The image of Alexander Calder above shows him in his studio, circa 1950. It is from a folder titled Photographs: Calder at Work, 1927-1956, undated, part of Alexander Calder’s Papers held by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art and available online through the efforts of their digitization project. I love that this image capture him in his creative space – you get to see the happy chaos from which Calder drew his often sleek and sparse sculptures.

Back in October, I had the opportunity to visit with staff of the digitization program for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art along with a group of my colleagues from the World Bank. This is a report on that site visit. It is my hope that these details can help others planning digitization projects – much as it is informing our own internal planning.

Date of Visit: October 18, 2011

Destination: Smithsonian Archives of American Art

Smithsonian Archives of American Art Hosts:

• Karen Weiss
• Many additional staff members

Summary:  This visit was two hours in length and consisted of a combination of presentation, discussion and site tour to meet staff and examine equipment.

Background: The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art (AAA) program was first funded by a grant from the Terra Foundation of American Art in 2005, recently extended through 2016. This funding supports both staff and research.

Their digitization project replaced their existing microfilm program and focuses on digitizing complete collections. Digitization focused on in-house collections (in contrast with collections captured on microfilm from other institutions across the USA as part of their microfilm program).

Over the course of the past 6 years, they have scanned over 110 collections – a total of 1,000 linear feet – out of an available total of 13,000 linear feet from 4,500 collections. They keep a prioritized list of what they want digitized.

The Smithsonian DAM (digital asset management system) had to be adjusted to handle the hierarchy of EAD and the digitized assets. Master files are stored in the Smithsonian DAM. Files stored in intermediate storage areas are only for processing and evaluation and are disposed of after they have been ingested into the DAM.

Current staffing is two and a half archivists and two digital imaging specialists. One digital imaging specialist focuses on scanning full collections, while the other focuses on on-demand single items.

The website is built in ColdFusion and pulls content from a SQL database. Currently they have no way to post media files (audio, oral histories, video) on the external web interface.

They do not delineate separate items within folders. When feedback comes in from end users about individual items, this information is usually incorporated into the scope note for the collection, or the folder title of the folder containing the item. Full size images in both the image gallery and the full collections are watermarked.

They track the processing stats and status of their projects.

Standard Procedures:

Full Collection Digitization:

• Their current digitization workflow is based on their microfilm process. The workflow is managed via an internal web-based management system. Every task required for the process is listed, then crossed off and annotated with the staff and date the action was performed.
• Collections earmarked for digitization are thoroughly described by a processing archivist.
• Finding aids are encoded in EAD and created in XML using NoteTab Pro software.
• MARC records are created when the finding aid is complete. The summary information from the MARC record is used to create the summary of the collection published on the website.
• Box numbers and folder numbers are assigned and associated with a finding aid. The number of the box and folder are all a scanning technician needs.
• A ‘scanning information worksheet’ provides room for notes from the archivist to the scanning technician.  It provides the opportunity to indicate which documents should not be scanned. Possible reasons for this are duplicate documents or those containing personal identifying information (PIP).
• A directory structure is generated by a script based on the finding aid, creating a directory folder for each physical folder which exists for the collection. Images are saved directly into this directory structure. The disk space to hold these images is centrally managed by the Smithsonian and automatically backed up.
• All scanning is done in 600dpi color, according to their internal  guidelines. They frequently have internal projects which demand high resolution images for use in publication.
• After scanning is complete, the processing archivist does the post scanning review before the images are pushed into the DAM for web publication.
• Their policy is to post everything from a digitized collection, but they do support a take-down policy.
• A recent improvement was made in January, 2010. At that time they relaunched the site to include all of their collections co-located on the same list, both digitized and non-digitized.

On Demand Digitization:

• Patrons may request the digitization of individual items.
• These requests are evaluated by archivists to determine if it is appropriate to digitize the entire folder (or even box) to which the item belongs.
• Requests are logged in a paper log.
• Item level scanning ties back to an item level record with an item ID. There is an ‘Online Removal Notice’ to create item level stub.
• An item level cataloger describes the content after it is scanned.
• Unless there is an explicit copyright or donor restriction, the items is put online in the Image Gallery (which currently has 12,000 documents).
• Access to images is provided by keyword searching.
• Individual images are linked back to the archival description for the collection from which they came.

