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Announcements, Duke Digital Repository, Projects, Technology
January 5, 2022 Molly Bragg
Duke University Libraries (DUL) is recruiting two (2) Repository Services Analysts to ingest and help collaboratively manage content in their digital preservation systems and platforms. These positions will partner with the Research Data Curation, Digital Collections, and Scholarly Communications Programs, as well as other library and campus partners to provide digital curation and preservation services. The Repository Services Analyst role is an excellent early career opportunity for anyone who enjoys managing large sets of data and/or files, working with colleagues across an organization, preserving unique data and library collections, and learning new skills.
DUL will hold an open zoom session where prospective candidates can join anonymously and ask questions. This session will take place on Wednesday January 12 at 1pm EST; the link to join is posted on the libraries' job advertisement.
The Research Data Curation Program has grown significantly in recent years, and DUL is seeking candidates who want to grow their skills in this area. DUL is a member of the Data Curation Network (DCN), which provides opportunities for cross-institutional collaboration, curation training, and hands-on data curation practice. These skills are essential for anyone who wants to pursue a career in research data curation.
Ideal Repository Services Analyst applicants have been exposed to digital asset management tools and techniques such as command line scripting. They can communicate functional system requirements between groups with varying types of expertise, enjoy working with varied kinds of data and collections, and love solving problems. Applicants should also be comfortable collaboratively managing a shared portfolio of digital curation services and projects, as the two positions work closely together. The successful candidates will join the Digital Collections and Curation Services department (within the Digital Strategies and Technology Division).
Please refer to the DUL's job posting for position requirements and application instructions.
Behind the Scenes, MorphoSource, Projects, Technology
The Shortest Year
October 15, 2021 Will Sexton
Featured image – screenshot from the Sunset Tripod2 project charter.
Realizing that my most recent post here went up more than a year ago, I pause to reflect. What even happened over these last twelve months? Pandemic and vaccine, election and insurrection, mandates and mayhem – outside of our work bubble, October 2020 to October 2021 has been a churn of unprecedented and often dark happenings. Bitstreams, however, broadcasts from inside the bubble, where we have modeled cooperation and productivity, met many milestones, and kept our collective cool, despite working nearly 100% remotely as a team, with our stakeholders, and across organizational lines.
Last October, I wrote about Sunsetting Tripod2, a homegrown platform for our digital collections and archival finding aids that was also the final service we had running on a physical server. "Firm plans," I said we had for the work that remained. Still, in looking toward that setting sun, I worried about "all sorts of comical and embarrassing misestimations by myself on the pages of this very blog over the years." I was optimistic, but cautiously so, that we would banish the ghosts of Django-based systems past.
Reader, I have returned to Bitstreams to tell you that we did it. Sometime in Q1 of 2021, we said so long, farewell, adieu to Tripod2. It was a good feeling, like when you get your laundry folded, or your teeth cleaned, only better.
However, we did more in the past year than just power down exhausted old servers. What follows are a few highlights from the work of the Digital Strategies and Technology division of Duke University Libraries' software developers, and our collaborators (whom we cannot thank or praise enough) over the past twelve months.
In November, Digital Projects Developer Sean Aery posted on Implementing ArcLight: A Reflection. The work of replacing and improving upon our implementation for the Rubenstein Library's collection guides was one of the main components that allowed us to turn off Tripod2. We actually completed it in July of 2020, but that team earned its Q4 victory laps, including Sean's post and a session at Blacklight Summit a few days after my own post last October.
As the new year began, the MorphoSource team rolled out version 2.0 of that platform. MorphoSource Repository Developer Jocelyn Triplett shared a A Preview of MorphoSource 2 Beta in these pages on January 20. The launch took place on February 1.
After more than two years of work, we are happy to announce MorphoSource 2.0 is available! Includes color mesh and CT scan web previews, expanded metadata for non-CT modalities, and a greatly improved UI. Let us know what you think! https://t.co/D0zx9PDDE3
— MorphoSource (@MorphoSource) February 1, 2021
One project we had underway as I was writing last October was the integration of Globus, a transfer service for large datasets, into the Duke Research Data Repository. We completed that work in Q1 of 2021, prompting our colleague, Senior Research Data Management Consultant Sophia Lafferty-Hess, to post Share More Data in the Duke Research Data Repository! in a neighboring location that shares our charming cul-de-sac of library blogs.
The seventeen months since the murder of George Floyd have seen major changes in how we think and talk about race in the Libraries. We committed ourselves to the DUL Racial Justice Roadmap, a pathway for recognizing and attacking the pervasive influence of white supremacy in our society, in higher education, at Duke, in the field of librarianship, in our library, in the field of information technology, and in our own IT practices. During this time, members of our division have also participated broadly in DiversifyIT, a campus-wide group of IT professionals who seek to foster a culture of inclusion "by providing professional development, networking, and outreach opportunities."
Digital Projects Developer Michael Daul shared his own point of view with great thoughtfulness in his April post, What does it mean to be an actively antiracist developer? He touched on representation in the IT industry, acknowledging bias, being aware of one's own patterns of communication, and bringing these ideas to the systems we build and maintain.
One of the ideas that Michael identified for software development is web accessibility; as he wrote, we can "promote the benefits of building accessible interfaces that follow the practices of universal design." We put that idea into action a few months later, as Sean described in precise technical terms in his July post, Automated Accessibility Testing and Continuous Integration. Currently that process applies to the ArcLight platform, but when we have a chance, we'll see if we can expand it to other services.
The question of when we'll have that chance is a big one, as it hinges on the undertaking that now dominates our attention. Over the past year we have ramped up on the migration of our website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9, to head off the end-of-life for 7. This project has transformed into the raging beast that our colleagues at NC State Libraries warned us it would at the Code4Lib Southeast in May of 2019.
They warned us – Screenshot from "Drupal 7 to Drupal 8: Our Journey," by Erik Olson and Meredith Wynn of NC State Libraries' User Experience Department, presented at Code4Lib Southeast in May of 2019.
We are on a path to complete the Drupal migration in March 2022 – we have "firm plans," you could say – and I'm certain that its various aspects will come to feature in Bitstreams in due time. For now I will mention that it spawned two sub-projects that have challenged our team over the past six months or so, both of which involve refactoring functionality previously implemented as Drupal modules into standalone Rails applications:
Quicksearch, aka unified search, aka "Bento search" – see Michael's Bento is Coming! from 2014 – is now a standalone app; it also uses the open-source tool Apache Nutch, rather than Google CSE.
The staff directory app that went live in 2019, which Michael wrote about in Building a new Staff Directory, also no longer runs as a Drupal module.
Each of these implementations was necessary to prepare the way for a massive migration of theme and content that will take place over the coming months.
Screenshot of a Jira issue related to the Decouple Staff Directory project.
When it's done, maybe we'll have a chance to catch our breath. Who can really say? I could not have guessed a year ago where we'd be now, and anyway, the period of the last twelve months gets my nod as the shortest year ever. Assuming we're here, whatever "here" means in the age of remote/hybrid/flexible work arrangements, then I expect we'll be burning down backlogs, refactoring this or that, deploying some service, and making firm plans for something grand.
Announcements, Behind the Scenes, Collaborations, Collections, Digital Collections, New Collections, Projects
Good News from the DPC: Digitization of Behind the Veil Tapes is Underway
Image October 1, 2021 Giao Baker
This post was written by Jen Jordan, a graduate student at Simmons University studying Library Science with a concentration in Archives Management. She is the Digital Collections intern with the Digital Collections and Curation Services Department. Jen will complete her masters degree in December 2021.
The Digital Production Center (DPC) is thrilled to announce that work is underway on a 3-year long National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant-funded project to digitize the entirety of Behind the Veil: Documenting African-American Life in the Jim Crow South, an oral history project that produced 1,260 interviews spanning more than 1,800 audio cassette tapes. Accompanying the 2,000 plus hours of audio is a sizable collection of visual materials (e.g.- photographic prints and slides) that form a connection with the recorded voices.
We are here to summarize the logistical details relating to the digitization of this incredible collection. To learn more about its historical significance and the grant that is funding this project, titled "Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South: Digital Access to the Behind the Veil Project Archive," please take some time to read the July announcement written by John Gartrell, Director of the John Hope Franklin Research Center and Principal Investigator for this project. Co-Principal Investigator of this grant is Giao Luong Baker, Digital Production Services Manager.
Digitizing Behind the Veil (BTV) will require, in part, the services of outside vendors to handle the audio digitization and subsequent captioning of the recordings. While the DPC regularly digitizes audio recordings, we are not equipped to do so at this scale (while balancing other existing priorities). The folks at Rubenstein Library have already been hard at work double checking the inventory to ensure that each cassette tape and case are labeled with identifiers. The DPC then received the tapes, filling 48 archival boxes, along with a digitization guide (i.e. – an Excel spreadsheet) containing detailed metadata for each tape in the collection. Upon receiving the tapes, DPC staff set to boxing them for shipment to the vendor. As of this writing, the boxes are snugly wrapped on a pallet in Perkins Shipping & Receiving, where they will soon begin their journey to a digital format.
