May 2024

In This Issue:

 

What’s New at Scholars Portal?

  • Join us in congratulating our new Associate Directors, Jacqueline Whyte Appleby and Harpinder Singh!
  • This spring we welcomed two new staff members: Sarah Reeser has joined the GeoPortal team as a GIS Analyst, and Rachel Wang is our new Systems Administrator, with a focus on Scholaris.
  • In February the Project RAMP team successfully migrated SPOTDocs from Confluence to XWiki. The new URL is docs.scholarsportal.info.  More information is available on the Project RAMP page.
  • In March we hosted a Scholars Portal 101 webinar to provide an up-to-date overview of Scholars Portal services, projects, and teams.
  • On May 1st and 2nd we hosted Scholars Portal Days 2024: Collaborative Intelligence. This was our largest Scholars Portal Days ever with over 440 registrants from across the country. Slides and recordings of the event are now available.

 

Service Updates

RACER

  • After more than 21 years we are saying goodbye to RACER, one of our oldest services. The last day to submit requests in RACER was Friday, May 17th, and RACER officially sunsets on June 1st.
  • Check out this issue’s Spotlight for a heartfelt farewell tribute to RACER.
  • More information about RACER sunsetting, including drop-in calls, is available on SPOTDocs.

Odesi

  • With Odesi now fully integrated with Borealis, the former Nesstar repository has officially been shut down. Former Nesstar links will now redirect to odesi.ca.
  • The migration has also brought changes to Odesi metrics, as well as early discussions on a revised service model. More information on both of these changes is available on SPOTDocs.
  • The Odesi team continues to work on a new Data Explorer and Curation tool. More information about external testing for this tool in beta will be available soon!

GeoPortal

  • The GeoPortal Redevelopment Project has officially kicked off! A Working Group has been formed, including GeoPortal staff and eight members from OCUL institutions who will bring their experience and expertise to the project. The first meeting will be held in mid-June.
  • The GeoPortal team at Scholars Portal has been developing a prototype for a new front-end interface, as well as strategies and tools for metadata improvements. The 1:50k Historical NTS Maps Collection has been a vital part of exploring and testing metadata standards for the GeoPortal Redevelopment Project.

Scholaris

  • Work is well underway with Scholaris, the new shared national repository infrastructure service, and with our two pilot schools. The production site for Ontario Tech University will go live in June, with the production site for the University of Toronto set to follow later this summer.
  • Two CARL Repository Expert Groups have been formed: the Scholaris Metadata and Discovery Expert Group (S-MDEG), and the Scholaris Electronic Theses and Dissertations Expert Group (S-ETEG).
  • Following a call for early adopters back in March, we now have two initial cohorts lined up. Work with Cohort 1 will begin Summer 2024 and work with Cohort 2 will begin Fall-Winter 2024/2025. The Early Adopters Expression of Interest form remains open for schools interested in participating in future cohorts.

 

New Content

New on Scholars Portal Journals:

  • The Cambridge Journal Archives have now been loaded and are available on the Journals platform.
  • The Korean journal “Kŭlloja” is in production now! Kŭlloja (근로자) is the representative political and theoretical magazine of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) in DPRK. The data of this journal was supplied by the University of Toronto East Asian Library. Archived content dating back to 1946 can be accessed on SP Journals for UofT users for North Korean history study.

New on Scholars Portal Books:

  • We are currently loading a set of government documents from the University of Toronto’s Gerstein collection, digitized by the Government Information Community.
  • The 12th collection of the Synthesis Digital Library series is now available on Scholars Portal Books. Synthesis was previously distributed by Morgan & Claypool, but has now transitioned to Springer Nature. The Synthesis 12 collection on Scholars Portal Books is available for activation in the Alma Community Zone.
  • We have loaded all of the 2023 content from The Eastern Door, and this content is now available to UofT users on the Books platform.