Improvements/Changes they wish for:

• They currently have no flexibility to make changes in the database nimbly. It is a tedious process to change the display and each change requires a programmer.
• They would like to consider a move to open source software or to use a central repository – though they have concerns about what other sacrifices this would require.
• Show related collections, list connected names (currently the only options for discovery are an A-Z list of creators or keyword search).
• Ability to connect to guides and other exhibits.

References:

• Image Gallery
• Main Website
• Digitization Project
• Technical Documentation – shares internal procedures and guidelines
• OCLC rapid capture paper
• Scanning equipment

Image Credit: Alexander Calder papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Digitization Program Site Visit: Archives of American Art

I recently had the opportunity to visit with staff of the University of Maryland, College Park’s Digital Collections digitization program along with a group of my colleagues from the World Bank. This is a report on that site visit. It is my hope that these details can help others planning digitization projects – much as it is informing our own internal planning.

Date of Visit: October 13, 2011

Destination: University of Maryland, Digital Collections

University of Maryland Hosts:

• Jennie Levine Knies, Manager, Digital Collections
• Alexandra Carter, Digital Imaging Librarian

Summary:  This visit was two hours in length and consisted of a one hour presentation and Q&A session with Jennie Levine Knies, Manager of Digital Collections followed by a one hour tour and Q&A session with Alexandra Carter, Digital Imaging Librarian.

Background: The Digital Collections of the University of Maryland was launched in 2006 using Fedora Commons. It is distinct from the ‘Digital Repository at the University of Maryland’, aka DRUM, which is built on DSpace. DRUM contains faculty-deposited documents, a library-managed collection of UMD theses and dissertations, and collections of technical reports. The Digital Collections project focuses on digitization of photographs, postcards, manuscripts & correspondence – mostly based on patron demand. In addition, materials are selected for digitization based on the need for thematic collections to support events, such as their recent civil war exhibition.

After a period of full funding, there has been a fall off in funding which has prevented any additional changes to the Fedora system.

Another project at UMD involves digitization of Japanese childrens’ books (George W. Prange Collection) and currently uses “in house outsourcing”. In this scenario, contractors bring all their equipment and staff on site to perform the digitization process.

Standard Procedures:

• Requests must be made using a combination of the ‘Digital Request Cover Sheet’ and ‘Digital Surrogate Request Sheet. These sheets are then reviewed for completeness by the curator under whose jurisdiction the collection falls. Space on the request forms is provided so that the curator may add additional notes to aid in the digitization process. They decide if it is worth digitizing an entire folder when only specific item(s) are requested. Standard policy is to aim for two week turnaround for digitization based on patron request.
• The digital request is given a code name for easy reference. They choose these names alphabetically.
• Staff are assigned to digitize materials. This work is often done by student workers using one of three Epson 10000 XL flatbed scanners. There is also a Zeutschel OS 12000 overhead scanner available for materials which cannot be handled by the flatbed scanners.
• Alexandra reviews all scans for quality.
• Metadata is reviewed by another individual.
• When both the metadata & image quality has been reviewed, materials are published online.

Improvements/Changes they wish for:

• Easier way to create a web ‘home’ for collections, currently many do not have a main page and creating one requires the involvement of the IT department.
• Option for users to save images being viewed
• Option to upload content to their website in PDF format
• Way to associate transcriptions with individual pages
• More granularity for workflow: currently the only status they have to indicate that a folder or item is ready for review is ‘Pending’. Since there are multiple quality control activities that must be performed by different staff, currently they must make manual lists to track what phases of QA are complete for which digitized content.
• Reduce data entry.
• Support for description at both the folder and item level at the same time. Currently description is only permitted either at the folder level OR at the item level.
• Enable search and sorting by date added to system. This data is captured, but not exposed.

Lessons Learned:

• Should have adopted an existing metadata standard rather than creating their own.
• People do not use the ‘browse terms’ – do not spend a lot of time working on this

Resources:

• Digital Content Guidelines: Selection Criteria for Digital Objects

Image Credit: Women students in a green house during a Horticulture class at the University of Maryland, 1925. University Archives, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Digitization Program Site Visit: University of Maryland

If my panel is selected, I intend this session to give me the chance to review all of the following:

1. What are the special design requirements of archival records?
2. What are the biggest challenges to publishing archival records online?
3. How can archivists, designers and developers collaborate to build successful web sites?
4. Why is metadata important?
5. How can search engine optimization (SEO) inform the design process?

