Fred Harvey Photographic Collection II

In my last Blog entry, I discussed a Fred Harvey digital collection housed at the University of Northern Arizona. Since I have a personal interest in this material, I thought it might be interesting to see how a different repository handled similar material. This week’s site is also a Fred Harvey Collection Exhibit housed at the University of Arizona. The library states that this collection is one of their most heavily used for purposes of photo reprints. The collection contains over 2,000 photos of Harvey’s hotels, restaurants, and railroad news stands, all of which are apparently online because the site states that there are other materials in the collection (guest registers, scrapbooks, blueprints, menu cards, and stationary) which can only be accessed in the reading room person.

Clicking on the

Victorian Studio Portrait Photo Collection

The Victorian Studio Portrait Photograph Collection, part of the University of Missouri Digital Library, contains images of 229 photographs from the mid-19th-early 20th centuries. All of these are portraits, as the name of the project implies, most of them taken in Missouri and Kansas. Frustratingly, the website does not explicitly state where the photos are from. It appears that this project originated from the University of Missouri at Kansas City Library, so I will assume that all of the photographs are from their collection. The home page for the collection describes the formats as “Cartes-de-Visite, Cabinet Cards, Tintype, etc.” However, the descriptions of the images do not include format or anything they know about the photographic method that was used. I can see that most of them are cartes-de-visite, but any user of the site who doesn’t know what those are is going to have to look elsewhere for a definition. The date of creation of most of these photos is unknown. A few of them have dates that place them as not yet in the public domain, going by the 120-year rule. Given that these are not 100% guaranteed copyright-free, it would be good to put some kind of rights statement/disclaimer on the site. I cannot find anything on the University of Missouri Digital Library site that talks about copyright at all.

The scanned images look good. The ones that are quite faded are difficult to see if a user is browsing through all of the images, but they show up well when they are enlarged. The dirt, scratches, cracks and blotches on the original photos are all here, but I don’t see any silver mirroring on these images. Is this something that would normally show up on a scan? The University of Missouri Digital Library program has posted Image Collection Guidelines that detail image file name and format standards and metadata standards. There’s also a link to the Virtually Missouri Digitization Guidelines that were used in this project. This is basically a digitization handbook, similar to the ones we have looked at in this class, which covers metadata, scanning and…copyright. At least someone is thinking about it.

Descriptive metadata provided for each photo includes a description of the picture, studio name and location, date (usually approximate), gender and whether it is a group photo. Administrative data includes the size of the original, a file name, and its location within the digital collection. The Visually Missouri Guidelines mandate use of the Dublin Core Elements and explain mandatory and optional elements. As I mentioned earlier, I feel strongly that it would be a good idea to indicate format and process here. I know this kind of thing costs money, but perhaps at some point the metadata could be tied to a search-and-retrieval system that could quickly show the user all of the photographs in sepia tone, for example. After all, the point of digitizing this stuff is so that people can use it.

The Institute For Figuring // Gallery

The The Institute For Figuring // Gallery has produced an exhibit called "The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef" displaying images of a type of crochet that is rather unusual, as pictured here. This reef carries the attribution, "Crochet Coral and Anemone Garden" with sea slug by Marianne Midelburg. The pieces model various types of corals, and the exhibit includes information on the coral reefs that are the inspiration for the exhibit. It's hard to say exactly what the Institute is about. It is about crochet; it's about pollution and the ocean; it's about hyperbolic space, fractals, and other things quite esoteric by my standards. But this exhibit is clearly a celebration of the intersection of handicraft and higher math, science and ecology. Not at all what I was looking for when I went searching for an online exhibit to blog this week.

The exhibit consists of information pages on coral reefs, pollution, the rubbish vortex in the Pacific Ocean, and the galleries themselves, pages with thumbnails of the crochet corals that can be enlarged to show detail of the handiwork. The images in the information pages are captioned, but the gallery images are not. No additional metadata on the images is available.

The audience for this exhibit is probably a general audience, though I suppose that there probably aren't that many people interested in crochet that expresses higher math and concern for global warming, plastic pollution, and the death of coral reefs all at the same time. I certainly learned something from my visit.

Deep within Cornell University's Albert R. Mann Library website, I ran across an interesting digital book collection called The Hive and the Honeybee, which comprises 30 digitised books from the E.F. Phillips Beekeeping Collection. The thirty books selected by scholars date from 1807 - 1917, but the digitised portion of the collection grows as funds become available.



To the left of each page is a clear menu including Main, About, Search, Brouse, Contact, Help. The help includes a list of FAQs, and also lists hints for Gerneral use, searching, browsing, and other topics. In essence, this collection could be used as a library teaching tool because it provides step-by-step explanations of searching through Boolean, Proximity or Bibliographic searches. It also describes how and in what format documents or entire books can be saved and printed as PDFs. In this help section, we eventually discover that the Hive and Honeybee materials were encoded in simple SGML with a 40-element DTD that conforms to TEI Guidlines. Books can be viewed either as page pics or as OCR text, and either in single page or the entire book.


