Open show-and-tell sessions: What’s in your VR closet?

There is growing interest and development in Virtual Reality (VR) for use in immersive education and training, collaboration and communication, as well as for enhancing teaching and learning. Within the University of Cincinnati there are VR activities found throughout campus, including in the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning (DAAP), the College of Medicine and in Game Design, as well as in UC’s Digital Futures facility.

woman experimenting with virtual reality

To showcase some of these VR activities, UC Libraries is holding a series of open sessions with distinguished speakers from UC’s Digital Futures who will share their work, research and innovations in VR. There are three sessions open to all.

Tuesday, September 19, 3pm

Chris Collins, Director, Center for Simulations & Virtual Environments Research

Thursday, October 12, 3pm

Professor Ming Tang, Director, XR-Lab

Thursday, November 16, 3pm

Professor Alejandro Lozano Robledo, Future Mobility Design (FMD) Lab

Venue: All three sessions will be held in the Walter C. Langsam Library, Room 475

All are welcome and light snacks will be provided.

Sidney Gao selected for cohort to earn a Digital Curation Certificate

sidney gaoCongratulations Sidney Gao, digital collections manager in UC Libraries’ Content Services Department, one of 15 staff working in Ohio libraries and archives selected by the State Library of Ohio to form a cohort and complete coursework to earn a Digital Curation Certificate from Library Juice Academy. In this pilot program, federal LSTA funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded to the State Library of Ohio will be utilized to cover the cost of enrollment. This award-winning Digital Curation Certificate is designed to build skills for work in digitization, digital preservation, metadata creation and more, and is suitable for those interested in the work whether they have prior experience or not.

New digital display for 1911 graduate Valentine Barker

 

A collection donated to the College of Engineering and Applied Science Library is now  a new digital exhibit. The Valentine Barker collection provides a snapshot of technical education and advertisement work in the early twentieth century. The collection was recently digitized by the UC Libraries’ Digital Collections Team. 

Valentine Barker was a 1911 graduate of the Ohio Mechanics Institute comprehensive art program.  The Ohio Mechanics Institute (OMI), founded in 1828, is one of CEAS’ source institutions and provided vital technical education during the early development of the city. Beginning in 1901 OMI served as a technical high school, Barker attended as a student of the technical high school.  

A selection of Barker’s talents and a brief overview of OMI history can be found in the digital exhibit.

Luna Digital Collections Application Briefly Unavailable Dec. 12

The Luna application, which houses some of our digital collections, will be upgraded to the latest version available from the vendor this morning, Dec. 12 starting at 10:00 am, so that we may patch some security vulnerabilities that were discovered from a recent scan of the server. Once the upgrade has been completed an all clear will be sent out for the server.

Most other digital collections continue to be available.

Thank you.

Librarians James Van Mil and Hannah Stitzlein take on new roles in digital collection production and management

To meet vital digital collection production and management needs, UC librarians James Van Mil and Hannah Stitzlein have taken on new responsibilities to support digital content, collection and repository service needs for metadata, access, discovery, promotion, ingest/harvest and preservation. Working closely with Sidney Gao, digital lab coordinator, and Glen Horton, head of the development team, they will provide matrix support for content, collections, imaging, repository functional development and technology infrastructure support.

james van mil and hannah stitzlein

James Van Mil and Hannah Stitzlein

James Van Mil has a new title of digital projects and preservation librarian. In this role within the Content Services Team he is responsible for planning and implementing strategies for the life-cycle of digital content. James is a primary contact point for digital collections project management services, UC Libraries digital content strategy and assuring adherence to standards and clarity of workflow for digital preservation.

Hannah Stitzlein has a new title of metadata and repository services librarian. Hannah Stitzlein, in her first year with UC Libraries has had a primary focus on metadata, the standardized description of digital content that ensures future access and data transfer for the libraries digital collections. In concert with metadata analysis and application, Hannah will now begin to provide repository services to further promote use of repository content and enhance discovery of collections.

Position Opening: Digital Imaging Coordinator (3-year appointment renewable), University of Cincinnati Libraries

The University of Cincinnati Libraries is seeking a digital imaging coordinator (a 3-year, renewable position).  Within the University of Cincinnati’s Preservation Services and Lab, the person in this position coordinates the UC Libraries’ digital imaging projects and workflows, ensuring successful project completion; operates and maintains digitization equipment and software; creates imaging workflows, including image quality controls, digital conversion and production reports. The digital imaging coordinator will work in a learning environment within a highly collaborative library atmosphere to increase and enrich online access to the UC Libraries’ collection of rare and unique materials.