All of this ties into what I have been pondering, writing about and researching for the past few years related to getting archival records online. So many people are doing such amazing work in this space. I want to show off the best of the best and give attendees some takeaways to help them build websites that make it easy to see the context of anything they find in their search.

While archival records have a very particular dependence on the effective communication of context – I also think that this is a lesson that can improve interface design across the board. These are issues that UI and IA folks are always going to be worrying about. SXSW is such a great opportunity for cross pollination. Conferences outside the normal archives, records management and library conference circuit give us a chance to bring fresh eyes and attention to the work being done in our corner of the world.

If you like the idea of this session, please take a few minutes to go sign up at the SXSW Panel Picker and give Archival Records Online: Context is King a thumbs up. You don’t need to be planning to attend in order to cast your vote, though after you start reading through all the great panel ideas you might change your mind!

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

SXSW Panel Proposal – Archival Records Online: Context is King

Is part of your job is to encode finding aids in EAD? Then please ask if you can send a dozen of them to the researchers on this project!

Seeking EAD records from repositories that have implemented EAD

Standards have been entering the archival lexicon at a fast pace to ensure data reliability, enable data aggregation, and manage data over the long term. However, we have not yet examined the use of these standards across the archival community. As we move into the next phase of standards-creation, a broad look at current implementations will help to inform the next generation of these standards. To do this, Kathy Wisser (Simmons College) and Jackie Dean (UNC Chapel Hill) are conducting research on EAD tag usage in the encoding community.

This project is intended to inform the TS-EAD revision process of the standard, and results will be disseminated through traditional publication avenues.

We are seeking a sample of encoded finding aids from institutions that have implemented EAD. If you are willing to participate in this project, please submit via electronic mail 12 to 15 finding aids to eadtagresearch@gmail.com by December 15, 2010.

The goal of the project is to identify encoding behavior and not to evaluate the quality of the encoding or the content of the finding aid. We will be noting the presence and absence of elements and attributes and the way that elements are used within the context of an EAD instance.

All results will be anonymized; no institution-specific information will be linked to the results. Institutions willing to participate will be acknowledged.

In order to obtain an accurate account of the use of the standard, we are looking for EAD instances from as many institutions as possible. We hope you will consider contributing to this effort.

If you have any questions about the project, please contact:

• Kathy Wisser (Simmons College – wisser@simmons.edu)
• Jackie Dean (UNC Chapel Hill – jdean@email.unc.edu)

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Support EAD Tagging Research

I have spent lot of time thinking about how to generate thematic overviews of groups of archival collections. My information visualization project, ArchivesZ, aims to provide ways of understanding aggregated archival description data, both from a single institution or across institutional boundaries. Now I find myself wondering if text mining with a tool like MALLET might generate smart topic groupings more elegantly than fighting with the wide range of non-standardized collection subjects.

Topic Modeling with MALLET

To get a sense of what MALLET generates, see the excerpt below from Blevins’s post:

With some tinkering, MALLET generated a list of thirty topics comprised of twenty words each, which I then labeled with a descriptive title. Below is a quick sample of what the program “thinks” are some of the topics in the diary:

• MIDWIFERY: birth deld safe morn receivd calld left cleverly pm labour fine reward arivd infant expected recd shee born patient
• CHURCH: meeting attended afternoon reverend worship foren mr famely performd vers attend public supper st service lecture discoarst administred supt
• DEATH: day yesterday informd morn years death ye hear expired expird weak dead las past heard days drowned departed evinn
• GARDENING: gardin sett worked clear beens corn warm planted matters cucumbers gatherd potatoes plants ou sowd door squash wed seeds

He goes on to explain that “MALLET also allows us to track those topics across the text.” What if, instead of text mining a diary, we pumped the descriptions of every archival collection from a single institution into MALLET. Of course we would need a good list of stop words including such common terms as archives, history, sources and records. But I wonder how the topics MALLET suggests would compare to the official subjects associated with each collection? Could this give us a broad overview of the topics covered by a specific repository and give us a new way to build paths to the collections based on topic?

Auto-Classification Using Castanet

Text miner Aditi Muralidharan also posted recently on this theme in Castanet: automatically generating a browsing structure for a collection and explains:

Castanet automatically carves a sub-structure from the hierarchical concept dictionary, WordNet (http://wordnet.princeton.edu), and matches items in the collection to one or many appropriate places within that hierarchy. Then, after some automated trimming and flattening, the result is a hierarchical browsing system.

