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Exam period can be a stressful time for students, and having examples of past papers to help prepare for the tests can be extremely helpful. It is possible that past exams are already shared on your campus--by professors in their specific courses, via student unions or groups, or between individual students. In this article, we will go over the workflows and infrastructure to support the systematic collection, provision of access to, and repository management of past exam papers. We will discuss platform-agnostic considerations of opt-in versus opt-out submission, access restriction, discovery, retention schedules, and more. Finally, we will share the University of Toronto setup, including a dedicated instance of DSpace, batch metadata creation and ingest scripts, and our submission and retention workflows that take into account the varying needs of stakeholders across our three campuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Placing Papers: The American Literary Archive Market (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020) discussed the post–World War II trade in authors’ papers. One finding of Placing Papers was how well Black writers did on the market as measured by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) rank of their papers’ housing institutions and the frequency with which Black authors were paid for their materials. However, this boon for Black writers only occurred once colleges and universities sought to improve the diversity of their holdings. In this update to Placing Papers, the author expands her data set to include more authors of color to verify her original findings for Black writers and determine the comparative success of Latino authors. The study determined that while Black writers indeed do just as well or better than white authors on the archive market, Latino writers remain understudied and undercollected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital heritage portal interfaces are generally similar to digital library and search engine interfaces in displaying search results as a list of brief metadata records. The knowledge organization and search result display of these systems are item-centric, with little support for identifying relationships between items. This paper proposes a knowledge graph system and visualization interface as a promising solution for digital heritage systems to support users in browsing related items, understanding the relationships between items, and synthesizing a narrative on an issue. The paper discusses design issues for the knowledge graph, graph database, and graph visualization, and offers recommendations based on the authors' experience in developing three knowledge graph systems for archive and digital humanities resources: the Zubir Said personal archive collection at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore; Singapore Pioneers social network; and Polyglot Medicine knowledge graph of Asian traditional and herbal medicine. Lessons learned from a small user study are incorporated in the discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study discusses the importance of the DSpace open-source software that supports numerous digital libraries and repositories around the world. With the release of DSpace version 7, a natural question that arises is whether the new version offers enough new functionalities to motivate system administrators to upgrade. This paper briefly describes the most important changes, including new features and bug fixes, included in DSpace 7.4 and prior minor versions. The next parts of this paper explore our estimate that there are several thousand DSpace-based systems globally that will likely have to be upgraded in the near future. The main reason for this need is that older versions of DSpace (including 5.x) have reached the end of their developer support period or are reaching it in mid-2023. Based on our own upgrade experience, we propose suggestions and recommendations on migrating from the previous DSpace 6.3-based environment to the new one in a case study that concludes this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the most controversial issues in international documents librarianship that has been the rollout of the Proquest 19th Century House of Commons Parliamentary Papers database. The author says that the database offers dramatically improved means of searching and accessing British Parliamentary information. The database is a significant tool for accessing a collection that has always been difficult to research in print and is often cited as being the richest and most important collection of printed government records in any country. Parliamentary papers, medieval papers through the eighteenth century, nineteenth century and print and digital in the twentieth century are discussed.

