Joshua Berkov (staff, UNC-CH), Cliff Dyer (staff, UNC-CH), Jennifer Joyner (graduate student, UNC-CH), Mike Millner (staff, UNC-CH), Kristin Shafer (graduate student, UNC-CH)

The Carolina Digital Library and Archives is entering into the final stages of a three-year grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to digitize five hundred oral history interviews from the Southern Oral History Program. As the project nears its inevitable conclusion, the project's team members have learned many lessons that can be passed on to others interested in learning how to digitize oral history interviews, or even other types of interviews. There are many different methods by which those who are interested can digitize a set of interviews, and our team members will create a poster to highlight those methods that have proven to work for us.

There are several competing methods for the digitization of the interview transcript. If an electronic copy of the transcript already exists, perhaps in an MSWord document, then the interested party needs to decide whether to transform it into HTML, XML, or another format. If the transcript currently only exists in hard copy form, then a decision needs to be made whether to use Optical Character Recognition technology to "read" the transcript into an electronic form; scan the transcript and publish it as is; or hire labor (in house or outsourced) to encode the hard copy transcript into an electronic language, whether HTML or XML.

Similar decisions must also be made with regard to the audio. Older interviews on cassette tapes will need to be reformatted into digital format, and the interested party will face a decision as to which format to use. Our team converts interviews from cassette tapes into WAV files and mp3 files. Our team is fortunate enough to have the equipment in house to do this, but audio conversion can be outsourced as well. These are just some of the technical aspects of digitizing oral history interviews that we will display on our poster.

William R. Burk (staff, UNC-CH), Tom Hailey (graduate student, UNC-CH)

This poster chronicles the collaboration of the John N. Couch Biology Library and the Department of Biology at UNC-Chapel Hill in designing and mounting a large educational exhibit. It also demonstrates the partnership of librarians in instructional outreach with an academic department.

Instruction has played an increasing role in academic librarianship in recent years. It includes not only classroom teaching and one-on-one assistance but also the creation of educational exhibits and displays. In mid-2006, the Biology Library and Department of Biology began a partnership to develop two large exhibits in the lobby of Wilson Hall. The aim of these displays is to promote awareness of the department's historical legacy, to highlight topics of interest to biology majors, to educate the academic community, and to create an interesting portal into the building. A fortunate outcome was strengthening the collaboration between the library and the department.

The first exhibit, titled From Organism to Molecule, was created by Biology Librarian William Burk and SILS graduate student Tom Hailey with the sponsorship of Biology chair Steve Matson and the assistance of numerous staff in Biology and the University Libraries. Providing a centennial history of the department, the exhibit features environmentally-friendly LED lighting, making it one of the first such exhibits on campus to use this growing technology. The display is divided into three sections (Botany, Zoology, and Biology), each covering a major component in the department's history. Educational relics and models give a glimpse of teaching methods employed through the century, and photographs depict the founders of the components departments, including the first female graduate students and staff as well as the first African American professor. This exhibit provides a synoptic window to viewing the history of the Biology Department on the Carolina campus and complements the university's effort to remember and appreciate its past.

We are currently planning the second exhibit that will focus on topics of current interest to biology students and the state's citizens. Unlike the first exhibit, which is considered to be a permanent installation, this second exhibit will rotate on an annual basis and will cover a wide array of topics of special interest to Biology students.

Sarah Carrier (graduate student, UNC-CH)

