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Recently, the D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University launched it’s new digital library in collaboration with SU Libraries and the School of Information Studies.
The library, inaugurated in April, consists of two collections: one Economic Opportunity and Employment collection and year Entrepreneurship compilation, said Nick Armstrong, IVMF’s managing director of research and data. QuartzSU Libraries’ new digital asset management platform, houses both collections.
“(Quartex) creates a portal of that information that (can) marry both the publications that the IVMF was producing, as well as the publications that they were curating,” said Déirdre Joyce, digital curator at SU Libraries. “We wanted to mix those external publications with the internal publications in this one place.”
Grace Swinnerton, visiting librarian for both IVMF’s research and analysis department and SU Libraries’ digital library program, said she works as a bridge between IVMF and the digital management department. Before using Quartex to create the new library, he said, the university’s institutional repository SURFACE it stored materials, but did not make them accessible to users.
“(Quartex) allows us to … have control over the style on the front end that we present to people, but also maintain intellectual control over the digital objects on the back end,” Joyce said.
Swinnerton, who also serves as SURFACE’s repository librarian, realized over time that with a large amount of metadata (the written material used to describe digital files) the repository would not be sustainable as a host for the materials or col· IVMF lessons.
“The nice thing about Quartex is that we have a whole other place where we can actually store a different metadata schema, so figuring out which metadata schema goes where has been a big (focus) the last couple of months,” Swinnerton said.
IVMF, SU Libraries and @iSchoolSU has recently launched the :books: IVMF Digital Library. Veterans now have free access to a new digital library of employment and resources for small businesses and accessible skills training.
— IVMF at Syracuse University (@IVMFSyracuseU) July 31, 2022
Swinnerton said the creation of metadata for the digital library has focused on increasing accessibility to both the Employment and Economic Opportunity and Entrepreneurship collections.
“(We’re choosing) keywords and terms that are associated with things like entrepreneurship (we have a lot of small business information that’s tagged with the word ‘small business’), but the (Employment and Economic Opportunity collection) is a little more focused on employers who can employ transitioning veterans,” Swinnerton said.
In his focus on metadata vocabulary, Swinnerton said the process of creating and deciding on vocabulary that will work to increase the accessibility of specific materials in both collections requires a lot of refinement and strategy. Strategies like search engine optimization rely heavily on metadata accuracy, Joyce said.
“The care of these vocabularies is critical,” Joyce said. “The better the metadata, the better the search, the better the quality of the results. If we don’t put in good metadata, it won’t be discoverable, either through a Google search or a Quartex search.”
The military community often uses jargon, acronyms and different types of language that are not typical in search fields, Armstrong said. Working with users to customize metadata makes it easier to access the materials they’re looking for, he continued.
The library aims to reach veterans who are looking for resources and research knowledge to start a small business or who want to find companies and organizations trying to locate or hire them, Armstrong said.
“While there are some national resources like the IVMF … being able to bring together information and create a one-stop shop for both veteran business owners as well as businesses looking to do business with veteran-owned businesses in one site is really an example of why we’ve been doing this,” Armstrong said.
Bonnie Chapman Beers, IVMF director of evaluation and innovation, said the amount of military-specific and entrepreneurship-based content makes the institute’s research output one of the best resources for veterans. Few other institutes offer similar research work, Beers said.
Assets like small business loans, networks, connections and mentorship start at the local level, Armstrong said. He hopes to increase access to connections and resources for veterans returning home to communities they may not recognize.
“When veterans get out of the military … if they don’t go back to their hometown, which often looks a lot different than it did when they left, they find themselves in a new community,” Armstrong said. “They’re transitioning into new communities and they may not have the networks and the connections to begin with. And that’s kind of a big driver of access to financial capital.”
Census data going back to post-WWII shows that veterans have started businesses at higher rates than other Americans. With the digital library collections, Armstrong said he aims to fill a void with resources that are largely unavailable to veteran and military-owned businesses.
“There are a lot of different reasons for that,” Armstrong said of the data. “But (for many it is) guaranteeing that opportunity to pursue the American dream.”
Posted on September 7, 2022 at 12:29 am
Contact Jana: [email protected] | @JanaLoSeal
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