IST 677, Fall 2009

The Crime in New York 1850-1950

2009-11-22T23:58:00.001-05:00

Project name and URL
The Crime in New York 1850-1950
http://www.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/crimeinny/

Organization name
Lloyd Sealy Library, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
http://www.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/

Description of what was digitized
The project consists of two collections, the Crime in New York 1850-1950 Image Collection and the Crime in New York 1850-1950 Trial Transcripts Collection. The photographs digitized came from two papers in the Lloyd Sealy Library's special collection, including items such as crime scene photos and identification photos. The trial transcripts digitized were also part of the the special collection of Lloyd Sealy Library. The digitization of trail transcripts was done by iArchives.

Audience for the project (stated or assumed)
The project aims to provide information on the crime history in New York City. Any one interested can access it.

Type of project background information available on the site
The website provide short description on the sources of the project, funding and so forth.

Additional comments
Comparing to other web portal of digitization projects, this website is extremely uncomplicated and low-tech, but it is definitely useful. Users can search the image database or browse by title, description, source, and dates, and the available browsing options of trail transcripts are defendants, defense attorneys, judges, prosecuting attorneys, and charges. The meta data is simple, too. This a database interface cut out for criminal justice study. There is no terms of use or privacy policy on the website.

JSC Digital Image Collection

2009-11-22T22:51:00.001-05:00

Project name and URL
Johnson Space Center Digital Image Collection
http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/

Organization name

This collection is maintained by NASA through the Johnson Space center

Description of what was digitized
NASA has taken over 9000 press release photos spanning the entire existence of the American space program.

Audience for the project
The main audience for the project is the general public, anyone who has an interest in history and/or the space program.

Type of project background information available on the site
There is a brief project synopsis on the main page, as well as a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page.

Additional comments

My excitement for finding this digital library was quickly abated when I made the realization that the images included in the project are only offered at a low resolution (640 by 480).

I found the "browse" search option to be more conducive to finding images than the search option, mainly because the "browse" feature allowed you to choose via the specific space missions (Apollo, SkyLab, etc).

Aside from the limited picture size, this digital library is still a valuable collection of pictures that allows the public a glimpse into the space program throughout the program's existence.

Million Book Project

2009-11-22T22:49:00.002-05:00

Project name and URL
Million Book Project
http://www.ulib.org/

Organization name
Led by Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science and University, the project has many partners in United States, China, Egypt, and India.

Description of what was digitized
Books in any language. The digitization of the first million books, less than 1% of the books published worldwide, was achieved in 2006-2007. The project avoids digitizing copyrighted materials, but there are many copyrighted items in the database with limited access.

Audience for the project (stated or assumed)
The project aims to preserve and provide access to all human knowledge for men and women worldwide.

Type of project background information available on the site
The funding of the project was from multiple sources, including money and manpower, that support the 50 copy centers functioning worldwide. One notable thing of the Million Book Project is that it accept gift that guarantee specified collection to be digitized. Most of the information is the concept and vision of the project, not much detail on how it works.

Additional comments
This is the only one site of the five digital library web portals I have problem accessing with Google Chrome. Universal Library web portal provides powerful search tools and intuitive interface, but the response time is extremely slow, possibly due to the high usage rate and large database. This is a project with great vision, with digitized items from all language and partners worldwide. An institution from Egypt is the most recent partner of the Million Book Project. It still got a long way to go.

Oregon Blue Book

2009-11-22T20:59:00.001-05:00

Project Name and URL:

Oregon Blue Book located at http://bluebook.state.or.us/misc/about/about.htm

Organization Name:

This project is compiled by the Oregon State Archives.

Description of what was Digitized:
A Governmental fact book found in one easy to use database and also holds a large variety of Oregon state history subjects in article and image formats.

Audience for the Project:

The Audience of this project is going to mostly be those wanting governmental information on the state of Oregon being people living in Oregon or those moving to Oregon. The website can also appeal to researchers interested in general Oregon facts.
Type of Project Background Information Available on Site:
The background the website contains looks to be rather plain. There is a small paragraph dedicated to their about, another showing the projects goals and features, and then a small section looking to get viewers to explore the website more in depth.

Metadata present:

Not a whole lot of metadata present in the factbook section of the project, while the section dedicated to the organization behind Oregon culture, arts, education has the organizations emails, phone, physical address, as well as their web address for users that are interested in exploring that website on some form of Oregon life.

Additional Information:

There is a large amount of information about Oregon’s government at the local, state, and national levels. The website itself would be a great asset to anyone doing research on modern Oregon’s government or the culture of Oregon. It seems like one big database dedicated to advertising the sights and sounds of Oregon to attract more people to coming to Oregon. There is a nice feature that allows you to view Oregon’s most scenic spots throughout the state in scenic images.

The New Georgia Encyclopedia

2009-11-22T20:30:00.001-05:00

Project Name and URL:

The New Georgia Encyclopedia located at http://www.newgeorgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Home.jsp

Organization Name:

This project is put on by Georgia Humanities Council, the University of Georgia, the University System of Georgia/GALILEO, and the Office of the Governor.

Description of what was Digitized:

The about NGE project page explains that the content of this digital repository is revolved around all aspects of Georgia in the format of documents and images. Some of its content subjects are people, places, events, historical themes, institutions and many others related to various topics.

Audience for the Project:

The audience of this project is the general public as well as scholars interested in anything related to Georgia and its rich history going back to colonial times.
Type of Project Background Information Available on Site:
The amount of background information is vast and the website does a good job of informing anyone interested virtually everything involved in putting this project together. The About NGE is equipped with its own subsections from the FAQ to Contributor Guidelines for those wishing to provide content to the NGE. The entire layout of the website is much more conducive to a positive experience with the site, more so than some of the other projects that provide an extensive project background.

How are the Digital Assets Presented:

The digital assets are presented through a basic 3 box search engine, selecting subject, a search term entered by the patron, and the search restriction the patron wishes to use. The content itself is neatly presented with authoritative information presented and a nice feature that highlights your original search term in the article. Some of the content proves to be in great detail allowing users to get what they would expect out of encyclopedia similar to Encarta or Britannica.

Metadata present:

The metadata contained in this project is less than other projects, but keep in mind that it is an encyclopedia. There is the main background information on the subject, followed by suggested readings and additional resources.

Additional Information:

There is a quick fact page on Georgia for basic background information on the state itself. The amount of content is large and it is not presented in a way that is going to feel overwhelming. It is concise yet informative enough to provide all the factual information one would need for a basic report. It also has on its main page sidebar a section dedicated to the encyclopedia’s most popular articles. It is an interesting addition to an already strong online encyclopedia that keeps the site well rounded and a fun page to visit and explore.

Tundra Times Photograph Project

2009-11-22T20:03:00.003-05:00

Project Name and URL:

Tundra Times Photograph Project located at http://tundratimes.ilisagvik.cc/

Organization Name:

This small project is put on by the Ilisagvik College located at the Tuzzy Consortium Library.

Description of what was Digitized:

The Tundra Times was a biweekly newspaper from 1962-1997 that gave information to natives that were looking to empower their native people. This project looks to take a leading reporter on Alaskan Native life, and make its photographs that were placed in the newspaper during the course of its life open to the public in a digital repository.

Audience for the Project:

The Audience for this project could vary from old employees of The Tundra Times who are interested in their old photographs, also Natives or those interested in the Native movement and the publications that supported it. It appeals to the general public as well as modern researchers on Native tribes in Alaska.

Type of Project Background Information Available on Site:

The website contains a helpful history on the project itself, their goals as an organization and where they are on their project. I was surprised of the exciting story about Native oppression and the rise of a newspaper that helped bring that oppression to the forefront of Alaskan news. It all makes for a neat history of a project that goes beyond just digitization and preservation and allows for patrons to really connect with the projects content.

Metadata present:

The Metadata is somewhat unique because of the tribal content contained. Some of their unique metadata is that the images have descriptors like ethnicity of the photographer of the image, the caption from the original newspaper production, the number on their Free CDs that they give out containing all the images.

Additional Information:

The search bar is old fashioned and the website looks like it was made in the 90s, but that does not detract from the content. Some of the photographs contained in the digital repository tell their own unique stories revolving around Native political rights. Each image also asks if the patron viewing the image can answer any of the missing data on the image, which I think is a very cool feature.

Vincent van Gogh's letters

2009-11-22T19:35:00.011-05:00

URL: http://vangoghletters.org/vg/

Organization: This digital project "is a co-production of the Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute". It is a digital companion edition to the book: Vincent van Gogh - The Letters: The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition, edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, and Nienke Bakker.

Description: This is the latest in a long line of iterations of Van Gogh's letters. Here you will find "all 902 letters from and to Van Gogh, richly annotated and illustrated, with new transcriptions and translations". Every surviving letter written and received by Van Gogh is represented. "This edition has taken every possible advantage of the research into Van Gogh’s works and letters that has been done in more than a century. The self-evident endeavour to draw upon and present as much relevant material as possible is coupled with the expectation that the use of new digital media will open up the complete corpus to a much greater extent than was possible in the past". (Well put.)

Audience: "In traditional scholarly publishing terms, this web edition is a study edition. That is to say it is intended for Van Gogh specialists, art historians and literary scholars studying Van Gogh’s letters or work, and students of art history, the history of literature and allied disciplines. Of course the internet is an open medium accessible to anyone, but the decision to produce this as a scholarly edition implies that the level of the content of the textual apparatus is tailored to students and people with an academic background." Roger, that. I would add that this digital project is also worth consulting by anyone interested in digitization and the high standards that can be achieved with massive investments of time, money, and effort.

Project background: This impressively slick digital version of the new definitive collection of Van Gogh's letters didn't happen overnight. The Van Gogh museum started to plan the analogue edition back in 1990. "It was initially estimated that it would take three people five years to complete the work. A steering committee was set up to monitor progress and authorize significant decisions that affected the handling of the text". Well, 20 years worth of inventorying, reviewing, translating, researching, annotating, editing, and designing work later, it seemed like the fruits of all that labor might be constrained by the physical confines of printed volumes. Fortuitously, "changes in the world of publishing and the rapidly growing potential offered by electronic media had caused the steering committee to reconsider, and it was decided to publish the large, all-encompassing edition digitally". It appears that no expense was spared on the digital version which truly "does greater justice to the immense volume of material and the complex of interrelated layers of information, and gives visitors to the site more options and more ways to use the edition".

Features: Behold the letters, in chronological order. You can also view the letters arranged in 16 different time periods, which gives a birds-eye view of the more detailed chronology of Van Gogh's life that can be clicked through by year. Taking the leisurely route through the chronology affords the user brief descriptions of events of Van Gogh's life each year and includes hyperlinks to related letters. It's a seamless conflation of context and digital content that is too rarely seen in digital projects. Discovering this site felt like finding the Holy Grail.

Letters can also be viewed by correspondent and place. You can also see a list of all the letters that contain sketches with one mouse-click. Letters can be searched by keyword and letter number. If the Advanced Search interface seems daunting, you can click on a question mark icon at every field to bring up explanations of how they operate. The "Quick Guide" on the "Help information" page looks like a lot to comprehend at first, but it's actually pretty straightforward and doesn't confuse the issue with movies or other animation.

Viewing a letter itself is quite a marvel. A letter level view has 3 panes. The center pane contains basic bibliographic details about the letter and can be expanded to display more information. The side panes display the letter's content. By default, one side is the translated transcription and the other side is the transcription of the letter in the language in which it was written. There are options to view the transcriptions of the letter with the original line endings preserved, you can view high-resolutions of every page of each letter, you can view the annotations for the letter, and you can view any artwork that the letter includes. You see any two of these views of the letter in different panes at the same time. If you click on the facsimile of the letter itself, you can magnify each page many times. This operation is a little slow, but that's a minor issue with such an amazing level of almost effortless detail you can call up with this interface.

Every part of the text of the printed book is also provided. The in-text citations are hyperlinks that expand in a center pane and any letters noted in the text link directly to the digitized versions. This digital project is the pinnacle of what digitization can be. I suddenly want to learn more about Vincent van Gogh. And with this sublime digital project at my fingertips, I can do exactly that, and so can anyone. On the one hand, the people responsible for this awesome acme of digitization deserve high praise. On the other hand, they have set the digitization bar pretty damn high and may very well have ruined most other perfectly acceptable examples of digital libraries for me.

(Well, at least I saved the best for last. This concludes my postings for this blog.)

Museum of Houston

2009-11-22T19:26:00.003-05:00

Project Name and URL:

Museum of Houston located at http://www.museumofhouston.org/

Organization Name:

Greater Houston Preservation Alliance and Rice University as well as other organizations in the Houston Bay-Area produce this digitization project with the objective of preserving Houston history.

Description of what was Digitized:

Houston area historical documents, photographs, maps, video and audio recordings as well, located in one location; the Museum of Houston. Content is provided by the cities educational and cultural institutions and is from the beginning of the city’s development to modern times.

Audience for the project:

The audience of this project is the public, but more specifically anyone who is interested in detailed Houston history rather than just a broader Texas History that some of the other Texas digitization projects contain. It says on their about page students, researchers, those interested in photography of Houston, and the general public, each with its own description of how they can utilize the site.

Type of Project Background Information Available on Site:

There is not a whole lot of information on the about page about the project itself. It does mention several websites and facilities that currently lend their content to the Museum of Houston for digitization in the repository, but not so much information about the project in great detail. There is a nice section on the technology behind the project which states the project’s scanning standards and image resolution policy which is something I have not noticed in many other projects.

How are the digital assets presented:

The Museum of Houston has a very cool browse section where you can browse the content using a who, what, where, when, and search bars that help narrow searches by those categories or just an overall broad search. Unfortunately there is no refine search, thus making searching for specific content can be hit or miss. Each document, photograph, map, or video comes with its own descriptors that explain some of the basic information about what the patron is viewing.

Metadata Present:

The metadata specifically states that it follows the Dublin Core Metadata standards run by another organization The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, who strives to standardize metadata. The metadata presented in the site are the basics including rights, subject terms, abstract, date created, location, and holding location.

Additional Information:

The site itself is a concise repository in detail, while the content is very hearty containing over four million photographs presented through the Houston Public Library. I appreciate the search uniqueness, with a range that is small enough to actually make several of the choices in the who, what, where, when boxes useful in narrowing a search.

The MacKinney Collection of Medieval Medical Illustrations

2009-11-22T15:15:00.002-05:00

Project name: The MacKinney Collection of Medieval Medical Illustrations

Organization name: University of North Carolina Library

What was digitized: Slides of illustrations from medieval medical texts and manuscripts.

Audience: An audience isn't specified, although the collection would be particularly helpful to students and researchers in the field of medieval studies.

Project background: The slides were digitized over a three month period in 2007. Five slides were scanned at a time at 4,000 pixels/inch with a Nikon SuperCool SCU 9000. Using Adobe Photoshop, the images were then sharpened, cropped, and color adjusted. Such adjustments were made so that the condition of the original slide could be accurately represented while maintaining a natural appears for users to view on computer screens. The original slides had not deteriorated physically, but there was visible discoloration. The color shifts ranged from moderate to severe, and so were corrected by Photoshop when possible.

Other information: The Library only owns the slides, not the actual manuscripts themselves. Dr. MacKinney was a medieval scholar and professor who built up a photographic collection of medieval medical illustrations during his studies, and so the source manuscripts are from various locations around the world. The source repository of each image is noted by the library, and users can choose to view the images by these locations.

Original Ektachrome slides make up most of the colleciton, and cannot be reproduced from a negative. Digitization allows for the protection of the original while also providing users with replicas of the slides as they currently are. The slides from this collection are actually a duplicate set; the master set is held by the National Library of Medicine of Bethesda.

The Portal to Texas History

2009-11-22T15:10:00.001-05:00

Project Name and URL:

The Portal to Texas History located at http://texashistory.unt.edu/

Organization Name:

This project is founded by University of North Texas Libraries' Digital Projects Unit.

Description of what was digitized:

Texas History Materials in the form of genealogies and pictures of relatives to historical maps.

Audience for the project:

The project is geared towards patrons who have an interest in Texas History or specific content formats like maps, photos, cities, etc.

Type of Project background Information available on site:

There is a small about us page that contains a basic synopsis of the type of content and where the content came from. It is a collection from Texas libraries, museums, genealogical societies, and private family collections which have come together in an all inclusive database. It is very similar to the Texas Heritage Online in its concept and in practice the two sites have very similar search bars and it is a bit of déjà vu. The project itself started in 2002 and really gained momentum in 2004 combining five different partners into one database. Today it has ninety-five partners and contains over 420,000 images of digitized content.

Metadata present:

It has a very basic metadata presence containing description, creator, location, creation date, partners, and the collection in their brief record. The full record contains more descriptors like language, subjects, keywords which is a help for patrons, resource type, and identifier.

Additional Information:

It has a nice section for educators on how to teach lessons revolving around the website and its content. They also have Facebook page with updates on their latest news and RSS feeds for heir information as well. These features add to an already positive environment that although it is not the grandest or most attractive site, for usability it proves to be a worthy digitization project with a nice database.

George Palmer Putnam Collection of Amelia Earhart Papers

2009-11-22T14:59:00.014-05:00

URL: http://www.lib.purdue.edu/spcol/aearhart/

Organization: "The world's largest collection of Amelia Earhart papers, photos, memorabilia and artifacts" is held by the Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives and Special Collections Research Center located in the Humanities, Social Science & Education Library which is one of the Purdue University Libraries.

Description: "The online collection includes more than 3,500 scans of photographs, maps, and documents relating to Earhart. Copies of the maps that were used on her last flight are available as well as photographs that she took while on the flight and mailed back to her husband. Earhart's medals are also available online. These include the U. S. Distinguished Flying Cross, the Lindbergh Medal, and the National Geographic Society Medal. An interactive map of Earhart's flight is included on the web site." This digital collection is part of Purdue University Libraries' e-Archives.

Audience: This digital collection was created in response to the fact that "Access to original collection is restricted due to fragility of the collection." Its contents will be of interest to anyone researching Amelia Earhart. Perhaps director Mira Nair consulted them when she was working on the critically-criticized film Amelia.

Project Background: The Purdue University Libraries e-Archives went online in 2006 "as a result of the work of the Digital Initiatives Team in the Libraries Archives and Special Collections. The team, comprised of a Digital Initiatives Librarian, a Metadata Specialist, and an Archivist, evaluated existing digital asset management systems and chose to purchase and implement CONTENTdm, the software that runs e-Archives. Based on existing standards and best practices, the team also wrote selection criteria for digitization and workflows for digital imaging and metadata creation."

Features: Well, CONTENTdm pretty much tells you what you need to know here. In other words, the contents are displayed in the usual CONTENTdm fashion, which means, if you know what you are looking for, you have a decent chance of finding it.

The collection "Home" page has some links to help users contextualize the items in the digital collection. There's a short biography which is informative, but inexplicably has not a single hyperlink to collection content in it. There is a link to an interactive map of Earhart's fateful last journey that is a good way to explore the collection. Some of the locations are hyperlinks (you have to try each one to find out which, though) that bring up a window with a description of that part of the trip and a link to photographs of that location from the collection. You can also navigate to the "Previous City" and the "Next City" on the map from this box. Unfortunately, not all of the links in these cartographically-generated pop-up windows lead to content. If there are no results for photographs of New Orleans, I don't think there should be a link for that. Also, the map is conspicuously lacking a prominent notation of the aviatrix's last known point of contact. No red X, no question mark, nothing. I think this is odd, to say the least.

Seventeen of Amelia Earhart's medals are featured on a separate page. (I do not know if this is every medal she won, but this would have been a good place to note this information.) Eight of them are presented via QuickTime viewer and can be magnified and rotated. This is an example of a very useful page. But get this: a "Quick Search" using the term "medal" brings up 274 items! Changing the search term to "medals" yields 115 items -- and...NONE of them are pictures of the actual medals! Even an Advanced Search on "Any of the words" using "medal" and "medals" "Across all fields" and restricting the search to this particular collection and the related Amelia Earhart at Purdue collection returns 19 items, but still no images of the medals themselves. This is an example of federated search failure.

Getting back to the links on the collection's "Home" page...there is one that takes you to a "Timeline" page. Why isn't every year on this page a hyperlink to a set of digital images from that year? Why?

The "About" link on the "Home" page leads to a short synopsis of the much longer, 89-page finding aid to the entire analogue archives. However, neither the summary web page nor the .pdf they took the trouble to upload has a single hyperlink to the digital collection. The page of "Other Web Sites on Amelia Earhart" is proof that the designers of the George Palmer Putnam Collection portal understand the concept of hyperlinks.

The portal is a great resource with lots of authoritative information about Amelia Earhart. But it is not a very useful way to explore the related digital images in the e-Archive. The "Home" page entices a reader with this statement: "New additions include personal correspondence, her marriage license and her prenuptial agreement" but there is not a link in the sentence to any of these recently added digital items. Even the intrepid searcher who types "prenuptial agreement" into the collection's search box will not find the idiosyncratic epistle. In other words, much like the latest movie of Amelia Earhart’s life, this digital project is a little disappointing. The portal that describes the items one might find in the digital collection smacks of wasted potential in terms of hyperlinked access points into the 2,223-item online archive.

Texas Constitutions 1824-1876

2009-11-22T13:17:00.002-05:00

Institution: Tarlton Law Library, Jamail Center for Legal Research

Digitized items: Constitutions of Texas from its most turbulent historical period

Audience: Legal scholars, historians, interested locals

Background information: A detailed history is available, charting Texas' progress from 1824 to 1876 as a part of Mexico, an independent republic, and finally an American state. Possible uses for these documents are suggested, and the history of the project itself is listed.

During this period, Texas naturally underwent a huge upheaval in its local laws, and these constitutions serve as a great indication of just what the results of such dynamic government changes can be. The documents are mostly easily legible, with typed transcriptions where legibility is questionable. The background information is excellent, and clearly a lot of thought went into the purpose of this project and who would use it. A wonderful digitization in all areas.

Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders: Crime Broadsides Collected by the Harvard Law School Library

2009-11-22T11:07:00.003-05:00

Ever heard of crime broadsides? If not, picture going to the circus and buying a commemorative program from one of the vendors outside. Now pretend that instead of watching a modern-day circus, you're actually in Britain between 1700 and 1900 and you're part of a crowd waiting to watch someone be publicly executed. The commemorative program you're holding details the condemned person's life, crimes, and sentence. That's a crime broadside.

The Harvard Law School Library claims to have one of the largest collections of crime broadsides (500+), and the entire collection is now available for viewing online at http://broadsides.law.harvard.edu/. No audience is explicitly stated for the collection, but it would certainly appeal to both historians and the generally curious. The Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders site includes fairly extensive background information on the history of crime broadsides (see Introduction, About the Collection, and Resources) and some brief information on how the collection was actually digitized. Funding was provided by the Peck Stacpoole Foundation, while conservation and digitization services were provided by divisions of the Harvard library system. For anyone interested in publishing, ordering a reproduction of, or citing a broadside, a helpful FAQ page offers guidance and contact information.

The collection can be browsed, searched by keyword, or searched by category. For the casual user, the "search by category" feature is the most interesting (and macabre). It allows users to search by crime, victim, and/or condemned (among other categories). Some of the more intriguing crime categories include body snatching, fortune-telling, and seduction, but the standard robbery, arson, and murder are also options. The search results view shows title (e.g., "Confession of Dr. Pritchard to the murder of his wife"), creator (e.g., Pritchard, Edward William), date, and a link for each result. Clicking on the link opens a new window with an on-screen image of the selected broadside, which can be zoomed in on, rotated, or converted to PDF for saving and printing.