The wait has begun! In eight to twelve weeks we anticipate receiving the digital files, at which point we will perform quality control (QC) on each one before sending them off for captioning. As the captions are returned, we will run through a second round of QC. From there, the files will be ingested into the Duke Digital Repository, at which point our job is complete. Of course, we still have the visual materials to contend with, but we'll save that for another blog!
As we creep closer to the two-year mark of the COVID-19 pandemic and the varying degrees of restrictions that have come with it, the DPC will continue to focus on fulfilling patron reproduction requests, which have comprised the bulk of our work for some time now. We are proud to support researchers by facilitating digital access to materials, and we are equally excited to have begun work on a project of the scale and cultural impact that is Behind the Veil. When finished, this collection will be accessible for all to learn from and meditate on—and that's what it's all about.
Behind the Scenes, Projects, Technology
Auditing Archival Description for Harmful Language: A Computer and Community Effort
August 26, 2021 Noah Huffman 1 Comment
This post was written by Miriam Shams-Rainey, a third-year undergraduate at Duke studying Computer Science and Linguistics with a minor in Arabic. As a student employee in the Rubenstein's Technical Services Department in the Summer of 2021, Miriam helped build a tool to audit archival description in the Rubenstein for potentially harmful language. In this post, she summarizes her work on that project.
The Rubenstein Library has collections ranging across centuries. Its collections are massive and often contain rare manuscripts or one of a kind data. However, with this wide-ranging history often comes language that is dated, harmful, often racist, sexist, homophobic, and/or colonialist. As important as it is to find and remediate these instances of potentially harmful language, there is lot of data that must be searched.
With over 4,000 collection guides (finding aids) and roughly 12,000 catalog records describing archival collections, archivists would need to spend months of time combing their metadata to find harmful or problematic language before even starting to find ways to handle this language. That is, unless there was a way to optimize this workflow.
Working under Noah Huffman's direction and the imperatives of the Duke Libraries' Anti-Racist Roadmap, I developed a Python program capable of finding occurrences of potentially harmful language in library metadata and recording them for manual analysis and remediation. What would have taken months of work can now be done in a few button clicks and ten minutes of processing time. Moreover, the tools I have developed are accessible to any interested parties via a GitHub repository to modify or expand upon.
Although these gains in speed push metadata language remediation efforts at the Rubenstein forward significantly, a computer can only take this process so far; once uses of this language have been identified, the responsibility of determining the impact of the term in context falls onto archivists and the communities their work represents. To this end, I have also outlined categories of harmful language occurrences to act as a starting point for archivists to better understand the harmful narratives their data uphold and developed best practices to dismantle them.
Building an automated audit tool
The simple, yet user-friendly interface that allows archivists to customize the search audit to their specific needs.
I created an executable that allows users to interact with the program regardless of their familiarity with Python or with using their computer's command line. With an executable, all that a user must do is simply click on the program (titled "description_audit.exe") and the script will load with all of its dependencies in a self-contained environment. There's nothing that a user needs to install, not even Python.
Within this executable, I also created a user interface to allow users to set up the program with their specific audit parameters. To use this program, users should first create a CSV file (spreadsheet) containing each list of words they want to look for in their metadata.
Snippet from a sample lexicon CSV file containing harmful terms to search
In this CSV file of "lexicons", each category of terms should have its own column, for example RaceTerms could be the first row in a column of terms such as "colored" or "negro," and GenderTerms could be the first row in a column of gendered terms such as "homemaker" or "wife." See these lexicon CSV file examples.
Once this CSV has been created, users can select this CSV of lexicons in the program's user interface and then select which columns of terms they want the program to use when searching across the source metadata. Users can either use all lexicon categories (all columns) by default or specify a subset by typing out those column headers. For the Rubenstein's purposes, there is also a rather long lexicon called HateBase (from a regional, multilingual database of potential hate speech terms often used in online moderating) that is only enabled when a checkbox is checked; users from other institutions can download the HateBase lexicon for themselves and use it or they can simply ignore it.
In the CSV reports that are output by the program, matches for harmful terms and phrases will be tagged with the specific lexicon category the match came from, allowing users to filter results to certain categories of potentially harmful terms.
Users also need to designate a folder on their desktop where report outputs should be stored, along with the folder containing their source EAD records in .xml format and their source MARCXML file containing all of the MARC records they wish to process as a single XML file. Results from MARC and EAD records are reported separately, so only one type of record is required to use the program, however both can be provided in the same session.
How archival metadata is parsed and analyzed
Once users submit their input parameters in the GUI, the program begins by accessing the specified lexicons from the given CSV file. For each lexicon, a "rule" is created for a SpaCy rule-based matcher, using the column name (e.g. RaceTerms or GenderTerms) as the name of the specific rule. The same SpaCy matcher object identifies matches to each of the several lexicons or "rules". Once the matcher has been configured, the program assesses whether valid MARC or EAD records were given and starts reading in their data.
To access important pieces of data from each of these records, I used a Python library called BeautifulSoup to parse the XML files. For each individual record, the program parses the call numbers and collection or entry name so that information can be included in the CSV reports. For EAD records, the collection title and component titles are also parsed to be analyzed for matches to the lexicons, along with any data that is in a paragraph (<p>) tag. For MARC records, the program also parses the author or creator of the item, the extent of the collection, and the timestamp of when the description of the item was last updated. In each MARC record, the 520 field (summary) and 545 field (biography/history note) are all concatenated together and analyzed as a single entity.
Data from each record is stored in a Python dictionary with the names of fields (as strings) as keys mapping to the collection title, call number, etc. Each of these dictionaries is stored in a list, with a separate structure for EAD and MARC records.
Once data has been parsed and stored, each record is checked for matches to the given lexicons using the SpaCy rule-based matcher. For each record, any matches that are found are then stored in the dictionary with the matching term, the context of the term (the entire field or surrounding few sentences, depending on length), and the rule the term matches (such as RaceTerms). These matches are found using simple tokenization from SpaCy that allow matches to be identified quickly and without regard for punctuation, capitalization, etc.
Although this process doesn't necessarily use the cutting-edge of natural language processing that the SpaCy library makes accessible, this process is adaptable in ways that matching procedures like using regular expressions often isn't. Moreover, identifying and remedying harmful language is a fundamentally human process which, at the end of the day, needs a significant level of input both from historically marginalized communities and from archivists.
Matches to any of the lexicons, along with all other associated data (the record's call number, title, etc.) are then written into CSV files for further analysis and further categorization by users. You can see sample CSV audit reports here. The second phase of manual categorization is still a lengthy process, yielding roughly 14600 matches from the Rubenstein Library's EAD data and 4600 from its MARC data which must still be read through and analyzed by hand, but the process of identifying these matches has been computerized to take a mere ten minutes, where it could otherwise be a months-long process.
Categorizing matches: an archivist and community effort
An excerpt of initial data returned by the audit program for EAD records. This data should be further categorized manually to ensure a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of these instances of potentially harmful language.
To better understand these matches and create a strategy to remediate the harmful language they represent, it is important to consider each match in several different facets.
Looking at the context provided with each match allows archivists to understand the way in which the term was used. The remediation strategy for the use of a potentially harmful term in a proper noun used as a positive, self-identifying term, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for example, is vastly different from that of a white person using the word "colored" as a racist insult.
The three ways in which I proposed we evaluate context are as follows:
Match speaker: who was using the term? Was the sensitive term being used as a form of self-identification or reclaiming by members of a marginalized group, was it being used by an archivist, or was it used by someone with privilege over the marginalized group the term targets (e.g. a white person using an anti-Black term or a cisgender straight person using an anti-LGBTQ+ term)? Within this category, I proposed three potential categories for uses of a term: in-group, out-group, and archivist. If a term is used by a member (or members) of the identity group it references, its use is considered an in-group use. If the term is used by someone who is not a member of the identity group the term references, that usage of the term is considered out-group. Paraphrasing or dated term use by archivists is designated simply as archivist use.
Match context: how was the term in question being used? Modifying the text used in a direct quote or a proper noun constitutes a far greater liberty by the archivist than removing a paraphrased section or completely archivist-written section of text that involved harmful language. Although this category is likely to evolve as more matches are categorized, my initial proposed categories are: proper noun, direct quote, paraphrasing, and archivist narrative.
Match impact: what was the impact of the term? Was this instance a false positive, wherein the use of the term was in a completely unrelated and innocuous context (e.g. the use of the word "colored" to describe the colors used in visual media), or was the use of the term in fact harmful? Was the use of the term derogatory, or was it merely a mention of politicized identities? In many ways, determining the impact of a particular term or use of potentially harmful language is a community effort; if a community member with a marginalized identity says that the use of a term in that particular context is harmful to people with that identity, archivists are in no position to disagree or invalidate those feelings and experiences. The categories that I've laid out initially–dated original term, dated Rubenstein term, mention of marginalized issues, mention of marginalized identity, downplaying bias (e.g. calling racism and discrimination an issue with "race relations"), dehumanization of marginalized people, false positive–only hope to serve as an entry point and rudimentary categorization of these nuances to begin this process.
A short excerpt of categorized EAD metadata
Here you can find more documentation on the manual categorization strategy.
