Session 1A Leveraging Open-Source Tools for DSpace An Adventure in Optimizing and Workflows

As staff move from one to position to another, some workflows get orphaned or passed around and build up snags and bottlenecks as institutional knowledge or technologies change. In this presentation we take one such orphaned workflow and dissect all of these problems and provide solutions. We will take a closer look into the evolving workflows used by Cornette Library to electronically preserve “The Prairie,” WTAMU’s student newspaper, and how we were able to reduce the time it took to add these items to WTAMU’s D-space repository.

This presentation focuses on interactive group problem-solving and examines a number of different techniques used in the Archives and Digital preservation process, ranging from fundamentally altering the role of a tool and changing the order that student workers do things, all the way to creating custom code to fill a gap. All of these workflow changes ended up in a new process that not only allowed for rapid expansion of the collection, but also a 30% increase in views for just a year of work.

If you are interested in Archives, digital preservation, librarians as programmers, or even just workflow optimization techniques, then join us as look at a case study in how to make some of those stubborn bottlenecks and snags go away.