As Ashley Madison experienced a widespread data breach this week, Anupam Joshi and Richard Forno, cybersecurity, spoke to the media about Internet security and how the leak will affect high profile users in Washington, D.C.

In an interview with ABC2, Joshi cautioned that data breaches are increasingly becoming part of daily life. “Information is valuable,” he said. “People are after information. No security is perfect and once you marry these things, there is an incentive for someone to spend the right time and effort to steal some information.” He also spoke about users falling into a false sense of security. “Nothing is really secure on the Internet,” he warned. “If you don’t want the thing you’re doing to show up on ABC2 at some point then don’t do it.”

Forno spoke to Beta Boston and TV Newsroom about public reactions as the data breach revealed several government officials as users of the website. “Depending on who you talk to, you’ll get two wildly different opinions on the issue,” he said. “Some people will say, `Well, they broke the law, they hacked into this private company’s computers and stole data.’ Yeah, that’s true. But from the other side, you have to say, were they doing this for a public service?”

Collin Sullivan has joined the UMBC Instructional Technology team as the new Turning Technologies Intern. This intern program offers students the opportunity to work with faculty to leverage the use of clickers in the classroom. Collin comes to us with a wealth of knowledge through his experience working with Howard County Public Schools Instructional Technology department. 

Collin is an incoming freshman at UMBC, planning to double major in Information Systems and Economics, with a minor in Political Science. He graduated from Long Reach High School in Columbia, Maryland. During his freshman year, he delivered professional development workshops for teachers that focused on incorporating technology into their classrooms. Collin also served as a student member on a board that was tasked with implementation of a countywide Bring Your Own Device program. Collin has written articles for the superintendent’s blog about the importance of technology in the classroom, and was also featured in the online EdSurge Magazine.

Collin is thrilled to be interning with Turning Technologies and working alongside of the Instructional Technology Team at UMBC. He is most looking forward to working with faculty to implement the use of clickers in their classrooms to engage students in course activities.

Please join us in welcoming Collin to the DoIT family!

Everyman Theatre, an award winning professional theatre, with a resident company of
artists from the Baltimore/Washington, DC area, is seeking applicants for Box Office
Manager.

Box Office Manager

The Support Specialist provides support to the Foundation’s general administrative, accounting, grants management, database administration, external affairs, and office operations functions. Responsibilities include general clerical duties, management of manual and digital filing systems, processing of accounting and grant award documents, database entry and maintenance, preparation of accounting reports and schedules, and detailed special projects.

UMBC seeks a part-time Arts Publicity Coordinator who will take an active role in publicizing arts and cultural events for the university. Specific duties include maintenance of online communications to promote arts and cultural events; management of social media communications; facilitation of print and non-print creative projects, working with in-house designers; writing and editing copy; outreach to the media; and compilation and organization of event information. Position will work approximately 20 hours per week.

by Nicole King

Hi! I’m Emily Somach, a graduate student at University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies. I am working towards my Master of Library Science degree, specializing in Archives, Records, and Information Management, and work as a Graduate Assistant in the UMBC Special Collections.

For the past six months, I have been working on an exciting project to create Encoded Archival Description (EAD) for Special Collections’ archives. The project is funded by the National Historical Publications & Records Commission (NHPRC) through the grant opportunity entitled “Documenting Democracy: Access to Historical Records Projects.”

What is EAD?

Well, the short answer is that EAD is a standard; it is used to encode data and information about personal papers or corporate records (i.e. archival materials). EAD is also an XML schema called EAD-XML, which means that an EAD record is written using the markup language XML (which is very similar in structure to the more familiar HTML). Lastly, an EAD record is also a type of finding aid.

And what, you may ask, is a finding aid? A finding aid is the archival term for an index or guide to a collection. It is useful to both archivists and researchers; it helps the former gain intellectual and physical control over collections, and allows the latter to find and use materials relevant to their work.

Essentially, EAD allows archivists to create platform independent records (or finding aids, the two are synonymous when discussing EAD) that are more dynamic and versatile than a word document or content management system record. EAD finding aids are easy to represent online and share between systems; they allow the public to find and access information about archival collections through online catalogs or discovery tools. Ultimately, collections represented in EAD become far more accessible and easy to locate and use.

How to Create EAD

EAD can be created by hand or through automated processes, but manually creating an entire record from scratch in XML is very time consuming and cumbersome. Luckily, for this project, we did not have to start from scratch or do everything by hand. Instead, we opted to repurpose the data we already had in PastPerfect, the content management system used by Special Collections. We developed a workflow that allows us to extract this data from PastPerfect and convert it into EAD-XML. While some post-processing and manual edits are required, the large majority of the workflow is automated.

