Fight for the Colors: Ohio Battle Flag Collection

This online exhibit, sponsored by the Ohio Historical Society, makes available a popular exhibit from the organization's physical site.

I enjoy the layout of the pages. I like the colors and the "old-timey" feel. I was excited to look through the collection, until I started getting broken links. I visited the "online relic room" and was not able to view the Mexican War flags.

Collection Principles
The online collection is a representation of a physical exhibit. The society is not only interested in the physical artifacts but also texts and visual representations of the flags.

Object Characteristics
I was never able to view any of the flags, which was disappointing, but there were other images on the pages, thumbnails of what I may have seen if the links all worked. I couldn't really get a lot of information from those.

Metadata
One place the site excels is with the metadata. There is a page devoted to the description of the digitization process. The broad initiative is to digitize a number of artifacts from different kinds of collections. This collection is one of the most used, so digitization is for preservation and access purposes. The page discusses the technical specs including type of scanner used.

Audience
The audience could include a number of people. Those that have visited the physical collection and would like to see it again, researchers, historians, proud Buckeyes, and school groups are all among potential users.

ASIFA- Hollywood Animation Archive

The Hollywood branch of ASIFA, the International Animated Film Society, is creating an Animation Archive online. Their blog about the project, along with many digitized items spanning images, audio and video can be found on Blogger. At first I thought that the blog was the archive- which would be extremely weird. Why put the archive on Blogger when ASIFA-Hollywood has a website? I had to dig pretty far into the blog entries to discover that the blog is not the archive, just a temporary way of providing access to materials they have digitized while they continue to build financial support for the project. The range of material that will be part of the Animation Archive is very broad. In addition to cartoons, there are illustrations from books and magazines, old drawing manuals, pinup calendars, oral histories and more. Obviously, much (if not most) of the digitized material is not in the public domain. ASIFA is putting it up anyway and invoking fair use. In the terms of use section, users are specifically prohibited from putting Animation Archive cartoons on YouTube et al., although I have to wonder how easy it is to enforce that.

The quality of all of the digital objects on this site seems impeccable but no technical specs are provided. There is a link to ASIFA's page on Film Preservation, which affirms their mission to preserve all their cartoons as high-quality 35mm prints on safety film, a noble but expensive goal. I also spotted something that said they're doing their transfers to film using the equipment at UCLA's Film and Television Archive. The cartoons I watched on this site were far,far better looking than any I've seen on the Internet Archive. As far as metadata is concerned...there's virtually none. They are building an animation database which will contain "biographies of artists, filmographic info and media files." Currently it is possible to look for digital objects with a simple Google search within the blog, just using keywords. Steve Worth, creator of the archive, is described on Wikipedia as an animation producer and historian. It seems to me that his foremost concern is providing access and he is not as worried about nerdy things like metadata and data migration as someone in the library or archival professions would be. This may turn out to be fine as far as the Animation Archive is concerned, only time will tell.

Even the drawing-impaired like myself can find a lot to look at in this blog/archive. The illustration above is from a book of fairytales that was owned by a friend of my parents', which I loved to look at when I was a child. I had forgotten all about it and it was so sweet to rediscover it in the Animation Archive. The primary audience for the Archive, however, will be professional and student animators and serious collectors, i.e. people who are really passionate about preserving the art of hand-drawn animation.

Child Under Tree - The Virginia Landscape - Virginia Historical Society

Virginia is such a lovely place. I'm sure that this time of year it is especially beautiful. This online exhibit, featuring, among many others, the painting shown to the left, Child Under Tree - The Virginia Landscape - Virginia Historical Society, suggests a peaceful and happy time. It can't dim the horror of what happened in Blacksburg yesterday, however.

The Virginia Historical Society has digitized a portion of a collection of landscape paintings that were exhibited in 2000, mounted them in a simple, "one-after-the-other" format, carefully described each one with an emphasis on information about the artists (on a separate screen one clicks through to from the exhibit main page), and loaded each image up with so much rights information that it was astonishing to read through. It would be very interesting to see some figures on the revenue that this project brings in. One would think there must be a very high demand for reproductions of these images, based on the elaborate rights policies and procedures for requesting permission to use or order reprints, etc. Corbis has nothing on this Historical Society.