The browse feature is less interesting for the broadside novice because rather than allowing a user to casually page through random broadsides, the feature instead requires users to "browse" through alphabetical lists of titles or names, select a record, and click on the link within the record to open a broadside. The user then must return to the results list to select another record for viewing.

I spent some time exploring how Harvard manages and delivers its digital content and was interested to read the overview of its Digital Repository Service. Given our recent discussions about digital preservation, I found this statement particularly interesting: "The DRS is both a preservation and an access repository. Its obligations include assurances that stored digital content will remain both viable and accessible into the indefinite future despite a constantly changing technological environment. All objects managed in the DRS will receive the highest level of preservation service consistent with the object’s characteristics and the current technical capabilities of the DRS and its staff." As I continue to learn about managing digital content, I will definitely return to the Harvard University Library site to remind myself of what it means to thoughtfully plan for the longevity of a digital project.

World War Poster Collection

2009-11-21T23:56:00.001-05:00

Project name and URL
World War Poster Collection
http://digital.library.unt.edu/browse/department/rarebooks/wwpc/

Organization name
This collection is part of the University of North Texas Library collection

Description of what was digitized
The University of North Texas have digitized collections of war propaganda posters from both world wars.

Audience for the project
The main audience for the project is the general public, anyone who has an interest in world war propaganda posters.

Type of project background information available on the site
There is little project background information available on the site

Additional comments

This digital collection is very detailed, each entry is not only referenced by keywords and artist, but cross referenced by subject, organization, sponsors. Each entry includes a written description of the poster, and contains details to the size of the poster as well.

The images are all scanned at high resolution and are highly detailed. The search function allows you to search full text, metadata, title, subject or creator. If the user clicks on the image in the search results, they are given the full sized image. Or they can click on the text and be brought to the main entry. At the main entry page there is also a link to the image.

Strong National Museum of Play Online Collections

2009-11-21T23:12:00.019-05:00

URL: http://www.museumofplay.org/collections/online/

Organization: The Strong National Museum of Play is located in Rochester, NY. In addition to housing the National Center for the History of Electronic Games and publishing the interdisciplinary and peer-reviewed American Journal of Play, the museum hosts one of the most fun digital collections you are likely to come across. And if that isn't enough pure, unadulterated nostalgic fun for you, the museum's National Toy Hall of Fame entire collection is also online.

Description: For a change, sufficient adjectives fail me. This collection is a 9,668 digital object trip down memory lane. The web site describes it like this: "Each of the objects featured in Online Collections includes a documentary photograph and factual information that can range from basic to extensive, including the maker, material, title, place of origin, and date. For a growing proportion of objects, you’ll also find additional information about the object’s historical context or specific significance". I say: it's awesome.

Audience: My first inclination is to say this digital project will delight anyone old enough to know how to use a computer. However, as it is under the auspices of a national museum, the contents are almost 100% all-American, so it's possible that this collection might not have global appeal. Also, while the Electronic Games gallery does feature the latest console games, previous eras are strongly represented and divided into 5-year time frames. A large part of the items in the overall collection are from times just long enough ago that the people in the class who are writing this blog will remember them fondly. Today's youngsters will recognize Elmo (wow - did you know about this?), but will probably be puzzled by a blast from the past like The Sunshine Fun Family (insert wistful sigh here). There are also plenty of very old toys, and vintage photographs, too.

Project Background: Once upon a time, someone had, like, the coolest idea EVER! Well, actually, Margaret Woodbury Strong founded the museum in 1968. In 2002, the museum acquired the National Toy Hall of Fame and has steadily evolved into a major center for the study of fun. (Can I interest you in reading the abstract for "A Digital Game Preservation White Paper"?) Although I can't find it stated explicitly, I strongly suspect that the museum's on-site 100,000 volume research library and archives was involved in the online collection that draws on the museum's catalog records. For the record, one disappointing thing is that this library does not have a bigger presence on any of the museum's web pages.

Features: The National Toy Hall of Fame page has a continuous scroll of all 44 inducted toys. If you hover over the scroll, it slows down, and clicking on one of the images brings up a brief history of the toy (or object)* and additional, non-clickable images. This page also has links to a list of the 44 toys, a FAQ page, a nomination form, and a virtual tour of the National Toy Hall of Fame gallery. (It will probably make you want to go to the museum, so click on those links carefully.)

The Online Collections main search interface could not be simpler. Each of the 5 main categories is shown in a primary-colored box ("Toys", "Dolls", "Games", "Electronic Games", and "More Play Stuff"). These 5 main categories are divided into sub-sets that make perfect sense. A breadcrumb trail means you won't get lost no matter how far you wander into the collection. The search box stays in the upper right-hand corner of whatever page you are on, but it is a little picky. For example, if you mis-remember "Candy Land" as being one word, you will be disappointed.

I'm not sure how the images in each sub-division of the main categories is arranged (and it really doesn't matter in this case, because discovery is half the fun here). Thumbnail images enlarge a little bit when you mouse over them and the name of the toy appears. Clicking on an image brings up the item record which contains information about the toy's manufacturer, material, origin, database object ID number, and date the toy was made. There is also a larger image of the toy that you can magnify to see in greater (and sometimes gently worn) detail. Some toys have additional information about them. But, of course, a picture can be worth a thousand words, right?

Another cool thing I noticed while clicking around (and around, and around) the site is that every time you click on, or refresh, one of the 5 main category pages, the images that appear over the sub-division labels change. This means that you see a lot of new toys automatically. The fun is basically exponential! Do yourself a favor and go explore this digital collection right now. I guarantee that you will have fun. And, you're welcome. :-) (But special thanks goes to the genius otherwise known as Jon Stewart who featured this amazing museum on his show.)

(*If you click on no other link in this post, please click on this one. It's too fabulous for words.)

Civil War Diaries and Letters

2009-11-21T21:56:00.003-05:00

Project name and URL
Civil War Diaries and Letters
http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cwd/"

Organization name
This collection is a University of Iowa Libraries collection

Description of what was digitized
The University of Iowa has collected materials from Iowa citizens that were also soldiers during the civil war and digitized them. Pictures, letters, full and partial diaries are scanned in and completely searchable.

Audience for the project
The main audience for the project is the general public, anyone who has an interest in civil war materials.

Type of project background information available on the site
There is a brief project synopsis on the collection main page.

Additional comments

This is a small collection of materials (I think a total of 53 items). On the main page, they provide users with "Sample Searches" which do a good job of acting like a menu system, as all the "samples" cover the entire scope of the collection. That's not to say the search function is not necessary, just that they've given users a good idea as to what the limitations of the collection are.

For each entry there is a toolbar which provides users the options to fit the image to the page, rotate the image or zoom in and out. The toolbar is simple and easy to use, images load quickly with very little lag time.

The National Library of Ireland's Digital Photographs Collection

2009-11-21T20:49:00.005-05:00

Project Name: Digital Photographs Collection

Organization Name: National Library of Ireland

Description of what was digitized: This project includes over 20,000 glass plate negatives which were digitized from the following collections currently existing at the National Library of Ireland: Poole Whole plate, Independent H, Lawrence Royal and part of the Lawrence Cabinet collection.

The Poole collection comprises 5,119 glass plate negatives and was created by the family firm of A.H. Poole in Waterford between 1884-1954. The majority of images in the collection are studio portraits but the Poole Whole Plate subset which consists of 5,119 images, reflects the diversity of the collection with studio portraits, social and political events and also images of architecture and industry in the south east of Ireland.

The Independent Newspaper collection of some 3,000 images, is made up of glass plates, plastic negatives and a small number of prints. The Independent H collection is a subset of the collection and contains 3,250 glass plates negatives dating from 1912-1936. It provides a record of many aspects of 20th century Irish life, and is particularly strong in the coverage of politics and sport in Ireland.

The Lawrence Collection consists of 12,824 glass plate negatives from 1870-1914. The images were produced commercially and capture topographical scenes of that period throughout Ireland. The entire Lawrence Royal collection (10,784 plates) and part of the Lawrence Cabinet collection (2,040 plates) are available here to view online.

All these images are accessible here at a low resolution with basic information, including title, date and location where available.

Audience of the Project: As one of the roles of national libraries is to strive principally to collect and preserve the nation's literature, their role also includes to promote the national culture and heritage to all the peoples they serve. Although it is not stated, this project is not intended for a specific group of users, instead for those who are interested in learning about the historical aspect of Ireland through its pictures.

Type of project background information available on this site: The "About" section of this project explains that in 2007 the National Library undertook a major enterprise to digitize its collections of glass plate negatives. No information is provided about funding and/or how long this project took place as well as who was involved in developing it.

How the Digital assets presented? The National Library of Ireland's Digital Photographs project was developed using the CONTENTdm platform. The functionality commonly offered by this software is found as part of this project; additionally, proper links to the Copyright office of the NLI as well as contact information to the reference desk was provided to request permission to reproduce material included in this project. The landing page provides the user with the option to provide an open ended search or to directly browse each one of the collections of this project.

What metadata is present: The metadata of the digitized photographs contain basic information, including an identifier number, title, creator, date, source, coverage, rights and collection name. The National Library, when describing the project, commented that the information accompanying a number of the images has not yet been enhanced that in practice means that some captions, which were transferred directly from original indexes/ lists, are very brief and sometimes inaccurate. My searches confirmed that is the case with many items in the collection. After having performed a search and an item selected, the images are displayed at full size. There is not an option to zoom in or out, or have them displayed outside the platform.

What additional information is presented and is it easy to use? The collection includes the necessary information for anyone to understand what it is about. Additional information about its funding, its timeline as well as plans for its future would have been neat to have included. Instead an open ended comment that the National Library is going to continue working on implementing future collections is posted.

As far as the implementation of CONTENTdm, it was done nicely and its customization follows the palette of colours which are standard to the web page of the National Library of Ireland. I found pleasing the fact that copies of the any of the items showcased in the Digital Photographs could be ordered directly from the library, and that patrons could use their own digital cameras to photograph material from the Library's collections (printed and manuscript).

Digital Image Collection (Western Illinois University)

2009-11-21T16:25:00.003-05:00

Project name and URL
Digital Image Collection (Western Illinois University)
http://collections.carli.illinois.edu/cdm4/index_wiu_digimgc.php?CISOROOT=/wiu_digimgc

Organization name
Western Illinois University

Description of what was digitized
This is a digital library of images from central Illinois, with emphasis on Western Illinios University, Macomb, IL, and McDonough county

Audience for the project
The audience for this project is anyone who is interested in pictures of small town america, scholars and historians of the early twentieth century.

Type of project background information available on the site
There is minimal information about this collection, just a brief blurb on the project main page. It is connected to several other collections throughout Illinois, however.

Additional comments

This small collection of photographs helps tell the story of a small college town in Illinois and how it has changed over the previous century. One thing I really liked about this database is that it was clearly put together by knowledgeable people-- as many of the photographs have meaningful blurbs describing the pictures. And in the case of stores that have moved, there is also previous locations listed, and other little trivia tidbits when necessary.

The search function is rudimentary, and unless you knew what exactly you were looking for wouldn't be much help. When you "browse" the collection, the files are all listed in alphabetical order. This doesn't help much, as there is very little intelligence to the file name. The files are just numbers, and are seemingly in randomly. That is, the pictures themselves aren't related to each other.

Still, for someone looking for photographs of a small town grocery store, or old university pictures, this is a decent collection.

NYS Aerial Photographs (Cornell)

2009-11-21T16:15:00.006-05:00

New York State Aerial Photographs

URL: http://library24.library.cornell.edu:8280/luna/servlet/CORNELL-AER~2~2

Organization Name: Cornell University

Description of What's Been Digitized:

The collection consists of 3,390 aerial photographs of New York State. The photographs range in date from 1938 to 1991 and five counties--Cayuga, Tompkins, Onondaga, Wayne, and Cortland--are represented in the collection.

Assumed Audience:

I presume the collection primarily appeals to researchers, historians, and photographers.

Background Information:

The site contains very little background or supplemental information--perhaps because the collection is relatively straightforward; however, there is mention of how the project was funded. Production was financed under a Cornell University Library Faculty Grant.

Presentation:

NYS Aerial Photographs may be browsed in its entirety (browse all), by county, or by date. In addition, there is an advanced search option that allows users to keyword search the collection. Users also have the ability to expand their search beyond NYS Aerial Photographs to include 27 other Cornell digital collections--a nice feature.

Initially, users are presented with a series of thumbnail images. When one hovers over a thumbnail, a pop-out media summary containing basic metadata appears--this is an important feature as the thumbnail images are more or less indecipherable from one another (at least to my untrained eye). When the user selects a thumbnail, she's presented with an enlarged image of the photograph--there's a pretty serious zoom function. An extensive list of metadata is available for each image in the left-hand toolbar.

Metadata:

The following metadata is available: collection, accession number, date made, classification, county, display site, state, description, repository, institution, rights, image ID, resolution size, format, media type, file name, width, and height.

Global Performing Arts Database

2009-11-21T16:11:00.014-05:00

URL: http://www.glopad.org/pi/en/index.php

Organization: The Global Performing Arts Database (GloPAD) is a project of the Global Performing Arts Consortium (GloPAC) and the Cornell University Library.

Description: "(GloPAC) is an international organization of institutions and individuals committed to using innovative digital technologies to create easily accessible, multimedia, and multilingual information resources for the study and preservation of the performing arts." GloPAC created and maintains GloPAD which contains images, video and audio clips, and other digital objects related to performing arts from around the world. It also contains authoritative information about people, pieces, performances, productions, and places in a number of languages to facilitate research on performing arts. The digital items stored in GloPAD are intended to supply content for Performing Arts Resource Centers (PARCs). The PARC is another concept GloPAC is developing, designed to be "Web-based learning environments," each with its own "specific focus, which may be geographic (Japan), temporal (turn of the 20th century), ethnic (Afro-American), thematic (feminist theatre), or audience-oriented (teen PARC)".

Audience: GloPAD is ostensibly for anyone interested in performing arts, but the content appears to be largely historical in nature, so will probably be used mostly by those researching the past. The first, prototype PARC is the Japanese Performing Arts Resource Center (JPARC), so there are a lot of records pertaining to Japanese performing arts in GloPAD. The level of detail in individual records also indicates that content is geared toward adult scholars and researchers.

Project Background: In 2002, through the Cornell University Library, GloPAC received an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant to create GloPAD. A web interface was created, and two other related databases were merged and restructured to support the metadata standards GloPAC developed as part of GloPAD's mission. The development of the Metadata Standards GloPAD uses was an important part of the project. An interesting essay describes why standardizing performing arts metadata was crucial. The resulting schema is considered a marked improvement in describing the myriad elements relating to performances worldwide, and will be revised and expanded as GloPAD continues to be developed. At least, according to the web site: "GloPAD is in a continual process of development". However, the "Current Development Team" page has the copyright statement listed as "1998-2006", and the initial $470,000 grant provided funding only through September 2005. While GloPAD is being maintained by Cornell, it is unclear if the project is still cultivating participants.

Features: The "Home" page is simple and shows the categories of searches that can be performed. Several "Suggested Searches" are listed under each category. These are hyperlinks to the specific search results and have been chosen because they are "examples that will return large sets of records", according to the "Search Tips" page. The "Using GloPAD" page gives useful tips on viewing records, using the copyright information in records, and multilingual searching. The site has a few short screencast movies that go into more detail about how to use the database. Statements on the "Using GloPAD" and "Tools" pages suggest that more advanced searching features were planned, but their continued absence is another indication that the project may be in a state of limbo. Indeed, most of the current funding seems to be aimed at the JPARC.

Performing a search brings up a record, or set of results. An individual record may also contain links to "Associated Items" which lead to other records. Result sets display up to 15 at a time, but what order they are in is not at all clear. If you find an item you want to return to, the best thing to do is to take note of the "GloPAD ID" number because results pages are sort of slow to load, and there is no way to skip ahead to a certain page of results.

I think that, in addition to consolidating far-flung performing arts historical ephemera and developing a global metadata standard for performances, GloPAD was designed to be a trusted digital repository for material from other institutions that have performing arts-related items which are not otherwise easily accessible. For example, may of the 89 items retrieved in the "San Francisco" search are from the Performing Arts Library in the Museum of Performance & Design. Located in San Francisco (and formerly known as the San Francisco Performing Arts Library Museum, or SFPALM, a change not noted in GloPAD records), this museum is a treasure trove of the city's rich performing arts history. While it has apparently recently decided to expand its focus internationally, the museum is quite small (the 3.5 million items it claims to have must include subscription database material because I've been there and there is just no way...) and it does not have any digital exhibitions or collections on its own web site. GloPAD is a way for similar institutions to afford the world glimpses into their holdings without having to create independent digital projects and programs from scratch. As a passionate patron of the arts, I hope that JPARC proves GloPAC's concept and that GloPAD content can be expanded to encompass more contemporary performances.

ICDL--International Children's Digital Library

2009-11-21T14:07:00.002-05:00

Organization name: The International Children's Digital Library Foundation, a non-profit organization is dedicated to the mission of supporting "the world's children in becoming effective members of the global community - who exhibit tolerance and respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas -- by making the best in children's literature available online free of charge. . . by building a digital library of outstanding children's books from around the world and supporting communities of children and adults in exploring and using this literature through innovative technology designed in close partnership with children for children."

Description of what was digitized: The goal of the Foundation is to digitize and make freely available at least 10,000 books in at least 100 languages from throughout the world. According to statistics on the site, to date 4346 books in 54 languages are in the collection. Over 1 million people from 166 countries have visited the site. The library relies on librarians, publishers, illustrators, and authors to submit books to the collection. Instructions for doing so and guidelines for what kinds of materials are appropriate are included on the site. It does not appear that sumissions are monitored in any systematic way. This is truly a voluntary, collaborative effort.

Audience for the project: In keeping with its goal of promoting tolerance, the Foundation hopes to reach children and educators from throughout the world.

Type of project background information available on the site: The site provides extensive information on the goals of its creators, plus the history of the Foundation. Copyright Policy, Collection Development Policy, Fast Facts, and Privacy Policy are all posted. Some technical information is included in the instructions provided for adding an object to the collection.

Metadata and search access: Detailed instructions about assignment of metadata are provided for potential submitters of content. Each field is defined and acceptable tags are identified. When an item is selected the related metadata is displayed. The search function is simple in keeping with the intended audience. Searches can be conducted by country, theme, length, country of origin, language. My personal favorite search strategy--the user can search by the color of the cover of the book, which I think is brilliant! Users have the opportunity to add tags for items, which seems like a great way to get children involved in adding value to the content of the collection.

Copyright issues: It is the responsibility of the party submitting the title for inclusion in the digital library to contact the rights' holder of the work and confirm that all intellectual property concerns have been cleared. The ICDL reserves the right to remove any item where it appears copyright status is a concern. According to a posted statement, the site functionality does not allow printing, downloading, or emailing of any of the work. Of course, there is no way to completely prevent this from happening.

Additional comments: This is a wonderful collection of content that most children (and adults) would never get the opportunity to experience. My one concern is that it seems to be little-known. The project has funding from some major organizations (American Library Association, Library of Congress, Microsoft, the National Science Foundation), but there does not seem to be much written about the project. It seems like more resources should be spent on promotion to spread the word about a great resource.

Maine Music Box

2009-11-21T04:29:00.001-05:00

Project name and URL
Maine Music Box
http://mainemusicbox.library.umaine.edu/

Organization name
The Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine initiated this project partnership with the Bagaduce Music Lending Library and the Bangor Public Library.

Description of what was digitized
Over 22,000. pieces of sheet music from 5 collections of partner libraries, from popular music to violin scores, dating from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, were digitized. High resolution digital images are available for music in public domain; music published after 1934 can be found in Maine Music Box but only text record and a thumbnail of the sheet music is available.

Audience for the project (stated or assumed)
Assumed audience is anyone interested in sheet music of that time period. Main Music Box provide a specially designed interface for teachers, who are probably one group of audience of this project.

Type of project background information available on the site
There are three steps in digitizing sheet music. First is to create a digital music files of the form of MIDI and Scorch through music-recognition progress. Scorch is digital music file with MIDI playback capacity, create by Sibelius Scorch; it enables viewers to change the key, see the cursor while playing, print out sheet music, and many other powerful functions. Second is to prepare various version of the image of music for website use, such as thumbnail or high resolution ones for printing. Third is to create lyrics for vocal work.

Additional comments
Although the Scorch software sounds amazing, I can't get to try it seems its only available in the password-protected instructional interface. That is the while competence of this project, as stated in the “about” page, and the other part of the project is OK. There are many browsing and searching functions, but do not come in handy. In the “about” page there are plenty information on the project worth looking, including meta data, copyright, file specification and so on.

Utah Digital Newspapers

2009-11-21T00:39:00.002-05:00

Project name and URL
Utah Digital Newspapers
http://digitalnewspapers.org/

Organization name
J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah

Description of what was digitized
The project digitized local newspapers. In the first year of the project, 3 weekly titles for 30,000 pages were digitized. Later on 17 more titles for more than 200,000 were digitized, from microfilm and hard copies..

Audience for the project (stated or assumed)
Assumed audience is anyone interested in learning local newspapers of Utah.

Type of project background information available on the site
A white paper released on December 2002, introduced the project and the approach they tried on this digitization project. Among the first 3 titles selected, one was digitized by University of Utah, and the other 2 titles were digitized by commercial partners iArchives Inc. and DiMeMa Inc.. They compare the cost and the functions available through these different process and later on use the knowledge to digitize a few more hundred thousand pages. In the white paper, one thing mentioned was that people were excited about the project and the project raised about $100,000, asides the grant.

Additional comments
The website is quite useful in browsing items. It provides basic search, exaxt search, browse by county, and paper timeline, which are useful to users. Users can even setup preference on browsing, add pages to on-site favorites; the help page also gives detail instruction. Most pages are presented in pdf format. Users can choose to view the page, the title, the article, document description, page description. One can view each article on the same page separately or the page as a whole; sometimes there would be a standalone title area. The transcript was OCR by iArchives Inc. Although it made full-text search available, I have to say that the OCR quality seems awful.

Alcohol, Temperance & Prohibition

2009-11-20T23:45:00.014-05:00

URL: http://dl.lib.brown.edu/temperance/

Organization: The Alcohol, Temperance & Prohibition Collection is part of Brown University Library's Center for Digital Initiatives. The collection features items from the Addiction Studies Collection and other related collections at the Brown University Library.

Description: Various ephemera from the contentious prohibition era including government publications, sheet music, and posters are represented. There are also over 1,000 digitized pamphlets that "were published by various groups leading up to prohibition, during the prohibition era, and ending with the 21st amendment in 1933, which repealed the 18th amendment from 1919 prohibiting the manufacturing, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors." These materials provide an illustrated glimpse into this lively and quixotic period of American history.

Audience: According to the "About" page, "The items have been collected at Brown for over three centuries for researchers and scholars at Brown and worldwide interested in American history, including the history of alcoholism, how the media was used for spreading ideas and information, and in how the arts presented various movements. The purpose of this digital collection is to give researchers and interested individuals a glimpse into the rich and diverse resources at Brown's library." This page also clearly states that all the items in the collection are in the public domain. However, listed on the main page for each record is a statement prominently labeled "Restrictions on Use" which reads: "This object is available for public use. Individuals interested in reproducing this object in a publication, web site or for any commercial purpose must first receive written permission from the Brown University Library" and gives contact information. This is somewhat puzzling, and a bit unfortunate, because this hilarious parody of a classic holiday poem would make a fantastic seasonal card to send to everyone you know!