PastPerfect records and data can be exported in a variety of formats, including PastPerfect’s own flavor of XML. For the purposes of our project, we decided to export records in this PastPerfect-XML format, which meant that we would eventually be transforming one type of XML into another, i.e. PastPerfect-XML into EAD-XML. We decided that such a transformation would be easier and more straightforward than any other, as it only requires one transformation and one language.

The Workflow

Stylesheet Creation

Upon starting the project, I worked closely with Dmitri Rudnitsky, an Information Systems undergraduate student at UMBC skilled in computer programming. Dmitri and I learned as much about EAD, XML, and XSLT as we could in two weeks, then set to work on the most technical aspect of the project: the XSLT stylesheet. XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language that is used to transform one XML file into another XML file. Not to get too technical, but we used this language to write functions that would take data from the PastPerfect-XML and rewrite it in the form appropriate to EAD-XML. Since Dmitri had to leave at the end of April, we wanted to utilize his expertise on this part of the project prior to his departure. By the time he left the project, I hoped to have learned enough to carry on with the rest of the work myself.

Fortunately, we had a working version of the stylesheet by the time Dmitri left. By this time, I also felt comfortable tweaking, streamlining, and editing the stylesheet on my own as the work progressed and I learned more about XSLT. This stylesheet is available on the project's GitHub space: https://github.com/UMBC-Library/EAD-XML/blob/master/stylesheets/PPtoEAD_withComments.xsl. A few months later I was able to create two more stylesheets for the project: one that splits a batch file into individual files and one that transforms the EAD-XML into HTML for web display. 

Data Cleanup

Once we completed the initial version of the stylesheet, I shifted gears and started focusing on the data export from PastPerfect. Before we could extract any data, we had to ensure that it was as standardized and error-free as possible. Using the descriptive rules outlined in the Society of American Archivists’ Describing Archives: A Content Standards (DACS), we developed our own set of guidelines and standard forms for each field in PastPerfect. We then checked and edited each field in each record to adhere to the guidelines and ensure a uniform output.

Occasionally, in order to correctly fill in a field, I had to physically locate a collection and identify or verify certain features. Most frequently this meant counting the number of boxes and calculating the equivalent linear footage, or checking to see what condition the collection was in and if it required conservation. Other times, it meant checking accession paperwork and describing how, when, or from whom we had acquired a collection.

Prioritization of Records

After the records were cleaned up, we prioritized all of them (about 150) into three groups: high, medium, and low. Prioritization was based on how complete they were or how much further editing they required. We added all of this information into a spreadsheet to track each record’s priority ranking, required edits, data cleanup status, and export status.

Export

Fortunately, after much brainstorming, trial, and error, I was able to create a batch processing tool that not only transforms one PastPerfect-XML file into EAD-XML but also splits it into multiple files. The result is a folder of files: one EAD-XML finding aid per record. Once I had the batch tool working, I exported all records from PastPerfect classified as highest priority into a batch file.

Transformation and Post-Processing

After export, I ran the batch tool on the PastPerfect-XML batch file which contained records for 38 collections. After about one second, a folder appeared containing 38 EAD finding aids.

As discussed earlier, it was not possible (or within the scope of my expertise) to automate every aspect of the EAD creation. This meant that a few aspects of each EAD file needed some manual edits. Most notably, the source and classification of subject terms and people names had to be added (i.e. if it was a Library of Congress subject heading or a local term, if a subject was a geographic location or a genre, etc.). Samples of these records are available on Github.

HTML for Web Display

The final step was to make the now complete EAD finding aids displayable on the internet. This meant using another stylesheet to transform the EAD-XML into HTML. To do this, I ran all of the new EAD-XML files through another batch tool, resulting in 38 HTML files. I then created a cascading stylesheet (CSS) to style the HTML, ensuring consistency with the new UMBC Special Collections website. While not complete, the final product will be an individual webpage for each collection that displays EAD data in a readable way and also links to the raw XML file as well as a printable PDF version of the EAD finding aid. The current templates for both of these processes are available through Github. Here is an example of how the EAD finding aid might display online:

Thank you for this thorough description, Emily! Although Emily is leaving UMBC very soon, the EAD project will continue into 2016. Have questions? Contact Lindsey Loeper, Special Collections Archivist, at lindseyloeper@umbc.edu or 410-455-6290.