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
• Barbara Aikens
• 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

The highlight of my digital archives week was the discovery of the Digital Curation Exchange. I promptly joined and began to explore their ‘space for all things ‘digital curation’ ‘. This led me to a fabulous list of resources, including a set of syllabi for courses related to digital curation. Each link brought me to an extensive reading list, some with full slide decks related to weekly in classroom presentations. My ‘to read’ list has gotten much longer – but in a good way!

On other days recently I have found myself involved in all of the following:

• review of metadata standards for digital objects
• creation of internal guidelines and requirements documents
• networking with those at other institutions to help coordinate site visits of other digitization projects
• records management planning and reviews
• learning about the OCR software available to our organization
• contemplation of the web archiving efforts of organizations and governments around the world
• reviewing my organization’s social media policies
• listening to the audio of online training available from PLANETS (Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services)
• contemplation of the new Journal of Digital Media Management and their recent call for articles

My new favorite quote related to digital preservation comes from What we reckon about keeping digital archives: High level principles guiding State Records’ approach from the State Records folks in New South Wales Australia, which reads:

We will keep the Robert De Niro principle in mind when adopting any software or hardware solutions: “You want to be makin moves on the street, have no attachments, allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner” (Heat, 1995)

In other words, our digital archives technology will be designed to be sustainable given our limited resources so it will be flexible and scalable to allow us to utilise the most appropriate tools at a given time to carry out actions such as creation of preservation or access copies or monitoring of repository contents, but replace these tools with new ones easily and with minimal cost and with minimal impact.

I like that this speaks to the fact that no plan can perfectly accommodate the changes in technology coming down the line. Being nimble and assuming that change will be the only constant are key to ensuring access to our digital assets in the future.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Day of Digital Archives

In the early 1960s, my father bought a Wheatstone concertina in London. He tells how he visited the factory where it was made to pick one out and recalls the ledger book in which details about the concertinas were recorded. After a recent retelling of this family classic, I was inspired to see what might be online related to concertinas. I was amazed!

First I found the Concertina Library which presents itself as a ‘Digital Reference Collection for Concertinas’. With fourteen contributing authors, the site includes in depth articles on concertina history, technology, music, research and a wide range of concertina systems.

I particularly appreciate the reasons that Robert Gaskins, site creator, lists for the creation of the site on the about page:

(1) Almost all of the historical material about concertinas has been held in research libraries where access is limited, or in private collections where access may be non-existent. The reason for this is not that the material is so valuable, but that in the past there was no way to make material of limited interest available to everyone, so it stayed safely in archives. The web has provided a way to make this material widely available—partly by the libraries themselves, and partly in collections such as this.

(2) There seems to be a growing number of people working again on the history of concertinas, perhaps in part because research materials are becoming available on the web. These people are widely scattered, so they don’t get to meet and discuss their work in person. But again the web has provided an answer, allowing people to work collaboratively and exchange information across miles and timezones, and for the resulting articles the web offers worldwide publication at almost no cost.

What an eloquent testimonial for the power of the internet to both provide access to once-inaccessible materials and support virtual collaboration within a geographically dispersed community.

Next, I found the Wheatstone Concertina Ledgers. This site features business records (in the form of ledgers) of the C. Wheatstone & Co. stretching from 1830 through 1974 (with some gaps). The originals are held at the Library of the Horniman Museum in London. It is a great reference website with a nice interface for paging through the ledgers. Armed with the serial number from my father’s concertina (36461) I found my way to page 88 of a Wheatstone Production Journal from the Dickinson Archives. If I am reading that line properly, his concertina is a 3E model and was made (or maybe sold?) April 25, 1960. I wish that there was documentation online to explain how to read the ledgers. For example, I would love to know what ‘Bulletin 3052′ means.

I liked the way that they retained the sense of turning pages in a ledger. Every page of each ledger is included, including front and back end pages and blank pages. I have total confidence that I am seeing the pages in the same order as I would in person.

You can read the overview and introduction to the project, but what intrigued me more was the very detailed narrative of how this digitization effort was accomplished. In How The Wheatstone Concertina Ledgers Were Digitized, we find Robert Gaskins of  the Concertina Library explaining how, with an older model IBM ThinkPad, a consumer grade scanner, and his existing software (Microsoft Office and Macromedia Fireworks), he created a website with 4,500 images and clean, simple navigation. From where I sit, this is a great success story – a single person’s dedication can yield fantastic results. You don’t need the latest and greatest technology to run a successful digitization project. One individual can go a long way through sheer determination and the clever leveraging of what they have on hand.

