Class 3 Acquiring and Managing Resources

Class 3 – Acquiring and managing resources

Exercise overview

Last week we explored information seeking behavior models and began thinking about the relationship between users, information and digital environments. We looked at Information Architecture briefly and explored the role that information organization plays in constructing information systems. We began a process that we will continue for a large part of the semester - pairing a technology with a concept, theory or business practice related to information infrastructures.

This week we will do this by exploring the world of resource acquisitions alongside an expansion of our understanding of HTML. In doing so we will use our foundational understanding of digital documents and begin working with information system design with a focus on leveraging digital document and metadata to create useable documents. We will work with metadata schema and JavaScript to create a simple web-based service and will use digital documents using HTML and CSS as the building blocks for understanding the relationships between information architecture and information design.

Instructions:

Work individually or in groups to complete the worksheet. When you get to a section that requires you to select a resource to explore – pick one resource (please don’t always choose the first one!). When asked to ‘discuss as a group’, consider your response and continue completing the worksheet.

We’re going to work with computer coding today and here’s an important note as you follow the exercises. Computer code is shown on numbered lines and are enclosed in boxes. The numbered lines are simply to help as a reference during instruction and should not be copied into your program. For example a line that reads 56. p { visibility:hidden; } should simply be typed in as p { visibility:hidden; }

Optional readings

5. C. M. Sperberg-McQueen and David Dubin, Data Representation, DH Curation Guide. http://guide.dhcuration.org/representation/

Discussion of readings

Exploration of Collection management processes, issues, and trends

Libraries, Archives, Schools and Museums each focus on the acquisition and management of different categories of resources. Generally speaking this difference may not be as much in the type (e.g. book, journal, magazine, e-resource, media) but rather in the policies that drive the development of the collection and the overall mission of the institution. School libraries for example serve a different mission and clientele than do academic libraries and Archives tend to collect unique resources with an eye on long-term preservation while public libraries often focus on acquiring resources to serve the immediate needs of their community.

If you have not already, read the Corral and Sauer readings and come back to the worksheet. These articles mention a wide range of issues, trends and collection management activities. Select a single activity and answer the following questions

Key Questions

Question 1. What issue/trend/activity did you select?

Question 2. Which type of institution (e.g. Library, Archive, School, Museum) does the issue/trend/activity mostly apply to? Why?

Question 3. Write down a 1 sentence description of the issue/trend/activity

The relationship between collections and information systems

In this class we consider two parallel themes, information about collection management, including document management, and information about the design of digital documents themselves. In learning about collection management in LASM institutions we will get a more holistic understanding of the factors that influence how and why we manage our collections. In becoming familiar with this process we discover that our information systems and documents are tightly woven together and that creating information infrastructures that help us manage our resources throughout the information lifecycle and collection management process is a detailed process. Reflect for a moment on the following collection management process and answer the questions related to the issue/trend/activity you studied above

Figure 1 Collection management process

Figure 2 LASM information systems

Question 4. What processes are most impacted by your issue/trend/activity? Why?

Question 5. What information systems are most important in your issue/trend/activity?

Question 6. How has your issue/trend/activity changed over the last 5 years. How will it change these processes/systems the next 5 years?

Spend a few minutes connecting steps in the collection management process with the information systems commonly used with these processes using Table 1. If this looks needlessly complex you are on the right track. There is a trend towards system interoperability simplification in LASM information system design. At the moment the profession is in a gap between these new systems that streamline interoperability and information sharing either through unified deployment on a cloud-based platform or through the use of new design techniques that facilitate implementation of information systems using business process modeling. Ultimately however, this work is made complex by the fact that LASM institutions are charged with information management in a way that is fundamentally different from other institutions. LASM institutions are called on to be customers of information producers, managers of a diverse set of resources, public service agents to our communities, appraisers of value for our collections and, of course, preservers of information resources. Ensuring that we have good processes and systems to support this work is definitely a non-trivial process!

Table 1 Table of CM processes and related information systems

CM Process / Information system types
Appraise / See data gathering - appraisal systems may include reports that focus on patron use, resource value, content fit or other measure of alignment with institutional mission or operational goals
Select / Miscellaneous systems including book reviews, approval plans, collection development policies. May use an Electronic Resource Management System (ERMS)
Acquire, License / ERMS, Vendor websites, often the Integrated Library System (ILS) for 'traditional' purchasing.
Receive, Process / ILS, external vendor databases for metadata records, ERMS for electronic records, Binding platform for print journals that need to be gathered into volumes
Store / Institutional Repository (IR) for locally created documents/scholarship, Digital and print archives for storage of master objects, High Density Storage Systems (HDSS) both physical and virtual resources, book shelves for print
Provide Access / Discovery platforms, may include locally hosted or cloud-based services, OpenURL resolvers, Interlibrary Loan and other resource sharing systems
Preserve/Conserve / Print preservation usually involves a preservation/conservation lab, preservation in digital arena includes use of automated digital object verification tools including backup, version control, bit-checking software (e.g. Jhove)
Gather Data / Materials use databases often located within other systems including ILS (print) e-stats systems (electronci COUNTER/SUSHI) or web analytics systems (e.g. Google Analytics).

Collection management wrap-up

At the end of the day, collection management involves similar issues for libraries, archives, schools and museums (LASM). Given constrained resources LASM institutions need to scope their collection development and acquisition processes to an institutional mission, needs of patrons and patron groups or in support of academic programs. At times LASM institutions have their collection management practices shaped by donors either through funding of through direct gift of collections. While donor support can be a good thing it can also create difficulties in ongoing collection management and organizational missions for the LASM institution.

