There really is something for everyone here. I picked this striking image of Martha Graham because I love modern dance, but there are also images of war, fashion, sports, landscapes, architecture and tons more. The images currently posted stretch from the 1750s through 2003 and include many that have never before been published.

It is also worth noting that not everything in this collection is a photograph. I found illustrated pages from books like the Queen Summer by Walter Crane. I also found illustrations like this one of the ancient temple of Artemis in Ephesus, Turkey.

From the text in Google’s blog post, it sounds as if Google is doing the digitizing – while LIFE Inc (or their parent company Time Inc) will profit from the sale of prints. The current posted photos represent 20% of all the photos. Ultimately the photo archive is expected to be about 10 million images and stretch to the present day.

TimeInc has partnered with QOOP to sell framed fine art photographs via links directly from each of the LIFE photo pages within Google. Take a look at the page dedicated to selling you a  framed art print of St. Moritz, Switzerland in 1947.

I had not heard of QOOP before, but they seem to have a number of options available for those who want to be their partner. QOOP also wanted me to join their ‘Social Commerce Revolution’. In order to join the revolution I had to create an account (it is free and easy it pointed out). To create my account I had to give them my email address, password and birth date. Not so bad. On the next screen they required that I enter my mailing address and phone number. I don’t really want to give them this information – but I am curious about this revolution I have been promised. And when I was done – a whole lot of nothing happened. I think that I am supposed to use QOOP to create and market products. Is it an affiliate program? Is it an artsier CafePress? Do I need to contribute my own images or can I use those of others? I am still not sure.

I do like their integration with the LIFE images, but I think that there is clearly more work to be done before they are going to foster a ‘Social Commerce Revolution’ anytime soon.

Time Inc’s press release includes the following details:

The LIFE Photo Archive featured on Google will be among the largest professional photography collections on the Web and one of the largest scanning projects ever undertaken. Millions of images have been scanned and made available on Google Image Search today with all 10 million images to be available in the coming months.

“For 70 years, LIFE has been about one thing, and that’s the power of photography to tell a story,” says Andy Blau, LIFE’s President. “LIFE will now reach a broader audience and engage them online with the incredible depth and breadth of the LIFE Photo Archive from serious world events, to Hollywood celebrities to whimsical photographs.” Time Inc. EVP, John Squires adds: “We’re delighted Google recognized the rich value of our photo archive and worked with us to bring it to millions of consumers. Consistent with the launch of the TIME Archive, PEOPLE Archive and the SI Vault, this initiative continues our efforts to build valuable new revenue opportunities from our rich heritage.”

All keywords are translated into 16 different languages. LIFE’s Photo Archive will be scanned and available on Google Image Search free for personal and research purposes. Copyright and ownership of all images will remain with Time Inc.

Google uses a special notation to support search across the LIFE collection – all you do is include source:life as one of your search terms within the Google Image search box. Each photo has a rich set of metadata including a description and the keywords mentioned in the press release above.

When you click on one of the keywords (which are actually called ‘Labels’ in the Google interface) it submits a search within the LIFE collection – but does NOT restrict that search to only the keywords. Rather, it seems to search across all the text associated with each image. For example – the label ‘Feathers’ on assorted images links to this URL: http://images.google.com/images?q=Feathers+source:life. This search returns many images, including one of Debutante Marilyn Lowe wearing a dress made from feathers which is not in fact assigned the label ‘Feathers’, but obviously does include the word feathers in the description.

For those accustomed to hotlinked tag-like terms only retrieving content that also is assigned that term (see all the images in the Flickr Commons tagged with ‘snow’), this might be a bit confusing. Also in contrast with the Flickr Commons, Google does not offer the opportunity for users to assign additional labels/keywords to the images. If you have signed on with a Google account, you can assign images within the LIFE collection a star rating. I don’t see how this is used right now, but I expect that over time they will leverage these ratings to sort the Google hosted image search results.

Since I spend a lot of time these days organizing controlled vocabularies, seeing the keywords assigned to these images makes me wish I could see Time Inc’s full and organized set of terms. My favorite spotted so far? Lines of People – as typified by this photograph of Models wearing checked outfits from 1958.

It will be interesting to see what other partnerships crop up in the next year to digitize other major collections. I am also very curious to know if people actually buy framed fine art prints at the current cost of $79.99 for an 8″x12″ inch print in a 13″x16″ frame. Who knows if Time Inc will be forthcoming with their degree of success on this front – but it will likely be an good test case for other major collections looking to recoup some of the cost of their digitization efforts and find a new revenue stream.

