James Creel

Automating the importation of a historic scientific serial into a digital repository

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the transition of a collection in Texas A&M Universitys institutional repository from single item submission to batch importation as a primary method of ingest. This transition was made possible with assistance and technical work on behalf of the library.Design/methodology/approach – The digital initiatives staff examined the workflow of the collections manager and submitters. A process was created to produce the necessary data structures for batch import from resources that were already being generated by the collection workflow.Findings – It was found that batch importing assistance provided by the library improved the collections growth rate and efficiency without interrupting the workflow of the collection management team.Practical implications – This paper demonstrates the benefit of libraries and other institutional repository hosts offering batch‐loading assistance to managers of large repository collections.Originality/value – This paper should...

A framework for building collaboration tools by leveraging industrial components

Groupware applications allow a distributed group of human users to work apart together over a computer network They are difficult to develop due to the needs to suit a range of collaboration tasks that are often with diverse and evolutionary requirements To address this problem, we propose a new framework in which shared data components conforming to a well-defined interface can be dynamically plugged in for flexible sharing, and a simple transformation tool is provided such that the myriad of industrial collaboration-transparent components can be transformed into shared components The validity of our framework is evaluated by building a suite of typical collaboration tools such as group editors Under our framework, most components in the Java Development Kit (JDK) can be transformed automatically for prototyping collaboration tools With minimal manual work, those tools can be adapted to achieve advanced flexibility, e.g., data and control components can be bound dynamically to switch control protocols.

Collecting and Digitizing Forgotten Graduate Student Scholarship: The PILOs Project at Texas A&M University

This article describes a project at Texas A&M University Libraries to add a group of legacy student works (Projects in Lieu of Theses or Dissertations, or PILOs) to the collections in both hard copy and digital form. These unique works of institutional scholarship constitute a new area of acquisition for the libraries. The authors describe the new team-based workflows necessitated to evaluate, acquire, catalog, store, digitize, and preserve these reports. The cross-unit team that designed and implemented the project has devised a successful model upon which future collection development efforts can be built.