Categorizing each of these instances of potentially harmful language remains a time-consuming, meticulous process. Although much of this work can be computerized, decolonization is a fundamentally human and fundamentally community-centered practice. No computer can dismantle the colonial, white supremacist narratives that archival work often upholds. This work requires our full attention and, for better or for worse, a lot of time, even with the productivity boost technology gives us.
Once categories have been established, at least on a preliminary level, I found that about 100-200 instances of potentially harmful language could be manually parsed and categorized in an hour.
Decolonization and anti-racist efforts in archival work are an ongoing process. It is bound to take active learning, reflection, and lots of remediation. However, using technology to start this process creates a much less daunting entry point. Anti-racism work is essential in archival spaces.
The ways we talk about history can either work to uphold traditional white supremacist, racist, ableist, etc. narratives, or they can work to dismantle them. In many ways, archival work has often upheld these narratives in the past, however this audit represents the sincere beginnings of work to further equitable narratives in the future.
Digital Collections, Duke Digital Repository, Projects, Technology, User Experience
ArcLight Migration: A Status Update After Three Months of Work
April 24, 2020 Sean Aery 5 Comments
On January 20, 2020, we kicked off our first development sprint for implementing ArcLight at Duke as our new finding aids / collection guides platform. We thought our project charter was solid: thorough, well-vetted, with a reasonable set of goals. In the plan was a roadmap identifying a July 1, 2020 launch date and a list of nineteen high-level requirements. There was nary a hint of an impending global pandemic that could upend absolutely everything.
The work wasn't supposed to look like this, carried out by zooming virtually into each other's living rooms every day. Code sessions and meetings now require navigating around child supervision shifts and schooling-from-home responsibilities. Our new young office-mates occasionally dance into view or within earshot during our calls. Still, we acknowledge and are grateful for the privilege afforded by this profession to continue to do our work remotely from safe distance.
So, a major shoutout is due to my colleagues in the trenches of this work overcoming the new unforeseen constraints around it, especially Noah Huffman, David Chandek-Stark, and Michael Daul. Our progress to date has only been possible through resilience, collaboration, and willingness to keep pushing ahead together.
Three months after we started the project, we remain on track for a summer 2020 launch.
As a reminder, we began with the core open-source ArcLight platform (demo available) and have been building extensions and modifications in our local application in order to accommodate Duke needs and preferences. With the caveat that there'll be more changes coming over the next couple months before launch, I want to provide a summary of what we have been able to accomplish so far and some issues we have encountered along the way. Duke staff may access our demo app (IP-restricted) for an up-to-date look at our work in progress.
Homepage design for Duke's ArcLight finding aids site.
Duke Branding. Aimed to make an inviting front door to the finding aids consistent with other modern Duke interfaces, similar to–yet distinguished enough from–other resources like the catalog, digital collections, or Rubenstein Library website.
Featured Items. Built a configurable set of featured items from the collections (with captions), to be displayed randomly (actual selections still in progress).
Dynamic Content. Provided a live count of collections; we might add more indicators for types/counts of materials represented.
A collection homepage with a sidebar for context navigation.
Sidebar. Replaced the single-column tabbed layout with a sidebar + main content area.
Persistent Collection Info. Made collection & component views more consistent; kept collection links (Summary, Background, etc.) visible/available from component pages.
Width. Widened the largest breakpoint. We wanted to make full use of the screen real estate, especially to make room for potentially lengthy sidebar text.
Component pages contextualized through a sidebar navigator and breadcrumb above the main title.
Hierarchical Navigation. Restyled & moved the hierarchical tree navigation into the sidebar. This worked well functionally in ArcLight core, but we felt it would be more effective as a navigational aid when presented beside rather than below the content.
Tooltips & Popovers. Provided some additional context on mouseovers for some navigational elements.
Mouseover context in navigation.
List Child Components. Added a direct-child list in the main content for any series or other component. This makes for a clear navigable table of what's in the current series / folder / etc. Paginating it helps with performance in cases where we might have 1,000+ sibling components to load.
Breadcrumb Refactor. Emphasized the collection title. Kept some indentation, but aimed for page alignment/legibility plus a balance of emphasis between current component title and collection title.
Breadcrumb trail to show the current component's nesting.
Search results grouped by collection, with keyword highlighting.
"Group by Collection" as the default. Our stakeholders were confused by atomized components as search results outside of the context of their collections, so we tried to emphasize that context in the default search.
Revised search result display. Added keyword highlighting within result titles in Grouped or All view. Made Grouped results display checkboxes for bookmarking & digitized content indicators.
Advanced Search. Kept the global search box simple but added a modal Advanced search option that adds fielded search and some additional filters.
Digital Objects Integration
Digital objects from the Duke Digital Repository are presented inline in the finding aid component page.
DAO Roles. Indexed the @role attribute for <dao> elements; we used that to call templates for different kinds of digital content
Embedded Object Viewers. Used the Duke Digital Repository's embed feature, which renders <iframe>s for images and AV.
Whitespace compression. Added a step to the pipeline to remove extra whitespace before indexing. This seems to have slightly accelerated our time-to-index rather than slow it down.
More text, fewer strings. We encountered cases where note-like fields indexed as strings by ArcLight core (e.g., <scopecontent>) needed to be converted to text because we had more than 32,766 bytes of data (limit for strings) to put in them. In those cases, finding aids were failing to index.
Underscores. For the IDs that end up in a URL for a component, we added an underscore between the finding aid slug and the component ID. We felt these URLs would look cleaner and be better for SEO (our slugs often contain names).
Dates. Changed the date normalization rules (some dates were being omitted from indexing/display)
Bibliographic ID. We succeeded in indexing our bibliographic IDs from our EADs to power a collection-level Request button that leads a user to our homegrown requests system.
EAD -> HTML. We extended the EAD-to-HTML transformation rules for formatted elements to cover more cases (e.g., links like <extptr> & <extref> or other elements like <archref> & <indexentry>)
Additional formatting and link render rules applied.
Formatting in Titles. We preserved bold or italic formatting in component titles.
ArcLight Core Contributions
We have been able to contribute some of our code back to the ArcLight core project to help out other adopters.
The behind-the-scenes foundational work deserves mention here — it represents some of the most complex and challenging aspects of the project. It makes the application development driving the changes I've shared above possible.
Built separate code repositories for our Duke ArcLight application and our EAD data
Gathered a diverse set of 40 representative sample EADs for testing
Dockerized our Duke ArcLight app to simplify developer environment setup
Provisioned a development/demo server for sharing progress with stakeholders
Automated continuous integration and deployment to servers using GitLabCI
Performed targeted data cleanup
Successfully got all 4,000 of our finding aids indexed in Solr on our demo server
Our team has accomplished a lot in three months, in large part due to the solid foundation the ArcLight core software provides. We're benefiting from some amazing work done by many, many developers who have contributed their expertise and their code to the Blacklight and ArcLight codebases over the years. It has been a real pleasure to be able to build upon an open source engine– a notable contrast to our previous practice of developing everything in-house for finding aids discovery and access.
Still, much remains to be addressed before we can launch this summer.
Here's a list of big things we still plan to tackle by July (other minor revisions/bugfixes will continue as well)…
ASpace -> ArcLight. We need a smoother publication pipeline to regularly get data from ArchivesSpace indexed into ArcLight.
Access & Use Statements. We need to revise the existing inheritance rules and make sure these statements are presented clearly. It's especially important when materials are indeed restricted.
Relevance Ranking. We know we need to improve the ranking algorithm to ensure the most relevant results for a query appear first.
Analytics. We'll set up some anonymized tracking to help monitor usage patterns and guide future design decisions.
Sitemap/SEO. It remains important that Google and other crawlers index the finding aids so they are discoverable via the open web.
Accessibility Testing / Optimization. We aim to comply with WCAG2.0 AA guidelines.
Single-Page View. Many of our stakeholders are accustomed to a single-page view of finding aids. There's no such functionality baked into ArcLight, as its component-by-component views prioritize performance. We might end up providing a downloadable PDF document to meet this need.
More Data Cleanup. ArcLight's feature set (especially around search/browse) reveals more places where we have suboptimal or inconsistent data lurking in our EADs.
More Community Contributions. We plan to submit more of our enhancements and bugfixes for consideration to be merged into the core ArcLight software.
If you're a member of the Duke community, we encourage you to explore our demo and provide feedback. To our fellow future ArcLight adopters, we would love to hear how your implementations or plans are shaping up, and identify any ways we might work together toward common goals.
Stay safe, everyone!
The New Books & Media Catalog Turns One
February 28, 2020 Cory Lown 2 Comments
It's been just over a year since we launched our new catalog in January of 2019. Since then we've made improvements to features, performance, and reliability, have developed a long term governance and development strategy, and have plans for future features and enhancements.
During the Spring 2019 semester we experienced a number of outages of the Solr index that powers the new catalog. It proved to be both frustrating and difficult to track down the root cause of the outages. We took a number of measures to reduce the risk of bot traffic slowing down or crashing the index. A few of these measures include limiting facet paging to 50 pages and results paging to 250 pages, as well as setting limits on OpenSearch queries. We also added service monitoring so we are automatically alerted when things go awry and automatic restarts under some known bad system conditions. We also identified that a bug in the version of Solr we were running was vulnerable to causing crashes for queries with particular characteristics. We have since applied a patch to Solr to address this bug. Happily, the index has not crashed since we implemented these protective measures and bug fixes.
