Survey of Digitization - Spring 2009

Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design | Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum

2009-05-06T19:33:00.000-07:00

Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design | Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum

This collection is home for more than 160,000 works of art from the Renaissance to the present concerning the history of European and American art and design. It includes works on paper featuring designs for architecture, decorative arts, gardens, interiors, ornament, jewelry, theater, textiles, graphic and industrial design, and fine arts.

The digital objects are listed for browsing and show thumbnails and titles. There is no search function so the user must click through the pages of images to find what they’re looking for. After choosing an image, the user can click on the image and view it one size larger. There is no zoom capability and the images, though very interesting, are small.

The metadata consists of the title, description, time period, creator, actual image size, the materials used to create the art, where it was purchased, where it was made, and the provenance. The metadata is good, but it would be nice if links were provided to art of the same type (architectural drawings, etc) so that they user could easily find more of the same.

The audience according to the Cooper-Hewitt website is designers, scholars, writers, and collectors. Anyone simply interested in design would enjoy the collection too, as well as any other collection part of the Cooper-Hewitt.

Though there is no denying the images are interesting, their digital representations leave something to be desired. They are small and do not zoom or enlarge enough to be truly appreciated. The site isn’t searchable and there are no links to the art by category of types of design. This seems to be a site based on getting people interested in viewing the physical exhibits in person. Something else to be noted is the word BETA just above the list of links to the site’s collections and this could be why the site isn’t quite up to par. Lastly, curatorial departments of the museum are closed until further notice due to renovations.

The Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings

2009-05-06T15:45:00.000-07:00

The Strachwitz Frontera Collection hosted by UCLA is an enormous resource for researchers interested in Mexican and Mexican-American recorded music. The project is a joint effort sponsored by Los Tigres del Norte Fund, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, the Fund for Folk Culture, as well as support from the Arhoolie Foundation, NEH, NEA, Grammy

Foundation, and even LucasFilm Foundation. The point is, it has a lot of funding and is a very large project. Initially, 30,000 recordings were made available (full access on UCLA campus, record images and samples available off campus). The NEH grant allows for another 20,000 recordings to be made available, half of which are up already. Overall, the entire collection contains over 130,000 individual recording son 78 rpm, 45 rpm, and 33 1/3 rpm discs.

The site has some project information and The Arhoolie Foundation "Projects Funded" webpage hasa bit more about the Strachwitz Frontera Collection project. The records date range is from 1905 to the 1990's. As for copyright, the library offers to takedown materials at the request of owners.

Descriptive metadata is not as complete as one would hope. Titles, subjects, record labels, etc. all appear in the full record, but dates do not on most records. And sadly, for all the financial support, and for containing audio files in the collection, technical information is lacking. Those of us interested in audio preservation are curious about what equipment and what standards were used to digitized the samples.

The item records are fairly standard. Images of both sides of the records are available. Zoom options are great allowing for fine detail of the image of labels. The audio samples are in Real Audio format, which makes them generally available to most Internet users. Over all, this collection has a lot of potential. As is, it is quite an interesting and wide-ranging collection. But I cannot help but think much more background information or research into the recordings could be made available.

Historic Topographic Maps of California--San Francisco Bay Area

2009-05-06T12:28:00.000-07:00

University of California Berkeley Historic Topographic Maps of California--San Francisco Bay Area

1. Selection Decisions
This project digitized topographic maps of the San Francisco Bay area from 1895 to the present (although the front page says it was last updated in 2007). The front page has a link to "information about this project" that very usefully lays out the selection decisions in an upfront, clear manner. The Berkeley team that did the project used the U.S. Geological Survey's topographic quadrangles of the San Francisco Bay region for digitization because they are in the public domain and were believed to be of most use to the Cal Berkeley community and to offsite users. The project includes 15- and 7.5-minute USGS topographic quadrangles that cover over 100 years of mapping of the region. The maps' coverage includes Point Reyes to Half Moon Bay (North to South) and the Pacific Ocean to Antioch, Livermore and San Jose (West to East). The summary of the selection decisions also includes a few sentences of justification why topographic maps are valuable, useful and worth digitizing in general, and notes that first edition maps were always used when more than one edition was available. As well, the selection decisions paragraph notes that the collection includes some editions of quadrangles published by the Corps of Engineers, the Army Map Service, or the Defense Mapping Agency. In all, "350 maps were carefully selected to represent a historic perspective of the changing landscape of the region from rural to densely urban. "

2.Metadata
There are some problems with organization of the project that make nailing down metadata somewhat more difficult than it needs to be. Links to metadata are jumbled up and it is hard to tell what goes with what. However, when specific needed links can be sorted out from the bad formatting, there are useful metadata features, including a pop-up table a lot like our metadata tables in GreenStone, that show the map title, date (when survey was done), alternate date (printed), dimensions, publisher, scale, and notes. However, these appear not to be offered for each and every map. There were many that I viewed where I could not find any metadata at all, but maybe this isn't terribly important to the people that they think will use the maps, in that they know the year from the object title, can reasonably assume that the army or USGS did the survey, and probably just want the information contained in the actual map. It would make any authentication difficult, though. One great feature they have on metadata is a link to the map's MARC record in the Berkeley online library catalog, which would make it very easy to go retrieve the physical copy. There is also more information about the digitization process than I have seen in maybe any other collection I have viewed this semester. The "information about the project" page has two great paragraphs about how the maps were scanned (what equipment was used) and where they did it, what resolution, how they migrated and backed up the data, how the project was funded, how the database was built and by whom, and even how they made the thumbnails. In all, a lot of information. This section also documents one particular librarian's insistence that the images be of very high archival quality, showing compliance with the good practice of "if you're going to digitize, do it as if you will only ever digitize that object once." Contact information for all of the staff responsible for the project is offered at the bottom of the page for people who have questions.

Objects:
The objects are high quality scanned maps. Links to all of the maps from different years of the same quadrangle are offered on the same page as the particular map you're looking at, so it is quick and easy to do comparison. One downside is that they seem to have gone with some kind of proprietary option for publishing the zoom-view images, through a company called lizardtech. So, the images are all in .sid format, which does not seem to be at all interoperable. I had to download and install a plugin from lizardtech's website to view the zoomable maps. This seems like it could be a big problem if that company disappears and no one can get the plug-in to view the digitized maps in a useable way (ie. not thumbnail sized). There are directions for saving the images in a tiff, gif, or jpg format for later use, though. That said, the images are FANTASTIC. One can zoom in close enough to very clearly pick up stray fibers in the paper or variations in ink thickness in the text on the maps. They are very, very nice, and would probably stand in just fine for the real thing if all you needed was the topographic information they contain.

Audience:
I would assume this is for people who know a thing or two about topographic maps. I do not, and so the site was a little hard for me to navigate, but for people who know the terminology and the uses, it's probably no problem at all. To me it seems like city planners, geographers, historians, college students, and possibly even high school or middle school students could make great use of these maps.

The History of Medicine

2009-05-06T09:27:00.000-07:00

The History of Medicine (IHM) has built a collection of about 70,000 images related to medical practice in several countries around the world. The collection contains images of portraits, photographs, caricatures, posters and graphic art. The images range in date from the 15^th to 21^st centuries and were gathered from the History of Medicine and the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

The images themselves are quite interesting and the interface is easy to use. Users are given the option to browse all the images and then narrow their browsing by selection a format, country or time period. When you select an item a small scale appears near the bottom which allows you to zoom in and out of the image. Although this is a really useful tool, it can be difficult to see on black and white images which make up a significant portion of the collection. Also, some of the images don’t hold up well when zooming in as close as possible.

The interface also allows many tools which allow you to share and interact with the images although some of these (such as creating a presentation) are only available to people with usernames and passwords.

Each image has a lot of metadata which is listed in a column on the left-hand side of the screen. They include information on copyright status but also make it clear that it is the user’s responsibility to determine whether or not they can use an item.

Although I didn’t use the tool, the collection is also searchable in Locator Plus which offers a completely different interface in which to display the results. Although I think this site is used primarily by people at IHM and NIH, they want the images to be useful for private study and research as well.

The interface looks really nice and is simple to use and the images themselves are really interesting. I would like a little more information on the collection itself however. Although the metadata includes information on which organizations publish the images, it’s unclear how they were used. I wanted more context for some of the images.

2009-05-04T20:40:00.000-07:00

The Sheet Music Consortium is not a digital collection in the strictest sense; rather, it is an aggregate and possibly a standardizing measure of several different sheet music collections. However, it's aim, associated information and structure are all exceedingly similar to a digital collection--indeed the only difference is the lack of images stored on-site.

There is a wealth of material within this Consortium database. Almost 50,000 instances of sheet music from the Library of Congress are aggregated here. Additionally, the "about" page makes clear the Consortium's purpose as well as the different collections original creators and provenance. There is even a section explaining dublin core standard metadata tags and all the necessary steps to gain approval as a member of the Consortium--a boon to smaller institutions not knowing where to start with digitization and a great way to make sure everything is standardized. I could not find much in terms of linking or interoperability, but the Consortium does allow you to "collect" instances into your own "virtual collection", as well as view other's previously created virtual collection, a fascinating resource and about as close to "web 2.0" as I've seen a curated digital collection get. The search function is also fantastically robust, allowing searching in multiple fields and with several symbol-based search enhancers such as a # to search for prefixs (i.e. lov# returns loving, love, lover, etc.).

Since all of the collections have to conform to dublin core standards, there is a perfectly acceptable and standardized amount of metadata for all instances. Of course, the display of this metadata leaves something to be desired on some of the external sites, which is a problem when you need to move off-site to reach the actual instance. However, the rule of conformity means the metadata will be there, even if it requires a little more searching. The only field that is markedly absent involves metadata about technology and processes used.

I can't say much for the actual instances: for one, they are not actually hosted within the consortium and for another the quality and structure vary wildly depending on the individual collection they are held within. The Library of Congress, of course, has it done up right; I can't say the same for some of the others. There is also nothing about copyright upon the Consortium site itself. One must travel to the individual collection's pages to find this information.

Overall this Consortium is a great resource for sheet music scholars searching for information on a specific piece, as this aggregate seems to collect a whole lot of them--over 100,000! The intended audience is likely either researchers or fans of sheet music or the periods they came from.

Lunar Orbiter Digitization Project

2009-05-04T19:46:00.000-07:00

http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/LunarOrbiterDigitization/
In 1966, there were five Lunar Orbiter missions launched which devoted to mapping potential lunar landing sites. Original Lunar Orbiter images were photographic images acquired during the mission period and be scanned into a series of strips on spacecraft and then transmitted back to earth. The images would be printed out in very high resolution.
This project provides more current updates which are available online. There are three sections: Global Status & Download; HiRes Status & Download and Pilot Project. I carefully reviewed Pilot Project part and found that this site is super enriched. There is a link to Lunar Orbiter Digitization Project Index where under parent directory, the images are listed with information about size and last modified time. Some of the images are in gif format while some are in tif format. Also there are html links. Comparing with other digitization project and comparing with their websites, this project seems complex by involving multiple image formats and due to the particular characteristic of the images, sophisticated digital technology was applied. Although there are relatively less images
Within Download part, there is a big star map pops out and users could select numbers in red italics to access data available for download. It is well virtualized. As if select a number, you could go further and access to downloadable images in a new window. The images are in low resolution jpeg format with rich medadata including which mission it was, size, frame number and so forth.
It is an amazing website and an awesome project.

Joseph Berry Keenan Digital Collection at Harvard Law Library

2009-05-04T11:10:00.000-07:00

Joseph Berry Keenan was the director of the International Prosecution Section, a group of lawyers and law professionals that served during the war trials in Tokyo after World War II. As head of the IPS, he collected correspondence, much of which is important to understanding what went on during those trials. Harvard Law Library has digitized them and posted them on the Web here.

The scans themselves are very high quality, and very readable; unfortunately, there's pretty much no metadata at all for them. They're organized by boxes and in a series of sequences--like an archive, in other words, rather than a library per se. They're not searchable, even though there's a "search" button at the top. You can download papers as PDF files, though. I can imagine that this would be a valuable resource for historians, especially those interested in law and the Second World War, but unless you know the sequence you're looking for, it would be hard to locate anything specific. It's more browsable than searchable, I suppose.

Wonders: Images of the Ancient World, NYPL

2009-05-04T09:17:00.000-07:00

http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=all&col_id=682

This New York Public Library digital exhibition consists of over 1,700 images (paintings, engravings, photographs, etc.) depicting ancient civilizations (Egypt, Greece, Rome, etc.) taken from 18th to early 20th century. The collection is massive, and exploring it can be a bit overwhelming at first. The only options to browse through the collection are to display all the images at once (clicking through page after page, organized alphabetically by title) or by viewing parts of the collection grouped by subject headings. But since there are still a lot of different subject headings, this can still take some time. A general 'search' feature is also available, though you can't pick a specific category.

Pretty much all the metadata you could possibly want is provided with each image: creator (if known), format/medium, date produced, the original collection it was taken from, etc. The catalog number in the library is also provided, should you want to go and see that drawing of the kneeling Greek archer you like so much live and in person. Images can be enlarged to a degree, but zooming in is limited to roughly 5x the thumbnail size. A link located on the toolbar near each image lets you purchase a print, should you so desire.

The lack of browsing options would suggest that this is a site for people who know their subject (Classics Majors, I'm looking at you. Well, not at the moment. I'm typing, actually. But... never mind). And, with that in mind, this is a very successful collection. But people without a good background in Classics will have to be content to take their time to figure out the collection, or spend some time wandering around aimlessly (which, honestly, there's something to be said for. There are plenty of interesting things to discover here).

Chicago State University

2009-05-03T20:42:00.000-07:00

The Chicago State University Collection contains historical photographs of the University. The site uses CONTENTdm, and is not at all aesthetically appealing. The about page for the collection establishes the University as an important witness to the demographic shift that occurred in Chicago during the 20th century. The collection does not reflect this. It contains only 16 photographs, some of the school seal rather than the students. Whether these photographs were the only ones they had or why they were chosen about the rest and why so few were digitized is left to the viewer's imagination.
The metadata provided is very thorough, with more than 15 fields including one for all the notes they have on the object. Metadata varies from object to object, but the information about the objects is substantial. The image itself is only visible in thumbnail or a screen-view size. The original scan is not available for viewing. The site provides no information about the digital object or what kind of technologies were used in digitizing.
I would guess that this collection is aimed at people with a casual interest in the university. The collection as a whole is too small for any real research and it does little to show the demographic change discussed in the about page.

The Pelican Project

2009-05-02T21:07:00.000-07:00

http://www.thingsmagazine.net/projects/pelican.htm

This digital collection focuses on scans of book covers from Pelican Books, which was an offshoot of Penguin Books that was started in 1937. Selection decisions aren’t listed, but looking through the collection, you can see that they made the choice to scan only front covers, which are in varying conditions. Investigating further, I found out that it's not a complete collection, so it may be made up just of books they had access to, or perhaps just covers they liked. There's no way to know, and the lack of information about selection decisions could be a missed opportunity. If they let users know what books they were still looking for they could possibly elicit the help of other Pelican Book enthusiasts to lend books or send in scans to help complete the collection. It’d also be interesting to know why the scans stopped in 1985. Did the series end, or did they just not like the cover design styles of the late 1980’s?

Rights management isn't talked about, but I think it'd be safe to assume that they didn't get permission to post these. Covers were scanned at 200ppi, which seems like a decent balance between not having high enough resolution that it would make rights owners feel threatened, but still displaying a quality image (though who knows really?). At first glance, I thought they had added shadows around the books, which seems like it would be a bad choice for preservation. On closer inspection, it looks like erasing the outer border of the scan is what gives the illusion of shadows. This decision gives the collection a cohesive visual look, and displays great against the white background.

The layout of the site is really clean. Items are arranged by year, which is really the only metadata. It's confusing that some books appear in two different years, and it would be helpful to know why that decision was made. It would also be nice to know more about the graphic designers, although I don't know if that information was in the books. Because of the emphasis on the visual design of the collection, I would say the collection is targeted towards fans of modernist design, or graphic design history. The collection is a great representation of the changing eras of graphic design, but with even a little information about their selection decisions and collection, it could be a much better resource.

American Indians of the Pacific Northwest Collection

2009-05-02T00:03:00.000-07:00

http://content.lib.washington.edu/aipnw/index.html

This collection is one of the University of Washington libraries’ special collections. The website provides an extensive digital collection of original photographs and documents about the Northwest Coast and Plateau Indian cultures, complemented by essays written by anthropologists, historians, and teachers about both particular tribes and cross-cultural topics. The digital databases includes over 2,300 original photographs as well as over 1,500 pages from the Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior from 1851 to 1908 and six Indian treaties negotiated in 1855. Secondary sources include 89 articles from the Pacific Northwest Quarterly and 23 University of Washington publications in Anthropology.

It is easy to explore the collection. Users can browse by Images, Documents, Image Subjects and Image Subjects. For example, users can click the “Browse Images” button, and in the next webpage, the list of available items will appear in the dropdown box. When users find the image they want to see, they can click the thumbnail, and a large picture will load on the screen. Zoom in or out can change the view to see the big picture or to get in close. At the same time, users can use some special tools such as “Maximum Resolution”, “Fit in Window”, “Fit to width”, Rotate left, Rotate right, Hide/show thumbnail and Clip image in a new window. Especially, for “Clip image in a new window”, users can click the mouse and drag the box diagonally to select part of the image. In the new window, right-click to perform other browser functions, such as save, print and e-mail. The metadata will be found under the picture along with Title, Photographer, Date, Notes, Subjects, Location Depicted, Object Type, Negative Number, Collection, Repository, Restrictions and Transmission Data.

Like most online digital collections, the essays and digital databases may be accessed by using the keyword search at the top of pages throughout the site. Overall, this is a high – level digital collection, as part of the American Memory Historical Collections at the Library of Congress, it was 1997/98 Award Winner in Ameritech Digital Library Competition. The intended audience for this particular digital collection would definitely be K-12 teachers, researchers and anyone who may be interested in American Indians culture.

Kolloen Family Photo Collection

2009-05-01T15:34:00.000-07:00

Recently a friend of mine discovered that his family is featured in a digital collection hosted by The University of Washington Libraries. The collection is only a sample of what the library/archive actually carries related to the Kolloen family. There is no explanation for why these specific images were chosen to be digitized but UW does offer some interesting background on the family, the historical context of the collection and the relevance for Seattle.

In total, the digital collection contains 34 images compiled in a ContentDM site. The images feature members of the family, the hotel they built and pictures of the Yukon Territory. The ContentDM format allows users to interact with the images in pretty interesting ways. The images can be viewed as many different sizes and rotated, although I'm not really sure why it would be useful to rotate the images as they are all right-side up. An interesting feature of the site allows you to select an area of the photo which then appears in a new browser window. The selected area does not show up any larger than the last view but it does allow you to crop the picture in the browser and then save the image as is. I think it's nice that you can interact with the images this way. I don't think I've seen any other digital collection that allows you to crop a photo within the browser.

Not surprisingly, UW does a nice job with the metadata which is displayed beneath each image. They provide detailed information about the image as well as hyperlinks in the title which allow users to view other images with the keywords in the title. The also provide information about the collection and the historical context. Users are able to save the images to their own computers as the copyright has expired on the images but they also have a service that allows you to order prints from the collection.

UW obviously has a great reputation and I like what they've done with this collection. I would like more information about why these items were selected over others but it's nicely done. Information is easy to find, images are clear and large and interactive. They really made the most of the ContentDM structure and put together an interesting collection that is important for the city of Seattle's history.

A Taste of Horton

2009-04-30T20:37:00.000-07:00

A Taste of Horton

A selection of items from the Horton Collection of Children's Material.

The Horton Collection was created by the Aberystwyth University in Aberystwyth, Wales, located in the Thomas Parry Library Rare Books Collection and contains over 800 items showing the development of children’s literature during the two hundred years from the mid-eighteenth century to 1913. The collection is intended to be a research into juvenile literature, historical and analytical bibliography, publishing, illustration, costume and drama.

The archive is arranged in both a gallery format and an index format, which is organized into author, bookseller, engraver, general, illustrator, printer, publisher, series, and title indexes. Each book has an extensive metadata list, containing, when applicable, the book's call number, author, title, edition imprint, page size, collation, the printer, illustration details, binding information, annotations, collections, references, contents, and tracings. The images scanned from the book, only a handful of each, may be seen at a higher resolution. The archive further contains links to other children's literature archives, libraries, projects, and collections.

The gallery display is very well organized, with the books being listed in alphabetical order by title. The scans of the books are displayed on one side of the main table, and the book title, author, and illustrator are on the other. A handful of the images have some distortion from the scanning process, but the pictures overall are very clear.

Ball State University Digital Media Repository

2009-04-29T18:20:00.000-07:00

Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, uses CONTENTdm to create their Digital Media Repository, a resource housing 57 separate digital collections featuring a variety of materials. The repository's About page gives some information about the goals of this digital initiative (greater access, adding to international body of digital objects, etc.), but it also has a link to a video explaining the project from the perspective of those involved in its creation, maintenance, and use. I thought it was nice that the video conveniently had a link to the .wmv in Dial-Up or Broadband formats, by the way. The video does a good job of explaining the benefits of such an initiative to a relatively regional state school like Ball State, and to those outside of their community who may not get a chance, or may not think, to explore their collections.

Users can do a simple search of the collections or sort the collections by Subject/Geographic Area, Dept., Format, or Explore A-Z. Sorting by these categories brings up expandable mens from which you can further drill down to specifics. Two collections I enjoyed browsing were the Musical Instruments Collection and the Works Progress Administration Miniature Furniture collection. Both contain images, but also video and/or audio files to augment the item's display. As the repository uses CONTENTdm, the look and feel of browsing the items is relatively standardized. Each collection will display limited image thumbnails and descriptive information in sortable columns when listing the categories you are browsing. Metadata for each item in the collections is mostly descriptive with some administrative data. It is adequate despite a lack of technical data, which might be useful for the audio and video files. For all of the collections, audio files are Windows Media and videos are in Quicktime format.

The Musical Instruments Collection lists 141 objects to explore. The collection home page has very little background information about the collection or the intruments themselves. The images are simply digital photographs of the instruments. But each instrument image is accompanied by a short audio file of someone playing the instrument. In many cases, detail imags of parts of the instruments are available. When video is used, it is 3D rotation of the instruments with zoom functions. The audio files are great and let you hear everything from more cowbell to music boxes to didgeridoos. Fun.

