Data Management

A Decade of the Digital Repository Service

Northeastern University Library’s institutional repository, the Digital Repository Service, is celebrating 10 years of caring for the university’s scholarly, archival, and administrative high-value materials. From day one, the mission of the DRS has been to provide a long-term, sustainable home for the born digital and digitized content being produced by members of the Northeastern community.

More than just a technical system, the DRS is a service provided by the library to help solve a common problem for faculty, staff, students, researchers, and project teams: where can I store the digital output from my work? The DRS allows these projects developed at Northeastern to be maintained and shared with a wider audience. In addition to maintaining the DRS system, services provided by DRS staff include running training sessions, answering questions, consulting, and depositing files for users.

Side-by-side depiction of two versions of the Digital Repository Service homepage
The 2012 DRS prototype and the 2025 version.

Originally developed as a prototype in 2011, the system was created by a library team — three developers, the repository manager, a Northeastern co-op, and a library administrator — with the goal of constructing a completely realized system ready for production. The first version was ready to be used fully by the Northeastern community in June 2015.

The DRS was launched with some rough edges, which were slowly smoothed into the system users are familiar with today. We have received tremendous response from users about the usefulness of the system, as well as thoughtful and constructive feedback about how the system can be improved (e.g. faster page load times, better search functionality, and more control over files, among others).

The DRS homepage displayed on a laptop screen with a hand typing on the computer's keyboard
The DRS, as it appeared in 2015.

We have done our best to grow with the university community as its needs shift by increasing support for datasets, loading large batches of files on behalf of users and project teams, and tripling our original storage capacity, but there is always more to be done to meet the needs of our users.

The shape of the content stored in the DRS has shifted over the years, as well. Initially just for theses and dissertations, university photographs, and archival material, the DRS now fully supports various types of project materials for digital humanities research, datasets for researchers in various disciplines, oral histories, and many others.

Since its launch, DRS content has been viewed, downloaded, or streamed more than 1.1 million times, and we’ve had more than 13,000 members of the Northeastern community sign into the system. The DRS averages approximately 2,000 unique visitors and 4,000 views, downloads, and streams a day.

Screenshot of a DRS display of a research poster titled "Investigating and addressing the needs of research support staff"
The DRS provides a home for and access to research and projects by members of the Northeastern community.

The success of the system can be attributed to the combined efforts of staff in many library departments, including development and system administration from Library Technology Services and Digital Infrastructures; outreach and faculty support from Research and Instruction; data management support from Research Data Services; issue triage and metadata collaboration with Resource and Discovery Services; and continual support and advocacy from library administration. And, of course, Digital Production Services, the department primarily responsible for maintaining the system and supporting the service through digital production, metadata maintenance, and user support.

The DRS is not the first system of its kind supported by the library. It adopted its first repository system in the early 2000s, followed by IRis in 2007. The library’s commitment to maintaining the scholarly output of the university was formed during those early years, a commitment we have refined and strengthened over the more than 20 years of dedicated support for faculty, staff, and students working to help fulfill the university’s mission. It’s been a great pleasure to support the Northeastern community in this way, and we look forward to the next 10 years and beyond.

Reflecting on reparative description initiatives in the Digital Repository Service

In an effort to engage in reparative description and a desire to improve the Library’s approach to processing and publishing digital collections by incorporating inclusive, non-discriminatory principles into our workflows, the Digital Production Services Department has been seeking new methods of description for digital collections that do not perpetuate harm to our patrons or to the communities described in the collections.

Admittedly, these are not new concepts. Building on the work of institutions and organizations such as the Digital Transgender Archive, Digital Public Library of America, and Digital Commonwealth (along with a host of other colleges and universities), our department has chosen to move forward with a three-pronged approach:

  1. Creating an actionable list of reparative metadata practices we can engage in on the item and collection level with the Library and Archives’ collections in the Digital Repository Service (DRS).
  2. Implementing updates for the upcoming version of the DRS, including new and expanded features which support inclusive description and mitigate harm.
  3. Writing and generating institutional buy-in for a library-wide statement on conscious and inclusive description of our resources.

Much of this work is still underway, but we have made a lot of progress generating item-level statements to provide context to sensitive and questionable materials. We documented criteria for selecting items that need statements, instigated a regular group review with members of Archives for content that rises to the need of consideration, created thematic categories of content that merits item-level statements, and generated documentation to track and manage the addition of these statements to DRS resources. We have currently added contextual statements to over 120 individual items with our institutional repository. If you would like to review these materials in greater detail, here is a link to a set of materials we’ve added statements to (some materials may require you to sign into the DRS).

