Libsafe User Guides (source: LIBNOVA)
NOTE: These instructions are the generic instructions from the vendor. They may be superseded by Harvard-specific policies and processes. Please visit How-Tos by Activity for those more detailed instructions.
Uploading content
The platform allows users to upload content to the platform using several methods.
Using the Management Interface
Locate the data container you want to upload content to using the “Containers” menu section or by searching for it.
Select the node (or subnode) where your container is located and click on “Open Container”:
In the data container page, choose “Explore content”:
Drag and drop the files you want from your local storage to upload to the files and folders area:
Using S3 Browser
S3 Browser is a freeware Windows application you can use to upload/download and manage the content you have in your platform.
To use it for uploading and downloading content from your platform, follow these steps:
Get your storage credentials.
Sign in to LIBSAFE.
Click on your name and then on “Access methods”.
In the S3 compatible protocol section, click “Regenerate”.
Copy your “AccessKey” and “SecretKey” and store them in a safe location.
Select “Accounts” and then “Add a new account”.
Introduce your Access Key and Secret Access key in the form.
Click on “Add new account”.
Connect to the account you have just created. S3 Browser will show you a message indicating that you are not allowed to get buckets list:
Click “Yes”, introduce the bucket name in the S3 browser field and click on “Yes” again.
To get the name of your bucket, just go to any container and go to the “Storage” tab. You will find that information in “S3 bucket name”.
The containers that you have access to are shown in the left pane:
You can now browse your files, upload and download using the icons below:
Adding metadata
LIBSAFE allows users to add metadata to any file, folder or data container preserved in the system. Functions can be used to automatically generate metadata on ingest or it can be added manually, or both.
Metadata can be used for searching (even using complex queries), or it can be exported or consumed by other systems. Metadata can be associated with the objects in the following ways:
● Manually, using the platform's Management Interface (for a single item or in bulk),
● loaded from a CSV, XML or JSON file,
● using the API, or
● using the platform functions (you can define code functions that will do rich and advanced extraction and processing to your metadata).
Using the Management Interface
Add metadata for a single item manually
Locate the data container you would like to add metadata to using the “Containers” menu section or by searching for it. This guide assumes metadata is properly configured for the data container.
In the data container page, choose “Explore Content”.
Right click on the item (file or folder) you would like to add metadata to and select “Properties”.
In the dialog, select the “Metadata” tab, and the metadata fields that are part of the metadata schema linked to your container are shown. You can add or remove metadata from them. When you have finished, do not forget to click “Save.”
Add metadata to multiple items in bulk
It is possible to add metadata to multiple items at once.
Locate the data container you would like to add metadata to using the “Containers” menu section or by searching for it.
In the data container page, choose “Explore Content.”
Select multiple items using your mouse to click-and-drag a box around the files or folders you want to select. You can also use Ctrl + Shift and use the “Select all”, “Select none” or “Invert selection” in the file browser top bar.
When the items to which you want to apply metadata have been selected, select the function “Bulk metadata editor” in your functions side bar. If you have folders selected, the platform will also apply your metadata to the files contained in them:
Add metadata from spreadsheets
You can use spreadsheets to bulk apply metadata to your files.
In the training container, you have the metadata_update_EXAMPLE.xlsx file (you can download it or open it within the platform by double-clicking the file) available. This file contains different columns:
● The first column contains the filepath of the files and/or folders whose metadata the user wants to populate.
● The rest of the columns contain those metadata descriptors to be populated. Under the headers, the user can include the value for each metadata descriptor for each file (or even keep empty cells if a given metadata descriptor shouldn’t be populated)
To start automatically importing that metadata to those files, the user just has to select the Excel file and click the “Run” button of the “Excel metadata import” function on the right:
Then, select “OK” in the pop-up that will appear:
A confirmation pop-up will appear:
The user can click on here and a new tab will open, with the information and logs about the execution. (Note: the user can refresh the screen to see new logs with the progress of the function.)
Once the function shows as completed
the user can check that the metadata was applied by selecting the file or opening the properties of the file:
The user will notice that a new file will be created. This is an Excel file with the previous values of those metadata descriptors that were modified/populated. This is just in case the user runs the import function with wrong information and it’s necessary to restore the previous values.
This could be done by running the Excel metadata import function using this new file as an input. If the previous values were blank, then the file will be empty.
Extracting metadata
If we wanted to have a separate file with our metadata that we have applied to our objects, we have the option to use the “Metadata extractor” function.
Select the files or folders that you want to extract the metadata from (if you want to extract the metadata applied to all objects in one container, don’t select anything). Click “Run” next to the function.
First, select the export format that you want this metadata in: it can be either JSON, CSV or XML format. You also need to specify if you want the embedded metadata, the container metadata or the object metadata. Moreover, you can add a prefix to the file that is going to get generated if you wish.
Now, we will have a new file with the metadata:
Derivatives generation
With our function “Derivatives generation” you are able to create derivatives of your TIF collection.
First, select the folder you want to convert (where your TIF collection is) and click on the “Run” button beside the function. In this case, you have the “My collection” folder, where a digitized book is stored:
Then choose the profile. In this case, for the digitized book example, you can select the first profile and click on “OK”:
A confirmation pop-up will appear:
The user can click on here and a new tab will open, with the information and logs about the execution. (Note: the user can refresh the screen to see new logs with the progress of the function.)
Once the function shows as completed
you can see more details on its log, at the bottom of the page:
Now, in the original “My collection” folder, three new subfolders will appear:
● MASTER. Here is where the original TIF files are stored.
● LOWRES. JPG (low resolution) versions of the original TIF files are generated here.
● PDF. Here the user will find a single PDF with the whole collection. Now, the digitized book is a single PDF which has been OCR’d, so the text of the collection is extracted and indexed.
The user can open it to check the extracted text:
Format conversion
LIBSAFE includes format conversions (audio, image, video and documents) that can be manually launched when the institution decides to convert or normalize different formats.
When the conversion is completed, the platform creates a new file, retaining the original. It is up to the institution to keep or delete the original obsolete file. This new file includes information about how it was created, and the original file includes information about this conversion.
Moreover, it is possible to link the new file to the original, for instance, by using the “Link” metadata type.
And, in the metadata of the original file, we have information with links showing which files are linked to it:
By using this metadata type, we can ensure that users are able to easily refer to either the old or the new converted version of a file in only a few clicks.
Snapshot of our content
We can create a copy of our content by using the function “Content snapshot”. This function allows users to create a backup of an entire container's contents at a specific point in time. It can generate a full copy of all files and folders, a detailed report about the container's structure and metadata, or both.
While not selecting any files or folders in your container, run the function “Content snapshot”.
You will now be able to select whether you want to do a copy of your content, get a report about the structure, or both.
Click “OK”.
If you decided to do both, for instance, a new folder will be created with the copy of your content inside, as well as a TXT and a CSV with its structure.
Moving content from hot storage to cold storage
This can be done by the out of the box function called “Change storage class”, as follows:
The process is pretty quick. Once completed the icon will change to the following: