LTS Newsletter: April 2024

Library Technology Services, Harvard Library

Welcome to Library Technology Service’s occasional newsletter for anyone interested in Harvard Library IT.

The ETDs@Harvard Pipeline is Live!

LTS recently completed work to provide robust support for the discovery and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) submitted through the ProQuest ETD Admin tool.

What does the pipeline do? ETDs submitted to ProQuest and stored in the ProQuest database are exported to Harvard, where they enter the pipeline and are added to our open access repository (DASH), library catalog (HOLLIS), and preservation repository (DRS) so that they can be accessed, discovered, and preserved in Harvard systems.

This work supports Harvard Library’s MYGO #19, “Integrate library technologies with systems and services across Harvard to enhance support for research, teaching and the production of scholarship,” as well as the University Archives’ mission to hold a record copy of theses and dissertations as part of the student record, and Harvard’s mission “to advance new ideas and promote enduring knowledge.”

Many thanks to our partners in the University Archives, Open Scholarship and Research Data Services, Digital Preservation Services, and LTS Support for their collaboration, review, and support, and to the LTS engineering and operations teams for their focus and thoughtfulness in architecting, developing, and deploying workflows across previously unconnected platforms.

DASH News

DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard), Harvard’s open-access institutional repository, furthers Harvard Library’s goals of equitable and sustainable service models for scholarly communication and open knowledge.  Last updated in 2018, DASH is being improved to provide a more efficient, interoperable, secure, accessible, and user focused product. Working with our technology partner, 4Science, OSRDS (Open Scholarship and Research Data Services) and LTS are steering the inclusion of critical features into the 2024 major release for DSpace, which is DASH’s open-source, community-driven software application.

The project, currently in Phase 2, will culminate in the migration of DASH to the most up-to-date version of DSpace. Harvard’s migration to DSpace 8, scheduled for release this summer, will be led by 4Science and is anticipated to be completed in autumn of 2024. We are working with our vendor to incorporate community-desired Harvard customizations into the main DSpace code for the next major release. These contributions to the community code base, like the Harvard contributed code for COAR-Notify, are integral to our work in open software and open scholarship. This work will ensure DASH remains stable, secure, and easily upgradable over time.

HOLLIS for Archival Discovery

LTS completed an upgrade of HOLLIS for Archival Discovery (HAD) to ArchivesSpace version 3.4.1 last month. This upgrade included security patches, updates to the user interface including new icons, an upgrade to Solr (what powers searching), and new features around the identifier field. In addition, as part of the update deploy, a new form for reporting harmful description was launched with integrations directly into HAD. This allows users to report potentially harmful description to the collection's owning repository for review and corrections as needed. Many thanks to Zoe Hill for her work on the HAD form and the LTS Staff and the ArchivesSpace testers for helping the process go smoothly!

LTS Staff

Welcome

Sanjay Jairam has joined LTS as a DevOps Engineer. Some of the library community may already be familiar with his excellent work on the DevSecOps project. We are delighted to have him on the team!

Au Revoir

Katie Amaral will be leaving LTS at the end of April. Katie joined LTS in 2019 and hit the ground running by completing the development of ACORN, the primary application used daily by Harvard Library's Weissman Preservation Center for documenting preservation treatments. She then moved on to help build the next generation of URN management tooling with NRS. More recently, she's played a vital role in LTS's effort to redesign Harvard Library's IIIF infrastructure to access, present, and share digitized materials through the development of the Media Presentation Service (you can see her and Doug's excellent presentation at one of the IIIF Consortium's annual international conferences). Katie also engaged in truly innovative work on Talk with HOLLIS, a HUIT ETIP project that explored new ways that a generative-AI-driven chat interface could empower users to search for and access all the materials Harvard Library has to offer. Along the way she's been an incredible resource by helping to refine and improve the way we handle authentication & authorization and standardize our application development processes. Katie's diligence, expertise, and initiative have been a boon to every effort she has contributed to here at Harvard. To say Katie will be missed is an understatement!

Job Listings

Production Systems Librarian (65120BR)
Digital Library Data Engineer (65694BR)

A Bit of History

Did you know that LTS (formerly known as OIS) created one of the first delivery systems for multi-page objects? Back in 2001, Harvard released its first Page Delivery Service that presented page images stored with structural metadata in the DRS through a web-based navigation tool. The Harvard University Annual Reports, from 1825-1995, were one of the first sets of materials made available, and now many types of multi-page works, including musical scores, scrapbooks, and manuscript diaries are presented using the same type of system.

Screenshot of early Page Delivery Service