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Selections of Work by Robert Wolff

Libraries

AI in Academic Libraries Site

Report titled, AI in academic libraries: Is prompting the new query? Written by Robert Wolff, December 6, 2025 for INFO 287: Hyperlinked Linraries

This report was first written for my Hyperlinked Libraries seminar [pdf] at San José State University, then migrated to an accessible, responsive web site.

Climate Change Research Guide

Climate change touches nearly every aspect of life through Earth's systems. As such, it is impossible to cover every related topic. We present here a selected set which might interest the undergraduate student, whether in the sciences, humanities, business, or health fields.

The guide site was created using Eleventy (same as this site).

Fedora Commons Ingest Tool

Fedora Commons is an open source repository for digital collections. This tool automates the ingest of digitized items and metadata into a Fedora Commons 4 instance.

All object relationships conform to the Portland Common Data Model.

All PHP code uses the PSR-2 (Coding Style) and PSR-4 (Autoloading) standards. This library was released under the GPLv3 License.

The library is installed via Composer:
$ composer require unhplace/fedora-ingest

Usage

use UNHPlace\FedoraIngest\FedoraCollection;

// Create a new collection with a named slug
$col = FedoraCollection('col-1');

// Set the local path for binaries
$col->setBinaryPath('data');

// CSV source
$col->ingestCsv('csv/metadata.csv');

// FGDC XML source
$col->ingestFgdcXml('xml/*.xml');

// Print the Linked Data URIf
echo $col->getUri();

CSV keys are Dublin Core metadata elements, e.g., dcterms:identifier, dcterms:title, dcterms:coverage, etc.

The project was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Leadership Grants for Libraries Program.

Geospatial Search

Screenshot of UNH PLACE, a geospatial search interface
The University of new Hampshire web site, c. 2017

My work on the University of New Hampshire PLACE project included testing an existing GIS web application, Open GeoPortal, with representative users. The results are published in the UNH Scholars Repository†.

PLACE is a geospatial data repository and search interface for digital collections. Usability testing helped us design features like the gazetteer search and a time slider.

The project was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Leadership Grants for Libraries Program.

† Wolff, Rob and Parker, Kristin, "Usability Testing: Open GeoPortal 2.0" (2014). PLACE Project. 9.

Drupal & Solr

Screenshot of UNH Digital Collections search results for NH Cities & Towns
The University of new Hampshire Digital Collections web site, c. 2017

The UNH Library Digital Colllections (2017) used the Solr search server to index their scanned documents, full text, and metadata. Drupal has a community-supported module to provide search facets using Solr fields.

This project required developing a Solr schema and appropriately weighting index columns to support keyword search.

A custom Drupal module provided a connection between Fedora Commons and the Drupal theme.

Redesigning the Catalog Search Box

Gray search box with six tabs and drop-down menu
Gray search box with three tabs and drop-down menu
Gray search box without tabs, but with a drop-down menu and Help link
Gray search box without tabs or drop-down menu, but with a Help link
Gray search box with an interior photo background, without tabs or drop-down menu, but with a Help link
Dark themed search box with an exterior photo background, without tabs or drop-down menu, but with a Help link

A new search platform for the library catalog meant redesigning the centerpiece of the home page, the Search Box. The team took an iterative approach, testing with users multiple times.