Over the past year we've made a number of other improvements to the catalog including:
Caching of the home page and advanced search page have reduced page load times by 75%.
Subject searches are now more precise and do not include stemmed terms.
CDs and DVDs can be searched by accession number.
When digitized copies of Duke material are available at the Internet Archive, links to the digital copy are automatically generated.
Records can be saved to a bookmarks list and shared with others via a stable URL.
Eligible records now have a "Request digitization" link.
Many other small improvements and bug fixes.
We sometimes get requests for features that the catalog already supports:
Queries with Boolean operators
Queries with wildcards
Searching across multiple libraries at the same time (from advanced search)
Anchor links for quick access to record metadata, and a jump to top link.
While development has slowed, the core TRLN team meets monthly to discuss and prioritize new features and fixes, and dedicates time each month to maintenance and new development. We have a number of small improvements and bug fixes in the works. One new feature we're working on is adding a citation generator that will provide copyable citations in multiple formats (APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and Turabian) for records with OCLC numbers.
We welcome, read, and respond to all feedback and feature requests that come to us through the catalog's feedback form. Let us know what you think.
Check out "Search Tips" and "Expert Search Tips" for detailed information about how to get the most out of the new catalog.
Behind the Scenes, Projects
FOLIO Update November 2019
November 22, 2019 Karen Newbery
Here at Duke, the buzz continues around FOLIO. We have continued to contribute to the international project as active participants on the FOLIO Product Council, special interest groups, and contribute development resources. You can find links to the various groups on the FOLIO wiki.
We've also committed to implementing the electronic resource management (ERM)-focused apps in summer of 2020. Starting with the ERM-focused apps will give us the opportunity to use FOLIO in a production environment, and will be a benefit to our Continuing Resource Acquisitions Department since they are not currently using software dedicated to electronic resources to keep track of licences and terms.
Our local project planning has come more into focus as well. We have gathered names for team participants and will be kicking off our project teams in January. As we've talked about the implementation here, we've realized that we have a number of tasks that will need to be addressed, regardless of subject matter. For example, we're going to need to map data – not just bibliographic, holdings and item data, but users, orders, invoices, etc. We'll also need to set up configurations and user permissions for each of the apps, and document, train, and develop new workflows. Since our work is not siloed in functional areas, we need to facilitate discussions among the functional areas. To do that, we're going to create a set of functional area implementation teams, and work groups around the task areas that need to be addressed.
To learn more about the FOLIO project at Duke, fly on over to our WordPress site and read through our past newsletters, look through slides from past presentations, and check out some fun links to bee facts.
Digital Exhibits, Projects
Managing impermanence – migration of the Libraries' digital exhibits
August 2, 2019 Will Sexton
Post contributed by Claire Cahoon, student in the master's program at the School of Information and Library Science, UNC-Chapel Hill.
This summer I worked as a field experience student in the Software Services department migrating digital exhibits into Omeka 2, Duke's most current platform. The ultimate goal was to start and document the process of moving exhibits from legacy platforms into Omeka 2.
The reasoning behind the project became clear as we started creating an index of all of the digital exhibits on display in the exhibits website. Out of 97 total exhibits, there were varying degrees of functionality, from the most recent and up-to-date exhibits, to sites with broken links and pages where only text would display, leaving out crucial images. Centralizing these into a single platform should make it easier to create, support, and maintain all of these exhibits.
Screenshot of the sidebar of an exhibit, showing the link to the previous version of the exhibit in the Internet Archive
I found exhibits in Omeka 1, Cascade, Scriptorium, JAlbum, and even found a few mystery platforms that we never identified. Since it was the largest, we decided to work on the Omeka 1 group over the summer, and this week I finished migrating all 34 exhibits – that means that after a few adjustments to make the new exhibits available, Omeka 1 can be shut off!
We worked with Meg Brown, Exhibits Coordinator for the Libraries, and the exhibits department to figure out how each exhibit needed to be represented. Since we were managing expectations from lots of different stakeholders, we landed on the idea to include a link to the archived version of each exhibit in the WayBack machine, in case the look and feel of the new exhibits is limiting for anyone used to Omeka 1.
Working with the internet archive links and sorting through broken pieces of these exhibits really put into perspective how impermanent the internet is, even for seemingly static information. Without much maintenance, these exhibits lost some of the core content when video links changed, references were lost, and even the most well-written custom code stopped working. I hope that my work this summer will help keep these exhibit materials in working order while also eliminating the need to continue supporting for Omeka 1.
While migrating, I came across a few favorite exhibits and items that combined interesting content and some updated features in Omeka 2:
Cover of "Anxious homes: cursory-cleaning for the imminent arrival of visitors or how to give the impression of a clean house in under 20 minutes" by Jackie Batey. Available in the Rubenstein Library: N7433.4.B38 A59 2006
Book + Art: Artists' books from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture (and the old version of Book + Art)
"Party Dress" by Catherine Michaelis
"Anxious homes: cursory-cleaning for the imminent arrival of visitors or how to give the impression of a clean house in under 20 minutes" by Jackie Batey
John Hope Franklin: Imprint of an American Scholar (and the old version of the John Hope Franklin exhibit)
John Hope's Franklin's letters and memos related to his activism, including advising the defense for Brown v. Board of Education.
Cheap Thrills: The Highs and Lows of Paris's Cabaret Culture (and the old version of Cheap Thrills)
The cabaret pieces to listen to, adapted by student composers for the Duke New Music Ensemble
Medicology, or, Home encyclopedia of health: a complete family guide… Vol. I, by Joseph Gibbons Richardson (1904). Available in the Rubenstein Library: RC81 .R52 1904
Animated Anatomies: The Human Body in Anatomical Texts from the 16th to 21st Centuries (and the old version of Animated Anatomies)
Videos of these anatomy flap-books
Omeka still has some quirks to work out, and the accessibility of the pages and the metadata display are still in the works. However, migrating these exhibits into Omeka 2 will make them much easier to support and change for improvements. Thanks to the team that worked with me and taught me so much this summer: Will Sexton, Michael Daul, and Meg Brown!
Digital Collections, Duke Digital Repository, Projects
Celebrating a New Duke Digital Collections Milestone with Section A
July 12, 2019 Spencer Bevis
Duke Digital Collections recently passed 100,000 items!
Last week, it was brought to our attention that Duke Digital Collections recently passed 100,000 individual items found in the Duke Digital Repository! To celebrate, I want to highlight some of the most recent materials digitized and uploaded from our Section A project. In the past, Bitstreams has blogged about what Section A is and what it means, but it's been a couple of years since that post, and a little refresher couldn't hurt.
What is Section A?
In 2016, the staff of Rubenstein Research Services proposed a mass digitization project of Section A. This is the umbrella term for 175 boxes of different historic materials that users often request – manuscripts, correspondence, receipts, diaries, drawings, and more. These boxes contain around 3,900 small collections that all had their own workflows. Every box needs consultations from Rubenstein Research Services, review by Library Conservation Department staff, review by Technical Services, metadata updates, and more, all to make sure that the collections could be launched and hosted within the Duke Digital Repository.
In the 2 years since that blog post, so much has happened! The first 2 Section A collections had gone live as a sort of proof-of-concept, and as a way to define what the digitization project would be and what it would look like. We've added over 500 more collections from Section A since then. This somehow barely even scratches the surface of the entire project! We're digitizing the collections in alphabetical order, and even after all the collections that have gone online, we are currently still only on the letter "C"!
Nonetheless, there is already plenty of materials to check out and enjoy. I was a student of history in college, so in this blog post, I want to particularly highlight some of the historic materials from the latter half of the 19th century.
Showing off some of Section A
Clara Barton's description of the Grand Hotel de la Paix in Lyon, France.
In 1869, after her work as a nurse in the Civil War, Clara Barton traveled around Europe to Geneva, Switzerland and Corsica, France. Included in the Duke Digital Collections is her diary and calling cards from her time there. These pages detail where she visited and stayed throughout the year. She also wrote about her views on the different European countries, how Americans and Europeans compare, and more. Despite her storied career and her many travels that year, Miss Barton felt that "I have accomplished very little in a year", and hoped that in 1870, she "may be accounted worthy once more to take my place among the workers of the world, either in my own country or in some other".
Back in America, around 1900, the Rev. John Malachi Bowden began dictating and documenting his experiences as a Confederate soldier during the Civil War, one of many that a nurse like Miss Barton may have treated. Although Bowden says he was not necessarily a secessionist at the beginning of the Civil War, he joined the 2nd Georgia Regiment in August 1861 after Georgia had seceded. During his time in the regiment, he fought in the Battles of Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania Court House, and more. In 1864, Union forced captured and held Bowden as a prisoner at Maryland's Point Lookout Prison, where he describes in great detail what life was like as a POW before his eventual release. He writes that he was "so indignant at being in a Federal prison" that he refused to cut his hair. His hair eventually grew to be shoulder-length, "somewhat like Buffalo Bill's."