Project Background: Brown University is the home of the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies (CAAS). In 1995, Chester H. Kirk generously donated money to the CAAS to acquire over 15,000 items relating to alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous that had been collected by an antiquarian bookseller named Charles Bishop. The funds "included substantial funds for the Brown University Libraries and funds for fellowships to facilitate study of the collection" which has helped Brown University's CAAS gain "attention as a center for the study of addiction to alcohol and other substances and to the history of attempts to treat or prevent such addictions". The University Library has continued to build on its collection in this subject by purchasing, or receiving by donation, other related important "named collections", and also "uses special funds to ensure that purchases of current literature will remain up to date." These materials are physically dispersed among three on-campus libraries and an off-site storage facility. The Alcohol, Temperance & Prohibition digital project is a convenient way to access 1655 of these thousands of records electronically. While this represents only a fraction of Brown's unique holdings on this subject, the images allow a user to get a sense of the nature of the broader holdings and they also afford an interesting glimpse into the attitudes and ideals behind the hotly-debated 18th amendment.

Features: The site is simple and easy to navigate. An essay entitled "Temperance and Prohibition Era Propaganda: A Study in Rhetoric" (by Leah Rae Berk) gives a brief survey of the history of the Puritan's losing battle against alcohol that nicely contextualizes some of the digitized items. It is frustrating, though, that the links to the images are listed at the end of the essay instead of being embedded in the text as hyperlinks, which would facilitate immediately viewing the items being described. But the essay is still a fine introduction to the material and gives the reader tips on how and what to search for.

The "Browse" feature allows users to search across 3 "Metadata Categories": "Creators and Contributors," "Publisher," and "Titles." There is also the option to "Browse All Records" which displays all 1655 items, 20 at a time. These appear to be in alphabetical order by title, but then seem also to be organized on a broader basis -- but it's not clear exactly what that basis is.

Once you get a sense of the terms and fields you can use to look for particular items, the "Search" page allows for "Basic" and "Advanced" operations. Both options permit Boolean searching and allow searches in the 3 fields mentioned above plus the "Abstract/Notes Fields" of records. Results can be displayed as "Detailed Records", "Thumbnails", or "Titles". An Advanced search can also be performed on year(s) and item format ("Any", "Audio", "Image", and "Text"). The "Help With Searching" page really only explains how the system performs wildcard searches, so it's a good thing that the two search interfaces are so straightforward and intuitive.

Clicking on an item record opens a new tab/window with a thumbnail image, the title, creator/author, and publication information. There are 4 different "Retrieval Options":

-"View Document (Images)" brings up a screen-sized view of a page with thumbnails of subsequent pages displayed on the left-hand side. Clicking on the large image brings up a version that can be magnified one very large level that provides as much detail as anyone could want.
-"View Description" provides catalog record-type information for the item, including the physical description, subject headings, etc.
-"View Thumbnails" is just what it sounds like.
-"View Document Map" has links to the METS-formatted metadata record, the jpeg images, the low resolution images, and the high resolution images. This view also lists the master file TIF locations, but these are not hyperlinks. It is interesting that this much detail is provided, but I have a feeling this view is tailored to staff.

The Alcohol, Temperance and Prohibition digital collection is great fun to peruse. My only complaint is that, despite listing an audio format field, I can't find any actual audio recordings. There is plenty of sheet music like this, but notation and lyrics don't have quite the same effect as streaming "The Alcoholic Blues" while, say for example, diligently attending to rigorous "Drink Impaired Scholarship". Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Canary Islands Digital Memory (mdC)

2009-11-20T23:33:00.007-05:00

Organization name: Gran Canaria's Universidad de las Palmas (UPGC), Spain

Description of what was digitized: Canary Islands Digital Memory (Memoria Digital de Canarias) is a combined project which contains six collections of historical value to this Spanish Autonomous Community. The collection contains 2,268 items representing printed and manuscript texts, historical documents, audio recordings, films and images.

Audience for the Project (stated or assumed): The intended audience is not described on the website, however, this project was developed to provide access to all historical resources (and data available) about the Canary Islands to universities, historians, and people interested. This is the only project of this kind in Europe and its information is invaluable.

Background about the project and access points: This project began in 2003 under the sponsorship of the Universidad de las Palmas de Gran Canaria's Library (UPGCL) with the goal of disseminating the history of the Canary Islands and to preserve its documentary heritage.

This project was implemented using CONTENTdm, and it is presented using two interfaces: One in Spanish and a second one in English (the URL above points to the English site). The landing page provides a map of the islands and give the user the choice to directly access the mdC collections or to browse them by topics: Texts, images, audio and video. Links to their "copyright / legal notice" page is included at the bottom of the page.

Metadata for this project: The records include detailed metadata about their content; the subject headings are in Spanish as well as each description of the record. A neat feature of the collection is that users can display the PDF of each image outside the collection, which allows for large documents to be read easily. For each one of the videos, there was a link pointing to an external repository, which opened in a different window, and that allowed for the user to access the content regardless of lacking of a video streaming plug in such as Quicktime, Real Player, etc. Some of the audio files did not play properly on my Mac as they were WAV formatted, but the records were also very detailed in terms of quality and background about the recording.

Additional Thoughts: As digitization is primarily about access, and access does not have walls or physical boundaries, I got motivated to research about projects outside the U.S. and what platforms they are using to deliver and provide access to their collections worldwide. The mdC project was one of six digitization projects under the responsibility of UPGC. Each ones uses the CONTENTdm as their platform, and the project managers kept its design consistent across the multiple collections, which provided a nice look and feel to it. It is valuable information for anyone interested to learn or to travel to this part of the world. If I may suggest an improvement to this project, it would be related to the lack of an overall 'About the Project" page. Instead one needs to explore each collection to learn about their background and content.

The Library of Congress: Baseball Cards, 1887-1914

2009-11-20T15:07:00.002-05:00

Organization name: The Library of Congress offers digitized images of 2100 early baseball cards from the Benjamin K. Edwards Collection, which was donated to the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division by the poet Carl Sandburg in 1954. Edwards’ daughter had given the collection to Sandburg after Edwards' death.

Description of what was digitized: Benjamin K. Edwards was a collector of cigarette cards, which, beginning in the 1880s, were distributed in cigarette packs in an effort to increase sales. These colorful inserts were the forerunners to today’s baseball trading cards. More than 1000 players from over 75 cities from throughout the U.S. are depicted in the cards. Much of the early history of the sport is represented in the collection. Edwards’ collection of cigarette cards also included 12,000 additional non-baseball images. The decision was made to digitize only the baseball cards.

Audience for the project: Although the intended audience is not described on the website, clearly anyone with an interest in baseball—either as a casual observer and fan, or as a scholar or researcher, will find this collection invaluable. Also, in addition to providing a rich and unique perspective on baseball history, the collection is an important resource for examples of commercial advertising and printing processes from the years covered.

Type of project background information available on the site: As to be expected from the Library of Congress, the website includes extensive and exhaustive information on “Digitizing the Collection, “Cataloging the Collection,” “Copyright and Other Restrictions,” plus a bibliography for other resources on baseball cards and history. Standards used, technical requirements and guidelines adhered to, plus a full description of workflow and equipment used are all fully documented.

Metadata and Searching: The user can search by keyword or browse by team, player, league, city or card set (categories used to issue cards grouped by some common feature). For each item, full bibliographic information and metadata is displayed. The user has the choice of viewing a thumbnail image or downloading several higher resolution versions of the image. Both front and back of each card are displayed. The interface is straightforward and easy-to-use. Because there is little text associated with these objects the indexing procedure is straightforward and browsing from a selected list is an effective way to access the collection. A nice feature is the capability of users to order reproductions of the images.

Additional comments: No surprises that this is a really well-planned and executed digital collection, in keeping with the Library of Congress’ American Memory Collection, of which this is a part. The collection is fascinating to browse, easy to access, and provides opportunities for the user to take his/her interest in the subject a step further. The full documentation of how the collection was digitized was a great read for me—just enough information but, for me, not technically overwhelming. This is a great example of a digitized collection of visual objects!

U.S. Daily Weather Maps

2009-11-20T11:37:00.004-05:00

I know that bigger isn't always better, so I was interested in finding a bare bones digitization project and evaluating how well it did its job. For this investigation, I chose the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Central Library's U.S. Daily Weather Maps Project at http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/dwm/data_rescue_daily_weather_maps.html. The collection comprises daily historical weather maps from 1871 to 2002. (Maps from 2003 to the present are located at http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/dailywxmap/index.html.)

These are not the kinds of maps you see on The Weather Channel, with bright yellow suns indicating good beach weather or angry clouds signaling bad picnic weather. Rather, these are government maps created using a format that was adopted in 1872. (If you've read Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History, then you're probably somewhat familiar with government weather maps.)

To the novice, the maps are just a whole bunch of numbers, lines, and symbols crammed onto a sketch of the continental U.S. But to meteorologists, environmental scientists, and the like, they are daily snapshots chock full of valuable data such as air temperature, barometric pressure, wind velocity, relative humidity, and precipitation. What was it like to step outside in Chicago on the day you were born? If you know how to read a weather map, finding the answer is as simple as using a drop-down list to select a specific year, month, and day. But if you don't know how to read a weather map, then this site will not be of much use to you because there is no additional information presented with the maps.

According to the site, the project was funded by the NOAA Climate Database Modernization Program (CDMP). The CDMP site states that the CDMP "is a partnership between NCDC and private industry to image and key paper and microfilm records and to make them available on the Web to members of the climate and environmental research community." Through the CDMP, agencies of the NOAA can submit funding proposals for digitization projects.

Given the specialized use of government weather maps, it seems entirely appropriate that the U.S. Daily Weather Maps Project does not attempt to do more than provide digital access to analog maps. There is no real need for metadata given the fact that the maps themselves contain the information relevant to their audience--namely, date and relevant weather data.

One small drawback of the site is that requires users to download a Djvu Browser Plug-In in order to view the maps. I am always hesitant about cluttering (or infecting) my computer with downloads that I don't know too much about, but the plug-in is free and easy to install, and I imagine serious researchers won't be too taken aback by the hurdle. Once the plug-in has been installed, each map opens in its own window and users are able to zoom in/out, rotate, save, and print.

I really enjoyed the straightforward simplicity of this site. There are no bells and whistles, just the bare essentials to improve accessibility to a discrete collection of objects. For anyone interested in learning more about the CDMP, the annual reports are definitely worth a look.

The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project

2009-11-19T23:05:00.009-05:00

Organization name: The University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Description of what was digitized: Audio of interviews with more 150 people totaling 335 hours, their related transcripts, documents,video and photographs.

Audience for the project (stated or assumed): It is assumed the project is intended for researches, faculty, professionals, students, and members of the community at large who may be interested in learning about the insights, questions and themes related to the U.S. Cold War nuclear weapons programs and the Nevada Test Site.

Type of Project Background information on the site: The information related to this project is very detailed, well written and divided into different areas for easy reading. The "About the Project" area includes a nice summary of the project and it offers five clickable links in the shapes of pictures to further information related to: Community involvement in the project, Using the transcripts, Student involvement; Using the metadata, and Acknowledgments.

The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project research was conducted from September 2003 through July 2007 in UNLV’s College of Liberal Arts with funding from U.S. Depts. of Energy (award no. DEFG52-03NV99203) and Education (award no. P116Z040093).

How are the digital assets presented? The landing page of the project is easy to read, well designed and - despite several prominent pictures, it does not look crowded. This project was developed using CONTENTdm, and the searching options are included in the left side of the landing page as "View all transcripts", "View Video", "Search collection", and then the "Advanced Search", "my favorites" and "Help". The design is very consistent all across the interface.

As this is a collection primarily of audio and videos, it requires a good internet connection to really being able to listen and watch the content fairly well. I used a iMac G4 over a home based WiFi network and was able to open and play several audio files without any problem. Each record includes detailed metadata describing the recording and its transcript. The transcripts are displayed in an embedded window, which is part of the interface, and the Quicktime application is launched to play the audio portion when the user is ready.

What additional Information is presented? Enough? Too much? Worthwhile?

I believe this is a very well documented project with the proper information to keep the researcher or user interested and motivated while using the collection. The project provides links to specific timelines of events related to the development of nuclear weapons, the local landscapes where testing took place, and an interesting section titled 'Community of Voices", that includes thoughts about this project from the military, women, protest and peace groups and others who were involved or impacted by the Nevada Test Site (NTS).

What metadata is present? Individual records in the collection provide detailed information about each project participant and interview. Unique identifying information - name, date and place of birth, date of interview and interviewer - are at the top of each record. Most participants provided descriptions of their affiliations with the test site. Records also contain metadata that describes the contents of the interview using uniform term lists for tests and experiments, agencies, individuals, locations and subjects.

Metadata was created using qualified Dublin Core and controlled vocabulary was selected from several sources such as the Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials, Library of Congress Name Authority, the Getty Thesaurus for Geographic Names, and U.S. Nuclear Tests.

Additional thoughts: This a very fine project and it was very well designed as well as implemented. Under the acknowledgments section, a very diverse group of teams members is named which also indicates there was lot of thinking when putting it together to take advantage of everyone's skills. I enjoyed exploring and learning about this collection.

Yale Daily News Historical Archive

2009-11-19T11:28:00.003-05:00

Organization name: This project was undertaken by the Yale University Library, The Yale Daily News Publishing Company, and The Oldest College Daily Foundation.

Description of what has been (and what will be) digitized: The goal is to digitize 123 years of the Yale Daily News, 1878-2000. It appears that to date, selected years have been digitized: January 1878-June 1879 (the first year of publication), Septmeber 1913-June 1919 (WWI), September 1940-June 1948 (WWII), January 1967-May 1970 (years of student unrest), and September 1978-May 1981 (the first years of the adminstration of president A. Bartlett Giamatti). It seems that this is a good example of selecting the most important assests for digitization when resources do not allow for immediate conversion of the entire collection.

Audience for the project: The stated audience is "the widest possible audience," including "researchers, alumni, students, and staff." Clearly this material is of significant historical interest. Five U.S. presidents graduated from Yale in addition to many presidential and vice-presidential candidates and numerous other noted public officials. Accounts of their time at Yale are likely to be of great interest. Also, according to the website many noted journalists have worked on the Yale Daily News, including William F. Buckley, John Hersey, and Joseph Lieberman, Calvin Trillin, and Garry Trudeau.

Type of project background available on the site: Extensive information is provided describing Yale's Digital Production and Integration Program, of which this project is part. Guielines, best practices, standards used, technical requirements, and contacts for further information are all provided.

Metadata and access points: The Archive is powered by CONTENTdm and has full search functionality. However, although the information page claims that all items are fully indexed, I was unable to successfully use the subject search option. The full-text search function works well, however, even after retrieving an item, I could not find any index terms that had been assigned. Full-text is a great strategy when searching for personal names, but would be very limiting when trying to search for concepts. Possibly the capability is there and the shortcoming is mine, but, if so, it is certainly not intuitive.

Other comments: The content is impressive, the quality of the digitized objects is very high, the options for the user to save, manipulate and view the collection is great, however, the documentation needs some work. There should be better help offered online. I found myself clicking many links in an effort to find information about the collection and I believe I wasted a lot of time looking for information that was not provided.

Memorial Hll Museum's American Centuries

2009-11-19T08:15:00.002-05:00

Organization name: This project was undertaken by the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA) in Deerfield MA. the work was a collaborative effort of four Massachusetts organizations: PVMA, the Center for Computer-Based Instructional Technology at the University of Massachusetts, Frontier Regional District 38 Schools, and Greenfield Community College. Memorial Hall Museum in Deerfield MA is one of the nation's oldest museums. The museum's collection is focused on early New England antiquities.

Description of what was digitized: American Centuries is a digital collection of 2000 objects, transcribed document pages, artifacts, maps, photographs, and books. All are held in the Memorial Hall Museum and Library and originate in the Connecticut River Valley region of Massachusetts. The items represent the time period from the earliest Native American inhabitants to the early 20th century.

Audience for the project (stated or assumed): The target audience is school-age students, K-12, and educators.

Type of project background information available on the site: Extensive information is provided on the history of the project--its partner organizations, scholars involved, funders, and staff. There is only limited information on how the work was completed--a list of software that was used in production is provided, but most of the technical information available is to maximize user access to the content. An online tutorial provides information on how to use the site most effectively.

Additional comments: The site offers an interesting, well-written paragraph describing every object included in the collection. In addition to a basic description of the item, information is added to put the item into historical context. If known, information about the history of ownership is provided which adds human interest.
The search function works very well. If desired, the user is able to search by keyword, historical period, topic (list provided), type of object (list provided), even the material from which the item is composed. The assigned metadata is provided for each item and can be used for more refined searching. For younger, less-sophisticated users, the simple keyword search function works well.
A few interesting features: the user has the opportunity to zoom in on images to get a closer and more detailed view, but is also offered a "magic lens" feature, which allows the viewer to hover over an excerpt from an historic document and view the transcription. Users can create personal collections of selected items that can be archived for future reference. Also, it is possible to view two objects side-by-side to make comparisons.

Bottom line: A very nice presentation of interesting, well-described objects from a particular geographic region. Well worth exploring and certainly of greatvalue to students in the local area.

AIDS posters

2009-11-19T01:34:00.001-05:00

Organization name
UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library - History and Special Collections Division

Description of what was digitized
This collection contains 625 posters from 44 countries which were created “by a variety of institutions and organizations to educate and warn people about AIDS and to offer advice and information in visual form.” (http://digital.library.ucla.edu/aidsposters/about.html)

Audience for the project (stated or assumed)
Audience not stated. Assumed audience would be students or adults of university age or older, social scientists, people involved in public policy, people interested in marketing and publicity, graphic artists.

Type of project background information available on the site
The site explains that the collection was acquired by the History and Special Collections division of the Biomedical Library in 2005, but it does not state from whom. It also does not explain if there was any special funding acquired to develop or maintain this collection. The library plans to continue expanding this collection, but there are no details about from where these additional posters will be acquired or how frequently.

How are the digital assets presented?
Users can search and browse this digital collection. The basic search is a keyword search. There is also an advanced search feature and users can search up to four fields by keyword, title, description, creator, subject, or country. Advanced search results can be sorted by title or country. Users can browse by country, subject, creator, or title. Each of the terms under each subject category is listed alphabetically. It is not possible to browse multiple subjects at one time from this screen. It is also not possible to select terms from more than one of the four categories to browse at one time. If the user wants to browse multiple fields, the advanced search function must be used.

A minimum of 6 and a maximum of 72 thumbnails of posters are displayed on one screen at a time. There is the image, a link to the full record, the title of the poster, and an option to add the record to the user’s Virtual Collection.

When the user selects a poster, a new window opens. The user has an opportunity to zoom in on the poster .2x, .4x, .8x. 1.0x and 1.2x. The title of the poster in the original language and copyright permissions are listed under the image of the poster. Additional information in the record include the title, alternative titles, translations of the titles into English, creator(s) of the poster, current repository, dimensions of the poster in metric and English units, publication location, date, subjects (which are also links so the user can perform a new search based on subject) and any notes, which can include a textual description of the artwork in the poster and any text.

Other thoughts?
This digitization project offers users the handy feature to select records from this digital collection to create a personal collection known as a Virtual Collection. This Virtual Collection will be named by the user and can be accessible at later times if the user chooses to create an account. Users can view the Virtual Collections created by other users, but they cannot modify them in any way. The Help screen gives full instructions on how to set up and manage an account for the Virtual Collections.

Copyright permissions and protections are explained in the copyright link which is on the homepage for the collection. Owners of materials which have been included in the collection have an option to opt-out, and explanations on how to do so are provided, though the site encourages people to consider options other than opting-out completely, such as selectively limiting content to the material.

Credit is given for those involved in creating the collection. The names of the collection curator and project director are listed and a link provided to send them emails. The names of the people involved in advising, programming, and doing metadata creation are also listed, but with no link to an email address.

New Mexico Digital Collections

2009-11-18T23:11:00.009-05:00

Organization Name: New Mexico's Digital Collections are digitized materials from libraries, archives and museums in New Mexico. The project is hosted by University Libraries of the University of New Mexico and the Center of Regional Studies, University of New Mexico.

Description of what was digitized: The collections focus on the history and culture of New Mexico. They contain documents, photographs, maps, posters, art and music. The collection is divided in the following topics: New Mexico history, water and land issues, Latin American and politics, architecture, business, and art & crafts. I could not determine the size of the collection, but I did see there were 39 different institutions which provided individual collections to this project. Their content could be accessed by directly selecting the institution of interest.

Audience for the Project: I could not find a statement online informing what group was the specific audience for this project. However, I had the chance of interviewing the Associate Dean for Research, Science & International Initiatives of the Zimmerman Library and learned its audience were the people of New Mexico and organizations and libraries interested in the studies related to the Southwest of the United States and Latin America.

Type of Project Background information available on the site: Under the "About" of the project, there is a generic information about the project itself stating that "The New Mexico University Libraries hosts the New Mexico Digital Collections. They originate from the University's collections and other New Mexico cultural heritage institutions." At the bottom of the page it reads that the project is funded in part by the Center for Regional Studies, UNM, but it does explains if it received a grant to be developed and - if that was the case, for how long it lasted. Adding that missing information to the About page would have made it better more informative about how it came together or and how long it took to be completed.

How are the digital assets presented? This is a project that was developed using CONTENTdm. It is mentioned under the About information and, although it has been customized, the project's platform has the look and feel of this software.

Upon launching the collection, the user is given the choices to perform a single search or to select from the Advanced Search or to browse the collections. Additionally, the user has the option to access the collections by five of the repositories that are contained in the collection. Finally, there is an option to search the collection by subject by clicking on a pull down-cascade style menu. The landing page is easy to use and to read.

Once one starts exploring the collections the records include an image along with a summary of the title, subjects, and description of the item with detailed information about them.

What additional information is presented? Enough? Too much? Like other projects that have been showcased in class, I guess there is an expectation that the audience for this project is web savvy or knows how to search for online content as there is not a tutorial or tips on how to locate information. I think that having a tutorial on how to use the collection, not so much CONTENTdm, would have allowed for its prospect users (specially young ones) to get a good understanding about accessing and using it without having to figure it out on their own.

Additionally, I would have expected seeing a 'copyright and terms of use' in the main or landing page, and there was not one. It is once a record gets displayed that, under the Rights field, a link to the copyright page to the UNM page is provided along with a line that reads "No institutional restrictions placed on use of this collection. Rights to the digital resource are held by the University of New Mexico".

What Metadata is present? The records which I accessed exhibited a very well detailed metadata with information in 13 of the Dublin Core fields. The pictures, postcards and additional content included their format, type and digitization specifications as well the dates they were digitized. The Source field included detailed information about the repository that held that item, as well as the physical location where it is held.

It is easy to Use? Yes. I think that CDM includes an easy set of navigation tools as one always know how to move around easily. As a suggestion - and because of the number of organizations involved - I would like to comment that a tutorial indicating how to best take advantage of its content would have been a plus, specially as this collections will be helpful at the elementary and high school level. One of the aspects that may be confusing to users is the 'preferences' options of the software, which I think it is something that can be improved in CONTENTdm itself.