Each of the 30 books was run through OCR prior to posting, so we can search the text of each book and also see the full text alongside the page shots. That's great, except that no-one seems to have gone back to correct the OCR, as shown by the fact that the tall s and ct ligatures were not read correctly. Here's an example of what the OCR did with the 1807 book: "But although many inter*-efting peculiarities have been difcovered, they are fo much interwoven' with errors, that no fubjed has given birth to more ab-furdities." The transcription of the word subject as "fubjed" really does look "abfurd".

Navigation within a book is a little slow to load, but is fairly good. A drop-down menu of pages allows you to select a page, and it even notes which ones are illustrated. Metadata accompanying each book that can be seen by the user is limited to Author, Title, Publication Info, Print source, Subject terms, and the URL. I see two problems with this: 1. Publication Info is invariably just the name of the Mann Library, without any further call number or shelf location information for citation. 2. There is no indication of how long a book is to help the user determine how or whether to download it. The only way to determine this is to open a book and scroll down the page reference drop-down box, which can take a long time for books over 50 pages. As for viewing, the images of pages can be scaled up twice, which for printed books is usually sufficient but leaves a bit wanting for illustrataions and photgraph. A rotation tool could also be useful for anyone who does not want to print or download images that are rotated 90 degrees to fit into the book (i.e. landscape prints).

Another thing I regret is that most covers and endleaves were not photographed in the process. Much of the interesting provenance information is located on those leaves. This project (or more likely the preservation microfilm project from which the images were obtained) clearly is interested more in the book as text than book as artifact and object of cultural history.


I find it interesting that external funds were raised for this project from interested apiculturalists across the country, beekeeping clubs, and as memorials in honour of bee lovers. This system of donation is similar to the way Phillips endowed the collection in 1925, when he asked each apiculturalist to set aside one hive to generate $50 in honey which was contributed to the book fund. All of the donors for the digital version of the collection are listed on the credits page, which can be linked to from the About page. Also listed in the credits page are the experts who selected the materials, 4 site designers and developers, and 7 project staff (bibliographer, public programs administrator, preservation librarian, preservation assistant, two metadata services people and a copyright specialist).

If you have time, it's an interesting collection to browse (by author, but with 30 books, it doesn't much matter). As for me, I'm off for a piece of toast with honey now.

Textile Museum of Canada

The Textile Museum of Canada holds more than 12,000 pieces and represents over 200 countries and regions. It is one of only eight museums of it's kind in the world. The TMC Collection Online is a research tool of images and descriptions relating to thousands of works in the permanent collection. While the website states that it is ever expanding, I was unable to find a clear statement concerning the selection process of which items are to be digitized. On the left hand side of the search page they pull out "Popular Objects" but they do not indicate what "popular" references.



The TMC collection is searchable by keyword and also has an advanced search function that allows search by variety of categories including object, title, maker, local name, place made, materials, people, ID, etc. I typed in wedding and came across 56 items. You can view the retrieved items by list, list with thumbnails, or by a detailed catalog of each item.



I chose to view a wedding dress from the mid 20th century. The item view details what the object is, its local name, the place it was made, the date it was made, it's dimensions, the materials and techniques, as well as who the donor was and the objects unique ID number. Each object also has it's own narrative. The narrative of the above object (the wedding dress) is as follows: Most garments are made from cut-and-pieced fabric by shaping a two-dimensional plane of cloth onto a three-dimensional form – the human body. The shaping is to allow for ease of movement, but the number of triangular pieces or gores that fan out the lower part of this dress goes well beyond what is needed for comfort.

Both the front and the back of the dress can be enlarged to an impressive degree, allowing a lot of the embroidery and detailing to be visible. I think that other than not providing information about their selection process, that this site is a great tool for researchers and casual visitors who are interested in textiles. It is a better visual tool than it is a resource for people to learn in-depth information about each object, but that being said, the objects appear to have been digitized well, with regard for the physical object.

Einstein Archive

The Einstein Archive is a digitization initiative from the California Institute of Technology and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It includes digitized manuscripts of personal and scientific writings and travel logs. The click through on the site is rather difficult to follow. The labels aren't very clear and the user doesn't really get a good sense of where the linked text will take them. It is similarly difficult to travel back without going through each page via the back button. After six clicks I finally reached actual material. There I found a database record chock full of metadata and finally image links. The images I viewed were available in German and English and were typed and appeared to be published works. The audience for the site could vary. Einstein is a popular figure, but many of his works would only be seriously considered by scholars. He is however, exceedingly popular so it seems that most of his published works would be widely available. The real gems of this exhibit are the travel logs and more personal items. Although, they can be a bit tricky to find.

Fixed Gear Gallery

The Fixed Gear Gallery is a labour of love created and maintained by Dennis Bean-Larson. The Gallery evolved from just that, a series of pictures of bikes emailed by users, to a bonafide resourced in the fixed gear cycling community. Fixed gear bikes are bicycles with only one gear and a fixed rear wheel (meaning you are constantly pedaling and can't coast). The simplicity of the bicycle's mechanics constrasts with the painstaking aesthetics of the enthusiast. Because the mechanical aspect of the bikes is relatively easy to handle, many cyclists who might otherwise leave bike mechanics to the pros feel confident learning how to build and repair them themselves, creating a cult of fanatics trolling eBay and local bike shops for the perfect parks. It's an interesting intersection of sport culture, environmentalism, consumerism, and popular culture, and it's on display at the Fixed Gear Gallery.