Here are some statistics from the initial implementation of this work:

  • Over 50% of the sensitive content contains overt racism or other forms of discrimination. The next most common category is graphic description of bodily harm, which almost exclusively comes from the Boston Globe Library Collection.
  • The content types vary, but almost 80% of identified digital objects are photographic in nature, with a much smaller portion of textual or audiovisual materials.
  • Two most commonly used statements are as follows:
    • This item has been flagged for racist or harmful content. We are preserving and making this item available as part of the historical record, but it does not reflect the values of Northeastern University Library. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the Northeastern University Library Archives and Special Collections at archives@northeastern.edu.
    • This item has been flagged for a graphic depiction of bodily harm that may not be appropriate for all audiences. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the Northeastern University Library Archives and Special Collections at archives@northeastern.edu.

Takeaways from patterns we have noticed in the process of identifying materials for statements:

  • As an institution that collects a wide variety of community-focused Civil Rights Era materials, there are a lot of items within the DRS that benefit from additional context and/or acknowledgement. For example, the Freedom House, Inc., records (M16, public collection) follows the institutional history of a community organizing group built to centralize activism for neighborhood improvement, quality education, and social, racial, and religious harmony in Roxbury, Mass. They collected a number of materials from an anti-busing racial hate group called ROAR, whose pamphlets and press releases we have digitized and added content statements to.
  • Photographs often lack context on the item level and therefore can be more jarring in their sensitivity. This is especially evident in the Boston Globe Library Collection, which contains thousands of print photographs taken by newspaper staff or contract photographers. Organized by topical subjects, the photo archive contains imagery related to difficult themes such as anti-busing demonstrations, fires, crime, and bombings.
  • There are items in the DRS which may be upsetting to some viewers, but after reaching consensus with the Archives staff, we do not feel that they rise to the level of needing contextual statements, given that their visual meaning is derived from their academic and research merit, such as marine animal necropsy photos in the Ocean Genome Legacy Project (public collection).

Ultimately, this is an ongoing process—one that will continue to need reflection and consideration from Library and Archives staff, as well as additional research on what other respected institutions are doing to provide context and mitigate harm. Inclusive descriptive practice is iterative, and as we continue this work, we will continue to reflect on the most effective ways to serve our users.

Scan It Right: Starting Your Own Digitization Project

Whether you are digitizing old family photos or creating a paperless record-keeping system, reformatting analog materials can be a lot of work! Here are some suggestions for what to think about when starting a project.

Documents, Photographs, Flat Art, Slides, and Negatives

Two unidentified women and one man standing in front of a computer.
Computer training course sponsored by New England
Telephone and Telegraph Company. https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu:126895

Choosing a Scanner
A paper-based document, such as a report, on normal paper can go through a sheetfed scanner.

Photographs, artwork, or material on old or delicate paper should go on a flatbed scanner.

Slides and negatives can go on specialized scanners or on multipurpose scanners.

While all of these material types can be scanned in a home or office, if you are dealing with many items, it can be more efficient to send them to a vendor.

File Type
TIFF is one of the standard file types for scanned images and an excellent choice for saving high-quality images long-term. If you would like to read more about standards for digitization, check out the FADGI Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials. If you need smaller files, you can use Photoshop to save TIFF images as JPEG files. The Northeastern community has free access to the Adobe Creative Cloud, which includes Photoshop and Acrobat.

PDF is a good file type for documents. Some scanners will let you save automatically to PDF. You could also save the document pages as TIFF files, then use Adobe Acrobat to combine the files into a PDF.

File Naming
Give your files unique and descriptive names and avoid spaces in the names — use underscores, dashes, or camel-case instead. Think about how the file names will sort in Finder or Windows Explorer. Some examples:

  • Faculty_Report_1970_01.pdf
  • ChemBuilding001.tif, ChemBuilding002.tif, etc.
Paul Mahan from the Boys' Clubs of Boston using an enlarger at a photographic laboratory
Paul Mahan from the Boys’ Clubs of Boston
using an enlarger at a photographic laboratory. https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu:212609

Resolution
Resolution is how many pixels the scanner captures per inch of the original material. This is usually expressed in ppi (pixels per inch) or dpi (dots per inch). A higher dpi will capture more detail but will result in a larger file size.

