Smithsonian Libraries

Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Smithsonian Research Online

During the week of January 16-19th, I visited the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) to discuss several matters relating to the Smithsonian Research Online (SRO) program and to offer technical support and training to STRI library staff. I was accompanied from Washington by Digital Services Head, Martin Kalfatovic, who was to attend a three-day Encyclopedia-of-Life meeting at Barro-Colorado Island during the same week.

Together we met with Oris Sanjur (STRI Associate Director for Science Administration), Vielka Chang-Yau (STRI head librarian), Angel Aguirre (librarian), Klaus Winter (STRI scientist) and Eldredge Bermingham (STRI Director). Everyone was in agreement that STRI-authored publication data ought to be collected in one place and that the SIL is doing a good job of coordinating this program across all Institution units. The Director and Associate Director will discuss the specific needs of their unit and report back to SIL, who will propose a workflow to accomplish this.

Meanwhile, I held a brief introduction to the bibliographic tools, EndNote and Zotero for STRI library staff and volunteers. While we had a training room available to us, unfortunately there was not a copy of these programs available to all participants. But they were still able to see the possibilities of using these tools in day-to-day library services.

Alvin and Vielka review the SRO website and list of Smithsonian-authored publications using the newly-installed LCD screen in the STRI library. Photo courtesy of martin_kalfatovic via Flickr.

Finally, I met with Fernando Bouché (Head, Office of Information Technology) and STRI programmer, Carlos Caballero, to discuss the management of publication data, its re-use on the STRI web page and inclusion in the SI Collections search system (EDAN).

STRI scientists publish over 300 scholarly papers every year. Approximately 70% of them are captured automatically by the SRO via websites and associated tools. This circumvents the need for manual data entry. The inclusion of the complete corpus of work being done there is an essential part of representing the research being conducted at the Institution and the cooperation between the SI Libraries and STRI will bring the project to fruition.

 

 

 

A Fall Intern Recap from NMAI and MSC

Below, Jaqueline Baird, one of our latest interns, gives an overview of her work at the Smithsonian Libraries. Interested in interning with us? Check out our Professional Development internships. Applications are open now through March 12, 2012.

 

When I was young, and my parents took me to the library, I was amazed by the stacks filled with books.  All of this information, right at my tiny fingertips.  Worlds awaiting my young and eager imagination.  The library was a special place for me then and continues to be a special place for me now.  As an adult, I knew I wanted to be a librarian.  A person who understands the extraordinary relationship between a person and a book.  A person knows the value of information.  A person who wants to help others.  Through my journey to the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, I have only strengthened my understanding that libraries are special places and librarians are unique people.

 

Museum Service Center Library in Suitland, MD.

 

I applied for the internship in September and was accepted into the program in October.  I was ecstatic.  Here I was, a small town Pennsylvania girl becoming a part of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries.  Every day since has been wonderful and exciting.  I have learned so many new skills to supplement the library science education I am receiving at The Catholic University of America.  From October to December I worked in the National Museum of the American Indian branch library under Baasil Wilder.  Baasil has been an excellent mentor and supervisor, giving advice about the career and sharing his own personal experiences.  While at the NMAI, I performed tasks such as organizing the reading room located within the library.  This was a labor intensive undertaking, but satisfying to know that it would benefit the users in the end.  The room was more clearly defined and uniform.  I also worked within the closed stacks, pulling books to ship to users and looking for missing books which helped me to gain a better understanding of what the collection contained physically.

 

National Museum of the American Indian Library.

 Another project that I worked on was entering artist information into a database available through the Smithsonian.  I would look at pieces of artwork, portfolios, and exhibition pamphlets to gather information pertinent to each author and enter that information into the system.  The final project I completed while at the NMAI was creating a collection development policy for the library in accordance with a final project for a collection development class I was taking.  The class and the internship worked well together for me because I was working so heavily with the collection that writing the policy really solidified the work I was doing and the knowledge I was gaining.  I realized how important the collection development policy is to any library and how it can really help the staff to become very familiar with their collection. Both Baasil Wilder and Bill Baxter were so helpful throughout the process, answering my questions and providing insight into not only the NMAI but the inner workings of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries as a whole.  Overall, working at the NMAI has been a beneficial and wonderful experience.  I am so happy I received an opportunity to work there and I hope to continue to be of service to the library. 

In January, I began working at the Museum Support Center branch across from the NMAI.  Though I have not been there long, I have already begun work on several projects and am excited to see where the rest of my time here takes me.  I am learning so much about libraries from a managerial perspective, working under Gil Taylor.   He shares his advice on the profession and provides suggestions for the rest of my time in school.  I knew that the Smithsonian Institution Libraries would be an amazing place to work, but it was the people who really make it exceptional.  Every person that I meet is so friendly and willing to provide help.  On the days that I go into either the NMAI or the MSC, I wake up with a smile on my face knowing that this will be an exciting day filled by doing what I love with other people who are doing what they love.

—Jacqueline Baird, Intern Fall 2011-Spring 2012

New and Notables: January 2012

Wondering what's new in the SIL stacks this month? Here's a sampling! Above the book listings, you'll see a slideshow with links to the WorldCat records for each book. If you are not a user of our physical collection, WorldCat will help you find a copy of the book in a library near you.

