McMaster University

This past week, we started depositing digitized books into our institutional repository instance for The McMaster Collection. As of this posting we have 216 books in the collection. However, currently these materials are only available to the McMaster community. This is completely out of my control, and I agree what some of you may be thinking, "wait, out of copyright books are not available to the general public!?"

Now that Historical Perspectives of Canadian Publishing is all finished up we have time, albeit a small amount of time, to concentrate on other portions of the Digital Collections site, and other collections.

The Image API was recently released for Drupal 5, and changed a lot of things. During my updates (and redesign), I thought it might be a good idea to provide a sort of "how to" for images in Digital Collections. First thing first, make sure you have CCK! Also of note, for each collection that I've setup with CCK, I created a new imagefield for each one, and provided it with a directory in the "files" directory.

Ok, more Drupal stuff for Digital Collections site. I'll yammer on about "must have" modules in this one. Hit the snooze button if you'd like. Oh, and this is in addition to the ones I mentioned in the previous post...

I have written about Drupal & the Digital Collections site (http://digitalcollections.mcmaster.ca) a few times now, but haven't really explained how to make a digital collections site out of Drupal. So, without further ado...

What are the necessities of a digital collections site?

• Dublin Core standard metadata
• OAI-PMH Version 2
• Searching
• Browsable
• Collection Sets

It has been a while since I have done an IR update. So, the UPDATE: 3 new e-Journals, 2 in the works, and 2 books from the anthropology department have been published to the IR. Also, the big news is we have a Scholarly Communications Librarian now - Barbara McDonald - who will be the spokesperson for the IR. So, now I can concentrate more on the technical side of the project. Also we have launched Selected Works. It is basically a standardized faculty page that allows faculty to manage their work, upload new documents, generate readership reports, and send mailings.

Access was great, my first time going, first time at a hackfest, first time presenting at a conference. I had to laugh to myself at some points. Presenters were throwing out their Access "street cred" - being at the '96 Access...I was in high school.

Hackfest
Worked on problem 7:

7 . Socialize Evergreen! John Blyberg just released SOPAC 2.0
(http://www.thesocialopac.net/ and
http://www.blyberg.net/2008/08/16/sopac-20-what-to-expect/) built on a
Drupal, MySQL, and Sphinx platform, with interfaces defined for

Here is the library press release:

The William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University Library is launching the latest in a series of digital initiatives aimed at bringing its unique collections to a wider, online audience. The new site, Peace and War in the 20th Century, has been developed with the assistance of almost $100,000 in funding from the Department of Canadian Heritage, through the Canadian Memory Fund.

Just we put the finishing touches on the Library and Archives Canada funded Peace & War in the 20th Century project, we received word from the granting agency that our newest grant application has been accepted. We have been awarded almost $100,000 to develop a state-of-the-art, interactive website on the history of Canadian publishing. The project will last for a year (same amount of time for the PW20C project), and will focus on the history of Canadian publishing houses, people in publishing, authorship, and aspects of unique to Canadian culture.