Based on the FADGI guidelines mentioned above, for text-based materials like journal articles or reports, 300 dpi is sufficient for most uses. For photographs and more image-heavy material, use 400 dpi. For slides or negatives, use around 3000 dpi.

Black and White, Grayscale, or Color
You can base this on the material you are scanning. If the material is entirely black and white or grayscale, then you can scan in black and white or grayscale. If the item has color that you want to capture, then scan in color.

Brightness, Contrast, and Cropping
Most scanners will allow you to adjust brightness and contrast settings. If you are scanning documents, adjust until the text appears solid (not choppy but not too dark or blown out). For images, adjust until the brightness and contrast look true to the original.

Text Searchability
If you are creating a PDF, in most cases it should be text searchable for accessibility. To do this, you need to run OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on the document. For members of the Northeastern community, this is available in Adobe Acrobat.

Audiovisual Material

If you want to reformat A/V material (like VHS and audiocassette tapes) yourself, the following webinars from Community Archiving Workshop provide some guidance on the type of equipment to purchase.

However, it is often easiest to work with a vendor for A/V transfers. These materials can suffer from degradation that makes them challenging to capture. The Association of Moving Image Archivists has a directory of vendors.

In addition, the following guides from the National Archives and Records Administration can help you identify formats in your possession before you talk with a vendor. The first focuses on audio formats, like cassette tapes, and the second focuses on video formats, like VHS tapes.

Storage

For the files you create, make sure you save multiple copies in different geographic locations. For example, you might save one copy on your computer; another in a cloud-based location, like Backblaze or Google Drive; and then the final copy on an external hard drive.

You can also share files with friends and family through shared folders on Google Drive. For A/V materials, you can post unlisted videos on YouTube, so folks can only view them if they have a link.

Have any questions? Feel free to contact the librarians in Digital Productions Service at Library-DPS@northeastern.edu.

New policies will impact research data sharing and scholarly communication

We’re monitoring recent changes to policy and legislation that will likely impact the work of Northeastern University faculty, staff, and student researchers. Read on for a brief overview of three of these impending changes, in order of their expected implementation dates.

NIH (National Institutes of Health) Policy for Data Management and Sharing

What is it? The NIH’s new policy on data management and sharing aims to improve the reproducibility and reliability of NIH-funded work by broadening access to research uploads.

When will the changes take place? January 25, 2023

How might this impact researchers?

  • DMSPs: All NIH proposals will require the submission of a data management and sharing plan (DMSP). Previously, only NIH proposals above a certain funding threshold required a DMSP.
  • Data availability: Research data is expected to be made accessible “as soon as possible, and no later than the time of an associated publication, or the end of the award/support period, whichever comes first.” Further, the new policy strongly encourages the use of established repositories to share data.
  • Costs: Reasonable costs related to data management and sharing may be included in NIH budget requests.

Additional resources:

CHIPS and Science Act

What is it? The CHIPS and Science Act is primarily related to semiconductor manufacturing and the STEM workforce pipeline, but also includes some open science directives.

When will the changes take place? One year following enactment (circa September 2023)

How might this impact researchers? Once the act takes effect, applications for National Science Foundation awards will be required to include machine-readable data management plans (DMPs). We do not anticipate that this will significantly impact researchers, as most DMPs are already machine-readable unless they include tables or charts. This requirement will enable more seamless information sharing between systems used by institutions and funders, ultimately reducing the paperwork burden for researchers.

Additional resource:

White House Office of Science & Technology Memorandum: Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research

What is it? OSTP’s new memorandum (aka the Nelson memo) builds upon OSTP’s 2013 Holdren memo. The new memo will make research funded by all U.S. government agencies immediately available to the public. This eliminates the current optional 1-year embargo period and applies to both publications and the data underlying peer-reviewed research. Under the new Nelson memo, the definition of publications is widened beyond articles to also apply to peer-reviewed book chapters and conference proceedings.

When will the changes take place? The Nelson memo will first impact funding agencies, which will be expected to fully implement their public access and data sharing plans by the end of 2025.

How might this impact researchers? Once the memo goes into effect, researchers and members of the public will benefit from broader, more immediate access to federally funded research results. The memo urges the use of persistent identifiers (PIDs) to unambiguously identify authors, affiliations, funders, and more, so this would be a great time to acquire and begin using an ORCID iD if you don’t already have one. The U.S. government has also signaled interest in examining current academic incentive structures to better recognize institutions and researchers for their support of public access to research.