Bean-Larson has accepted submissions for the gallery since 2001. That year, 51 users submitted images of their bikes. In 2006, there were 1,458 additions. The images are available as links in a tabular format, creating something of an awkward navigational experience for the user. Additionally, the site accepts articles, interviews, and how-tos from readers, and these are located similarly awkwardly, to the left of the image links. There is no search function available, and images are identified by number. Clicking on a link (usually the name of the user and the type of bike) opens a new window with the image as well as the only available "metadata", the text of the email that acompanied the image attachments we're now viewing. This format is obviously quick and easy for the web builder- there are no editorial decisions made- but we're able to view the sender's email and, depending on the nature of the email client, personal and/ or business information along with the date and timestamp information. This could create privacy issues in the long term.

In terms of submission guidelines, the site specifies that submissions should be attached files, jpegs only, with a total email size of no larger than 5MB. There are no further specifications, and there is no control over photo quality. The photos could be digital images or scans.

The site exists primarily as a resource and point of connection, and while I doubt preservation is a high priority, there is a great deal of information here that could be lost. I'm questioning where backups are, if there are any, etc. To me, this is an example of a very low-tech site that is hugely important to a niche community and the only one of its kind, but could easily become difficult to maintain. There is an archived version of the site as it appeared in 2001 and 2002 here.

Harry Ransom Center Online Exhibitions
The First Photograph


The Harry Ransom Center's permanant online exhibition of the First Photograph documents the creation, rediscovery, and conservation of the first image captured by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826. The image, a scene from an upstairs window, was the first to be successfully captured on a polished pewter plate sensitised with bitumen of Judea which hardens on exposure to light. After 8-10 hours of exposure, he had managed to produce the first permanant photograph from nature.

The exhibit has some good things going for it as an information source. There is an easy-to-navigate contents bar across the top of each of the 8 pages in the exhibition. The final page is a list of credits, listing the people who worked on the text, took photographs, and owners of non-HRC material. The site also explains why the real photograph object is exhibited the way it is in the HRC, how the case was constructed and other useful details. The chronology page gives readers an extended view to outline the history and provenance of the photograph from the birth of JNN to 1963. The conservation and preservation page is perhaps the most interesting, and it certainly has the best illustrations and the most technical information.

While the site serves its didactic purpose, it has severe drawbacks from an exhibition standpoint. This is due in part to the text-heavy layout (I used the word 'readers' above on purpose). Many of the images are far too small for the viewer to gain anything of substance from them. The credit section mentions no technical information on how the images were taken, how anyone else could cite or call them up in the reading room, or what resolution etc. was used in digitising the material.

Because this exhibition is just that, it is not just to condemn it for the lack of specification of technical matters, but I believe the HRC should concentrate on improving the general standard of their online exhibits. This one was put together a few years ago, and it really does show. Hopefully it can get the same update that the Beckett and Morris exhibits are currently undergoing.

Bill Viola: The Passions (Getty Exhibition)

This website documents Bill Viola's exhibition The Passions which was organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum. The exhibition was shown at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the National Gallery in London, Fundacio "laCaixa" in Madrid, and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra during 2003.

Collection Principles
The videos, images, essays and catalogue excerpts displayed on the site are intended to give the user an understanding of the fundamentals that underlie Bill Viola's work. Because The Passions is a collection of installation works, great care has been taken on the part of the Getty to educate the user about the effects of exhibition spatial design, image format and size, and video speed in a physical exhibition.

Object Characteristics and Metadata
The website presents five video installations from The Passions exhibition that are explored in depth: Emergence, Silent Mountain, The Locked Garden, The Quintet of the Astonished, and Six Heads. Each work has its own page. The page consists of a thumbnail still image with metadata, interactive written excerpts and video clips or larger still images. The metadata is fairly standard for artworks. It includes title, date, medium, dimensions of work and can also include information about the installation space or about the commissioning of the work if applicable. The excerpts address issues meant to help the viewer better understand Viola's motivations. Topics associated with each video installation include: connections to past art, themes in art, the making of the video, artist's notebook entries, influences from past art, and a place for viewers to post their reactions to the work. Video excerpts from some of the works are available for streaming. Sometimes, the viewer is limited to stills from the original video.

Under "the Exhibition" there are still images from more works in The Passions exhibition. These still images allow the viewer to zoom in for better detail. The images are identified with minimal metadata and strung together with a brief essay by John Walsh, Curator and Director Emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Museum. To supplement these images, there are links to the exhibition checklist and credits and to Mark Kidel's video documentary "Bill Viola and Emergence." The checklist and credits include all individuals involved with the works shown in the physical exhibitions (including the actors and production staff used by Viola) and all individuals involved with the website creation.

Audience
Although Bill Viola has his own website, very little of his visual work is available to the public in an easily accessible format. There are very few videos that can be purchased, even for exclusively educational purposes, of his more recent works. As such, the access that is provided by this website is quite remarkable to individuals interested in Viola's work. It would also be a good site for individuals interested in past Getty exhibitions or individuals interested in how contemporary artists interact with Medieval and Renaissance art.