In 2007, the University of North at Chapel Hill Libraries systems and cataloging departments undertook an XML to MARC conversion project. In this poster, the method, execution, and results generated through the chosen approach are detailed. Lessons that were learned during this process are applicable to other institutions seeking both a flexible and automated way to generate MARC records from XML metadata, regardless of the structure of the XML record. The goal of the particular project was to transform metadata for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) into MARC records in a flexible, efficient manner, and with as little manual effort as possible. UNC ETDs are stored in the CONTENTdm system in PDF format along with corresponding metadata. The metadata fields were first mapped to appropriate MARC fields by catalogers. The challenge was to then find the best way to export the metadata and accomplish the actual conversion. The approach had to be a simple, easily executable, and long-term solution due to the fact that MARC records for new ETDs would have to be generated every semester. In addition, any MARC records created in the process had to be as rich in content as those manually developed by the cataloging department. Other challenges included the lack of rich metadata in standard CONTENTdm exports, which led to the use of the entire indexed XML collection metadata file stored on the server. Employing original scripts written for the project using the programming language Perl, the author accomplished the transformation of CONTENTdm metadata in XML to MARC. Two publicly available Perl modules were used to transform the metadata first into proper XML, and then into MARC. The modules used were XML::Simple (version 2.18) and MARC (version 1.13). The final step in the process involved simplifying the execution of the Perl script using the "Library for WWW in Perl" (LWP) module that allows for the access of data on the Web. The entire collection XML file is therefore available at a particular URL for a library staff member to access and then generate MARC records. Records for a particular semester can be generated, or records can be created based on a range of CONTENTdm record numbers. The Perl scripts used in this project can be reused and generalized to other similar projects.

Jennifer Castaldo (graduate student, UNC-CH), Linda Daniel (staff, Duke)

Academic libraries spend millions of dollars each year on electronic resources, yet research demonstrates that many databases are underutilized because users are unfamiliar with their contents. Libraries need to market these resources to their users so that this money is well spent and so that users may find the necessary resources to do their research.

The Duke University Libraries currently subscribe to over five hundred databases a year, but usage statistics show that most patrons tend to use the same ones repeatedly. To address this need, we developed a plan to market our databases by advertising a database each week on the libraries' homepage. The first step in our marketing plan was to develop a tag-line to brand our database promotions. Get the "Best @ the Library" became our slogan and we used this title at the beginning of each ad. Some of the more specialized and/or new electronic databases were highlighted. Ads were created for each database and they were placed on the homepage in the "News and Events" box. The ads were hyperlinked to a secondary page that gave an illustrated description of the resource. A different ad was posted each Monday afternoon.

To assess the effectiveness of this marketing program, we collected data to document the number of clicks on each advertisement. The results indicate that user awareness of the selected databases increased with an average of over one hundred clicks per week for each advertisement. We also tracked usage statistics on the selected databases. Each database was promoted for approximately one week. Data was collected two weeks prior to its promotion, during the week the ad was up, and two weeks after the ad was removed from the homepage. The results of this study do not demonstrate a direct relationship between clicks on the ad and the database's use during the time of its promotion. Since the selected databases were specialized, users may not have felt an immediate need to use these sources.

This study provides us with a positive assessment of this marketing service. It demonstrates that our advertisements increased awareness of the highlighted databases and may also help promote user awareness of the overall services that the library offers.

Hyun-Duck Chung (NCSU Libraries fellow)

NCSU librarians are designing a suite of e-learning modules on topics that deepen student understanding of how information is created and the scholarly communication process. Unlike library tutorials or face-to-face library instruction that focus on how to find and evaluate information, these short, animated streaming modules will cover topics such as the role of peer review in research, the social construction of information in Wikipedia, the literature review process, and how economics shape access to information. They are being designed to stand alone, or be used by librarians and other educators in various settings and across institutions.

This poster focuses on the process of developing a module on peer review, and presents a model of how librarians can engage faculty in the early stages of design, and the advantages of such an approach. Frequently in the design of online learning modules and tutorials, developers seek the input of potential users late in the developmental phase or only after the completed product has been marketed. In contrast, iterative models such as ADDIE from the area of instructional design, call for early input from potential users so that such input can help shape the scope, content, and delivery of the end product. The poster also reports on the approach of the interviews, questions asked, and the factors that emerged as being important considerations in designing the peer review module.

Maggie Dickson (staff, UNC-CH)

Digitization of the Thomas E. Watson Correspondence is a two-year project funded by the Watson-Brown Foundation to digitize the entire correspondence series of the Thomas E. Watson Collection, housed in the Southern Historical Collection. Correspondence in the series is that of Thomas E. Watson (1856-1922), a Populist politician from Georgia, and his political friends and rivals, his constituents, and his family and friends. The primary goal behind this project is to develop an infrastructure and Web interface for the most effective display and manipulation of digitized archival materials online. We intend to use the existing EAD (Encoded Archival Description) Finding Aid for the collection for description of and access to the digital materials. Findings from this project inform, and are in turn informed by, the findings of the concurrent Mellon-funded project, "Extending the Reach of Southern Sources", which is investigating ways to implement a mass-digitization program at the Southern Historical Collection. At the completion of this project we will have developed a digital experience which closely replicates that of a researcher in the search room at the Manuscripts Department, as well as workflows and guidelines for the mass-digitization of further SHC collections.