Additional resources:

The library is working with campus partners, including Research Administration and Research Computing, to develop guidance and resources to assist researchers as they navigate these changes. As always, if you need assistance with a data management or data management and sharing plan, or if you’re searching for a secure, permanent home for your research outputs, we’re here to help!

Katz Tapes Provide Valuable Resource on History of Music Industry

This blog post was written by Sean Plaistowe and edited by Molly Brown and Giordana Mecagni for clarity.

Larry Katz is a music journalist who spent a long career working at Boston-area newspapers and magazines. While collecting information for upcoming articles, it became his practice to record the interviews with musicians and artists and put them aside in case they proved useful in the future. Over time, he amassed a collection of over 1,000 of these interviews, with artists as diverse as Eartha Kitt, Carly Simon, D.J. Fontana (the drummer for Elvis), Aerosmith, David Bowie, Ornette Coleman, Aretha Franklin, Bob Marley, James Brown, Miles Davis, and Elmore Leonard, as well as actors including Ted Danson, Mel Brooks, and Loretta Devine.

In 2020, Larry donated his collection to the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections (NUASC).

A collage of various musicians and artists. At the center is a cassette tape that is labeled "The Katz Tapes"

These interviews create a fascinating resource that provides insight into the music and arts industry across a wide variety of genres and eras. In them, you can catch some novel and intimate moments of music history. On one tape, you’ll hear Weird Al Yankovic discussing the difficulties of obtaining permission to parody Eminem’s music. Other tapes with artists like Nina Simone or Aimee Mann discuss musical influences or even the challenges and biases of navigating the recording industry. These interviews contain countless quiet moments as well, such as Prince discussing his preference for his home in Minneapolis over either coast, as well as his favorite movies of the year. The quiet clicking of teacups connecting with saucers while Eartha Kitt discusses her career provides a welcome feeling of connection and belonging that can feel rare and precious in researching these figures or music journalism more generally.

Black and white image of a man with curly dark hair and a collared shirt.
Larry Katz. Photo courtesy of The Katz Tapes website.

After graduating from the Manhattan School of Music in 1975, Larry Katz worked as a bass player before starting his journalism career at Boston’s Real Paper in 1980. In 1981, Larry worked as a freelance music writer at the Boston Globe and Boston Phoenix before being hired at the Boston Herald as a features writer, where he covered a wide variety of arts and lifestyle beats before settling into a role as a music critic and columnist. In 2006, he became the Herald’s Arts Editor and in 2008, he took over the features department, a role he had until 2011.

In 2013, Larry revisited his tape collection. Re-listening to the interviews sparked memories of the circumstances and contexts that these recordings were made in, information he felt compelled to share. He started a blog, The Katz Tapes, where he began to write reflections on artists and their interviews, often taking into account events that had transpired since the original conversations. Along with these reflections, Larry provided a transcription of the recorded interviews which he often interspersed with links to notable performances or songs related to the artists. Larry also donated the contents of this blog to the NUASC.

Making this collection usable and accessible to the public has involved many hands and collaborations, both internal and external. First, the tapes were digitized by George Blood LP, with funding generously provided by the Library of the Commonwealth program run by the Boston Public Library. Once the digitized tapes were safely back in the hands of the NUASC collections staff, the files were then handed to the Digital Production Services department to do the painstaking work of processing and cataloging the collection. They split audio files that contained multiple interviews, combined interviews that were on multiple tapes edited out white space, and created catalog records.

Making the blog content available was another challenge. Despite already being digital, moving content from Larry’s independent site to Northeastern hosting proved difficult. Initially, I was hopeful that we could use a handy WordPress feature that would allow for the whole cloth export of his blog. No such luck. Instead, I found some scripts which allowed me to scrape the many unique images which Larry had included with each post. The blog also linked to a lot of songs and performances hosted on YouTube, but unfortunately, due to the vagaries of time and copyright law, many of these videos were removed. When possible, I attempted to restore links to sanctioned videos. As an added feature, I created a playlist that includes many of the songs referenced in these posts.

Now that the collection has been cataloged and the blog has been ingested, we welcome anyone to search for their favorite artist, listen to their interview, read some of the reminiscences and insights form Larry about the artist and the interview, and listen to a Spotify playlist of some of the artists Larry interviews at thekatztapes.library.northeastern.edu.

In addition to the Larry Katz collection, researchers and enthusiasts of the arts in Boston may be interested in the Real Paper records and the Boston Phoenix records, both available at the NUASC.