Image Credit: The copyright of both of the images shown above belong to Time Inc. Please click through to view details about each image, including the photographer’s name and the option to purchase your own print of the image.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

LIFE Photo Archive Digitized and Put Online by Google

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Anyone going to IA Summit 2008?

Introduction to Shareable Metadata and Interoperability

The first speaker, Sarah Shreeves, started the panel off with her presentation titled The Dynamics of Sharing: Introduction to Shareable Metadata and Interoperability (follow the link to view the full set of slides). Sarah is not an archivist, but she has extensive experience with metadata aggregation.

She began with the assumption that “we” (libraries/archives/museums/cultural organizations) cannot afford to think about our collections only in the context of our local community. There is no way to know where your metadata is going to end up – either grouped with other things or pulled out of your collection into single atomized items.

Why share content? It benefits our users, supports one-stop searching, brings together distributed collections and supports mashups . Sharing helps us and increases our exposure. We have to do this – we cannot assume that our users will come in through the front door. Lorcan Dempsey uses the phrase In The Flow to mean how to get your content “out” into the world where users will find it.

Keys to Shareability or Interoperability:

• You need the technical side (Z39.50, OAI PMH, RSS …etc)
• Organization commitment of resources (people, training, time, priority)
• Standards.. lots and lots of standards

There are two main ways to share metadata. The first is known as federated search. In this model a user searches from a single central location. That query is sent to distributed database and the answers are sent back for the central query source to assemble the results. Z39.50 and Search/Retrieval via URL ( SRU) are examples of technology used to perform federated searches.

The second way of sharing metadata is known as the metadata aggregation model. In this scenario, metadata is pulled from many places into a single location. This is what search engines, union catalogs, OAI PMH, RSS and Atom do. It provides an opportunity to massage and normalize the data. Once users find what they are looking for – they are often redirected to the original source of the item.

A major challenge of the metadata aggregation model is “the ability to perform a search over diverse sets of metadata records and obtain meaningful results” Priscilla Caplan (in Metadata Fundamentals for All Librarians). This is hard because we are not used to what metadata looks like outside our local context. Sarah then showed lots of different examples so the audience could see how different the metadata is.

Metadata is not monolithic. It can be a view projected from a single information object. It is possible to create multiple views appropriate for different uses. Each view will affect the granularity of description, choice of vocabularies, and choice of formats.

You can customize the format of your metadata depending on the context of how the metadata will be consumed. This might sound scary, hard and overwhelming – but Sarah is confident that we can do this in smart ways. She believes that we should be able to lobby for the features we need to support different views.

Sarah’s list of attributes of ‘shareable metadata’:

• is quality metadata
• promotes search interoperability
• is human understandable outside of its local context
• must be useful outside its local context – an aggregator can actually build services based on the data in the records provided – example was geographic data that can be used to put the items on a map
• preferably is machine processable – Subject clustering – machine created – but still needs lots of human intervention to make it work
• provides enough contextual information – the Theodore Roosevelt collection didn’t have a Roosevelt subject term because the title of the collection was assumed to be enough. She also mentioned a map that didn’t include the fact that it was a map in it’s metadata
• is consistent across a collection – ie, same date field, same controlled vocabulary.. this is within a single collection
• is coherent
• is true to its content but also its audience – different views for different perspectives
• conforms to standards – descriptive, technical, etc

There are some safe assumptions you can make. Users often get to your data through shared records – not through your front door. Users either don’t know about your collection or won’t remember. Shared records can lead users to local environments where the full context is available. Users are often entering through deep links that may bypass the introductory information that provides the larger context for a collection.

Implementing Shareable Metadata Practices

Jenn Riley, of the Inquiring Librarian Blog, gave the 2nd presentation: Implementing Shareable Metadata Practices in a Diverse University Environment. Jenn has a grand vision of what we are trying to achieve with all these efforts to share metadata. We needs lots of different ways to discover the data.. lots of environments.

We need machine-readable descriptive metadata, definitions of properties of shareable metadata in various communities (this is the focus of this session), and protocols and systems that use them for sharing that make it automatic. We also need online delivery of content too, but that is a big challenge and out of scope for this session.