New geospatial datasets in Scholars GeoPortal:

  • Land Information Ontario File Geodatabase (ed. 2023): This product contains an extract of all publicly available (Open) data layers available on Land Information Ontario’s (LIO) GeoHUB. Each annual extract represents the data housed in LIO’s GeoHub as of the date the extraction occurred, and is intended for historical and reference purposes only. Data is available in four geodatabase files: Ontario Hydrography Network (OHN) and Cartographic products, Contours, Wetland, and Additional Open Data Layers.
  • Toronto Property Data Maps 2023:  This series combines topography and parcel mapping, and provides a base for thematic mapping services and other published hardcopy products. Each property data map depicts features such as building envelopes, building outlines, railway lines, major watercourses, municipal addresses, curbs, park names, street names, property lines, right of way, and boundaries.
  • Northwest Ontario Orthophotography (NWOOP) 2022: The Northwest Ontario Orthophotography (NWOOP) 2022 is an aerially acquired imagery data set covering approximately 40,675 square kilometres in northwest Ontario, including Thunder Bay, Kenora and Sault Ste. Marie. Aerial images were taken between May 15th and November 2nd, 2022 under the best conditions possible to achieve cloud free, snow free, ice free, smoke free and leaf off captures.
  • City of Toronto Orthophotography 2022: The 2022 City of Toronto orthoimagery covers the entire City of Toronto. Full-colour aerial images were taken between April 28 and May 14, 2022.

New surveys in Odesi:

  • Social Policy Simulation Database and Model (SPSD/M) v 30.1: The Social Policy Simulation Database and Model (SPSD/M) is a micro computer-based product designed to assist those interested in analyzing the financial interactions of governments and individuals in Canada. It can help users to assess the cost implications or income redistributive effects of changes in the personal taxation and cash transfer system. The SPSM is a static accounting model which processes each individual and family on the SPSD/M, calculates Canadian federal and provincial taxes and transfers using legislated or proposed programs and algorithms, and reports on the results. It gives the user a high degree of control over the inputs and outputs to the model and can allow the user to modify existing tax/transfer programs or test proposals for entirely new programs. The model can be run using a visual interface and it comes with full documentation.
  • Labour Force Survey, January 2024: The Labour Force Survey (LFS) is a monthly survey of Canadian households carried out by Statistics Canada. The LFS is the source of Canada’s official unemployment rates, including the rates used by Employment and Social Development Canada in the calculation of Employment Insurance (EI) eligibility and benefit criteria. Data from the survey also provide information on major labour market trends, such as shifts in employment across industrial sectors, hours worked and labour force participation. The LFS also provides employment estimates by industry, occupation, public and private sector, hours worked and much more, all cross-classifiable by a variety of demographic characteristics.
  • Canadian Survey on Early Learning and Child Care, 2023: The Canadian Survey on Early Learning and Child Care (CSELCC) was conducted by Statistics Canada in 2023 with the cooperation and support of Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC). The CSELCC gathers information from parents and guardians on early learning and child care arrangements for children aged 0 to 5. The survey asks parents and guardians about the arrangements they use for their child, including the associated costs, the difficulties they may have faced when looking for care, and what their preferences for child care are. This survey also collects information on parents’ and guardian’s labour market participation to better understand the interaction between work and the use of early learning and child care arrangements.

 

Spotlight: Farewell, RACER

The spotlight is an opportunity for members of the OCUL community to share how Scholars Portal services fit into their work. This edition’s spotlight is a collective farewell to RACER, after more than 21 years of faithful service, and was contributed by Sabina Pagotto, Assessment and Member Engagement Librarian at Scholars Portal, as well as many members of the RACER community. 

This month we say goodbye to RACER, one of Scholars Portal’s oldest services. RACER is the name of our OCUL installation of VDX, the interlibrary loan management system. Since it went live on June 18, 2003, RACER has handled nearly 8 million requests and successfully filled over 4 million. Divide that by 21 OCUL member schools and 21 years, that’s an average of about 9,400 filled requests per institution per year (both item loans and digital or physical copies).

