. And Christine mentioned this briefly. It's a user friendly way to import OII PMH metadata records. It allows import by collection, including a collection thumbnail image and a link out to the work online. It allows the addition of a standardized right statement to be implied across the import is needed. It's a simplified and simple Dublin Corp via OII PMH NCS file import status is monitored in the admin dashboard and there's a view of that in the slide that you can kind of see you can track the progress and and status the various aspects of the imports. We're showing what fields can be configured for each individual import, including a base URL metadata prefixed, and you can set that right statement at the bottom here with an option to override existing right statements. For customization. That's an idea that was default the default format of breadcrumbs wasn't sufficiently functional to allow users to access up the hierarchy that includes collection information on how to get to a specific work or get back to the higher level breadcrumbs are configured to better reflect organization of the system. The trails here incorporate individual contributing institutions parent collections, which contain child collections, and they're dynamic so that they show the collection of the discovery path via that unique search, even if the work is in multiple collections it's going to show it by how you found it and here's an example of what the request look like. This is a little more robust so that you can actually see the collection information up in the breadcrumbs. A couple other additional customizations that we were able to implement that were by Atlas request was needed descriptive URLs for the institution and collection pages. You can see how that kind of gobbledygook becomes something much more human friendly. The addition of thumbnail images to represent instead of the default hyrax icon, anybody's been in hyrax they've probably seen this box icon, and it's a much more robust user experience to be able to see individual icon that represents the collection. Modification of a file download link for works aggregated from external collections, where a file download button would typically is now a button to view the full item, which links out to the external source. And here's an example of what that looks like in Atlas, and then if you click the full view full item, it pushes you out to a link to the host collection. So for our project partners, it was important for this work that the rest of the community could benefit any work that the rest of the community could benefit from be contributed back for them to take advantage of so one of the significant features of Atlas was the bulk racks, and the outland portal work was the basis for a fuller featured version of bulk racks, which is now publicly available. This is now expanded to support OAMH CSV also bag it and XML files all out. We're soon going to be releasing bulk a bulk racks version that has full round trip import and export, and we're able to add the export function in partnership with another project that's that's very soon going to be released. And I'll pass it back to Christine. Okay, thank you. And to that we do have some future plans with the digital library. We just concluded some usability testing and got some really, really interesting feedback on that and identified a number of improvements with searching and just with some aesthetic things that we want to perhaps, you know, implement based on that usability testing and we are currently actually working with Kevin right now scoping out and specking out that that those improvements in that development work so we look forward to encourage, you know, you know, look forward to continuing our collaborative relationship with nacha they've been a really great partner for us and developing this, as I said we have the I triple f viewer. And they're working with the Christ Church folks right now about how they have people actively volunteers actively transcribing these, you know, 250 some year old church records. And so we're also looking at how we can embed those transcriptions into the digital library so that folks can see the transcriptions alongside with, you know, just outside of or within the viewer so we're exploring different options with that as I said earlier, right now we're just doing metadata harvesting but a number of our members have things digitized and have no place to put their digitized collection so we have been hearing from our members that they would really like for us to also act as host, and that is certainly high on our list to begin exploring. So we'll probably be a member only benefit at this point in time. And we're, you know, one of the things that we're talking about is that, you know, there's going to have to be some fee involved just because you know server server space has a cost. You know, so we're looking at a purely cost recovery model our intention is not to be this is not going to be a money making thing for us. So we're looking to investigate and just kind of also do some landscape analysis of, you know, what, how, how, how hosting would look for us for our members. What is the common service store size that they may need and what kind of time and staff investment of time and resources is it going to take. To perhaps you know, unfortunately with with with the current global situation where you know we as a lot of organizations are kind of having to reevaluate some things budgetarily and so forth and so