The WPA miniture furniture was an unexpected find. This collections homepage has a link to an about page with a bit of background on the items. They come from an Indiana State Museum Project from the 1930's and 1940's centered in Evansville, Indiana, that sought to preserve in miniature typical furnishings of the era. The scale is reportedly 2 inches to 12 inches. The furniture was intended for display in libraries, museums, and schools throughout the state and the items were functional. The collection provide images of 33 objects and includes 3D rotating videos that you can manipulate, just like the musical instruments.

The repository contains several collections that include relative typical types of objects. The two particular collections above include 3D objects. Creating digital collections that come closest to recreating the experience of interacting with the real objects seems much more difficult with 3D objects. Augmenting with audio and video (especially that can be manipulated) is a step in the right direction.

2009-04-29T14:31:00.000-07:00

The Massachusetts Historical Society's collection of the diaries of John Quincy Adams.

This collection is a digital representation of the entire collection of J. Q. Adams' diaries. He kept three simultaneously: a one-line diary (denoted "short"), a rough draft, and the final draft (denoted "long"), all of which are digitized. The site is somewhat curated as it does not allow searching of the text, but provides browsing by themes. The site states that "though every page is digitized, there is a curated selection of pages divided by people, events, topics, places, and career highlights." There is a slight attempt at a movement that might be in the direction of 2.0 with a link at the bottom of the front page to an "online feedback form." I was disappointed when I realized it said "form" and not "forum," which I believe would add tremendous value to the site.

The user is allowed to search by date, browse by volume (all 51 of them), or to browse a timeline based on the events recorded in the diaries. Specific dates (such as his inauguration) and "selected pages" from the diaries are highlighted for researchers.

The metadata is standardized but skimpy. Each digital page has a footer containing information regarding the physical diary and ownership, a persistent link, and credits to MHS and the digitization date.

The zoom function is powerful but does not offer much in the way of research beyond reading the text. The zoomed image is a JPEG and offers some unsightly but practical copyright information.

_{Page one of the long entry the day of Adams' inauguration.}

“Reuter’s Seeds for the South”

2009-04-29T13:18:00.000-07:00

This digital collection contains a series of catalog covers from Reuter’s Seeds Company. The collection is part of a larger digital library of Southeastern Architectural collections within the Special Collections division at Tulane University, though it is not exactly clear how these topics relate. The collection contains approximately 30 images dating from 1915 to 1966.

The collection level metadata provides surface detail about the materials. The librarian in the project is named, and contact information is provided. There is not any information related to the processes of implementing this collection. The selection criteria are vague, but it seems like the images were selected based on how well they reflect that particular genre. The description states “[the] covers reveal changing design styles, advances in hybridization (1927 brought "the new Wondermelon!"), and new approaches to advertising.”

Each individual object is described through title and date, and images are stored both in color, and black and white. The manipulation afforded through the site is the enlargement of scanned photos, but no other viewing option is available. The collection search capability includes the browsing feature, and a link to and from the home page of special collections.

The stated appeal of the collection is the “nostalgic, colorful, and very entertaining” nature of the materials, so they may be directed at a more general audience. The quality of the digital images afford only a limited view of the materials, making this a more casual experience for the site visitors.

The British Cartoon Archive

2009-04-28T21:47:00.000-07:00

The British Cartoon Archive

The current incarnation of The British Cartoon Archive’s site is a recent relaunch equipped with better functionality including the ability to zoom in on images. The archive is a part of the University of Kent’s Templeman Library and is a registered museum devoted to displaying the history of British cartooning over the last two hundred years. In includes over 130,000 original editorial, socio-political, and pocket cartoons as well as comic strips, newspaper cuttings, books and magazines. Some of these materials date as far back as 1904.

The objectives of the British Cartoon Archive are to conserve and catalogue cartoons, encourage research, plan and promote exhibitions of cartoon originals, and to service teaching. The audience is considered to be researchers, authors, teachers, the media and students.

The search function allows you to search the archive’s catalogue. There is no list of keywords provided or any sign of a browsing option besides the handful of “recently added records” which appear just below the search bar. An advanced search allows the user to input specific dates along with their text search. After searching “librarian,” two pages of results appeared including options to narrow the search by a list of provided artists and publishers. Beneath each thumbnail the title of the cartoon, its artist, where it was published, and the date of publication are listed. Selecting a cartoon yields an image with little metadata. A list of related terms occur under the heading thesaurus and the series title is displayed. Other than that there is only the reference number, the text of the cartoon’s caption, and whatever text is embedded within the cartoon itself. Clicking on “biography” leads you to a page describing the artist. There are also links on the side of the image to see more from the publication, more by the artist, to suggest an edit, and find more artwork from the same day. The touted “zoom” feature mentioned on the front page is an option but it does not load on my computer after repeated attempts.

This site, though clearly a work in progress, would benefit from adding more metadata to its images to give context to the cartoons. The artwork is engaging and interesting just as you’d expect such cartoons to be but they’d be far more useful if the information to which they were reacting was provided. They might also consider adding a function that allows users to browse by collection since currently the collections are listed on a separate page but there are no links to them. Also, the zoom feature does not work and needs to be fixed.

The Visual Front: Posters of the Spanish Civil War from UCSD's Southworth Collection

2009-04-28T18:51:00.000-07:00

The Visual Front: Posters of the Spanish Civil War from UCSD's Southworth Collection is a cool digitization project designed to make availible to the public propoganda posters from one of the most harrowing conflicts of the 20th century. The site argues that the posters would have been a frequently encountered item in the wartime landscape as individuals struggled to go on with their daily lives. For all of their impact and motivations, these items are "vivid testimonies of the event." Given the scale of the tragedy and its historical importance, there is little question that the posters of the Spanish Civil War are important artifacts that would be of interest to everyone from scholars to average citizens. It is then all the more frustrating that all of the great information contained in this website is arranged in such an obtuse, unusuable fashion. Although there is a great deal of curation on the site, there does not appear to be any kind of ongoing curation.

For starters, there is no way to search the collection. The two access points for the information are 1) a list of the titles of the posters in Spanish and 2) an unlabeled visual index that provides a large list of thumbnails. Upon clicking on a thumbnail, the user is taken to a seperate page with the image, metadata including: the title and the title's translation, the artist, its source, medium, and size of the original poster. Underneath this information are well-written and information rich descriptions of the poster, the context of the imagery, and what details if any are known about the artist or specific subject matter. There is such a fascinating wealth of information here that it is just criminal that it is so cumbersome to access. The images of the posters themselves are enlargeable only once. To really represent the artifacts, they should have scanned them at a higher resolution. As it stands, they just aren't good for anything but looking at. This collection is a prime example of how terrific materials and great information can be rendered almost useless by a fundamental lack of understanding of how digital collections should be built and conveyed.

Van Gogh Museum of Amsterdam

2009-04-28T16:55:00.000-07:00

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam
http://www3.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/index.jsp

The Van Gogh’s Museum houses a permanent collection that can be search by alphabetical list, landscapes, self-portraits, Portraits, Drawings, Peasant live Still Lifes, Van Gogh’s work in periods. The site provides a history of the collection. The largest collection of his work – more than 200 paintings, 437 drawings and 31 prints – can be found in the Van Gogh Museum. Many other drawings and paintings by Van Gogh can be found at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo (The Netherlands) and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.The collection can be viewed in eight language; Edderlands, Espanol, Francais, Deutch, Italiano, Japanese and English.

In this website you will find a selection from these letters, including references to paintings on this website.
Vincent Van Gogh was a passionate and fairly good letter writer. He put his thoughts and ideas to paper in over 800 letters, some to fellow artists such as Emile Bernard and Paul Gauguin, but most to his brother Theo, who was Vincent’s greatest source of support. Most of the manuscripts are in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum; they form an indispensable source of information about the artist’s life and work.
For the time being, this site does not provide information on all of Van Gogh’s works. The museum does, however, aim to present its own complete Van Gogh collection on the Internet within the next few years. A complete catalog of Van Gogh’s entire oeuvre is available on a website launched a few years ago by David Brooks, in close cooperation with the Van Gogh Museum’s documentation center. The museum regards this site, www.vggallery.com, as a reliable source of information.

The site offers an video overview of Van Gogh’s life and each Van Gogh’s pieces can be zoomed in and panned depicting minute detail. The metadata is robust with interesting data provided.

Crime Broadsides

2009-04-28T13:26:00.000-07:00

Harvard Law School Library's collection of crime broadsides spans the years 1707 to 1891 and includes more than 500 broadsides. Broadsides were sold in Great Britain at places of execution. In their time they were called both dying speeches and bloody murders. This collection takes the time to carefully explain the historical context of the broadsides, the origin of the collection at the law library and that their entire collection is online.
In addition to several pages about the collection, the site allows users to browse the collection, or search by category or keyword. The search features have a variety of drop down menus and are a bit overwhelming, but they are very through. The records that match the submitted query appear as a short list of metadata elements, without any thumbnails. By clicking "display full record" the user is taken to a page with all of the metadata elements visible, including title, creator, description, genre, subject, ID number and any notes they have about the item. However, the image of the object itself is still not visible. By clicking on another link, the image is pulled up in a special viewer in a new window. The number of clicks required make viewing an object cumbersome at best.
The images themselves can be viewed in great detail, allowing zooming all around the page, though figuring out how to use the special viewer might take an inexperienced user a little bit of time. The images are also easily converted to pdf for downloading. Information about the digital object was not listed on the site.
It seems this collection is for a user with a passing interest in the subject. While the site itself could have been designed better, a scholar would only be able to begin his research online. To acquire more information, I suspect they would have to go to the law library in person.

International Children's Digital Library

2009-04-28T08:37:00.000-07:00

The International Children's Digital Library is a project that digitizes children's books from around the world. The books are uploaded as digital scans; since the library's obtained the rights from publishers to digitize these books, they don't allow you to download, copy, or print them, just view them online (although I'm sure someone can find a way around this). Books are searchable by keyword, age group, length, and even cover color (which I think is a fun category).

The metadata isn't all that detailed--it lists the author, the illustrator if there is one, the publication year, language, publisher, and a short summary. I don't think this is much of a problem, though, since the users they're targeting, kids and possibly their parents and teachers, aren't going to be really concerned about much beyond that; it's a lot like a listing for a kid's book in a public library system. Rights information shows up in the scans. Books aren't translated into other languages, but that's because the project was created in part for children coming from other countries to the States, so they can learn in their native language while they're still young. Overall, this is an interesting and fun resource, and hopefully they'll be able to expand it in the future.

Cad é mar atá tú?

2009-04-28T07:04:00.000-07:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/irish/blas/learners/index.shtml

For our final blog posts of the class, we were instructed to find digital libraries of video or audio files. I found this collection of Irish language lessons within the BBC's website.

The collection principles of the site are very specific: two series of 15 five-minute lessons in the Irish language that were originally broadcast on a weekly basis by BBC Northern Ireland. While the collection is small and specifically tailored, the site is thoroughly curated. The collection is divided into two series, conforming to the series format of the original broadcasts. Each series may be accessed in two separate ways: through web pages featuring streaming lessons and text or by downloading the entire series as mp3s. In addition to this, the site also links to a secondary collection of streaming sound files of other BBC broadcasts related to the Irish language, an online animated vocabulary quiz, and a more involved mini-game on the Irish language entitled "Colin and Cumberland Learn Irish." (One gets the feeling that Colin and Cumberland might be recurring characters on the BBC Northern Ireland.) All in all, the extra features provided by the site, more than make up for the small and specific nature of the collection.

The objects themselves are four to five minute audio clips. They are available in two separate formats. First, they are presented as streaming audio in the format of ram files that my computer opened with real media player. Secondly, each lesson may be downloaded as an mp3 and put on a portable player, which I find really cool. (The entire lesson series may be downloaded as mp3s at once.) I do wish the objects contained a bit more metadata. The site identifies the talent (Fearghal Mag Uiginn), the production company (BBC NI "Radio Ulster"), the titles of the series and lessons, the format of the files, and the fact that the original broadcasts aired on Wednesdays. Sadly, it does not indicate which Wednesdays.

Despite the limited metadata and specific nature of the collection, I found the BBC Northern Ireland's Learning Irish collection to be quite interesting.

Slán!

Chicago Historical Society - The Haymarket Digital Collection

2009-04-28T06:43:00.000-07:00

Chicago Histo rical Society - The Haymarket Digital Collection

The Chicago Historical Society decided to put together a digital collection that focused on a major event that occurred in the 19th century that redefined labor laws and established a political divide within the psyches of the American population: The Haymarket Riots of 1886.

The Chicago Historical Society thoughtfully provides an article about their selection criteria for digitizing the material for this collection. First and foremost the creators of this digital collection determined to establish the boundaries of this collection to consist of primary documents that stemmed from the Haymarket Riots. The Chicago Historical Society already had a large collection of primary materials. Then they decided take an inclusive approach by digitizing most of the material, however as the bulk of their collection are the 3. 323 page transcript of the witness testimony and cross examination in the trial and the accompanying evidence books. Since there was a lot of material within that pile of documents, they decided to only the material concerning the twelve candidates chosen to serve on the jury along with the text of discussion that arose during the trial to showcase the procedure and law. The creators of the digital collection also wanted the project to display a series of events and the fallout that occurred afterwards.

The metadata is rather scanty in this project. Each image is scanned beautifully and comes in with a zoom in feature and a higher resolution option; however only the basic metadata (not any kind of schema is observed) is included: the format, the measurements, the creator/s, date of publication, all of which is presented in a more of a "bibliographic" format. Search features are almost non-existent in this collection. The collection is grouped by types of documents, for example, broadsides or trial documents. There is a table of contents that lists the materials within the collection, but no keyword searches or any other method of information retrieval, other than scrolling down and clicking on the title of a collection and going through each "exhibit" until you find the one you want.

Despite the ineptitude of the search and metadata, the contents of the collections are quite interesting. The Chicago Historical Society has done a great job in procuring primary documents and other material to convey the events of the Haymarket Riot. The collection consists of broadsides, artifacts (banners, revolvers used by the police during the riot), phamplets, photographs, trial documents, prints, and letters and manuscripts written by those who were involved in the melee of the Haymarket Riot.

The intended audience is directly stated by the Chicago Historical Society: "in digitizing its collections the Chicago Historical Society seeks to make the primary materials of history available to the widest possible audience." With that being said, I believe this collection targets academia, more specifically history majors and maybe even high school students, with the intent of showing the usefulness of primary material research.

Dr. Walter Lindley's Scrapbooks

2009-04-26T20:39:00.000-07:00

Dr. Walter Lindley's Scrapbooks is, naturally, a digitized collection of the scrapbooks compiled over the lifetime of Dr. Walter Lindley (1852-1922) who was an early resident of Los Angeles and a fairly prominent physician during his time. It is not, however, complete at the moment. Rather, it is a work in progress with Claremont College (CC) promising to add to the online collection in the coming months. Interestingly, CC divided the scrapbooks in its collection into series that appear to unify the scrapbooks thematically. For instance, those scrapbooks concerning Shakespeare are all combined into the Shakespeare series. Those dealing with Lindley's travels likewise are filed into the Travel series. In a bizarre twist, though, CC did not start their digitization project with the first series. They instead began, presumably, with the third and are now working through the second. No information is given as to which series will come next. Nor is any explanation given for why they began with the third series, which deals with Lindley's candidacy for mayor of Los Angeles. Perhaps, they did so thinking that series would draw more attention than any other series. Yet, no statement is given to explain if such was their reasoning or if, rather, they just haphazardly picked a series and began digitizing. Thus, one comes away with the impression that CC has, on one hand, taken the pain to exert some authority and intellectual control over this collection while, on the other hand, not taking the trouble to explain why they are putting up certain scrapbooks first.

Each digitized image in this collection is accompanied by a series of metadata fields that, together, remember the type of MARC record found in a regular online library catalog. The fields used are consistent over the entirety of the collection and include such unsurprising fields as Title, Creator, LCSH Subject Headings, and Date. There are, however, some unique fields. One such field is the Subjects - Local field which apparently contains information more pertinent to the specific document and, thus, less generic than those subjects found in the LCSH area. Another interesting use of a metadata field is how CC employs the Publisher field. Rather than having this field correspond to the publisher of the physical document, CC has instead used this field to declare the publisher to be the Special Collections department of its Honnold Mudd Library. This author sees no reason to fault CC for this as they do include the information of who created, for example, a newspaper article, but they put this information in the Creator field. Again, this makes a good deal of sense. It is only surprising and novel in the sense that this author does not believe he has seen the Publisher field used in this manner before.

One frustrating aspect of this collection is the ContentDM software it uses. This author is not a fan of ContentDM due to the fact that each iteration he has seen of it has not allowed a user to view an image in a standalone window. This collection is no different. An undeniably high-quality image - ostensibly a TIFF, although this is not quite certain - is displayed and the user is given a variety of options which include zooming to, but not beyond the image's full size, rotating the image clockwise or counterclockwise, panning in every direction, and choosing whether to have the image be displayed at maximum resolution or fitted to the screen or width. On paper, this may look like a plethora of options. This author, though, has always found these options in a ContentDM interface to be clunky and frustrating even if they are well-intended. Additionally, this author was puzzled as to whether these objects have persistent identifiers. It seems logical to suppose that the 'reference url' CC provides a link to is, in fact, this persistent identifier. Yet, there is no exact and unwavering statement to support this assumption. Thus, this too is a bit perplexing.

CC provides no precise declaration of who their intended audience for this collection is. However, one may suppose, given Dr. Lindley's apparent status in the burgeoning Los Angeles community just before and right at the turn of the 20th century, that this collection is aimed at a local constituency made up not only of scholars, but also citizens interested in exploring the influence and connections a prominent man had in the days before Los Angeles became the cultural and economic powerhouse it is today. It is hard for this author to judge how effective CC is and will be with respect to reaching these audiences. In spite of that, this author can attest that this collection is worth browsing simply for some of the fascinating newspaper clippings.

The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music

2009-04-25T23:18:00.000-07:00

http://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/index.html

The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music is a digital initiative by Johns Hopkins University. As far as I can tell, everything from the physical collection was scanned, except perhaps material published after 1923. It's sad to see "Images are restricted due to copyright and are unavailable for viewing” for many items published after 1923, but there is still a text record for those entries, and the selection decision is mentioned in the site's FAQ and search tips section.

The scans of sheet music collections are available as downloadable .pdf’s, which seems like a good choice for keeping sets of sheet music together. I can’t figure out the resolution of the .pdf images, but they’re quite clear, and seem to be fairly large, with one 4 page grayscale .pdf having a file size of 2.88mb. For black and white images, a choice was made to scan as grayscale, while color printing is scanned in color.

The metadata is fantastic, with notable fields such as the first line of the song and its chorus, as well as a field for listing the “Engraver, Lithographer, Artist”. The naming for items is related to their box # in the archive, which is effective for locating the original artifacts. It is slightly awkward when this same convention is used for browsing the collection, limiting the user to browsing one box at a time. One feature that I really like is the “tours” section, which combines lectures from Lester S. Levy with images from the digital collection, and seems like a great way to show off and activate a digital collection. The only thing lacking is a direct link to the item in the collection from the tour.

The New York Public Library Mid – Manhattan library Picture Collection Online

2009-04-25T17:54:00.000-07:00

http://digital.nypl.org/mmpco/index.cfm

The Picture Collection Online presents more than 30,000 digitized images from books, magazines and newspapers as well as original photographs, prints and postcards, mostly created before 1923. I think it is mainly because the works published before 1923 are in public domain. Obviously, there are no copyright problems for the online picture collection. The Picture Collection Online includes the following subjects: African-Americans, American History, Animals, Army, Birds, Clothing & Dress, Costume, Design, Dragons, Exploration, Fashion Drawings, Fur Fashions, Gloves, Hats, Hairdressing, Hosiery, Insects, Native Americans, New York City, Pioneer, Life, Punishments, Reptiles, Shoes, Slave Ships, Slavery, Snakes, Textiles, Umbrellas and Parasols. From the subjects mentioned above, I find the website has a wide variety of collections.

Browsing the picture collection is very easy. Users can browse by Folder Titles, Image Titles, Names, Subjects, Source by Author, and Source by Title. Then click the dropdown button, the list of available items will appears. Users can select the item you want to watch. If users like to see a large picture, they can click the thumb sized picture. The Metadata is provided with Title, Image ID, Creators, Physical Description, Material Type, Subjects, Date Published, Barcode Number, Struc ID, Source and In Folder. The problem I encounter is some pictures can’t be uploaded correctly.

For searching function, the collection provides keywords searching. In addition, users can also use advanced searching function through using “Search in all fields”, “Match all of these words” and “Include word variants”.

Furthermore, the collection offers users the opportunity to save the items they like to “My Gallery”, and users can easily visit their own collection at any time. For the picture collection, the intended audience should be students, researchers and individual interested in history pictures.

Corey and Nate's Beer Labels

2009-04-25T10:43:00.000-07:00

Cory and Nate have amassed over 4800 beer labels from around the world in their collection. On their "about us" page their beer label adventure began in college drinking bad beer until they discovered micro-breweries during their sophomore year. Nate created the website using Perl. There is a link to Pay Pal to support them.

The "beer label" page has labels listed alphabetically by brewery with a key of icons including: bold for a brewery with more than 5 labels in the collection, a red star for "especially yummy beers", a yellow-highlighted NEW for a recent update, a notepad for a write-up, a green dollar sign for purchasing info and a red circle with a white bar (like a do not enter sign) for a beer to avoid.

When you click on a brewery link, thumbnail images of beer bottles with labels appear with names the spelled out underneath. A row of five pint glasses is the rating scale for the tastiness of the beer. There is also information on the brewery. Clicking on the image thumbnail will enlarge the image with a big "Beer Label" watermark across it. There are also links for viewers to update information about the brewery or to contact Corey and Nate about trading labels and bottles. The amount of information about a beer depends upon either information they have gathered themselves or from visitors to the site. There isn't any information about where the image came from or how it was digitized.
They have some interesting legal information pertaining to the images they have water-marked, particularly their claim of "this is a not-for-profit hobby site clearly covered under the Fair Use portion of the Copyright Law" and a link the Standford Reference Site. They also request if you want something taken down, skip the cease and desist and just ask them.

Definitely a site for beer aficionados.

Life-Your World in Pictures

2009-04-23T21:05:00.000-07:00

Live-Your World in Pictures
http://www.life.com/

I had heard of this collection but had never had the opportunity to simply browse the site. There are so many options to browse including “Today’s Top Photos”, Editor’s Pick, Most Popular, Would You Rather See, and Did You miss This?

The Life Collection can be scanned by news, celebrity, travel animals, sports and other searches that you may request. Then your search can be refined by date, person, location, types. The Meta data is found below the image along with the photographers name and the date. The image can be enlarged. In addition, there are additional subjects of human interest, or current interest.