Speaking of whom, Duke Digital Collections also has some material from Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody), courtesy of the Section A initiative. A showman and entertainer who performed in cowboy shows throughout the latter half of the 19th century, Buffalo Bill was enormously popular wherever he went. In this collection, he writes to a Brother Miner about how he invited seventy-five of his "old Brothers" from Bedford, VA to visit him in Roanoke. There is also a brief itinerary of future shows throughout North Carolina and South Carolina. This includes a stop here in Durham, NC a few weeks after Bill wrote this letter.
Buffalo Bill's letter to his "Brother Miner", dated October 17, 1916.
Around this time, Walter Clark, associate justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, began writing his own histories of North Carolina throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Three of Clark's articles prepared for the University Magazine of the University of North Carolina have been digitized as part of Section A. This includes an article entitled "North Carolina in War", where he made note of the Generals from North Carolina engaged in every war up to that point. It's possible that John Malachi Bowden was once on the battlefield alongside some of these generals mentioned in Clark's writings. This type of synergy in our collection is what makes Section A so exciting to dive into.
As the new Still Image Digitization Specialist at the Duke Digital Production Center, seeing projects like this take off in such a spectacular way is near and dear to my heart. Even just the four collections I've highlighted here have been so informative. We still have so many more Section A boxes to digitize and host online. It's so exciting to think of what we might find and what we'll digitize for all the world to see. Our work never stops, so remember to stay updated on Duke Digital Collections to see some of these newly digitized collections as they become available.
digital collectionsDuke Digital Repositoryfinding aidsRubenstein Section A
Assessment, Collections, Projects
Data Sciencing our Journal Subscriptions
June 14, 2019 Angela Zoss 1 Comment
The ongoing tensions between academic institutions and publishers have been escalating the last few months, but those tensions have existed for many years. The term "Big Deal" has been coined to describe a long-standing, industry-wide practice of journal bundling that forces libraries to subscribe to unwanted and unneeded publications rather than paying more for a limited number of individual subscriptions. This is a practice you see in other industries – for example, cable packages that provide hundreds of channels, even if you only want one or two specific channels.
What is especially problematic in higher education is that academics produce and review the content that gets published in the journals (for free), and then the universities have to pay the publishers a subscription fee to access the content. Imagine if YouTube required a subscription fee to watch any videos, including the ones you had posted. It's a system that makes research harder to access and inhibits global scientific progress, all so publishers can earn an enormous profit margin.
Right now, academic publishing is controlled by five publishers (the "Big Five") – a monopoly that makes it very difficult for libraries to negotiate better deals. Only very large organizations or consortia, like the University of California, have been able to start pushing back against the system. It will likely take large shake-ups like this for any large changes to take hold, but it in the meantime there may be ways to situate ourselves for making better purchasing decisions.
At Duke, we often review our usage of specific journal titles as we prepare to make purchasing decisions. Usage data comes in a variety of forms, but the most popular are counts of Duke views and downloads that come directly from the publishers and the number of times Duke authors publish in or cite a particular journal. There are many other kinds of data that might be of interest, however, including Duke participation on editorial boards, usage differences across disciplines, and even whether or not the journal is fully open access. Blending various data sources and optimizing the search decisions for a given budget cycle can be overwhelming.
Last fall, Duke University Libraries decided to propose a project for Duke's Data+ summer program – a summer research experience in data science for undergraduate students. Our project, "Breaking the Bundle: Analyzing Duke's Journal Subscriptions", focuses on Duke's subscriptions to journals published by Elsevier. The program is in its third week, and our team of two incredibly-sharp undergraduates has been hard at work building and blending our datasets. Our goal by the end of summer is to have a proof-of-concept dashboard that lets collection managers adjust the weights of various usage measures to generate an ideal collection of journals for a particular budget.
It is still very early in the process, but the students have been hard at work and have made great progress. We decided it would be best to develop the analysis software and dashboard using R, a statistical computing project with a rich history and many helpful development tools. In addition to publisher-provided views and downloads, the students have been able to use websites and APIs to collect data on journal open access status, editorial boards, numbers of publications, and numbers of citations. All Data+ teams present publicly on the projects twice during the summer, and we hope to schedule a third talk for a library audience before the end of the program on August 2.
Just one of many files of R code generated for the project so far.
We look forward to seeing what the summer will bring! While this project is just one small step, automating the collection and analysis of journal usage will position us well, both for responsible purchases and for a hopefully-changing publishing landscape.


Happy Grind Monday! Each week G & P Unlimited Co. will share 10 songs from our weekly musical Grind-List that help shape our company's culture. You might not know this but the letter "G" stands for Grind/Get-Up and the letter "P" stands for Pursue in G & P. So when you wear and support our brand you are Grinding or Getting up to Pursue an Unlimited Lifestyle.
So this week Grind-List is called Love and Politics! Please continue to pray for those who are affected by the governmental shutdown.
I hope you Enjoy! Have an amazing week! Live Life-Be Unlimited -Become Legendary!
Please Share, Provide Comments, and Suggest Tracks.


Slugs & Snails There are 34 products.
Slugs & Snails are 'the original' boy's and girl's tights company. A small family run business, they have been producing practical and exciting designs from the West Coast of Ireland since 2008. Slugs & Snails offer quirky, gender neutral designs which offer superb value for money and an alternative approach to clothing; a product which can be shared between and passed down to siblings…an excellent approach to recycled clothing! They even do a limited edition collection of adult tights so there's no need to be jealous of the kid's fabulous legwear!


Home Box Office Brings Back Fabulous Bette Midler Concert For Pay-TV Viewers By WILLIAM D. KERNS Fine Arts Editor January 2, 1977 The odds are against the vast majority of Lubbockites ever seeing a Bette Midler concert in person. But thanks to the miracles of that still controversial technical advance known as Home Box Office commercial-free television, the South Plains will be able to view one of her greatest shows four more times this month. And what a show It is. Completely mesmerizirtg, this show — which was recorded and filmed at the Cleveland Music Hall in February 1976 — is a brilliant conception of showmanship. Indeed, it is the sort of musical entertainment which quickly inspires the viewer to turn out the lights, strike a match to a candle, turn up the sound and wish he was there. Associated Press critic Bob Thomas has already labeled Bette Midler "the most remarkable talent to emerge since Barbra Streisand." He may very well be right since all who tune in to this concert can see there is much, much more to this songstress than the hit "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy." Sure, Bette is still primarily known for singing the old songs. She likes to groove into what she labels "hubba hubba music," that is, music from the 1940s. But one only has to listen to her rousing tempo with Glenn Miller's "In The Mood" to realize the excellence she's achieved with that decade's music. Even her naughty stories come straight out of a Sophie Tucker jokebook. And yes, her show does possess a goodly amount of blue material Many concerts do nowadays. But the four letter words in Miss M's act come off more hilarious than pornographic. Few people can add charm to vulgar innuendo with the skill of a Bette Midler…as evidenced by the crowd's reaction in the Cleveland Music Hall those nights. Nevertheless, it remains her singing to be the foundation upon which her act is built. Bette Midler, after all, is one of the least attractive performers ever to grace a stage. As for her wardrobe, well, she works out of rags and it's easy to see why she's won numerous Worst Dressed Woman awards. But her talent and energy more than make up for all of this. She has an uncanny ability to lend respectability to the hits of the big band era, then zoom forward 30 years and draw every ounce of feeling from a couple John Prine ballads. She'll sing a song from Disney's "Snow White," tell a few jokes, then add more oomph to "Delta Dawn" than Helen Reddy could dream possible. Miss M is constantly moving on stage. Dancing, skipping, acting out her tunes, she performs with a consistency and style that would exhaust an Olympic gymnast And yet her timing remains on key, especially apparent with the best number in the show when she picks up a barroom telephone, dials area code 202 and proceeds to croon a love song to Nelson Rockefeller. Her performance is totally unpredictable and totally entertaining. In fact, it's more a happening than a concert. She works with constantly changing sets (making an appearance in the hand of a lifesize King Kong long before Jessica Lange) and makes excellent use of a full scale orchestra and a talented background trio called, not surprisingly, the Harlettes. But special recognition should also be aimed toward director Tom Trbovich, editor Bill Breshears and Home Box Office for making "The Divine Miss M" a truly memorable TV concert For once music lovers could witness an actual two hour and fifteen minute live performance without having to watch Wolfman Jack push pimple paste between sets. Naturally, the Bette Midler extravaganza is a show which would be even better viewed in person. But that West Texas is able to view it at all is one of the best Christinas presents the season has offered. The show first aired on Home Box Office in June and popular reaction is what brings it back this time. And why not? After all, it could very well be the first gift a television-watching music lover would ever express a desire to receive twice…or even more. Indeed, I doubt that the Divine Miss M has ever been more divine. Don't miss it!


text:
Vanessa martha är en fjärilsart som beskrevs av Christian Friedrich Stephan 1923. Vanessa martha ingår i släktet Vanessa och familjen praktfjärilar. Inga underarter finns listade i Catalogue of Life.