The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music

The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music is a collection at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at the John Hopkins Univeristy. The collection itself has over 29,000 pieces of music and is centered around American music between the years 1780-1960. The music itself was given to John Hopkins as a gift, in which he had created his own cateloguing system and as such, everything was cross indexed when it arrived at the university. Levy wanted to help to increase appreciation in music through his collection.

When first accessing the site, the user is able to select either the browse feature if they just want to browse, or the search feature if the user is only wanting to search whats available. Each piece that is located presents a thumbnail of the scanned sheet, as well as the ability to enlarge the image. Below with each image includes information about the composer, lyricist, publisher, title, instrumentation, the first and last line of the piece, the subject and the call number.

Each of the pieces are arranged by subject, which are then seperated into seperate boxes. In this way, if a user does travel to John Hopkins, the process in locating the piece they are searching for would be realitively easy. Because Levy had is own subject headings, these subject headings are also available on the website to clarify what to what he is referring to.

Another interesting note to this site is an explination as to why some songs are not available for viewing. The project will not put up music that is published after 1923 because it is not in public domain. A text is available, but the music itself is not available. For music published before 1923, the library has a note stating they are willing to make photocopies for a small fee.

The images themselves are a bit blurry and make it difficult to make out any text or notes on the music sheets themselves. Apparently, this only happens on some computers, while on others it is not a problem. It is a problem they are working on. They also state quite clearly that the resolution is not great, but this is all that is available as to any technical aspects of the online collection.

Their selection process was simple- there was none. Everything that was in Levy's collection is shown.

This collection seems to available for general users as well as researchers. The site states that researchers and especially musicologists were using his collection even before it came to the university, so its current location makes it much simplier to access.

Overall, I think this collection is well done. Despite the poor resolution, it seems as though the library is willing to do what is necessary to accomodate their users within the legal bounds.

Brown University Center for Digital Initiatives: Napoleanic Satires

This is a collection of Napoleonic satirical prints produced between 1792 and 1829, from Germany, Britain, France, Holland, and Russia. The "about" section of the website details the scope and contents of the collection as well as holding information. It also provides technical information, noting that:

The satires were scanned at 600 DPI 24 bit color and saved as uncompressed TIFF images. The TIFFs were then migrated to JPEG (125, 750, 1500, 300 pixel) and MrSid (3000 pixel) images for distribution via the web. The scans were cataloged by Hope Saska in the IRIS image cataloging tool using the VRA core categories. The IRIS records were then uploaded to Luna Insight and further converted into XML records for inclusion in the central database.

Thc site allows you to browse by title, creator and contributors, and also by thumbnail. One of the titles is, "Austrian bugaboo funking the French army." Since I am not quite sure that that means, I decided to check it out. The page that comes up states that there are three different retrieval options. You can view the image, view a description, or view the document map. The page tells you is the image is in the public domain and then provides Brown's contact address to gain more information about reproduction of the images in the collection.

The view image feature allows you to zoom in to specific parts of the image and to rotate the image. A lot of the images have handwriting on them, but with the magnification, we are able to read what is on the image. The image description section provides all the necessary bibliographic data and the document map provides the metadata for the objects.

I think this site does a great job with metadata, image quality, and control issues. It's not a very exciting site, but it's detailed and organized. It also comes with other features such as timelines and essays, which many of the other library run sites have not included. This provides excellent contextual information for the digital objects..

L'Institut Franco-Chinois de Lyon

While browsing the Web for information about libraries to visit this summer, I happened upon this interesting virtual exhibit of maps, books, posters, photographs, letters and manuscripts evidencing the relationship between Lyon, France and China during the early years of the 20th Century: L'Institut Franco-Chinois de Lyon. Each image is accompanied by a short descriptive sentence, including a date, and a longer paragraph describing more generally the scene in Lyon at the time and the aspects of the relationship that the image illustrates. The images are presented as small thumbnails, but can be enlarged somewhat. The resolution is not all that great, however, and there is no item-level administrative metadata provided.

The library's entire Chinese collection includes over 55,000 items. This virtual exhibition only shows a small sampling (probably fewer than 100). The library does not explain how it has chosen what to digitize. This is, however, a municipal library, though such a specialized collection is rather unusual perhaps. Nonetheless, it does appear to be prepared for the general public rather than for researchers. The larger collection appears to target the research audience more explicitly.

The library has a number of these virtual exhibits on different subjects. They seem to try to tell a story by taking advantage of the Web to organize a small set of artifacts and place each in the context of the times through the writings that accompany each image. Pretty much exactly what you might see in a museum exhibit, more so than in a library. Nicely done though light on the metadata.

Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads

The Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads is a digitization project undertaken by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, which has a collection of 30,000 broadsides with printed ballads from the 16th-20th c. If I'm reading the website correctly, they have actually scanned all 30,000 broadsides in addition to putting the catalog of broadside ballads online. The Bodleian owns the copyright to these images and sets out some very specific rules governing their use. Only one printed copy per person can be made without special permission and a fee, even for non-commercial use. Hypertext links to an image are OK, but the image itself may not be incorporated within any online document. This is "to protect the integrity of the image"- each image is also labeled at the bottom with a copyright mark and reference number, which makes it easier to detect unauthorized use.