I have heard of Castanet before via the Flamenco Search Interface Project. Apparently Muralidharan did a project using Castanet last summer to create a category system for Flickr Commons images based on the images’ tags which is then rendered using a Flamenco interface. I include a partial screen-shot below to give you a taste of what the navigation of images feels like a few levels down in the hierarchy. I love the classification of ‘Group Action’ then filtered by a sub-classification of ‘Commerce’. The first images shown are of ‘horse trading’ – with additional headings and images beneath them as well as additional filter options on the left.

What If?

What if we pulled all the English language archival descriptions from around the world as our original data set. If we used this data for topic modeling, our subjects clusters would be cross-institutional. Maybe we could map the local institution assigned subjects to the topic model generated topics for each collection and get a sort of automated crosswalk for finding related collections. If we used the local institution assigned subjects from the archival descriptions for Canasta style auto-classification, maybe we could generate a way to hierarchically browse collections topically.

Both MALLET and Flamenco are open source (I am not sure of the status of Castanet) and, as I discovered working on ArchivesZ, many institutions will share their archival description data for a good cause. So – is this a good cause? I need to tease these ideas out a bit more, but what do you all think of it at first blush? Feasible? Interesting? Worthwhile experiments?

Image Credits: MALLET logo from MALLET homepage. Images in screen shot from Flickr Commons with no known copyright.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Topic Modeling, Auto-Classification and Archival Description

Even with the recent announcement that the Flickr Commons is not currently accepting new applications, there are clearly still applications being processed. NARA has been on Flickr since February of 2009 and loaded 49 sets of images. As announced in a recent press release, on the first of February 2010 Flickr flipped the switch and all the images in the The U.S. National Archives’ photostream was shifted over into the Commons.

The 49 sets are sorted into 4 collections:

• Historical Photographs and Documents (19 sets) – including NARA favorites like Rosie the Riveter and Nixon and Elvis and documents from regional archives across the country.
• DOCUMERICA Project by the Environmental Protection Agency (27 sets) – one set dedicated to top picks and the rest organized by photographer. Interestingly, NARA’s website has indexed the 15,000+ images from this project by subject and by location. I wonder how the picked which image from DOCUMERICA to port over to Flickr?
• Mathew Brady Civil War Photographs (2 sets) – currently 473 out of the 6,066 digitized Mathew Brady images are uploaded into the Commons. The images posted in the Commons are available in a much higher resolution than they are within ARC. A great example from this collection is the image of the Poplar Church (image shown to right) available as a 600 x 483 GIF on ARC and as a 3000 x 2416 JPG on Flickr. This image also has gotten a nice set of comments and tags.
• Development and Public Works (1 set) – the only set in this collection consists of images taken to support the Flathead Irrigation Project. “The Project was initiated to determine rights and distribute water originating on the Flathead Indian Agency in Montana to both tribal and non-tribal land.” These images seem to be the same resolution on both archives.gov and Flickr.

In honor of this transition, NARA posted a new set of 220 Ansel Adams photographs. One of the first comments on the set was “low-res scans? Pretty big letdown.” Fine question. As noted above, other images from NARA in the Commons much larger than the 600 x 522 that seems to be available for the Ansel Adams images. It would be great to have a clear explanation about available resolutions published along with each new set of images.

NARA has published this simple rights statement for all NARA images in the Commons:

All of the U.S. National Archives’ images that are part of The Flickr Commons are marked “no known copyright restrictions.” This means the U.S. National Archives is unaware of any copyright restrictions on the publication, distribution, or re-use of those particular photos. Their use restriction status in our online catalog is “unrestricted.” Therefore, no written permission is required to use them.

NARA has also posted an official Photo Comment and Posting Policy and a fairly extensive FAQ about the images they have post on Flickr. I do wish that there was a simpler way to request reprints of images from the Commons. Most of the NARA images have this standard sentence – but for someone not familiar with NARA and more accustom to one click ordering, the instructions seem very complex:

For information about ordering reproductions of photographs held by the Still Picture Unit, visit: www.archives.gov/research/order/still-pictures.html

I also wish that more of the images had location information assigned – only 113 of the images show up on the fun to explore map view. At first glance it looks as if this information is populated only for images taken near airports. There are many images that include a location based subject in the image description posted on Flickr, yet do not include geographic metadata that would permit the image to be shown on a map. The one image I did find that was not at an airport but did include geographic metadata is this image of the World Trade Center assigned to the NYC Financial District Flickr Location. While I could add a location related tag to NARA’s images, there does not appear any way for the general public to suggest location metadata.

