Webinar Recordings

Drawing on the specialized technical skills developed by Scholars Portal staff, “Learn with Scholars Portal” is a free webinar series that helps OCUL library staff develop practical technical skills and expertise in new areas.

Digital Preservation: What Does it Really Look Like?

Presented by Grant Hurley in October 2021.

Most would agree that libraries and archives should preserve digital research collections for the future. The digital record of human activity is vast, complex, expanding. It includes everything from born-digital personal archives, publications, audiovisual materials, research data, statistics, and geodata, and websites and software, to digitized files created from threatened analogue sources like photograph negative collections and magnetic tapes. But while an understanding of the importance of digital preservation is widely shared, few understand what the real, day-to-day work of digital preservation involves.

This webinar introduces the functions of digital preservation with an emphasis on demonstrating the actual technologies and strategies used by preservationists. It discusses the basics of how digital files are constructed, how files are stored safely, and how a suite of specialized tools are used for management and access over time. An understanding of these methods and functions will help viewers effectively build and assess systems, workflows and tools to move digital preservation work from aspiration to action.

Slides for the digital preservation webinar can be downloaded here.

Getting Started with Web Accessibility

Presented by Kaitlin Newson & Bartek Kawula in November 2021.

Much like physical spaces, libraries also need to ensure that their digital spaces are accessible to users with disabilities. This webinar introduces some of the principles and practices of web accessibility, including an overview of assistive technologies, practices for creating accessible content, and ways you can test your web content for accessibility issues.

Slides for the web accessibility webinar can be downloaded here.

Usage Statistics and Web Analytics: A Deep Dive

Presented by Sabina Pagotto in January 2022.

In libraries, we love our numbers and metrics, whether it’s gate counts, tallies of reference questions, or circulation stats. In the online world, many of us have looked at usage statistics for electronic resources, or the web analytics on our library websites or research guides, to determine how successful they are. But in order to make the best possible use of these online metrics, it’s important to understand how they work. Where do usage statistics come from, and how can we get the answers we need from them?

This webinar introduces key concepts in online activity logging and usage reporting, demonstrates useful features for web analytic analysis, and discusses limitations of automatically collected usage data. The discussion examines how a user’s actions on a website actually translate into analytics reports, and situates online usage within the broader context of library assessment.

Slides for the usage statistics webinar can be downloaded here.

Introduction to Linked Data

Presented by Wei Zhao in March 2022.

Linked Data is a set of design principles for sharing machine-readable interlinked data on the Web. It is the basis of the Semantic web. This webinar will introduce the principles, core technologies, and the expected benefits of Linked Data, including an overview of Linked Data initiatives and Linked Data projects at Scholars Portal.

Slides for the linked data webinar can be downloaded here.