Källor

Praktfjärilar
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
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Social Profit Sector Perspectives On Change And Innovation with Paul Nazareth
As the world offers more means for people to help, the social profit sector has come to adapt to it. Paul Nazareth, the Vice President of Education and Development for the Canadian Association of Gift Planners, opens up the doors to take us into the perspectives on change and innovation in social profit. With the rise of crowdfunding, the sector has undeniably been feeling the weight of competition. Instead of complaining about it, Paul took this as an opportunity to understand and learn from. He talks a little bit about what he is seeing in the marketplace, how important it is for organizations to have that sense of the big picture, and how donors could make gifts of a lifetime. On the leadership side, Paul shares where leaders can find new ideas or inspiration.
Listen to the podcast here:
It's a time for people to sit back and think about the work that they do, the family that they love and the lives that they're leading. I thought it would be great to have the most connected person in philanthropy, Paul Nazareth. He's the Vice President of Education and Development for the Canadian Association of Gift Planners and truly the great connector in our sector. Welcome to the show, Paul.
It is great to have you here. I want to start with the hard-hitting question. Paul, what is Netwalking?
Netwalking is something I've been doing for a little under a decade and came to me from one of the globe's most recognized thinkers, a woman by the name of Nilofer Merchant. She had a TED Talk called Sitting is the New Smoking. At the time, I was working in a cubicle in a bank as a philanthropic adviser working in donor-advised funds and realizing, "That's it, I've got to get moving." Right from then, I started holding walking meetings. I've been spending how many years sitting in coffee shops. I held a public Netwalking event. I do it once a summer and invite a good group of about 30 to 50 people out. It's a walking workshop. It's very structured and guided that allows for creativity and collision between adjacent industries. I try to get entrepreneurs, philanthropy professionals but also strategic thinkers out to this to help people think outside of the conference box.
Tell me a story about one of the conversations you've had at a previous Netwalking event.
What I'm proud of now after doing this for almost a decade is what's happened since is people are having ideas together. I've got a couple of people who started a business together, people who started programs together. That collision of ideas and helping people to get unstuck, helping people to look at solving problems in a different way. One of the things I enjoy is helping people articulate their problems, goals and dreams. We don't think out loud enough. Journaling and all that stuff is a challenge for a lot of people. When I get them into a physical space to do it and make no mistake, the fresh air, the movement, the walking is a big part of this. Our association, the Gift Planning Association has been holding a course in Banff, Alberta for many years. There is this concept of digesting knowledge in fresh air. The brain didn't grow just to think. It grew to facilitate movement, and movement and thinking are tied together.
The opportunity for people who wouldn't otherwise have a conversation to come together is such an important element of doing that deep thinking, that strategic work. One of the reasons we started doing this show was we wanted to have conversations with leaders to talk about things that they don't normally talk about with their boards, they don't talk about with their management teams. It sounds like you've created something that crosses several sectors there to facilitate those conversations that wouldn't happen.
The organizations that recognize that staying still is moving backwards are those who take risks. Click To Tweet
That's the plan.
In your role, you travel across the country and meet with hundreds and hundreds of great people working in the social profit sector. Over the last couple of years, what are some of the things that as a sector you've done very well?
Especially in an age where you're hearing about all these social innovations and the government investing in social finance and the growth of B-corporations. The challenge with a lot of these things is that what the charitable sector, the social pockets community does, a lot of it will never be sexy, community housing, helping the vulnerable and the needy. Helping the people at the bottom is something that our sector does well. We're getting better at it in my opinion in a lot of ways. There are this fire and this desire to be of service and a lot of the fancy places where people want to innovate. I sit down with a lot of people who want to transition industries all the time. I explained to them the workload and the challenges and the pay. A lot of them say, "No, I'm not willing to be committed to that." Our sector continues to be effective at least in this way of having progress, being passionate and refining our purpose.
That's a very powerful message to be sending out. Those people that are looking to make a transition, what are the characteristics of professionals who do that successfully, make that jump either from the public service or from the private sector into the social profit world?
I meet with dozens of these people a year. I'm passionate about helping the ones who are not going to fit. You can't reconcile very often the pace of change, the speed of progress that they desire and that they work with, especially entrepreneurs. Whereas in the charitable sector, because of funding and funders cycles, because of the age of some of our organizations, the bureaucracy in place, either governance or even tax, it's a slower pace. Some of them struggle with that. That cyclical pace of the sector, they struggle with that as well. This is one of the things we struggle with. We are a community of scarcity very often. There isn't that risk and reward. There isn't even that appetite often for risk.
There are a lot of things working against people who want to transition, but there are the ones who stick. I worked for an amazing professional who came to CanadaHelps, one of Canada's largest online charities. She transitioned from being the CEO of an online eCommerce dating site, Lavalife, to running CanadaHelps. She has led successful skill. She came in and the organization was a little under $60 million and in 2020 we'll hit over $200 million. She has an incredibly powerful focused skill. There's a need for people to transition and bring that strategy, that experience but they still have to figure out how to adapt a bit to that humility, a bit to that collaboration versus competition mindset of the charitable setting.
The Abundant Not-for-Profit
There are two things in there that I want to jump on and dig into. One, you started talking about scarcity. That's one of my favorite topics in the sector more than the other side of that coin, which is abundance. We see in our work that the discovery group is a lot of organizations that have found themselves either in a funding crisis or a leadership challenge. Scarcity is the defining element of their culture and of their approach to solving their problem. In organizations like CAGP and the conference communities that you build, what role did they play in helping reduce scarcity or move organizations closer to abundance?
If there's anything that for me and even in my work I'm dedicated to, it's about that shift from scarcity to abundance. We're based in Vancouver. Our colleagues at The Vantage Point even produced a book called The Abundant Not-for-Profit. It's helping people to shift that mindset of scarcity from everything to funding, access, donors, community and capacity to understanding that because we are very strong in the "why," we need to feel the "how." The charitable sector is laser-focused and winning on the "why," but we're losing when it comes to the "how." It's bringing capacity to scale. CAGP, the Gift Planning Association exists to diversify revenue. We bring together everybody who makes that possible, not just charities but advisers in law, tax, insurance and accounting.
I was talking to an insurance professional who has helped several charities in understanding about diversifying income through their Social Security and life insurance. One of the things that he shows them and we are now looking to get Canadian data on from people like Penelope Burk, sickness research that shows that when charities help donors diversify their giving, the giving doesn't go down, it goes up. I spent a few years in a bank working in donor-advised funds and foundations and I know the money is there. The donors don't have a scarcity mindset. We are dealing with the largest amount of Canadians with the least amount of kids, the largest amount of capital changing hands. The capacity is there. We just have to own that abundance.
Owning that abundance, that should be the title of your book. The other thing that you mentioned there that I would be interested in your perspective on was competition. When we get called into work with a board that's doing strategic planning or preparing for CEO succession, inevitably one or more board members will say, "We need to understand who our competition is? What's our environmental scan? Who are we up against?" We work hard to say competition as a mindset is quite problematic in the sector. How do you manage that tension between competition, which I often think the board members are meaning performance excellence? How do we measure ourselves as to how we're doing our "how?" They're not asking how are we doing in terms of market share necessarily, but wanting to make sure that the performance is there. How do you talk about the competition? How do you see it in the sector?
One of the challenges is the very concept of a board of a charity, which means you're bringing in people who you hope brings that experience, that common sense. The experience is often from the corporate world, that capitalism world. The competitive language comes in, when in fact we know that in the charitable sector, our power is in collaboration. Reaching out to our charities' lateral peers and lifting each other, leveraging each other's strengths and weaknesses, be it funding, funders, fundraising, mission, capacity, operational. It's the charities that are now banding together inside of a cause structure are the ones that are winning. They are the ones who are smart enough even to reach out to adjacent industries. What's the ecosystem of our cause? What are the problems we're trying to solve? There's power. I just don't have a place in my life for competition. I know that collaboration is what brings power.
That is a message that I may use those words the next time I'm talking to a board that ask that question. There is a strength in the sector that you talk about the opportunity for collaboration. Paul, what drives you nuts about the sector?
Part of it is our organization, the work that we do about strategic giving and gifts of assets, etc. I've been a fundraiser for many years. I've seen the transformation of how not just a wealthy person, but a middle-class Canadian understanding the tax benefits and able to give more. They said these words to me, "This feels like winning the lottery. I can give more as a regular person and I've never given a few hundred in my entire life." There's this resistance of the charitable sector always to diversify, to amplify our impact by understanding how we not only fundraise but think about money and how we do what we do. That's the hardest thing. I'm obsessed with the difference between the "why" and the "how." Everybody tells me, "We're losing to crowdfunding." That's great. What are we doing about it? How do we understand the moving parts? We've got to dig deeper into the things that we're concerned about, not just losing sleep.
You mentioned crowdfunding there. That is something that a lot of organizations, particularly social service organizations, United Ways all across the country, across North America are dealing with and are seeing as a threat to their traditional donor base. What do you make of crowdfunding? What are you seeing in the marketplace?
