1. Shared Shelf as a Means to Many Ends
Greg Reser
UC San Diego

3. Artstor is a web-based image database.

4. Shared Shelf is a content management system that allows you you to catalog, manage, and share your Artstor digital collections. You can upload your images, video, audio, and documents to Shared Shelf and add data to make them searchable. The content you catalog can then can be published and shared with your institution through the Artstor Workspace, or shared externally on the web via Shared Shelf Commons, or published to an Omeka site.

5. Shared Shelf My content Artstor

6. Shared Shelf My content UC San Diego

7. Pushing content to the UC San diego Library digital collections portal
Pushing content to the UC San diego Library digital collections portal. This is where our usage has really picked up.

8. An example of this use is...
A faculty created collection of videos, images and maps that document Slab City, California.

9. We imported the items into Shared Shelf and did the cataloging there.

10. Here's the cataloging screen.

11. We then published the items to Artstor

12. and made it available in Shared Shelf Commons - Artstor's portal for open and free content

13. We also pushed the items to the UC Libraries digital collection
We also pushed the items to the UC Libraries digital collection. Publishing to Artstor and SS Commons takes just a few clicks. I wish I could say getting the content to our DAMS was this easy, but it takes a little work.

14. How
How did we achieve this miracle?

15. OAI-PMH
We didin’t use Shared Shelf’s OAI-PMH harvesting server to get the metadata. I don’t even know what that means and our IT department busy enough managing our DAMS to set it up for me. So I did what many of us do…I used Excel.

16. Shared Shelf allows you to export metadata to Excel and our DAMS has an Excel ingest tool – because it’s just so useful. It's a pretty simple process, except...

17. Everyone has a template
(and they think everyone else's template stinks)

18. Shared Shelf has an export template and our DAMS has an import template. In order to minimize the mapping and transformation we have to do, we altered our Shared Shelf cataloging field to more closely align with our DAMS template. It wasn't possible to align them 100%, so there is still some work we have to do before ingest.

19. The main thing is to change the column headers
The main thing is to change the column headers. The UCSD DAMS ingest will only work with its headers.

20. Filename was easy. The only thing I had to do was change the file extension because we want to ingest the original video file to the DAMS so it can be archived.

21. Title, like a lot of other fields, didn't require any change.

22. Shared Shelf doesn't have a creator role field, but our DAMS requires a role value. Our solution is to cheat a bit and put the role in brackets after the name in Shared Shelf. Using a combination of splitting cells and sorting, maybe some Vlookup, the creators are moved to the appropriate DAMS creator column.

24. Default Subject

25. DAMS Subjects

26. Comparing the end result in both interfaces

28. Collaboration
Once we established a workflow to move metadata from SS to our DAMS, we realized SS is a great tool for collaborative cataloging projects in the DAMS. This has driven a large increase in our SS usage recently.

29. Greg's Whiskey Consumption
Donald Trump

30. UCSD Shared Shelf Use
collaboration

31. Melanesia 10,611 items Herman Baca 3,491 items CCAS 2,484 items
These are our current collaborative projects. We are working with the original material providers, catalogers, and subject specialists.

32. Melanesian Photograph collection
Melanesian Photograph collection. Four faculty who took photos in the field as part of their research. They use this cataloging screen to input a basic description.

33. Catalogers then create authorized headings from the data

34. Some collections have been completed and are in the DAMS

35. Enhancement

36. Creating metadata is much more expensive (time consuming) than digitizing images. Rather than delay the publication of collections, we opted to use folder information from the finding aids to create very basic description for some collections like this one of the papers of Herman Baca, a prominent Chicano rights activist.

37. "Baca, Herman. Baca with others"
39 items with
Title:
"Baca, Herman. Baca with others"
Date:
"between 1964 and 2007"
The problem is, we have a lot of items with the same vague title and date. Now that we have staff time available, we can enhance the metadata to make it more meaningful. But staff can only go so far enhancing the items, what is really helpful is when a subject expert can add depth to the description. In this case, we had access to the best subject specialist - the subject himself - Herman Baca. Baca has agreed to use Shared Shelf to enter new metadata for his collection.

38. To make this easy for him, we made a very simple cataloging screen that prompts him for new information.

39. We also had students transcribe any inscriptions, which are useful as-is, but hopefully will help Bacca to provide even more details

40. What to do

41. UCSD Shared Shelf Use
Storage limit $$$

43. Minimize storage space Make small derivatives
Just big enough to identify
3000 x 5000 px
40 MB
400 x 600 px 105 KB

44. UCSD Shared Shelf Use
Storage limit $$$

45. Clean up when you're done

46. Don't overwhelm
Make a simple form
Date:
Location:
Description:

47. Include any info you have or can infer
Be helpful
Include any info you have or can infer
Filename: 75_1267_1285_Port Moresby.jpg
1975
Port Moresby
Date:
Location:
Description:

49. Controlled Values

50. Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars
We are currently working on a collaborative cataloging project for the DAMS that includes photos taken by three UCSD professors who were part of a 1971 delegation trip to China in 1971 during the Cultural Revolution. This trip preceded President Nixon's visit to China in 1972 and was the first time for Americans to enter China since the Communist Party took over the country in 1949.
Prof. Paul Pickowicz
Prof. Susan Shirk
Prof. Bill Joseph
These three professors provided some description which was placed in a spreadsheet some time ago - before we know we would use Shared Shelf.

51. This spreadsheet was then uploaded to Shared Shelf so catalogers could enhance it further. Why - because seeing the images is helpful when cataloging.

52. This spreadsheet was then uploaded to Shared Shelf so catalogers could enhance it further. Why - because seeing the images is helpful when cataloging.

53. Catalogers love controlled vocabularies - sorry - controlled access points.

54. This is the Shared Shelf tool to build them.

55. Back in the cataloging screen, the cataloger can work faster by selecting a terms from the drop down list.

56. Cataloging Screens

57. Start with a template
It's best to start with the default Shared Shelf Core fields and add from there.

58. If you have to, create a new field

59. All Fields
Shares Shelf Admin: you start by defining all the fields you might want to use in your cataloging form. Note that you can change the label and the help text for the default fields so they are clearer to your users.

60. Cataloging Form
Title
Date
Description
All Fields

61. Full UCSD cataloging screen vs. minimal.
The great thing is that you can set this up yourself - no IT support needed.

62. Access Control

63. You can set permissions for cataloging screens

64. Contributors can work from anywhere, as long as the have internet access. All they need to do is log in from a web browser. No VPN, no virtual machine.