The scanned image of each broadside is initially displayed as a small picture next to a catalog number, a brief description of the broadside and the first few lines of the ballad. It's necessary to use the zoom function to actually see the page itself. These scans are pretty raw-looking, with all of the wrinkles and blotches of the original object, but they're definitely readable and the woodcut illustrations that accompany a lot of the broadsides are easy to see. I'm not sure whether they scanned the actual broadsides or scanned microfilmed facsimiles of them- the wording in the project description is kind of unclear. Most images are bitonal, were scanned at 400 dpi, and are displayed at 180 dpi. A few of the ballads are printed with musical notation. These are accompanied by MIDI files that play the ballad's tune (on solo piano).

The cataloging metadata compiled for this project is amazing. It's possible to search for items by title, first line, subject, author, publisher, date, reference number (shelfmark) and more. The individual woodcut illustrations have been classified by subject using the ICONCLASS image classification system. ICONCLASS is a visual art thesaurus/classfication system that describes content only. For example, individual woodcuts might be described according to the themes, settings and/or people depicted. It's also possible to browse trees and hierarchies in ICONCLASS. The Broadside Ballads digitization and cataloging project started in 1995, and it took about four years- it looks like the website was created in 1999. The scope of this project is really incredible. I guess it goes to show what a really elite cultural institution with lots of money can do.

Fred Harvey Photographic Collection

The Fred Harvey Collection is one collection that is part of the Cline Library and Special Collections and Archives Department's Image Database at Northern Arizona University. The Special Collections and Archives houses "significant photographs, manuscripts, oral histories, and motion picture footage documenting the natural and cultural features of Northern Arizona and the Colorado Plateau."

Collection Principles

This collection includes over 5,000 color and black-and-white images photographed by and for the Fred Harvey Company, however only 45 items have been digitized and published on the Web. Fred Harvey was famous for his "Harvey Houses", hotels, restaurants, and newsstands. He was perhaps most famous for his development of the "Harvey Girls," the hostesses and waitresses who were employed at his establishments along along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe trainlines through the Midwest and Southwest United States. The collection includes training manuals that demonstrate the strict guidelines for personal and professional behaior that the women were expected to follow. Many of his most famous hotels are in the Southwest and include the El Tovar and Hopi House at the Grand Canyon. This online collection is associated with the Fred Harvey Manuscript Collection and is not intended to be a currated exhibit, but more of a digital library.

Object Characteristics

Each item is given a local call number with associated metadata. This online collection doesn't include every item in the collection, and there is no information provided that explains why certain items were published over others. Most of the items are black and white photographs, but there are two multi-page published pamphlets included. The user is able to navigate relatively easily between the pamphlet's pages and can select different views and layouts. There is also an architectural drawing by the famous architect, Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter (who designed many of Harvey's lodges) that uses EyeSpy Launch Pad to interact with the digital object.

Metadata

The associated metadata is descriptive and uses controlled vocabulary for subject access. The metadata for many images is minimal, however, and only provides the most basic descriptive information. Certain images have extended metadata, including a brief narrative on content and biography/history of the item. A "terms of use" statement is provided with each image. There is often a link to the online Finding Aid (though for some reason, not always) included which provides some item provenance.

Audience

More than likely, this site and the items included would be of interest to scholars of the American West, Culinary History, Business History, Women's History, Train and Transportation History, Social History, Architectural Studies, and Native American History.

COLD WAR INTERNATIONAL HISTORY PROJECT

The Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) was established at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. in 1991. The project's digitization effort prioritizes making available previously inaccessible sources from former communist countries. CWIHP interested me because of the ways in which it seeks to eliminate practical barriers to research by digitizing materials in wide range of repositories and by providing documents in translation; the website states that the project “seeks to transcend barriers of language, geography, and regional specialization to create new links among scholars interested in Cold War history.”

The project is very much focused on government documents; there is little if any non-governmental material, and no multimedia materials. The archive contains about 50 collections such as “Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan” or “Ant-Colonialism in the Cold War.” These are primarily subject-based collections rather than the papers of individuals or agencies. The number of documents in the collections I looked at ranged from three to probably a couple hundred. The site also includes digitized versions of the CWIHP Bulletin, the historical journal published by the project.

COLLECTION PRINCIPLES
Though the CWIHP homepage refers to “featured collections” of special interest, there are no stated selection principles for objects to be digitized. The program administrators' assessment of the importance of a document seems to be a guiding principle, along with the desire to make previously inaccessible materials available. The nature of the existing subject collections also likely influences decision making for digitization.

OBJECT CHARACTERISTICS
The documents are available in transcription on the pages of the CWIHP website. This text can be copied and otherwise manipulated. For a small fraction of the documents, a PDF of the original is provided, which allows scholars to read the documents in the original language. These PDFs would likely be of great value to serious historians. I was unable to locate any information about the scanning process used, the processing of the text or any other technical data about the objects.

METADATA
The project provides quite a bit of metadata. Each document is accompanied by a list of 12 information fields including collection, format, creator, contributor, subject and coverage. Many of the fields are often blank, however. The “format” field indicates that a document is a translation. Rights information is also provided, as is information about the location of the original document, the name of the translator if applicable, and brief descriptions of the context and content of the document. The archive as a whole can be browsed by geographic location. The search function seems to provide keyword text searching, and the “advanced search” provides some Boolean functionality. Still, the site states that “Currently the search function is not fully implemented, so we recommend browsing through the collections rather than doing searches.”