One example of a human interest collection is the collection of 18 “Colorful, Cute Frogs”. These images can be viewed as either a thumbnail or as an enlargement. Below the image is the photographer, the gallery name, and date.

Each Image may be e-mailed, shared, rated, printed, or linked to. When you click and read the license link a wealth of data is presented including the title, where and when the photograph was taken. Additional information is provided information about the finding in this case more of these frogs and about their habitat. The license type, copyright information as well as a statement about the company’s right to pursue unauthorized use. There is an additional statement stating the following: “Availability for this image cannot be guaranteed until time of purchase. Getty Images reserves the right to pursue unauthorized users of this image or clip. If you violate our intellectual property you may be liable for: actual damages, loss of income, and profits you derive from the use of this image or clip, and, where appropriate, the costs of collection and/or statutory damages up to $150,000 (USD).”

POP-UPS

2009-04-23T18:50:00.000-07:00

The POP-UP World of Ann Montanaro

This exhibit is the first online exhibit created, and maintained, by the Rutger's University Libraries, of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. "The items in this collection were drawn from the collection of Ann Montanaro, who collaborated on the organization of this exhibit and authored its captions and discursive texts." (Source)

The "About POPUP World" section details the mechanics of how the exhibit was created, including the specific equipments used to record the images and be entered into the digital archive. The archive as a whole is extensively footnoted, and there are several pages of links to other pop-up archives and sources of information on pop-up books. There is also an extensive history of "mechanical books", the predessors of the pop-up.

The archive is organized into the following sections:

Past and Present I (1884-1949)
Past and Present II (1950-1993)
Images of Travel
Birds and Bees
Not for Children
Traditional Tales Reconstructed
The Miraculous and the Devout
Fanciful Beasts
The Beautiful and the Bizarre
Entertaining (and instructing) Children

Each image has extensive metadata attached, including the digital image size, book author, artist, paper engineer, publisher, source of specific book printing, book size, and number of pages in the book. The description then goes on to describe the text of the book and the content of the images and pop-ups. The specific pop-up photographed for the collection is then described in detail. Each image may be seen at a higher resolution by clicking on the link at the beginning of each image text.

Abraham Lincoln Paper Collection at the Library of Congress

2009-04-23T16:33:00.000-07:00

The Abraham Lincoln Paper Collection at the Library of Congress is both a fascinating collection and an interesting digitizaiton project. The LOC's complete Lincoln paper collection consists of 20,000 seperate documents. The digitized part of the collection is a result of a collaboration between the LOC's Manuscript Division and the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College. Altogether the digital collection includes about 61,000 images and 10,000 transcriptions. Each of these 61,000 images exists as a jpeg, a gif, and a tiff. The tiff masters were transferred to the National Digital Library Program (NDLP). The archival gif versions, however, are freely accessible online. The site design is very basic, and looks date. According to the homepage, the site was last updated March 21, 2002. I'm certain that the site is actively maintained, but the collection does not appear to be engagingly curated.

Before existing in a digital format, the Lincoln papers were captured on microfilm. The index created for this microfilm collection served as the backbone for the organization of the digital collection. The papers may be searched by keyword, or by textual content. It is also possible to browse the collection based on date. Upon retrieving an item, metadata is provided in the form of date, subject, to whom a paper was written (if it is correspondence), and series. The files enlarge very nicely so that you can really see all of the detail in the handwriting. This is a really superb collection, and is no doubt of great interest to historians, biographers, and other sorts of detail-oriented researchers.

E. Azalia Hackley Collection of African American Sheet Music

2009-04-22T16:41:00.000-07:00

The E. Azalia Hackley Collection of the Detroit Public Library was the first to showcase the contribution of African Americans in the performing arts. The collection contains over 600 works that feature African American themes published between 1799 and 1922. The digital form of the collection was created in 2003 and originally was to include just 19th century works. Later, 20th century works were added up to 1922 because they were in the public domain. The collection was started in 1943 and contains other 20th century works. The site mentions that future evaluation of works that come into the public domain will determine whether to add them to the digital collection or not.

Materials can be searched or browsed by title, lyric first lines, composer, contributor, subject, and dates. Search or browse results pages contain thumbnails and quick descriptive information. The description pages contain full metadata and links to view a larger version of the image in an external viewer, similar to the DSpace I saw in my example from last week. The description pages also contain a digital ID number and OCLC number for further cross reference.

For the most part, the titles and images of the sheet music covers would be considered mildly to outrageously offensive today. But it offers an incredible snapshot into the times. Also interesting is that the site includes some audio examples of selected works. However, they are in MIDI format. The project info page explains that this is because of the small file size and the availability on the internet of files of public domain works. Only 7 audio examples are provided.

The site is a nice example of a digital collection that uses Greenstone, but incorporates it into a conventional website. Other examples simply try to incorporate style sheets into the Greenstone environment. The Hackley Collection keeps its supplemental information pages on their main web server and link to the Greenstone server only for the items. The supplemental pages are very informative and lead users to many sources to learn more. The "Project Info" page very helpfully includes information about the project's history, funding, and selection process, but also tells us technical data about image creation and metadata standards used. It also mentions the use of Greenstone software.

Huntington Archive Black and White Photograph Collection of Asian Art (1969-1984)

2009-04-22T13:07:00.000-07:00

http://huntingtonarchive.osu.edu/database.htm

This collection of black and white photographs taken by Susan and John Huntington from 1969 to 1984 is a mixed bag. The collection's content is cool, and it is apparent from the intense level of metadata on each object and the quality of the images that the National Endowment of the Humanities grant funding received by the project supported it well. However, the functioning of the site is very clunky and not entirely useful in some respects, and while there is a lot of data on each object, there is very little information about the collection as a whole of the decisions that went into making it.

1. Collection Principles
The opening page for the digital archive of photography taken in South Asia of Buddhist and Hindu religious art, sculpture and monuments gives some background on the collection, including who the photographers were, when they took the photos, in which countries they photographed, and so on. It also notes that the project was funded by an NEH grant and that the Huntington Archive is in a consortium with Ohio State, who played a major role in the project. The page notes that 30,000 images are included in the digital collection, but says nothing about how that number relates to the physical collection of photographs or how selection decisions were made. Further, on the search page, there is a short note that tells that the number of hits returned for a search denotes the number of digital images available to the public, as not all images are available for public use, but says nothing more about how many or why. There is a rather lengthy paragraph at the bottom of the page about rights for the collection.

2. Objects
The images are searchable by entering descriptive terms in the search box, and browseable by
iconography, original location, current location, material type, dynasty/period, and religious category. There is very detailed information on the search page for optimizing searches, including how to do diacritic-format spelling for Sanskrit words, which is nice. One really annoying thing is that there seems to be no good way besides hit "back" over and over to get from a results page to the search page again. Another problem, and the collection addresses this with apologies written out all around, is that the image files are big, and they take a long time to load. I have decent internet connection and usually never encounter a problem with images, but even for me they took a pretty long time. Once they are open, though, they are pretty awesome. You can select from tabs above the image a larger or smaller size to view and a smaller or larger image to use for zooming. You can zoom really super close and still have the image come across totally clear. The number of images is pretty staggering, and in order to browse you would have to be somewhat familiar with Buddhist, Hindu, Sanskrit, Tamil, Hindi, and/or Telugu terms or you will be clicking around blindly. There are also no thumbnails on the browsing page, just lists of terms that are links, which is a problem, but if you actually enter a search term in the box, your results appear as thumbnails.

3. Metadata
This collection has a strength in metadata for individual objects. On one image, for instance, the fields Country, Site Name, Monument, Alternate Name, Subject of Photo, Photo Orientation, Dynasty/Period, Date, Material, Dimensions, Current Location, Copyright Holder, Photo Year, and Scan Number all appear. On others, even the asana (body position, as in yogic systems) demonstrated and other more religiously-specific information about how the figure in the sculpture is positioned or what they are wearing/holding/using and so on appear. In all, it is easy to get a lot of information about any one of the images. As with most collections I have looked at, though, no information on the scanning equipment used or the process involved there.

4. Audience
The introduction page explicitly states: "The goal of the digital project was to provide web access to the original images and accompanying text database for educators, scholars, and students interested in the visual arts and culture of Asia." Based on the amount of metadata on the objects, the quality of the images and the extent to which you can clearly zoom in on them, I wouldn't doubt that this could be used for scholarly purposes.

Liberian Law at Cornell University Library

2009-04-22T12:31:00.000-07:00

Liberian law at Cornell University Library
http://dlxs.library.cornell.edu/l/liberian/
This digital collection of manuscripts and legal documentation from the Cornell University library has as its mission statement on the home page : “Liberian Law contains documents dealing with the creation of the nation of Liberia and the laws enacted at its foundation. These materials include the Constitution and the Laws of the Commonwealth going back to the Colonization Society.” This is a very clear definition of what the collection contains and there are no documents that could be considered outside this selection criteria. The site is easy to navigate with few superfluous icons and visual adornments. A user may either browse or search the collection based on author, text, and title key words that use Boolean search logic. Within the search function there is an option to limit the search terms, but when I tried this function the page did not redirect. The site does link to outside pages that I believe are run on a different platform or software due to appearance and format of the pages that are linked. It was not clear from the two times I tried to access these outside pages if the trouble was caused by neglecting site maintenance or if the site is under construction. The documents are broken into six primary categories that are divided by date and subject matter (acts passed, statutes, and constitutions). The images may be seen either as an “online book” or downloaded as a PDF. The online book view has no zoom capabilities and only one size of the image is available. The images are also in TIFF format and this treatment of the images seems to indicate that the purpose of the collection is more of a finding aid than a primary resource as much of the text is illegible and there is no transcript. The metadata for this collection consists of the title of the original document, the author (in many cases this a governmental body or group), the date, and the collection the document belongs to. It would have been nice to have more description of the document and this lack suggests that users must know exactly what they are looking for. The selection criteria for this collection appears to be all the documents relating to Liberian law at the Cornell University library. The page explaining the creation of the collection provides the history of the documents which all appear to be from the same geographical area and dealing with similar issues of Liberian law. The collection appears to be the product of one of Cornell’s professors interests and there is no indication that this collection has not been fully digitized. This collection was digitized based on an increase in demands by scholarly researchers requesting Liberian law documents and inquiring about the size and scope of the physical collection. The site claims this increase in scholarly research in the humanities and interdisciplinary as the reason for the digitization effort.
Cornell University has other digital collections that may be of note including home economics and a history of math collection. They can be found here: http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/

Brigham Young University Campus Photographs

2009-04-22T11:37:00.000-07:00

The Campus Photographs Collection at Brigham Young University consists of photos from their main campus, their Idaho campus and their Hawaii campus. The photographs are of "student life, athletic competition, campus buildings, portraits of individuals, aerial shots of the various campuses, and other views of life on a university campus."
The about section is very brief saying that the collection contains historically significant photographs. It does not explain if they consider their entire collection historically significant or if they have only placed the photographs they believe are historically significant online. They also neglected to explain who was deciding what was historically significant.
The collection can be searched and browsed by campus or in its entirety. The search results pull up a list that includes the thumbnail, title, subject and description of each image. By clicking on an item, the user is redirected to a page with a larger image and very thorough metadata. There are 29 different metadata fields for each image, including call number, holding institution, original date and digital date, as well as historic time frame and genre.
The images are all jpgs created from scanning in the originals. Each item contains information about the medium of the original as well as the size of the digital file and a link to the full resolution image. Each image is complete with notes of provenance and rights information.
Because of the extensive metadata provided with each image, the site seems to be geared towards users with a research interest in the university and its history, but it could just as easily be used by someone with a passing interest.

Ye Olde Archery Digital Library

2009-04-22T06:35:00.000-07:00

http://www.archerylibrary.com/

The Archery Library describes itself as an online library containing digital versions of old archery books, prints and articles from times past. First of all, I should mention that the Archery Library seems more or less to be fairly amateur in its construction. It does call itself a non-profit and mentions that the proceeds of the google ads on the site go to site maintenance. This makes sense for a site devoted primarily to dated books on an activity that is essentially a hobby.

Despite its relatively amateur execution, the Archery Library possesses clear collection principles. It seeks to provide digitized texts related to the practice of archery. Sadly, however, the collection is not very large. (17 books, 8 articles, and 10 prints) Furthermore, the books and articles have been digitized as transcripts only which I find disappointing since the mostly encompasses publications from before 1900 with a couple of items dating from the Sixteenth Century! The most impressive object in the collection is Roger Ascham's Toxophilus, the fchole of fhootinge conteyned in tvvo bookes from 1565, albeit from an 1864 reprint. Unfortunately, the early modern English spellings are not quite as impressive in transcribed text as they would be with the use of appropriate characters, but again the site does seem rather on the amateur side. It was also created fairly early in the internet era (1996.)

The most disappointing feature of the site is its lack of metadata. This also stems, I feel, from the fact that this is an amateur site dedicated to a hobby containing objects from a personal collection. This would explain why many of the prints on the site contain only "origin unkown" as metadata. Still, the lack of metadata is particularly troubling for books. Only the author is mentioned consistently, and sometimes the edition. Nothing is said of even place of publication. Also, the site's curation is minimal. The FAQ hasn't been updated since the '90s. Objects are divided merely into books, articles, and prints (using an evolutionary ancestor of greenstone's?) and the only search function included is google search. A google search for "Agincourt" within the library site returned four pages of hits. I guess Agincourt was rather the high water mark for archers. Speaking of watermarks, the objects in the Archery Library all have them, which I find drastically out of place with the otherwise amateur hobbyish tone of the site. It is clear that the intended audience of the site is primarily hobbyists and archery enthusiasts.

As a digital library, the Archery Library receives pretty low marks. As an example of what one person can do with a computer, a hobby, and a personal collection in their spare time (in 1996, no less!) the Archery Library assumes more interest.

Native American Constitution and Law Digitization Project

2009-04-21T22:13:00.000-07:00

Native American Constitution and Law Digitization Project
http://thorpe.ou.edu/
Native American Constitution and Law Digitization Project is a cooperative work coordinated by the University of Oklahoma Law Center and the National Indian Law Library and Native American tribes whose government documents appear on this site. They are published with permission of the tribes and rightfully in the public domain. “Tribal constitutions and codes are the heart of self-government for over 500 federally recognized tribes, and are the lifeblood of Indian sovereignty.” [http://thorpe.ou.edu/] There are more than 500 tribal governments are recognized by US government and Native Americans are an integral part of the US social fabric. This project aims to make tribal more recognizable by today’s public and provides a chance getting access to tribal government documents. I am so surprised that it is a so called digitization project however I did not find even one digitized item on this site. The whole web site seems pretty tricky and it took a while to figure out what to do and where to start. I just randomly browse whatever I could click into and the content is exclusively represented in html format I don’t know how they made it and what does digitization mean here? I believe that original documents are all in paper and they have to digitize them. However I could not actually “see” the items and the content have been transferred to neat html format. Why they call this project a digitized project? It is a good website for purely research purpose and attractive to those who just care about content and want to read something rather then appreciate the original looks.

StoryCorps

2009-04-21T11:30:00.000-07:00

StoryCorps is an organization that records people's interviews with one another--family members or friends can come to a StoryCorps booth and get a CD-quality recording of their talk, and these interviews go into an archive at the Smithsonian Institute. The organization's website has a collection of clips available here. Most of the clips are "human interest" stories, but some record people's memories of things like the Holocaust or the Bath School disaster (a school bombing in Michigan in 1922), which might be of interest to historians.

While not a formal digital collection, these clips are still available publically for people to access and possibly use as a research resource, or simply for enjoyment. As a result, there isn't much useful metadata, although I am glad to say there is at least some--the website records the interviewer and interviewee, a short summary, and where the audio was recorded; on occasion, it records the organization that StoryCorps partnered with to collect the interview. It might be a better resource with more detailed metadata or if full interviews were made available, but some of the interviews might be sensitive or too personal in nature for the people involved to be okay with releasing them publicly (even though they're going to a national archive, but oh well). Obviously, this isn't a project meant for scholars, but for laypeople.

JARDA: Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives

2009-04-20T16:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/jarda/

JARDA is a themed collection within Calisphere, the University of California’s digital collection of primary resources from archives throughout the state. The collection includes an incredible range of significant materials that provide context for each other. The site doesn’t provide much information about how the librarians chose what would be digitized for this themed collection. The collection narrative simply states that it includes “heavily requested materials for research, classroom study, and other uses,” that these materials have historically been “difficult to access physically” because of their physical dispersal among collections. “The JARDA project was created to remedy this problem.” It is not clear whether the librarians evaluated which materials relating to Japanese American relocation were the most “heavily requested,” but it is implied that the creators of this collection looked for themes that could be generated out of their combined collections. JARDA draws from the organizing librarians’ ten sites of employment, including the Japanese American National Museum, the California State Archives, the California Historical Society, and seven university archives from University of California (Los Angeles and Berkeley), California State University, University of Southern California, and University of the Pacific. Building this consortium was the first part of the collection decision-making process. It appears that diversity of material types was also key; the collection includes diaries, letters, photographs, drawings, US War Relocation Authority materials, and oral histories conducted with people who lived in the camps and with people working as administrators of the camps.

This collection utilizes metadata at several levels. First, the introductory page offers a “Background and Timeline” narrative to contextualize the collection materials. Second, the collection is divided into four themed areas: People, Places, Daily Life, and Personal Experiences. Within each of these, there is overview information about what is in the themed area, a list of related browse terms that users can click on (including named locations, terms like repatriation and barracks, names of artists and authors, etc.), along with lesson plan materials. Each theme page also includes a series of thumbnails that invite users in visually as well. Once users click on an image, they see another layer of metadata. All images include title, the collection where the physical object is located, and the contributing institution housing that collection. Some of the collections and contributing institutions are linked to the home pages for these resources. Digital objects also include other metadata as relevant to and available for the object, including creator/contributor and date. The objects seem to have descriptive titles rather than including descriptions.

The digital objects appear to differ between separate collecting institutions. Most photographs appear to be 300dpi or 600dpi JPEGs, paintings also appear to be 600dpi JPEGs, sketches are 300dpi JPEGs, while many diary entries are 600dpi JPEGs. Many, but not all, of the images include a color strip or a grayscale strip to allow adjustment for true color.

The central audience for this collection is clearly gradeschool teachers and children. Each themed area includes “Questions to Consider,” a list of the “California Content Standards which lesson plans with these materials may fulfill, a list of “Terms to Understand” and their definitions, documents including lesson plans and activities, and a note (and disclaimer) about “Racial Slurs” that may be found in the original captions to photographs from the US Relocation Authority. The introductory page for the collection also includes three teacher-developed themed lesson plans for particular grades. The images in this collection are compelling and the context is well narrated. It is sometimes difficult to navigate back and forth, and not all of the images are scanned in the same quality, but the material is useful and presented in an interesting way.

The Boy Made of Meat

2009-04-20T09:29:00.001-07:00

The University of New Hampshire has digitized three versions of William De Witt Snodgrass’s poem “The Boy Made of Meat” along with the images created by Gillian Tyler. Their site does a nice job of giving users a biographical introduction to Snodgrass and the poem’s creation but does not provide much information on the why and how of the collection. Readers simply know that Snodgrass created several drafts before publishing the final version with the wood cut images made by Tyler. It’s unclear where this piece could be found in their collection or what technology was used in creating the digital images.

It’s an interesting collection as it provides three separate drafts of the poem along with some correspondence sent between the author and editor. Unfortunately, there is no transcription to go along with the letters and many of them are difficult to read. But the content is interesting and the images are a nice quality even though they are not especially large. It’s a funny poem with interesting images but it’s unclear what the relevance is to New Hampshire’s collection. Additionally, there is no metadata for any of the images which is limiting.

UNH does have a page displaying their list of digital collections which is how I found the poem in the first place. This is the only place one can find metadata for the pieces in the collection but this information is sometimes incorrect or contradictory. For example, the introduction page claims Snodgrass wrote the poem in the 1960s but in some places the metadata lists his date of death in 1886. Additionally, the list which provides metadata only offers an abbreviated list of images rather than all the items in the collection.

It seems the project was completed in 2003 which may account for some of the problems but not all of them. Clearly cataloging problems could have been fixed making the data consistent throughout. If the project were much bigger these problems would have made the collection nearly impossible to use. Because it’s small it can still be a useful project but it certainly has much room for improvement.

World Digital Library

2009-04-19T22:38:00.000-07:00

The World Digital Library (http://www.wdl.org/en/)

I am glad that the World Digital Library will be my final blog entry because it encapsulates and embodies so many of the issues we have addressed in class this semester. The site is being officially launched on April 21, 2009, and it seems to represent the best practices for creating and organizing digital libraries, in addition to showcasing impressive capabilities that I have not seen in many (or to this degree, in any) collections this semester.

Reviewing the "About the World Digital Library" page and the other extensive documentation provided on the site (Mission, Background, Partners, Financial Contributors, Frequently Asked Questions, and Acknowledgements), one quickly realizes that a tremendous amount of resources and collaboration among very powerful cultural institutions and private interests were involved in this project. The site is being launched at the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as the culmination of a vision proposed by U.S. Librarian of Congress James Billington in 2005. According to the website, the World Digital Library was "developed by a team at the U.S. Library of Congress, with contributions by partner institutions in many countries; the support of the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); and the financial support of a number of companies and private foundations." Financial support from companies included a $3 million contribution from Google and a $1 million contribution from Microsoft. At the time of the website's launch, 26 institutions in 19 countries had contributed to the project.

With so much time, money, and effort expended, one should have high expectations for the project. My review of the website did not disappoint. The digital library appears to meet almost every expectation of the NISO principles:

- The digital library had a Content Selection Working Group, which according to the website, made a clear decision to focus on quality standards over quantity.

-The page entitled "Legal" shows a consideration of copyright and user privacy issues.

-The items in the collection are actively curated. They include thorough descriptions and extensive metadata (all of which contain hyperlinks to additional searches of the collection). Many even include videos by curators discussing the items.

-The collection appears to seamlessly integrate almost every type of file format, from PDFs to MP3s to TIFs to Flash Videos (with closed captioning). One can view the motion pictures and sound recordings as easily as the PDFs and photos in the collection.

-Everything on the website, except for the objects themselves, have been translated into seven languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

-The website provides a myriad of ways to browse the items in the collection: by place, time, topic, type of item, and contributing institution. The site also provides a clear way narrow search results by the same criteria, and it also includes features, such as interactive geographic clusters and a timeline.

-Users can download preservation-quality TIFF files. Also, the website's ablity to zoom-in and move images around is definitely one of the most impressive features of the site.

