A New Home for Calabash

Abstract

In the summer of 2020, Digital Scholarship Services at NYU Libraries was approached by NYU professor Jacqueline Bishop about finding a new home for Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters. Multilingual and focused on centering unheard voices, Calabash was a pioneering journal showcasing poetry, literature, and visual arts from across the Caribbean. The journal, which Dr. Bishop edited from 2000-2008, had since ceased publishing, and the NYU server that had been hosting the site was due to be retired. While it is not unusual to need to migrate content when systems become obsolete, this request required us to adapt existing workflows and develop some new ones. It also highlighted some of the limitations of our systems, especially when it comes to describing multilingual material. This poster outlines the workflows and activities undertaken to capture PDFs of each article, derive and enrich metadata using OpenRefine and Google Sheets, and upload material to NYU’s institutional repository. The migration work was multifaceted, iterative, and cross-departmental, involving colleagues from digital scholarship services, technical services, data services, and digital library departments. Along the way, we encountered some challenges, such as data that wouldn’t scrape, a need to reorder names, material in languages not represented in our system’s language code list, and decisions about which FDA import method to use. These challenges pushed us to learn more about web scraping, OpenRefine, and the DSpace import process. The scripted and semi-scripted methods we used got us part of the way there, but not quite all the way, so in 2021 and 2022 we had the help of two outstanding students from the NYU/LIU Palmer Dual Degree program, who enhanced the descriptive metadata to improve discoverability so that the journal's rich content can now reach a wider audience.