Archives and digital libraries face different challenges in implementing standard practices related to shareable metadata. Archives are unique, making the notion of a single workflow model not possible. They are not a ‘homogeneous body’. Archives need to figure out how to support the expanding view of the mission to meet the needs of online users and make more services available. They need to find resources to provide appropriate description as well as technical implementation – and need time and money and skills in order to do this. On the other hand, digital library practice assumes content is digitized– that there will be ‘stuff’ at the end. Metadata-only workflows are not common. Digital libraries usually assume item-level description, but this is often not the case, and concepts of provenance and original order are largely foreign.

Communities need to agree on key definitions to bridge the gulf between digital libraries and archives. Digital libraries need to understand that Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is not a metadata format, EAD is a markup language.

The good news is that aggregations are not out to replace archives specific discovery systems. We don’t have to give up the local robust environment, we can and need to do both.

Key shareable metadata principles for archives:

• Context: need enough context so the user can figure out if the record is useful for them. At the same time – too much repeated info can cause issues too.
• Content: what is the appropriate granularity for shared records from archives — this choice needs to be done per usage and per audience.

Possible strategies include the creation of collection-level records only, creation of an aggregator that understands multi-level descriptions, the design of multi-level descriptions carefully for future item/file-level view, linking to digital objects from the lowest level of description in the finding aid and description at the item level.

Jenn then discussed the experiences at Indiana University’s Digital Library Program :

• They have a new EAD finding aid website
• the new system is more faithful to encoding with less ‘helpful’ fixed presentation
• mutual learning process about archival descriptive practices
• many decisions made about when encoding should be changed when systems should be changed
• results of this process: RE-ENGINEERING! New template, report card, better previewing capability — new template for EAD that supports new data we didn’t have before… report card built on schema-tron and encoder can preview how their encoding is really working and preview what the final product finding aid will look like
• some EAD files link to digital objects
• soon there will be item-level OAI records (Dublin Core and MODS) for digitized items linked from finding aids
• central Digital Library repository that allows EAD as the *master* metadata format
• new workflow that permits links from any level of a multi-level description in EAD

The more you put stuff online – the more you attract the sort of attention that gets you more money to put more stuff online. Jenn suggests lobbying of software vendors for a better support of EAD.. don’t settle for Dublin core. We need to discuss with our user communities about the need for an archives-specific aggregators and consider the multi-level description.

Libraries and archives are learning from one another. The item centric view can be too narrow – but it can help with re-engineering. More structure in finding aids can be a good thing. Archives can show libraries why expertise in descriptive practice is still necessary — maybe those who are running out of things to catalog on the library side can spend some time describing over on the archives side?

Archival Frameworks for Shareable Metadata

Kelcy Shepherd, Digital Interfaces Librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst , gave the final presentation of the session: “Archival Standards and Tools: A Framework for Shareable Metadata”.

The first framework Kelcy addressed was Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS). What about DACS is applicable to sharing metadata? It is compatible for use with controlled vocabularies. It can make sure that our access points will work well with access points from other metadata communities. Since DACS is output agnostic, you can create the data and then use that data to generate different views or formats. A single set of DACS based data can produce printed finding aids, EAD finding aids, MARC 21 or MODS records.

In order to produce each of these different views from a single original format, you must a crosswalk. A crosswalk maps individual elements from one data format to corresponding elements of another. Unfortunately, crosswalks come with their own challenges:

• granularity
• missing elements
• single element on one side that would need to be split into multiple elements on the other side

You need expertise in both standards addressed by a each crosswalk in order to do this well.

Next Kelcy discussed Encoded Archival Description (EAD). EAD is a data structure standard, machine readable format for encoding archival descriptions. It allows archivists to share the data across institutions. If you want to re-purpose a finding aids metadata, the data needs to be in a machine readable format. EAD gives you this. You can convert an EAD encoded finding aid into a Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) document using an XSLT stylesheet and a crosswalk. The stylesheet may take a lot of work (especially for use across many finding aids), but there is a big payoff. Once the work is done a single stylesheet can be used across many many finding aids.

The Archivists’ Toolkit was cited as an example of a tool that can let you output multiple formats from a single set of data. It can produce EAD, MARC, MODS and Dublin Core records.

Tools can support efforts – but it all comes back to quality archival description. The best tool in the world will never make bad content into good content. If data is inconsistent – you have to manually go back and clean it up. I particularly liked Kelcy’s point about ensuring that your data doesn’t need the screen labels you to make sense. If you don’t consider this, when you export that data into a new format or view the data can loose it’s meaning.