Here are some of the newest additions to the National Air and Space Museum Library collection:

	Astronomy at the Frontiers of Scienceby Jean-Pierre Lasota, editor.   Springer, New York/Dordrecht, 2011.    QB47. A88 2011
	Cataclysm: General Hap Arnold and the Defeat of Japan by Herman S. Wolk.  University of North Texas Press,Denton, Texas,  2010.  UG626.2 A76 W65 2010
	DC-3, A Legend in Her Time.  A 75th Anniversary Photographic Tribute by Bruce McAllister.  Roundup Press, Boulder, Colorado, 2010.  TL686. D65 M33 2010
	Skies to Conquer: A Year Inside the Air Force Academy by Diana Jean Schemo.   John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2010.  UG638.5 P1 S34 2010
	Wings of Ice: The Mystery of the Polar Air Race by Jeff Maynard.  Vintage Books, New South Wales, North Sydney, Australia.  G608. M39 2010

—Leah Smith

 

New books in the National Museum of American History Library:

	Benching Jim Crow : the rise and fall of the color line in southern college sports, 1890-1980 / / Charles H. Martin. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, c2010. GV706.32 .M37 2010
	Founding rivals : Madison vs. Monroe, the Bill of Rights and the election that saved a nation / / by Chris DeRose.Washington, D.C. : Regnery Pub., 2011. E302.1 .D47 2011
	Are we not new wave? : modern pop at the turn of the 1980s by Theo Cateforis.Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, c2011. ML3534 .C37 2011
	Japanese American resettlement through the lens : Hikaru Carl Iwasaki and the WRA's Photographic Section, 1943-1945 by Lane Ryo Hirabayashi ; with Kenichiro Shimada ; photographs by Hikaru Carl Iwasaki ; foreword by Norman Y. Mineta. Boulder, Colo. : University Press of Colorado, c2009. D769.8.A6 H578 2009
	Lincoln on war edited and with an introduction by Harold Holzer. Chapel Hill, N.C. : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, c2011. E457.92 2011

— Trina Brown

Website Redesign: Update One

As we've mentioned before, the Smithsonian Libraries is redoing its website to move to Drupal 7 and away from our legacy ColdFusion site. The new site aims to be more friendly easier to our visitors, with a "flatter" hierarchy of information and simpler navigation to find information. It's been two months since we started and we have an update on where we are in the development and some of the fun things we've encountered along the way.

Graphic Design

The same content appears differently in various browsers. Shown: Internet Explorer, Opera and Chrome

(N.B. When I refer to "styles", I really mean CSS. For the uninitiated, this is generally what controls how a web page looks, separating it from what a website does or what information the site contains.)

We're happy to say that the graphic design is nearly complete! Our initial design started with a Photoshop file. The first round of development of was simply to convert the Photoshop file into an HTML 5 Prototype that looked as close as possible to the Photoshop file while still looking normal in all of the major browsers. It's a fact of life that we still need to support some of the quirky styles that are needed to make a site look good in Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and OS X Safari. This HTML Prototype is a way to make sure that what we want to build can be built. After that, it's a matter of turning it into something functional.

(Side note: There are those out there who may argue that this step is inconsequential and possibly a misuse of valuable time. As I've continued beyond the Prototype, I've found that the it is a useful reminder of what the page should look like. I've referred back to it a number of time during my conversion of the Prototype to a Drupal 7 theme.)

So that means the second round, creating a Drupal Theme was the next logical step. Even though the manner in which I created the prototype was completely different from that of creating a Drupal Theme, the work that I did there carried forward and streamlined some of the development of the theme. For the record, we are using the Zen theme, which is meant to act as a foundation for a sub-theme of your own creation, which we did. We cleverly named our sub-theme "smithsonianlibraries" to set it apart from the other themes that Drupal uses. Of course, we will not be sharing this theme with others, though it may get use on related websites that we build in the future, especially if they are Drupal.

Content is key!

Pretty graphics aside, there comes a point in developing a site in Drupal where the content starts to become important. It's one thing to create a handful of placeholder menu items, but those all need to be deleted and recreated (or edited) when the content becomes available. So now we have something along the lines of a chicken-before-the-egg problem. Building a website requires the content, but the content requires somewhere to go before the site can be built. So in one sense, these two things happen in parallel while we're building.In this case, I started out with some sample content to get the basics in place, but at this point in time I've deleted the sample content for a more complete set of records. They may still need some edits, but the content is still closer to "final" than "beta."

Much of the content so far has not be a simple matter of export-from-old and import-to-new. Certain portions of the site are getting a new, flatter architecture which means that content that once was separated onto multiple different pages is now being combined into a single, rich page. The benefits to the user experience far outweigh the temporary challenges that we face in reorganizing the data.

At this point in time, we can say that each of the 20+ locations of the Smithsonian Libraries will have it's on "homepage" giving you all the most important information about that library in one place. More information will be available if you wish to delve deeper, but this aims to help visitors find information faster and easier than before.

There's more to come!

As we mentioned before, this first phase of development presents a new website based on Drupal 7. Despite the learning curve involved, for both the developers and the rest of our staff, we feel we are well-positioned for what is to come later this year... 

For now, schedules have shifted slightly, so now we are working towards an internal launch date in February or March and the launch and announcement of our new site sometime in April, at the earliest.

Stay tuned!!