Another key factor impacting collection management practice is the shift from print to electronic formats. This shift has required the development of licensing and copyright expertise in LASM professionals, has shaped the strategic planning of LASM institutions at every level (e.g. planning for space, services, financial sustainability, community outreach) and has required new professional literacies to make it possible for librarians and archivists to acquire, process, provide access to, preserve and evaluate these resources.

At its core, these literacies require that LASM professionals have an in depth understanding of how digital documents are created and what information systems are required throughout the document's lifecycle.

Exploring the connection between document structure and use

Documents can be divided into discrete subcomponents according to its intellectual content. Encoding systems then allow you to control the content representation, content layout and formatting, interactivity.

A few important details on HTML

HTML documents, jpg images, audio files, and other text and medial documents, when made available via a special application known as a web server, will form a website. In essence, a website is nothing more than a collection of documents that are linked together using the <a> or anchor element. These documents commonly live together on a single file system but as you know from your own use of the web it is very common for links to point to other servers and websites. In fact, this widespread inter-linking of pages is what makes the web work. Much like Bate's Berrypicking model users and computers traverse the web by clicking on links embedded in documents

Let's resume our tour of HTML this week by creating two webpages that link to one another. Open a text or code editor and create the two documents.

Figure 3 Save this document as myfirstpage.html

<html>
<body>
<h1>This is page 1</h1>
<p>This webpage is my first page. It links to my <a href="mysecondpage.html">second page</a</p>
</body>
</html>

Figure 4 Save this document as mysecondpage.html

<html>
<body>
<h1>This is page 2</h1>
<p>This webpage is my second page. It links to my <a href="myfirstpage.html">first page</a</p>
</body>
</html>

Save the two documents in the same folder (e.g. on your desktop create a folder called mywebsite). Be sure to follow the file naming convention indicated in the caption above each box. In doing so you will name your two documents the same name that you use in your <a> element (e.g. <a href="myfirstpage.html">).

Let's see how these two pages work together. Open a web browser and open the file called "myfirstpage.html." You should see a link that you can click. Follow that link to your second page.

Key Questions

Question 7. What HTML element did we use to create the link?

Using the W3Schools website (http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp) look up the role of each of the elements used in your document "myfirstpage.html"

Element / Element type / Role in HTML standard
<html>
<body>
<h1> / Heading
<a> / Anchor
<p> / Paragraph

The two documents that you have created are the foundation of every website. While many websites are created dynamically (e.g. computer programs generate web pages 'on-the-fly') when the page reaches your web browser it is usually a simple document with HTML elements, CSS stylesheets and JavaScript scripts.

As you can see, a website is simply a set of documents made available through a special program (e.g. a web browser) that interprets the page text and shows it using pre-defined formatting rules. As we observed earlier though, often we point to pages that exist at other locations or at least need to reference documents that may live somewhere else than the same folder as all of your other documents.

Let's explore this in more detail by creating a folder structure for our web pages. Using Figure 3, create the folders "website," "folder1," and "folder2" on your computer (make sure folder1 and folder2 are within your website folder) and place your two web pages in their respective folders.

In your web browser open the file firstpage.html and follow the link to your second page.

Question 8. What happens when you follow the link to your second page?

Because the secondpage file now is located in another folder we need to update our link path in the file myfirstpage.html. These file system locations follow a few simple rules that may not seem intuitive at first. This location is called a "Path" in HTML and refers to the contents of the href attribute which is, in this case, a child of the anchor element (e.g. "href="/sample/test.html" contains the path /sample/test.html). For now we will just focus on something known as "relative paths" or path statements that provide a location from whatever the current folder is. In contrast to a relative path which does not state what the root folder is, an absolute path specifies the entire location of a document. Study the following example relative and absolute paths in the table and answer the questions below.

Path in HTML <a> element / Path type / Location on your computer
<a href="page1.html"> / relative / The page1.html document is located in the current folder that your web-browser is working from.
<a href="./folder1/page1.html"> / relative / Page1 is located in a sub-folder called folder1
<a href="http://me.com/page2.html"> / absolute / Page2 is located at the website me.com in the root folder. This is actually an example of an absolute path in that it specifies the server and the root folder on the server
<a href="../folder1/page1.html"> / relative / Page1 is located within the folder1 folder which is one level up from the current folder
<a href="./folder2/page2.html"> / relative / Page2 is located within the folder folder2 which is a subfolder of the current folder
<a href="/folder2/page2.html"> / absolute / Page2 is located within the folder folder2 which is a subfolder of the current folder

Question 9. In a path statement what does a "../" mean at the beginning of a path statement?

Question 10. What does "./" mean at the beginning of a path statement?

Question 11. What does "/" mean at the beginning of a path statement?

Question 12. Explain the following path: "../../folder3/file.html"

Question 13. What is the main difference between a relative and an absolute path?

Question 14. If your website home is a folder "website" which contains two folders, folder1 and folder2, each of which has a document named page.html in it, what would the two href path statements read to allow you to access from one document to the other?

Class 3 Acquiring and Managing Resources

Exercise overview

Instructions:

Suggested Readings

Optional readings

Discussion of readings

Exploration of Collection management processes, issues, and trends

Key Questions

The relationship between collections and information systems

Collection management wrap-up

Exploring the connection between document structure and use

A few important details on HTML

Key Questions