-The website also attempts to include the best of Web 2.0 sharing capabilities available at this time. Users can download and print images, email them to others, and post images to their Facebook accounts or to Twitter.

-The website provides a "Help" page that provides easy-to-understand screenshots to walk new users through the website's features.

-As for the intended audience, the Frequently Asked Questions page asks "Who will use the site?" and provides the following answer: "Anyone with an interest in the wider world. Students, teachers, scholars and the general public may approach it in different ways, but there is something of interest for everyone."

This is definitely the most impressive digital library I have ever seen. What remains to be seen is whether UNESCO and the Library of Congress will be able to maintain the same level of funding in the years to come to keep the digital library on the cutting edge of technology. I certainly hope so.

The Las Vegas Matchbook Collection

2009-04-19T13:01:00.000-07:00

This matchbook collection by Jeff Hermann began as a casual collection of matchbooks in a margarita glass. Over time he has gotten donations form his dad and uncle and bought a few on ebay. According to his "Collecting" page, he has "well over a 100" vintage matchbooks. I assume "vintage" means 1950s-1970s. Only 40 covers are digitized.

His metadata includes "Complete" , "Condition" , "(F)rontstrike/ (B)ackstrike) and "Feature". None of these qualifiers are explained, so I assume that "Complete" refers to all of the matches being intact. "Condition" is based on a 1-? scale presumably based on his own evaluation. "Feature" required some investigation on my part, and I discovered on the American Matchcover Collecting Club website that a "Feature" is "a trademark for a match book containing wide match sticks that were printed with lettering, designs or a combination of both (not to be confused with printed sticks). The standard 30-stick size match book held 21 wide stick feature match sticks in three rows of seven. The 20-stick size match book held 15 wide match sticks and was known as the Feature. Introduced September 1930. They are no longer made." I also discovered that there is a rating system for matchbooks that isn't what Hermann's is based on.

He acquisition information includes entity and date. Most of the entities are ebay, Uncle Kurt, and Dad. Some matchcovers have comments about the history of the casino, etc., but he doesn't state from where he gets that information. He also apologizes for the image on some of the scans. The only search option is to click on the matchcover's name, and the image can't be magnified.

It is hard to tell when he last updated the site. He has a couple of pages under construction. Based on the number of members in the AMCC, this must be a popular hobby. I guess for those folks, this would be an interesting resource.

The Aberdeen Bestiary Project - University of Aberdeen

2009-04-19T09:31:00.000-07:00

The Aberdeen Bestiary Project - University of Aberdeen

Once again, I have chosen to write about a specific digital initiative within a series of collections done by an institution; however the Aberdeen Bestiary merits a having a whole initiative devoted to scanning every single page, complete with translation and commentary because the book is just so rich and compelling!

The Aberdeen Bestiary Project was carried out by the University of Aberdeen; they've been very successful in finding funding for creating digital projects, furthermore their approach is to pick a very valuable and visually rich book or manuscript from their collection and devote the whole project to scanning and translating the entire book from the text to its bibliography with the motive of giving online users a chance to examine it as closely as they can without actually perusing it in the physical form.

The University of Aberdeen chose to digitize their copy of the Bestiary because it is widely considered to be one of the best examples of its type, was written and illuminated in England and had been kept in a "royal" library or monastic library in one fashion or another since the 1600s and has belonged to the University of Aberdeen since 1820s. It's well preserved and has light indication of usage which gives evidence of how the Bestiary may have been used.

As for metadata, since the collection focuses only on one book, there is a introduction, history, and codicology which records and explains the metadata in very detailed fashion. As for metadata associated with each image, there is a notable lack of any kind of machine readable format, rather it's in a traslation/transcribing format with links to particular details of an image and curator's commentary on context, illustrations, particular markings or wear that might convey interesting information on the Bestiary's history. The book itself is not that searchable, with only an index and keyword search, but if the user starts at the beginning of the book, one can move through the entire book as if you were flipping through it in the physical level.

The images themselves are visually arresting. For a book that was printed and illuminated in the 1200's, it's in remarkably good condition. The traslations prove to be valuable; one thing that I really liked about the way they displayed the translation was to put it side by side with the transcribed Latin passage, so scholars can see for themselves the process of translation and perhaps come up with their own translations. Also, many pages have the option to zoom in on portions of the pages in order to see/read the original text . Each illumination and illustration have their own commentary and zoom in option.

Another useful aspect about this collection is the codicology section of this digital project. This sections is a detailed bibliography of the physical form of the book. Each aspect of the publication is examined in detailed which helps the user gain a more comprehensive picture of book itself.

The intended audience for this particular digital project would definitely be medieval scholars, english majors, students that are interested in rare books (thanks to the detailed codicology section).

Here's a bit of text from the description of the hedgehogs from the Aberdeen Bestiary:

Of hedgehogs

The hedgehog is covered in prickles. From this it gets its name, because it bristles, when it is enclosed in its prickles and is protected by them on all sides against attack. For as soon as it senses anything, it first bristles then, rolling itself into a ball, regains its courage behind its armour. The hedgehog has a certain kind of foresight: as it tears off a grape, it rolls backwards on it and so delivers it to its young.

(Here's the picture of the hedgehogs, rolling around, impaling grapes on their spines, and trotting home to deliver to their young!)

The Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection

2009-04-17T18:42:00.000-07:00

http://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/Default/Skins/Colorado/Client.asp?Skin=Colorado&AW=1239506677238&AppName=2

The Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection includes 147 newspapers published in Colorado from 1859 to 1923. These newspapers come from 60 cities and 40 counties throughout the state, and contain papers published in English, German, Spanish, or Swedish. The website provides access to over 477,000 digitized pages from these newspapers, and Newspapers are digitized from microfilm copies owned by the Colorado Historical Society. The collection was build by the Colorado State Library, the Colorado Historical Society, and the Collaborative Digitization Program, and supported by Library Services and Technology Act grant and state funds.

I find that browsing the collection is easy and simple. Users can start by clicking “Browse” button, the list of available titles appears in the dropdown box. Users can select the newspaper title, and then select the year, the month, and the day from the set of dates highlighted on the calendar. The newspaper issue loads on the screen, move the mouse over the article and click the part they want to read, a new Article Window will appear. Users even can select Article > from the toolbar to add an item to MyCollection, or to email, print or save an article as HTML, especially, the collection provides these function icons on the same webpage. In addition, users can select View> from the toolbar to see the article in different formats.

For search function, users first type the keywords in the Search For box, select the newspaper title they want to search (if users want to select multiple titles, they can hold down the Ctrl key or shift key), and select time period, the list of search results will appear. Users can click on the image of the article to open a new article window to read. The search term is highlighted in the text of the article. What‘s more, users can click on the buttons of AND, OR, NOT or NEAR to insert a search operator into the Search For box.

Overall, the collection is well-maintained. Especially, users can save the articles to their computers. The intended audience should be students, researchers and individual interested in Colorado history.

Mystic Seaport: The Museum of America and the Sea

2009-04-17T08:53:00.000-07:00

The Mystic Seaport Museum is dedicated to the history of America's realtionship with the sea and inland waterways. I was very impressed with this site because I have a longtime fascination with boats and sailing. Their collection represents over 75 year's worth of acquisitions. There are indexes of ship registries, in addition to other useful finding aids. This is the website of what appears to be a very active physical museum. As such, it is ably and actively curated. In fact, they are adding new digitzed images to their online offerings on a weekly basis. This would indicate that the museum is engaged in ongoing digitization efforts. The museum's site offers an array of information regarding their collections, and also included digitized materials.

The Mystic Seaport Museum links to the the Rosenfield Collection, the largest collection of maritime images in the country. This collection includes nearly one million photographs from 1881 to 1992. Many of the images have been digitized and are searchable. Metadata included with a retrieved image includes accession number, title, category, size, date created, and a curated description explaining exactly what is in the image. The images themselves are jpegs and are enlargeable as well. The collection offers visitors the chance to purchase prints of these materials as well. This is a very good, very well organized collection. The intended audience for this collection, as presented, appears to be serious researchers. There are instructions regarding the hourly hiring of in-house research staff to answer specific queries. It would be of substantial worth to persons seeking images to illustrate a book, researching ship designs, or basically doing any kind of research that has to do with the history of sailing vessels in America. It is clear that much of the materials offered by this collection have yet to go digital, but it seems to be a good digitization effort.

Bernard Becker Medical Library

2009-04-16T21:25:00.000-07:00

Bernard Becker Medical Library Digital Image Collection

The Bernard Becker Medical Library in the Washington University School of Medicine hosts an excellent digital image collection of over 4000 images from the Archives and Rare Book collection.

The home page of the Digital Image Collection is the archive's search function, which allows users to search by keyword, subject, persons portrayed, collection, and/or online exhibit. Instructions below guide users to type "all" into the keyword search to display all the images in the collection, as well as how to search by date or a date range. The subject, persons portrayed, collection and online exhibit search functions all contain a pull-down menu listing the search options in each search header. Search terms may also be combined for more precise searches. The combined search function is somewhat awkward, however, since a person performing a search has no way of telling what combination will yield results.

Each item lists a very thorough metadata list, containing the image identifier number and metadata record number, title, description, a list of tagged subjects, date, physical description of the original item, the collection the image in from, the format of the digital image, and the image rights. The institute's MARC records file for the image may also be displayed.

Users may also leave a comment about the image (including contact information if a response is desired) and view a larger version of the image.

Museum of Fine Arts in Boston

2009-04-16T16:18:00.000-07:00

http://www.mfa.org/ Museum of Fine Arts in Boston

The Art of the Ancient World Collection.

The MFA houses one of the world’s finest collections of mummies, sculpture, ceramics, and dazzling gold from ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Roman Empire. With over 70,000 works of art, you can immerse yourself in the world of pharaohs and emperors. In addition to architectural elements, sculpture, painting, vases, jewelry, and decorative arts, the department houses a numismatic collection of approximately 8,000 coins.

There is a recent acquisitions link that allows you to view each of the newest acquisitions that are now on display in there Gallery. You can view, zoom in and out, pan up, down, left, and right. The sub-collections include Ancient Near Easter Art, Egyptian Art, Etruscan Art, Greek Art and Nubian Art, and Roman Art. Each image has a full range of detailed meta-data and even shares with you what tours to go on to see the object.

The site shares the agreement made with the Italian Ministry of Culture in 2006, where thirteen antiquities were transferred to Italy to begin of a new era of cultural exchange. The agreement includes the creation of a partnership in which the Italian government will loan significant works from Italy to the MFA’s displays and special exhibitions program, and it establishes a process by which the MFA and Italy will exchange information with respect to the Museum’s future acquisitions of Italian antiquities. The partnership also envisages collaboration in the areas of scholarship, conservation, archaeological investigation and exhibition planning. You can view high resolution images of the pieces that were loaned and shared with the press. This would be great to have simply for insurance purposes.

The advanced search allows you to search by accession number, name artist, medium, culture, classification, provenance, or keyword.

Federal Theatre Project Materials Collection

2009-04-15T15:22:00.000-07:00

The Federal Theatre Project was a Works Progress Administration program active from 1935–1939. The Federal Theatre Project Materials Collection was originally discovered in 1974 in a Library of Congress storage facility and soon moved to George Mason University in Virginia. The materials in the collection include posters, set and costume designs, and original scripts. The online version of the collection contains JPEG images taken from 35mm color slides, the result of a preservation effort begun in the early 1980's, and is hosted on the Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC).

The presentation of the collection is very basic. Through a broken link at one page, it's clear that the FTP collection was built in Greenstone. Many of the image description pages list an available date of December 2002. So, the online collection is 7 to 8 years old now, and the site design reflects that. Sadly, little technical information is given about either the slide photography process or the digital scanning process used.

Browsing the collection is broken down into the following eight categories: title, creators, subjects, theaters, places, dates, related names, and series. Browsing the series category shows 388 costume and set design items, 22 FTP scripts, and 598 poster slides. Each item page in the collection gives sufficient descriptive metadata and provides a thumbnail to view a larger version of the image. Clicking on the larger image link opens a new window where the digitized slides are displayed using a very simple DSpace viewer. The only information available on the larger image is where the original item resides. No zoom function, or other tool is available to inspect the images or documents further. The 22 scripts are actually PDFs. Clicking on a larger version of the scripts simply opens or downloads the PDF according to your browser settings.

The collection offers a great look into design styles of the era. As expected, many posters have an Art Deco feel. For that reason, the site could be valuable to some researchers of that era, or to those interested in local theater design and popular poster art of the time.

Memorial Hall Museum, American Centuries

2009-04-15T14:37:00.000-07:00

Memorial Hall Museum online collection: http://www.memorialhall.mass.edu/home.html

Interactive clothing: http://www .memorialhall.mass.edu/activities/dressup/index.html
The Memorial Hall Museum online collection features a plethora of interactive and static digitized items from their collection. The focus of the museum and online component is 17th to mid 20th century with emphasis on everyday life artifacts. It includes clothing, table ware and cook ware, carpentry and technology (spinning wheels, wool carding, lamps &c), and handwriting. The site does give some general narrative history but is more visual in content.
On the home page there are specific links for researchers, teachers, and students. The students are not quantified but after doing some of the fun activities I determined that primary school children are most likely the target audience. The site is crowded with thumbnails and associative symbols indicating that children with a low literacy level would be able to navigate and explore the site easily. There are four primary categories beyond the researcher, teacher, student menus that provide the clustering of the site content. These are the online collection where object and images searches may be performed, the “things to do” with more interactive aspects of the digitized collection including “dress up”, “objects in the round”, and “now read this”. The “objects in the round” requires QuickTime player which may be inconvenient for some educators or at-home researchers, but there is still plenty to do. “Now read this” provides the visitor with a scrap of 18th century writing and provides a text box into which one may type what they think the document says. The answer is given in transcript format and the spacing between the text in the clearer format suggest to me some form of OCR but this is not made explicit anywhere in the site. The searching functions are well designed with time period, place, keywords, and provided subject categorizations. The metadata for the general collection search is mostly narrative but a table in the upper right hand of each result does give the date, item title, acquisition number, and materials that the item is made of. The tone for the narrative metadata and directions for all the interactive portions is gentle and non-technical which again points to younger children and primary school educators as the target audience for most of the site. Every image has some degree of fluidity; the online collection without any associative interactive activities includes detail zooms of portions of each object that were felt by the curatorial or education staff to be of interest to visitors. There is little information about the maintenance of the site, but it appears to be in wonderful condition and well maintained. The collection is at this point static meaning there will be no additions. The site was primarily funded by an NEH grant. The about page lists contributors and staff including scholars, production and design staff, project funding assistance, and a history of the site and project. It explains the coverage period for dates and “teacher selected themes” including immigrants and “the land”, further providing reasons for the focus of the museum and digital effort on New England history and development. There was collaboration with 5th to 12th grade teachers who helped the site creators focus on educational needs concerning site design and object and activity inclusion

Library of Congress American Folklife Center: Fort Valley State College Folk Festival Collection

2009-04-15T12:20:00.000-07:00

1. Collection Principles
Even though the look of the site is really html old school, and the information is arranged kind of awkwardly through an unnecessary series of links, this collection is one of the best I have viewed yet this semester in terms of the information it provides and the content is great. The site offers a paragraph about the collection of song recordings represented from one of, if not the, first folk music festival organized solely by African Americans, the Fort Valley State College Folk Festival, which was held from 1938 to 1943. If a user scrolls down, there are two helpful sections with a list of links, one of which is "understanding the collection," which when clicked gives the best overview of the collection principles I've seen so far. It gives a detailed history of the collection, including original recording media, who did each of the recordings, the government program that funded the ethnographic project for which the song recordings were collected. The collecting policy for the digital collection is very clearly stated as being all 104 of the surviving recordings. They really couldn't have offered any more information that one might need on this section of the collection.
2. Object Characteristics
The recordings are easy to browse by recording title, performer, and keyword, and there is a search box. There is a link under the "using the collection" section of the introductory page called "building the collection" that helps users understand what they will hear when they use the collection by offering a good description of how the audio recordings were digitized and noting that scratchiness and noise were not cleaned up at all in the digitization process. This also helps users authenticate the recordings, as the institution states forthrightly that they are as they were originally. The sound files themselves are awesome. There is also a useful link on the page that opens when you click on a particular recording called "Information about audio playback" that tells about the pros and cons of various media players (quicktime, windows media player, and so on) for using the collection and detailed instructions on how to get and use them. I used quicktime, and all of the files I opened played great. It's a really interesting, really neat collection in terms of content. Also, almost everything on the page that opens when you click the link to a specific recording is a link itself, so you can easily navigate to all the songs by that performer by clicking his or her name, for example, or the "collected by" name to get all of that ethnographer's recordings without having to go back to the search page.
3. Metadata
This collection is great on metadata. As I stated above, there is plenty of information on the history and scope of the collection, plenty on the digitization process, and there is a separate link on the intro page under "using the collection" about the rights issue, and even an interesting part where the collection creators address the "orphan works" issue we have encountered in class by stating that they tried repeatedly to contact one of the people whose work appears but that they were unsuccessful to date and welcome any contact by him or his family in the future. On each object, when you click the sound file's link, there is information about that particular recording, including performer, date, collected by, "notes" in which the musical genre is listed, format (sound recording), Library of Congress call number, and an identifier.
4.Audience
This is probably useful to a variety of people, like regular interested folks, middle school or high school history, social studies, or music teachers, and probably even could be used by scholars because there is so much metadata and the recordings are of a high quality. A music historian or anthropologist could easily do a project or a quick content analysis paper on what they found here. After looking over the collection and listening to some of the tunes, I was not left wondering what purpose the collection could possibly serve, as I have with others in the past.

JSC Digital Image Collection

2009-04-15T11:12:00.000-07:00

NASA's Johnson Space Center has a digital collection of more than 9,000 press release images. IT is unclear how they chose the images that are in the collection or if it is all the pictures they have. The about information was buried within the site so that I had to actively search to find out that JSC stood for the Johnson Space Center. They do have a rather lengthy copyright statement explaining what the photos can be used for and what they cannot be used for, along with contact information for ordering prints.
The image collection can be browsed or searched by keyword, ID number or date. The search interface was a bit clunky and made searches more difficult than they should be. For example, to search by date you had to provide a start day, month and year as well as an end day month and year or it won't allow the search at all. I would imagine most searches don't have such a specific time period in mind. Browsing was also tiring because after viewing an image you had to select the back button to return to the list of photos before selecting another image. Once an image is selected you can view metadata fields with information about the photo ID, program, mission, date, type of film used, title, description and subject words. While the metadata is helpful, it was difficult to ascertain much about the photograph itself from the metadata provided. The images were available in a size large enough to be seen clearly but not so large they could be reproduced well or would give researchers a detailed look at the photograph.
If a user was interested in a specific mission or a specific time period in the space program, I imagine the collection would be fairly easy to navigate, but it does not provide contextual information for anyone who does not know much about the space program already. Regardless, it seems the site is geared towards a person with a casual interest as I would imagine serious researches would get tired of the interface quickly.

CELT

2009-04-15T07:04:00.000-07:00

http://www.ucc.ie/celt/index.html

CELT, an acronym for corpus of electronic texts, purports to "bring the wealth of Irish literary and historical culture to the Internet, for the use and benefit of everyone worldwide." CELT is a joint venture of the Department of History and Computer Centre of University College Cork.

The collection focuses solely on texts. The texts were chosen to convey Irish culture and history to both scholarly and general audiences, and as such are taken from documents in multiple languages, including Irish, English, Hiberno-Norman French, and Latin. The collection is well maintained and is still actively being increased. The site mentions that as of April 7, 2009, the collection comprises 1045 texts.

Sadly, CELT is not satisfactorily curated. The objects are not placed in any sort of exhibit, and the only browsing feature available is to enter the collection via language of text you are looking for. There is a search function to the site, which uses Google's custom search. However, objects found by the search appear on your screen with no metadata other than title and no way to get at the metadata.

This brings me to the objects themselves. All of the texts are available as transcriptions only. There are no scanned images of, for instance, early medieval scrolls hand-written by Irish monks, which I find highly disappointing. The transcribed texts are marked up in accordance with the TEI, which is something I guess, but I really would have liked to see images of the original documents.

When accessing objects through the browsing feature, one has the option to see the full metadata, which is actually quite impressive. It includes not only the metadata for the source object, but also the digital provenance and metadata for the mark-up and all revisions therof. It would have been nice to have this information also available through the search function.

CELT remains very much a work in progress. It has a lot of potential but has yet to live up to it.

William Shakespeare - Digital Collection

2009-04-14T17:09:00.000-07:00

William Shakespeare - Digital Collection

I am a huge Shakespeare aficionado so I was delighted when I came across Miami University's (in Oxford, Ohio) Digital Collection of the first four folios of Shakespeare's plays. The Shakespeare collection is one of several different digital initiatives that the University has undertaken with the goal of "preserv(ing) and provid(ing) easy access...to support student and faculty research both at Miami University and elsewhere." The Shakespeare Collection clearly fulfills institutions' expectations by providing easy access to a famous work from which careful scrutiny of different editions brings one face-to-face to some of the biggest areas of research in the English field.
Other than establishing the mission of preserving and providing easy access to otherwise fragile and extremely valuable materials, there was really no need for establishing a selection decision regarding the first four folios of the Shakespeare plays. They, however, did make a concious decision to embark upon a digital initiative to scan and process the four Folios, so indirectly, I feel their selection decision was related to the desire to display these valuable editions for use on a wider basis.
The collection itself is made up of exhaustive scanning of every single page of the four Folios with the option of zooming in from 13% to 100%. The Folios are displayed a single page at a time, and when one is leafing through a play, you can jump from page to page. At the bottom of each image is Dublin Core metadata with the basic information of the Folio. There is also an option of running an advanced search within the Shakepeare collection if you are looking for a particular word or phrase.

The intention of targeting this digital initiative towards students and faculty is pretty obvious. They express this motivation directly on the library's homepage and the way the Shakespeare collection is presented is tailored for research. This is about as close as I can get to the four Folios at one time.

The Galapagos Museum

2009-04-14T12:20:00.000-07:00

This collection presents digital renditions of photographs, texts, artifacts and specimens belonging to the University of Wisconsin Zoological Museum Galapagos Collection, in celebration of Darwin’s 200th birthday. This online collection is pretty unique, given that it is rare for any institution to possess specimens from this geographical area. In this case, providing access to these objects online provides a significant potential advantage over the analog collection. It is not clear what the selection criteria is for the collection. It does seem, however, like all objects have been digitized, so that the digital collection could represent all items. This includes all specimens (more than 1200) collected on missions between 1969 and the present, and “thousands of images.”