Back on the Concertina Library‘s about page we find “There is still a lot of material relevant to the study of concertinas and their history which should be digitized and placed on the web, but has not been so far. Ideas for additional contributors, items, and collections are very welcome.” If I am following the dates correctly, the Concertina Library has articles dating back to February of 2001, shortly before Mr. Gaskins started planning the ledger digitization project. At the same time as he was collaborating with other concertina enthusiasts to build the Concertina Library,  he was scanning ledgers and creating the Wheatstone Concertina Ledgers website. Three cheers to Mr. Gaskins for his obvious personal enthusiasm and dedication to virtual collaboration, digitization and well-built websites! Another three cheers for all those who joined the cause and collaborated to create great online resources to support ongoing concertina research from anywhere in the world.

All this started because my father owns a beautiful old concertina. I love it when an innocent web search leads me to find a wealth of online archival materials. Do you have a favorite online archival resource that you stumbled across while doing similar research for family or friends? Please share them in the comments below!

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

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Concertina History Online Features Virtual Collaboration and Digitization

• Weather balloon observations received from Lilongwe, Malawi (Africa) from 1968-1991: all the red on these charts represents data rescued by IEDRO — an increase from only 30% of the data available to over 90%.
• Data rescue statistics from around the world

They do this work for many reasons – to improve understanding of weather patterns to prevent starvation and the spread of disease, to ensure that structures are built to properly withstand likely extremes of weather in the future and to help understand climate change. Since the theme for the day is climate change, I thought I would include a few excerpts from their detailed page on climate change:

“IEDRO’s mandate is to gather as much historic environmental data as possible and provide for its digitization so that researchers, educators and operational professionals can use those data to study climate change and global warming. We believe, as do most scientists, that the greater the amount of data available for study, the greater the accuracy of the final result.

If we do not fully understand the causes of climate change through a lack of detailed historic data evaluation, there is no opportunity for us to understand how humankind can either assist our environment to return to “normal” or at least mitigate its effects. Data is needed from every part of the globe to determine the extent of climate change on regional and local levels as well as globally. Without these data, we continue to guess at its causes in the dark and hope that adverse climate change will simply not happen.”

So, what does this data rescue look like? Take a quick tour through their process – from organizing papers, photographing each page, the transcription of all data and finally upload of this data to NOAA’s central database. These data rescue efforts span the globe and take the dedicated effort of many volunteers along the way. If you would like to volunteer to help, take a look at the IEDRO listings on VolunteerMatch.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Blog Action Day 2009: IEDRO and Climate Change

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

This is exciting for two very different reasons:

1. New catalog software!
2. Getting to read all the gory details about ARC!

If this makes you curious, then go give the RFI a read, but here are some juicy ARC tidbits to consider:

• ARC’s Logical Data Model – 20 pages worth of data model that I am sorely tempted to print out, tape together and hang on a very large wall
• ARC was built as a customization of OLIB back in 2003 and has been upgraded along the way
• ARC currently contains 2,478,259 archival descriptions and 8,810,938 authority records
• An average of 25,000 archival descriptions are added to ARC each week

The RFI states: “NARA has outgrown the existing ARC system and requires a more robust solution that’s capable of scaling to support at least 250 million archival descriptions and links to upwards of 500 million digital copies over the next 4-7 years.” Why so many records? Because all of NARA’s partners are digitizing records so quickly that they are creating a massive backlog of documents and the future only holds more of the same.

This RFI is only for planning purposes, but I will definitely be following this story as it unfolds.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

NARA Outgrows ARC: Researching New Catalog Software Options

The Sunshine Week blog announced the release of a 2009 Survey Of State Government Information Online. The survey results explains:

Using a standardized worksheet surveyors rated each section on its usability, looking at factors such as whether the information was clearly linked, if full reports or only summaries were available, whether viewing and/or downloading was free, and whether the data were current. The categories for the survey were selected for generally serving the overall public good — the kind of information people need for their own health and well-being and that of the community.

See the worksheet for details on the categories selected for inclusion in the survey and the results for lots of interesting tidbits about exactly which states provide access (or not) to various public information online. A few very randomly selected highlights:

• Maryland: Nursing home information, mhcc.maryland.gov/consumerinfo/nhguide, got high marks for facilitating online search and for allowing users to “compare data in a variety of ways.”
• Iowa: The state auditor’s office reportedly offers online more than 5,000 full reports of all its audits dating back to 2001. The audits are easily accessible from tabs on the main Web page, www.auditor.iowa.gov.
• Colorado: Bridge inspection reports in Colorado are considered public, but they are not published online. Anyone who wants to see the reports is advised to file an FOI request.