One odd note about this and other World Trade Center images – the auto-generated tags have broken up the building name very oddly as shown in my screen clip on the left.

Another fun way way to explore the NARA Flickr images is to visit the ‘Archives’ page (slightly hilariously titled “U.S. National Archives’ Archives”). Here we can browse photos based on when they were uploaded to Flickr or when they were taken. Those images that include a specific date can be viewed on a calendar (such as these images from 1918) or in a list view (those same images from 1918 as a list), while those taken ‘circa’ a year can be viewed in a list with all other images from sometime that year (such as these images from circa 1824).

Beyond all the additional tags and content collected via comments on these images, I think that being able to find NARA images based on a map, calendar or tag is the real magic of the commons. The increased opportunities for access to these images cannot be overstated.

Take this image of a sunflower. If you visit this image on archives.gov, you can certainly find the image and view it – but good luck finding all the images of flowers as quickly as this Flickr tag page for NARA images of flowers can. Even looking at the special Documerica by Topic page doesn’t get me much closer to finding an image of a flower.

It will be fun to watch what else NARA chooses to upload to the Commons. I vote for more images that are assigned metadata such that they show up on the map and calendar. I will also put your mind at ease by telling you that the lovely ladies at the top of this post are their because their image is one of the most popular uploaded by NARA to date (based on it having been marked a favorite by 88 individuals). The only image I could find with more fans was the classic image of Nixon and Elvis with 250 fans at the time of this posting.

What is your favorite NARA Commons image? Please post a link in the comments and if I get enough I will set up a gallery of Spellbound Fan Favorites!

Image Credits: All images within this blog post are pulled from NARA’s images on the Flickr Commons. Please click on the images to see their specific details.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

National Archives Transitions to Flickr Commons Membership

I have spent much of the past year learning the details of Search Engine Optimization. Usually shortened to SEO, this simply refers to the use of techniques which improve the traffic sent to a website via organic search. Want your webpage to show up at the top of the list for a specific search in Google? You want to work on your SEO.

So when I look at new archives website, I can’t help but keep an eye open for how well the site is optimized for search engines.

I hope that UMBC will forgive me for nitpicking their new site. A lot of their choices are great for SEO,  but they also have room for improvement.

Things Done Well for SEO

• Home Page Title & Description: The site’s home page has a good meta description. This is the text displayed below the link on a search results page – as shown below:
• Unique Page Titles At Collection Level: Each photography collection homepage has a unique page title and a nice block of explanatory text. Google can only read words – so the more unique text on a page, the better the job Google can do in figuring out what your page is about. Example: Ardsley Park Album
• Good anchor text: (also known as link text) The words used in anchor text tells search engines information about the destination page. For example, the blue text below is anchor text.

Areas for SEO Improvement

• Unique Page Titles At Item Level: Individual images and documents all use a generic page title such as ‘UMBC | Digital Archive | Document Viewer’. Document Example: Accidental Death of an Anarchist Image Example: 10 year old Bootblack
• H1 Tags: In the HTML of each page, the dominant heading of the page should use the <h1> tag. This helps Google know the phrase you are targeting with this page. It is your 2nd best place to emphasize your content after the page title. In the case of the item pages, there seems to often be a headline type title at the top of the page – but it currently is not an demarcated with an <h1> tag.
• Think About Search Results and Indexing: Pages displaying results of internal searches on your site are not likely to be useful as indexed pages in Google. The thinking here is that they can dilute the focus on the item and collection level pages on your site if Google also has many search results pages in the index. If UMBC wanted their search pages to be indexed, then those pages’ URLs should be simplified and the search results pages need a page title that somehow includes the search criteria. There are two ways that I know of to disable this indexing – blocking via the site’s robots.txt file or via a robots meta tag in the header of the search results page. Both of these methods tell obliging search engines to not crawl certain parts of your site.

Final Thoughts

There are plenty of other things that UMBC could do to support this new website. They could create an XML sitemap of all their pages and submit it to Google (maybe they already have). They might re-title some of their pages based on using a tool like Google Insight to see what variations of a phrase is searched on most frequently. My goal here was to give you a taste of the sorts of things that catch my eye. Also, SEO is still more of an art than a science – so you will sometimes notice that what one SEO expert recommends is the opposite of what the next expert would tell you.