AUDIENCE
The audience for this project is an international community of historians, mostly academics. I don’t feel that the site would be particularly attractive to a wider audience, especially with its lack of visual media.

Zak Smith's Illustrations for each page of Gravity's Rainbow

The artist Zak Smith illustrated each page of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

The illustrations are available online at the link above- the entire project has been digitized, so every page is accessible. The scans are fairly high quality but do not allow zooming or any up-close inspection. Almost no metadata are available for the images; they are organized in order by book (the novel consists of 4 books) and are titled with excerpts from each page, although it is not clear whether or not these are the titles of the actual pieces. Looking at the source html for the pages reveals that the images are jpegs and are scanned at 768 x 553 as far as sizing goes. The scans are fairly high quality and allow inspection of the media used. They reveal the hand of the artist and looking at the images online in order is interesting as a standin for the experience of viewing them in a gallery, although the lack of information about each image calls into question the purpose of the digitization project.

The images are archived at The Modern Word although the artist's individual web page links to them along with link to his gallery. The collection seems to have been digitized primarily for access purposes and the level of quality control exercised is questionable.

Aesop's Fables Online Collection

Heather - our narrator

The Aesop's Fables Online Collection appears to be an amateur project by one man and his daughter to digitize the text of Aesop's fables, index and cross reference them, organize by moral, and provide Real Audio of the daughter reading the text. This site is especially interesting because it is an amateur production and it is interesting to see what lengths people will go to just to put information out there without financial or institutional benefits.

Collection Principles

The site author does not specifically address how he chooses which fables to post. However, he does repeatedly boast about the large number of fables available and promises that more are coming - he claims to update the site daily. It seems that quantity is the key issue here. Aesop's fables are not the only stories represented. He explicitly mentions taking fables from a published work and putting them on the web. He does not mention anything about copyright and I think that fair use might be difficult to argue here as I think more weight might be given to a more scholarly effort. However, given the age of much of the material, it is likely that most if not all items and stories are in the public domain. It would be interesting to know if he considered copyright at all in creating this site.

Object Characteristics

The site consists of different short fables, each given their own page. Most fables are text only - no graphics or audio. Some fables have Real Audio available where the site author's daughter, Heather, reads the story aloud. The audio isn't very good quality. Heather sounds like she is reading in a tunnel. Also, it is honestly a bit creepy. The site author includes a photo of his daughter on the site so we can know what our young narrator looks like. If you click on the picture Heather tells you her hometown, first and last name, date of birth, what school she attends, and the name of her teacher. Personally, I think this is a ridiculous amount of information for a child to have on the internet and her father is just asking for trouble.



Metadata

Besides the section where he mentions the books that some of the stories were taken from, there isn't much metadata. He does however include links to lesson plans using the stories. So he doesn't provide information about how the objects came to be, but about where they should go and how they can be used.

Audience

Besides the author and his family, the intended audience is clearly families and teachers. The site author refers to his collection as "the truest family fun on the Internet." The veracity of that statement aside, the author is truly focused on and dedicated to creating a family friendly collection of morals and stories for people to enjoy together. The inclusion of lesson plans shows that he is also interested in educators using this resource in the classroom.

Bracton Online

Bracton Online is a re-keying project that is being conducted by Harvard's Law School. Taking the text of a book or document, re-keying is re-typing it using a word processor, allowing it to be seachable online. In this case, the law school is re-keying a book that is considered an important part of English legal history. Bacton: De Legibus Et Consuetudinibus Angliæ or Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England, is a book that is attributed to Henry of Bratton that's supposed to describe rationally all of English law. The book is available in Latin, however, English translations are also. This particular project has re-typed both the Latin and English versions of the book.

The book was sent to a professional keyeing house, where the text was double keyed- in other words, the same text is retyped by two different people and the issues are then compared and the appropriate corrections are made.

According to the site, "The HTML used in the two electronic versions of Bracton is generated from SGML text tagged according to the TEI-Lite standard" The features that were tagged were only those that could be identified by those who do not have any special knowledge fo Bracton or Latin.

Tagging- "Most of the tagging was done by the keying house. We did identify some highly repetitive and easily automated tagging which could be omitted from the spec given to the keying house; this was a cost saving measure, as we were paying by the keystroke. This tagging was later inserted via a simple Perl script, and included such things as adding an explicit tag for each line break (we had asked the keying house to preserve but not tag these), and adding the PLACE=FOOT attribute for all the notes. One drawback of having the keying house do all of the tagging was that we were limited to tagging those features which could easily be identified by people unfamiliar with Bracton."

The site is set up so that you have two options of viewing the text. One, using HTML allows the user to access both the Latin and English at the same time. For those only wanting one language, the languages are available in sepearte web sites as well.

The selection procedure was simple- it used the book by Samuel E. Thorne, which contains both the latin and english translation. Because it is only one book that is being re-keyed, the selection mist likely went into chosing what edition of the book would be used. They chose it because they say its to this man they owe the modern understanding of the text.

