Scholar@UC Upgrade and Content Freeze

Scholar@UC is undergoing an upgrade!  On Oct. 19 or soon after, Scholar@UC will freeze content to undergo a planned migration to an upgraded platform, “Scholar 3.0”.  During the freeze, all content including works, collections, and user profiles will be available but read-only; submitting new content will not be possible during this time.  The content freeze is projected to last a little over one week (restoring full access on October 30th or soon after).  Once the migration is complete, an all-clear email will be sent out and new content contributions and changes can resume.

The Scholar@UC 3.0 upgrade includes some exciting new features: Continue reading

Job posting: Digital Lab Manager, University of Cincinnati Libraries

The University of Cincinnati Libraries is seeking a Digital Lab Manager (a 3-year renewable position). The successful candidate will direct the operations of a digital lab in a university research library, including digitizing rare books, manuscripts and special collections, managing digitization projects and workflows, maintaining equipment and software, providing quality control, and supervising student assistants. This is an exciting opportunity to join a dynamic and diverse organization in a great university, great city, with high potential for interesting technical work.

Evaluation of candidates begins on September 21, 2017. The University of Cincinnati is an EE/AA employer. For more information and application instructions see: https://jobs.uc.edu/job/Cincinnati-Digital-Lab-Manager-OH-45201/425512200/.

New Digital Content: UC’s First Thesis, Thomas Jefferson Letter, Hamilton County Morgue Records, News Record, UC Commencement Programs, and Preservation Lab Treatment Reports

After working through some storage limitations on the Digital Resource Commons, the UCL Digital Lab is pleased to publish several recently digitized items.

John Hough James Thesis and Thomas Jefferson Letter

The first thesis written at the University of CincinnatiIn July 2016 the Eaton family donated two jewels from their family archive: the first thesis ever written at the University of Cincinnati in 1820 by John Hough James and a letter from President Thomas Jefferson, to whom James had written for additional source material on Poland.

Hamilton County Morgue Records

Ossie Bowman's death entryAbout three years ago, UC Libraries published a digitized collection of historical ledgers from the Hamilton County Morgue, documenting the circumstances of death for thousands of Cincinnatians. Somehow during this process, one of the volumes was missed. We have just published volume 11 of the Morgue Records, 1910-1911.

News Record

The News RecordWhile most issues of News Record from the 1960’s and 70’s have been digitized over the past five years, we were missing seven volumes from the 1970’s. The UCL Digital Lab is pleased to publish the complete run from the 1970’s, each issue has been OCR’ed and full-text indexed.

Commencement Programs

Invitation to first UC commencementWe have recently published a digitized collection of 116 UC commencement programs, from 1878 to 1973. While most years only include the official program, some contain invitations to commencement-related events and even the text from commencement addresses. These programs have been OCR’ed and full-text indexed to make it easier to search for UC alumni.

The Preservation Lab Treatment Reports

Preservation Lab Treatment ReportThe Preservation Lab has been publishing treatment reports and photographic documentation that are a record of conservation treatments conducted in the lab on special collections items held either by the University of Cincinnati Libraries or the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. The reports offer detailed bibliographic information and technical information on the construction of the materials. Several new reports have been added to both the UC Libraries and Public Library collections.

New Digital Content: Ambrose Bierce Letters, UC History Books and Reports, Indian Botany

The UCL Digital Lab has been busy over the past several months digitizing new content and collections. While we are still curating some of that content, we wanted to share a few things in the meantime.

Ambrose Bierce letters to Myles Walsh, 1895-1911

Formal black and white portrait of a man, Ambrose Bierce, in tuxedo.

Ambrose Bierce

The collection of the letters of Ambrose Bierce to Myles Walsh consists of the correspondence to Elizabeth (Lily) Walsh and Myles Walsh from 1895-1911. Myles Walsh’s sister, Lily, was a protege of Bierce and during her illness–and after her death in 1895–in young adulthood, the two men began writing to each other.

The Archives and Rare Books Library created an online exhibition last year. The letters have now been added to the DRC as searchable PDFs.

University of Cincinnati Historical Books and Reports

We digitized several books and reports relating to UC. All are now available in the Digital Resource Commons. A complete list is presented below, in chronological order.

Indian Botany

I know what you’re thinking: Indian botany, where did that come from? UC Libraries has a fantastic collection, some of our items are rare and unique. Occasionally these rare and unique items are requested through Interlibrary Loan. Unfortunately, frequently, due to their rarity and condition, we are not always able to fulfill the requests. We’ve embarked upon an effort to, when possible, digitized this content and make it available to the work in digital form.

The first example of this is Some Wild Flowers of Kasmir by Emilia F. Noel. UC’s copy of this 1903 botanical exploration of Kashmir includes many penciled in annotations, believed to be in Noel’s own hand.

As we are able to publish more collections, we’ll make announcements here!

Scholar@UC 2.2 can now import videos from UC’s Kaltura

 

We’ve just released Scholar@UC version 2.2.0. In addition to many bug fixes, there are several new features available in this new version:

  • Users can now use the “Cloud file” upload tab to import their UC Kaltura videos directly into Scholar@UC.
  • Keyword search has been extended to all descriptive metadata fields.
  • Added Clermont, Blue Ash, and Law Library to the “College” menu option for student work types.
  • On collection pages, the “Search within this collection” button has been renamed “Browse this collection.”
  • To facilitate batch loads and imports of works from other repositories, repository managers can now change work ownership to users who have never logged in.   Once those users login, they will have complete control of their content.

A full list of changes can be found in the 2.2.0 changelog.
Source: Scholar@UC

Scholar@UC 2.1 released

Scholar@UC version 2.1 is now available.  With this update, Scholar@UC enforces a 3 GB limit for files uploaded or downloaded through the online interface, but also directs users to a form for requesting help with larger files.  The Scholar@UC team will manually or bulk load larger files directly to the repository, and provide an asynchronous method for authorized sharing of larger files when requested.

Note that 3 GB files may be extremely slow, until IT@UC has completed the work to add memory resources to the Scholar@UC production environment.  The Scholar@UC team will continue to lobby for improvements to this environment.

College and Departmental fields are now available as facets, and appear on all input forms, pre-populated (except for theses and student works) with the College and Department of the submitter, as provided by UC identity management.  These default values can be overridden.  The Scholar@UC team will add these values to past works.

We have improved the load time for Collections containing a large number of works.  In addition, a ‘Search within collection’ button takes the user to a browsable view of the collection, where facets and keyword searching can be applied.

See the Scholar@UC Change Log on GitHub for a complete list of bug fixes and changes.


Source: Scholar@UC

All systems now back online after earlier storage outage

Update – all systems affected by the storage outage (see description below) are now fully back online.  Please contact ucdp@uc.edu or scholar@uc.edu with any questions. Thank you.


(June 7th: 10:42 am)
The isilon storage array maintained by IT@UC had an outage last night. The storage system is back up, but some systems that use it are not. At the time of this blog post, the Digital Resource Commons (https://drc.libraries.uc.edu); the Digital Collections and Repositories website (https://digital.libraries.uc.edu), the Luna image and media repository (https://digital.libraries.uc.edu/luna), and Journals@UC (https://journals.uc.edu) are either down are not fully functional. Some development or test systems are also down. These systems are all in process of coming back online.

Scholar@UC (https://scholar.uc.edu) is up. This blog post will be updated when all systems are back online. You may contact ucdp@uc.edu or Scholar@uc.edu with any questions. Thank you.