Purpose

Introduction

This application was created to act as a tool to improve the longevity, robustness, and agility of digital collections, and the speed and simplicity with which they can be uploaded and maintained.

It assists in opening up the list of tools and databases that librarians, archivists, libtechs, student workers, and any other collection manager can use.

This ensures that novice to expert management can leverage whichever tools best serve their purposes, from something as simple to unix tools like 'grep', and mac OSX tools like spacebar-preview (which can quickly give you the information you need locally or on a server) to complex external web services or APIs.

Initial Motivation

The program's initial creation followed my personal involvement at a local university digitizing and uploading a number of said university's archived magazines into their digital collection.

I found the existing methods of doing so overly cumbersome, repetitive, inaccurate, and inflexible. Encouraged from the beginning by my advisor to try to improve the protocol, I began planning out a way to 1) improve the speed and accuracy of the process of transcribing metadata from each digital, OCR-ed pdf, 2) increase the portability of this data to other systems, and 3) script the quality check and actual addition of the file and its metadata to the digital (dspace) instance.

Broader Context

The field of library science, the process of digital archive management, and the general thrust of the current state of information and microservices suggests a growing need for flexible methods of transferring, gathering, and consuming metadata that is easily readable by both humans and computers.

From very minor maintenance concerns that can be drastically eased by unix scripting to the much larger coordination of disparate systems and schemas from various providers, integration is a huge daily issue in the field that is all too often dealt with painfully and repetitive with assigning manual tasks.

At its core, this program was made to assist in removing this impediment to automation and flexibility, and to therefore make digital archives easier to manage, update, migrate, add to, improve, and expand.