Polite elephants are the ones that are likely to roll over and destroy you. Click To Tweet
I don't spend time wringing my hands saying, "We're losing." I ask, "Why are we losing?" Crowdfunding has translated now into a billion-dollar industry. The largest GoFundMe was purchased by PayPal, a billion-dollar organization. We have to ask ourselves, "What are the mechanics? What are the moving parts? What is it that's appealing to donors? What is it that is undercutting the traditional charitable landscape and taking it apart?" You've got things like the technology that these platforms use. They use very high levels and seamless technology that's integrated into phones, digital media, all of it. The charitable sector rejects the advancement of technology and it's unbelievable. My time in CanadaHelps was such a challenge in that way. The other part is the concept of storytelling and narrative. The organizations are wanting to keep doing what they're doing. They are more tied to their logos and their brand identity than they are about the language of solving problems. Crowdfunding is an addictive concept: problem, one life, one solution and I did that. We're not giving people those kinds of opportunities easily in the charitable sector.
Are there organizations that are doing it particularly well or integrating crowdfunding into their revenue roadmap, the other streams of revenue?
Funny enough, this is where my joy and my time with CanadaHelps is working with small, scrappy charities. There are a lot of them across this country. By small, I'm talking more about medium-sized organizations. The smallest out there, they're volunteer-run, etc. They're lost in special event and doing what they're doing that's under $50,000-plus. The charities between $500,000 and $2 million out there who are scrappy, who are using storytelling, who are testing technology, that are taking risks, they're exciting to hang around because they're the entrepreneurs of our sector. They are gaining a lot of ground. It's the biggest organizations that are the big sinking ships that are worried about losing market share. Some of them are pushing the envelope, the Kids Help Phones of the world and SickKids, etc. I enjoy spending times with the ones that are saying, "Let's take a risk." They're the ones getting the biggest risks.
What are the characteristics of those organizations that are taking those risks? Crowdfunding, start there, but even more broadly. What types of organizations? What's driving those organizations that are taking those risks?
The organizations that recognize that staying still is moving backwards. They're seeing, "Where's our revenue now? What's the split between government funding, donor dollars? For our donor dollars, what's the breakdown in our diversity, our demographics? Where do we need to grow and how do we do that?" It's the people mapping out where a lot of our fundraising leaders are. The Blakelys of the world or talking to donor journey. The ones that are unpacking not just procedure but process and tying it to purpose are the ones that are going farther faster.
That's a very helpful perspective there. Are there issues in the sector that you see that have an air of mystery or act as a polite elephant in the conference rooms and the board rooms and the day-to-day of our organizations?
Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance
Indeed, those are the things that hurt because they're dangerous. Polite elephants are the ones that are likely to roll over and destroy you. As Trudeau once said, "It's the crowdfunding piece that we have to stop complaining about and dig deeper to understand." It's also truly and this is one of the challenges of the Canadian Association of Gift Planners. We have let our focus on tax and tactics allow people to think of plan giving and different types of asset giving as some sorcery, as there's a chemistry to it all, when in fact we broke this with the growth of cash given to online, to credit cards, etc. We have to integrate assets into that as well. All the silos and the language planned in August, you've got to break it down. It's all giving. In 2019, Canadians hold more of their assets in their wealth, in assets, not cash. Any organization that needs to have revenue growth needs to be looking at a full diversification of their revenue.
How much of that air of mystery or sorcery has been the professionals themselves wanting to protect the special status that they have as the experts in that area?
We have looked inwards and recognized that ceiling. I've got a talk out there. It's a bit of a TED format. We have a talk called the FRANK Talks named after our spiritual founder, Frank Minton, who helped found our organization. My whole concept was unpacking that and that we as fundraisers sometimes hold on to the concept of strategy as the outcome, whereas we have to bring clarity. How does fundraising work? Why does it work? How does an organization bring revenue? Where do we need to grow and where do we need to go by demographics and diversity? We need clarity or we're not going to make it.
Building on what you're saying there about clarity, one of my observations about the sector over the last couple of years has been a real effort to allow organizations and the professionals in those organizations to focus on the big picture of philanthropy in our society. How important is it for organizations and for individual professionals to have that sense of the big picture for the sector and the direction that society is moving?
In my role with the Gift Planning Association, I'm in a bit of a leadership position. For many years, I've been very much a tactical fundraiser. Fundraisers, finance, a lot of people even in marketing, we tend to look only two feet in front of us. Because a lot of us are tied in that scarcity mindset and focus on executing strategy, we haven't allowed ourselves to think of the big picture. I'm thinking deeply and being torn apart by this growth of the reconciliation and what's called the Decolonization of Philanthropy movement led by the author, Edgar Villanueva, an indigenous professional from the United States. He came here to Canada and was speaking at the Community Foundations Conference. His book on decolonizing philanthropy, on unpacking the way we have done things for a century-plus, it could destroy major giving if we stop and we're not good at stopping to think. I have to say I'm afraid. Machines don't stop. We don't stop the car on the side of the highway and take it apart. This is going to be a tough one. It's social justice. It's the future of how philanthropy could work. It's going to be a tough process.
For those that might be more interested in that, give us a quick summary of Villanueva's argument.
The concept of the colonization, how it has manifested itself that those of us who are trying to solve certain social problems are having to go cap in hand to the people who have created wealth by exploring those social problems. A perfect metaphor out there is the ones about how the multi-billionaires came forward as part of the Notre Dame tragedy. They pledged hundreds of millions of dollars and to date, very little of that money has come forward. Meanwhile, their network has increased by hundreds of millions. There's a whole inequality here and it's a system that we have built on top of our fundraising. The poor asking the wealthy who have a vested interest in the poor staying poor and then funding Band-Aid solutions. Those Band-Aid solutions will not allow society to be healed. That philanthropy might even be playing a detrimental part in social cohesion. There's a lot to unpack there. A lot of us have to look at how our organizations function. What do we even represent? That's what he taught to unpack one's DNA.
In your experience, you have the opportunity to talk to a lot of organizations and a lot of professionals. When you think of those organizations talking to donors, what advice do you give and what perspective do you share about how to talk to donors about gifts of assets and making gifts of a lifetime?
Band-Aid solutions won't allow society to be healed. Click To Tweet
The gift of assets is pretty much a "how." The "how" is near the end of the conversation. We need to get better at starting these conversations and listening to donors to where they want to go. How a donor has been given to you for many years? Why did they give it to you for so long? What is their vision of your organization? Not the other way around. We're so good at spouting our mission, vision and values, instead of asking them, "What is the problem that you're engaged with us to solve?" In doing so, they will talk to you about capacity. The gifts of assets are simply the way to make their vision a reality. Our colleague who is the head of the American Planned Giving Association said, "We turn to planned giving when our donors' vision is larger than their current assets. They plan and together we plan. We make powerful things happen."
In your own experience as a fundraiser, is there a story that comes to mind when you think about that concept?
It's a bit of a funny one that I often tell in my speaking engagements, but it means a lot to me. I had an individual when I was a very young fundraiser. As always, you started an organization and often discover that nobody is visiting donors. We had an individual giving six-figures and had an opportunity to visit him and say, "Let me drop off your tax receipt and if anything, talk to you about why you get to this organization." I went to see him and he didn't have a lot of time to talk but he said, "You're here, let me write your check for the six-figures." He's writing the check and the person was giggling. He's a big man and I always tell people it's not the most comfortable feeling to see a big main giggle. I didn't think of anything. I'm a young fundraiser. I didn't have a lot of confidence in that social networking way.
I came back the next year and the person said, "I'm going to write the check again." He's outright laughing. I said, "I've got to ask you, what's going on?" He said, "I'm buying an Audi." I said, "I don't understand what you're talking about." He said, "Last year, I bought a Jacuzzi." I said, "I am not following you." He said, "Next year, I'm buying a boat." I said, "I don't understand." He said, "I'm buying it with your money." I said, "Now you've got my attention." He said, "Did you know that my spouse and I sat down with our financial advisor and looked at all the charitable giving that we do. We told him about the plans that we had to do good things. We ascertained that we could give your organization $250,000 a year, but you keep asking for $100,000, so I write that $100,000 check."
The very fact that it opened my eyes to what was possible I said, "Why didn't you even tell me that?" In this particular case, I was representing a faith-based organization. He said, "I know that if I don't start giving at my capacity, it's going to get a lot hotter than a Jacuzzi." It showed me that there's a lot of capacity there. I suspected it as fundraising. When I became an advisor, I saw the capacity of the donors. We have the largest amount of Canadians with the least amount of children or heirs who are sitting on top of properties. Everybody can see this, but it's there and nobody wants to ask. We have this inherent fear of asking. I've got to say, I've had a career of being a very lazy fundraiser. I don't do a huge amount of asking. I just asked the donors what they care about. They paint the picture and the charity is the canvas. They say, "What is it going to take to make this a reality?" We let them know and nine times out of ten, they've got the capacity or we make that your cap.
One of the big fears that a lot of major gift and plan giving, all fundraisers have is knowing what's the right amount to ask for. That fear of asking for too much. In my own experience, my favorite story is asking someone for a gift of $5 million. The person laughed, but not for the same reason your donor laughed. He said, "Douglas, you honor us too much to think that we could make a gift of that size," and with a big smile on his face. If you're listening and you're talking about a cause that matters to donors, they're willing to have that conversation. They're willing to handle some of the discomforts that they have and you have or I'm talking about money if it's service.