The original exhibit consisted of 240 paintings and drawings. The online exhibit shows just 12 of them. There is no explanation for why these were chosen. There is no metadata concerning the digitization process. The images are thumbnails that expand to slightly larger versions when one clicks on them. The audience is, I suppose, the general public.

The Power of Advertising: Burma-Shave

This online exhibit, from the William F. Eisner Museum of Advertising and Design in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, focuses on the famous Burma-Shave ad campaign of the 1920s and 30s. The company used series of road signs painted with rhyming limericks to catch the attention of motorists. Each series of signs ended with the words "Burma-Shave." This ad campaign elevated the company from near obscurity to the #2 brushless shaving cream in the country.

I find the museum's website atrocious. For a museum focused on design, one would think that good design would matter, but it seems like the site is concerned with aesthetics only and not usability. One of the most frustrating features of the site is the lack of an overall navigation bar. Once you click to a page, you have to use the back button to get back to where you were and there is no way to navigate easily through sections.

There also doesn't appear to be a direct link to the exhibit itself. Only to the page listing all of the museum's current online exhibits.

Collection Principles
Kitsch seems to be the overwhelming theme here. As it doesn't appear to have much if any scholarly value, the principles guiding the collection don't seem to be that strict. It seems that the exhibit uses whatever information it has available.

Object Characteristics The site opens in a tiny window from the link on the exhibit page. There is an animated introduction that seems like it should include music, but it doesn't. This flashy info provides a dramatic intro to the Burma-Shave phenomenon while in the left vertical bar, text from the different signs appears. After the introduction, the user has three pages to choose from. The first is a text description of the history of Burma-Shave, the second is a collection of audio and video, and the third is a collection of images. The audio is actors reading the old Burma-Shave ads and is frankly a bit disturbing. I don't see much value in this section of the exhibit. The video links open the tiniest boxes I have ever seen and feel a lot like a VH1 behind the music. There are some still images intertwined with interviews and some reenactments of people using Burma-Shave or coming up with great ideas about how to market Burma-Shave. The image section is rather standard. The images are of course small and can't be resized.

Metadata
There isn't a lot of metadata associated with the site. The images are captioned with a year and what the item is. The audio section explains who the speakers are. The video section doesn't have a lot of information. The interviewees' names are superimposed on the screen, but there is no information about the reenactments.

Audience
As previously mentioned, this is not an academic resource. It is a light exhibit created for the general public. I see it as a way for people to reminisce about their experiences with the campaign and enthrall younger generations with the wonder of the red signs.

UNT Music Library Virtual Rare Book Room

Just like the previous post, this is a University of North Texas digitization project. The Music Library Virtual Rare Book Room contains scanned images of over a hundred bound-format musical scores, mostly from the 18th c. The digital library includes some materials that were borrowed from private collectors and scanned with their permission. They plan on adding materials to the collection and there is contact information for the Music Librarian at UNT so that website users can suggest items for future inclusion.

The scores can be viewed in PDF and in page-turner format. The Technical page explains PDFs and gives instructions for allowing byte-serving in Adobe Acrobat so users can view the files faster. The digital images for the most part look good, although I did find an illustration in a Don Giovanni score that is much too dark. The Technical also specifies that the images were scanned at 400 dpi using a planetary (I'm guessing this is just another word for overhead) scanner so as not to damage the books.

The metadata for the items in this collection is admirably complete. Users can browse by title or author or search by a variety of fields, including LC subject headings, which here seem to indicate either the genre or the form of a work. Each work is accompanied by a few background paragraphs, a link to the UNT catalog record, a short bibliography, a physical description of the book, including scanned images of the cover, and for operas, a plot summary. There is a glossary of conservation terms provided as a reference for the physical descriptions. I did not know that the technical term for insect debris is frass. Note to the writers of Battlestar Galactica: another faux curse word is yours for the taking.

As someone who has been struggling a lot with technology lately, I really appreciate this project's friendliness toward users who have little or no experience viewing digital objects. I also like that they credit the (mostly library school) students who did all the work in big letters on the about page. We should all be so lucky.