In many cases changes, such as the Unique Page Title at the Item Level mentioned above, may not even be possible due to software or programmer resource limitations. The trick is to take advantage of every option that is available. There are also trade-offs to be made. UMBC’s site provides some very slick interfaces for viewing the details of a group of documents, such as theater programs and other materials related to a theatrical production. The imlementation elegantly handles the situation of multiple scanned images which relate to a coherent set of documents. Sometimes you can’t have both your innovative UI and perfect SEO. Then it gets down to what your goals are for your website. Are you trying to make a specific community of existing users happy by providing them with tools they can use? Or does your mission focus more on reaching out to a broader audience?

There is no silver bullet to search engine optimization. It just takes knowledge of the available tools and techniques combined with a willingness to keep learning and experimenting. Like the ‘Do-It-Yourself-Woman‘ pictured above in the Nationaal Archief‘s photo I found out on the Flickr Commons, you too can learn the basics and do-it-yourself. A great starting point is Google’s free SEO Guide. Also, please remember that the best time to plan your SEO strategy is before you have built your site in the first place!

I would love to do research on how much progress archives websites can make in their organic search traffic after SEO improvements. My thinking is to take a snapshot of a month of analytics (the statistics that tell you how many people are visiting your website) and then apply some SEO inspired changes. After a suitable delay (it takes some time for SEO to do its job) we consider another month of analytics to determine any change in organic traffic.

Do you want me to do a quick review of your archives website to see if there is room for SEO improvement? Please contact me or add a comment to this post. I feel like there is a conference presentation in all this if we can find a good set of websites to optimize.

Finally, thank you to unsuspecting UMBC – your new website really is beautiful.

Image credit: Doe-het-zelf vrouw /Do-it-yourself-woman from Nationaal Archief on Flickr Commons.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

SEO Evaluation of an Archival Website: Looking at UMBC’s Digital Collections

Duke University Rare Books, Manuscript & Special Collections Library (RBMSCL) : Lynn Eaton (Reference Archivist)

While I didn’t find my way into this session until the start of the next speaker’s presentation, Lynn was kind enough to share with me her personal printout of her presentation slides. The links below and any associated commentary are based solely on my own interpretation of the various screen-shots included.

• Duke Digital Collections
• RBMSCL Finding Aids
• AdViews: A Digital Archive of Vintage Television Commercials – this includes interviews with experts, a TV ads quiz and a wide range of TV ads available via iTunes U.
• Duke Yearlook – a set of Flickr collections displaying images from the Duke University Archives, each focused on a decade or theme related to Duke’s history.
• Duke University Libraries YouTube Channel: example Duke Exhibit: “A Century of Sex Appeals”
• Duke Digital Collections on DukeMobile iPhone application – This wasn’t included in the presentation’s slides – but I spotted it on the YouTube Channel. I downloaded the DukeMobile app onto my iTouch and had a great time exploring the Duke Digital Collections included in the images section of the app. I think it was

University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) Digital Collections: Tom Sommer (University and Technical Services Archivist)

UNLV has experimented with new technologies as they appear. Tom made a point of saying that when they started seeing others provide a feature on their websites, UNLV would find a way to try it out. A great example of this is the addition of a tag cloud and google map to The Boomtown Years collection listed below.

• Howard Hughes Digital Collection – Images displayed in this online exhibition about Howard Hughes, such as this portrait of Howard Hughes, feature the opportunity both to rate and comment on the image. In addition, they provide an RSS feed for every possible metadata attribute (such as location, subject and media type)
• Southern Nevada: The Boomtown Years – in addition to ratings and comments, this collection adds on display of recent comments, tagging and a google map which ties images to locations in southern Nevada.
• UNLV Special Collections Facebook Page – shares news and updates about projects – launched 2 months ago

Marist College Archives and Special Collections: John Ansley (Head, Archives and Special Collections)

Marist first launched their website in 2001 to raise awareness of their collections. They also used listserves and the on-campus newspaper. Utlimately their best tactic was working one-on-one with professors whose interests intersected with their collections. This led to contact with special interest groups. Working with the special interest groups led to new tag and metadata values for their collections.