The collection level metadata provides information about the zoological museum and its purpose. Not much technical information exists about how the collection was digitized. Each individual image metadata functions much like what one would expect from a scientific/biological organizational scheme. Descriptive components are focused on the specific species, and not the digital image. There is some information pertaining to where the photo was captured, and the date it was taken.

The digital images are mostly fixed. The only manipulation is the enlargement feature. The photos are in color. For text objects, the collection links to the online location for the publication. In this case, the metadata seems only to contain information about copyright. This may be so explicit since all individuals can access this material, not just students at UW.

The easy accessibility of this collection will likely attract a broad audience, from scientific researchers, to enthusiasts. One challenge exists in searching for the specimens discussed on the intro page. In this case, it seems a patron would have to have a pretty clear knowledge of what he or she were looking for, since the search engine demands fairly specific information.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution

2009-04-14T09:59:00.000-07:00

_{The Execution of the Queen}

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution.

This site is a good example of primary resources losing information through the digitization project when the paper itself is not digitized. The site is dedicated to teaching about the French Revolution using its 245 digital images, 338 texts, 13 computerized maps of specific areas and time periods, and 13 modern recordings of old songs (re-recorded in 1989). Lynn Hunt of UCLA and Jack Censer of George Mason University are in charge of editing and maintaining the site, supported by the American Social History Project at the University of New York and and the NEH. It was created in 2001.

It is a relatively small and unimpressive collection in many ways - the images cannot be zoomed, and although the texts are all searchable, it is through transcription and not digitization. The maps were all drawn on the computer and offer little information other than to illustrate the short essays. The site is structured in such a way that it might actually hinder research, despite all of the learning tools provided. I found it was more optimistic to view this site as a sort of short class or a textbook on the French Revolution. There are 12 chapters of readings that are linked with useful primary sources that a teacher might use to illustrate a point. Only one point of view is offered in each chapter, there is no room for discussion.

The metadata on the entire site is summed up on the home page: "This site with more than 600 primary documents is a collaboration of the Center for History and New Media (George Mason University) and American Social History Project (City University of New York), supported by grants from the Florence Gould Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities." Other than that, some items include the source on the bottom of the window, but even this is not standardized. The most metadata can be inferred from the brief description of the item, but this is usually somewhat narrative which takes away from its practicality.

The search options are quite useful and thorough for this small collection. You may, from any page on the website, enter a keyword quick search, or go to the search page where you may enter a keyword, chose the subjects to search from a list of 20, and the format. But it seems kind of silly to have such a powerful search for such a small and structured collection.

This site is useful like a textbook, but does not encourage scholarship as it so ardently tried. This digitization project did not consider the value of seeing the actual resource or describing the physical objects in any great detail. The zoom is not always useful or even available. It seems cramped, like there is no room for further questions.

_{Work at the Indigo Plant}

After doing this blog, I found a link to a new site from this one. It is titled Imaging the French Revolution and has an even narrower scope, focusing only on crowds during this time period. Though set up similar to the first site, this began in 2003 and looks a little nicer. This narrow scope is actually useful. Instead of attempting to tell the story of the entire revolution, scholars and historians have submitted several different essays based on the topic of revolutionary crowds, which illuminates one aspect instead of hazily pointing at several. There are only 42 images, and these still can't all zoom, but the metadata for each is extensive and standardized. Images and linked directly with correlating texts or discussions. The highlight of this site compared to the other is the ability to submit retorts through the discussion page. Although not as useful as a comment box, the essays and retorts and scholarly, cited, and reviewed so they have a great deal of authority. Of the two sites, the second is much more useful for research and communication.

Johnson Space Center's Digital Image Collection

2009-04-14T09:46:00.000-07:00

NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston has put up 9,000+ photos from their archive online here. The database is searchable, and one page has several drop-down menus where you can browse several categories of photos. According to the site's FAQ, the photos themselves are all in JPEG, 640x480 and 72 DPI, so not a very sustainable format, but the FAQ also links to a site containing some (though not all) of the photos in uncompressed HD format. The site also says that the JSC is fine with the photos being reproduced under some pretty rigorous guidelines (see them here).

Each photo has a page where you can see a 640x480 version of it--again, not very clear--and a page where you can see a thumbnail of it and the metadata. (I'm not sure why they wouldn't merge the two somehow, but oh well.) The metadata itself isn't great--an ID number, what kind of film was used, date taken, the mission it's associated with, a title, a brief description, and subject terms. The subject terms seem to have been created by NASA staff. There's no mention of the photographer, or the creator of the digital object, either.

The site's creators seem to believe that people might want to reproduce these in certain publications, like magazines or textbooks or classroom materials, but they're probably not targeting scholars, like people interested in the history of the space program. If they were, I think they'd have a much better photo format and more robust metadata.

Tapedeck.org

2009-04-13T16:54:00.001-07:00

This digital collection of audio cassettes was put together by German graffiti crew Neckcns, who have a surprisingly strong web presence. Selection principles can be inferred from their "About Tapedeck" page, with the site focused on showing "the amazing beauty…(sometimes) weirdness…and amazing range of designs" in audio tapes. Combined with the webmasters' graffiti art background, I don't think it's a stretch to say that this site's intended audience is artists and designers. In past posts, I think I've tended to label some sites as intended for graphic designers, when it was more that they scanned pretty objects without labeling them properly. I think this site is successfully intended for designers/art people by being easy to browse, with a real emphasis on the visual (Despite the Google ads).

There's a fairly consistent naming system—all names contain the tape's brand, line, and amount of minutes, while some have info about the date the picture of the tape was taken. I thought it was funny that all names ended with "audio cassette tape". There's no metadata fields available to the user, but you can browse the collection by brand, playing time, or tape quality (though only one at a time).

The tapes are photographed rather than scanned, with images at 96ppi, with 800 pixels on their longest edge. Their choice to closely crop the images unifies the collection, and also seems to help me overlook when an image is slightly out of focus, which I guess is good for presentation, but bad for preservation. The close cropping and similar shape of all the tapes makes the collection quite adaptable for new uses. It would be nice to know about their choices for which side of a tape was photographed, and also if they had a policy on rewinding or cleaning tapes beforehand (though it looks like they didn't).

There's no rights information given, and I'm not sure manufacturers were copyrighting their tape art, but it doesn't seem quite right that the webmasters posted a copyright for "all content…except where stated otherwise." That said, they seem to be supportive of people using images from their collection, such as this video, or this mixtape program.

ASU Apollo Image Archive

2009-04-13T14:04:00.000-07:00

The goal of Arizona State University's Apollo Image Archive project is to make the film from each of NASA's Apollo moon missions available to the public, and to provide information on the equipment used to capture the details of the historic space missions. So far, photographs from Apollo Missions 15, 16, and 17 are available to view and download from the site: the ultimate goal is to make all of the film accessible to the public.

Images are provided as both high quality TIFF files and PNG files. The TIFF files are the original scans, before being cleaned up or processed, while the PNG files are altered slightly. ASU allows users to download all of the images, but still holds rights to the images and lists the following as 'fair use' for the collection: "ASU hereby grants permission for news media, educators, personal, and scientific users to download and use individual ASU-produced Apollo images and their complete associated captions if applicable for personal, educational, and research uses without express permission. The following credit line is required: "NASA/JSC/Arizona State University." If space constraints do not permit a credit line of this length, then "NASA/JSC/ASU" is acceptable." So, short of using images from the collection for commercial purposes, it seems like use is pretty much fair game as long as credit is given to the institution.

For now, the images are organized into galleries by their respective Apollo mission. Clicking a thumbnail of an images brings up a larger version on a separate screen that displays metadata and allows for further 'zoomification'. The metadata is extensive: moon mission is listed (15, 16, 17... why not 13? Someone should look into that) along with the film exposure, film type, scanning resolution... even stuff like 'spacecraft altitude', which definitely underused as a metadata field. Good to see it put to use here, in any case!

A map few of the surface of the moon created from the images captured can also be zoomed in on and explored, with allows you to explore the collection 'in context' as it where, complete with freakin' moon coordinates. It's essentially a lo-fi 'google moon', though it lacks some of the bells and whistles. Plus: you can't use it to get directions! Lame.

A few issues: as the site grows (scanning takes a long time, as does processing and cleaning the images) some aspects of the design will have to change. Some sort of search function will have to be added in the future. Right now, images from three of the moon missions are available, and it's already a bit rough to navigate through page after page of photos without any sort of browse or search. This could be tough, since many of the photos look the same... what sort of search fields would you include, exactly, especially if the site is aimed toward the public (who, last time I checked, weren't exactly keen on their specific moon coordinates)? With that in mind, I think a good compromise would be to shift focus towards the map feature: it's an intuitive and very visual way to deal with the images, many of which could look very same-y to the general public.

James Baldwin Early Manuscripts and Papers Collection, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

2009-04-12T22:12:00.000-07:00

http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/baldwin.html

This entry adds to the two reviews of Yale’s Beinecke Library digital collections already in the blog, but I thought this collection structure worth comment. The James Baldwin Early Manuscripts and Papers Collection is the source collection for the digital archive. The paper collection has an interesting provenance, the introductory note points out: they were owned by a man who bought a building which previously housed a publishing company at which Baldwin had left a suitcase of his “materials.” The online archive makes available pieces of these materials, including early drafts of Go Tell It On the Mountain, “selected correspondence,” and photos of Baldwin by Carl Van Vechten. The website points out, “Currently, only a portion of these papers are available in digital form,” but the site does not explain how these were chosen or whether the qualifier “currently” means that in the future more will be digitized. The pieces available are made available in their entirety, so that makes them useful for more than just piquing our interest; scholars could actually use the manuscript pages here to explore Baldwin’s process (and his apparent fascination with or habit of practicing his signature).

The objects include extensive metadata. Perhaps most interesting is the implied metadata of the faulty structure of the digitized collection: when users click on “See all images” from the James Baldwin Collection page, the site goes to the Van Vechten Collection, which includes a few images of Baldwin amidst the sea of other black artists, authors, and performers Van Vechten photographed. This is a telling absorption of Baldwin and indicates the lack of attention given to his work as well as the authority invested in the white observer, Van Vechten. Baldwin is fabulous in Van Vechten’s photos, though, and relinquishes none of his authorship. If you search for “Baldwin” in the collection (in order to actually come up with the Baldwin collection!), the relevant photographs, correspondence, and manuscript pages come up. The metadata is thorough and appears to be derived from metadata for the paper collection (including summary, subject, genre, type of resource, source collection, call number, folder number, citation, etc.). The specifically digital metadata relates to the objects themselves.

The digital objects are low resolution (undiscoverable dpi) when the original is text on a full-page or near that size; the digital objects are high resolution (4000 dpi) when the original is a half-sheet of text or smaller or a photographic image. The objects allow zooming to four and eight times original size, which shows good detail. The available objects are jpegs and can be linked to their specific pages or saved by the user, thus indicating a willingness of the Beinecke for people to use these digital objects.

The intended users seem to be scholars interested in these long-lost documents from the Baldwin suitcase; however, not all of these documents are scanned. Baldwin scholars can find some useful materials here, but will most likely visit the archive. Perhaps Van Vechten scholars will have more luck!

Papers Past - National Library of New Zealand

2009-04-12T16:23:00.000-07:00

Papers Past (http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast) is a digital collection of the National Library of New Zealand that contains more than a million pages of newspapers and periodicals from New Zealand from 1839 to 1920. It is a very well-organized, well-designed, and interesting collection.

Selection Decisions:
The website does not contain an extremely detailed collection policy, but it does give an indication that the Library is focused in its collection development for Papers Past: "National Library curators select new newspaper titles for Papers Past based on a number of factors, such as national and regional significance, the availability of paper or microfilm copies of the newspaper, and ensuring a good range of regions and dates. We do not provide recent material because of copyright restrictions." The collection appears to be actively curated, with the recent addition of another newspaper, The Grey River Argus, in 2007-2008. The website has a good "Introduction" page, and the curators have prepared a detailed description for each newspaper in the collection.

Metadata:
The website does not provide much documentation on its selection of metadata schemes, nor does it display as much of its metadata as many of the other digital library collections we have reviewed this semester. However, the collection's searching and browsing capabilities make it clear that the Library has captured a significant amount of metadata for each newspaper and each individual digital object. Users can search by "exact phrase," "any of your words," and "all of your words," and they can utilize optional filters to narrow results to particular newspapers, dates, or content type (articles, advertisements, or illustration captions). Many of the individual newspaper titles are separately searchable, as well. Users can also choose whether to preview images in the search results. The digital library also utilizes cookies to maintain users search histories on their individual computers. The collection's browsing capabilities are quite extensive, as well. Users can browse (i) by date (a very nice feature, but sometimes you can click through year, month, and date, and end up in a placeholder "This newspaper issue was published but no copy is available."), (ii) by region (a clickable map of New Zealand), and (iii) by newspaper title.

Object Characteristics:
Each of the digital objects in the collection contain citation information that one might expect for newspapers (volume number, issue number, page number, and date), but there is not as much metadata about the objects relating to the digitization of the images themselves, their location in the Library, the scanners used to digitize the objects, etc. The Library has OCR'd each image in the library, so each image is viewable in PDF format or in text format. The website provides a very nice explanation of what OCR is, and provides an estimated OCR accuracy percentage for each digital object. Users have the option to download a printable PDF or a high resolution PNG file for each items, which is also a helpful feature.

Intended Audience:
The website appears to be intended primarily for researchers, particularly those interested in New Zealand history, politics, and culture. The National Library's description of Papers Past notes that, "Researchers of family history and whakapapa (genealogy) will find the shipping news, births, deaths and marriages of interest." The fact that the website can be viewed in English or in Māori, a New Zealand language, also indicates the strong regional audience the site intends to reach.

E-collections at the Center for Research Libraries

2009-04-12T14:33:00.000-07:00

http://ecollections.crl.edu/

CRL (the Center for Research Libraries) acquires and preserve both traditional and digital resources for research and educational use. The materials are made available to member institutions through interlibrary loan or electronic delivery.

CRL major collections include dortoral dissetations, some of the earliest African-American newspapers and other materials that produced outside the America. There are electronic collections. Books, foreign documents and other items have been scanned and are available through library’s catalog.

I checked some of the collections and found that World Newspaper Archive collection needs username and password to access. Others are accessible and have searching systems for users to explore the whole collection.
I carefully looked at Chinese Pamphlets collection which collects materials like political posters, cartoon books, pamphlets and materials in different formats that published in Hong Kong and in Mainland China. Some of the items are even rare in China.All 254 items are presented in thumbnail with Chinese spelling names. Users could click the thumbnails to see larger images. The images are presented in a pop up window. Users could do actions like rotate the image, zoom in or fit in different ways. There is a bar going along with the pop-up window in the left hand side. Users can view document description or each page’s description in a new window.

JSC Digital Image Collection

2009-04-11T19:12:00.000-07:00

http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/index.html

The collection was maintained by NASA's Johnson Space Center. NASA's Johnson Space Center provided this collection of press release images from the manned space program, from Mercury to the STS-79 Shuttle mission. This collection represents over 9,000 images and these images are available in 640x480 JPEG format (average size 40k each).

The website itself is very easy to browse. Clicking the “Browse” button from main menu, and then users can browse by Institutional, Apollo, Gemini, Mercury, Skylab, and Shuttle. For each item, the collection first provided a thumbnail picture, a simple title, a link of 640x480 JPEG image and a link about details. The metadata can be accessed by clicking the Details link. The collection provides a thumbnail picture, Photo ID, Program name, Mission, Date Taken, Film Type, image title, and Description, Subject Terms. Especially, for convenience use, in the same webpage, the collection also provided a link of 640x480 JPEG format under the snail picture.

Furthermore, users can search by date range, NASA photo ID, and keyword. However, Searches are case-insensitive. Wild card (pattern matching) operators are not supported. Symbols (*, &, @), single-character words and abbreviations (a, i.e.), and single-digit numbers (1, 2, 3) will be ignored.

The collection provided guidelines for use of NASA imagines. As a government entity, NASA does not "license" the use of NASA materials or sign license agreements. In addition, the website provided some quick links and other useful external links such as NASA Human Space Flight, NASA Home Page, NASA Photo Gallery, JSC Home Page, Earth From Space, and Earth Sciences & Image Analysis.

Overall, the website is a well-organized collection. Obviously, the intended audience is students, researchers, and any person who may interested in space technology.

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey

2009-04-11T14:05:00.000-07:00

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey (POB) is an ongoing digitization effort undertaken collectively by the Open University and the Universities of Hertfordshire and Sheffield. It has, in the past, acquired funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Big Lottery Fund, and the Economic and Social Research Council. Though there is no clear creation date of POB provided, its first mentioned funding source arrived in 2001 in the form of a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This would suggest, at the very least, POB has existed or been in developmental stages for eight years. This author mentions this seemingly unimportant detail only as a means of setting up this point: in eight years POB has accomplished something truly significant. According to POB, over 190,000 pages from the Old Bailey Proceedings and the Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts have been digitized in this time span. These digitized images represent all the extant editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings - from 1674 to 1913 - and the Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts - from 1679 to 1772. This is, in short, an extensive - even, perhaps, exhaustive - digitization effort whose main collection development policy is clearly to create as complete a collection of these documents as possible and to make them, according to POB, "fully searchable" and "free of charge for non-commercial use." From what this author has seen, POB appears to have unquestionably succeeded on the second of these fronts.

POB does not explicitly state a metadata schema to which it adheres. One does have the option to view a record in XML markup and this option provides a bit more clarity with respect to the way each document and its accompanying record are formulated. Yet, even here, it remains unclear if POB proscribes to a certain metadata schema. Moreover, outside of each record's unique identifier, the metadata that does appear is mainly subject or description driven - i.e. Offense, Punishment, Verdict, etc. - and tends to resemble a MARC record's subject field in this respect. Unfortunately, where a MARC record's subject entry, if clicked, takes one to other items with the same entry, clicking on a subject entry in POB takes one, instead, to another page that explains all offenses, punishments, verdicts, etc. This author found this to be frustrating and, ultimately, unsatisfying in light of the fact that one can, should one wish to, view all records with a punishment of imprisonment in an asylum provided one does a search for it. One cannot accomplish the same feat from the record-level and this is where, in this author's mind, POB fails to meet its aim of a "fully searchable" database as one has the ability to go top-down, but not the ability to travel in the opposite direction.

Despite the above shortcoming, POB is impressively explicit with respect to their digital objects. Microfiche were scanned at 400dpi and saved as TIFF files which are being "preserved for archival purposes, and should eventually be accessible over the web once data transmission speeds improve." Initially, GIF files were then derived from these TIFFs for web purposes whereas the standard practice now appears to be creating JPEG derivatives from the TIFFs. Afterward, POB digitized the text so as to make it meet their goal of having a fully searchable digital collection and this is where this project becomes utterly fascinating. This process of digitizing text involved "double rekeying" certain parts of the collection, meaning that "the text is typed in twice, by two different typists, and then the two transcriptions are compared by computer." Other parts of the collection had their text digitized through a process in which the text was "manually keyed once and a second transcription was created using optical character recognition (OCR) software." In each case, computer driven comparisons were used to locate any differences which would then be addressed manually. POB goes on to claim a 99% level of accuracy with its digitized text and this author found no evidence to suggest otherwise. It is both the aforementioned derivative images and this digitized text that are accessible in every record for a user. The only real complaint this author can lodge here concerns the quality of the images. They appear to be no better than a photocopy in many cases. This may not, in truth, be POB's fault as they make it clear early on that the images are derived from microfilm. Thus, they are merely making do with what they have and cannot be held too accountable for not having performed miracles. However, their images are a case study in the aesthetic losses caused by digitizing surrogates.

POB does not make any declarations on their site regarding an intended audience. They do, however, have what they call a "User Wiki". In this wiki, POB encourages user participation in the form of providing biographies, historical backgrounds, corrections, and teaching resources among others. From here, one comes away with the impression that POB wishes their digitization effort to be appreciated and used by an audience that includes but is not isolated to scholarly niches. This author sees no reason why this could not be possible with the right exposure as this is a fabulous resource that provides an expansive and fascinating look back into the minds and stories of the rightfully and wrongfully accused.

The Museum of Fred

2009-04-10T09:14:00.000-07:00

The Museum of Fred, which describes itself as a time capsule, is a collection of magnificent artwork. As Fred explains, The paintings represented here were not created by well-known blue-chip artists. "They were created by ordinary people. For unknown reasons they were donated to thrift stores where I purchased them." Fred has migrated these artworks to a digital format in order to demonstrate the importance of ephemera to overall understanding of culture.

As Fred argues, the making of art is too important to be left to the art professionals.

The site itself is well designed and offers galleries organized by the subject matter of the artwork. Topics include wild animals, landscapes, pets, and portraits. Unfortunately, there is no metadata offered. It is understandable that it would be impossible to identify the artists, but it would have been beneficial to include information regarding the acquisition of the artifact. An additional problem arises with the quality of the images themselves--Fred selfishly keeps the images in a small and unenlargeable format. Although Fred maintains that he actively curates the site, and has since 2000, there is suspiciously little evidence of activity. Nonetheless, I love this website and think it is a great resource for people who are interested in outsider art or ephemera in general.

Mozart Database

2009-04-09T22:03:00.000-07:00

NMA Online

Neue Mozart-Ausgabe: Digitized Version

In 2006, the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum (International Mozart Society) made available the musical text and the critical commentaries of the entire Neue Mozart-Ausgabe in order to make his many compositions available to a wide-range of the public.

The Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum traces its origins to 1880 Salzburg, Germany, and was founded to celebrate the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The digital archive has digital copies of the scores of Mozart's many compositions, as well as more than 8,000 pages of critical commentary published since 1954.

The scores are organized by type - sacred vocal music, concertos, orchestral compositions, etc. The scores each have a table of contents, the score, as well as any text related to each specific piece.

The database's search function is also very thorough. Mozart's compositions have been arranged numerous times into a single, organized catalog. Each catalog is notated with a different appreviation (K, KV) and may be searched for under each catalog number. Searches may also be performed by piece type, key, and/or editor.

The Mozart score database may be read in German, English, or Chinese, and is free and available to the public. The Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum intended for these musical compositions widely and conveniently accessible to the public, for personal study and for educational and classroom use. As a musician myself, the database is a wonderful resource for a wide variety of uses.

Museum of Childhood, London

2009-04-09T14:30:00.001-07:00

V&A Museum of Childhood
Cambridge Heath Road
London E2 9PA
United Kingdom

Museum of Childhood houses the UK’s National collection of childhood related objects dating back to the 16th century.