This appears to be a project for reseachers or those familiar with the Bracton, as its main feature is the search option that scans and searches the text.

DUST BOWL MIGRATION DIGITAL ARCHIVES

The Dust Bowl Migration Digital Archives is a small digitization project undertaken by California State University Bakersfield. The heart of the collection is a group of 57 oral histories created in the early 1980s as part of the California Odyssey Project's Oral History Program, which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

The site also includes about 150 photographs from the Farm Security Administration, most apparently taken by Dorothea Lange. These images are part of the Library of Congress’s American Memory collections, and the site provides a link to the pertinent LOC statement, which says, in part, that “Photographs in this collection were taken by photographers working for the U.S. Government. Generally speaking, works created by U.S. Government employees are not eligible for copyright protection in the United States.”

SELECTION POLICY

With the oral histories, the creators of this digital archives began with a well-defined, preexisting set of documents. It seems that a conviction regarding the importance of these oral histories motivated the project, though there is no statement regarding selection policies or the origin of the digitization project. The selection of photographs is intended to illustrate the oral histories, though there seems to have been a preference for Lange’s work, based on her notoriety. Several of the famous “Migrant Mother” photographs are included.

OBJECT CHARACTERISTICS

The oral histories themselves and the guide and index to those histories are all in the PDF format. PDF should, I believe, provide some search functionality, but the text searches I attempted failed. The PDF format is useful and convenient in many ways. It has also been describes a de facto standard. Yet it remains a proprietary format, which makes me wonder how good a choice it is for a project like this, even though it is so widely used. The photographs are JPEG images, mostly in the range of 600x700 pixels and around 75-150 KB. I discovered no additional data about the photographs.

METADATA

The site provides a PDF of the cumulative index for the oral histories, which was produced in 1981. Each of the oral histories was assigned a number, which is listed under any index term represented in that history, along with a page number. There is no electronic search function, though a determined researcher would benefit from the PDF index. There is also a guide (again in PDF) to the oral histories that provides an overview of the way the histories were collected and brief biographical information about the subjects. There is no metadata provided for the photographs except for the captions that describe the subject and identify the location where the photo was taken. There is no search function for the photos, though they are divided into eight categories and browsing is fairly efficient for a collection of 150 photos. I was a bit frustrated by the failure to provide the photographer’s name, though the site says that the majority were taken by Lange.

AUDIENCE

The fact that the materials are owned and the exhibit hosted by CSU Bakersfield suggests two target audiences: CSU faculty and students, of course, but also a regional audience, as Bakersfield is in the heart of the area to which the dustbowl refugees migrated. The oral histories would be of value to social historians, and quite possibly genealogists and avocational historians.

Archives of Irish America

NYU's Irish American Studies department, working with the NYU library system, created the Archives of Irish America in 1997. Judging by the list of collections that's posted on the website, the archive is still pretty small, although they are actively collecting. They've digitized a few things to create some online exhibits. There are text, images, and audio related to the Irish American Athletic Club and American response to hunger strikers in Northern Ireland c.1981, and there are some videotaped oral histories. The thing that caught my eye, however, is the exhibit The Spin on Ireland: Irish Music Record Cover Art Since 1950.

There are 23 album covers here- only the front cover is shown- grouped thematically and accompanied by text. These are albums that were played on a local radio show, so they look a little bit worn, but the scans are excellent in quality. Each cover shot gives some basic metadata about the album: title, artist, label, catalog no., country, year, and the cover photographer, if known. It seems to me that the photographers must still have copyright on these images, which range in age from the 1950s- the 1980s. I don't know whether the digitizers actually tried to contact anyone, or just took a chance and put it up. Interestingly, the archives copyrighted the oral history video that they put together. They also credit the copyrighted music used in the video. So they're definitely copyright-aware.

The record covers exhibit is satisfyingly kitschy and I think this archive has a lot of potential, but it looks to me like they don't really have enough (processed) collections to build a digitization program on. They have a lot of old Irish American newspapers, only one of which is on microfilm, so that might be a good place to start. The website does have links to other ethnic history archives and research guides, but none of these sites really has much in the way of digitized Irish American history materials or sources. I guess it's an idea that's still yet to come.

British Periodicals: 1660-1800

Instead of blogging about an already live digitization initiative, I thought that I'd discuss a potential digitization initiative that I recently learned about. Last week at the Ransom Center, a scholar discussed his work on the creation of a searchable database that cataloged hundreds of periodicals from the 18th century. The goal of the database is to provide scholars with content and bibliographic information and currently does not provide digital versions of the periodicals.


During the lecture, one of the other scholars asked whether the database would ever provide links to digital images of the periodicals. This provoked a discussion of the difficulties of digitizing this material. The main issue discussed was cost. In conjunction with Rutgers, the scholar had proposed a digitzation plan and did a pilot test of how much cost and time would be required to do the work. They attempted to use OCR technology to capture the content of the articles, but because of the quality of the objects, the OCR process was rejected due to the amount of errors produced. Next, they shipped out some of the periodicals to be keyed in overseas. This also produced accuracy problems because the outsourcing company did a poor job keying in odd or archaic characters, again raising concerns about accuracy.