Calisphere

2009-11-18T21:59:00.001-05:00

I know someone has written on California Digital Library, but mine is simply on one of the 500 websites CDL created.

Project name and URL
Calisphere
http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/

Organization name
California Digital Library, and a long list of contributing institutions
http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/institutions.html

Description of what was digitized
The project digitized photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising and many other items, which are related to the history of California.

Audience for the project (stated or assumed)
Anyone interested in primary sources of the history of California. The project collected various sets of materials for educational use, and the website is designed to fit the needs of educators. As stated in frequently asked questions, the materials are intended to be used for research, teaching, and personal study.

Type of project background information available on the site
The project was supported by U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services and administrated by administered in California by the State Librarian. CDL does not own the materials or the right to grant license.

Additional comments
CDL didn't just digitize materials and put those in database awaiting users. The materials were chronologically organized in various topics with corresponding introduction. The website designing was intuitive and eyeballs-grabbing. These setting make it great for education and browsing. But the access it provides is not very friendly to serious researchers. There is only one simple search function available, and the subject headings of each item are text, not hyperlinks, which limits the cross-linking between items. By and large it does well serving its target audience.

Folger Shakespeare Library Digital image Collection

2009-11-18T20:22:00.002-05:00

Project name and URL
Folger Shakespeare Library Digital image Collection
http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=3077

 Organization name

Folger Library
 

Description of what was digitized
Over 29,000 high resolution images from the Folger Shakespeare Library, including books, theater memorabilia, manuscripts, art, costume images, drawings, and more. All digital assets deal with Shakespeare in some way.

 Audience for the project (stated or assumed)
This digital library would appeal especially to Shakespeare scholars. Researchers exploring literature from the 1600s would also find this library useful. Researchers studying the history of theatre would also find the assets in this library of value. College students and Professors may also find the library useful.

Type of project background information available on the site
The collection in its entirety includes more than 256,000 books, 60,000 manuscripts, 250,000 playbills, 200 oil paintings, 50,000 drawings, watercolors, prints, and photographs, and a variety of other materials including musical instruments, costumes, and films. Folger Library’s Shakespeare collection is the largest and finest in the world.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any information on the website that dealt directly with the background on digitizing the images.    

How are the digital assets presented?
Digital Images are presented as thumbnails and then clickable larger images. Once an image is selected, users can zoom in and out, print the image, maximize and minimize the image size, receive image data, or get help. 
A tab is available in the “Workspace” view that allows a user to get information about thumbnail images without having to open them up to a larger size. This is a great feature for users who may be looking for certain images and do not want to have to expand thumbnails to a larger size to get information about them and determine if they are what they need.
 

What metadata is present?
The metadata available with the actual image is very limited. Two tabs are available: File Data and Information. File Data contains the Image ID, Resolution Size, Format, Media Type, File Name, Width and Height. Information lists PDI Record, Shelfmark, Title, Details, Image Root File, Image Type, and Image Record ID.

Most of the “Information” didn’t make sense to me, as I didn’t know what PDI stood for and I also was unsure of what Shelfmark meant. The details of the images were extremely limited; for example, an image of a jacket simply had “Jacket” under details. This made me wonder how effective a search would be, since the metadata was so limited.

Some images contain “Hamnet” information attached to them, which from my understanding is the same information contained in the library’s cataloging system. This information is more in-depth, including a creator, date, MARC information, Title, Place of Creation, Physical Description, notes and citations. There didn’t seem to be any way to determine which images contained the “Hamnet” information and which didn’t without clicking on the image information.

Other Thoughts:
Although users are able to access images within the Digital Library without it, the library encourages the use of “Luna Insight” to access all of the features the library has to offer. The software is free and allows the user to create a permalink to images, save search strategies, export HTML pages containing thumbnails that link back to images, and access to the Quartos collection, which is only available with the Luna download.

Downloading software from a library may be something users are reluctant to do, as if they aren’t familiar with the software they may not know how it will affect their computers. I didn’t download the software, for this reason.

To browse the images of the collections, one must disable the popup blocker on their Internet browser. This was quite annoying, as I couldn’t remember where that setting was in Firefox.  

AdViews (Duke University Libraries)

2009-11-18T18:18:00.008-05:00

AdViews

URL: http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adviews/

Organization Name: Duke University Libraries

(A number of groups at Duke University--including the Digital Collections Program, the Hartman Center for Advertising & Marketing History, Media Studies, A/V Geeks, the Archive of Documentary Arts, and Duke University Libraries--have collaborated on this project.)

Description:

The AdViews collection is comprised of thousands of digitized television commercials--from Alpha Bits cereal to Weebles--from the D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B) advertising agency. The materials range in date from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Audience:

Students and researchers are the stated audience--but I think just about anyone would enjoy this collection.

Background Information:

The commercials are part of the D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles archive housed in Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. Digitization has been performed in phases throughout much of 2009--the university intends to digitize the entire archive. According to the AdView website, the commercials are being digitized from 16mm preservation film prints.

Presentation:

The collection may be browsed in its entirety or narrowed by company (Procter and Gamble), product (Crest toothpaste), or date. While browsing, users are presented with a thumbnail image of the product (a still from the ad maybe?). If I were to select, say, Crest toothpaste from the 1950s, I'd be presented with a list of ads from the decade--there are 53! The commercials can then be viewed in iTunes. I've never seen a digital library use iTunes--everyone should check this out.

Additional Information Provided:

Copyright and citation
Expert Interviews--Featuring interviews with the former CEO of DMB&B, a Markets and Mgmt. Studies Professor/ex-marketing executive, the founder of A/V Geeks, and two library professionals.
Technical Info--Includes information about digitization, metadata, and more
Share this (via Connotea, Del.icio.us, Facebook, Google, Digg)--We're all used to seeing this feature on various blogs and websites, but I've never seen a digital library offer it!

Metadata:

Filename, reel number, date of clip, product, company, notes, ad agency, hard drive, album ID, and I-Tunes title.

The Alexander Parris Digital Project

2009-11-18T13:11:00.002-05:00

Description of What Was Digitized: Alexander Parris was the most prominent architect/engineer in Massachusetts in the first half of the 19th century. This collection has digitized Parris materials from six major sources in Boston: The Boston Athenaeum, The Boston Public Library, Boston National Historic Park, Charlestown Navy Yard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Massachusetts Historical Society. The collections include various documents, papers, and sketched related to the life and works of Alexander Parris.

Audience for the Project: While no audience is explicitly stated, it appears that those who will get the most out of this site are people who are interested in architectural history and/or the history of buildings in the Boston area.

Background Information: This project was orchestrated by the State Library of Massachusetts drawing on resources from the aforementioned six sources. It is funded by a grant through the federal government's Library Services and Technology Act and administered by the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners. The Microsearch Corporation was enlisted for the actual digitization of the assets (with the exception of those provided by the Massachusetts Historical Society) and created the website and online archive.

Presentation of the Digital Assets: The digital assets are organized into a list of categories (some of which may be clicked to reveal subcategories). The categories range from agreements to architectural drawings to invoices. There is no "search box" type option. The only way to peruse the collection is to use the browsing categories. Once you are in the browsable categories, you can do a more detailed search by clicking the "search" link in the menu box to the left.

Additional Information: Aside from the transcriptions that accompany certain items, there is no additional information presented. Most of the images are only accompanied by their appropriate metadata and the option to save the record as a PDF or as a Word file.

Metadata: Although it's not explicitly stated, it looks as if metadata was entered using CONTENTdm or some similar program. Elements include things like physical description, document type, summary, digital ID, etc. It also includes metadata on the collection from which the actual item originated and its repository.

Final Thoughts: For me, this site was a little more difficult to navigate than some of the others I have browsed. Some of the font/color combinations made things a bit difficult to read without really looking at them. There were also some parts that I initially found confusing. For example, when you first click on the search button, you come to a page that has another search button and links to lists of personal names, place names, transcription criteria, and description of fields. The first two link to a simple authority list of names and places. You can't link to anything from this list. Having taken a few cataloging classes, I understand why the list might be needed, but I think that where they included it could lead to some confusion.
On the whole, it is an interesting little archive though its narrow scope will probably only appeal to certain history/architectural buffs.

Antique Pattern Library

2009-11-18T10:59:00.015-05:00

Project name and URL:
Antique Pattern Library
http://www.antiquepatternlibrary.org/index.html

Organization name:
Antique Pattern Library

Description of what was digitized:
Antique needlework pattern books in the public domain, including: crochet, knitting, tatting, netting, embroidery, needle lace, beading and other needlework patterns. Many were published more that 100 years ago.

Audience for the project:
The audience for this project is anyone with an interest in antique needlework patterns. This might include crafters or individuals interested in the history of arts and crafts.

How are the digital assets presented?
The pattern documents are available through the Catalog link. The files are scanned by volunteers in PDF format, and listed in alphabetically by author, if possible. Entries are presented in MLA style in a table.

What additional information is presented?
Licensing and Conditions of Use are addressed centrally on the homepage. In addition, a link to Other Resources is provided. Resources referenced include information for building digital libraries, using antique tools, and locating more antique patterns. The group also maintains a Yahoo Group which distributes a newsletter to members.

What metadata is present?
This library is very small, and does not employ metadata as a tool for searching. Instead, the web author recommends users search keywords with their browser FIND option. I tried this method of searching the files, and it works great. I am sure it keeps things simple for the volunteers involved in structural decisions too. What a neat little niche library!

Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC)

2009-11-17T22:36:00.011-05:00

Project Name: Digital Library of the Caribbean

Organization Name: The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is an actively growing, open access, collaborative digital library. Four U.S. institutions and five Caribbean partners (academic libraries, foundations and national libraries) were awarded a U.S. Department of Education Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA) grant to build dLOC. This award began in October 2005 and ended in September 2009.

Administered by Florida International University (FIU) in partnership with the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI) and the University of Florida (UF), dLOC's technical infrastructure is provided by the University of Florida (UF) in association with the Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA).

Description of what was digitized: dLOC's current database of resources includes 8,179 items. Its collections include newspapers, photographs, archives of Caribbean leaders and governments, official historical documents, and historic and contemporary maps. The project coordinators hope to add future collections, which will feature numeric data for local ecosystems, oral and popular histories, travel accounts, literature, and musical expressions.

Audience for the project (stated or assumed): The participant's manual of dLOC libraries states that the project's audience include young school students, college-age researchers, and university professors from the United States and multiple countries of the Caribbean.

Type of project background information available on the site: dLOC's web site includes a very well written description of the background of the project, how it was conceived, funded and administered. It also provides a well written definition of what they call 'partners' and how a library can join or becoming a partner; additionally, what it is expected from them, and finally provides links to its governance, bylaws, and FAQ pages.

How are the digital assets presented: Greenstone's Digital Library System was chosen as the metadata storage, retrieval, and search engine for dLOC. The project managers chose to utilize only the metadata portion of Greenstone. This project gave me the opportunity of using this system.

Upon entering the Digital Library of the Caribbean, the user has four options to access the information. First, there is the general search option which allows the user to type in a specific search query. On top, there are four tabs for an Advanced Search, All Items and Partner Collections options.

The Advanced search option allows for the user to - in addition of using the Boolean searching - to select from three collections which seem to be housed on this server: The Caribbean Newspaper Digital Library, the Digital Library of the Caribbean and the Panama and the Canal (no further information is provided about the additional two other than their availability to be searched).

The Partner Collections allows for the researcher to individually browse and search the collections of each partner library, following the same pattern of searches. Additionally, there is information to each organization if the user decides to click on the logo of the organization.

I don't know if this was a Greenstone or design limitation, but after having performed a search on a item and displayed the metadata or thumbnail there was not a 'Return to results' button anywhere on the screen (which I found very basic) and found myself clicking on the back button of my browser.

What information is presented? Enough? Too much? Worthwhile? Due to the multi country and multi organizations involved in this project, the information provided is enough. Because the interface was well crafted and the most extensive part of the information is included under the "About dLOC", on the top of the page, the regular patron won't feel overwhelmed by having to read it or even know it is there.

The information on each record is detailed, it includes an area called 'Page Image", and a separated where the user can zoom in and out. The branding with the name of the project is visible at all times as well as relevant information about copyrights and the source of the item.

What metadata is present? Every item in dLOC is associated, upon submission into the dLOC repository, with a Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) file that describes descriptive, administrative, and structural information relevant to its display and long-term preservation. dLOC can also accomodate descriptive metadata in simple and qualified Dublin Core, particularly in cases where collections are harvested using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Taken from "About dLOC: Digitization ".

The metadata for each record is very well written, including subject headings and a permanent link. I have learned that organizations were required to take a training on how to create the metadata for the project, but I was not sure about how much time they had indeed devoted to input it. The staff in charge of QA invested good time making sure all the data was consistent.

Thoughts about Copyright and this multi country project: As this project involved several countries, I was particularly interested to research about dLOC manages the copyright issues primarily internationally. Their web page included an statement mentioning that when an item selected for digitization is scanned in its country of origin, the laws of the country of origin should be understood to apply. However, when an item selected for digitization was scanned away from its country of origin, the organization should consider both the laws of the country of origin and the laws of the location from which the digital resource will be made accessible via the Internet and apply those laws that afford the item the longest protection.

Additionally, they commented that for content providers using the centralized services of the Digital Library of the Caribbean, the laws of that location were the laws of the United States.

Final Thoughts: I enjoyed exploring and learning in depth about this virtual project as I had met the coordinators at conferences and events where they were promoting it; however, I never had the chance to seeing it live. dLOC is or was project aimed to put together the cultures of the Caribbean under a single digital platform, and to promote and preserve them for the future. It provided many opportunities for Libraries that don't have the resources and staff to create and manage their own digital projects.

Finally, having learned that digitization is not so much about preservation but access, I would have preferred seeing this project developed using a system such as CONTENTdm in order for its metadata to be harvested onto WorldCat, and being able to enjoy worldwide visibility, access, and much needed promotion for the content from this region.

Digital Dada Library

2009-11-17T22:20:00.005-05:00

Project name: Digital Dada Library

Organization name: The University of Iowa Libraries

What was digitized: Books, essays, articles, and manuscripts that are connected to the Dada movement.

Audience: University of Iowa students and faculty, Dada scholars, and literary/art historians who are interested in the Dada movement.

Project background: The International Dada Archive was founded as part of the Dada Archive and Research Center in 1979. The Archive aims to preserve and disseminate the written documentation of the Dada movement. There is no information provided regarding the implementation of the Archive's digitization program, the Digital Dada Library.

In order to avoid copyright issues, only those documents that are in the public domain have been scanned. The documents have been scanned in their entirety, including even the blank pages at the end of books.

Other information: The collection is divided into two sections: periodicals and books, leaflets, and other stand-alone written materials. The periodicals are organized by title, then by issue number. Books and other materials are organized by author.

Most of the periodicals are not complete runs; even if the Dada Archive owns complete reprints of the article, only those issues from Special Collections are scanned. In the cases when the Archive does not own the originals, reprints were included instead, with copyrighted items such as prefaces and critical annotations omitted.

Basic metadata is given: author, title, location, publisher, and date. The collection is not searchable, so unless the user knew the author or publication that they needed, it might be difficult to find relevant items. The images are also available to be downloaded as PDF files.

The Lewis Hine Project

2009-11-17T17:06:00.002-05:00

Undertaken by: Joe Manning, freelance journalist from Florence, Massachusetts, working independently to research individuals shown in digital photographs available from the Library of Congress.

Description of What Was Digitized: Lewis Hine, a well-known photojournalist of the 20th century, was hired by the National Child Labor Committee in 1908 to take photographs of child labor conditions around the United States. The result was thousands of photographs now held by the Library of Congress and available on their website at: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/nclchtml/nclcabt.html. Joe Manning, a "freelance journalist, historian and genealogist, poet, photographer and songwriter," has undertaken the project of identifying the children in the photographs and locating their descendents. His website includes interviews with descendents that have been successfully contacted and have agreed to cooperate with the project, family photographs provided by the descendents. Also included are photographs of other childern still unidentified in an effort to locate family and related articles about Manning's efforts.

Audience: The intended audience is not described, but certainly the human-interest factor about what happened to these children is likely to be high. Many of the children were photographed working in mills at ages under the legal age for such labor. Himes provided some sketchy facts that indicate they worked long hours for very little pay. Certainly the conditions under which they worked would be of interest to historians as well.

Type of Project Background Available on the Site: Clearly for Joe manning, this is a labor of love. He provides a lot of information on how he has gone about tracking down descendents and the resulting interviews. He describes his hopes for a book, documentary, or travelling exhibit based on the photographs and what he has learned about their subjects. Manning also provides a lot of detail about the process of tracking down family members.

Access Points: The material is arranged in broad categories and the user is able to browse. There is no search function.

Additional Thoughts and Information: I found this project interesting because Manning, a private citizen working on his own, has taken digital materials made available through a large, well-funded project (the Library of Congress) and taken them a step further. He has used them as a launching point to learn more and has created a second digital library--a library that preserves the photographs, but adds the information he has been able to find about each person, the context of hi/her life, and descendents. Among the links provided by Manning is one to a blog produced by another person undertaking an effort to photograph today the locations that Hine photographed at the turn of the century. I think it is fascinating to see how digital records can inspire exciting work by individuals working without significant resources or funding.

The Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae

2009-11-17T12:46:00.002-05:00

Description of What Was Digitized: The Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae (or The Mirror of Roman Magnificence) is a compilation of maps and other printed imaged depicting Rome, its architecture, its landscapes, and its landmarks printed during the Renaissance. The University of Chicago owns the largest collection of images and prints from The Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae. For this project, close to 1000 images from the university's Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae were digitized and archived.

Audience for the Project: While no audience is explicitly stated, the specific nature of the subject and the manner of information that accompanies the digital images leads me to believe that it might be intended for students and scholars of Rome in that time period.

Background Information: The collection was built as part of the Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome symposium hosted by the University of Chicago in 2007. The digital images were made in high resolution and are made available on the site using Zoomify which allows a user to zoom in and out of the image to easily get a better look.

Presentation of the Digital Assets: Upon entering the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, the user has two options. First, there is the search and browse option which allows the user to type in a specific search query or browse by categories that include date, engraver, city, and publisher. Another option is to choose a virtual itinerary which are mini-exhibits designed by scholars to highlight a particular theme, location, artist, or collection.

Additional Information Present: If you choose to follow an itinerary, each image will contain information on what the image is, what its importance to the collection is, and how it fits the theme of the itinerary. If you access images through the search/browse option, you do not get this additional information. All that is present is the metadata (which still provides some further description, but only of the item itself). Both items accessed through search/browse and items accessed through the itinerary have options to display the full XML metadata record and/or print a copy of the image.

Metadata: This collection uses the VRA (Virtual Research Association) Core 4.0 metadata schema to organize its metadata. Metadata includes things like publisher, publication date, artist/engraver/printmaker, display text (if applicable), techniques, references, measurements, etc.

Final Thoughts: Over all I found this to be a very easy to use, interesting digital collection. To get the most information associated with the images, it would be in you best interest to peruse an itinerary.

Bartleby.com: Great Books Online

2009-11-17T12:12:00.014-05:00

Project name and URL:
Bartleby.com: Great Books Online
http://bartleby.com/

Organization name:
Bartleby.com, Inc.

Description of what was digitized:
Bartleby.com is "... is an Internet publisher of literature, reference, and verse..."

Audience for the project:
The intended audience for the library is students, scholars, and anyone with an interest in its holdings.

Type of project background information available on the site:
Steven H. van Leeuwen, Chairman & CEO, states:"Bartleby.com began as a personal research experiment in 1993 and within one year published the first classic book on the Web (Whitman’s Leaves of Grass)." I am not sure if Leeuwen is referring to the first classic book ever to be published on the Internet, or just the beginning of this particular project.

How are the digital assets presented?:
Each document has its own web page. At the top of the web page, a site wide search box is provided, in addition to bread crumb navigation. The user may also choose to use a separate search box for the individual documents. An image related to the document is often included on upper left, next to the document title. A link to the bibliographic record is provided, with links below to sections or chapters of the document.

What additional information is presented? Enough? Too much? Worthwhile?:
If you have a Kindle, or similar device, and like to read classics, the 20-volume Harvard Classics Shelf of fiction is available for download in the following formats: Microsoft E-book Reader, Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader, and AportisDoc Mobile Edition at no charge. Bartleby.com offers this service in partnership with Amazon. Quick links are also provided to a thesaurus, writing style guides, and quotation sources.

What metadata is present?
The information is categorized by subject, title, and author. The user may also search by broad document genre: Reference, Verse, Fiction, and Nonfiction, and each of these is further divided.

Open Library

2009-11-17T06:02:00.002-05:00

Project name and URL

Open Library
http://openlibrary.org/

Organization name

Internet Archive
http://www.archive.org/index.php

Funded by the California State Library
http://www.library.ca.gov/

Description of what was digitized

The goal, according to the About Us page at <http://openlibrary.org/about>, is to have a descriptive Web page for every book ever published. So far, they have 30 million records (20 million of which are available at the site) and offer full-text for 1 million books. From my searches, it seems that some of the scanned texts are offered as links to the Internet Archive, and some are through Google Books.

Audience for the project (stated or assumed)

According to the FAQ at <http://openlibrary.org/about/faq>, a key difference between OCLC's Worldcat and the Open Library is that Worldcat is directed at librarians while Open Library is directed at the public at large.

Type of project background information available on the site

The project is an open project and solicits help from the user community in any way members can help. In particular, they have a page describing how librarians can get involved, About the Librarianship at <http://openlibrary.org/about/lib>. Additionally, the site is within the Web 2.0 tradition and is set up as a user editable wiki. Tellingly, in light of OCLC's recent attempts to lock up its data behind copyright, contributors are told on pages with the forms for editing that they "irrevocably agree to place [their] contributions in the public domain."

Metadata

This site, in a sense, is all about metadata. Though some pages offer links to scanned versions of the book they describe, the Open Library itself is a project to make information about the books available rather than the books themselves. Most of the metadata is cataloging information: Title, author, date of publication, description of the physical book, subjects, and so on. The page for a book also offers links to some booksellers that might sell the book, Worldcat and some other services for finding out where to borrow or trade for the book, and, for some of the books whose data is in the library, full electronic text of the book.

Encyclopedia of Chicago

2009-11-16T22:51:00.002-05:00

Project name and URL
Encyclopedia of Chicago
http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org

Organization name
Chicago Historical Society

Description of what was digitized
The project is not to make a comprehensive online encyclopedia of Chicago, but rather to paint the city in broad strokes through essays, photographs, maps, and other historical documents.

Audience for the project
The audience for this project is really anyone who has interest is Chicago, it's history, or American history in general.

Type of project background information available on the site
There is a detailed history of the project located on "Introductory Materials" page.

Additional comments

At first glance, this digital library is hard to navigate. The main page is running a horizontal frame scheme, and it took me a minute or so to realize what I had "written off" as just a title bar image in fact was the menu system as well. I wish I could say that things got easier from there.

If a user knows what information or topic about Chicago they're looking for, they will more than likely find it. As mentioned, this database is striving to feature a wide array of topics dealing with the history of Chicago.

They also feature quite a few maps and photographs. And while the scrolling and zooming features for these are great tools, they do take some getting used to.

Overall, I think this is a great database for someone to use as a starting point for information on the history of Chicago, to perhaps get a better insight on what they they need to focus in on and then go out and find more information on what they need specifically.

