Dsg 2015-03-12

Announcements

• Given that several staff members will be at the all-day ACRL event on campus, our meeting on 3/19 is canceled.
• Our last meeting in March will focus on the DRS Toolkit.
• Our first meeting in April will focus more on assessment.
• The DSG has been asked to do a presentation at the all-library staff meeting on 3/25. Jim will compile slides related to each staff member's presentation.
• Julia mentioned that in Deborah Mandel is interested in having the DSG collaborate with the DMC at some point, ideally in the fall. Ideas for the collaboration involve showcasing student work from both areas.

Discussion of Bookworm / Grants with Ben Schmidt

Ben Schmidt (History) attended the first half of our meeting to discuss Bookworm and the potential for grant opportunities that involve Bookworm and the DSG. An overview of Bookworm can be found here. Some general observations:

• Julia stressed the value of grant proposals that could potentially benefit multiple projects implementing Bookworm.
• A grant proposal that was not successful from last year focused on making Bookworm more TEI-aware and proposed using the ECDA, WWP, and TAPAS as test projects. The plan was to consider how Bookworm functioned within three contexts that made use of TEI in different ways (and to compare these differences).
• Now that we have the DRS Project Toolkit, we are interested in focusing on what Bookworm might look like as a component in the toolkit. Many of the Toolkit's current proposals / dimensions focus on visual and audio items in collections, and Bookworm would help us focus on text-centric digital projects. The possibility of providing the ability to export data in a Bookworm-friendly way and construct a project interface that let you display that data was discussed.
• While Bookworm and TEI are still dimensions of these conversations / grant plans, they are no longer the main priority. Some ideas for implementation of Bookworm considered how it might work on projects with a document metadata model (i.e. projects using Wordpress or Omeka), but it was also noted that many Omeka projects are more image-heavy than text-heavy. A generalized Omeka parser could be a useful deliverable.
• Ben discussed the logistics of getting Bookworm up and running. A server would need to be configured to run it: MySQL would need to be continuously running with a significant amount of memory and some customizations. This can be done using Amazon servers, and Yale has a version of Bookworm running on virtual machines.
• The value of a single database and a single API that all DSG projects could use (so that only one server instance was needed that we could distribute across various databases running on the back end) was discussed. Using the Fedora API to send Bookworm the data it wants was also discussed, but Sarah mentioned that such a set-up might only grab item metadata: the possibilities of grabbing full-text from items would still need to be discussed and explored.

Discussion of Assessment

Amanda led a discussion of library assessment and the DSG's potential use of assessment. The wiki page on Assessment and Evaluation can be found here. Amanda wants us to think about:

• How assessment has looked / functioned at the library
• What role we want assessment to play in our particular area
• What our particular philosophy of assessment should be

Some additional points discussed included:

• Some background on the history of library assessment and how library-wide assessment has emphasized user engagement and outreach.
• The library's status as a net borrower instead of a net lender.
• The library is particularly interested in data by college and faculty assessments so that they can track use across the university. There is a general interest in making data more transparent.
• There's a particular interest in what kinds of questions to use when conducting usability testing / what feedback we might provide on this front.