Making the Journal the best that it can be.

Comprehensive social search on the Internet remains an unsolved problem. Social networking sites tend to be isolated from each other, and the information they contain is often not fully searchable outside the confines of the site. EgoSystem, developed at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL), explores the problems associated with automated discovery of public online identities for people, and the aggregation of the social, institution, conceptual, and artifact data connected to these identities. EgoSystem starts with basic demographic information about former employees and uses that information to locate person identities in various popular online systems. Once identified, their respective social networks, institutional affiliations, artifacts, and associated concepts are retrieved and linked into a graph containing other found identities. This graph is stored in a Titan graph database and can be explored using the Gremlin graph query/traversal language and with the EgoSystem Web interface.

This article describes how the University of North Texas Libraries’ Digital Projects Unit used simple, freely-available APIs to add place names to metadata records for over 8,000 maps in two digital collections. These textual place names enable users to easily find maps by place name and to find other maps that feature the same place, thus increasing the accessibility and usage of the collections. This project demonstrates how targeted large-scale, automated metadata enhancement can have a significant impact with a relatively small commitment of time and staff resources.

In late 2012, OSU Libraries and Press partnered with Maria’s Libraries, an NGO in Rural Kenya, to provide users the ability to crowdsource translations of folk tales and existing children’s books into a variety of African languages, sub-languages, and dialects. Together, these two organizations have been creating a mobile optimized platform using open source libraries such as Wink Toolkit (a library which provides mobile-friendly interaction from a website) and Globalize3 to allow for multiple translations of database entries in a Ruby on Rails application. Research regarding successes of similar tools has been utilized in providing a consistent user interface. The OSU Libraries & Press team delivered a proof-of-concept tool that has the opportunity to promote technology exploration, improve early childhood literacy, change the way we approach foreign language learning, and to provide opportunities for cost-effective, multi-language publishing.

In this article, we present a case study of how the main publishing format of an Open Access journal was changed from PDF to EPUB by designing a new workflow using JATS as the basic XML source format. We state the reasons and discuss advantages for doing this, how we did it, and the costs of changing an established Microsoft Word workflow. As an example, we use one typical sociology article with tables, illustrations and references. We then follow the article from JATS markup through different transformations resulting in XHTML, EPUB and MOBI versions. In the end, we put everything together in an automated XProc pipeline. The process has been developed on free and open source tools, and we describe and evaluate these tools in the article. The workflow is suitable for non-professional publishers, and all code is attached and free for reuse by others.

The Valley Library at Oregon State University Libraries & Press supports access to technology by lending laptops and e-readers. As a newcomer to tablet lending, The Valley Library chose to implement its service using Google Nexus tablets and an open source custom firmware solution, CyanogenMod, a free, community-built Android distribution. They created a custom build of CyanogenMod featuring wireless updates, website shortcuts, and the ability to quickly and easily wipe devices between patron uses. This article shares code that simplifies Android tablet maintenance and addresses Android application licensing issues for shared devices.

As the archival horizon moves forward, optical media will become increasingly significant and prevalent in collections. This paper sets out to provide a broad overview of optical media in the context of archival migration. We begin by introducing the logical structure of compact discs, providing the context and language necessary to discuss the medium. The article then explores the most common data formats for optical media: Compact Disc Digital Audio, ISO 9660, the Joliet and HFS extensions, and the Universal Data Format (with an eye towards DVD-Video). Each format is viewed in the context of preservation needs and what archivists need to be aware of when handling said formats. Following this, we discuss preservation workflows and concerns for successfully migrating data away from optical media, as well as directions for future research.

Digital signage has been used in the commercial sector for decades. As display and networking technologies become more advanced and less expensive, it is surprisingly easy to implement a digital signage program at a minimal cost. In the fall of 2011, the University of Florida (UF), Health Sciences Center Library (HSCL) initiated the use of digital signage inside and outside its Gainesville, Florida facility. This article details UF HSCL’s use and evaluation of DigitalSignage.com signage software to organize and display its digital content.