The Cuban Postcard Collection

2009-11-16T22:47:00.003-05:00

Project name: The Cuban Postcard Collection, part of the Cuban Heritage Collection

Organization name: University of Miami Libraries

What was digitized: The collection is made up of postcards from the 20th century onward.

Audience: University of Miami faculty and students, as well as all researchers who are "interested in Cuban history, the Cuban exile experience, and the impact of Cuban Americans in South Florida and beyond".

Project background: The goal of the Cuban Heritage Collection is to preserve, provide access to, and promote historical materials about Cuba and Cubans, particularly the Cuban community of Southern Florida. The postcard collection is one of eighteen digitized collections.

The Cuban Postcard Collection contains postcards of Cuba "and the Cuban experience outside of Cuba", and dates from the 1900s. The images on the postcards vary from real photos to printed photos to drawings. Several hundred postcards are acquired each year.

Other information: The collection can be browsed by subject or place. Over 80 of the postcards have both sides scanned, which means that the researcher can view the address section on the reverse of the card. Some are blank, some just have the recipient's address, but others include messages to the recipient. Most of these were sent before the 1950s, but it's interesting to consider what sort of privacy issues the Library had to research before deciding whether to scan the postcards.

What's particularly interesting to me about the Cuban Heritage Collection as a whole is the amount of community support behind it. There's a group called AMIGOS that raises funds to support the mission of the collection. They sell cards and posters, conduct membership drives, and sponsor lecture series and exhibition openings. However, even with this support, the Library still required grants to develop their digital collections, which seems to underscore the fact that developing and maintaining a digitization program can be quite expensive.

Primary Sources on Copyright

2009-11-16T17:43:00.002-05:00

Project Name
Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900)
http://www.copyrighthistory.org/

Organization Name
UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

Description and Background Information:
This is a nice example of a huge collaborative project bringing together hard to find documents in one place. An enormous number of institutions were involved in supplying expertise and materials for digitization, as can be seen from the "Acknowledgments" page. Primary documents related to copyright (legislation, treaties, contemporary newspaper articles, pamphlets, etc) were digitized from "Renaissance Italy (Venice, Rome), France, the German speaking countries, Britain and the United States." An international advisory board and five "national" editors from different institutions were involved in selecting the material.

Most of the background information on the website is related to the selection process, rather than the digitization process itself.

Audience
Students and scholars researching the history of copyright.

Presentation and Metadata
Basic metadata such as title and publication date are provided, along with a very helpful "abstract" that explains the context and importance of each individual document. Important documents also have supplementary commentary from modern experts.

Images from the documents themselves are presented with a very basic image viewer, which lets the reader turn pages, zoom in, and print individual pages.

Other Thoughts
Although the current website serves its purpose, it could use some changes in the future to make it more user-friendly. Currently, the many "browse by" options on the left-hand side bring up giant lists that are difficult to scroll through. For instance, the "key words" list is very unwieldy, basically a list of every single keyword and related documents all together on one page. This menu could use an extra step where the user is asked to select a specific keyword, allowing them to then view only those tagged documents. Also, there really should be a way for users to download complete pdfs of the documents so they can easily print them. Right now you can only download pages individually.

Greetings from Milwaukee

2009-11-16T16:03:00.020-05:00

Greetings from Milwaukee

URL: http://www4.uwm.edu/libraries/digilib/postcards/

Organization Name: University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (UWM) Libraries

Description:

Greetings from Milwaukee is comprised of a selection of postcards from the Thomas and Jean Ross Bliffert Collection. Thus far, 755 postcards--depicting historic photographs of Milwaukee businesses, cityscapes, zoos, amusement parks, etc.--have been digitized. The majority of the postcards selected for digitization were produced by publishers in Milwaukee between the late 1800s and 1960.

Assumed Audience:

Milwaukians, researchers, and fellow postcard collectors/enthusiasts

Background Information:

Thomas and Jean Ross Bliffert actively began collecting postcards in the mid-1940s. In 1998, they donated their collection--consisting of approximately 12,000 local, regional, national, and international postcards--to the UWM libraries. (As previously mentioned, the digital collection is limited to Milwaukee-related postcards.) The physical collection may be viewed, in its entirety, in UWM Special Collections.

Presentation:

Users are presented with a variety of search options. Postcards can searched by keyword, title, subject, publisher, publication date, job number, printing process, and digital ID; in addition, the collection can be browsed as a whole, by subject term, or by publisher. The postcards are presented as thumbnail images, until one narrows her search to a specific image. At this point, the user is presented with an enlarged view of the postcard, a description, and a list of metadata.

Additional Information:

"About the Collection" includes: a description of the Bliffert Collection and the digital project, credits, and copyright information.

Metadata:

Title, description, subject, alternate terms, site, location, postcard publisher, publication date, job number, printing process, original item type, original item size, original item medium, original item orientation, collection name, finding aid, original item location, donor, repository, rights, digital publisher, digital ID, date digitized, digital collection.

Lancaster County Digitization Project

2009-11-15T15:41:00.002-05:00

Organization Name: Lancaster County Historical Society, et al.

Materials to be Digitized: newspapers and manuscripts from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania

Audience: Historians, locals with historical interest

Background information: The site doesn't actually contain much information on the project itself. There's a brief paragraph on the material it is digitizing, but nothing about how it got started. We also get a list of some of its accomplishments over the years, and a list of institutions that have participated in the project, but no insight into what these things mean.

However, the collection itself is set up very well. Each newspaper or manuscript collection has its own clearly labeled section, with a search feature that is easy to navigate and focuses on the day the material was released. These papers are easily legible, and users with poor eyesight also can click on a column, which makes it appear in a new window with larger type. While the site itself could definitely use some work, the collection it houses is quite useful.

Alaska’s Digital Archives

2009-11-15T11:47:00.000-05:00

Project Name: Alaska’s Digital Archives

Project URL: http://vilda.alaska.edu/

Organization Name: Alaska Virtual Library and Digital Archives project, a collaborative effort of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the University of Alaska Anchorage, and the Alaska State Library.

Description and Background Information:
Using the CONTENTdm software, this collection of over 10,000 digital objects in a variety of formats (moving images, oral histories, documents, photographs, paintings, maps, and more) provides access to a fascinating collection of historical documents that illuminate the history of Alaska. According to the “About” page, the collection continues to grow, and the partners are working on a “lessons learned” document to provide recommendations to the state to inform future digital initiatives. Unfortunately, it does not state a timeline for such a document, nor does it indicate in any obvious place when the site is updated, so it is difficult to tell how up-to-date the site is or when such a document might appear.

Audience:
According to the “About” page, the collection is intended “to support the instructional and research needs of Alaskans and others interested in Alaska history and culture” (http://vilda.alaska.edu/cdm4/about.php). I would argue that this site would also be of use to anyone interested in the Yukon Territory history, as well as researchers in the field of geology, native cultures, and more (not necessarily connected exclusively to Alaskan history).

Notable Details about the Collection:
This collection demonstrates the power and limitations of the CONTENTdm software.

Searching/Browsing:
The extensive indexing of terms in all fields of the detailed metadata records allows the searcher to conduct very specific search queries. I felt, however, that too many of the words are indexed, leading to too many results for each search. I also felt that the choice to include a large number of subject headings for each digital object led to misunderstandings of exactly what the object contained (rather than clarifying the main subjects of the object). Subject headings don’t seem to be listed in order of importance or emphasis in the object, nor are they listed alphabetically. I looked at several moving image objects, and the cataloger assigned subject headings for just about every item that appeared in the moving image, no matter how long it appeared or how central it was to the main topic of that particular moving image clip. If a researcher wanted to look at movie images that focused on sled dogs, for example, she would need to wade through dozens of videos that only showed brief glimpses of sled dogs. While I can imagine the importance of this exhaustive search result for certain types of researchers, I wonder how helpful this would be for the average researcher.

Other searching/browsing thoughts: I wished there was an alphabetical index of all possible search terms so that users could browse by topic, rather than the very limited ability to browse by collection. Thankfully, on the home page, the site designers listed links to the different file formats in the library, so if a visitor wished to browse through the moving image files, for example, such a task is easily accomplished.

Featured Collections: The project does feature two important collections: Alaska Native History & Cultures and Movement to Statehood. These collections are well-designed to allow users to browse a selection of materials by broad topic, region, and time period. These sections added a nice balance to the general collection search discussed above. In these sections, the user feels the guiding hand of the collection designer, leading her to important digital objects. This type of guidance is important for those users who would feel lost or unsure where to start when faced with a list of 10,000 objects.

Collection Itself: This collection is an impressive and important resource. The sheer number of objects and the variety of formats – though only a small percentage of the extensive collections held at each of the participating partners – provide users with a wealth of fascinating primary source materials. It is obvious from even a cursory view of the site that a great deal of work went into gathering, documenting, preserving, and uploading all these objects, and the use of the CONTENTdm software provides a relatively easy-to-use interface for the user.

The September 11 Digital Archive

2009-11-15T10:04:00.004-05:00

Organization names: The Center for History and New Media and American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning. The Library of Congress also counts the archive as part of its collection.
URL: http://911digitalarchive.org/index.php
Description of what was digitized: More than 150,000 digital artifacts relating to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. This includes both born-digital and scanned content, and allows individuals to add to the archive themselves.
Audience for the project (stated or assumed): Anyone seeking to learn more about the subject, as well as serious researchers.
Type of project background information available on the site: A clear explanation is given on the About page, including information about the project’s grant funding and timeframe. The project’s aims are stated clearly: “Our goal is to create a permanent record of the events of September 11, 2001. In the process, we hope to foster some positive legacies of those terrible events by allowing people to tell their stories, making those stories available to a wide audience, providing historical context for understanding those events and their consequences, and helping historians and archivists improve their practices based on the lessons we learn from this project.”

A huge amount of information is available on the site, organized under the browse tab into category by type of information. Multiple organizations contributed to the initial iteration of the site, which was first made available relatively soon after the Sept. 11 attacks. Although the project formally ended in June 2004 and “official” content from the sponsoring organizations is no longer being contributed, more new content is still being added by individual users through the contribute section. Users can submit their own stories and upload their own images or documents, and browsing the site reveals that many people are still doing so.

Another strength of the site is the special collections section, which links to five free-standing sites that also put together personal and historical reflections. For example, the September 11 Digital Archive is the Smithsonian Institution’s “designated repository for digital materials related to 9/11,” so stories from visitors to the National Museum of American History’s “Bearing Witness to History” exhibit are collected here.

The metadata included on this site is also very impressive. Each entry has a “view more information” link that leads directly to a significant amount of metadata, including the date entered, the media type, whether it was born digital, and whether it’s under copyright. Images have the same metadata entry included on each page with a thumbnail and a link to download the original file (usually medium-sized .jpgs).

The wide variety of materials on the site is also notable. In addition to the standard documents and images, there are original digital animations, audio/video files from different groups of people, PDF files of “incident action plans” issued by the fire department in New York City, and much more. Contributors to the site are so varied – and interesting – that the resulting collection is much stronger than it would be if the information had come from an individual source.

The only criticism I have of the site is that a clearer explanation of the scope would have been helpful. For example, I’m not sure why the FDNY plans are included, but NYPD plans are not; perhaps they simply weren’t available, but an explanation of what exactly is in the archive and why would be welcome.

That said, of all the projects we’ve looked at this semester, this was the first one that I felt like I couldn’t stop looking at. It’s an incredible resource organized in a truly user-friendly way.

The Inuit Artists Project

2009-11-14T23:04:00.003-05:00

Project Name and URL:

The Inuit Artists Project

http://www.ccca.ca/inuit/index.html?languagePref=en&

Organization Name:

The Center for Contemporary Canadian Art (CCCA)

Description of what was digitized:

Twenty-seven Inuit artists have contributed images of over 1,513 pieces of work to form the core of the Canadian Art Database. Diverse cultural groups in Canada produce distince artistic expressions and this database is meant to facilitate dialogue among and between the artists and the cultural groups as a whole.

Audience (stated or assumed):

The stated audience is the Inuit artists themselves as cross-cultural dialogues are one of the primary motivations for the creation of the website. However, it is obvious that the site would appeal to academics studying the Inuit cultures and to the general art lover who appreciate the unique style of the Inuit art forms. The site's international audience also continues to grow, with 65% of the more than three million monthly hits coming from 100 countries outside of Canada. In the past 12 months, the site has received over 34 million hits.

Type of Project background information available on website:

This project began in 1996 as a personal database of Inuit art (Bill Kirby is the Director of CCCA), and over the last 13 years he has worked through grant money and community partnerships to grow the project to its current iteration. In 2008 the CCCA project became a partnership project with the University of York. Kirby has taken a post as an adjunct professor and will continue to oversee the ingestion of works - both artistic and textual - to this attractive and informative site. What must have been the initial project of just Inuit Art has expanded so that the Inuite Artists Project is a small portion of what is available on the CCCA website.

How are the digital objects presented?

There are dropdown links to explore various gallery shows and contained collections of various artist's works. Most effectively, a user can keyword search for a subject, an artist, a medium, etc., and the advanced searches can help the user search for specific time frames and subject matter. The returned list may or may not include thumbnail images of the work, but will always include presumably enought metadata to describe the work. For example, the title, medium, subject and size are the basic fields included in the none-image attached entries.

There is an interactive map of Canada identifying the location of various Inuit artist's communities. Clicking on a town will return information on the culture of that area and a listing of artists from that area. Once the user has chosen an artist to learn about, a link jumps to a biography where there is a link to an index of thumbnail images of all of that artist's works presented in the CCCA database.

Metadata:

Title, author (creator), date of creation, copyright holder, materials, measurements, current owner, and the ability to click on the thumbnail to view a larger image.

Other Thoughts:

I was drawn to this site because of a previous experience with the Inuit culture in Alaska. I was priviliged to meet an Inuit weaver but found that the culture does not allow for the sharing of techniques with non-natives. This website allows the user to peek into what can be a very closed culture.

The digitization methods themselves are not divulged, but the results are proof that the project director was concerned about access and respect for the culture. My only criticism is that several times I was unable to track back to a screen that was the root of a search. The interactive map was appealing, but one of the screens that was difficult to find again, once the user clicked beyond to the artist's works.

Museum of Talking Boards

2009-11-14T22:21:00.002-05:00

Project Name and URL:

Museum of Talking Boards

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

Organization Name:

Museum of Talking Boards © 1996-2009

Description of what was digitized:

The website has several interactive pages to simulate the use of a Ouija board, but the digitization project is the picture gallery of talking boards. Presented in no particular order are ninety-six talking boards and an assortment of planchettes produced during the years 1860 to 2005. Some of these boards were on the market for a fairly long time, a decade or more in some instances. Others survived for a brief period, sometimes a single production run. In any event, they have for the most part disappeared from the American scene, a few showing up on the antique market from time to time.

The other pages of the website offer a history of the board and several interpretations of its use – aome view it as an interesting party game and some view it as a serious way to devine the future. The combination of the picture gallery with the history, stories and some theories on how and why the planchette moves across the board, combine to make the whole site more than a collection of game boards.

Audience (stated or assumed):

The site would be of interest to anyone who has an interest in Ouija boards themselves, but also to business-types interested in the marketing aspects of board games, or the longevity of the phenomena. This could also interest anyone interested in pop culture of the twentieth century.

Type of Project background information available on website:

This is such a non-academic site that it does not offer much to the visitor who wants to know about the technologies behind the project. The pictured boards (over seven dozen) are from a personal collection, so there is not physical museum to which one could go and see them for real.

How are the digital objects presented?

The collection is browsable. Each board has a descriptive paragraph with it that covers its particular history. Some boards also have a “view larger image” icon, but not all. The larger image has a longer written explanation with it and some have interactivity with a floating planchette. There are no details as to size of the board, but materials used in making it, and explanations of illustrations are offered. The FAQs claim that the information has been reliably researched through historical records “known to be accurate”, court records, newspaper accounts, U.S. patents and interviews with relatives of manufacturers. There is a disclaimer line that asks for any corrections to be sent through the Contact Us page.

Metadata:

Virtually none! If you want to buy a board, there’s a page. If you want to know about superstitions surrounding the board, there’s a page. History, how-to’s, FAQ’s – there’s a page. But I was unable to find basic metadata that would accompany an academic or cultural museum’s presentation of this material. Provenance of each board is not offered.

Other Thoughts:

Since all the boards are in one private collection the purpose of the site seems to be to just let others view the boards, learn some history about them, and explore some theories about how it works. The site was awarded a “Best Collections” award and it is deserved because the collection is unique and well-presented. However, from the standpoint of judging it as a digital library – it is missing much of what we all know is necessary for a user to accomplish much more than play. It is easily navigable, it is visually pleasing, it is fun. It is not academic and it is not meant to be.

Joe Fishstein Collection of Yiddish Poetry

2009-11-14T14:43:00.002-05:00

Project name and URL
The Joe Fishstein Collection of Yiddish Poetry
http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/fishstein/index.htm

Organization name
McGill University

Description of what was digitized

This collection includes Yiddish poetry, many of which came from rare volumes, as well as postcards, photographs, and trade union memorabilia. The items came from a private collection.

Audience for the project (stated or assumed)
There is no stated audience for this project. The assumed audience would be researchers, historians, and those interested in Yiddish poetry. This collection does not seem to cater to a younger audience.

Type of project background information available on the site
There is little project background information available on the homepage of the site. The site explains that the contents of this digitization program were also part of a catalogue published by McGill University Library in 1998 and that the book launch was accompanied by an exhibition of the highlights. The site also states that “the book and accompanying exhibit were pared by editor/curator Goldie Sigal, who also acted as editor and curator of the present online catalogue and exhibit.” There is a link at the bottom of the page which reads “Digital Collection Program” which I thought might lead me to information about digital collections at the library as a whole, but all it did was bring me to the homepage for the university’s library and collections (which didn’t seem to have a link to a specific page regarding digital collections.

Additional information about the collection is available under the Catalogue link, including how the collection was acquired, biographical information about Joe Fishstein, history of the Yiddish language and Yiddish literature, the Romanization of Yiddish to make it accessible for cataloging for this project and any variance in the catalog entries. This required more hunting than I expected.

How are the digital assets presented?
This digitization project includes catalogue entries and representations of the digitized objects. The covers and, in some cases, the title pages of the volumes containing the poems have been digitized, but the text of the poems themselves are not digitized.

If you run a search, the search searches the bibliographic record, which includes the titles of the work and a link to the full bibliographic record, but these records don’t link to a page with the text of the work. These records also don’t have a thumbnail image of the cover of the volume in which the work is located, nor do they have a contextual link to the image.

It is possible to search the catalogue by keyword, title, author, illustrator, LC call number, and entry number. The results screen tells how many records have been retrieved, and the entry number, author name, and title of the work and a link to the full bibliographic record. The bibliographic records are not extensive. While they are assigned LC call numbers, they don’t contain any sort of subject headings.
The author name is not linked to other bibliographic records containing that author. It is possible to search by author from the search screen, but having the author name linked as well would save the user a few steps.

There are two browse features on the website. The first is tied in to the bibliographic records. Users can browse by the topics Yiddish Literary Collections, Yiddish Literary Endeavours, Yiddish Translations of Other Literatures, and Jewish Civilization, all of which have dropdown to select from. Users can also browse by A-Z index of authors, illustrators, titles, or periodicals. Each letter of the index must be clicked on separately. The listings themselves are not all displayed at the same time.

The other browse feature on the website, but it is not a way to browse the entire collection. It browses the parts of the collection that were part of the exhibit. The categories include The Man, The Milieu, Fathers, Authors, Poetesses, Poland, Soviet Union, United States, Canada, Israel, Special Imprints, Translations, Humour, Theatre, and Illustrators. When you click on one of these categories, thumbnails of the objects that were part of the exhibit are displayed with a one-line description underneath. When the thumbnail is selected, a larger image appears with a more thorough description, date of object (if known), dimensions of the original object (if applicable), and what part of the object is displayed (e.g. front cover). It is possible to zoom in on the image.

Ease of Use
This digitization project could be more easy to use. The search system requires the user to have some knowledge of what to expect from the collection. Even browsing the collection does not present the user with the full collection. This digitization project seems to document the exhibit that was held at McGill University rather than open the entire collection up to an online audience.

The Walt Whitman Archive

2009-11-12T20:30:00.002-05:00

Project name:
The Walt Whitman Archive
http://www.whitmanarchive.org/

Organization name:
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln

What was digitized:
The Archive brings together a lot of different Whitman material, including digitized editions of Leaves of Grass, scans of his poem manuscripts, contemporary criticism of his work, a collection of photographs of Whitman, and some correspondence sent to him by his family. There’s even an mp3 of a wax cylinder of Whitman reading his poem "America" (which, incidentally, was used in one of those ridiculous Levi’s commercials).

Audience:
Scholars, students, and general readers.

Project background:
There is extensive project background information on the "About the Archive" page. This is a nice example of an active digital archive that is planning for the future and regularly updating and expanding. You can even view earlier version of the project website, which is pretty cool.

Digital Asset Presentation:
Presentation varies depending on the type of asset. There are different styles for scanned documents, photographs, letters, etc. Overall, it is a well-designed and easy-to-use site. The only problem is that there is so much different material and it is spread out among different headings and tabs. It could take you a while to dig through everything and really realize just how much is in the Archive.

Other information:
Whitman presents a real challenge to editors of his works due to the constant revisions and alterations he would make to his poems. For instance, Leaves of Grass went through six editions during Whitman’s lifetime, each involving significant revisions and additions to the collection. This can make it very difficult to provide a “definite” edition of Whitman’s works. As the editors of the Archive explain, Whitman’s work often "defies the constraints of the book" making a digital archive uniquely suited to presenting it. For instance, the archive already has all of the American editions of Leaves of Grass available for comparison. I imagine digital archives like this will significantly change how literary scholars do research, making it much easier for anyone to access all of the different editions of a work and do textual comparisons.

Yale University Library: Digital Collections Manuscripts and Archives Digital Images Database (MADID)

2009-11-12T18:24:00.001-05:00

Project Name and URL

Yale University Library: Digital Collections Manuscripts and Archives Digital Images Database (MADID)

Organization Name

Yale University

Description of What Was Digitized

The items digitized in this collection comprise photographs, posters, drawings, and text documents.

Type of Project Background Information Available on the Site

There is very little project background available on the site. However, there is an extensive copyright statement as well as examples of how credit lines should read. If a user if interested in more information on the Yale University Manuscripts and Archives collection as a whole (as opposed to this selection of digitized items), there are links at the bottom of the page to consult.

Yale recommends using MADID as "a starting point for image selection." Because the collection continues to grow, it will be interesting to see how much of the university's archives become a part of MADID.

Audience for the Project

Audience members include students, professors, researchers, historians, librarians, geneologists, Yale alumni, and people who wish to learn more about Yale's archival holdings.

How Are the Digital Assets Presented

There are two ways of searching this collection: 1. browsing different aspects such as the archives, manuscripts, or publications, and 2. using the advanced search.

Unfortunately, the browse options yield long lists that are not alphabetical. There are no thumbnails, which would be useful.

Clicking on a random link "Photographs of Kline Biology Tower," yields a variety of large thumbnails of both color and black and white images. When I selected one of the photographs, I saw a very large image with a watermark ["Source: Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University Library. Produced for reference use only. (mssa.img.005384)].