The Museum's permanent displays are arranged into three main galleries. Moving Toys which showcases the Museum's collection of moving and optical toys, Creativity, exploring an array of inspirational objects and ideas, and Childhood which tells the social story of childhood using a variety of objects, from dolls' houses to contemporary children's fashion and design.
Each of the galleries displays several pictures that can be enlarged and then what’s really cool about this site is that there is a 360 interactive virtual tour that allows you to explore the collections. There is one for a full screen and one for low resolution that is recommended for dial-up viewers. There are thumbnails, hotspots and the interactive map to navigate from one location to another. The menu at the bottom allows you to zoom in and out.
In addition, the “What’s On” page goes into more detail about the exhibits, the temporary displays, the events, workshops, and courses, and daily activities. Further more, you can schedule birthday parties on the weekends.
The page on Children’s lives is where you can find out about different aspects of the history of childhood. The information on these pages has been put together using our childhood archives and reserve collection and divided into the East End Lives, Edwardian Lives, Education & Creativity, Holidays & Entertainment, Nursery Rhymes and Lullabies, Parlour Games, Health & Work. Then each of these sections are divided into additional topics.
About US- presents the museums purpose and mission.
Shopping-The shopping page items are way cute and enlarge to get a better view of what you may want to put in your shopping cart.
But best of all is the page about “About This Site” that share how to edit settings, about browsers and plug-ins, getting help with the website accessibility, Browse-aloud (speech-enabled software) and Flickr-getting started guide. This museum’s approach is not only to share but to teach users about the technology that will allow them to get the most out of this web site.

NYPL Digital Gallery: William Blake

2009-04-09T08:24:00.000-07:00

The last blog entry I did was on the William Blake collection maintained by the Carolina Digital Library and Archives. This week I chose the Blake Digital Gallery maintained by the New York Public Library. This collection is comprised of three books written and designed by Blake. The books were done with “relief etching” and feature images in both color and black and white. There isn’t much discussion of why these items have been digitized over others but they seem to imply that these are the only works of this type by Blake in their collection. It seems, although it’s not completely clear, that the library simply digitized all of their Blake holdings.

The library provides a brief history of the collection as well as some background information on Blake and his work. I find this collection much easier to browse than Carolina's but there is much less content. Users are given the option to view one book at a time or simply browse thumbnails of all of the 91 images. Viewing the images can be a little awkward. There's no easy way to read the text of the books and they do not provide a transcription. However, viewers are given two ways to zoom in on the images. You have the option to “resize” the image which makes it about twice as large or you can zoom in which opens the image in a new window. This second option only allows viewers to see small sections of the image at a time.

The metadata is not immediately viewable but can be accessed by clicking the Image Details link. The collection provides the image title, author, medium, specific material type, physical description, item/page/plate, source, source description, location, collection call number, digital ID, record ID, date of publication for digital item and the date of the update.

Overall, I think this is a nice, well-maintained collection. I also appreciate the fact that you can save individual images to your computer even though they sell prints of them images. Zooming in on images is a little awkward but the quality of the images is really nice. Again, a transcription of the text would be a nice feature but I think the library assumes the images are the focus of this collection which is perhaps why they leave the text out.

Andy Goldsworthy Digital Catalogue

2009-04-09T06:51:00.000-07:00

The Andy Goldsworthy Digital Catalogue combines many of my favorite things: a good digital collection, Scotland, and one of my all-time favorite artists: Andy Goldsworthy.

Technical support was provided by my friends at HATII at the University of Glasgow; this included digital repository, metadata schema, and interaction development.

This collection covers the first 10 years of Goldsworthy's career (1976 - 1986), with a second volume (and possibly third) to come.

Browsing the catalogue is simple, and there are numerous different organizational schemes to access the collection - by year, form, material, and place. I believe that the naming convention is taken from Goldsworthy himself, with what looks like

File Name (this one, for example, is 1986_110)
The "title" (Yellow and dark elm leaf work; Penpont, Dumfriesshire, 8 November 1986);
related diary entries, if any ("Diary: 8th Nov Scaur – Penpont | cold hands – | went further along scaur – beautiful- [...] |worked with Elm leaves – yellow & |dark ")
Related images (in this case there's a context shot)
Keywords (colour, leaves, lines, torn, yellow)
Date (Work completed and recorded 8th November 1986.)
Places (Scaur, Penpont, Dumfriesshire, UK.)
Bibliography (AGA: S/Bk_015, col. illus., text)
Source (Colour 2 1/4 inch square transparency; Film: Fujichrome; AGA location: 86/2; No. of images: 1/4 [Others: S/C; 86/Nov/E; 86/2]; Archival Disk: 1986_005)

The creators of this collection were obviously interested in providing an exhaustive overview of Goldsworthy's archive (both published and unpublished work). Browsing is simple, and it's straightforward to navigate between images and collections within the larger collection.

The only thing that's missing is a detailed overview of the project documentation. But maybe they're too busy for that right now. The project is still active; and they're developing DVDs for the collection. I'm hoping that Tina Fiske will publish some of her work eventually.

The Marshall Papers Project

2009-04-08T16:16:00.000-07:00

The Marshall Papers project (http://www.marshallfoundation.org/Database.htm) is a subcollection of five volumes drawn from the large manuscript collection of General George C. Marshall's papers at the Marshall Foundation's Archive in Lexington, Virginia. According to the website, "the published volumes span the years 1900 to 1946 and comprise some 3,000 pages" that include "letters, telegrams, memos, reports, and speeches."

Selection Decisions: The George C. Marshall Foundation's website has many interesting and attractive features. Overall, it appears to be a very well-designed website. Unfortunately, however, the digital library collection of the Marshall Papers appears to be an anomaly on this otherwise current website. The selection of the five volumes covers a chronological period, but the website acknowledges that it is incomplete, as it is missing the important period from 1947 to 1959 when General Marshall served as the Secretary of State and then later as the Secretary of Defense during the Korean War. Other than the brief one paragraph "About this collection" page, I could not find any other explicit collection policy. Also, the collection does not appear to be actively curated -- it contains an invitation to researchers to "visit often in 2007."

Metadata: The digital library is very straightforward and simple, but it is surprisingly not user-friendly and not aesthetically pleasing to the eye. There are three ways to search the collection: (i) by searching for words in particular fields (anywhere, title, text, keywords, or date), (ii) by using the word search tool that produces an unattractive drop-down menu of browsing options of documents with number identifiers that are not very helpful, and (iii) by browsing documents in their entirety. There is sufficient metadata to produce results for each of these results and to allow users to select their own presentation preferences: interface language (numerous languages to choose from), Encoding (default is Unicode UTF-8), Interface format (graphical or textual). Users can also select search preferences: query mode (simple or advanced), query style, case differences, word endings, search history, and how many search hits to display per page. On the positive side, word search brings up text documents with yellow highlighting on the search terms. On the negative side, if you click on Volume 5 in the browse contents feature, there are some pages that do not have titles, dates or other basic metadata.

Object Characteristics: This may be the only digital library collections that I have encountered this semester that does not provide images in PDF format. The only options to view the objects are in HTML text or in Microsoft Word, which is odd since the Marshall Foundation's other digital collections seem to provide at least some PDF images. I could not locate a finding aid for the collections, which makes identifying numbers, such as #1-001, largely superfluous. Objects are presented as search results in long lists that require a lot of vertical scrolling. When one clicks on an object, the metadata is relatively sparse in that it only includes: the document number, the publisher, the date of the document, copyright information, and a very brief description of the object.

Intended Audience: The intended audience is probably students, historians, and other researchers. One indication of this is the recommended citation form that the digital library provides for each digital object, which can be very helpful to researchers. Nonetheless, the digital library has largely limited its usefulness to today's researchers by not including PDF images of the original document pages. Relying on OCR'd text in HTML may have been acceptable in the early days of the web, but in my experience, it is not relied upon, and certainly not preferred, by historical researchers today.

Chopin Early Editions

2009-04-08T15:45:00.000-07:00

The Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago Library has digitized their collection of over 400 early edition scores of Frédéric Chopin. According to the project's website, the Chopin Early Editions collection contains digital images of all of the scores in the library's collection. The library includes on the site detailed background information about the project, intellectual access, and the in-house digitization process. The stated purpose of the project was to help Chopin scholars, music scholars, and performers who want access to the scores. To build the collection, the library used Greenstone Digital Library Software, which drew me to the collection because it is an example of a live project using the software we are all trying to learn.

The website is very basic, but seems to contain necessary information and straightforward navigation. Copyright on the site indictes the project dates from 2004. Users can access the collection by browsing one of four categories: Titles, Uniform Titles, Genres, and Dedicatees. A search box allows for keyword searching within one of eleven dropdown categories, in which the four browsing categories are included. The images are displayed (after clicking a browsing category or performing search) in a simple list organized alphabetically. If a category chosen contains more than one score, that number appears next to the title in parentheses. Top navigation allows the user to move to another browsing category or search.

When navigating to individual scores, the user first sees a bibliographic description page with information in many of the search categories described above. Additionally, more subject information, and URI and library Call Number are also listed. No technical or other administrative metadata seems to be available. Users can then click on a "View Score" tab to see a JPEG version of the image (the project's "About" pages mentions that the scores were scanned at TIFFs with the JPEGs intended to be quick access copies). A dropdown menu provides quick navigation to different pages of each score. The images contain a ruler along one side of each to provide the online viewer scale. At the bottom of each image, users can click a link to a higher quality version of each score. The higher quality images only allow for one zoom factor, but the final image is sufficiently large to view handwritten notes or small type easily.

For the time it was created, the project managers seem to have done a nice job of giving useful, though not entirely comprehensive, information along with good quality scanned images. Overall, it's nice to see a successfully completed project that used the Greenstone platform as we try to create our own digital collections.

Olga's Gallery: Individuals creating collections and content on the web

2009-04-08T14:58:00.000-07:00

http://www.abcgallery.com/index.html

Olga’s Gallery is an interesting private attempt to create an encyclopedia of art and art history. The site is not for profit, although there are advertisements in the top margin of each page and there are links that take a visitor to a commercial website such as ArtPosters.com for the purchase of posters and prints seen on the Olga’s Gallery page and has around 10,000 images.
The about page is a series of letters describing the creation and purpose behind the site. It is run by two sisters and their sons and was developed specifically for post-secondary teaching and education, although no credentials past the saccharine testimonials of the sites creator’s sons to the authority regarding the metadata, essays, and artist biographies exist.. Of course “art lovers” are welcome to visit and participate and they seem to be the audience this site will most useful to. All the images are available for non-commercial, education, and fair use under United States copyright laws. The text is protected as a creative work and may not be used without express permission from the website owners and designers.
The collection focuses on western European styles and artists. It is primarily paintings, but there are a few sculpture images included. There is no information about where the original of each digitized image came from, which means there is little consistency in the size and quality. There are thumbnails and large views for each image, but no zoom capability. The most interesting part of this site is the metadata and the biographies that constitute the original portions of the site which seems sprung from a desire to make the site seem professional and academically authoritative.
The metadata assigned to the thumbnails includes artist name, creations date, material (marble or oil, opposed to sculpture or painting), and a location. The location is a bit unclear if this where the piece was created or where it now resides. For certain images there is a “more” hyperlink that provides one of the site’s mini-essays. This includes a brief paragraph on symbolism, mythology, or other influences in the piece, a bibliography including other pieces which have similar themes or motifs and contemporary artists, and artist biographies. All the essays are written from a very classical position with heavy emphasis on history beginning in ancient Greece and ending in Italy sometime in the 1800s.
There are six ways to search the collection; by artist alphabetical; by country, again whether this is the place of origin for the painting, artist, or where the physical piece is now is unclear; by movement; and by a general in-site search engine. The site is outdated looking, but the search function for the site is unusual in how broad the results are. A search on the term “Cana” retrieved 21 relevant pages. These include painting titles with the word in them, the short essays, and variations on works names such as Giotto’s The Wedding Feast at Cana and The Wedding Feast at Cana and the Deposition of Christ; one of these is the painting and the other the essay but both can be found on the same page. this seems redundant but I could see that this would be useful for people who have a an interest in learning basic or beginning associations in and about European art.
This is not the most well-built collection or the most interesting collection scope choice, but I am still interested in looking for private non-profit websites that try to display art and images in a way that makes the most sense to the site designer. How we think about a collection of images is changing and how individuals tackle the idea of contributing to general data and information through the Internet from an art historical perspective is something worth considering. These are people with low budgets and little training who have still managed to get thousands of images and millions of visitors on their websites no matter how bizarre their perception of history may be.

The American Missionary Association and the Promise of a Multicultural America: 1839-1954

2009-04-08T13:27:00.000-07:00

1. Collection Principles

This collection of photographs relating to the American Missionary Association offered by the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University has a nice introductory page on the background and scope of the collection. It tells the number of items in the collection (over 5,000 digital images), the years they cover (1839-1854), how/why the photographs came into being and the purpose that they served for the Association, and from where the center drew the photographs to be digitized (the AMA Archives, AMA Archives Addendum, AMA Annual Reports and American Missionary Magazine Records). In all, I think it gives a nice picture of the collection. I do wish that it explicitly stated the relationship between the AMA and the Amistad Case, and consequently then the Amistad Research Center, which I did not understand until I talked to an archivist from the Center about for an unrelated purpose. The AMA arose out of the Amistad case, and its first members were drawn from the the Amistad defendants' supporters and defenders. The group then went on to do Christian missionary works that they believed would help end slavery and improve US race relations. This page does have an interesting paragraph that offers transparency on the part of the collection processors describing how they decided to deal with some of the now patently offensive language used within the collection to describe various ethnic groups that was common at the time. I appreciated their openness about the challenge they saw in remaining true to the archive in its original state while demonstrating the advances our society has made in showing respect through language choices.

2. Objects
The images are arranged as thumbnails, so it is easy to browse. When one is clicked, the window changes to show an enlarged version of the image. The enlargement could be bigger to show detail, but it is nice that at least there are no watermarks. The images have unique identifiers, but against the recommendation in the NISO guidelines, the identifiers are persistent URLs rather than any consistent naming scheme. Right-click is disabled when dealing with the images, so I couldn't pull up "properties" to see what format they used. One cool thing about the objects is that they scanned the photographs fully, with no trimming either of the original or the digital image, so you can see marginalia written around the edges of some.

3. Metadata
The collection provides a lot of metadata, which is useful. First, as I stated above, there is a good deal of metadata on the overall collection in the introductory page. Then, on each image, they have used many of the dublin core fields that we are encountering in greenstone, like title, subject, description, notes, rights, format type, coverage, source, language, relation, and so on. A nice thing is that in the "notes" field, they bothered to put exactly where the particular image is housed in the physical collection, including series, box, and folder numbers, so it would be really easy to find these if one travelled to New Orleans to deal with the actual materials. There is not, however, any information on scanning equipment used, date scanned or updates.

4. Audience
This collection could be used by middle and high school students, the general interested public, and possibly by scholars. Since the images do not blow up very large, for a scholarly audience it would probably be most useful for browsing the collection without having to travel to New Orleans, in order to see if such a trip would be warranted after checking out the collection online.

Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project

2009-04-08T11:54:00.000-07:00

The Michigan State University Library and the MSU Museums have partnered to digitize American cookbooks from the late 18th century through early 2oth century. There is a short and informative video hosted by the humanities and special collections librarians that emphasizing the British, African, African-American, and Jewish cookbooks in the collection. There is also commentary on the the books cultural and historical significance. The commentary also addresses why old cookbooks are hard to find (they wear out) and the value in preserving cookbooks due to the fact that they often addressed the issues from their day, such as housekeeping, gardening, preserving, special cooking utensils, illnesses, injuries, caring for livestock, homemade products, and emergency care. Many foriegn cookbooks were Americanized to incorporate native crops like pumpkins and corn. The video is best viewed in its original size, and even then some close-up images of books are pixelated and fuzzy. The index page also includes an introductory essay about the scope and nature of the entire collection, an FAQ about the project, press coverage, and staff who had a hand in the digitzation project. There are also in-depth explanations about the the digitization process, the editorial intervention, encoding guidelines and the the digitization of the museum objects into a multidimensional format. Only 75 books from the collection have been digitized, presumably chosen to indicate the scope and representative nature of the collection. How these books were chosen is not expressly stated.

Search options for the digitized books include alphabetical by author's last name, book title, recipe name and ingredient. A search result will include recipe name, cookbook title, and author, which are all active links for cross-search purposes. Browsing these books can be done by date and "Interest". "Interest" is a categorization list inspired by the digital collection's content and is "meant only as a suggestion for further research." There is no information on how "Interest" came to be determined. The glossary is dedicated to aniquated, colloquial, or obsolete terms that are found in the digitized items. The glossary includes links to references consulted in its building. The last update for the glossary was in 2004.

Each cookbook's index page includes a PNG thumbnail image of the book's cover, and author, publishing, and "Interest" links. Each author's index page inclues a bibliography of her/his work, biographical information (if known) and the resources consulted. The thumbnail can be enlarged as a JPEG in a separate window. Digitized books can be viewed via forward/backward arrows; the transcript of the book can viewed either in html or xml, or the entire book can be viewed as a PDF. A short introduction to the the book gives an overview of its content, highlights, and some editorial commentary.

The museum objects are in their own list alphabetically. Some can be manipulated to view from different angles and enlarged. There is no date on the dimensions of the object or its provenance. There are small paragraphs about it usage, but no data as to where these objects may be referenced in text (at least not as active links).

This site would be very informative for culinary, historical, social, and anthropological researchers or casual inquirers. I think it would have been interesting to a have a search function relative to the book's covers; much of the art/design on the covers is representative of the time it was published - i.e. Art Deco, Victorian, etc.

The Art Institute of Chicago

2009-04-08T11:19:00.000-07:00

The Art Institute of Chicago has an online collection featuring over 33,000 of the works in their gallery. While they do not address the reasons for selecting the objects they have for digitization, I would assume they selected the best items in their collection.
The collection can be browsed by genre or searched by keyword, artist, collection, accession number, title or type. In addition, each object has a "browse similar" box below it, in which it lists categories that might also be of interest to the viewer. Each individual item is a small photo, but most enlarge to full screen images when a user clicks on them.
Each genre has an about page that contains notes about the scope and content of the collection and each object contains metadata about that particular object. Metadata includes: title, date, measurements, information about the artist and the collection it is a part of, who the item was a gift of, and the medium used. The metadata varies between items but this is mostly because of the different types of art represented. Metadata does not include any information about the digital representations of the objects.
While a knowledge of art is not necessary to browse the collection, the site does not provide any extra help in explaining the different kinds of art. It also does not provide historical context or information about particular artists. Because of this, the site's intended audience seems to be regular museum visitors and perhaps people who would live too far from the museum to visit its physical location. Though it could be used by researchers, it does not appear that they are the intended audience of this particular collection.

Perseus

2009-04-08T07:29:00.000-07:00

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/

The Perseus collection is one of the oldest digital libraries I have found. In fact, according to the site, the collection existed as an on-site digital library at tufts before the creation of the internet. Of course, it was moved online as soon as technologically feasible. The Perseus digital library originally focused solely upon the Classics, meaning primary documents in ancient Greek or Latin and various scholarly commentaries on them in a variety of modern languages. Since its inception, however, the Perseus digital library has expanded to include more modern primary sources that may have been influenced by the classics and to sources on the humanities in general. The Classics remains the largest sub-collection, followed by materials on the Renaissance, which makes sense considering the influence of classical works on the latter period.

As mentioned above, the guiding collection principle of the collection was originally to collect objects related to the Classics, and although the collection has since expanded, wherever possible one still sees a classical influence. This tends to lend a coherent theme to what otherwise might seem a disparate collection. The collection is obviously curated and well maintained. It is divided up into sub-collections based on theme, and some of those are also divided into sub-collections (e.g. Art and Archaeology Artifacts under the Greek and Roman Materials.) The site features both a search box and browsing options. The browsing options are a lot more developed than the search box, which is just your basic search box in the upper right corner. The browsing options allow you to explore by historical period, region, type of object, etc.

The objects themselves vary in their presentation. Many of the texts are simple transcriptions (I didn't find a single scanned text.) Appropriately, however, Greek characters are used for texts in ancient Greek. Some of the texts also include links to English translations, and virtually all of them contain links directly to commentary on the text in question. My main complaint about the texts is that they do not seem to have a whole lot of metadata, other than original author and whoever edited whatever edition Perseus transcribed. There is virtually no background information. On the other hand, the images on the site do possess adequate metadata, including not only the origins of the object but also where it is currently located (Boston Museum of Fine Arts for the coin above) and sometimes its digital provenance.

I get the feeling from the website that the Perseus digital library was originally designed for students of the Classics as a learning tool. There is a large focus on texts, and the site has resources such as dictionaries, translations, and commentaries. Furthermore, many of the texts are famous ones that have little room left for new scholarly interpretation but may still be of great use as practice for students aspiring to learn classical languages. However, I do think that the site definitely expanded from its original mission and now serves a large scholarly purpose as well, both for the Classics and other areas of the humanities.

All in all, the Perseus collection was an interesting example of a very large and comprehensive digital collection existing with very little internal narrative.

Sabadabada.com - Brazilian Record Covers

2009-04-07T17:55:00.001-07:00

http://sabadabada.com/new_page_2.htm

Sabadabada.com is a one-person site designed by a record collector of Brazilian music that was designed for passing on information to other collectors. As evidenced by the downloadable albums, the site isn't concerned about rights management. Album covers are photographed rather than scanned, with most images since 2008 photographed at 314ppi, while older photos are 180ppi. Mp3s are encoded at 128mbps, with no tag information, instead just track titles inside album folders.

Selection decisions are touched on in the About page: "I set out to build the site that I wished somebody else had built before I started collecting. I wanted to post some information, without opinion or commentary, and to share some of the music that I thought was worth collecting." There's also an unmentioned time limit that the webmaster has to work on a non-revenue generating site, so it may not be as much a representation of what's "worth collecting" in Brazilian music and more a collection of what the author had time to digitize, with a focus on what he liked the most first. While the music/mp3 section seems kind of random in its selection choices, the album cover section is closer to a proper digital library, with covers sorted by record company and original catalog number. This, along with an album title, is the extent of the metadata.

While there are obvious problems with consistency in selection, respect of intellectual property rights, and quality of digital objects and metadata, there's no legal digital initiative alternative that covers what this site does. Thinking of the Ad*Access project and the problems of making a digital library for 20^th century objects, this site brings up questions for me about the effectiveness of illegal-ish sites to provide access to quickly-disappearing objects. There is a difference, of course, in sustainability. While Ad*Access will most likely continue to be a resource, sabadabada.com may not last a cease & desist order.