Michael Fitzgerald (graduate student, UNC-CH)

Unlike traditional bibliography or cataloging, jazz discography has been organized around the intellectual point of creation - the recording session, not the resulting physical artifact. The production of a database application that takes this into account has been a significant achievement. While there are many products that are designed to inventory a collection, /Brian/ remains the only program of its kind available. Entirely coincidentally, it serves as a clear example of a working system that implements the concepts described in the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model. Developer Steve Albin began work on /Brian/ in 1994 and by 2006 it had progressed to version 5.5. It was conceived independently of FRBR but with similar goals in mind. Relational database design stresses ideas such as unique identifiers and keys, which translate into authority control, and, most importantly, the entity-relationship design used in databases gives a conceptual understanding of how creation occurs through composition, and separately through performance and how entities follow from each point of creation. For each entity there is associated metadata and using a variant of the well-established Brian Rust format, the /Brian/ application produces reports that seamlessly bring together metadata from three different entity levels. This information is displayed for the user, who may be entirely unaware of the underlying structure to the data. /Brian/ is now used by an international community of discographers and since 2003, the visible product of this community has been made available on the www.JazzDiscography.com website in the form of nearly 75 artist discographies and nearly 250 leader discographies. The ability to exchange information is of great benefit to discographers and interoperability in /Brian/ is facilitated through the use of XML files. This also opens the door to re-using the XML data in other contexts. It is anticipated that fresh ways will be found to display discographical information and as the /Brian/ application continues to evolve it will now be interacting with other XML-friendly applications that will inevitably lead to new and exciting developments in the study of musical performances and sound recordings.

Adrienne MacKay (staff, UNC-CH), Kevin Eckhardt (graduate student, UNC-CH), Stephanie Adamson (graduate student, UNC-CH), Natasha Smith (staff, UNC-CH)

Going to the Show is a map-based, 2-year LSTA grant-funded digital project undertaken by Documenting the American South / the Digital Publishing Group within the Carolina Digital Library and Archive (CDLA). We are developing an online, interactive collection documenting and educating users about cultural and social life in early 20th-century North Carolina by highlighting the role of movies and moviegoing in communities across the state from 1907 ( when the first movie theaters opened) to 1930 (the end of the silent film era in America). This project has three dimensions: a searchable, relational database containing an inventory of more than 1,000 documented commercial movie theaters in operation in all towns and cities in the state from 1907 to 1930 and an inventory of all African American theaters in North Carolina through the 1950s; 650 digitized and geo-referenced Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps from 1896 to 1922, representing the central business districts of 44 North Carolina cities and towns within which movie theaters and movie going were situated; and digitized versions of a range of documentary materials and accompanying historical commentary (photographs, city directory listings, architectural drawings, postcards, newspaper ads and articles) for individual theaters in selected communities. Additionally, in conjunction with the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Education, a set of curriculum materials, including lesson plans for K-12 classroom learning, will be developed. Going to the Show will be one of a few free, web-based, public sources for state-wide collections of original Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps and will serve everybody in North Carolina, in the country, and in the world. For the purpose of this poster, we intend to explicate the process of stitching constituent Sanborn Fire Insurance Map pages into central business district representations and the subsequent geo-referencing of these stitched maps. We will also provide examples of content and contextualization. Finally, a large component of this project involves experimenting with new and exciting GIS technologies, and as such, we will showcase our early interactive prototypes, including our web interface, which uses the GoogleMaps API and AJAX technology, as well as our stand-alone GoogleEarth objects.