Here is a sample of metadata I viewed at the site:

Title: Close-up of Kline Biology Tower.
Image Number: 5384
Original Material: Slide
Record Unit Name: Photographs of Kline Biology Tower, Yale University, 1964-1966 (inclusive).
Collection ID: mssa.ru.0621
Box Number: CS4
Folder Number: 64
File Name: 005384.jpg
Credit Line: Photographs of Kline Biology Tower, Yale University, 1964-1966 (inclusive). Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University

The help information was minimal, but the site is easily used, so it fits the needs.

Overall, I was impressed by the plans, elevations, and architectural photographs and archival materials available at the site. I'd recommend a more sophisticated display system with more information about the images themselves.

Darwin Correspondence Project

2009-11-10T14:25:00.002-05:00

Project Name and URL:

Darwin Correspondence Project (DCP)
http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/index.php

Organization Name:

Cambridge University Library at the University of Cambridge, UK.
*This project is jointly managed by the University of Cambridge and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Description of what was digitized:

On this site you can read and search the full texts of more than 5000 of Darwin's letters, and find information on 10,000 more. As I explored the site I found very few digital images of the physical letters, mostly there are transcribed, fully searchable copies of letters written by (7,600) and to (6,500) Darwin. The other entries are memoranda and other supporting documents. All are being published in the complete edition of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin (F. Burkhardt et al. eds, Cambridge University Press).
Also included in the database are short biographies of nearly 2000 correspondents and more than 1000 other people mentioned in the letters. The biographical entries of Darwin's correspondents link to complete lists of all letters he exchanged with them.

Audience (stated or assumed):

The digital library aims to provide full transcriptions of the letter texts themselves, but also, by the inclusion of scholarly footnotes and appendixes, to make them accessible to historians, scientists and general readers.

All manner of users are sought as I even noted a special project highlighted on the home page of school children writing letters to Darwin as part of a University of Exeter project. The foundational materials were provided by the Darwin Project and two of the final submissions have been published on the website.

Type of Project background information available on website:

The history of the project is given – its inception by an American scholar with help from a British scholar in 1974 that has grown into this comprehensive project meant to track down and make available online, all correspondence to and from Darwin during his lifetime. What is missing is the digitization methods chosen and followed. For example, I could not determine if the letters were scanned and then Optical Character Recognition used to produce the machine readable and searchable format of the site, or whether all letters were re-keyed. There is mention that each letter, once digitized, is reviewed four separate times before being released to the website.

It is clear that not all letters are transcribed from originals. Some are from previously published books and summaries only. What is positive about this approach is the metadata listed in the lefthand banner column that allows the user to easily find the provenance of the letter, and as much information as privacy and copyright allows for providing contact information if a user wishes to peruse an original. (FYI: The largest single collection is in Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, UK and the second largest is in the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, US.) The DCP “does not control access to ANY original material either in Cambridge or in any of the other repositories housing Darwin manuscripts.

Editorial decisions are itemized in a separate section. For example, undated letters are given a provisional date by the editorial staff (subject to correction if new information is found).

How are the digital objects presented?:

The collection is browsable within broad subject areas (Darwin and religion, Darwin and science, Darwin and gender), or a user can access a detailed Advanced Search page. The opening search page looks deceptively simplistic, but the Advanced Search Tips icon leads to an array of choices to limit the search in ways that only a true scholar may think necessary. There are also some pre-grouped letters that are meant to give a general audience some background into Darwin’s life by virtue of being funny or interesting.

Metadata:

Since the intent of the site is to make the content of the letters searchable for the most scholarly of users, the metadata is quite extensive. It is prominently displayed in a left hand banner and includes hyperlinked items to give users detailed information.
• The letter number (or ‘calendar number’) is a unique identifier for each letter. The series originated in the published Calendar to the correspondence.
• Where the name of the correspondent has been supplied by the editors, the name appears in square brackets. Doubtful attributions are indicated by a question mark. Hyperlinks are often provided to biographical data on the parties mentioned.
• Any parts of the date supplied by the editors appear in square brackets. Less than half of the known letters have a complete date written on them by the author.
• The metadata to the lower left of each entry has basic information about each letter:
o author
o addressee
o date
o physical description
o where to find the original
o whether we have published it, and if so, in which volume of the Correspondence
• The ‘provenance’ is usually the location of the original letter. Alternatively it refers to the source from which the summary or transcription has been made.

Other Thoughts:

Since copyright clearance is on all of our minds this week, I thought I’d try to apply the Hirtle chart to these letters, of course realizing that the project is based in the UK and thus probably conforms to their copyright restrictions, not ours. Since private letters are originally unpublished and Darwin died in 1882 these are considered in the public domain and therefore available for digitization without infringement.
I found the website to be time consuming to navigate because of the tremendous amount of data provided and the level of searchability aimed for by the creators. Some of the search frames offered I found to be less intuitive, but I was able to find and explore several avenues of random thoughts without dead ends. As the mission is to provide transparent access to the content of Darwin’s written correspondence to anyone, the website accomplishes this goal and more. I was not only able to search for content, but was also drawn into the excitement of reading primary source materials on a still-controversial historic figure.

Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945

2009-11-09T14:45:00.016-05:00

Project name and URL:
Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945 at http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/hsx/

Organization name:
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Description of what was digitized:
This library uses the personal experiences of artist, Richard Grune, and nine others to narrate the experience of homosexual holocaust victims. Digitized documents include many photographs, paintings, legal documents, videos, in addition to documents created by the Nazi regime.

Audience for the project:
A very wide audience would find this content useful: researchers/college professors, the general public, as well as students and teachers, 7th grade and above. Younger children may be scared by the content.

Type of project background information available on the site:
A detailed bibliography of both English and German documents detailing subject background is provided.

How are the digital assets presented?:
The best part about this project is the presentation format. The digitized documents are embedded in a narrative discussion of actual individual experiences. This is a powerful strategy to use with content that provokes an emotional response, and very effectively connects the user with the story behind the face. However, I will say that I almost overlooked the links to these "Personal Histories." It would be a shame for users to overlook this information. I also noticed the collection is not searchable, rather, the user is lead through via the narrative. It might be useful to add this option, but the project is small enough to work well without it.

What additional information is presented? Enough? Too much? Worthwhile?:
A pdf handout is provided for teachers, in addition to a link to other fantastic online resources.

What metadata is present?
Metadata varies depending on the original object represented in digital format and is used for descriptive purposes, only, as I did not find a way to search this project.

Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland

2009-11-08T23:41:00.003-05:00

Project name: Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland (e-codices)

Organization name: University of Fribourg

What was digitized: Medieval manuscripts from libraries across Switzerland.

Audience: The audience includes both manuscript researchers/scholars and the general public.

Project background: The e-codices program focuses on providing complete digital reproductions of manuscripts and their corresponding scholarly descriptions. Twenty-one libraries are currently involved in the project. The amount of manuscripts per library varies; one has over 300, while others have fewer than 5. The actual digitization of the manuscripts began in 2005, and is ongoing as more libraries join the project and more collections are added.

Other information: The library has a short FAQ section that addresses basic questions regarding the use of the materials. Interestingly, they address the question of whether an incorrect or incomplete manuscript description can be corrected. The library states that they don’t guarantee completeness or accuracy, and that most of the libraries participating in the project have chosen the descriptions. Some of the descriptions are over a century old, and will only be replaced if the more recent description is shown to be more accurate. The website is available in English, French, German, and Italian, but the scholarly descriptions are only available in the languages they were originally written in, which will presumably cause problems for some researchers.

The manuscripts were digitized using a strict set of criteria to ensure that they were protected against damage. Books cannot be open past a certain angle, and mechanical pressure cannot be used to flatten pages. The library used a special camera table to cut down on the handling of manuscripts, and controlled the lighting, temperature, and humidity of the digitization lab. Interestingly, there is a maximum work period of eight hours per item.

Volunteer Voices

2009-11-08T15:17:00.001-05:00

Project name and URL
Volunteer Voices
www.volunteervoices.org

Organization name
Volunteer Voices and University of Tennessee (loosely, as it submitted the ILMS grant application on behalf of ten partner institutions and Tenn-Share, a resource sharing consortium that came up with the idea)

Description of what was digitized
Print documents including handwritten notes, letters, photographs, bills for sale, flyers, newspaper articles and advertisements, sheet music cover illustrations, and pamphlets. There is no comprehensive list of the types of documents included, though it looks as though the documents are solely print and not in any other media format.

Audience for the project (stated or assumed)
The stated audience for this project includes students in K-16 classrooms and the general public.

Type of project background information available on the site
Volunteer Voices received a three-year grant from the Institute of Museum and Library services to build its first digital collection “The Growth of Democracy in Tennessee”. Three digital content specialists travelled around the state, scanning and creating records for more than 10,000 items from approximately 100 institutions. Institutions include archives, libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions. There are also lesson plans available. The University of Tennessee is maintaining and preserving this collection. Volunteer Voices also aims to provide training opportunities for personnel to learn digitization standards and best practices.

How are the digital assets presented?

People can perform a simple or advanced search of the Volunteer Voices website. They can also browse by era, county, topic or institution. Eras are listed chronologically, with the oldest at the topic. Counties are listed alphabetically. Not every county has a link, so presumably those counties are not yet represented in this resource. Topics are listed alphabetically. Institutions are listed alphabetically by name. There is also a map of Tennessee with county lines shown and stars in blue, red, and outlines in blue, but it is unclear what these stars present. They don’t link to anything nor do they present any information when rolled over. I expected them to link to an institution that is located in that part of the state or at least provide an institution name when rolled over.

When people search or browse for items, the total number of items retrieved is listed at the top of the page as well as number of items displayed on the current pages. There is an option to sort results by date (descending or ascending) or A-Z. Each entry includes a thumbnail of the image as well as title, publishers, date created, abstract, era, collection name, contributing institution, and URL information. There is also link to “view long format new window”. A new window opens up and includes information about the digitization center, original publisher, copyright and conditions of use, statement of responsibility, subject areas, topic subjects, geographic subjects, city of contributing institution, Internet media type, digital origin, extent, language, and genre.

When a document that is handwritten is viewed, there is an option to see the original image or to see the text of the document typewritten. It is helpful to have both as it allows people to be able to see the text and penmanship of the original document and also be able to clearly read what it says.

Content in Volunteer Voices is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. This allows educators and students to use the images freely in their studies. Attribution is expected. Terms of use for each digital asset outside of the Creative Commons license is determined by the contributing institution. The name of the contributing institution is included as a field in the bibliographic record for the asset.

Is it easy to use?

Browsing the collection is easier than searching. The topics are very clear and present the expected results. When searching it is unclear if all of the relevant results are retrieved. I searched for “quilt” and retrieved 2 results and for “quilts” and retrieved 2 results, but these results were not the same.

There are a few parts to the website that should be changed or added to. From the search results screen there is no way to return to the home page of the Volunteer Voices site. There is no link labeled “home” and the image in the upper left which is often considered a link to return to home takes the user to a page with an option to conduct a simple or advanced search or to browse the collection (listing broad topics alphabetically and listing eras in American History as they related to Social Studies taught in Tennessee K-12 education).

Final thoughts
Overall it is a very nice digitization program. The variety of asset types make for an interesting collection, particularly when browsing different subjects. I think that the lessons plans will be more effective than the assets themselves for the younger grades.

The Oneida Community Collection

2009-11-08T11:07:00.001-05:00

Organization names: Syracuse University Library
URL: http://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/o/OneidaCommunityCollection/
Description of what was digitized: Photographs, full-text digital editions of books and articles, a list of publications on social reform movements of the mid-19th century, and bibliographies and finding aids for SU Library’s Oneida materials.
Audience for the project (stated or assumed): The stated audience is scholars using library materials for the research, but anyone trying to learn about the history of the Oneidas or the development of this region of New York would find it useful.
Type of project background information available on the site: Credit for supporting the digitization project is given to the Regional Bibliographic Databases and Interlibrary Resources Sharing Program funds, awarded by the New York State Library. A thorough history of SU’s involvement with the Oneida Collection is also presented, explaining why the Library has a large collection of materials on the subject.

The site is very bare bones, with essentially no interface beyond a list of links on a white background. The simple organization, however, is perfectly adequate for the subject matter; it might not get anyone excited about browsing a beautiful site, but the divisions between the categories is clear and the relatively short list of materials makes it easy to scroll down and see the entire thing at once. The presentation is clean and easy to understand.

The list of bibliographies and finding aids, which at first seems like a very dry portion of the site, actually reveals just how extensive the collection is. This tool would be extremely useful for a student writing a reference paper on the Oneidas or a visiting researcher looking to see as many of the relevant materials as possible.

Complete bibliographic citations are provided for all of the publications. Extensive metadata, such as the dates of scanning and the names of the people doing the scanning and encoded, is included at the top of each full-text entry. A clear copyright statement — “It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text.” — is also included on each page.

The photographs also have a clear copyright statement, noting that they “are protected by U.S. Copyright and reproduction of any image presented in this collection requires the written permission” of the executive director of the Oneida Community Mansion House. E-mail and mailing addresses, as well as a phone number, are provided as contact information, which is very convenient.

The photographs themselves are slightly more problematic. In the finding aid listing links to the photographs, some entries identify the people in the photographs and offer dates and other information. (Information likely was not available for all the historic photos.) The metadata, however, is disconnected from the actual images, because each photograph appears alone on a page without any information. The resolution is also fairly low, so that details of old, slightly blurry photographs really cannot be made out.

Overall, however, this site is well-organized and its simplicity is refreshing. People using this site will come away with a very clear idea of what SU’s Oneida Collection contains, as well as the history of the Oneida Nation.

Vietnam War Era Ephemera Collection

2009-11-07T13:08:00.002-05:00

Project name and URL
Vietnam War Era Ephemera Collection
http://content.lib.washington.edu/protestsweb/index.html

Organization name
University Libraries, University of Washington Digital Collections

Description of what was digitized
Collection includes pamphlets, posters, newsletters, booklets, and letters created by the various Seattle-area groups of American civil rights and protest movements in the late 60s and 1970s.

Audience for the project
I do not see a specified group but I am assuming it is for anyone interested in the history of the Vietnam protest movement.

Type of project background information available on the site
There is a 1/2 page of information detailing the history of the Vietnam protest movement of the late 1960s and early 70s. This is followed by an about the database section explaining how the database came to be and what is in it.

How are the digital assets presented?
List of pictures and poster. When clicked on it becomes larger. Below is a list of information on the poster or flier. This information includes title, creator, publisher, place of publication, date, notes intended purpose, issue area, subjects, geographic coverage, digital collection, digital ID number, repository, repository collection, object type, physical description and digital reproduction information. This is all done within the ContentDM format.

Is it easy to use?
It is very easy to use. Just look through the pictures and click on them and you are able to fully get the information behind each picture. Extremely easy to use.

I am very interested in this because I find social protest fascinating. this is a great site to look at the ephemera from the late 1960s and the social protests involved in that area.

19th Century American Sheet Music Digitization Project

2009-11-07T12:21:00.002-05:00

Organization name: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Description of what was digitized: Sheet music from the 1830s to 1850s, including covers and notes.

Audience: Students in Music, History, Art, English, Political Science, Sociology, and American Studies classes.

Background information: It's explained that a total of 125 binders of music are in the library, as well as how many have been digitized (at the time of this writing, it's 82). Background is also given on the sheet music industry of the time and its historical importance that led to the decision to digitize them.

Searches can be done with title, composer, or just keywords. Alphabetical browsing in these areas is also available. The pages themselves are easily legible despite naturally being in somewhat poor condition, and transcripts are provided of any notes that have been written. These are of good historical value, and easily bypass any legibility problems of the old-fashioned handwriting or the digitization process itself, as seen before in this class. A very good job here.

Feeding America (cookbooks prior to 1922)

2009-11-06T22:27:00.002-05:00

Project Name and URL:
Feeding America: the historic American cookbook collection
http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/intro_essay.html

Organization Name:
Michigan State University Library and Michigan State University Museum collaboration

Description of what was digitized:
The Feeding America project created an online collection of some important American cookbooks from the late 18th to early 20th century. The digital archive includes page images of 76 cookbooks from the MSU Library's collection as well as searchable full-text transcriptions. This site also features a glossary of cookery terms and multidimensional images of antique cooking implements from the collections of the MSU Museum.

Audience (stated or assumed):
The stated audience is: “The Feeding America online collection hopes to highlight an important part of America's cultural heritage for teachers, students, researchers investigating American social history, professional chefs, and lifelong learners of all ages.”

Type of Project background information available on website:
This digital library is presented as though it were an example to all digital library students on what to include and how to include it. From the home page there is a page link to The Project which states the mission of the digital collection creation, the intended audience, and then there are nine hyperlinks to other brief pages, one of which gives the basic technical digitization choices made, the standards chosen, encoding guidelines used, the staff listed by responsibility, and a listing of editorial choices made in transcription. These pages are well-worth perusing for anyone interested in the how-to part of digital library creation. I have pasted the short explanation of the process used to create the page images. The clear language, the lack of academic language makes this portion of the site much less intimidating to a novice, and very interesting to the casual inquirer.

Page Images
For the purposes of scanning, the cookbooks were divided into two groups: those in good condition, which could be laid face-down without strain to the spine, and those which are either tightly bound or very fragile, which had to done with an overhead scanner.
A few early 20th century titles with library buckram binding have been disbound; no books with their original binding were disbound.
The books in good condition were scanned on a Hewlett-Packard color flatbed ScanJet 5100C with a 9x12 inch scanner bed or on a UMAX Mirage D-16L color flatbed scanner with a 12x17 inch scanner bed. Scans on both these machines were done at 400 dpi, 24-bit color, and saved in compressed .TIF format. The fragile books were scanned on a Minolta PS3000 overhead scanner at 600 dpi, 1-bit color and saved in .TIF format.
The .TIF images were then resized and saved as .JPGs using JASC Image Robot. version 1.1. Copies of the archival .TIF images are available on request; the .JPG images are used for web delivery.
Typing copies of the books were produced by converting the archival images to PDF files, thus saving the book from further handling.

How are the digital objects presented?:
There is the ability to search the collection or browse the collection. There are many hyperlinks among entries connecting items by content or culture or era. The user may search by author, title, recipe or ingredient. When browsing, the user can order the collection by date, by interest or alphabetically by title. The browsing user views a thumbnail of the cover, title if available, the author’s name, and a list of topical interest areas identified for each item.
When an individual item is reached there is a larger image, basic metadata (author, title, publisher, year and place of publication), and a written introduction to the work, supplied by a member of the MSU Special Collections staff or the MSU Museum staff. This is an incredible added value to the user who is winnowing the digital collection for a specific topic. As already mentioned, there are many hyperlinks among the items connecting and grouping items by interest area, ingredients, authors, geography, etc.
The books can be viewed as .pdf pages, page images, or as HTML or XML text. Again, while viewing HTML text, a user can toggle back to the page image to see any accompanying illustrations. The usability of this collection is incredible.

Metadata:
Quite basic. Each book includes a thumbnail image, title, author, publisher (if known), publication date (if known), place of publication (if known).
Metadata on image specifications and size of the physical item is glaringly missing. Especially when looking at the multi-dimensional images of the corresponding museum objects, size and information on material could be of great interest to the scholarly user.

Other Thoughts:
This is a good example of a limited project that does not try to be more than it is. Several observations I had: 1) copyright was not an issue since all 76 titles were published works from 1922 and before – everything is in the public domain. 2) all imaging work was done in-house so that budget must have been easier to target prior to beginning than in a project involving outside vendors. 3) I liked the straightforward language used in all parts of the site – the site designer truly kept in mind that the audience may not be, and was intended to include, non-academic users. 4) I especially liked the interconnectedness within the items included in the digital collection. Being able to click through to other books of Creole cooking or using bread foam as an ingredient was fascinating.
My only criticism would be the lack of metadata for the truly techno user. However, the concomitant clarity of the site and ease of use will draw in a wider audience than digital technocrats and there are several places to contact the MSU library and museum system for further information on specific items, and related items that were not chosen for digitization but may be in the 7,000+ items still in the physical collection.

USC Digital Library

2009-11-06T10:35:00.001-05:00

Project name and URL
Soul of Los Angeles Collection, part of the USC Digital Libraryhttp://digitallibrary.usc.edu/search/controller/index.htm

Organization name
University of Southern California

Description of what was digitized
The “Soul of Los Angeles” Collection contains 222 photographs taken by Jerry Berndt. All of the photographs are black and white and are of a photojournalism style. The photographs highlight the religious life of immigrants in Lost Angeles.
When selecting a Digital Collection to view, users may browse by Collections, Featured Content, Time Periods and Places. Each collection has an “About” section to describe it.
The Digital Library as a whole has a variety of digitized materials:“Spanning a wide range of visual media, the USC Digital Library offers digital images of drawings, illuminated manuscripts, maps, photographs, posters, prints, rare illustrated books, as well as audio and video recordings (USC, About).”

Audience for the project (stated or assumed)
Members of the USC community, including students, faculty and staff would all be an audience. In addition, those interested in the study of the religious lives of immigrants in Los Angeles would also be an audience. Although the names of the subjects in the photographs are not given, the descendants of immigrants to this area may be interested in studying the photographs for the purposes of identifying family members or friends.
Type of project background information available on the site
The items in the collection reflect USC’s mission “to select, collect, preserve and make accessible high quality digital images of unique materials with metadata to support research, and provides a “gateway” to resources on Los Angeles and Southern California” (USC, About).

How are the digital assets presented?
The photographs are presented as 256-pixel thumbnails and when selected are opened to a larger 1024-pixel image. No real manipulation (zoom, cropping, rotating, etc.) is available.

What metadata is present?
The information provided for each photograph is pretty extensive. There are Seven Main Categories of Metadata given: Description, Names and Dates, Subject, Relationships, Physical, Access, and Identifiers. Under the “Description” of the photograph is the title and record ID. “Names and Dates” contains Created, Creator, and Publisher. Where the “created” is given, I’m not sure if the date is when the photograph was taken or digitized. My guess would be that it was when the photograph was taken. “Subject” contains Topic, Coverage and Place. The “Topic” filed is hyperlinked which allow a user to find other items in the library on the same topic. “Physical” lists Type and Format, and “Access” lists the Rights, Repository and Ordering. “Identifier” gives a Record ID and Source.

Other Thoughts:
The library allows users to submit project proposals for potential digital collections. The user fills out a submission form and sends it in for review and then is contacted via email if the proposal has been approved. Once a project proposal has been reviewed, the user can follow the status of the project on the “Projects and Collections Page” of the library.
The “Search History” tab may be useful for those doing extensive research and wanted to trace their search steps. The “My Selections” section is also useful for those doing extensive research, allowing a user to deposit items into this folder and then email or print the images later.
The Advanced Search feature works well, as I did a few searches and received the results I was hoping for. The Search allows the user to search by Keyword or Record ID and make other search selections such as Media Type, Place, Date Range, Results per page and Collections.

Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (CHNC)

2009-11-05T19:22:00.000-05:00

Project Name: Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (CHNC)

Project URL: http://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org

Organization Name: Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection in partnership with the Colorado State Library and the Colorado Historical Society.

Description and Background Information:
CHNC uses the powerful Active Paper software from Olive Software to provide access to 147 newspapers published in Colorado from 1859 to 1923 in English, German, Spanish, and Swedish. The digitization was done from microfilm and funded originally by two large grants – a Library Services and Technology Act grant and an Institute for Museum and Library Services grant. The site makes a point of telling visitors why digitization is restricted to newspapers published in and before 1923: they are in the public domain, an important element that allows digitization of the incredible collaborative project that is newspaper publication.