Her concluding point was that if you don’t have the tech skills or support, work on your content.. use DACS… get your data in order and it will pay off later.

Questions and Answers

Question: How does this work when you are trying to share your metadata with communities that use different controlled vocabularies – thinking about the single EAD that generates MODS and MARC .etc etc…

Answer: Aggregators often they don’t use subject headings. This is nearly impossible to do in OAI – people use lots of different controlled vocabularies.. and sometimes no controlled vocabulary at all. There are experiments being done with subject clustering. Algorithms are used to cluster like things together – but it still requires human intervention to make sure the clusters make sense.

On the other hand – if you are using a standard vocabulary, there is work being done to map from one standard to another. An example of this is the OCLC Metadata switch project .

Question : What about social taggging?

Jenn : We are in no position to turn down metadata.

Sarah: DSpace has a concept of community. There is a way to let a community organically build their own controlled vocabulary as they go – new contributions are provided choices of terms that have been used before.

Bill talked about the article about Michaelson where they gave the same finding aids to 40 archivists to use LCSH for picking subject headings. The result was 0 consistency! Every single archivist picked different subject headings.

Jordan: PennTags is an example of an effort to combine social tagging with traditional classification. It shows tagging not as competition but as another way to get user generated descriptive information. It is an example of a way to ‘get into the flow’.

Sarah: Google will now use OAI PMH as a site map for indexing, but it throws away the metadata.

Jenn: Dlib – representing digital collections on wikipedia article.

Bill: PennTags is acting as an aggregation system to pull siloed information together.

Question: In some cases EAD data is flattened down for all items so that each item has all the context data and only one field is different on each? Is this an indication that the mapping have been better?

Answer: It is a problem – can be a problem…ultimately it is all about use and audience.

My Thoughts

I came away from this session with my head whirling with ideas. I was so pleased to hear people talk about concrete examples. We need more examples of challenges and real world benefits to further efforts to aggregate, publish and share archival content and it’s metadata. None of this is easy, but each project will give us new lessons and add to the growing set of best practices.

I truly believe that the sooner we tackle these thorny problems, the sooner we will start seeing the impact in improved access to archival records. The sooner we deal with it, the less we will be adding data that will have to be fixed later.

For anyone who has been following my blog – you will already know about my ArchivesZ project from last spring. One of the big struggles we had was figuring out how to make the subject term metadata ‘useful’ for aggregation and visualization. Another example of the challenges and benefits to shareable metadata is the SAA presentation about Publisher’s Bindings Online .

I had one last sentence in my notes from this session – an idea for a Facebook application that would let you feature your favorite archival image or record. This would be an amazing example of getting archival records ‘in the flow’ and showing up in surprising new places where no-one is ‘looking’ for records. Hey – maybe I should prod the Footnote people with this idea. It might be right up their alley!

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2007, 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.

SAA2007: Content Aggregation, Shareable Metadata and Access (Session 607)

Who Spoke?

Jessica Lacher-Feldman (session chair) – University of Alabama, PBO project manager

Amy Rudersdorf – now at North Carolina State University, Digital production coordinator, NCSU special Collections, but was at University of Wisconsin, Madison during PBO project

Kristy Dixon – University of Alabama , PBO staff

PBO Project Overview

PBO was made possible by a 3 year Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant. Originally awarded in 2003, the grant was extended once (and I think they mentioned additional funding being applied for). The primary grant funded the digitization of 10,000 images from up to 5000 book bindings. Ultimately 10,570 images were added to PBO and made searchable by metadata. The bindings selected included books from 1815-1930, primarily US titles and mostly in English.

Their guiding vision was of “giving something to the world that is both needed and useful” (and really beautiful). And they succeeded! PBO is a lot more than 10,000+ digitized book bindings. The project strived to make the information available in many different ways, including via:

• a web-based database
• online exhibits & galleries,
• vodcasts and podcasts
• web-based tutorials
• virtual and real exhibits
• presentations & class lectures
• opportunities to adapt the project to other disciplines – history, book arts, librarianship, literature.. K-12 and more

Technology and Processes

The division of labor for PBO was split between the University of Alabama and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Many extensions to the OCLC SiteSearch based database were made by the UWDCC (UW Digital Collections Center) digital production center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison .

They went through an overview of the participants and staff – who did what.. what skills were needed and what was brought by the two institutions to the collaboration. They acknowledged their fabulous advisory group including Sue Allen – “the expert on publisher’s bindings”. Individuals from outside their teams contribute based on their special interest and knowledge about a specific individual (this contribution is still ongoing).

Working in collaboration forced them to wrestle with many challenges including:

• staff in two locations – most of whom had never met
• “long distance relationships are hard”
• they had to work hard to ensure that all were ‘equally-valued participants’
• standards – you need ground rules from the outset

Collaboration & Description

“Every pair of eyes are different”. PBO tapped into the resource of the ‘young fertile minds’ to power the project out of the local MLS programs at both institutions. Even with a detailed description form – there was confusion over subject headings and overlap – especially when those selecting subject headings were grad students who might not know the official terms for things. For example, the list of terms might include Ouroboros – but the students might not know this  it is the term for a snake eating it’s own tail.

Ultimately they had to do quality control at a single location. They spent a LOT of time on this.

Their top tips for cultivating continuity for virtual project teams:

• write into your grants money for travel (they stressed that your grant includes funds to support people meeting each other)
• continuous communication is critical
• ‘shared working group website’ available online
• email, conference calls and instant messaging (IM) for communication
• regular reporting to each other
• being project manager means that you have to be on top of everything – you need to be the glue
• focus on the deliverables – use planning tools and timelines

They discovered that IM was key to developing trust between the two institutions.

Metadata – the core of the project

The key to their metadata approach was to consider a book less as a ‘bibliographic object’ and more as an ‘art object’.

They called books in PBO ‘objects’ but still kept the bibliographic metadata. They used Dublin Core by pulling the MARC data into the Dublin Core structure. As part of this they took all the subjects from the bibliographic info and moved it to the Dublin Core description and labeled it ‘book topic’. Then they used the ‘Subjects’ portion of the Dublin Core record to describe the binding and talk about what the images are OF. This is where the subject terms from the controlled vocabulary were added.

These are the steps of their metadata workflow process:

• selection from collections of note – faculty, consultants and library staff did this step
• description – used a paper form, described the books on paper and joined that description to what was in the MARC record – done by the grad students and library staff
• metadata entry – entry of data through an online form – done by students (overseen by library staff) actually ended up being cheaper to manually enter the MARC data (rather than automated extraction)
• quality control – content, grammar, spelling – done by library staff (took a lot more time than anyone expected)
• no live update between their working Filemaker Pro database and the final SiteSearch database
• record ownership – indicated in the identifier field (with a special code in the identifier) AND in the Submitter field

A lot of description went into this project.

They needed to develop a controlled vocabulary for the project. To do this they first worked with content specialists to develop a list. They used Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) terms where they could, as well as Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus. Then they added some local terms. The controlled vocabulary list evolved with the project and is the foundation of all teaching, search and more.

The speaker showed an example of the controlled vocabulary – the terms really are a window into the past. Users can browse the controlled vocabulary through the front end.

On the description paper form they had a list of ‘binding themes’ for those doing the description to pick from. A lot of work was done to get the huge list of themes onto a single page. Ultimately they had to provide some fill in the blank extension fields. For example, rather than believing they had listed every useful trade or profession, there was a section on the list labeled: Profession/Trade – _______________ with the expectation that those describing a binding might need to fill in the blank.

Digitization and The Database

Generally two scans were taken from each book, but sometimes as many as five. What did they scan? Front cover, spine, back cover and end papers.

There were two different image reformatting standards at the two institutions – 300 DPI vs 600 DPI. Both used a black background when scanning. All books were presented in as in condition – some have front/back covers missing. After the scanning they began with master TIFs and then transformed them to JPGs in three sizes in 72 DPI.

The presentation showed screen shots of:

• simple search
• brief view record in search results — which includes subjects
• full record view – including display of all images associated with the book object record
• gallery view – thumbnail, title and indication if there are one or more images related to the title
• guided search (advanced search)
• clickable subject headings

All the images in PBO are freely available for download.

With an eye to digital preservation, all the original uncompressed TIF images are archived in triplicate to digital archive tape and stored in three different locations. The metadata is stored with images in both text and SGML format (which is what SiteSearch works with). The full process documents are available on the project site.