Jessica Roseberry (staff, Duke), Mira Waller (staff, Duke)

Since the 1970s, the Duke Medical Center Archives has played a vital role in preserving and providing access to the legal, administrative, and historical records of Duke Medicine.  With the addition of a dedicated oral historian to the staff in 2003, the archives has increased its commitment to preserving the oral stories of the Duke Medicine community.   Oral history can provide previously undiscovered insight into historical truths because it provides eyewitness and sometimes very personal accounts into the past.  The focus of this poster is an event utilizing the power of oral accounts to create community and to celebrate diversity.  The “Tea with Trailblazers” event has been held at the Duke Medical Center Library, coordinated primarily by Duke Medical Center Archives staff in conjunction with library staff.  It has been an annual occurrence for the past three years and was created to highlight and learn about African-American trailblazers at Duke Medicine in February, Black History Month. Speakers have included an African-American administrator, a doctor, licensed practical nurses, a physician assistant, and others who were early African-American pioneers at Duke Medicine.   Duke is a Southern medical institution that originally opened its doors with segregated patient wards and no African-American professional staff.   Using traditional poster materials, as well as digitized clips from the previous three teas, this poster will illustrate how the teas facilitate a sense of community, how oral histories can provide a forum for those voices traditionally left out of the historical record, and how the processes behind the creation of the three teas has evolved over time.

Stephen Sherman (graduate student, UNC-CH)

The Information Commons model of service is being adopted by an increasing number of academic libraries. As this model becomes more prevalent, the issue of assessment will be of increasing importance. While a number of case studies have utilized quantitative measures of assessment for these spaces, very few examples of qualitative evaluation are present in the extant literature. This study provides an example of qualitative methods by investigating students' perceptions of the North Carolina State University Libraries Learning Commons. This investigation involved two approaches. A survey was used to gather input directly from NCSU students, including their opinions of the space and services offered, as well as any suggestions for improvement. This survey was offered both online and in paper form in order to maximize the response rate. Paper copies of the questionnaire were distributed throughout the Learning Commons and completed surveys were collected by library staff. The online questionnaire, identical to the paper form, was advertised to students outside the library space through flyers, online forums, and the campus newspaper. The responses from the survey were complemented by a qualitative analysis of posts to the Learning Commons discussion board, an online forum that is used for communication between library staff and student patrons (and vice versa). The findings from this study will help to inform future planning and assessment for these spaces, both at the NCSU Libraries and at other academic institutions with similar facilities.

John Vickery (staff, NCSU), Michele Matz Hayslett (staff, NCSU)

The concept of open data offers clear, acknowledged benefits for research and scholarship.  Still, many obstacles to the success of open data remain. These include economic, cultural and technical issues. Libraries are key stakeholders in the development and success of open data. As such, it is important for the library community to address these challenges and anticipate their implications for services and collections. Specific obstacles that libraries must address include infrastructure challenges; integration of metadata creation into the research process; commodification of data; barriers in academe and publishing to sharing research; and intellectual property and legislative constraints. This poster, based on ongoing research and a presentation at the 2007 IASSIST conference will examine each of these obstacles. The poster will also address ideas for how libraries can anticipate and prepare for the emerging importance of open data. The presenters will solicit feedback from LAUNC-CH participants on whether and how they are seeing the open data movement impact their areas of work. For example, are faculty members asking for help finding or using open data sources; are librarians working to incorporate open data sources in library collections; what other implications of open data should be addressed by libraries?

The purpose of our research was to determine why and where, if at all, censorship of library collections occurs, specifically in relation to the public libraries of North Carolina.  We wanted to know if books are actually being banned, what kinds of books are being challenged, and what types of communities and people are likely to request this action.  We undertook this project with the intention of discovering which books from the American Library Association's (ALA) List of 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1999-2000 are present in the collections of North Carolina public libraries.  For our research, we studied the top 25 books from this list.  Our purpose was to determine the relationship between the demographics of a community and the presence or absence of these often challenged books in their libraries.  We chose to research the 10 largest (by population) counties in North Carolina, as well as the 10 smallest, searching online catalogs for the top 25 most frequently challenged books from the ALA list.  We hoped that by researching both urban and rural areas, we could get a more accurate reading of the censorship that occurs in North Carolina.  Our goal was to answer several questions related to demographics and challenged materials:

• What types of books are being challenged?
• What types of communities and people challenge books?
• What are correlating factors within communities between:
  • education level and number of challenged and/or banned books?
  • income and number of challenged and/or banned books?
  • religious affiliations and number of challenged and/or banned books?