Audience:
Anyone interested in the varied and exciting history captured in Colorado’s small, locally-published papers is a potential audience of this incredible collection: historians, genealogists, historic preservationists, teachers, students, residents, non-residents, etc.

Notable Details about the Collection:
This project effectively showcases the incredible power of the Active Paper software. If you are at all interested in newspaper digitization, I recommend that you take a look at this project.

Active Paper provides amazingly powerful and user-friendly options for anyone researching newspaper content, photos, obituaries, and more. The online tour provides a quick, yet thorough, overview of how to use the site, highlighting many of the powerful features, including a detailed search; how to view, print, save, or e-mail articles; how to browse individual editions; and how to use the various controls to navigate the site. The FAQs provide even more detailed information.

The software allows you to search by keywords within specific dates, papers, or collections of papers; view each newspaper by page or article; search for particular images; save articles in “my collection,” a cookie that is temporarily housed on your computer until you delete your temporary files; view articles as PDFs so you can zoom in and save; view articles in white print on a black background in order to improve readability; and much more. When you perform a keyword search, the software remembers what words you used so that you don’t have to start from scratch with each new search. When you click on a search result, your search terms are underlined in the article view.

In order to help those searchers who may be overwhelmed with the amount of material on the site, the project developers offer two “Micro-Archives”. The first is “This Week in Colorado History,” which highlights something interesting relating to that week in history that the developers found in their work. The second is “Featured Topic,” which is updated monthly to highlight “harder-to-find subjects, topics you've told us interest you, or items that students research often” (FAQ). At several points on the site, visitors are invited to contact CHNC to offer feedback, provide suggestions, or point out notable objects discovered during research. I found this openness refreshing and wise, as many of the newspapers provided in this digital collection are donated by Colorado residents and library patrons.

Digital History

2009-11-05T18:34:00.002-05:00

Project name and URL
Hyperhistorian
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu

Organization name
Hyperhistorian

Description of what was digitized
A digital history book, over 400 documents from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, primary source documents, an audio collection of speeches by historians and a collection of maps.

Audience for the project (stated or assumed)
Site was made with the intention of supporting the teaching of American history in K-12 and college, I assuming the undergraduate level.

Type of project background information available on the site
Everything that I have read indicates the site has the intention of informing individuals on American history.

How are the digital assets presented?
I will use a picture as an example. Picture is placed on the left hand side. To the right the era is on top, bold faced. Next to it is the name of the picture. Below this is the scene that is in the picture, with a possible name to the person involved and a date. Below this is when the picture became available on-line and the url for the picture.

What additional information is presented? Enough? Too much? Worthwhile?
I am only deserving the picture but no additional information is provided other then what I have written down. I think the is a fair amount of information to be provided.

What metadata is present?
Date picture became available on-line, picture url, name of picture.

Is it easy to use?
It takes a few clicks to get through to pictures but that involved straight forward information and was not difficult to do.

Overall, I found this to be a pretty interesting website. There are not a lot of history focused that I know of so I am happy to see another.

National Archives Experience's Digital Vault

2009-11-04T16:08:00.003-05:00

Description of What Was Digitized: The Digital Vault is a collection of 10 billion + scans of historical documents and photographs and media from the National Archives.

Audience for the Project: Because of its interactive nature, the Digital Vault might appeal to the casually curious. The entire site puts me in mind of a museum. It's a place where anyone can find something interesting, provided they're not looking for one specific thing.

Type of Project Background: There is no background available directly from the Digital Vault's website, but a bit of project information can be found on the National Archives' website. The project is a collaboration between the National Archives and Second Story Interactive Studios. The Digital Vault arose from a desire to share the expansive offerings of the National Archives with a wider audience.

How Are the Digital Assets Presented?: The Digital Vault's assets are organized and presented in a manner completely unlike any digital collection I have ever seen. With an emphasis on interactivity, assets are arrayed in a design based on a Fibonacci spiral (according to Second Story Interactive Studios' website). Items in the spiral can be selected and manipulated by the user. If you're not looking for anything special, you can have the vault set you on a "track" which is almost like a game where you start at one point (usually a random digital object) and must make your way from point to point by browsing other objects and selecting the one that pertains to the clues given.
For those not as adventurous, there are also options for a traditional search. Search results come up as thumbnails of the object and cannot be organized any other way.
Users also have the option to create their own collection of objects that they are particularly interested in. These objects can then be used to make a poster or movie. As far as I can tell, there is no way to save your collection to view at a later time.

Additional Information and Metadata: Each digital object comes with a brief blurb about what it is, where object originated, and where it is currently housed. Additionally, each object has a series of tags that can be clicked on to bring up items with similar tags. Some objects also have links to additional resources, educational resources, and related media. Unlike most archives that I have perused, the Digital Vault doesn't contain any sort of metadata lay out or CONTENTdm style information.

Additional Thoughts: The Digital Vault definitely has a bit of a learning curve to it. Once you get the hang of it, it's easy enough to use, but, as I mentioned before, you really can't be looking for anything too specific otherwise it's too frustrating. This is probably the closest to a true online museum that I have seen. If you have a few hours to kill, you might learn something interesting.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Company Maps of Florida

2009-11-02T16:57:00.007-05:00

The University of Florida's digitized collection of Sanborn Fire Insurance Company Maps of Florida is a boon to researchers interested in the urban history of the Sunshine State from the period spanning from the Civil War to just after the end of World War I. More than 3,000 full-color map sheets make up the collection, revealing intricate street-level details of the development and growth of scores of Florida cities. According to the About page, the University of Florida's Map and Imagery Library digitized "original copyright-deposit copies" of Sanborn maps that are now in the public domain. In addition to meeting the needs of researchers, the collection is also designed for "municipal governments and engineering and architectural companies."

There are several options for viewing the digitized maps (brief view, thumbnail view, table view, and full view), and within each view, the maps can be sorted according to title, date ascending, or date descending. In the full view, users can zoom in several levels to view virtually every detail of fine print on the maps. Also within the full view, users can click on a tab to reveal metadata for the maps. The metadata provided includes the following:

title
creator
subject
spatial coverage
bibliographic ID
volume ID
source institution
rights management
resource identifier

The site also includes basic and advanced search features, though the advanced search feature lacks any discussion or explanation of the available fields across which one can search. Navigation of the collection is generally user-friendly, with tabbed browsing options on each page. However, once a user clicks on the full view of any map, the only way to return to the main listing of maps is by repeatedly clicking the Back button (to page back either through multiple map sheets that have been viewed or through any zoom iterations that a user has employed) or by returning to the home page of the map collection and re-entering a search.

The digital assets are supplemented by an extensive overview of Sanborn Fire Insurance Company Maps prepared by the Library of Congress in 1981. (According to the University of Florida site, only the Library of Congress has more Florida Sanborn maps in its collection.) While not specific to the Sanborn Fire Insurance Company Maps collection, the University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) has a Technical Resources page that is chock-full of information on the architecture and development of the university's digital collections. For example, it was here that I learned that the UFDC employs open-source software (the Greenstone suite) for its digital collections. Unfortunately, the link to the Technical Resources page is barely noticeable at the bottom of each webpage. It would be nice if it were more prominently linked to within the specific About section of the Sanborn collection so that digital library enthusiasts could better appreciate the workings of the site.

Otis Artists' Books Collection

2009-11-01T19:16:00.000-05:00

Project Name and URL

Otis Artists' Books Collection

Organization Name

Otis College of Art and Design

Description of What Was Digitized

The unique and complex collection of artists' books at Otis College of Art and Design were digitized and placed on this site. Artists' books can be made of any number of materials and may not even remotely resemble what we typically think of as a book. There also are artists' books that are printed by the artist or others in limited or mass productions.

Type of Project Background Information Available on the Site

Documents on the digitization project itself are available on the Artists' Books Collection - Project Files page. These very useful documents include:

MARC Field Crosswalk.
Best Practices for Cataloging.
MARC 6xx Fields & Controlled Vocabulary Lists (Sample).

One document that isn't there is one on how they digitized the actual works. Some are so complex and fragile that I was interested in the documentation of their processes relating to the physical digitization of the works.

In addition, the "About" page (also the home page of the collection) includes abundant information about artists' books. According to the about page, the collection was digitized with assistance from the Getty Electronic Cataloging Initiative. "The Otis Library cataloged the books and and photographed representative portions of each work," says the site.

The Otis Library holds one of the world's largest collections of artists' books thanks to one of its previous librarians, Joan Hugo, an expert on the works. To date, the collection comprises approximately 2,000 artists' books. The Otis Library's collection of artists' books also was one of the first collection of its type to be digitized.

Audience for the Project

Audience members include art historians, artists, students, researchers, museums, galleries, and people who wish to learn more about artists' books.

How Are the Digital Assets Presented

The Otis Library uses Contentdm as its online record database. I've seen this used before in more sophisticated ways. I wish that they had opted to include more exploratory ways of searching, such as limiting by type of artists' book, materials, etc. Otherwise, users must page their way through the listed items unless they know the artist or a particular term they wish to search. Speaking of search, the advanced search covers all the library's special collections, so the user must be careful to only the select the artists' books collection because the default is that all the collections will be searched.

Once a user decides on a given artists' book to view, the user can rotate the image, clip it to a new window, and change the resolution. However, the resolution options are not implicitly stated. This is a visibility issue because most users who download images need to know the resolution. Being able to change the zoom percentage of the color images (they are all color scanned) is particularly handy if the image is large. On the other hand, you cannot increase the zoom more than 100%.

Most of the works also include access to inside pages (although not all inside page in most cases). This is helpful for researchers because sometimes the "covers" or outsides of artists' books do not remotely resemble their "insides".

In the "View" drop-down menu, users can select from different options including "Page description". This option is actually the metadata. Here is an example of metadata I encountered:

Collection: Otis Library's Artists' Books
Title: Ant farm 20/20 vision
Alternate Title(s): 20/20 vision; 2020 vision; Twenty twenty vision
Date: c1973
Press(es): Ant Farm (Design group)
Physical Description: [20] p.: ill.; 29 cm.
Subject(s): Art, Modern -- 20th century -- Exhibitions Future in art
Description: CalendarLOG of the exhibit. Cover title. Comb bound calendar for the year 1974. "The 20/20 vision exhibit includes architectural models, full- scale mock-ups, designs for new institutions, media predictions, and ideas concerning our thoughts and perceptions in the 21st century."--P. [1].
Book Type(s): Artists' books Calendars
Binding: Comb binding
Call Number: N 7433.4 A56 T83 1973

I really like that the catalogers defined the book type as well as the cover title. I'm guessing that because there is no "Author" field that this work has not been attributed to an artist. I'm also puzzled as to why they would use "Author" rather than "Creator" for this collection's metadata. But, that may be a function of their using Contentdm for all their special collections and a wish to standardize across collections. The quotation also was puzzling because it had a footnote number, but no footnote, and the attribution was essentially worthless for me since I could not figure out who "P" was.

The help files were context-sensitive, which was very handy. There was no copyright information for the collection, which I found to be surprising. There was not even a link to the Otis Library's overall copyright and intellectual property rights page. I also found the inability to effectively use my browser's "back" button to be irritating.

Overall, I enjoyed seeing the wide variety of artists' books. It made me want to visit the Otis Library in person to see the objects. I would suggest that the Otis Librarians revisit the collection they put online in 2003, and see if there are better ways to use Contentdm to manage the digitized works and their accompanying records and metadata.

Curse Tablets of Roman Britain

2009-11-01T16:51:00.003-05:00

Project name and URL
Curse Tablets of Roman Britain
http://curses.csad.ox.ac.uk/

 Organization name
Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents (CSAD), Stelios Ioannou School for Research in Classical and Byzantine Studies, Oxford University

 Description of what was digitized
This is a neat project digitizing ancient “curse” tablets from Roman Britain. Curse tablets were thin metal lead sheets inscribed with requests to the gods and tossed into sacred sites like temples. In Roman Britain they usually asked deities to punish thieves, for example, "...to the holy god Mercury. I complain to your divinity that I have lost two wheels and four cows and many small belongings from my house. I would ask the genius of your divinity that you do not allow health to the person who has done me wrong…”

Audience
While the presentation of the tablets themselves is quite technical and presumably aimed at scholars, context is also provided for amateurs through a educational module Cursing for Beginners. There’s also detailed information about the archeological sites where these tablets were found.

Project background 
There is not much information about the digitization process itself. One page does explain that modern digitization techniques were used to make the tablets more legible when photographed: “Images can also be manipulated to bring out the contrasts of light and shade and images photographed from different angles can be combined to map incisions revealed by the play of light and shadow across the tablet.”

How are the digital assets presented?
The tablets are presented in several different ways. First, there is a high-resolution digital photograph, and also a hand-drawn (and much more legible) copy of the tablet. Then, a transcription of the Latin text is provided, along with detailed line notes. Lastly, in most cases, there is an English translation of the text.

Because these are unique objects, they have some unique metadata. A detailed description of the physical tablet itself is provided, with the size and condition. Citations are given for the original scholarly article that described the tablet. If possible, the original “author” of the tablet is listed.

Other thoughts
This is an interesting project since only about 30 tablets were digitized, but extensive background information was created about the nature of curse tablets and the ancient sites where they are found. It looks like it was a pilot test for creating a more extensive database in the future to help share these unique documents, as well as to educate the general public.

Lunar Orbiter Digitization Project

2009-10-31T16:46:00.002-04:00

Organization name: United States Geological Survey (USGS)

Description of what was digitized: Orbital photographs of the Moon.

Audience for the project (stated or assumed): Astronomers, others interested in space exploration.

Type of project background information available on the site: A description of how the photographs were taken and digitized, and the purpose behind them.

This project involves five missions from 1966-67 in which sattelites were launched into orbit around the moon and took photographs of various parts of the surface. This includes the far side of moon, which had never been seen before. They are presented using a new technology which allows for an incredibly high resolution level, presenting a complete picture of the moon's surface when assembled together. The pictures are available as their seperate original versions, or assembled into more complete maps. The project is still ongoing, with a disclaimer that any conclusions drawn from the pictures are not the responsibility of the USGS.

If we ever do begin colonizing the moon, these pictures will definitely prove useful. Indeed, determining if colonozation would be possible was one of the goals of those five missions. However, until then they are relegated to just a curiosity, of interest mostly to professional astronomers. It seems the project mostly falls into the "because we can" mentality of digitization that the textbook warns against, though the new resolution technology will likely see wider use if it is successful here.

Darwin Digital Library of Evolution

2009-10-31T13:50:00.002-04:00

Organization names: The American Museum of Natural History Library, plus several additional partners
URL: http://darwinlibrary.amnh.org/
Description of what was digitized: Documents, photographs and a lengthy bibliography relating to the study of evolution.
Audience for the project (stated or assumed): Students and serious researchers of evolution interested in the progression of Darwin’s writings, and nature hobbyists or biologists interested in casually browsing photographs of species Darwin used in his work.
Type of project background information available on the site: An extensive list of acknowledgments is listed on the “People” page, but the About page has only information about the “opening day collection,” which is presumably the material originally on the site. No dates are listed.

The main page of the project explains its scope, which is extensive, aiming to make all the available literature about evolution – including but not limited to Darwin’s work – accessible online through the site. It’s unclear how close the digital library is to that goal; several manuscripts and publications are available as full-text, searchable documents, but it’s only a fraction of the 16 books and 150 articles the site attributes to Darwin. The site is divided into three main content areas: the library, the gallery and the bibliography. It specifies the scope and notes that the material aims to be “historically and topically coherent.”

Documents in the library are divided into Darwin’s own works, plus works by his ancestors and descendants, and responses throughout history. The latter three categories have summaries, presumably written by project staff, about work in each area. Darwin’s category contains a list of some of his publications and manuscripts. Four of the five entries are clickable, which brings up a Flash player embedded in each Web page that allows readers to access the full documents. This is helpful and clear, but it’s difficult to understand which manuscripts and publications are presented in the first place, and why some of them are clickable when others are not. No metadata other than citation information is provided.

Metadata is sorely lacking from the photographic entries in the gallery, as well. The photographs are all titled simply “Darwin’s Plants,” with a Latin name beneath each picture and an attribution, but there is no way to navigate through the photos other than clicking “next” and “previous.” A test search on the word “dioica,” part of the name of a species of flower that I found on a photograph, turns up four documents and no photo. It’s possible that the search is comprehensive for the library but not the gallery, but it would be nice to know that before performing a search.

The bibliography is arguably the most useful part of the site, listing about 3,500 works related to Darwin and evolution. It can be organized alphabetically, or chronologically, and 98 of the references contain links to the full-text (although there is no way to see only the full-text items except scrolling through the list of thousands of works). Bibliographic entries also do not appear in the search.

This digital library also includes a clear point of view, noting on the main page that, “We have undertaken this effort believing that more broadly diffused knowledge of the scientific and cultural history of evolution will secure the place of evolutionary science in open societies.” (At first, I was surprised to see that a government-funded museum would be able to espouse a particular position about science, even if evolution is generally accepted science by most Americans and taught in government-funded public schools. Eventually, though, I realized that I was conflating the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian’s natural history museum; there’s nothing unusual about the New York City Museum, or any other nonprofit, taking a stance.)

This site assumes a high degree of knowledge on the part of the user; if someone know exactly what part of Darwin’s work he or she was looking for, this would be a very convenient tool. For a casual user, however, it would be hard to pick out useful information from this digital library. Maybe putting the scope of the project on the main page was an attempt to help the user "get it," but a bit more explanation would be helpful.

LibriVox

2009-10-31T12:55:00.010-04:00

Project name and URL:
LibriVox@ http://librivox.org/

Organization name:
LibriVox is a non-profit organization, run completely by volunteers with no annual budget. Partner institutions include Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive.

Description of what was digitized:
Volunteers record podcasted readings of books in the public domain and donate them to LibriVox.

Audience for the project:
The project audience includes anyone capable of navigating the catalog search, downloading audio files, and/or subscribing to feeds.

Type of project background information available on the site:
"LibriVox was started in August 2005, by Hugh McGuire, a Montreal-based writer and web developer." Included in the website are a list of projects that inspired McGuire to create LibriVox.

How are the digital assets presented?:
Each entry includes a credited summary of the item. Visually, the interface leaves something to be desired. The links providing access to the files are not pretty. The following is an example:
01 – Chapters 01-07 – 00:27:28
[mp3@64kbps - 13.1MB]
[mp3@128kbps - 26.3MB]
[ogg vorbis - 14.0MB]
The download links are contained in the brackets. It would be nice to create download buttons instead. The site's lack of aesthetic beauty, however, is understandable considering the library is managed with no budget.

What additional information is presented? Enough? Too much? Worthwhile?:
The cataloged item often contains links to additional information, such as the Gutenberg e-text for the particular document and relevant Wikipedia entries. I think this is a great way to help listeners learn more about the book, author, or period during which it was produced.

What metadata is present? Is it easy to use?:
The simple search option allows the user to identify the object by title, author, status. Advanced search options allow the user to search by category (fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and dramatic works) or genre. Specific metadata available through the advanced search include Title, Author, Category, Genre, Status, Solo/Group, Language, Catalog Month, Reader, BC (Book Coordinator), and MC (Meta Coordinator). The interface is simple and easy to navigate; however, I think some users might be turned off by the unattractive interface and decided to continue their search on other websites.

Medieval Stained Glass Windows Photographic Archive

2009-10-29T11:52:00.005-04:00

Project Name and URL:
Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (CVMA) of Great Britain
http://www.cvma.ac.uk/index.html

Organization Name:
The Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (CVMA)
Founded in 1949 to study, document and publish information about medieval stained glass windows.

Description of what was digitized:
The website hosts a digital photographic archive of over 18,000 images of medieval stained glass in Great Britain. The ongoing digitization project aims to make all 30,000+ stained glass images of the National Monuments Record available online.
In addition, the project has two principal series of print publications, one of Monographs and one of Summary Catalogues; a special grant awarded by the British Academy Projects Committee in 2006 made it possible to establish a digital publication framework. So far, only one publication is fully available via the website.
Also, the Conservation publications have been translated into English language and presented in full text, freely available on the website.

Audience (stated or assumed):
Anyone with an appreciation for stained glass would enjoy the site, but it was specifically developed to speed up access to research results and is intended to bring the work of the CVMA (GB) to a wide non-specialist audience and facilitate debate among scholars.

Type of Project background information available on website:
CVMA (GB) is an established non-profit organization dedicated to preserving records of medieval stained glass throughout Great Britain and contributing to scholarship, conservation and enjoyment of these pieces of art.
The website does not provide technical details about the digitization projects, but they do provide a link to the digitization service employed for the projects: http://www.heds-digital.com/. HEDS is a not-for-profit service that is housed at the University of Hertfordshire. Their website offers their services as a “one-stop shop” for a digitization project – providing everything from project management to the digitizing itself. CVMA does not specify on their website which HEDS services they used specifically on their projects.

How are the digital objects presented?:
In a word – beautifully! This is one of the most pleasant, easily navigable digital archives I have discovered.
Photographic Archive:
This is an extremely user-intuitive presentation of medieval stained glass throughout Great Britain.
1. Users may search by CVMA inventory number, if seeking a known image
2. Users may search visually by specific county on a GB map and click to reach thumbnails of the windows
3. Users may search lists by county or by location (village, town, borough)
4. Users may advance search by a plethora of criteria such as
a. Part of church
b. Window orientation (cardinal direction)
c. Building type
d. Subject of image
e. Window designer
f. Date of creation
g. Medium (architectural church drawings, archive record, watercolour)
h. Many other specifications
Publications:
So few publications are simply listed by author with thumbnails of covers and instructions on ordering or (for the single digital publication) a click-through to the text.

Conservation Material:
Every publication on conserving medieval stained glass is presented in full text with clickable table of contents to quickly reach specific chapters.

Metadata:
Picture Archive:
1. Thumbnail image (clickable to full screen image), CVMA inventory number
2. Location: county, county (1974)*, Building Type, Civil Parish/Borough, National Grid Reference
3. Window: Technical panel description of the window
4. Photograph: Format, Copyright, Photo Reference Number
*County boundaries in Great Britain were altered in 1974, so this information is crucial to establishing provenance when referencing published materials from before or after that date.
Digital Publications:
1. Title
2. Author
3. Summary
4. Bibliography
5. Copyright statement
Print Publications:
1. Thumbnail of cover
2. Author
3. Title
4. Place of publication
5. Year of publication
6. Format
7. ‘How to order’ information
International publications:
1. Title
2. Author
3. Place of publication
4. Year of publication

Other Thoughts:
I am impressed by this website on several levels. One, I know nothing about stained glass and yet I was able to navigate the content without a tutorial. Two, the thumbnail images gave vividness to ancient items that drew me into the site for much longer than was needed to complete this assignment, therefore I congratulate the site designers on their choices for image specifications. Three, not a scholar in the area, but the metadata provided appears to provide enough information to supply a scholar the necessary information to winnow out the less applicable images and concentrate on many particular areas. It never occurred to me that a scholar may only be interested in stained glass in North facing windows, or ones in Crypts, or ones in a particular county. More obvious groupings (by subject or creator) are also easily created.

I especially enjoyed the clickable maps that allowed me to see the density of stained glass examples available in a locale. If I were a scholar needing to access the physical item, it would be simple to plan a trip and maximize my time usage to visit multiple sites in an efficient order because of these maps.

