Menu Close

Category: digitization

SAA2006 Session 305: Extended Archival Description Part II – ArchivesUM

The second part of SAA2006 session 305 (Extended Archival Description: Context and Specificity for Digital Objects) was a presentation titled “Understanding from Context: Pairing EAD and Digital Repository Description”. Delivered by Ann Handler and Jennifer O’Brian of the University of Maryland‘s ArchivesUM project, this talk explained the general approach being used to tackle the challenges of managing item level description of digitized images at a large, diverse institution.

They described the tension between collection level descriptions and the inheritance of attributes by items. With more images being digitized all the time, storing the images on a network drive made them hard to find or inventory. Different departments at University of Maryland described images at different levels and using different software. While one department had just folder collection level descriptions, another set of 3000 photos were described at the item level but without adherence to any standard.

A flat system of description was not the answer because it provided no way to include hierarchical description. Their answer was to combine archival description via finding aids with well structured item level description.

As the ArchivesUM project defines them, an item can be part of more than one collection and could be part of a collection that represents the source of the item as well as an online exhibition. The team also wanted to create relationships between the existing repository of finding aids and new digital objects. In order to accomplish everything they required (and in contrast with the Archives of American Art’s choice of ColdFusion), ArchivesUM selected FEDORA – an open source digital object repository for their development. They created a transitional database using SQL Server to track and store the metadata of newly scanned digital objects to not loose anything while the custom FEDORA system was being developed. The digital object repository uses a rich descriptive standard based on Dublin Core and Visual Resources Association (VRA) Core .

In order to connect to other kinds of objects from non-archival collections and other sources they simply add them in finding aid. To present the finding aid they needed new style sheets. Their improved layout helps user understand the hierarchy of the collection and how to find the individual record they are looking for, lets them move up and down through tree easily to explore and helps user understand the context of the record they are viewing.

One of the questions that was asked at the end of the session related to the possible drawbacks of linking just one or two digitized documents to a finding aid. The concern was that it might mislead the user into believing that these few documents were the only documents in the collection held by the archives. The response was strong, asserting that the opposite was true – that having the link into the finding aid gave users the context they desperately needed to understand the few digitized records and point them in the right direction for finding the rest of the offline collection. This is especially important in the Google universe. Users may end up viewing a single digitized record from an online collection and, without a link back to the finding aid for the collection, not understand the meaning of the record in question.

The ArchivesUM team is currently setting the stage for migration to the live system. I look forward to exploring the actual user interface after it does.

Read more →

Session 305: Extended Archival Description Part I – Archives of American Art

2 Comments

Session 305 included perspectives from three digital collections which are trying to use EAD and meta data to solve real world problems of navigation and access. This post addresses the presentation by the first speaker, Barbara Aikens from the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian.

The Archives of American Art (AAA) has over 4,500 collections focusing on the history of American art. They received a 3.6 million dollar grant from the Terra Foundation to fund their 5 year project. They had already been using EAD for their standard in online finding aids since 2004. They also had already looked into digitizing their microfilmed holdings and they believe that the history of microfilming at AAA made the transition to scanning entire collections at the item level easier than it might otherwise have been. So far they have digitized 11 full collections (45 linear feet).

Their organization of the digitized files was based on collection code, box and folder. Basing their template on the EAD Cookbook, AAA used Note Tab Pro to create their XML EAD finding aid. I wonder how they might be able to take advantage of the open source software tools being developed such as Archon and the Archivists’ Toolkit (if you are interested in these packages, keep your eye open for my future post looking at them each in detail). There was some mention of re-purposing DCDs, but I was not clear about what they were describing.

The resulting online finding aid lets you read all the information you would expect to find in a finding aid (see an example), as well as permitting you to drill down into each series or container to view a list of folders. Finally the folder view provides thumbnails on the left and a big image on the right. Note that this item level folder view includes very basic folder meta data and a link back to that folder’s corresponding series page. There is no meta data for any of the images of individual items. This approach for organizing and viewing digitized collections is workable for large collections. The context is well communicated and the user’s experience is very like that of going through a collection while physically visiting an archive. First you use the finding aid to location collections of interest. Next you examine the Series and or Container descriptions to location the types of information for which you are looking. Finally, you can drill down to folders with enticing names to see if you can find what you need.

As an experiment, I tested the ‘Search within Collections/Finding Aids’ option by searching for “Downtown Gallery” and for gallery artist files to see if I was given a link to the new Downtown Gallery Records finding aid. My search for “Downtown Gallery” instead directed me to what appears to be a MARC record in the Smithsonian Archives, Manuscripts and Photographs catalog. Two versions of the finding aid are linked to from this record – with no indication as to how they are different (it turned out one was an old version – the other the new one which includes links to the digitized content). A bit more experimentation showed me that the new online collection finding aids are not integrated into the search. I will have to remember to try this sort of searching in a few months to see what the search experience is like.

What I was hoping for (in a perfect world) would be highlighting of the search terms and deep linking from the search results directly to the series and folder description pages. I wonder what side effects there will be for the accuracy of search results given that the series/folder detail description page does not include all the other text from the main finding aid. (ie New Finding Aid vs New Finding Aid Series Level Page). Oddly enough – the old version of the finding aid for this same collection includes the folder level descriptions on the SAME page (with HTML anchors permitting linking from the side bar Table of Contents to the correct location on the page). So a search for terms that appear in the historical background along with the name of an artist only listed at the folder level WOULD return results (in standard text searching) for the old finding aid but not for the new one. Once the new finding aids are integrated into the search results – it would be very helpful to have an option to only return finding aids that include digitized collections.