The Portal to Texas History

The Portal to Texas History is a collaborative digital library hosted by the University of North Texas. The photo to the left shows a crowd standing in line in front of an Austin Kentucky Fried Chicken stand in the 1960's. The photo is part of the Austin History Center's collections.

Collection Principles

The mission of the initiative is to offer "students and lifelong learners a digital gateway to the rich collections held in Texas libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, and private collections. The Portal team at the University of North Texas provides strong leadership by supporting collaborative efforts with its partners, while pursuing the goals of accessibility, best practices, and preservation of historical material." This web site provides a great deal of transparency into their processes for selecting materials, which are submitted by cultural heritage centers "out in the field". The project has received funding from several grants, the most notable appears to be from the Summerlee Foundation, which allows this inititative to give "mini grants" to these participating cultural agencies in order to digitize objects that are in jeopardy of being lost. The Best Practices , Equipment, and Tutorials pages links to relevant pages on those subjects and offers standards regarding the digitization of the items. This is a valuable resource for other digitization programs. This project also regularly publishes a newsletter to inform interested parties about new objects and new partners, as well as information about using the resource.

Object Characteristics/Metadata

Users are able to search by full text, metadata, title, subject, or creator or browse by subject, collection, contributor, or era. Subjects are often further subdivided into more specific categories. This interface allows users to customize the display into either a grid or a list. Brief metadata is provided with the thumbnail image. Once the information is clicked, more detailed metadata is provided, many with hyperlinks to additional information or to narrowed results on the topic. Users are able to interact with the photo and can contribute information. The site uses Dublin Core and provides a metadata tutorial for the partner institutions.

Audience

Texans, researchers, life-long learners

UbuWeb Film

UbuWeb began in 1996 as an online repository for visual, concrete and, sound poetry, but later expanded to embrace all forms of the avant-garde. It includes, among other things:
-An Anthology of Conceptual Writing
-Collection of Online Contemporary Poetry
-A Film and Video Archive
-An MP3 archive
-a whole lot more...
UbuWeb is huge it has tons and tons of digital resources. Unfortunately, most of them appear to be accessible only through browsing. But the collection is amazing if your interested in the avant-garde.

I'm going to blog about the "Film and Video" section, since there is just too much on this site to consider it in it's entirety.

UbuWeb:FILM AND VIDEO

Unfortunately, the selection process for this site is obscure. There is not any clear information detailing why this information has been brought together. There are hundreds of videos to choose from, but I chose the Marcel Duchamp section. This brings you to a video page, allowing you to watch the video straight from a browser or open a new window to play the video in in quick time. The site is good with contextual information about the film, but bad with metadata It does not tell you what the film was originally recorded on, nor any information about the digitization project (i.e. which organization did it, who owns it, etc.) This is the main draw back of the site. It provides a lot of great information and resources, but lacks a lot of "best practice" requirements (including information that would be helpful to serious researchers).

UbuWeb's main goal is exposure through access and in that they succeed. On their "Film and Video" page they discuss the importance of the analog versions of these films and hope that people who get an initial taste of these films will seek them out further through museum and theater attendance. To this end they provide a list of distributors of the films, stating that, "We realize that the real thing isn't very easy to get to. Most of us don't live anywhere near theatres that show this kind of fare and very few of us can afford the hefty rental fees, not to mention the cumbersome equipment, to show these films. Thankfully, there is the Internet which allows you to get a whiff of these films regardless of your geographical location," adding that hopefully the viewer will be"enticed to purchase a high quality DVD from the noble folks trying to get these works out into the world. Believe me, they're not doing it for the money."

As far as copyright is concerned, UbuWeb makes it pretty clear by stating, "UbuWeb posts much of its content without permission, ; we rip out-of-print LPs into sound files; we scan as many old books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as fast as we can OCR them. UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with unlimited space to fill. It is in this way that the site has grown to encompass hundreds of artists, hundreds of gigabytes of sound files, books, texts and videos." Their main concern is access, which is great, but there is no provenance, no digital metadata, no unique identifiers, no way to organize the information consistently. The process is not transparent, which is okay for the casual user, but perhaps not for the scholar.