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Syracuse University’s D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families recently launched its new digital library in collaboration with SU Libraries and the School of Information Studies.

The library, launched in April, consists of two collections — an Employment and Economic Opportunity collection and an Entrepreneurship collection, said Nick Armstrong, the managing director of research and data at the IVMF. Quartex, SU Libraries’ new digital asset management platform, hosts the two collections.

“(Quartex) creates a portal to this information that (can) marry both the publications that IVMF was producing themselves, but also the publications that they were curating,” said Déirdre Joyce, SU Libraries’ head of digital stewardship. “We wanted to mix those external publications with the internal publications in this one place.”

Grace Swinnerton, a visiting librarian for both the IVMF research and analytics department and the SU Libraries Digital Library program, said she works as the bridge between the IVMF and the department of digital stewardship. Prior to using Quartex to create the new library, she said, the university institutional repository SURFACE stored materials. However, the older system was less accessible for students than Quartex, Swinnerton said.

“(Quartex) allows us to … have control over the styling in the front end that we present to people, but also maintain intellectual control over the digital objects that are in the back end,” Joyce said.

Swinnerton, who also serves as the SURFACE repository librarian, realized over time that with a large amount of metadata – the written material used to describe digital files – the repository wasn’t going to be sustainable as a host for the IVMF’s materials or collections.

“The beautiful thing about Quartex is we have this 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 months,” Swinnerton said.

IVMF, SU Libraries, and @iSchoolSU recently launched the :books: IVMF Digital Library. Now veterans have free access to a new digital library of employment and small business resources and accessible skills training.

Check it out: https://t.co/p615FN8EX4

— IVMF at Syracuse University (@IVMFSyracuseU) July 31, 2022

Swinnerton said creating metadata for the digital library has centered around increasing accessibility to both the Employment and Economic Opportunity and Entrepreneurship collections.

“(We’re choosing) keywords and terms that are associated with those things like entrepreneurship – we have a lot of small business information that is all tagged with the word ‘small business’ – but the ( Employment and Economic Opportunity collection) is a little bit more focused towards employers who might employ transitioning veterans,” Swinnerton said.

In her focus on the vocabulary of metadata, Swinnerton said the process of creating and deciding on verbiage that will work to increase accessibility of materials specific to both collections takes a lot of refining and strategy. Strategies like search engine optimization depend heavily on the precision of metadata, Joyce said.

“Curating those vocabularies is critical,” Joyce said. “The better your metadata, the better the search, the better the quality of your results. If we don’t put in good metadata, then it can’t be discovered, either through a Google search or through a Quartex search.”

The military community often uses jargon, acronyms and different types of language that aren’t typical in search fields, Armstrong said. Working with users to customize the metadata makes the materials they’re looking for easier to access, he continued.

The library is aiming to reach veterans who are looking for resources and research insights to start a small business or who want to find companies and organizations trying to locate or recruit them, Armstrong said.

“Even though there are some national resources like the IVMF … being able to pull information together and create a one-stop-shop for both veteran business owners, but also companies that want to do business with veteran-owned businesses in one place is really an example for why we’ve been doing this,” Armstrong said.

Bonnie Chapman Beers, the director of evaluation and innovation at the IVMF, 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 provide 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 who are returning home to communities they may not recognize.

“When veterans get out of the military, … if they’re not going back to their hometown, which often looks very different than it was when they left, they’re in a new community,” Armstrong said. “They’re transitioning out into new communities and may not have the networks and connections to get started. And this is sort of a big driver behind access to financial capital.”

Census data going back to post-World War II shows that veterans have been starting businesses at higher rates than other Americans. With the digital library’s collections, Armstrong said he aims to fill a void for resources largely unavailable to veteran and military-owned businesses.

“There’s a lot of different reasons for why that is,” Armstrong said on the data. “But (for many it’s) ensuring that opportunity to pursue the American dream.”

CLARIFICATION: In a previous version of this story, Swinnerton

Published on September 7, 2022 at 12:29 am

Contact Jana: jlseal@syr.edu | @JanaLoSeal

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