While exploring the folder level view, I assumed that the order of the images in the folders is the original order in the analog folder. If so, then that is a fabulous and elegant way of communicating the original order of the records to the user of the digital interface. If NOT – then it is quite misleading because a user could easily assume, as I did, that the order in which they are displayed in the folder view is the original order.

Overall, this is exciting work – and shows how well the EAD can function as a framework for the item level digitization of documents. It also points to some interesting questions about how to handle search within this type of framework.

UPDATE: See the comment below for the clarification that the new finding aids based on the work described in this presentation are NOT online yet – but should be at the end of the month (posted: 08/09/2006). 

Read more →

SAA 2006 Session 103: “X” Marks the Spot: Archiving GIS Databases – Part I

‘X’ Marks the Spot was a fantastic first session for me at the SAA conference. I have had a facination with GIS (Geographic Information Systems) for a long time. I love the layers of information. I love the fact that you can represent information in a way that often makes you realize new things just from seeing it on a map.

Since my write-ups of each panelist is fairly long, I will put each in a separate post.

Helen Wong Smith, from the Kamehameha Schools, started off the panel discussing her work on the Land Legacy Database in her presentation titled “Wahi Kupuna: Digitized Cultural Resources Database with GIS Access”.

Kamehameha Schools (KS) was founded by the will of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop. With approximately 360,000 acres, KS is the largest private landowner in the state of Hawaii. With over $7 billion in assets the K-12 schools subsidize a significant portion of the cost to educate every student (parents pay only 10% of the cost).

KS generates income from residential, commercial and resort leases. In addition to generating income – a lot of the land has a strong cultural connection. Helen was charged with empowering the land management staff to apply 5 values every time there is any type of land transaction: Economic, Educational, Cultural, Environmental and Community. They realized that they had to know about the lands they own. For example, if they take a parcel back from a long lease and they are going to re-lease it, they need to know about the land. Does it have archaelogical sites? Special place to the Hawai’ian people?

Requirements for the GIS enabled system:

  • Find the information
  • Keep it all in one place
  • Ability to export and import from other standard-based databases (MARC, Dublin Core, Open Archives Initiative)
  • Some information is private – not to be shared with public
  • GIS info
  • Digitize all text and images
  • Identify by Tax map keys (TMK)
  • Identify by ‘traditional place name’
  • Identify by ‘common names’ – surfer invented names (her favorites examples are ‘suicides’ and ‘leftovers’)

The final system would enforce the following security:

  • Lowest – material from public repositories i.e the Hawaii State Archives
  • Medium – material for which we’ve acquired the usage rights for limited use
  • Highest – leases and archaeological reports

Currently the Land Legacy Database is only available within the firewall – but eventually the lowest level of security will be made public.
They already had a web GIS portal and needed this new system to hook up to the Web GIS as well and needed to collect and disseminate data, images, audio/visual clips and references in all formats. In addition, the land managers needed easy way to access information from the field, such as lease agreement or archaeological reports (native burials? Location & who they were).

Helen selected Greenstone – open source software (from New Zealand) for the following reasons:

  • open source
  • multilingual (deals with glottals and other issues with spelling in Hawiian language)
  • GNU General Public License
  • Software for building and distributing digital library collections
  • New way to organizing information
  • Publish it on the internet and CD-ROM
  • many ways of access including by Search, Titles and Genres
  • support for audio and video clips (Example – Felix E Grant Collection).

The project started with 60,000 TIF records (can be viewed as JPEGS) – pre-scanned and indexed by another person. Each of these ‘Claim documents’ includes a testimony and a register. It is crucial to reproduce the original primary resources to prevent confusion, such as can occur between place names and people names.

Helen showed an example from another Greenstone database of newspaper articles published in a new Hawaiian journal. It was displayed in 3 columns, one each for:

  • original hawaiian language newspaper as published
  • the text including the diacriticals
  • English translation

OCR would be a major challenge with these documents – so it isn’t being used.

Helen worked with programmers in New Zealand to do the customizations needed (such as GIS integration) after loosing the services of the IT department. She has been told that she made more progress working with the folks from New Zealand than she would have with IT!

The screen shots were fun – they showed examples of how the Land Legacy Database data uses GIS to display layers on maps of Hawaii including outlines of TMKs or areas with ‘traditional names’. One can access the Land Legacy Database by clicking on a location on the map and selecting Land Legacy Database to get to records.

The Land Legacy Database was envisioned as a tool to compile diverse resources regarding the Schools’ lands to support decision making i.e. as the location and destruction of cultural sites. Its evolution includes:

  • inclusion of internal and external records including reports conducted for and by the Schools in the past 121 years
  • a platform providing access to staff, faculty and students across the islands
  • sharing server space with the Education Division

Helen is only supposed to spend 20% of her time on this project! Her progress is amazing.

Read more →

Introduction

2 Comments

My name is Jeanne. I am a graduate student in an Archives program pursuing my MLS (aka, Master of Library Science). I have enjoyed all my classes to date (3) and I love the ideas that those classes have generated. Sometimes I leave class with just as many personal ideas scrawled in the margins of my notebook as class notes written on the main page. I am especially intrigued by the ways in which concepts from different fields intersect. How do ideas from my current field of software development and database design illuminate new issues, questions and concepts in the realm of archival studies?

I am particularly interested in topics related to audio and visual archival materials, digitization, description, meta-data, and retention of context in digitized collections.

So, here we are – you reading and I writing. I hope to make you think about things in a way you may not have before. I hope if you have been down the mental road I am taking and you have noticed something that I have missed, you might take a moment to point it out to me.

Please – ask questions and let me know your thoughts.

Read more →