Stamp collectors frequently donate their stamps to cultural heritage institutions. As digitization becomes more prevalent for other kinds of materials, it is worth exploring how cultural heritage institutions are digitizing their philatelic materials. This paper begins with a review of the literature about the purpose of metadata, current metadata standards, and metadata that are relevant to philatelists. The paper then examines the digital philatelic collections of four large cultural heritage institutions, discussing the metadata standards and elements employed by these institutions. The paper concludes with a recommendation to create international standards that describe metadata management explicitly for philatelic materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the digitization of cultural heritage in Russian libraries, archives, and museums. In order to achieve the research goals, both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies were adopted to analyze the current status of legislative principles related to digitization through the literature review and the circumstance of the latest projects related to digitization through the literature and website review. The results showed that these institutions seem quite successful where they provide a wide range of services for the users to access the digital collections. However, the main constraints on digitization within libraries, archives, and museums in Russia are connected with the scale of the work, dispersal of rare books throughout the country, and low level of document usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation documentation provides important information about a library's collections, including condition assessments and treatment decisions. Paper files or local databases, however, can make this information unavailable to most library staff and create problems for searching and preservation. To avoid these problems, in 2016, Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) started using the MARC 583 field to record conservation documentation for items in the Special Collections Library. By placing this information in the catalog record, conservation information was publicly viewable, searchable, and protected by regular database backups. This article describes the process of implementing the MARC 583 field at Penn State for conservation documentation, including selecting standards, encoding the field, and outcomes from the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Details matter, especially when they can influence whether users engage with a new digital initiative that relies heavily on their support. During the recent development of MacEwan University's institutional repository, the librarians leading the project wanted to ensure the site would offer users an easy and effective way to deposit their works, in turn helping to ensure the repository's long-term viability. The following paper discusses their approach to user-testing, applying Dan Saffer's framework of microinteractions to how faculty members experienced the repository's self-archiving functionality. It outlines the steps taken to test and refine the self-archiving process, shedding light on how others may apply the concept of microinteractions to better understand a website's utility and the overall user experience that it delivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper details an approach for accurately machine sorting Library of Congress (LC) call numbers which improves considerably upon other methods reviewed. The authors have employed this sorting method in creating an open-source software tool for library stacks maintenance, possibly the first such application capable of sorting the full range of LC call numbers. The method has potential application to any software environment that stores and retrieves LC call number information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) archives which was organized in 1979 by its then Secretary Philip Van de Voorde. It cites various materials available in the archives including correspondence, minutes of meetings, and working papers on special projects. It notes several steps needed to accomplish when donating materials to GODORT including proper files labeling with content, year, and committee and keeping materials to be donated in a letter-size file folders.

The North American library community is looking at ways to enhance authority records with nonroman scripts. The Library of Congress Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO) Authority File (LC/NAF) is limited to Latin script. This paper looks ahead to the use of other scripts in LC/NAF. The author examines the options for using Hebrew script in MARC 21 authority records, and considers the prospects for cooperative authority work between American and Israeli libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines factors that limit the ability of institutions to digitally preserve the cultural heritage of the modern era. The author takes a wide-ranging approach to shed light on limitations to the scope of digital preservation. The author finds that technological limitations to digital preservation have been addressed but still exist, and that non-technical aspects-access, selection, law, and finances-move into the foreground as technological limitations recede. The author proposes a nested model of constraints to the scope of digital preservation and concludes that costs are digital preservation's most pervasive limitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Materials related to Japanese military "comfort women" in Korea are managed by several institutions. Each digital archive has their own metadata schema and management policies. So far, a standard or a common guideline for describing digital records is not formalized. We propose a Japanese military "comfort women" knowledge graph to semantically interlink the digital records from distributed digital archives. To build a Japanese military "comfort women" knowledge graph, digital records and descriptive metadata were collected from existing digital archives. A list of metadata was defined by analyzing commonly used properties and a knowledge model designed by reusing standard vocabularies. Knowledge was constructed by interlinking the collected records, external data sources, and enriching data. The knowledge graph was evaluated using the FAIR data maturity model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The MetaScholar Initiative of Emory University Libraries, in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, the Atlanta History Center, and the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, received an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant to develop a new model for library-museum-archives collaboration. This collaboration will broaden access to resources for learning communities through the use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAIPMH). The project, titled Music of Social Change (MOSC), will use OAI-PMH as a tool to bridge the widely varying metadata standards and practices across museums, archives, and libraries. This paper will focus specifically on the unique advantages of the use of OAIPMH to concurrently maximize the exposure of metadata emergent from varying metadata cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing interest in ephemera collections within libraries will necessitate the bibliographic control of materials that do not easily fall into traditional categories. This paper discusses the many challenges confronting catalogers when approaching a mixed collection of unique materials of an ephemeral nature. Based on their experience cataloging a collection of Pennsylvania German broadsides and Fraktur at the Pennsylvania State