"Without Work One Finishes Nothing"

"Without work, one finishes nothing." 
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Scopus Certification After six weeks of video tutorials, modules, and quizzes, I have completed my Scopus Certification. Yay! I dabbled in Scopus before the course so that I could create video tutorials, however, the course did help put realistic scenarios into context. For example, I knew that Scopus allowed one to compare sources but being able to concretely say that one can decide where to publish by comparing sources is a more specific example of use. I also liked that Scopus provided one-sheets for various audiences. Though some of the audiences aren’t relevant to SwRI, it still helps to see examples of outcomes that can be tailored to specific users. The course was very helpful overall. I was only slightly disappointed that the API module wasn’t more detailed but I know that they are a beast in their own right. It wouldn’t be fair to expect everyone taking the course to have the background knowledge of APIs to dive deeply into them. The course gave great examples of API use and even highlighted developer tutorials and examples for further research. 

LibGuides Analytics SwRI has its own special fiscal calendar with subperiods that I won’t claim to understand but that I liken to broadcast calendars. August 28th was the end of another month which means that this week I ran my LibGuides asset statistics. Each video tutorial I create gets uploaded to LibGuides as an asset along with the transcripts. At the end of each month, I run a report to see which tutorials were viewed the most during the month. This month, the featured video tutorial was How to Save Searches & Set Alerts in Google Scholar so it’s probably no surprise that it had the most views. My Getting Started with ASTM Compass video was approved, so that was also uploaded to LibGuides this week. 

1:1 Meeting My boss and I had our 1:1 meeting on Tuesday where we discussed course expectations, project updates, and any other issues or concerns. She mentioned that we will have a meeting later in September to discuss ways to showcase a virtual rare book exhibit. Brainstorming activated.

Rare Book Database I worked on the database side of the Rare Book Collection this week. I am using Airtable to catalog and showcase the Rare Book Collection. While looking through the gallery, I noticed that the images were not in the correct order. I want users to get as close to a “real” experience as possible so I want the images to display spine, front cover, pages front to back, then the back cover. However, the images were not correctly ordered in the database. I started to manually rearrange the images but quickly decided that there had to be an easier way of automating the task. After some Googling, I saw that unordered uploading was a common problem in Airtable. However, someone had created a script that could be run to automatically sort the image field. On the discussion thread, I noticed that someone mentioned it was bad practice to upload multiple images to one record. They stated that all images should be its own record and should then be linked to the relevant record. At first, I didn’t think this practice relevant to our purposes for the database but upon further reflection, I came to the conclusion that the user had a valid point. 

By uploading each image as its own record and then linking it to a relevant record, all records (and the data within them) would be more organized. Also, by uploading each image as its own record - new collections could be created easily without having to reupload the same image. For example, to get the database up and running I want to link all of a book’s images to the Book Title table. But if we ever wanted to create a new collection (such as Scientific Illustrations), all we would need to do is link the image record that is already in the database to a new parent record. 

This new system of organization meant that I had ended up deleting a table and creating a new one called Edited Images. The table, Public Book Gallery is now linked to the tables Edited Images and Author Info. By linking in this manner, any changes made to the Author Info table gets automatically updated in the Public Book Gallery. And by having the Edit Images table, at any point in the future, a new table can be created and easily linked to the images for a new gallery. 

With one problem solved, I then set about uploading all the images I had previously deleted to the newly created Edited Images table. However, when I started linking them I noticed that I had problems in my original naming convention. I have been naming images Book Title page number or identifier (e.g. Micromagentics p4; Micromagnetics title page). This created problems because the title page usually ends up being the last image when sorted alphabetically. To remedy this, I looked up ways in which I could quickly and easily sequentially rename all files in a folder. I found an easy way to perform the task in Windows. However, the task meant that all images would be renamed to the same title and a sequential number would be added to the end (e.g. Micromagnetics 1; Micromagentics 2). Renaming all of the images in this manner would make uploading to Airtable quick and easy. 

However, renaming the images in this way would make it more difficult for staff to find appropriate photos. Though my original naming convention can use some work, staff can search the folder for keywords (e.g. text, figures, plate). I feel that being able to search for features of the images is an important component of the collection. This means that the sequential renaming shortcut would not work in the situation. To solve the problem I have renamed the image with a digit leader (e.g. 01 - Micromagnetics title page; 02 - Micromagentics p4). This naming convention is not the prettiest but will allow the images to be sorted numerically so that they end up showing in the order I want them to. 

Thankfully, Airtable allows the primary field to be a formula. With some Googling, I applied a formula to the primary field that keeps the imported image name. Grouped by a feature (such as book title) and then sorted alphabetically, the images can be linked in the appropriate order. And because the original name also contains features of the image, one can search the database with a keyword and will still be able to yield relevant results.