• Hidden in Plain Sight – online exhibit about fore-edge painting. Includes videos as part of introduction since it is hard to understand through still images. The bibliography receives the most hits.
• Marist Environmental History Project – this ongoing project aims to document who has what information about environmental history. The site includes an extensive list of primary sources as well as a 24 minute oral history:  The Enduring Storm:  The Story of the Storm King Case and the People Who Launched the Modern Environmental Movement (mp3).
• Intercollegiate Rowing Association Poughkeepsie Regatta – timeline used to guide users to who won each race, PDFs of programs, and extensive bibliographies (including an index of 1000+ NYT articles about the regatta).
• Lowell Thomas Travelogues – a household name during the golden age of radio, Lowell Thomas created extensive multimedia travelogues of his travels around the world. He is credited with making T. E. Lawrence famous as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. The site was launched as a teaser to the over 1000 linear feet of photos, audio, video & other records which will be available to researchers in October 2009. For a taste of what is coming, check out this Lowell Thomas travelogue video clip – my favorite quote from which is “…come with me on a magic carpet out to the land of history, mystery and romance.”

My Thoughts

The archivists at all three of these educational institutions have tried new things and worked hard to share their materials with people beyond the traditional range of a reading room. The promise of the web, and all the tools and techniques it supports, is still being uncovered. It will be up to innovative archivists to keep discovering ways to push the envelope and welcome new audiences from all the corners of the globe.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dukeyearlook/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2009, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Archival Collections Online: Reaching Audiences Beyond The Edge of Campus (SAA09: Session 405)

Overview: Review of 100 virtual museum websites and multiple flickr groups plus surveys of amateur website creators, memory institutions and Arts & Humanities academics leads to new perspective on digitization and creation of collections online by dedicated enthusiasts.

Session Highlights

Areas of “Amateur” endeavor  have a long history of launching collections, such as:

• cabinet of curiosities
• foundation of astronomical research
• british flora and amateur botanists
• weather observations
• open source software movement

Being an amateur doesn’t necessarily mean being bad at what you do!

Within the realm of self-defined museums some common topics often emerge:

• ephemera (advertising, packaging, nostalgia)
• comics
• technology – especially old tech, there is a surprising trend of being fascinated by technology approximately 10 years older than the collector
• personal and “embarrassing” collections
• genealogy

For these self-defined museums the scope is self-defined – these are self-delineated collections. Virtual museums can document aspects of cultural heritage considered socially taboo or in some way too sensitive to collect. A great example of this is the Museum of Menstruation which claims to have been created 14 years ago and is currently trying to establish a public permenant display for the public.

Platforms have evolved over the life of the web, starting with static html, then blogs and now Flickr images as a mode of presentation.

This is a list of successful amateur collections online:

• Today’s Inspiration – illustration from the 40′s and 50′s
• JonWilliamson.com – advertising 1940s-1960s
• Pulp Fiction Flickr Group – 882 members who provide basic metadata and often label stuff within the image – currently contains 3,385 items.
• Curio Cabinet Flickr Group – 1,206 members and 5,537 items

Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) is a more traditional site created by a cultural heritage institution. It contains 100,000+ images copyright cleared for use in teaching, learning and research in the UK. VADS is a very detailed static source of images with metadata, but provides no interaction.

Amateurs do provide metadata, but it is intuitive metadata. It might not fit into rigid buckets of data, but that doesn’t meant that the metadata available isn’t useful.

What are the boundaries between amateur and professional? Work vs hobby?

Many of these amateur sites get much more traffic than most standard museum sites. More than 50% of museum digitized images are never visited.

Memory institutions are starting to put things into the wider online community:

• Smithsonian: photos in Smithsonian Flickr Commons
• Tate: The How We Are Now project invited the public to contribute photos to the How We Are Flickr Group. The images were streamed to screens within the How We Are: Photographing Britain exhibit and 40 photos were chosen to be included as the last set of photos in the physical exhibit.
• Victoria & Albert Museum: created a Flicrk group of photos taken at the V&A museum along with a long list of other V&A Flickr groups and streams
• Oxford University’s Great War Archive: contains 6,500 items contributed by the public and related to the First World War.
• Facebook and Twitter are being used more often for informing the community about their collections

Much of amateur research has been driven by advances in technology. A great example of this is the advent of affordable metal detectors led to dramatic changes in archaeology. The internet and Web 2.0 technology are arming a whole new generation of enthusists who can find one another and collaborate more easily than might ever have been dreamed of 20 years ago.