University, the authors describe the process of deciphering handwriting, preserving genealogical information, deciding on cataloging approaches at the format and field level, and furthering access to the materials through digitization and the Encoded Archival Description finding aid. Observations are made on expanding the skills of traditional book catalogers to include manuscript cataloging, and on project management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Confronted with increasingly rapid technological developments and the likelihood of continued economic constraints, libraries face numerous challenges in the coming years that are already affecting their operating models. While many functions are well-established, the responsibility of adequately preserving our collections remains a mandate only partially fulfilled. Many of the same developments that increase access complicate preservation efforts by increasing the competition for diminishing resources, expanding the number of options available, and fundamentally questioning established norms such as the notion of permanence. This paper explores the impact of these trends on the library's role as memory institution and poses questions about the near future of preservation in the research library. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ways the Philadelphia-based Chronicling Resistance project is breaking down or reinforcing the silencing of historically marginalized populations in the archives and the ways the shuttering of archives during the coronavirus pandemic has affected those populations' access to and relationship with archival material. Initiated by the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL) in 2018, Chronicling Resistance has had two chief aims: to amplify stories of resistance in the archives and to help collect and preserve stories of today's acts of resistance. The global pandemic hit shortly after the project entered a pilot phase (February 2020) in which three individuals who identify as black and as cultural organizers began working as nontraditional archival research fellows in PACSCL institutions. The researchers were frustrated by the loss of physicality and increased dependence upon archival theory's social hierarchies in online searches. In virtual group discussions about their research practice, they expressed concerns about the increased policing effect that public health precautions like restricted access to special collections may have on black and brown people. Their perseverance through the pilot phase, however, also offers an opportunity for archivists and special collections librarians trying to find improvisational, creative solutions to a public health and public history crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, colleges and universities around the world were forced to close or move to online instruction. Many institutions host yearly student research symposiums. This article describes how two universities used their institutional repositories to adapt their student research symposiums to virtual events in a matter of weeks. Both universities use the bepress Digital Commons platform for their institutional repositories. Even though the two universities' symposium strategies differed, some commonalities emerged, particularly with regard to learning the best practices to highlight student work and support their universities' efforts to host research symposiums virtually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stemming from a previously published serials literature review by Library Resources and Technical Services (LRTS), this paper provides a review of a subset of the serials literature published in 2008 and 2009 focusing on open access (OA). The broader scope of the serials literature sets the stage for a culture of openness receptive to the OA movement. Catalysts to this movement, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandate, university OA policies, and increased emphasis on self-archiving in institutional repositories (IRs), are of interest to serials and electronic resource professionals who steward academic research collections. This interest is exemplified by the significant number of open-access-related articles intertwined throughout the serials literature of 2008 and 2009. Topics covered in this article include the NIH mandate, universities' responses to the NIH mandate, overviews of OA, the IR as a model of OA, strategies for supporting IRs, and evaluation of the effects of OA on scholarly communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) presents a complex conceptual model. Because of this, it is not easy for everyone to understand. The purpose of this paper is to make some of the more difficult aspects of the FRBR model, in particular the Group 1 entities work, expression, manifestation, and item, easier to understand by placing FRBR in the context of what it is: a conceptual entity-relationship model. To this end, a definition of the term ‘model’ is presented, a variety of types and functions of models are introduced, conceptual models are discussed in detail, modeling an abstraction is explained, and different ways of interpreting FRBR are suggested. Various models used in the history of cataloging are introduced to place FRBR in the context of the historical development of document models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes guidelines for collaboration across libraries, archives, and museums that incorporate an understanding of how collections develop, the social systems that impart value to the collected items, and the needs of the research population. Future directions for professional practice implied by these general theoretical principles may enable collecting institutions to provide a high level of service to patrons while retaining their defined individual identities, expertise, and access (albeit sometimes indirectly) to the original physical objects. The proposal relies on institutional relationships. To comprehend how relationships between collecting institutions can be used to preserve the historical record, one must understand why materials that document the historical record matter. The solution suggested here -- that of a managed de-accessioning and accessioning cycle of selected and, therefore, historically important materials between different types of institutions -- is an adaptation of the ideas presented by both Atkinson and Baker. Emphasis is placed on fostering active relationships between individual institutions in order to preserve original documents that have attained significant contemporary social value and potential future usefulness. Reshaping day-to-day practice and designing systems modeled on the proposed themes could lead to Pareto-optimal outcomes for all participating organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a case study of how six digitization competencies were developed and disseminated via grant-funded digitization projects at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries Special Collections and Archives. The six competencies are project planning, grant writing, project management, metadata, digital capture, and digital asset management. The authors will introduce each competency, discuss why it is important, and describe how it was developed during the course of the grant project, as well as how it was taught in a workshop environment. The differences in competency development for three different stakeholder groups will be examined: early career grant staff gaining on-the-job experience; experienced digital collections librarians experimenting and innovating; and a statewide audience of cultural heritage professionals attending grant-sponsored workshops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]