Library and Links: Overview: United States Institute of Peace

2009-04-07T17:20:00.000-07:00

Library and Links: Overview: United States Institute of Peace

This week, I've selected the United States Institute of Peace's Digital Library. This organization received a grant to collect, scan, and feature peace treaties put together in 1988 and later to contribute to their mission to strengthen the worldwide access of documents that feature the efforts to prevent, manage and resolve international conflict. As of now the Digital Library features three collections: Peace Agreements Digital Collection, Truth Commissions Digital Collection, and Oral Histories Project on Stability Operations.

According the digital library's website, the US Institute for Peace created the digital library to utilize technology to strengthen preventive diplomacy and increase ease of access to these hard-to-reach documents. One collection, the Peace Agreements, will accept any official peace agreement document that ended any kind of inter- and intra- state conflicts worldwide since 1988. The other collection, Truth Commissions, acquires any decrees establishing truth commissions and similar bodies of inquiry around the world and the reports published by such groups. The third collection is collecting full-text interviews of individuals involved in stability operations, namely in Afghanistan or Iraq.

As for metadata, the collections are organized by country. In the Peace Agreement Collections, some countries have a pdf copy of the peace agreement, so the user can see it in its original language and type and marginal notes that have been added to the document itself; but others just have a transcribed and typed version on the US Institute of Peace website. For the Truth Commission Collections, each country has a list of the names of different organizations (sometimes huperlinked to take you to their homepage, but sometimes it's just an explanation posted on the website. US Institute of Peace work in the different metadata elements in tiny print on the bottom. The third collection, Oral Histories on Stability Operations, each stability operation has its own section with a list of interviews to access through pdf files. The interviews are divided up by personnel and date of interview.

Each of the items featured in the US Institute of Peace was selected with the motive to educate people on the state of international conflict management, so the documents featured are all of an important cultural nature, along with the full text transcribed interviews. The collection is not much to look at, but the content is pretty weighty.

According to the website, the digital library was built to benfit an audience of social work students, along with political science students and diplomats, historians, and the US Institute of Peace's students.

Zoos: A Historical Perspective

2009-04-07T13:21:00.000-07:00

Zoos: A Historical Perspective is "A collection of pamphlets and guide books published by zoos over the past century that has been collected by the National Zoological Park branch of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries." The collection includes objects from zoos and gardens across the world. The introduction to the collection makes grand statements about the purpose and uniqueness of this collection. Unfortunately, an almost complete lack of metadata, searching capabilities or basic organization makes navigating and using this collection a tedious chore.

The introduction clearly states the sort of fields this collection could contribute to, including animal studies, human-animal relationships and graphic design. It does not list any explicit curation or collection policy, mentioning only that the project came about after a massive re-organization of the National Zoological Park's archival collection. It is anyone's guess exactly why they chose to put these objects up. I could not find a date of last update anywhere on the site, but judging from the decidedly web 1.0 feel of the collection it does not look like it has been updated recently.

There is no search function. none. Not even a helpful browsing arrangement. Objects are arranged alphabetically, by the country the pamphlets came from, on one loooong page with click through links to the objects themselves. There is also a woeful lack of metadata. Besides the "author" (more often than not the zoological institution) and name listed above the object, there is a short, sometimes illuminating but mostly redundant description and the indicator From the Collections of the National Zoological Park Library, Smithsonian Institution Libraries underneath. There is no metadata associated with the objects themselves.

Speaking of the objects, each one is of a fairly large size but there is no ability to zoom in. Most objects from other countries have foreign text underneath them with not translation or explanation. Also, every object has a black frame with a "Smithsonian Institute Libraries" logo underneath. Kudos for avoiding something as ludicrous as a watermark but this additional branding seems unnecessary, especially as there seems to be absolutely no way to stumble upon these objects without coming from the Smithsonian-hosted main site. Interoperability is technically possible, as they have not blocked linking or right clicking, but the collection is of no help in providing a link or even associated data about copyright or legal matters.

All in all there are some interesting objects here. The introduction seems to want the audience to be serious cultural and zoological researchers but the poor design, non-existent metadata and search capabilities and mediocre picture resolutions make it good for not much other than to point out how not to build a digital collection.

Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project

2009-04-06T21:14:00.001-07:00

Lincoln/NET is a digitization project conducted by Northern Illinois University, presenting Lincoln’s historical materials produced during the Illinois years (1830-1861) which includes writings, speeches as well as other materials. Lincoln is the United State’s sixteenth president ever shed significant light on American history, and well known for the performance during the War time. This project is valuable for a rich presentation of Lincoln’s records do help explore and further understand Lincoln’s career and his social and political context.
This digitization project distinguishes itself from others primarily due to the multimedia (Flash) presentations. Text, image, video, sound and interactive resources are included in. the copies of videos for local use are downloadable. Part of the content is under protection under copyright laws and such materials could be used only for research and educational use. For other uses, could contact project director in Northern Illinois University.
Text: there are two ways of searching: Full-Text search and Bibliographic Fields search. Considering that users might not familiar with the details and just want to randomly search something, an example box is followed by where users could pick “fields” they are interested in.
Image: images could be searched or browsed. Here are 12 divisions covering every aspects of Lincoln’s life. The images are represented in thumbnails with brief bibliographic description. By clicking the thumbnails, a large image will pop up with further metadata information regarding to creator, data, image source, and so forth.
Video: one part of the videos is presented in RealPlayer, and the other part is presented in Adobe Flash format. There is also a half completed part.
Interactive resources: Timeline of Lincoln’s life is presented in Flash. What’s more, maps of election results in different years and different states are presented in Maps. That is the most distinguish and rich part within this project.
It is a wonderful site for history fans. The dynamic construction of the project facilitates accessibility and the impressive materials satisfy users on various purposes.

Educating Change: Latina Activism and the Struggle for Educational Equity

2009-04-06T13:32:00.000-07:00

http://www.brown.edu/Research/Coachella/index.html

This small collection, though appearing to follow some conventions of Brown University’s Center for Digital Initiatives (cited on some of the pages), appears to be the product of a group of students’ summer research project. The site produces an interesting narrative about the Chicano movement in California in the 1970’s, its connections to farmworker activism and advocacy for education, and the effect the movement has on present-day Providence, Rhode Island, where Brown University is located. Interviews with three women forms the core of the collection materials. Socorro Gómez seems to be the catalyst for the study, because she was born in Jalisco, Mexico, moved with her family to California, where she went to college, then moved to Providence, Rhode Island in the 1990s to become principal at a local elementary school. This history provides a unifying narrative for the arc of the collection.

The collection description only vaguely explains theme-based selection criteria: “This archive for Educating Change constitutes materials initially collected during our summer research project in 2004. […] The material primarily relates to the walk outs from Coachella Valley schools in 1976, but also covers related issues such as the farm workers movement, bilingual education, immigration, and the Chicano/Mexican American civil rights movement.” The creators do not describe who they are, and, though they assert that the collection is growing, they don’t explain how. It appears that the research group located the three women, interviewed them, archived pieces of their interviews as well as the transcripts of the full interviews, digitized some personal photographs and ephemera the women shared, and then located copies of newspaper articles and took photographs of sites of historical events significant to the women’s narratives.

Like the selection criteria, the metadata appears to be based in narrative. Visitors to the site can search the collection or can browse the collection by creators and contributors, by title, or by theme (education, farm workers, immigration, politics, women). When a visitor locates an object to view and clicks on it, the page lists the title, source, and date for the object and offers a statement from Brown University on use restrictions that implies that these objects are archived at Brown. The page also offers the option to “View Description,” which links to a longer page of metadata including other titles, publication/creation, creators/contributors, description, and host collection (here identified as this website collection, Educating for Change). The description includes a physical description of the object’s type and size as well as an abstract which offers a narrative about the content of the object. This is all good information, but because the collection is so small and overlap between themes is so great, it is difficult to browse through and get a sense of the information. (Additionally, images included on the narrative pages of the exhibit do not include any metadata and do not link to any information, which is frustrating.)

For limited information on the digital objects, from the object page viewers can also look at the “Document Map.” The Document Map offers a link to the metadata in xml as well as links to the object’s thumbnail file, low resolution jpeg, and high resolution jpeg. Low and high resolution are not defined. Also, there is a source TIFF file, but it is not viewable. The video clips are in mp4 format and the objects carry with them information about the video. The size of the video image is 320x240 pixels, and the bit rate varies from about 190 to 350 kbits/second while playing.

Because the collection depends for its value on the narrative laid out by the site, it appears that its ideal audience is probably activists working on initiatives for educational resources for Latino children in Providence, Rhode Island (there is a substantial narrative about Providence demographics and the changing educational environment that the site esbtablishes is underserving the Latino children there). The fact that the site is also available in a Spanish-language version would also be of use to a Latino activist audience in Providence.

Arizona – Sonora Documents Online

2009-04-05T11:58:00.000-07:00

This digital collection is hosted by University of Arizona Special Collections, and combines resources from major repositories around the state. Composed of 19th and 20th century materials, the collection documents economic, cultural, and governmental issues, including mining, land grants, the border, and others. Forms include documents, imprints and photographs. There is not a specified decision-making process. It may be that each of the three repositories involved selected all materials pertaining to this particular historical subject, or selected those which fall in line with the grant funding requirements (the collection was funded through an IMLS grant).

This seems to be a truly archival collection (with several individual collections making up the online collection). Each image is therefore part of a larger document, or group of documents.
The collection level metadata, as in an archives, is a finding aid with a historical note, a scope and contents note, and an arrangement. The arrangement, which lists each item, provides a link to the digital representation. Digital images contain little information about the actual digital object. Only the digital copyright date is listed.

On a higher level, the digitization process is summarized on the intro page. The collection was launched using CONTENTdm software. The digital objects can be searched through either a “browse” or “search” feature. Each image can be enlarged. The images were uploaded as black and white JPG files. In some cases, the quality of the image is limited, and therefore makes online viewing somewhat difficult. Many of these documents are faded and written in cursive (as seen here).

There are not many personal or family papers contained in the Arizona-Sonora Collection. The specifics of this collection, and the archival nature will likely make them usefully only to a research audience. Because of the low quality images, it may be the case that the online versions function more like a preview than an actual research experience.

The Collection of the Family of Henry Posner Sr.

2009-04-05T10:20:00.000-07:00

http://www.library.cmu.edu/Research/SpecialCollections/Posner/index.html

The collection was established by Helen and Henry Posner Jr. at Carnegie Mellon University in 1978. Henry Posner Sr. and his wife Ida M. Posner were the collectors of the books and art in the Posner Memorial Collection. During their lifetimes, Mr. and Mrs. Posner Sr. traveled widely and acquired rare books, carved ivory, jade and other items of fine art. The collections include two parts. The first collection, assembled mostly between 1924 and 1955, served his interests in fine bindings, books about fine arts and books for the family's reading. The second part, collected between 1955 and 1972, focused on books illustrating landmarks in intellectual history, especially in the natural sciences. This website makes almost all of the books in Posner Memorial Collection are available in full text online to users.

It is easy to browse the whole website by Author, Title, Publication Date, and Subject or Call Number. The metadata fields for each image include View Book, Title, Author, and Date. When users click the link of the item, it will lead users to another webpage. In this webpage, it shows first the small images such as the cover of the book, and also provides more links about this item, such as “Library Catalog”, “Collector’s File”, “Annotation” and “View Book Page Images”. Especially, users can read the full text through the link “View Book Page Images”. “Medium Image” and “Large Image” functions are very useful for people with eyesight problems. Users can just read one by one page, and it is convenient to use “book” button to return to the first page of the book at any time, or use “next”, “prev” “next 50” or “prev 50” buttons to explore the book. Obviously, it is not easy for users to find the exact page.

Furthermore, users may access to the collection either by searching for word(s) or phrase in all main categories (author, title, subject, date) of books or by searching for word(s) or phrase on all pages inside the collection's books. When I use the key word 'picture' to search all pages inside books, I am so surprised to find out that 819 pages were found containing the word 'picture'.

Because use of the Posner Collection is intended for educational purposes only, the audience for this site would primarily be college students, researchers, and anyone who may interested in history of science, literature and decorative arts.

Baylor University Oral History Institute

2009-04-04T13:40:00.000-07:00

Baylor University's Oral History Institute has put an index to their collection online; it's fully cataloged and you can search it by interviewer, interviewee, keyword, or LC subject (some of which don't come up with any results, by the way). The metadata's fairly thorough, noting things like what format the interview was recorded in (mostly analog tape) and the ID number the institute's given to each interview. Good, standard metadata for oral histories, I think

What's mostly frustrating about their digital collection, though, is that some of the interviews cataloged don't have any online file associated with them, and when there are files available they're PDF files of the transcripts. The front page says that only interviews conducted after 1990 have these transcripts digitized, and there's a request form (also a PDF) on the front page for any transcripts not available on the site. The audio itself hasn't been digitized yet and so if you actually want to hear it you'd have to go to the actual physical archive and ask about it. To an extent this makes sense, since most historians making use of oral histories mainly use the transcripts, but for people like anthropologists or people working specifically in the field of oral history who might want the audio, this isn't really a helpful resource. It feels more like an instance of them saying, "Hey, this is what we have, come visit our archive" instead of "This is what we have; let us share it with you." It may be a matter of financial or other resources, of course, but as it stands at the moment this doesn't strike me as very useful. (Of course, I say this, and I'm a student in an oral history class who's part of building our own oral history archive, where the audio *will* be available. So I may be biased.)

--A. McClendon

Images of Russia and Caucasus Region 1929-1933

2009-04-04T11:36:00.000-07:00

Images of Russia and Caucasus Region 1929-1933

The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee (UWM) created the digital collection, Images of Russia and Caucasus Region 1929-1933, in 2007. The digital collection contains "over 700 images of Russia and the central Caucasus including the Republic of Georgia and Dagestan from the William O. Field Collection housed at the American Geographical Society Library (AGSL)," which is located at UWM. The collection is further supplemented "by Field's diaries and travel notes, and a selection of maps of the Caucasus region". UWM goes on to state that "the photographs were researched and indexed as part of the project to provide additional points of access". Thus, though no specific collection development policy is provided, this author came away with the impression that UWM sought to create as full and as accessible a digital collection as they could based upon this very geographically and chronologically specific collection of William O. Field's photographs.

One area where this collection produced by UWM largely excels is in the breadth and consistency of its metadata fields. These fields include such obvious fields as Title, Photographer, and Subject while also regularly employing less expected fields
such as Original Item Size, Digital Publisher, and Repository. In every record and image this author viewed these fields were listed, filled, and in most pertinent cases clickable with ceaseless regularity while also being. Such regularity allowed UWM to employ a feature this author has yet to come across in any other digital collection he has viewed for this collection: advanced searching based upon the elements and terms used in UWM's metadata schema. One can mix and match these elements and terms to create a customized search that uses the precise vocabulary UWM used itself. The end result should have been quite a streamlined and user-friendly system that increases efficiency. However, this author found this system to be frustratingly shoddy and disappointing in light of the transformative power such a system could have on the ease with which users access information.

UWM is explicit with regards to the process of creating the digital objects in this collection. They declare that "the images were scanned from film negatives and slides, when possible" and, when not possible, "photographic prints were used as a source for scanning." These scans resulted in TIFF files that UWM stores itself. They then created JPEG derivatives and uploaded these into CONTENTdm software for web access. It is difficult, however, to discern the bit depth and resolution of these JPEG derivatives. They first appear at 46.9% their normal size. Two levels of zooming are allowed which bring the viewer to 100&. One cannot zoom any further beyond this. Yet UWM does offer a few extras from this point to the user. The user can, for instance, focus the image on a specific portion by panning in different directions or by clicking the portion on which (s)he wishes to focus. This is a nice option to have. However, much like UWM's advanced search function in this digital collection, this option does not work quite as well as one would have hoped as it can be both disorienting at first and disappointing once one becomes familiar with its limitations (i.e. it refocuses on a certain part of the image, but does not enhance the context or understanding of the image in any notable way that this author observed).

It is hard to judge UWM's intended audience for this digital collection. The time that must have gone into creating its 'enhanced' functionality suggests a scholarly or research-based bent. However, the catch of this digital collection is that UWM and AGSL demand "permission to reproduce materials in this collection for publication or distribution" while also offering high-resolution digital images at a base cost of $10 for those outside the University of Wisconsin system. Thus, there is also somewhat of a profit or business model - for lack of any better terms - here as well. Then again, the first protected - i.e. free - uses mentioned by UWM are those for "individuals or libraries for personal use, research, teaching or any 'fair use' as defined by copyright law" should these parties have a need to use the images. This, then, would seem to make the case that UWM's most expected audience is a scholarly one seeking to research Russia and the Caucasus after its revolution and before its entrance into WWII. Nonetheless, the images in this collection are, without question, really quite riveting.

Wellcome Images Collection

2009-04-03T10:03:00.000-07:00

Wellcome Images

Wellcome Images, a division of Wellcome Library in London, describes its collection as "two thousand years of human culture." The images are primarily biomedical and healthcare related but there are also those focused on themes concerned with social history and art. The Wellcome Trust funds the Wellcome Library and website and is a charity that supports biomedical research. This explains the focus and selection of materials featured within the collections.

The site states the intended use of the images under the heading "Prices," where it states that they are available for download for "personal, academic teaching or study use, under one of two Creative Commons licenses." However, newer photographs or larger files or prints have prices listed. Thus, the intended audience would be patrons interested in using them for academic purposes.

Wellcome Images is divided into galleries that include highlights, illness and wellness, life, culture, nature, and war. I selected culture after a brief look over the health related images which were a bit graphic. The title, unique number, a thumbnail, and an option to add to lightbox are shown for each image. The metadata provided includes the same information as listed when browsing the gallery as well as credit, by, from, and collection. There are options to select related keywords to search for more images with similar subject matter. Some images also include metadata concerning publication information, the library reference number, and a link to the full bibliographic record for the image in the Wellcome Library Catalogue. The full bibliographic record contains physical descriptions, note, references, author etc., unif. title, topic-mesh, system no., publ. place, and record no. It also links to the full MARC record display.

The images are of good quality but there is no zoom function available and only one size offered. The user can search using keywords and can select to search historical images, contemporary images, or both types at the same time. There are answers to 26 common search related questions which could be very helpful in navigating the image collection.

Picture This: Family Photographs of Everyday San Francisco

2009-04-03T08:46:00.000-07:00

The San Francisco Public Library maintains a very attractive online exhibit dedicated to photographic representations of the experience of the family. This exhibit is very nicely curated, but appears to have been a temporary as opposed to ongoing project. The site was last updated several months ago. It does not feature a search function, but is rather organized by category with thumbnail images of photos availible for selection. The images themselves are nicely scanned jpegs, which may be enlarged once. The exhibit seems focused on the multicultural makeup of San Francisco, and has many images that are quite striking. It seems like the target audience would be the general public, teachers, and people interested in the kinds of images that exist in the library's archive. Metadata is provided for each item, but is often limited to the identification of the subjects of the photos, a title, the donor, and when it was taken. More information, such as location and information about a finding aid would have been very helpful. For its purposes, I think that this site does an adequate job of presenting a curated sampling of archived materials. It would be useful for teachers interested in showing historical diversity, and of interest to persons casually exploring the city's history. This is a good example of what you can do with some web skills and a limited digitization effort.

Comic Books of the 1950s

2009-04-02T19:08:00.001-07:00

"Comic Books in the '50s" was created and compiled by the Electronic Collections Manager at the University of Buffalo libraries. This online archive hosts a wide variety of comic book covers from the 1950s and a section called the "Crusade Against Comic Books", a movement from the '50s that believed comic books were unsuitable for children.

The comic book covers are organized alphabetically by title. They may also be searched for by title, year, genre, and/or theme. Each cover also has the title of the comic, volume and number (if applicable), month, year, and publisher.

Batman No.(128 ) December ,1959 National Periodical Publications

Wonder Woman No.(67 ) July ,1954 National Periodical Publications

The "Crusade Against Comic Books" gives a brief history of the anti-comic books sentiments that were on the rise in the 1950's. It also describes the creation of the Comics Code Authority (CCA), which is the "comic book industry's mechanism for self-regulating the portrayal of sex, violence, and antisocial activity in American comic books." (Source)

This archive is fun for fans of comic books. It does not, however, have a cover for all the major comics from this era. Fans of superheros such as the Flash or the Green Lantern, will be disappointed. This archive does have covers from comics such as "Might Mouse", "Archie", "Jungle Tales" and more. It is also disappointing that there is no mention anywhere as to the source of these comic book covers. Presumably, they were a donation to the UB Libraries, but that information is not available from the website. More information may be requested from Mark Lavin, the Electronic Collection Manager.

http://www.fan-museum.org/

2009-04-02T14:10:00.000-07:00

http://www.fan-museum.org/
The Fan Museum
12 Crooms Hill,
Greenwich, London SE10 8ER

The Fan Museum of Greenwich, London web site appears to be actively taken care of and up to date. It has a current temporary exhibit ADAM AND EVE and pinch me,
An exhibition of Biblical Fans from the 17th century to the present day
15 January 2009 - 31 May 2009 and POETRY IN MOTION begins June 2009 - 04 October 2009-. Its collection’s history seems well researched and documented on the web site. “The Fan Museum is the first and only museum in the world devoted in its entirety to all aspects of the ancient art and craft of the fan. It has been described as "an architectural and artistic gem", and as "an oasis of tranquility". The Fan Museum is home to a collection of more than 3,500 predominantly antique fans from around the world dating from the 11th century to the present day. Its collection and fans on loan from other collections are displayed in changing themed exhibitions in which fans are presented in their historical, sociological and economic contexts. For conservation reasons it is not possible to display the whole collection together at any time; therefore the museum features two distinct displays. The first is permanent and serves as an introduction to fans: their history, how they are made, the materials used, and the various types and sources of fans. The second, highlighting a particular theme, changes three times a year to enable visitors to appreciate the many aspects and intricacies of fans.”
The site also has a statement of copyright: “All images are the property of The Fan Museum and as such are copyright protected © 2007 and not to be reproduced without express permission.”
In 1991, when the Fan Museum opened it had the distinction of awards from both the National Art Collections Fund and the English Tourist Board for "outstanding contributions to the Arts and to tourism".
Sadly, you would have to actually go to the museum, as there are only a few examples of each of the previous and current exhibits, which are so small that there is no chance of viewing the details. Absolutely nothing is clickable to enlarge or zoom in on. No metadata is provided for any of the fans displayed on each web page. Unfortunately, ones high expectations are quickly dashed by the lack of presentation. The only way you might be able to get up close and personal with these fans is if you are actually there in person.
The gift shop at The Fan Museum contains a fascinating range of high quality items all of which have a fan theme which would make great gifts. Individuals may even commission their own design. The museum even provides workshops for a wide variety of purposes; e.g. publicity, banqueting, weddings, anniversaries, presentations, etc.
The Fan Museum has a fully qualified conservation service for the preservation and protection of cherished fans.
They have a shopping page with a sampling of their gifts and a pdf. order form to download, but even here the objects are so small with no opportunity to zoom in for a closer look that you really wouldn’t want to risk ordering something that you couldn’t see.