I would have liked to have seen more technical data on exactly what parameters were used on the photographic images, but I am a firm believer in “more product, less process”. So, if capturing that level of technical detail is not a sought-after data bit by regular site-users, I concur with their decision to not include it. However, I would hope that the details on the digitization process are being maintained by the content curators for purposes of future migration to newer technologies.

One last thought – Each time I entered the photographic archives I had to read and click an agreement on their Terms and Conditions for use. It was quick, simple, self-explanatory, but very prominently displayed for any user to be reminded of legal copyright issues. Bravo CVMA!

Presenting The New York Public Library: Drawings, Photographs and Prints

2009-10-26T19:57:00.001-04:00

Project name and URL:

Presenting The New York Public Library: Drawings, Photographs and Prints
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=culture&col_id=189
 
Organization name:

New York Public Library
 
Description of what was digitized:

2, 180 images including photographs, lantern slides, and postcards highlighting the history of the New York Public Library including images of buildings, collections, and programs.
 
Audience for the project (stated or assumed):

Anyone with an interest in the history of the New York Public Library, as well as an interest in the history of the architecture of the NYPL, Astor and Lenox Library Building, Brach Libraries in the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island, and the Library building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.

 Type of project background information available on the site:

This is one of many digital collections done by the NYPL. There are over 700,000 digital images in total from all collections, including photographs, maps, drawings, rare illustrated books, and more.

The digital collections “helps to fulfill the traditional mission of The New York Public Library to select, collect, preserve and make accessible ‘the accumulated wisdom of the world, without distinction as to income, religion, nationality, or other human condition." It offers broad public access to a wide range of historical and cultural documents that "enable individuals to pursue learning at their own personal levels of interest, preparation, ability and desire, and help ensure the free trade in ideas and the right of dissent’” (NYPL, About).
  

How are the digital assets presented?:

When an image is selected from the thumbnail view, a variety of options exist for the user. You are able to “Find More Images” related to the photo, based on the subject. You are also given an option to “Browse More” although the options here are very broad, including the NYPL Archives and Collection Guide. I would suspect these would be options for someone who may not know exactly what they might be looking for.

A link to “Buy” is attached to the images, which allows you to crop the photo to your liking and then purchase a reprint in various sizes. A “print” option is also available, which I haven’t seen before in any other projects.

 What metadata is present?:

Image Title, Creator, Medium, Specific Material Type, Notes, Source, Source Description, Location, Catalog Call Number, Digital ID, Record ID, Digital Item Published 

Other Thoughts:

The amount of materials the NYPL has digitized is quite extensive. The options for the user, including the buy and print options are a nice feature. The metadata for the images isn’t that impressive, at least in this collection. I would have liked to see some information about the digitization process itself including information on the scanners used, and at what resolution.

Although you are able to “Find More Images,” a “Subject” of the photograph isn’t given, if you wanted to search the catalog for like materials. Although the title and creator of the photograph are given, if you wanted to search for similar subjects, using for instance LCSH, you would have to determine them for yourself.

The Edgar Allan Poe Digital Collection

2009-10-26T10:13:00.002-04:00

Project Name: The Edgar Allan Poe Digital Collection

URL: http://research.hrc.utexas.edu/poedc/

Organization: The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

What Was Digitized: A large portion of the collection consists of letters, manuscripts, first editions, and other documents by or pertaining to Edgar Allan Poe. The original, physical collection once belonged to William H. Koestler of Baltimore. The collection also includes items that once belonged to Poe such as books and furniture as well as photographs, newspapers, and a small collection of sheet music based on Poe's poetry.

Audience for the Project: The audience for this project is not explicitly stated, but judging by the collection's connection with the Poe Society of Baltimore and the University of Virginia, it seems to be geared towards Poe scholars as well as those who are merely curious about the author's life and works. The collection was digitized and put online to coincide with Edgar Allan Poe's 200th birthday this past January so it is possible that they were trying to cater to Poe enthusiasts who might be celebrating the occasion as well.

Project Background: As I mentioned before, the project was launched to coincide with Edgar Allan Poe's 200th birthday and with a physical exhibit at the Ransom Center entitled "From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe". There is little information as to how the collection was digitized or who undertook the task, but the website does explain the project's links to the University of Virginia's Small Special Collections Library and the Poe Society of Baltimore.

Presentation of Digital Assets: The collection is organized into browsable categories that include manuscript works, letters, books, newspapers, etc. The collection makes a distinct separation between those items that are authored by Poe himself and those that are authored by others, but pertain directly to Poe. Letters and manuscripts include a link to a transcription of the text. Books are fully digitized and can be viewed using PageTurn which I, personally, thought was rather neat as makes you feel like you have the actual book in hand.

Additional Information Presented: Sadly, additional information was either lacking or not at all present. Aside from some standard metadata, there were very few informative notes pertaining to the items. No information on the items' physical location is provided. I assume that those listed as Koestler Collection are at the Ransom Center. Aside from those items listed as being from the Koestler Collection, there is no information on the item's origin. I would have been interested to know how the university came across some of these pieces.

Metadata: The metadata included with each item is fairly standard and brief. It includes things like title, creator, date, format, place of publication, and a very brief description. Most items have ID numbers, but some items do not. Sometimes a brief note accompanies the item to give further information.

Additional Thoughts: I found the collection to be well organized and easy to use. It is fairly small so I think that helped. I don't know how well the layout would have worked for a larger collection. I also wonder about the criteria for including an item in the collection. While I was fascinated by the manuscripts, books, and letters, I was a little confused about items like a libretto for a play in which Edgar Allan Poe's father appeared or a playbill for a show in which his grandmother played in the chorus. Perhaps these items might fit better in a larger museum, but I thought they didn't really fit with the theme of the collection. Another short coming was the newspaper section. For the most part, transcriptions did not accompany the newspaper articles as they had for the letters and manuscripts. Some of the newspapers had small print or deteriorated paper so it was difficult to read the image. Also, I felt it might have been better to separate the newspaper articles into those written by Poe and those that merely pertained to Poe.

The THEATRON

2009-10-25T17:10:00.000-04:00

Project Name: The THEATRON

Project URL: http://www.theatron.org

Organization Name: Theatron, in partnership with a European consortium that includes the University of Warwick School of Theatre Studies, the European Foundation for Heritage Skills, the University of Amsterdam Department of Theatre Studies, Atelier 4d Architekten, the University of Ferrara Department of Engineering, and Aebly.

Description and Background Information:
The THEATRON provides access to rich 3-D virtual models of theaters from across Europe from the 6th century B.C. to modern times. Users can navigate through the theaters starting from several pre-set viewpoints (from which users can rotate 360 degrees and move forward and backwards) both inside and outside the theater. Accompanying each viewpoint is a sidebar of extensive text that describes the history and architecture of the theater and the advantages and disadvantages of each viewpoint. The text includes additional photographs (historical images, paintings, modern-day sites, etc.) and, for some theaters, audio files that compare what can/could be heard from the stage at each viewpoint.

Audience:
Teachers, students, scholars, and hobbyists of European theater history will find valuable information on this experiential-learning site.

Notable Details about the Collection:
This site filled me with awe and wonderment as I explored the theaters. Unlike many other digital libraries where you read or look at digital objects, in this library you experience the digital objects. You can look at stages from the floor or balcony, crawl under stages to see how the trap doors work, see what the audience looks like from different points on the stage, walk around the space to see how it changes as you move – as well as study floor plans, see historic photographs, and more. The detailed sidebars offer context and history with each view, enriching the experience. The experience reminded me of a 3-D virtual world, complete with a rich user’s guide – except you cannot interact with the avatars you see throughout the models.

The metadata presented is “limited” to the extensive details provided in the sidebars. Users cannot access metadata describing how the models were created or when they are updated.

Unfortunately, this digital library is a bit challenging to use. Users are required to download and install 3-D software in order to use the library, and this could present a significant hurdle for potential users who many not have the required computer or browser configuration or who may not be able to install software on the computers they use to access the library. Once users install the software, they must also configure their computer screens a particular way, and even then they may not be able to view the digital objects in a user-friendly manner. I followed all the instructions given, and I still struggled to configure my computer to view the library properly. In the end, I worked around the issues I had, but in 30 minutes of struggling, I still was unable to easily see all the information presented. These issues present significant accessibility concerns for this digital library – a lesson to keep in mind as libraries explore ways to make their digital collections more interactive and exciting.

Delaware Post Card Collection

2009-10-22T22:25:00.001-04:00

Project Name and URL
Delaware Post Card Collection
http://fletcher.lib.udel.edu/collections/dpc/index.htm

Organization Name
University of Delaware Library Digital Collections

Description of what was digitized
The University of Delaware Library has digitized over two thousand postcards of Delaware and nearby areas. The postcards are mostly from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, though there are some postcards from the latter part of the twentieth century. Images of the postcards are mainly of monuments in Delaware, though there are some postcards of small town life.

Audience for the project
There is no stated audience for this project. It looks like it would be of interest to people researching the history, architecture, tourism or social life in Delaware. It would also be of interest to people interested in photography.

Type of project background information available on the site
There is not much background information about this specific project on the site. There is no information about the acquisition of the postcards or the importance of the postcards to this library’s collection. The site does describe the importance of the images of the postcards as a visual record and the captions and written messages as a way to learn about the image or the social attitudes or interests of the past. Funding and staffing is described in general about all ten digital collections as a whole on the About Us page.

Presentation of digital assets
It is possible to browse and search the collection. If you browse the collection, by default the items are listed by title, first by 0-9, then by A-Z. The image, the subject, and any caption on the back are also included in the presentation. It is possible to re-sort the titles with Z first. The results can also be sorted by subject A-Z or Z-A. If you search the collection, the presentation is the same, though filtered just to the images relevant to the search. It is also possible to search geographically by choosing one of the geographical subject headings.

Images of postcards that are displayed show the front and the back and allow the user to zoom in. Some images are not displayed due to copyright restrictions. The full record of the image still comes up in a search, complete with textual description of the image. It is not clear how many records do not have a visible image, though it looks like at least 115 records do not have an image displayed.

What metadata is present
Metadata includes the title of the postcard, publication date, original color (or if black & white), subject headings, geographic subject, name of digital collection in which it resides, acquisition information, master image location, digital image ID, reproduction notes, copyright notice, permission for use, date the record was created, date the record was modified, and the date the record was imported.

Ease of use
Overall it is pretty easy to use this digital library. There are different ways to browse and sort the results. The advanced search provides recommended terms to assist in the search. One problem is that when users search in the postcard collection, then click on “browse” in the navigation bar, they are brought to a screen which seems to filter the search further. The items that appear are in the American Civil War collection, which is one of the ten digital collections at the library of the University of Delaware. However, the results that are on the screen are not postcards and it is unclear how they were selected to be on the screen. Another problem is that there is no link to the homepage of the postcard collection. The link at the top of the screen takes the user back to the homepage for all of the digital collections and the user must then click on the collection of interest.

Additional Information
The University of Delaware maintains several digital collections. Instead of having a use policy for each project, there is an About Us link at the bottom of each page of each project which links to one page which include conditions of use, staffing information, funding information, and the guidelines for digital conversion and the metadata and delivery system the university has followed for all of the digitization projects.

The New York Public Library Digital Gallery

2009-10-22T13:19:00.003-04:00

What Was Digitized: The New York Public Library Digital Gallery contains over 700,000 images scanned from the library's collections of manuscripts, posters, fine art, photographs, maps, and more.

Audience: The audience is not explicitly stated on the New York Public library's website, but it seems to be set up for the general information-seeking population. The images contained within the archive vary greatly by subject and theme so the archive is not really set up to appeal to scholars of a particular area.

Project Background: While no start dates are mentioned, the NYPL digital archives was begun with the intention of providing free and open access to images from the original and rare holdings of the New York Public Library. While the archive is quite extensive, it is only a sampling of the NYPL's actual collections. When the project began, the digitization committee set for criteria by which an item would be considered for inclusion in the digital archive. It either had to be in high demand by the public or something too rare or unique for transit or frequent handling. Little know items that were deemed important or worthy discoveries by the library may also be included.

Presentation of the Digital Assets: Digital assets are organized by subject, but are also placed into browsable collections like "Art and Literature" or "Nature and Science". On my visit to the digital archive, I chose to browse through the collections. Each collection contains its own introduction and a bit of background information as well as a list images available within the collection. Clicking on a name will then take you to the image or (in the case of digitized manuscripts) images. Some collections have subject tags that will link the user with other similarly tagged collections or items. There is also an A-Z subject list that proved to be a little too unwieldy for me to use. That might be more appropriate for someone who knows what they're looking for as opposed to someone who, like me, is just browsing.

Additional Information: While the introductions and descriptions provided with the separate collections is usually informative, there is not much information accompanying each individual image. Relevant information on the author and/or creator of a work are displayed if known. There are also links to other relevant names and/or subjects. Image details are available.

Metadata: The metadata in the image details is minimal, but enough to uniquely identify each image. It includes a record ID, an image ID, location of the physical item, and the date of the image's publication (the digital image, not the item itself).

Thoughts on Usage: If you are going to take a look at the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery, you might want to set aside a whole afternoon to do it. It is vast. I wandered through this archive the same way I imagine one would wander through the actual New York Public Library. While it was very easy for me to get lost in this archive, I would imagine that someone who visited it with a specific purpose might become frustrated by the sparse information for individual items and the sheer number of items available.

Other Thoughts: One of the neat things I found while researching the background of this project was some information on the actual digitization of the items. If you scroll down to the "Digital Images" section (http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/dgabout.cfm), they explain the equipment and image capture process in greater detail. I thought that it was interesting that they don't try to enhance images at all and that they try to create as close a representation to the physical item as possible. I wonder now if this is the philosophy of most digitization projects or if that is unique to the NYPL.

New Hampshire Political Library Digital Archive

2009-10-22T05:03:00.002-04:00

Project name and URL

New Hampshire Political Library Digital Archive
http://collections.politicallibrary.org/

Organization name

New Hampshire Political Library
http://politicallibrary.org/

Description of what was digitized

According to the Online collection (digital archive) page <http://politicallibrary.org/Collections/Digital-Archive.aspx>, the online collection contains about 7,000 items. The collections that have been digitized include correspondence of Alida Weergang, political buttons and jewelry, papers of former New Hampshire governor Hugh Gregg, speeches of former governor John King, campaign papers of 1980 presidential candidate John Anderson, campaign posters, and campaign papers for Pat Buchanan and Lamar Alexander.

Audience for the project (stated or assumed)

The Online collection (digital archive) page <http://politicallibrary.org/Collections/Digital-Archive.aspx> mentions the goal of making parts of the library's collection available to "researchers around the world" by means of putting digital images on the Internet. The library's mission statement <http://politicallibrary.org/About-the-Library/Mission.aspx> implies that the library wants to reach a more general, national audience to promote the democratic process and the importance of allowing New Hampshire to host the first primary of each presidential election season.

Type of project background information available on the site

The Online collection (digital archive) page <http://politicallibrary.org/Collections/Digital-Archive.aspx> mentions grants from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Metadata

The images are accompanied by data which can include the identification number, source, item type, candidate, coverage, subject, description, technician doing the digitization, date of digitization, year of campaign, political party, and physical characteristics.

Alaska's Digital Archives

2009-10-20T09:12:00.007-04:00

Alaska entered the spotlight during last year's presidential election, but there is much more to the state than headline-grabbing vice presidential candidates. Alaska's Digital Archives invites visitors to discover Alaska's history and culture via more than 10,000 digitized photographs, artifacts, maps, film clips, and oral histories. The Archives are the product of a collaborative effort undertaken by three groups—the Alaska State Library, the Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the Consortium Library at the University of Alaska Anchorage—and comprise material from the following sources:

the Alaska State Library Historical Collections
the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Alaska and Polar Regions Collections
the University of Alaska Anchorage Archives and Manuscripts Department
the Anchorage Museum of History and Art at the Rasmuson Center
the Seward Community Library Association
the University of Alaska Museum of the North
the Sitka Tribal Library

According to the website, the Archives are designed to be used by teachers, researchers, and the general public. The interface, which is powered by CONTENTdm, has numerous points of entry, including browse by collection, browse by media type, and advanced search. Visitors can set preferences for how results are displayed, and limiters are available within search result listings to allow for further refinement. Visitors can also click to "add item to favorites" when viewing results. Within "My Favorites," there are great features for viewing selected items in a slideshow format or comparing items using a split screen. Each item in the Archives is accompanied by substantial metadata, including title, creator, descriptors, subject headings, location, region, time period, original date, and holding institution.

For budding digitization students, the About page provides a nice peek into the evolution of the collection. Apparently the project began as an effort to create a searchable online database of historical photographs and eventually grew to include many different types of digitized content. It is currently funded, in part, by an unspecified congressional award. The site reports that "[p]roject partners continue to add new materials to the database and are producing a guidebook identifying lessons learned. . . . They are also preparing to make recommendations to other organizations throughout the state related to practices for participating in this venture."

The site includes an FAQs page that discusses, among other things, copyright policies, noting that "[e]ach institution that contributes to Alaska's Digital Archives has its own policies regarding rights and conditions of use for its holdings." Visitors are directed to a hyperlinked listing of the participating institutions' policies. The site also includes a detailed Help page that appears to be a product of CONTENTdm.

My only real quibble with the site is that the browse feature linked to at the top of each page takes the user to a page designed for browsing the Archives by sub-collection. However, this is neither the extent of nor the best of the site's browsing features. Tucked behind a small "GO" button on the homepage is the "ViLDA Alaska Native History and Culture Pathways," which allows users to browse materials by topic (e.g., education, art, ceremonial life, etc.), by region (e.g., Northern Alaska, Interior Alaska, etc.), or by time period. I would love to see the site group the different browsing options onto one comprehensive page to ensure that all users can fully plump the depths of the Archives.

Medieval Manuscripts -- Syracuse University

2009-10-19T14:55:00.007-04:00

Medieval Manuscripts

Organization: The Special Collections Dept. of the Syracuse University Library

URL: http://library.syr.edu/digital/collections/m/MedievalManuscripts/mainpage/#Anchor-Description-49575

Description of what was digitized:

The Special Collections department at Bird Library holds a "small but significant" collection of Latin medieval manuscripts. The collection includes ten parchment manuscripts--ranging in date from the 13th through 16th centuries-- of various origin (Spanish, English, Italian, French, Flemish, and German). Beginning in May of 1999, selections from each manuscript were digitized for display on the library website.

Assumed audience:

Researchers and scholars.

Project background available on site:

According to the introductory materials posted on the site, the Special Collections department embarked on the project with the following objectives in mind: "to gather full descriptive information on the ten western medieval manuscripts of the collection; photograph selected images from each manuscript, and digitize these images for display on the web" ("Description of the Collection," para.3).

Presentation:

The opening page of the project web site features an index to the medieval manuscripts. Once a user selects a specific manuscript, let's say MS 1, she is presented with another index: an index of select pages from MS 1. She can now choose from a list of approx. five page images. Each of these five images can be viewed in three ways -- there is a broad view of the entire page (text & illustration), a close-up view (text & illustration, again), and a detailed view (the detailed view is generally of just the illustration). The images are presented in .jpg format.

Additional Information:

Brief (textual) descriptions of each manuscript
Links to manuscript descriptions in table format (the metadata)
Citations to medieval manuscripts in the collection
Additional references (print and web sources)
About the Images -- here there's information about the image selection process, the digital camera used to capture the images, and the editing process.
Acknowledgments
Contact Information

Metadata:

There is an extensive list of metadata available for each manuscript: shelfmark, total folios, outer dimensions, physical issues/binding, notes (manuscript level, part level & text level), sources, inputer/reviser, part number, country & city, date, layout, script, representational decoration, author(s), other associated name(s), title, status of text, language(s), and more.

rome reborn

2009-10-18T20:27:00.002-04:00

Project name and URL
Rome Reborn

http://www.romereborn.virginia.edu/

Organization name
Institute for Advance Technology in the Humanities

Description of what was digitized

The goal of the digitization project is to illustrate urban development from the beginning of Rome founding through its depopulation in the early Middle Ages, around 550 C.A. The current model is based off the year 320 C.A.

Audience for the project (stated or assumed)

This project is for scholars and those with a keen interest in Rome during this time period as it the best recollection of what we currently have of how the city looks like during this time period.

Type of project background information available on the site

The about page has a very thorough guide of what we know about Rome during this time period. It lists the amount of buildings we have found and remodeled in the program from this era. It has a detailed list of the constituent parts that make up the model. It also has a gallery for the 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 versions of the project.

Included on the site is a large list of computer generated graphics of what particular sites looked like. The graphics are not obviously using a high end computer graphics program but they do their jobs effectively of showing what the buildings would like. There are also "behind the scenes" videos and real time demonstration of what Rome 1.1 looks like.

What I really like about this is that it appears to be a collaborative project whose goal is to better understand the city of Rome in a particular time frame, with the ability to include and delete certain segments as they prove to either fit in or be shown to not be part of the time period. History and archaeology are fields that really has not grabbed hold of the possibilities that computer have provided for it, until very recently. 3-D rendering brings objects to life in ways that only reading about them or seeing them in sketches can not do. It also can be a great outreach source. Many people will refuse to read journal articles or look at field notes but if you wish to reach out to the general public many people will spend a few minutes to look at a youtube video detailing what the Coliseum initially looked like. Outreach to the public such as this is a good thing and I look forward to seeing what the humanities will be able to do with such projects in the future.

Footnote

2009-10-18T19:34:00.001-04:00

Project name and URL
Footnote.com

I discovered the other day that users on SU’s wireless network have access to premium content on Footnote. It’s interesting to compare a subscription-based digital library to the free, non-profit ones we’ve been looking at. (Apologies to those of you who aren’t in Syracuse and won’t be able to get access, you can still look at the freely available records and get a feel for the site.)

Organization name
I first heard about Footnote because it is one of the National Archives and Records Administration’s private digitization partners. There are a lot of NARA records already digitized, along with material from other institutions like the Library of Congress.

Description of what was digitized
There are lots and lots of different collections. Footnote is kind of a hodgepodge of different documents, from military and government records to photos and historic newspapers. They’re all together in one big search, which I guess improves the likelihood of getting a hit.

Audience for the project (stated or assumed)
The site lists history buffs, genealogists, researchers, family historians, military historians and teachers.

Type of project background information available on the site
There isn’t any information on the Footnote site itself, but their agreement with NARA is public. Basically, Footnote pays for the digitization process and meets NARA’s technical specifications. The digitized content is available immediately on Footnote’s subscription site, and in five years NARA will be able to provide free access on its site.

Metadata
There is basic metadata on the collection level, and then “annotations” can be added to individual pages/items by members or the Footnote staff. The annotations note things like names, places and keywords to improve searching. There definitely seems to be a genealogy focus with mostly names tagged.

Further Thoughts
Footnote is a social media site, so it lets members participate actively in lots of different ways. The most used/useful aspect is the “annotations,” which act as a kind of crowdsourcing, getting members to provide metadata like significant names and terms in the documents.

The interface for searching and viewing the documents is very slick and easy to use. I like the way the search starts as a Google-style “one box,” and then provides more advanced options on the search page to narrow the results. It makes it pretty simple to do a complex search and I think even novice users would be able to use it quickly. I also like that the image viewer lets users adjust contrast and brightness themselves. This makes it really easy to make a document more readable. There are some problems though, it took me way too long to figure out how to “turn the page” in a multi-page document.