we're hoping to perhaps launch this in early 2021. But, you know, we'll have to see but it's something that we definitely want to do. So we've been looking at and this is kind of an idea that Christie had is a lot of our members as I said, especially the very small ones do have these amazing special collections, very, very unique items that I have been privileged to see when I've gone out and But they don't have the means to actually digitize and or, you know, know how to go about doing that and so we've thought about launching for some, you know, for our members kind of a competitive grant program where they could receive equipment, as well as in person training on how to digitize, you know, how to, you know, you know, get good files get good metadata. And so we are going to look at also launching at kind of these micro grants program for our members to get them up and running to, you know, get a small digitization lab in their library so those are kind of some of our future plans to support our members work. So that's really, you know, all that we have at this point just kind of giving you an overview of why we built digital library, how we built it, how we're using it to support our organization and kind of the mission of our organization. And also, you know, Kevin was kind of getting into some of the more technical things about, you know, what we did, you know, some of the unique things we needed to support our members but also just kind of the capabilities that are out there. So if you are looking at doing this so I don't Kevin if you have anything last that you would like to say but and then we can take some time for questions. I don't, I'm happy to be a part of this project not sheet has been invested in this for some time I look forward to continuing to work with Christine and Christie and the rest of the outlet team. We do have a question Christine in QA about omica is on the list of metadata but harvesting is that amica classic omica s both are either do you know the answer to that. I think it's, I want to say it's just I only want I've ever heard Christie talk about I should message her since we're sitting here I could probably message her and ask her. I don't know if it says in our documentation I did I attempted to put a link to our documentation in the chat and I realized I always had to like Kevin and Diana didn't do it to everybody. But I think Diane was kind enough to to repost it out there. It might specify in our documentation. But Patrick if you want to email me I will talk with Christie and find out if it's both a mecha classic and omica s or if it's one or the other, or I said I can probably quickly message her and ask her if she's if she's available I might be able to get an answer out of her. So, but that's a good question. Let me let me see if I can get an answer. Actually, it looks like and this is Diane back again sorry about that. Thanks for that great talks really interesting, but it looks like Patrick has weighed in again he said that drop down Kevin showed suggested it's classic. Oh AI. But not. Very observant. It's in there somewhere. And thanks for that question, Patrick, and, and the floor of course is open for questions if anybody else has a question please go ahead and, and type it into the q amp a box or drop it there in the chat box. And while we are waiting for more questions or comments to come in I just want to take a moment to remind everyone that this webinar is part of CNI's virtual spring meeting on going through the end of May. We will have lots more webinars to come and dropping and pasting here a direct link to this the schedule for the rest of the meeting if you want to check that out and see what else we have in store our next webinar will take place this Friday afternoon when we will hear about Sorry, I'm wrong. I'm confused about this. Thursday Thursday will hear from Martin Klein on the persistence of persistent identifiers of the scholarly web. So join us for that and many other webinars. So, Christy, Kevin, this is quite an impressive undertaking, an amazing gift to the community. I was just taking a look at the digital library a little bit while you were talking and there are truly some treasures already in there. I want everyone to take a look and poke around it's just amazing what you're delivering through that tool to the entire community. So thank you very much for that and looking forward to seeing some of the other collections that you'll be able to surface through your work with your members. Thank you. Just tremendous. I don't see any other questions coming in right now so. And I haven't I put a question out to Christy and our in our teams and I haven't have it heard back for so I'm sorry Patrick but feel free to email me and I if it and I should be able to answer that. That sounds great I think yeah we've got the contact information for both Christine and Kevin up on the screen there if you want to reach out to them and I will be closing down now the public portion of this webcast I'll be stopping the recording if anybody wants to come down and approach the podium as it were and have a chat with Christine or Kevin. Just raise your virtual hand and I will bring you. I will unmute your microphone and welcome you to chat with them. And with that I will thank Christine and Kevin once again for being here thanks to all of our attendees for being here. I'll see you back at another CNI webinar soon and be well everyone I'm turning off the recording now. Take care. Thank you. Thank you.