Remarkable Ohio

2009-04-01T18:19:00.000-07:00

Remarkable Ohio is a site sponsored by the Ohio Historical Society and the Ohio Channel (covering state government and local PBS programming) that provides a database of 1279 historical markers located throughout the state. I find it interesting because it is not a collection of exclusively archival material, but also of photos of the markers themselves. The markers are the focus of the site, so descriptive data is largely concerned with the signs' locations. The site contains contemporary photos of each of the markers, mostly taken by registered participants from local historical groups or other citizens. The site's collection is being created largely by these citizen participants with some historical materials from the OHS to augment the information available about each of the markers. In fact, some markers have no photos, yet.

Unfortunately, any historic photos that are included offer very little information about the item itself. Historical photos seem to be uploaded only by the OHS at this point. A short narrative description of the subject of the photo, often including dates, is offered along with some sort of catalog number in parentheses. As a result, I think the site, and specifically OHS, misses an opportunity to let users know where they can go see more historical materials, not to mention providing technical data for us library types. Each marker's page has an option to scroll through small images (if multiple images exist) and include a link to "full resolution" images. These are just JPEGs and are only slightly larger than the first image, in most cases. No manipulation tools are available to inspect images further.

As mentioned, data about the markers is much more informative. Both sides of the markers are transcribed on each marker's page. Street addresses are included, along with latitude/longitude–participants are encouraged to use GPS devices to record the markers' locations. Links are provided for imbedded Google maps to the markers' location, but every map link I attempted was broken. Other information includes year erected, local sponsors, and category and subject keywords for the markers. Those keywords can be used to search for specific markers, or users can browse the markers by county, title, or category. Users can also register for a free account and save their favorite markers in a special collection. If users wish to use the images, the site offers a means to request permission from image owners online.

The Remarkable Ohio program is presenting information about a different type of information carrier. I feel it is sort of like a collection of photos of libraries. Typically, inside the library is where most would expect to find the information, but on this site, the information is on the wrapper in some sense. I also like that this digital collection is being created as it goes along. A bit of Web 2.0 sneaking in?

Jacques Burkhardt and the Thayer Expedition to Brazil (1865-1866)

2009-04-01T16:20:00.001-07:00

http://ted.lib.harvard.edu/ted/deliver/home?_collection=mcz

Selection Decisions

The information page for this digital library gives an overview of the collection and related initiatives. I can't find any evidence that there was anything left undigitized from the physical collection, but there is information about non-scientific drawings and portraits that were segregated from this digital collection, and are instead viewable with Harvard's general image search. On the information page there is also the ability to do an advanced search of the collection. Browsing is not as intuitive, with no thumbnails available, and all scans browsable only through the "browse indexes" section of the MCZ Ernst Mayr Library Artwork Collection, which appears to have only the Burkhardt drawings in it. As a new user to the collection, it made me question if I was browsing the right collection, and if I was seeing the results of only the Burkhardt collection. For sustainability, I wonder what would have to be redesigned if non-Burkhardt items were added to the MCZ Digital artwork collection.

Metadata

There's a large amount of metadata for each object, including biological classification information for the animals represented in Burkhardt's drawings, expedition names, and even the date and locations for most drawings. There is enough information to find the objects in the physical collection, with each item having its own unique call number.

Object Characteristics

For each image, there are 4 levels of zoom, allowing great detail with an option to save the zoomed image. There's also an option to "View full image". Downloading an XL version of this scan gave me a ≈ half-megabyte .jpeg file, in 72ppi but with very large dimensions (1469 x 2400 pixels at 20 x 30 inches). Since the original image was 9 x 14 cm, I wonder if the scan could also be thought of as ≈ 400ppi at the original size? In both ways of saving, there is an annoyance in that saved images are named "Convertor" by default, rather than referring to their name in the collection.

Intended Audience

With respect to the collection's emphasis on searching rather than browsing, lack of thumbnails, and inclusion of biological classification information, I would guess that the intended audience for this collection is researchers who work in the fields of biology and zoology.

University of Wisconsin Galapagos Collection

2009-04-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

The University of Wisconsin's Galapagos collection contains documents and pictures from Ecuador. The University is one of 3 locations that have been given permission by the Ecuadorian government to have these materials, making the collection rare and worth preserving. It is unclear whether the online collection contains all of the photographs or just a select group from the collection.
The photographs can easily be searched by keyword, title or some other attribute, and an advanced search feature is easily accessible to users. A few subject searches I ran for things such as "turtle" came back without any results though there were clearly images of turtles in the system, revealing that the search is not as good as it could be.
Each image in the collection can be viewed in three different sizes (small, medium and large) and metadata is provided on the same page. Metadata includes fields such as the title, photographer, date, place, time, description, type, subject, is part of, rights, submitter, and a local identifier. Some fields, such as subject, place and submitter are links to other items with the same field entries.
The images themselves appear to be mostly photographs taken in the field in Ecuador to supplement the papers and scientific studies of the natural ecosystem there. The largest version of the photographs is big enough to see the subject, but not big enough to be the largest version they could have placed on the site. The reasons for their decisions about the images and their sizes is unclear.
The site seems to be geared toward academic researchers who might be interested in the work done in Ecuador. IT could also serve people with a mild curiosity but the interface is too cumbersome to hold their attention for long.

USC LIBRARY DIGITAL ARCHIVE

2009-04-01T10:59:00.001-07:00

The digital archive at the University of Southern California provides online access to both internal and external archival resources. This seems to be a large-scale project, containing large volumes of digital resources, and several partner agencies (including other libraries, newspapers, museums and historical societies). The central purpose of the collection is to document regional history. Though there is no specific selection criteria available, the “about” page does communicate a focus on materials that document “the Southern California Region, the Western United States and the Pacific Rim.” Collection materials are traditional archival forms, including photos, film, audio recordings, maps, documents, and artifacts.

Each digital image contains individual metadata, including some basic information (creator, title, source, description etc.) and also some information about the digital object. Photographic items, for example, receive a digital identifier, and information about access restrictions and terms of use. One particularly interesting feature of the metadata is a section about “provenance,” which pertains not to the digital image, but to the physical object. Nonetheless, this seems like an attempt to retain the object’s archival value even if it is just a mention and link to the larger collection.

The digital image is not easily manipulated. The only access feature is the enlargement or magnifier. However, images can be printed, e-mailed or added to a personalized “selection” folder. Additionally, the images can be browsed in multiple ways, which enhances the quality of the collection. For example, patrons can access “featured content,” or browse geographically. The introductory page also has an inviting slideshow of apparently random images.

The “about” page does make a reference to the collection’s potential audience, stating: “broad public access to a wide range of historical and cultural documents that provides maximum access to relevant, authoritative, and scholarly resources. It also allows individuals to pursue learning at their own personal levels of interest, ability and desire.” It seems the emphasis is on both an academic and public audience.

The Pequot Museum

2009-04-01T07:41:00.000-07:00

The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, located in Mashantucket, Connecticut, is a unique institution in that it is a $193.4 million dollar museum on Native Americans fully run and financed by the Mashantucket Pequot nation and located on that nation's reservation. (The Mashantuckets also operate Foxtails, the world's largest casino, conveniently located at the midpoint between New York and Boston.) The museum maintains an active web presence, with its permanent physical exhibts also being rendered into webpages.

The Mashantucket Pequot Museum's website is not a full digital library, but an extension of the physical museum and archives so that material on the Pequots and other Amerindians can be accessed by the public. (The Mashantuckets main purpose in creating the museum is to raise awareness of Native history and the issues facing many First Nations today. Fundraising is handled by the casino.) That being said, online objects are displayed in two ways. First, the website consists of a number of exhibits (corresponding to physical exhibits) that are obviously well curated on topics such as The Pequot Village. These exhibits consist mostly of text providing a nice summary of pertinent historical and archaeological knowledge as well as insights from curators and/or researchers. Sadly, they do not contain many actual digital objects, and what they do have is limited to images of museum displays (typically panoramas) and maps. Furthermore, these objects lack all metadata!

However, the Mashantucket Pequot Musuem also provides a link to a flickr page on which they display a number of images of objects from their archive. These objects are much higher quality, can be enlarged, are described with an abundance of metadata, and are generally primary source type objects. On the downside, there are only about twenty of these superior digital objects, and they clearly serve primarily as a teaser for the Mashantuckets' impressive archive. (There is also an online finding aid for their archive, as well as instructions for ordering copies and/or arranging a scholarly visit to the archives.)

As a self-contained digital library, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum falls a bit short, but as an advertisement to available resources, it strikes me as quite successful. Also, I found the Mashantuckets incorporation of flickr into their normal website to be rather clever. I do believe that the Mashantuckets have made progress on their goal of raising awareness of Amerindian culture to both the general public (thus the panoramas) and the scholarly community (thus the archives and finding aid.)

The Collier Classification System for Very Small Objects

2009-03-31T20:20:00.000-07:00

VSO Home

It's a bit of a stretch to say that this is a kind of intellectual repository or an online collection of the Classics put on the web so that access can be more widespread, but nonetheless Brian Collier's website Very Small Objects is entertaining, aesthetically pleasing to look and also contains a very creative "classification system.

The objects featured on this site are close-up photos of very small items found anywhere and everywhere. Collier accepts all objects submitted to him and names them based on a classification system that is largely influenced by satirical version of the scientific nomenclature, comprising of fragments of words from the English language. He then photographs each object complete with measurements posted within the picture so the user can see how small the dimensions are. All the photos are stored in a "database." The criteria for photographing each submission is that they be of a certain size, with a new name based on Collier's classification system, non-living (Collier opposes the collection of live specimens), and somewhat distinguishable of what it once was.

As for metadata or ways to search the collection, this is an area that is sorely sorely sorely needed. Each item in the database is classified by the first part of its name and progresses through the names in a list format with a little thumbnail picture for reference. For example, all the things that were never alive (ie rocks, plastic) start off with the name Neli, and if it's a part of a whole= Nelipart and so on; all the Neliparts are grouped together. There is no search feature to easily access a particular specimen. As for metadata about each object, the only metadata made available on the site is the "name" and its dimensions.

The collection itself is pretty neat to look. There are all kinds of itty-bitty things. During my examination of the site, I saw a fragment of a green M&M, electrical components, beachcombing loot, dried up curls of a leaf, a watch gear, the list goes on. It's an eccentric collection based on a classification system. Collier exhibits his collection around the nation and in Europe.

As for the audience, I think it's geared towards people who are knowledgeable about classification systems, naming items, and has a kick out of emulating the scientific nomenclature system: namely information professionals and scientists or just about anyone willing to take the time to peruse this very small object collection.

Watch your favorites. Anytime. For free.

2009-03-31T13:04:00.000-07:00

http://www.hulu.com/

The NBC-News Corp. video joint venture Hulu.com is a video site that features video from more than 100 content providers. Offerings include TV shows from FOX and NBC, as well as from subsidiary cable channels such as Bravo and the SCI FI Channel. The website also shows films from studios including Sony and MGM. Especially, this website is free of charge for full length movies and TV Shows. After a nearly five-month long beta version, Hulu.com was launched in 2008.

In order to enjoy videos at Hulu.com, users will need the following software installed on their computer: 1. IE 6.0 or above, Firefox 1.5 or above, or Safari 2.0 or above. 2. JavaScript and Cookies must also be enabled 3.Adobe Flash Player 9.0.115 or above. 4. Microsoft Windows XP SP2, Microsoft Windows Vista, Macintosh OS X or Linux. It streams, just like YouTube, and it's ad-supported, with bumpers and "commercial breaks," just like the TV it's trying to ape. More importantly, the streams have been exceptionally smooth.

The website is very easy to use. It only has two main menus: TV and Movie. For example, when users click the “TV” button, it will show submenus: Channels, popular Episodes, Popular Clips, Popular Shows and Browse. For Channels, it presents TV shows including all types such as Action and Adventure, Animation and Cartoons, Comedy, Drama, and Family etc. There are updated lists of the most popular and the highest rated videos, so uses can keep up with what other people are watching. When looking for a specific show, users can search by name or can also look at an alphabetical list of all the shows in Hulu’s library. In addition, one of the biggest highlights of using the site is the video player. Users don’t need to download and install special video player, because the website operates directly in the web browser using flash player technology. When users are watching movies, mouse over the player and the usual controls will appear. The “embed” function allows users to set in and out points, so users can embed just a selected chunk of a video clip on their blog. The “share” function allows users to send the link to their friends. The “timeline” function allows users to watch a movie at any time point. “Lower lights” dims the whitespace around the player to dark gray. And “Pop out” turns the video player into a pop-up. On the full-screen mode, the site allow users to watch at full screen. Even users can leave comments under the player. For metadata, the website provides a thumbnail picture, name, time and channel for each item.

All in all, Hulu.com is a video presentation site with a good variety of TV shows and movies to start. Hulu’s user experience is better, and everything loads and plays very quickly. The audiences for this collection include all TV and movies lovers.

Books from the Past

2009-03-31T13:01:00.001-07:00

Books from the Past (http://www.booksfromthepast.org/) is a digital library based in Wales that provides “an on-line collection of books of national cultural interest which have long been out of print, and are unlikely to be reprinted by traditional means.” It is the result of collaboration between Culturenet Cymru and the Welsh Books Council. At first glance, one may think that the digital library will not offer anything exceptional, but after spending some time with it, it is quite apparent that Books from the Past is a very sophisticated and well-designed digital library.

Selection Decisions: This digital library has some of the most thorough and transparent collection documentation that I have encountered. Its “About” page reveals the step-by-step thought processes that Culturenet Cymru and the Welsh Books Council had in designing the collection, including the respective goals that each organization had from the project’s inception. The organizations were very thorough in considering standards that would make the collection broadly available, freely accessible, and sustainable over time. The organizations understand the value of collaboration and hope to invite similar institutions to join them in their partnership. They also understand the importance of content selection as the project increases in size, so the Welsh Books Council has identified at least 200 books of educational and cultural value to be eventually included in the collection.

The website’s “Help” page thoroughly describes almost everything a user would need to know about navigating the website and utilizing its features. It discusses how to select English or Welsh for the language of the website, how to choose a book, how to navigate through a book, how to search within a book, how to change the default search settings, how to search the entire collection, and how to download materials from the site.

Metadata: One of the most impressive features of the website is its discussion of metadata standards and other standards on the “About” page. The designers decided to use XML for metadata and encoded text, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for text encoding, the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) for the structural metadata, and the Greenstone Archive Format (GAF) for xml-html transformations. The reasoning for each of these decisions is clearly stated on the website and provides a solid basis for the long-term preservation of the collection’s digital objects.

The collection’s metadata also allows for searchability within each book and across the entire digital collection. Users can search by book title, author, subject, publisher, date of publication, period, or language. Users can also browse books by image or by text. The designers have even considered unique challenges that arise when searching in Welsh, including the ability to include diacritics (“mark[s] added to a letter or symbol indicating a change in its usual pronunciation”) or mutations (“instances where the initial letter of a word changes depending on its grammatical context.”)

Object Characteristics: I was impressed with the discussion on the “About” page under the heading “The case for PDF.” The designers of the digital library did not simply decide to include PDF images because it was easy and popular. They really thought through the pros and cons of using PDFs for the files and determined that PDFs would not fully meet their needs. Accordingly, they provided functionality that would allow users to download images in PDF, ASCII, or RTF files. They scanned the images at 300dpi in 24 bit color, and they use TIFF for master file images and JPEG (SPIFF)/GIF for web display files. Their selection of the METS standard allowed them to tie the digital objects together for each book in a coherent manner. At this time, there are books in Welsh and English, but there are not translations for either type. This could be a potential area for enhancing the digital objects at some point in time.

Intended Audience: The intended audiences are primarily educators, scholars, and students since the books were selected for their educational and cultural value. However, it could be of potential interest for anyone interested in rare books or Welsh culture.

2009-03-31T11:27:00.000-07:00

The Mildred Wirt Benson Collection at the University of Iowa

Mildred Wirt Benson was the original Carolyn Keene, pseudonym for all authors of the Nancy Drew mysteries. She attended the University of Iowa in the 1920's, determined her whole life to be an incredible writer. UI collected what remained of her personal collection in the 1990's, soon before she died in 2002. Sadly, Benson sold, threw away or burned most of her documents and correspondence, but the library has the entire collection of her remaining writings. They are housed in an archive of UI's special Iowa Authors collection.
This collection is complete in its mission to digitize all of her published works, including articles published as a student journalist, her thesis, almost 100 short stories, and 135 books. Each is legible and searchable through OCR technology. The standard search function is very useful for browsing, but the advanced search could be used for scholarly research and even allows you to search across collections.
The metadata for each entry includes standard information such as title, creator, and publication information. It also includes archival collection information and rights management of the particular object (which is useful because some of this collection is under copyright and some isn't). They are careful to include information about the scanning process, including the name of the machine, the date of scan, and who to contact with questions or a request for the tiff image.
There are useful links throughout the metadata so it is easy to browse through the different layers of the administrative details. On the UI Digital Library main page, they include links to tutorials for using the digital services provided, including a variety of 60-second tutorials.
The most interesting part of the collection to me is the Memory Book. Each page of the book is shown as a whole and in zoomed parts, which is useful since almost the entire scrapbook is made up of newspaper clippings. It also includes the loose items - everything from tickets to a piece of string. This scrapbook is the most personally revealing part of the collection as most of her notes and correspondence are gone; it shows how much pride Wirt took in her journalism career, what events were memorable, and awards she won for swimming.
Although the photographs of her late flying career were a close second for favorite...

Wiliam Blake Archive

2009-03-30T18:17:00.001-07:00

The William Blake Archive is sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the Carolina Digital Library and Archives at UNC-Chapel Hill. Both clearly have very high digitization standards and access to amazing materials. This is certainly not the only Blake Archive but it seems to be much more extensive than most, including the New York Public Library's project which features three of Blake's works.

The digitization initiative includes Blake's illuminated books, commercial book illustrations, separate prints and prints in a series, drawings and paintings, and manuscripts and typographic works. The about page is the most complete information page I've seen on a digitization initiative. Viewers are given thorough information on the people actually involved in the program and details of the long-term plan. They began with the illuminated manuscripts in the early '90s and have been adding to the collection since. One could spend a couple hours just reading over the supplemental and background information provided for the project. You can even take a virtual tour of the collection to learn about all the features included.

The images themselves can be accessed two main ways. The only real downside of this project is that there is no way to browse thumbnails. You can select a medium and then a work through either the index or navigator pages (the navigator is actually a pop-out window). There is also a search feature but users aren't able to enter their own search terms when searching for images. (There is the option of searching the text using your own search terms however). For an image search, the site provides a list of search terms available and lets you select several of them to find images.

Once an image is accessed, there are several ways to view it. One drop down menu offers an image enlargement, illustration description, or textual transcription. The image enlargement opens another window and lets users zoom in once more to see more detail. The textual transcription will give the original text plus an English translation if necessary. The illustration description essentially provides the same information as the inote button. When a user selects inote, another window opens with the image split into several sections and a menu to select each of the sections. Once selected, the user is given a description of the action and content of that frame. The info button below the image provides detailed metadata for the featured image. They include the three levels of resolution available, information about the works creation and the source of the image. They even include information about the scanner used for the images.

Although I first saw this project five years ago, it is one of the most exciting digital projects I've encountered. They provide more than sufficient data on the project and its implementation as well as giving detailed information on the images themselves. The only thing I think would improve the site would be thumbnail previews rather than textual lists of the items in a work.

Freshwater and Marine Image Bank

2009-03-30T09:17:00.000-07:00

http://content.lib.washington.edu/fishweb/index.html

The Freshwater and Marine Image Bank was established by the Fisheries-Oceanography library at the University of Washington. Their goal was to create a comprehensive digital collection of historic fish pictures for the world to enjoy, and to maintain it well into the future (at least as long as people have the desire to look at fish, which knowing people, will be quite a while). The collection consists of approximately 19,000 images captured from a wide variety of publications printed between 1735 and 1924. The idea being, of course, to focus on images that would be in the public domain. On to presentation and metadata!

Searching by keyword or browsing by predetermined classifications both bring you to the same thumbnail view screen of relevant images. Each image is listed along with it's title, which unfortunately isn't standardized at all. Some are scientific, Latin names of flora and fauna depicted, some are descriptions of the image, and some are even written in the language of the image's country of origin! It can make things confusing at times. Clicking on the thumbnail brings up a larger version of the image with all of the metadata, which is extensive (date, author, publisher's information, copyright information, etc.) Much better than the thumbnail view, at any rate.

All in all, the site is easy to navigate despite the large size of the collection, and there's plenty to look at for the aspiring marine researcher. The public domain focus also makes it a great source for students working on presentations or projects. The images are all of high quality, and relevant metadata is provided. Overall, one of the least silly and best put together sites I've looked at so far.

19th century American Sheet Music Digitization Project

2009-03-29T19:42:00.000-07:00

http://www.lib.unc.edu/music/eam/index.html

19th century American Sheet Music Digitization Project was conducted by The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill which, at present, has a collection of descriptive bibliographic listings for 82 accessible volumes (3300 pieces) along with digital images for the contents of the most volumes. The collection is in consisting of 125 binders’ collections and the owner’s name was embossed on the cover of bounded volume. The collection “illuminates the culture of the eastern and southern U.S. during a most significant time in the region’s history”. It is a fabulous source for research on multiple disciplines such as music, history, art, sociology and American Studies.
Users may access to the collection either by searching by keyword, by title keyword and by composer or browsing the collection by title, by composer, by series and only by entries with images.
Users may browse the collection in series volumes. Because each volume embodies its owner’s taste and philosophical learning therefore description would be given in volume. All the sheet images are represented in thumbnail. There are enrich descriptive information go along with the images of music sheet. The information includes composer, short title, full title, publisher, publisher number, pages, language, cover inscription, series. Always there are hyperlinks on first 2 or 3 entries, and by clicking the links there are new relative searching results come out.
The sheet images are printable for educational use.