For more information and to apply, please visit http://bit.ly/2KMmipn.

Read Source to Learn How We’re Making Digital Collections More Widely Available and More UC Libraries’ News

sourceRead Source, the online newsletter, to learn more about the news, events, people and happenings in UC Libraries.

In this edition of Source we highlight some of the University of Cincinnati Libraries’ newest endeavors in digital collections. From the latest version of the university’s digital repository, Scholar@UC, to a new archive space for special collections, to our recent membership in the large-scale collaborative repository HathiTrust, UC Libraries has made great strides in increasing our digital footprint and exploring new ways to enhance our user’s scholarship and the ways they can access and utilize our collections.

In addition, read about two exciting projects UC Libraries is involved in: PBS’s Great American Read and the touring exhibit Native Voices: Native Peoples’ Concepts of Health and Illness.

Read these articles, as well as past issues, on the web at http://libapps.libraries.uc.edu/source/ and via e-mail. To receive Source via e-mail, contact melissa.norris@uc.edu to be added to the mailing list.

The University of Cincinnati Libraries Have Joined HathiTrust

The University of Cincinnati Libraries have joined HathiTrust, a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating and sharing the record of human knowledge. UC Libraries joins more than 130 international research libraries in HathiTrust, and is the third Ohio library to join along with The Ohio State University and Case Western Reserve University.

“Membership in HathiTrust will enable the University of Cincinnati Libraries to partner with national and international collaborators with similar missions to preserve, protect and make accessible the scholarly record,” said Xuemao Wang, dean and university librarian. “Our membership will provide opportunities to enhance digital scholarship research like that done in our Digital Scholarship Center, as well as ensure the long-term digital preservation of our collections.”

HathiTrust began in 2008 as a collaboration of the universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (now the Big Ten Academic Alliance) and the University of California system to establish a repository to archive and share their digitized collections. Today, the HathiTrust’s Digital Library catalog equals 16 million volumes digitized and deposited by member libraries.

As members of HathiTrust, the University of Cincinnati community will have full access to digital materials inputted by UC Libraries, as well as those items in the public domain and those for which there is permission. In addition, benefits of HathiTrust membership include digital content storage, cost-effective long-term preservation and access services for UC Libraries’ digitized content. Continue reading

New Langsam Exhibit Features The Lucille M. Schultz Archive of 19th-Century Composition

schult exhibitOn display on the 5th floor lobby of the Walter C. Langsam Library, the exhibit – The Lucille M. Schultz Archive of 19th-Century Composition – celebrates the recent donation to the university by professor emeritus Lucille M. Schultz of an archive of 19th-century textbooks  collected while she researched her award-winning book The Young Composers. To write her book, which analyzes writing curriculum for children and demonstrates its continued relevance today, Lucy visited dozens of archives where she was fascinated by the lively illustrations and unusual writing prompts in the old textbooks. The exhibit features some of these writing prompts along with illustrations from the texts.

Lucy’s archive is available for viewing via the university’s digital repository Scholar@UC.

The creation of the exhibit was a collaboration between the Libraries and Kelly Blewett, a doctoral candidate in rhetoric and composition at UC, along with her colleague and fellow graduate student Ian Golding. It was designed by communications College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning (DAAP) design co-op student Sam Kane.

Read about Preserving Taft, the Writing of E.B. White and the Digital Scholarship Center in Source.

source vol 16 no2Read Source, the online newsletter, to learn more about the news, events, people and happenings in UC Libraries.

This latest issue of Source includes a feature on the work of the Preservation Lab and their collaboration with the Archives and Rare Books Library on a collection about William Howard Taft. Xuemao Wang, dean and university librarian, talks about how libraries need to adapt for the future. Kevin Grace, university archivist and head of the Archives and Rare Books Library, writes about a collection centered around children’s books author and co-writer of The Elements of Style, E.B. White. A grant from The Andrew Mellon Foundation in support of the Digital Scholarship Center’s research on machine learning and data visualization in multiple disciplines in the humanities and beyond is announced. Dean Wang and Liz Scarpelli, director of the University of Cincinnati Press are interviewed about the progress of the Press one year in. Gino Pasi, archivist and curator for the Henry R. Winkler Center for the History of the Health Professions, writes about a set of historical and important surgery films recently digitized and made available. Other articles announce the Libraries’s Adopt-a-Book program and the 2016/17 Annual Progress Report.

Read these articles, as well as past issues, on the web at http://libapps.libraries.uc.edu/source/ and via e-mail. To receive Source via e-mail, contact melissa.norris@uc.edu to be added to the mailing list.