Future Growth

The PBO team is talking to Louisiana State University (LSU) to figure out how PBO can grow. LSU would need to work and live with the way PBO works and learn their processes. They are talking to other institutions – if you are interested in adding content to PBO, please contact them.

The Richard Minsky Collection has been purchased and is being added to the project. This is a rich collection that was gathered to create a catalog. PBO has the catalog and all of Minsky’s research that goes with the collection. The goal is to feed as much of this rich data into PBO as possible. They are working with individual scholars and collectors to find other avenues for growth.

Value Added Components

One of the focuses of PBO has been to look beyond the digital images themselves to creating value added components for their user community.

A tutorial for users is provided, including information about how to email a record. A comprehensive bibliography has been created and is used by scholars. The page prompts users to submit feedback so the bibliography is a live document.

Over 30 galleries have been created – organizing access to essays and additional info by topic. Types of galleries include:

• Galleries on Bindings and Book binding techniques – these are not really related to individual book objects – but give more information, for example Silver & Gold: The Art of Metal Stamping
• Galleries on Collections – for example the Wade Hall Collection of Southern History and Culture
• Galleries on Artistic Styles and Movements – a narrative approach provides information on the historical roots of the movements and show how the bindings fit into the movements
• Galleries on History -  they have 11 of these galleries,including major historical events, literature and culture of the time
• Galleries on Literature

Links to trusted information outside of PBO’s site are shown whenever possible. For example – links to the full text of books are provided via Project Gutenberg. Throughout the site’s text link to sources such as the Library of Congress, .gov sites, PBS and so forth can be found.

Canned searches are provided to make it easy for users to explore content. An example of this is the Silver & Gold: The Art of Metal Stamping search that will find every binding with either silver or gold stamping. This is in contrast with making users figure out the right syntax to submit the search criteria themselves.

The Teaching Tools portion of the site provides sample lesson plans on all sorts of topics. They worked with some high school history teachers via focus groups and got feedback about what they needed and wanted. The Industrial Revolution lesson plan was created based on that feedback.

The research tools that were created as a result of the PBO project and are made available online are:

• glossary – 456 terms defined using ten major authorities
• bibliography of print & web resources
• controlled vocabulary for subject headings
• publishers map – an interactive map that includes 2123 publishers so far
• tutorials on various subjects

Signed or Designer bindings is a new resource to which scholars continue to contribute new information.

Through collaboration with teaching faculty they developed the presentation such as Indians, the Frontier, and the West in American Bookbindings. This presentation will eventually be podcast on the PBO site. It talks about how these books inspired people to move west and inspired kids to read.

Another podcast is on the way addressing the representation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It will discuss how the book was it marketed to different groups – Yiddish, German… etc. There already exists a gallery and essay on Uncle Tom’s Cabin .

Conclusions

The team has been very pleased by the tangible scholarly impact of PBO. They have seen extensive collaboration with the university community, new research, and promotion of the use of special collections materials in the classroom using digital resources. They point to PBO as showing a path to preserve these increasingly fragile books by moving out of the general stacks and into special collections – with a result of increased access to the book and decreased handling.

The presenters avowed that PBO could never have been created by their team alone – working with consultants and advisers was the key to their success. They needed input from experts and others to help PBO grow and keep it sustainable. This interaction makes the project strong – it has it’s own legs and won’t cease to exist when the money disappears.

Publicity and outreach got attention on the PBO project from the very beginning. They made documenting their experiences and making recommendations about how to market digital projects part of the original plan in their grant proposals. These documents were part of their deliverables. They even published a white paper about PBO and outreach.

PBO uses Google Analytics so they can see where their users are coming from. Also it makes cool talking points for your reports and fun things to tell the Dean!

I think the best conclusion to my summary of the presentation portion of this session is the list of points on the final slide titled “Beyond the grant: Room to Grow”:

• Potential future contribution from other repositories in the US and abroad…
• Potential future collaboration with teaching faculty at UA and beyond
• With additional collections, the database and the project will only grow stronger
• Potential as a web portal, clearing house, or consortium
• Additional potential funding opportunities, scholarship, and ways to highlight collections, resources, knowledge, and abilities

Questions and Answers

Keep in mind throughout this section that I am summarizing and paraphrasing the questions and their answers. Please do not take any statements as full and complete quotes. In cases where I missed too much of the question or answer I generally skipped including it in the list below. If you are anxious to know exactly what was said, you would need to buy and listen to the conference recordings for this session.