“I think the excitement is something that is hard to recreate in this world of instant access to everything on a smartphone, but it really had an impact, and seemed like the beginning of a lot of great Scholars Portal initiatives that make Ontario universities stand out in this regard.”  

          –Anonymous 

“Of all my 55 years in Interlibrary Loans, I cannot remember software that lasted this long.” 

          – Bonnie Brooks, Queen’s University

The name RACER is actually an acronym for “Rapid Access to Collections through Electronic Requesting”. The full name highlights how much of an ILL game-changer RACER was when it first launched. This name won the VDX End User Interface naming contest in 2002, narrowly beating out “FindIt” and “Unidoc”. In the announcement of the new name, the implementation group noted: “One thing for sure though, it is a new ‘ILL word’ soon to become synonymous with OCUL ILL. Just think, another acronym for ILL staff to insert into the multitude of acronyms used in the daily work of ILL!” A prescient remark. For many years, RACER was so synonymous with ILL in OCUL that RACER was often a shorthand for ILL more generally. RACER was a huge part of the lives of ILL staff across OCUL.

Here is what members of the OCUL Resource Sharing Community will remember about RACER:

“How quickly our users took to RACER! They caught on to the Request Item button like nobody’s business!”

“Throwing out some of the requests that poured in the first year since we didn’t have enough staff to process them.”

“The day I came in to work to find over 200 book requests from ONE patron!! All big, heavy art books, most were not auto-mediated. I loved it!”

“The sense of community and understanding.”

“Hearing that on March 3rd 2005, RACER passed its one million mark at 3:34pm when a patron here at Queen’s initiated request number 1000001.”

“When I first started my job in my ILL department, and seeing the word créée on the home page of RACER. What strange magic is this? A word with three Es? It can’t be right…”

“Explaining to the British Library how we found one of their items and tried to request it for our patron on the RACER platform. One of the staff sent them an email asking why they weren’t responding to our RACER request. They replied asking what is this RACER of which you speak?”

“We didn’t think faculty would like the name RACER so we used VDX in our emails. Our mistake and we had to live with it.”

“The blank request form really was easy to show students/faculty how to use… and telling people to just let the system work its magic and find the item… a lot of eyes lit up at those words!”

 

The RACER transition team is hosting a drop-in call to say farewell RACER on May 31st, the last official day of our VDX license.

 

The Nitty-Gritty

New and improved features:

  • ACE has a new Table of Contents (TOC) editor. This tool allows staff to immediately fix problems with auto-generated TOCs, so that students can successfully download the specific chapters that they need. ACE coordinators can request access to this tool to fix problematic TOCs themselves, or report any problem TOCs to ace@scholarsportal.info.
  • Books: All books loaded to Scholars Portal Books up to mid-2021 have now gone through TDR processing for long term preservation. We are currently processing content loaded up to March 2023. Where it exists, you can view preservation metadata for any title by clicking “View status” on the book’s page.
  • Permafrost: A new feature in Archivematica allows users to import XML-formatted metadata with their digital materials, for inclusion in the METS metadata record of their preservation packages.
  • OLRC:  We are piloting a tape backup service to support members looking to mitigate risks to their digital assets and improve disaster preparedness. A tape backup creates an independent copy of data on separate infrastructure that can be retained for long periods and can be used to restore data in the event that something unexpected or unwanted happens to the primary copy of your data. For more information about the pilot, please reach out to cloud@scholarsportal.info.

Bug fixes:

  • SPOTDocs has been upgraded to version 16.1.0 of the XWiki software.
  • Journals: Fixed a bug with special characters in article URIs.
  • Odesi: Resolved issues regarding proxied access to Odesi for some institutions. We do not recommend using a proxy to access Odesi except when accessing licensed data.
  • ACE: Resolved some issues accessing EMMA with their new login model.
  • OLRC: Fixed accessibility issues regarding the OLRC logo in dark theme.

Many thanks to all those who reported bugs to us or assisted in testing! If you spot any problems, please report them via our built-in feedback forms or to help@scholarsportal.info.

 

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Next edition: September 2024

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