As a result of this study, we have determined that the examined demographics, including income, education levels and religious preferences, cannot necessarily be considered indicative of the presence or absence of challenged books in North Carolina library systems.  It seems that the idea shared by many is that censorship and challenges run rampant in our public libraries, but we believe that this theory is based more on anecdotal evidence than actual numbers. Our hope is that the results of this study will be of interest to others in the process of getting an education in Library and Information Studies, as well as current librarians and people with a vested interest in censorship, and will assist in the professional development of a philosophy toward censorship and its effect on public library collections. 

There are many students, workers and residents in North Carolina and the United States who have limited English-speaking abilities. It is impossible and impractical to expect librarians to know their languages and cultures but librarians do need to know how to encourage and help people often unfamiliar with American institutions. Helping them use libraries may be difficult but there are techniques, behaviors and communication tips that help library staff deal with and serve this clientele. This presentation will outline basic guidelines, from signage and speaking clues to stretching one's imagination and helping create a pro-active climate of openness in the library. The author is the former head of the North Carolina Foreign Language Center.

Ensuring persistent access to their growing collections of digital assets is a challenge confronting contemporary institutions of all types and sizes. Work in the areas of digital preservation and access has resulted in a set of strategies, technological approaches, and activities now termed "digital curation." This evolving area of investigation and practice necessitates new approaches for professional education and development. Some educational opportunities exist to prepare professionals to work in this area, but most have taken the form of one-to-five day workshops, and only a few graduate-level information and library science programs focus specifically on digital curation coursework. To better manage a rich and expanding body of diverse digital assets in the coming decades, it is necessary to provide comprehensive educational opportunities in order to prepare students for professional appointments as digital curation specialists.

An international initiative is underway at the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) to develop a graduate-level digital curation curricular framework, course modules, and experiential components. The project, "Preserving Access to Our Digital Future: Building an International Digital Curation Curriculum," (DigCCurr) is a collaboration of SILS and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), guided by an international advisory board of leading experts from Australia, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. This paper shares preliminary findings from several data collection activities, including personal interviews and surveys, undertaken to inform curriculum development.

Specifically, this paper reports on:

• A description of the ongoing DigCCurr project, including the Carolina Digital Curation Fellowship program;
• A six-dimensional matrix of digital curation curricular components and a high-level categorization of digital curation functions;
and
• Perceptions on the changing professional competencies and personal attributes for employment in digital curation environments.

This paper presents four perspectives on the application of digital curation principles in real-world settings, presented by the Carolina Digital Curation Fellows. The Carolina Digital Curation Fellowship program supports five graduate students interested in research and work in data and digital curation for two academic years (2007-09). Funded through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Carolina Digital Curation Fellows combine coursework with a digital curation practicum assignment in an academic library, archive, or data center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Presented are reflective accounts of specific digital curation challenges from the perspectives of four of the Fellows, within the context of their Fellowship settings. John Blythe will speak on the challenges associated with inconsistent file naming conventions from his experience building a directory within the dark archive for the Carolina Digital Library and Archive's (CDLA) Documenting the American South publishing initiative. Lisa Gregory has been working on image scanning projects for the CDLA's Digital Production Center. She will speak on the intersection of the image needs and expectations of project managers, production center staff and librarians, and the importance for all stakeholders to have a common, basic understanding of imaging best practices and standards. Samantha Guss works at the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science's Data Archive, one of the oldest and largest collections of social science datasets in the United States. She will discuss her project to standardize the archive's metadata to prepare it for migration to a Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) compliant system and how such activities necessitate the need for good ingest metadata practices and education of data creators. Lastly, Jennifer Mantooth will speak on her experience attempting to identify archival value in defunct Webspaces hosted at her practicum site, ibiblio.org. Because ibiblio's implementation of openness extends to contributor access and maintenance of their own Webspaces, it leads to a unique situation of how to archive abandoned and often context-less files, and the question of whether these Webspaces should even be considered archival in the first place.