We're both over thinking that a lot. That's the challenge too is they don't know that we don't have the same capacity of seeing a wealth management firm to do wealth indicator studies and all of that thing. Some big charities do but in the end, we have the blessing of a relationship. If we build that relationship, we will be in the conversation. We've got to stop and listen and let them the right to ask for us. In the end, they will disclose everything, what's their capacity, what's their willingness, what's their timeline. It's the person that can guide the conversation that will truly get the most and empower the donor to do those.
Change In Social Profit: If there's anything that we need in this world, it is a greater level of dialogue and trust.
That is a very important lesson. Thank you for sharing that and underlining it for us. You mentioned you're relatively new in the leadership role. Where do you find new ideas or inspiration as a leader?
I look outwards. I'm a voracious reader and often look to that world of leadership across the board and look out where to opt into that space. I'm mentored by a number of different CEOs and leaders both in the charity world but also in the for-profit sector. I try to keep an open mind to networking and connecting to learn as much as I can and be that sail to catch the wind of where things are going. That's a big part of it. It's interesting when you were talking about what do we need in the sector. One of the books that struck was by our former Governor-General, David Johnston. He wrote a book called Trust. If there's anything that we need in this world, it is a greater level of dialogue and trust and the outlines for everybody, including the charitable sector. He is the President of a university for a couple of decades and headed up several charities including Rideau Hall. He talks about authenticity but also power. For us, we've got to remember the transactional power of trust. That's a helpful one for people that are trying to build deeper donor relationships and connections with the community and charitable colleagues.
One of the things I loved about that book was how the stories that he shares speak to the inherent philanthropic intent of people to build community, to participate in the community. Often our institutions, when they're not acting with authenticity, get in the way of what is a normal instinct which is to give, to support, to contribute. He offers a bit of a prescription for us to get out of our own way and the social profit sector.
That's a great book for a lot of people to take a look. It's one of those that can be almost a cure to what ails us.
You mentioned you have mentors, but where do you look when you have questions that you're struggling with either as a leader or as a professional?
I have a lot of young professionals grow the way that they network and build mentors because I struggled with it so much in my early career. Along the way, I pulled a concept from a couple of people called Creating a Personal Board of Directors. Much like a charity needs a board of directors where we as leaders as individuals need a board and just like a board, we need to cover those different bases. What are the considerations of human resources, legal, risk management, marketing, capacity building, revenue generation, all of it? I try to maintain a regular list of mentors in each of those different areas and facets on the right side of leadership. Every few years, much like a regular board, I turned the board over. Every time I experienced an evolution, the board needs to go upmarket as well. It's been a wonderful concept for about a decade in that space.
I imagine you having a conversation with someone about their term limit being up.
Sometimes we think that everybody's going to stay with us for life, but like real relationships, things evolve. Click To Tweet
Not quite. It's never that explicit. I've got the Excel spreadsheet, but also even to release them. Sometimes we think that everybody's going to stay with us for life but like real relationships, things evolve. We all have a time and place to be together and there's a natural time and place to start and finish.
Paul, if someone were starting their first job in leadership in the social profit sector, what's the advice you would give them for how to approach either their first day or their first 30 days?
As always, I live in libraries and I turned to books. One of the greatest out there is The First 90 Days. We have great helpful piece for people, but very often we try to figure out the strategy and do the push when in fact listening will always be one of the greatest things. We live in a time of incredible listening power with the tool of social and digital media. You can get out there to things like LinkedIn, even Twitter and Instagram to follow the greatest leaders in the social profit community. Every time you people put out a podcast, I follow the podcast to interview all the resources that they have on there. You can create a powerful listening post in every facet of leadership and be mentored by all of these people. Whether they know it or not, if they're kind enough to be putting out content and teach. We're living in a golden age of mentoring and leadership.
That's a great place to leave our discussion and a great note to end with. I do want to come back to the one thing you said that I hope everyone takes some time to reflect on. You're talking about the difference between collaboration and competition. The phrase you said is collaboration is not a default strategy. It is our strength. It is our power. For those of us in the sector, board members, leaders, team members, donors, keeping that collaboration as a power in mind is a great tool for recharging.
People often tell us to put those elbows up but if we lock arms, we're unbreakable.
Paul, thank you so much for being on the Discovery Pod.
Thanks so much for having me.
Canadian Association of Gift Planners
Netwalking
CanadaHelps
FRANK Talks
Edgar Villanueva's book
The First 90 Days
About Paul Nazareth
Paul Nazareth is a leader in Canada's philanthropic sector with over 19 years' experience. Vice President, Education & Development at the Canadian Association of Gift Planners, he was most recently was VP at the charity CanadaHelps. Paul has been a philanthropic advisor with Scotia Wealth, spent over a decade with charities like the University of Toronto and the 230 Churches of the Catholic Church of Greater Toronto.
He is on the board of several Ontario charities, is Chair of the advisory committee at the Humber College postgraduate fundraising program, on the advisory committee of the Carleton Masters in Nonprofit Leadership program, a speaker in every Province with the Association of Fundraising Professionals, a national faculty instructor with CAGP and the Knowledge Bureau as well as tax and advisor communities like Advocis, CPA Canada and Estate Planning Councils.
Paul writes on philanthropy for a variety of publications as well as appearing on national television to speak about creating a personal legacy through charity. Paul has been featured in the Globe & Mail and Forbes on the topic of personal branding and continues to teach networking strategy to social and for-profit leaders.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


I have been asked by a lot of our customers about the best day and time to send out emails to their customers. Hence, I decided to look at the bunch of emails that get delivered from our software as well as do some secondary research from various online sources.
Most email marketing activities happen during the weekdays. Primary research by several email marketing companies reveals that a majority of the emails are sent out on Tuesdays and Thursdays. However, a performance of these email campaigns varies significantly based on the type of business you have.
B2B Business? Prefer weekdays but avoid Mondays.
B2B businesses tend to see a better response when their emails are sent over the weekdays & a relatively poor response to emails sent over weekends. Your customers are generally reading business emails only at work & you want to reach out to them while they are in office.
Monday is considered as the worst weekday to send out the email newsletter as people have tons of emails in their inbox already and do not want to spend time on an offer or additional reading material. Research by the web marketing group reveals that Thursdays tend to show the best response for B2B businesses in terms of open and click-through rates.
B2C? Lower opens on weekends, but worth experimenting!
However, in the case of B2C businesses, there is a lot more flexibility. Although this graph is a general representative of all emails sent, it still gives a good perspective of the overall performance of email marketing activities across the week.
While it is important to note that email open rates are lower on the weekends, your email promotion also has lesser competition on the weekends compared to the weekdays.
Hence conducting a couple of email marketing activities over the weekend as an experiment could be worth it.
B2B Business – 11am-4pm is a good time.
You want to pick a time when the B2B recipient has cleared his morning backlog of emails and is able to follow up on new emails landing in the inbox. Emails sent during the day in such cases tend to get better responses.
B2C Business? Experiment with evenings.
A couple of years back, most emails used to be read after 12 pm and before 8 pm. However, with the changing technology & increase in tablets & smartphones (today 48% of the emails are viewed on mobile & this number is rising), email consumption habits have evolved as well. Increasingly, people have started reading more emails after 8 pm and earlier in the day as well.
I suggest you do a split test where you send the same email to half of your list in the morning during working hours and to the other half later in the evening around 7-8 pm and notice the difference.
While email marketing activities are conducted throughout the year, it is noticed that the best results (highest open and click through rates) are obtained during specific periods of the year in a case of B2B and B2C businesses.
B2B? Target the budget review period of your recipient.
As a B2B Business, knowing the budget review period of your recipient can really help in getting a better return on your email marketing activities. By sending targeted mailers to your clients – segmenting them on their 'budget review', you will notice a really good response.
B2C? Do not miss out on the festive periods and the year-end!
It is a well-known fact that customers love to shop during festive seasons. Different countries have periods of really high activity (example: The US has high shopping activities around Thanksgiving and Christmas in December, India has higher shopping around Diwali in October/November). It is in the best interest of an email marketer to make the most of such opportunities to increase ROI.
Although I have given some general suggestions on the best periods of the day and week to do email marketing, there is no one right answer to – what is the best time to send out the email newsletter.
The performance of the email newsletters varies significantly across industries and is also directly proportional to the quality of your lists (opt-in vs. acquired), content and the frequency of the mailers. With consistent sending patterns, focus on good content and willingness to experiment and notice trends, you will definitely be able to narrow down on the right day & time to send out the newsletters to your recipients.
Export the results of your newsletters from your email marketing software and compare the performance of the newsletters for a particular weekday. Identify what works well for you.
We would love to hear from you what days & times have worked best for your email marketing activities!


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With the production of the Jazz Rooftop Tent, the Fun Top also came alive.
This tent has the same features as the Jazz but with an additional sewn-in covered entrance to offer protection against the elements.
Optional add-a-room below the entrance.