Smithsonian Libraries

Meet Trina Brown!

    The Libraries welcomes Trina Brown, our new Instructional/Reference Librarian. Trina received a B.A. in speech communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an M.L.S. from the University of Maryland. In her new position, Trina looks forward to getting to know the training needs of the Libraries and Smithsonian staff, while also keeping her hand in reference librarianship. Her home base is in the National Museum of American History Library.

 

 

    Trina is a self-described “army brat” and lived in a number of U.S. states including Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Alaska. She has lived in the DC area since 1997, when she moved to the area for a position in interlibrary loan/reference assistance at the Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library. For the past 5 years, Trina has worked for the Foundation Center, a nonprofit information center in DC, as a reference librarian. She also taught classes on fundraising and grant writing.  Trina is excited to be back at the Smithsonian, as her new role not only incorporates reference and instruction, but also outreach; she will be actively participating in the Libraries’ social media platforms and other initiatives.

    A movie buff, Trina also enjoys reading, painting and charcoal drawing, and has recently taken up knitting. She is a fan of art museums, and likes to visit her old “home” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery. Trina enjoys travelling to New York City and hopes to explore Annapolis, Maryland on a future trip.

Notes from the LITA National Forum: Linked Open Data

On September 30, two of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries' staff attended the American Library Association's LITA (Library and Information Technology) National Forum. The three-day conference was titled "Rivers of Data, Currents of Change". Although it was not explicitly defined, there was a common thread of conversation surrounding Linked Open Data throughout the conference.

For this reason, the presentation given by the Smithsonian Libraries' digial projects librarian Keri Thompson and lead developer Joel Richard, along with Trish Rose-Sandler of the Missouri Botanical Garden, was well-received. Titled "Building the New Open Linked Library: Theory and Practice," the talk gave a high-level overview of the redesign of the Libraries' website, a brief summary of Linked Data, how the Libraries' website redesign centers around the concept of Linked Open Data, and some of the unique things that happen when open data is made available on the web, specifically with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL).

Keri Thompson gave a summary of where our website is today and a very concise overview of the types of content we have. She also gave a brief introduction to Linked Open Data to help get the audience up to speed, since only about half were familiar with the concept.

Joel Richard talked about implementing Linked Data in Drupal 7 and one in-depth example of the data we are planning to put online. The data set provided Taxonomic Literature 2 (or TL-2) is a database of botanists, their publications and detailed information about their contributions to botany and is being digitized by the Libraries'. He also discussed how we are mapping the TL-2 data to the Linked Open Data model, and challenges that we foresee in this development.

Trish Rose-Sandler discussed and presented examples of the new and unique types of things that people can do when we make our data available on the web. These included repurposing BHL content as well as new visualizations of data that were impossible before BHL. 

Overall, the presentation was well-attended with between 50 and 60 people in the audience and a number of good questions posed after the presentation and in subsequent days at the conference. Fortunately the Libraries' talk occurred early in the conference and it was good to see that Drupal and Linked Data were mentioned in a number of talks throughout the conference, including the closing keynote presentation by Barbara McGlamery, a Taxonomist at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. The Libraries' staff plan to attend the 2012 LITA National Forum in Columbus, OH to follow-up on our experiences as we build the Digital Library in the upcoming months.

View the Powerpoint slides of the presentation from the ALA Connect Site.

 

Personal Digital Collections

A recent article in BusinessWeek (http://buswk.co/h8pnfS) profiled a Japanese company that provides homes with some needed extra space. A recent startup, Bookscan, offers scanning of personal book collections in part for customers to more efficiently use their domestic space. As many know, Japanese homes are generally much smaller than North American homes and one can imagine that the elimination or reduction of a bookshelf can be a very valuable expansion of living area.

In addition to services such as those offered by  Bookscan, major manufacturers have begun introducing increasingly sophisticated consumer scanning technologies (an example from ION Audio pictured here). There have even been attempts with personal cameras and other equipment (http://bit.ly/fNqHrt) to scan entire volumes for personal use.

One thing is clear: it has never been easier to create personal digital collections than it is now and that's one reason a Digital Library group was recently formed at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. In addition to licensing content from commercial publishers and scanning our own books, the SIL is beginning to handle a wide variety of digital materials created outside the professional publishing world. However, the acquisition and management of this type of content in library collections demands forethought and the development of a coherent approach.

Most data management and digital library experts agree that early management intervention of digital material (preferably at the time of creation) is the best way to ensure that the content will survive and be usable even in the short term. And the SIL's new Digital Library group aims to ensure that electronic materials are easily discovered, usable and integrated into the larger Smithsonian digital world. The group plans to meet regularly, relying on the perspective of all SIL staff to recommend work flow and practices for specific situations and material-types. All staff are welcome to attend DL meetings and either contribute their own experience or learn more about the collection and management of this material at SIL.

 

 

 

 

Caldwell Lighting project @ the Smithsonian staff picnic

L to R: Doug Dunlop, Metadata Services; Keri Thompson, Web Services; Jen Cohlman, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum Library

Each year at the Smithsonian staff picnic on the National Mall, the Smithsonian Congress of Scholars sponsors a "research tent" that allows Smithsonian staff to share their current and upcoming research projects with colleagues.  This year, the Libraries featured our work on the Caldwell & Co. Lighting project.  As always, it was wonderful to see what research projects or exhibitions our colleagues are working on. There was even another lighting related project (!) "The Challenge of Domestic Illumination in the 19th Century" from the National Museum of American History - but it focused on patents and technology rather than design.

The Caldwell project was great to work on not just because the collection is great, but because, like all our digital projects, it gave Libraries staff the opportunity to collaborate across our various departments and share ideas about new ways to provide access to our collections.

For the Caldwell photo archive, we tried to provide wider access to the collection and bring it to potential audiences by putting select images on the flickr commons, experiment with geotagging images that had lighting fixtures from known locations, and creating wikipedia articles on the company.—Keri Thompson