All of this made me recall my blog post about the parallel goals of journalists and archivists when considering digital public records and databases. I wanted to celebrate Sunshine Week by looking for other online sources of government information. My first stop was the website of the Council of State Archivists (CoSA). They had a couple of great resources including:

• A 2007 status report on the state of State Records (and it looks like a new report should be out soon – their 2008 survey just closed at the end of January 2009)
• Directory of State Archives and Records Programs
• Details on their Local Government Project

A bit further afield we find GovernmentDocs.org advertised as a “community government document reviewer system”. On their about page we read:

With the GovernmentDocs.org system, citizen reviewers can engage in the government accountability process like never before. Registered users can review and comment on documents, adding their insights and expertise to the work of the national nonprofit organizations which are partnering on this project. This new information then becomes instantly searchable. The text of each document is searchable, as well, thanks to a powerful Optical Character Recognition (OCR) functionality.

GovernmentDocs.org adds a powerful layer to government transparency and accountability by indexing documents in a user-friendly manner that is remarkably easy to share. Every page of every document has its own unique url, allowing you and other users to link to that page on blogs, send emails about the documents to friends, and expose the information to a wider audience.

Here is an example GovernmentDocs page taken from a request submitted by CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) regarding the Endangered Species Act. Each GovernmentDocs page has a unique URL, full text transcription of the page and supports comments and reviews. The possibility of building up a community around these records is very real. I am curious to see how many citizen reviewers and comments are associated with these documents a year from now.

Please help celebrate Sunshine Week by exploring all these amazing resources!

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Sunshine Week 2009: Archives, Records and Other Online Government Information

The first oral history project that combines old family pictures with the stories that go with them, Centropa has interviewed more than 1,350 elderly Jews living in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Sephardic communities of Greece, Turkey and the Balkans. With a database of 25,000 digitized images, we are bringing Jewish history to life in ways never done before.

Their fleet of 140 individuals conducted extensive oral interviews and digitized thousands of old family photos. They are quite intent on clarifying that they do not create videos during their sessions with their interviewees. Instead, they record audio of their multi-hour sessions, transcribe these sessions and combine them with the digitized family photos to create their movies.

The juicy center of their website is found in the Centropa Movies which are alternately billed as a “library of rescued memories” and a “digital bridge back to a world destroyed”.  Their movies are also available via iTunes and on the CentropaOffice YouTube Channel. The movie I have included below tells the story of Judit Kinszki and focuses on her father Imre Kinszki, a budding photographer from Budapest, Hungary. From this movie’s Centropa Movie page you can also navigate to Judit Kinszki’s biography , the full family photo album and a study guide for this movie.

The amount of detail provided with each posted interview is really incredible. Biographies, detailed notes on each photo, the study guide, a family tree and a currently grayed out but promising link to “Discuss Movie”. This site has clearly given great thought to how to support teachers and has followed that vision through in the form of tons of supporting materials. Centropa has chosen the path of quality over quantity with the 17 movies currently posted.

Upon further reflection, I realize now that the movies are an outgrowth of the database of photographs and biographies. The detail was not added to support the videos – but rather the videos are the next step of evolution beyond the photos and interview transcripts.

In addition to the movies they offer a Recipe Archive, downloadable eBook versions of some of their interviews as well as Centropa Student, aimed at high schools in Europe, North America, and Israel. For those of you working on your own oral history projects, there is the Centropa Oral History Tool Kit, available in 5 languages. The Centropa Glossaries are less glossary and more a detailed list of people, social groups, events and terms that can be searched by country, type or keyword. Finally, don’t miss the ‘Narrated Stories and Introductions’ featured on the right sidebar on the Centropa Movies page, such as Maps, Central Europe and History or the Introduction to Centropa for US Students.

Reading Centropa’s claim that they are the first to combine the use of family photos and oral histories made me recall the University of Alaska Fairbank’s Project Jukebox. This project launched back in 1988 and aims to ” integrate oral history recordings with associated photographs, maps, and text.” The original was written using Hypercard!

They have a map showing all the communities in Alaska currently included as part of the project. A good example of an individual photo with accompanying narration is Harry Cook in his Garden from the Kiana Village History Project. No – it isn’t as elegantly assembled as the Centropa Movies, but the intention is much the same. They use old photos as a catalyst for helping individuals being interviewed and then combine the audio and images to improve end users’ understanding of the context of individual photos.