Next Steps & Conclusions

Future research will involve looking at the psychology of collection: archives vs collections. For now it is important to realize that institutions are not the only hosts of “worthwhile” digital objects. Pro-am (aka, pro-amateur) are doing better with using web 2.0 & getting more traffic.

What can memory institutions learn from this?

• interact with user communities
• use the ‘grand central stations’ of flickr, twitter, facebook
• usability of flickr is better than what most memory institutions build for themselves

My Thoughts

This session considers the ways cultural memory institution can take advantage of the web by looking at what the successful enthusiasts are achieving. This research-backed approach confirms what I would have expected. Libraries, museums and archives are leaving a lot on the table when it comes to putting their collections online. Sites run by non-professionals are doing an amazing job of drawing in new audiences, keeping people around and then initiating conversation within that audience.

The Flickr Commons is a big step forward, but it isn’t the only option. There are also varying opinions about how successful the crowdsourcing aspect of the Flickr Commons is for memory institutions. A lot of this goes back to to a core question “how do we know if we have succeeded?”. There is much to be said for setting out clear goals when launching online initiatives. Is your goal increased traffic to your site or crowdsourcing of metadata? A great example of an initiative whose goal is clearly collection of crowdsourced metadata is the German Federal Archives who chose to use the Wikimedia Commons for their photo metadata initiative.

If you are trying to extend your mission of providing access to materials to the public, then how do you measure success? Putting your materials in what Melissa called “grand central stations” (or what I have also heard termed “public crosswalks”) definitely increases the chances of serendipitous discovery by new individuals. That said, we can see from the successful blogs mentioned above that tackling a niche with enthusiasm and consistent posting can go a long way to building a following. JonWilliamson.com seems to have only launched back in November of 2008 with a post featuring a Scotch Tape Christmas ad from 1951. The author posted in May of 2009 that his images in Flickr had surpassed 100,000 views.

To conclude this post I leave you with a list of inspirational digitized collections online that were created by various cultural heritage institutions:

• Publishers’ Bindings Online – discussed in SAA2007′s Session: Publishers’ Bindings Online – Digitization, Collaboration, Standardization and Community Building, a multi-institutional project that includes galleries of topical images combined with an essay that gives the images context. Two of my favorites are:
  • From Domestic Goddesses to Suffragists: The Story of Women Told on Bookbindings, 1820-1920
  • Indians, the Frontier, and the West in American Bookbindings
• Calisphere – more than 150,000 digitized items organized for easy use by K-12 teachers. This is especially interesting in that it represents items already available in Online Archive of California, but organized in a way to make them easy to find and use with their target audience in mind.
• Yiddish Books Online – A project by the National Yiddish Book Center that uses the Internet Archive as a platform to host 11,000 digitized out-of-print Yiddish books. This project is a nice cross between a branded custom site and a grand-central station

Have a favorite online collection website? Please share it in the comments below.

As is the case with all my session summaries from DH2009, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mms0131/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

DH2009: Digital Curiosities and Amateur Collections

For my test I searched for an exact match on “Ticket with portrait of George Washington”. This returns one result – the one image in Flickr with the same name, from The Field Museum in Flickr Commons. If you click on the ‘More Filters’ link, you will see other ways to filter your results – including the option to restrict your results to only include images whose creators permit reuse.

Next I clicked in the ‘Creator allows reuse’ and my one result disappeared! Quite disappointing in my book.

Google is also getting onto the ‘make it easy to search for reusable images’ bandwagon. Search Engine Land reported that Google Images Quietly Adds Creative Commons Filter. That post pointed me to Google  Operating System‘s search interface that lets you play with the options that Google has available. After a clicking through to some of the images returned by a Google Image Search for creative commons images of archives, the way the Google model appears to work is to look for creative commons badges or links on the page with the image. I even found Flickr creative commons images, but when I tried to find my Flickr Commons image of the ticket used above for my Yahoo image search experiment it wasn’t returned by Google either.

So if an archives (or museum or library) posts images on a page that indicates that the content is licensed under creative commons, it seems those images will then appear in Google’s image search as reusable. That is good news! Another way to get users to find your public domain images.

The question I am left is how to resolve the gap between Flickr Commons’ ‘no known copyright restrictions  rights statement and both Google and Yahoo’s definition of reusable content.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Yahoo & Google’s Search for Reusable Images and the Flickr Commons