Question: Who maintains the website and who makes decisions about how things are going to get updated?
Answer: UA maintains the static web pages and UW maintains the database. The project manager has been in charge.. made prototypes of new design and sent it around for feedback. They have standards for colors in their handbooks.

Question: If the grant funding dried up right now would the project be sustainable?
Answer: There is support from the institutions… for example, it is just one project of many at UW.

Question: How did you get such good scans of the book spines?
Answer : At UW they used blocks or boxes to prop up the books and laid black foam core on top on flatbed scanners. At UA – they used black paper covered blocks in combination with overhead scanners.

Question: How did you get the full cover scans?
Answer: They very carefully lay the cover flat – so the pages sticking are sticking up.

Question: Who customized SiteSearch – OCLC or UW?
Answer: UW did the work – they had one and a half dedicated IT staff to do the customizations.

Question : Have you had to negotiate copyright issues for bindings from the late end of the time range of the project
Answer: No.

Question : Are you aware of others doing similar projects? Have you been approached and or are looking for others who want to contribute?
Answer: Yes. Right now they are working with LSU and are not actively seeking out new participants. There are plans to grow the project eventually.

Question: Did you think about the fact that you were creating your own online publication?
Answer: They didn’t realize it ahead of time – they didn’t realize how powerful the database was going to be to fuel their ability to build further on the work.

Question: Can you search for ‘young people’s covers’ – is there metadata for what age groups might enjoy specific books?
Answer: It depends on if it was part of the descriptive information, but you can search on ‘boys’ or ‘girls’ or ‘juvenile’ and gain useful results.

Question: Can you talk about the work behind the MARC to Dublin Core migration?
Answer: In some ways it was easier than they thought it would be – so many of the fields transfer directly from MARC to Dublin Core.. it was the revelation about the book as art object that made them realize the work they needed to do. Building the controlled vocabularies was where the heavy lifting occurred. It involved going through giant spread sheets with subject terms in alphabetical order looking for typos and working toward consistency (ie, use plurals). The spreadsheet didn’t show how many items used each term – it was hard to know how many changes would be needed.

Question: Do you get hits from the standard online catalog into PBO?
Answer: This is not happening now. They would love to build a better connection between the OPAC and PBO in both institutions.

Question: How did you make decisions when there were disagreements?
Answer: “I don’t remember any more.. it was all so beautiful…” <laughter > . There were no big issues about standards. There were more issues about the grant and things like how many images or books they were supposed to scan. In some cases it was easy because they were in charge of very different project areas – each team had “their own little fiefdom”.

Question: Do you think you might sell images to generate revenue?
Answer: They have considered it. The have made a calendar and a poster, but gave them away. They also have used images for making holiday cards. They don’t see selling images as a main goal right now.

Question: Have you considered pursuing online collaborative methods for work with the scholars and collectors?
Answer: No, but they think that would be useful to explore.

My Thoughts

I loved the energy and connection displayed by the presenters. It was fun to see a team of people who clearly were so proud of their work and pleased by its reception. I was personally intrigued by the highlighted challenge of coming up with (and painstakingly validating) their controlled vocabulary for subjects. I firmly believe that the topic of subject terms and their standardization across repositories will only grow in importance. For those interested in some of what is being done on this front – take a look at both the UK based High Level Thesaurus (HILT) and the Simple Knowledge Organisation Systems Core (SKOS) project. I suspect many will be intrigued by the SKOS use case titled An integrated view to medieval illuminated manuscripts.

Even given the mammoth effort required to create a shared controlled vocabulary, it is clear that the benefits they have reaped from this effort are still being discovered. The speakers mentioned on multiple occasions how pleased (and surprised) they were to realize how powerful their database of metadata has proven to be. All the amazing value added features build on this ‘heavy lifting’.

While it will be rare for such item level attention to be given to most archival documents, PBO sets the bar high for what can be done via collaboration across institutions. Their dedication to sharing their lessons learned is a fine example of what all big projects who are forging new frontiers could be doing. Finally – it is the weight of all the value added elements (galleries, tutorials, lesson plans.. and the list goes on) that have raised what could have been just a set of classified images in a database to being an active community with a growing draw for many types of users from around the world.

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2007, 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.

SAA2007: Publishers’ Bindings Online – Digitization, Collaboration, Standardization and Community Building (Session 707)