I have signed up with Centropa to be notified when they launch the promised ‘Add Your Family Photos’ feature. Until then I will keep scanning my own family’s photos, such as the one below featuring my grandfather (back row on the right), and working my way through all the Centropa Movies and their supporting materials.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Preserving Jewish Memory: Family Photos Join Oral History in Centropa Movies

I spotted the New York Times article  Historical Photos in Web Archives Gain Vivid New Lives via Dan Cohen’s Twitter Feed. The article is a nice treatment of the difference between the Library of Congress‘s 50 photo a week contributions to the Flickr Commons and the German Federal Archives‘ contribution of 100,000 images to the Wikimedia Commons (described as ” the virtual archive for material used in Wikipedia articles”).

I took a look at the details of this project – starting with the homepage of the Commons: Bundesarchiv on the Wikimedia Commons. This passage explains one of the goals of the Budesarchiv Gallery:

Very old photographs have become public domain, and events and persons of today can be photographed by Wikipedians with their digital cameras. But for the time between there is a huge gap in Wikipedia articles. The donation of Federal Archive is important to close that gap, and it is to hope that it can serve as a model to other institutions in Germany or elsewhere.

Also, each individual photo includes this disclaimer:

For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Factual corrections and alternative descriptions are encouraged separately from the original description.

There is a special category to call out instances of these types of descriptions - BArch images with biased descriptions. In my exploration, I discovered only a very few with these original image captions translated to English. One example is the photo of a single room home for a family of eleven.

In contrast to the Library of Congress addition of 50 photos a week, the German Federal Archive plans to add “a few thousand images a month”. The Commons:Bundesarchiv To Do list is also interesting reading. The To Do page includes tasks both in German and English (though the wiki discussion page is all in German). I love having the opportunity to read about issues confronting those working on this sort of project. For example – there is a discussion about how to determine if an image should remain Uncategorized. What if only 1 person out of three is tagged? Does it still ‘deserve’ to remain marked as ‘uncategorized’?

New categories created for use in this project need to use a special template so that they show up properly within the sub-categories of the Category:Images  from the German Federal Archive page. For example – the page which sorts images by country has 64 sub-categories at the time of this post. A new country added using this template approach would immediately show up on the  images by country sub-category page.

I will say that the learning curve for classifying images within the Wikimedia Commons in general, and the Budesarchiv project in specific, is much higher than tagging images in the Flickr Commons. There is a handy CommonSense tool (available via the ‘find categories’ tab on any image) that will suggest categories based on keywords, but even that is a bit overwhelming for a beginner.

As an example, let’s look at the image I chose for this post of two boys finishing their ice cream in 1949. Here are the categories currently assigned:

• Images from the German Federal Archive, year 1949
• Images from the German Federal Archive, location Berlin
• History of Germany
• Ice cream
• Black and white photographs of children
• Black and white photographs of Germany
• Standing males
• Photographs by Brenner

Let’s take a look at what the wiki text looks like to set these categories. First there is the special template for the project which specifies the year and location.  I believe that these are attributes uploaded with the original photograph. This gives us the first two categories in our list (emphasis added mine):

{{BArch-License|
|signature=Bild 183 1984-0202-506
|batch=Bild 183
|year=1949
|month=
|location=Berlin
|PD=
}}

Then we get to the standard Wikimedia Commons categories. These are the categories most akin to tags in Flickr. These are the categories which will promote discovery of these images alongside images from other sources from across the Wikimedia Commons:

[[Category:History of Germany]]
[[Category:Ice cream]]
[[Category:Black and white photographs of children]]
[[Category:Black and white photographs of Germany]]
[[Category:Standing males]]
[[Category:Photographs by Brenner]]

These categories were clearly hand added by someone, since the original caption reads (by my rough translation) At the beach: “Is it already gone?”. I suppose I could go in and add [[Category:Beaches]], but I am honestly not sure if there is enough beach in the photo to warrant such a classification.

I am very curious to see comparison stats of the assignment of categories/tags to images in both the Flickr & Wikimedia Commons a year from now. How will we measure success? How will we grade the accuracy of metadata assigned by the public? Which images will get more public views and usage – those added to the Flickr Commons or those added to the Wikimedia Commons?

For now, I am happy to set aside all these thorny questions. I am just so pleased to see a new and ambitious experiment in crowdsourcing image metadata.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

German Federal Archives, Crowdsourcing & the Wikimedia Commons