What they decided was that at this time, it would be too costly and time consuming to create accurate surrogates. He also argued that most scholars interested in this material would probably want to see the object itself and would not prefer a surrogate. I though this was an interesting argument, but there was no factual information provided to back of this claim. The scholar had no user studies or data to defend this assumption.

When the digital portion of the project fell through, so did a lot of the funding for the project. This lack of funding has prevented from the database from becomming live at all. Therefore, all of the information that has been cataloged and entered into this database is not serving its function at all, because no one can access it.

This lecture was interesting to me because it highlighted the complications of starting a digital initiative project without much insight into the process and without much knowledge of user needs. It put into perspective the necessity of proper planning and project management.

The Imaginary Museum

This online catalog is a digital version of the multi-venue exhibition The Imaginary Museum seen in 2003-04 at the Adam Art Gallery, The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Christchurch Art Gallery. Working with a variety of materials including photographs, sound recordings and published transcripts, David Clegg re-mixed this same archive for each different venue.

Collection Principles
Clegg's online catalog presents a set of audio recordings in which a group of European gallery directors and curators describe the architectural features of the art institutions that they represent. Clegg provides a series of audio fragments coupled with specific images that are meant to create a dialogue asking the audience to consider the relationship between representational spaces and the audiences responding to these. The choice of audio and visual fragments that have been digitized and presented by Clegg is intended to form an argument that visitors to art venues produce meaning according to the ways they look at and move through exhibition spaces.

Object Characteristics
The project is presented in the form of thumbnail images of twenty-one European art museums and galleries. When you click on a thumbnail image, a pop-up window opens containing two larger images associated with the audio track. The audio track, originally captured with a Sony Mini Disc, is available in low quality (mono) and high quality (stereo) audio stream. To experience the binaural stereo effects the site recommends using headphones when listening to the stereo streams. If using a dialup modem connection the user will likely experience buffering when listening to the stereo streams.

Under documentation, there are 18 thumbnail images organized between the three physical venues. Clicking on each thumbnail opens a pop-up window with a larger image. These images document the original exhibition. Because of the extensive use of Flash to produce the site navigation between images and different audio streams is clunky.

Metadata
Although the site appears to be organized in a clear fashion replicating the taxonomy of seemingly commonplace responses to art gallery architecture which Clegg presented in the original multi-venue exhibition, the lack of metadata makes locating specific resources difficult. For example, the the 21 thumbnail images under project associated with the audio and image files is limited. It consists of the following: the name, city, and country of the art venue in question; a link to the art venue's website; and the name and have no associated labeling. In order to locate audio and image files associated with a specific European art gallery or museum, the user must click on multiple thumbnails until the desired files are found. The metadatatitle of the individual interviewed in the audio fragment. The use of Flash to produce the website seems to have prevented the ability for users to search the website in any efficient manner.

Audience
The site is quite interesting. It is an interesting project presenting a different view of how the walls, seats, entrances, cafes, and windows of an art venue determine the experience of visitors to the art venue. The site is not particularly easy to navigate or to discover from web searches. For the site to be of use, the user must be willing to spend a good amount of time browsing through the site. The difficulties associate with downloading any of the audio or image fragments also makes it somewhat impractical for researchers. Other than creating a virtual catalog of the original multi-venue exhibition, the site does not seem to have a specific purposiveness for users.

Cat Art Show at the Carriage Factory Gallery - The Cat in Art

I tried in vain to find an exhibit of album artwork and liner notes to compare with our class undertaking, but ended up settling for a cat art show... Cat Art Show at the Carriage Factory Gallery - The Cat in Art. Several artists' works are featured and the show ran for a month (February). It is not clear whether the online exhibit will continue now that the show has closed. Each image has a link to a "purchase" page, some information about the original, but nothing about the digitization process (other than what's available on the properties right-click tab). This image, for example, is captioned with the following: Bob Cat, Original Oil, Image Size: 10" x 8"; Framed Size: 12" x 10" $250.

There are no curatorial comments regarding the show. These images reflect the entire show, though there is one painting for which an image is not available, glaringly not available (why bother to have it as an entry in a digital image exhibit if an image is not available?). The images are simply placed, one after another, on the page. Despite the lack of sophistication of the presentation, the site is "presented in part by the Kansas Arts Commission, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency."

There is also a very extreme copyright statement, absurd actually, that, after its overstatement of all the prohibitions that go far beyond the rights the law gives copyright owners, thanks us for our respect in this manner. In my exercise of fair use to copy the image above, I have, according to the site owners, violated their rights and disrespected them. I feel that it is the other way around, of course.

Historical African-American Autographs

"Historical African-American Autographs" is one of seven online exhibits created by the Kansas City Public Library. This site, unfortunately, is an example of what not to do when publishing a digital collection.

Collection Characteristics (Selection Decisions)
The collection is introduced with a statement that apparently came from an "unauthorized note" found with the autograph collection explaining that the autographs resulted from a request by the Kansas City Lincoln Branch Head Librarian, Priscilla Burd, in 1937 to prominent African-Americans to be used in a display the same year. The branch was later closed and its collection of "black literature, black history, pamphlets on black studies, and clippings files of local black history" became the bulk of materials comprising the Ramos Collection at KC's Main Library. This introduction gives a brief provenance of the collection, presumably to authenticate the autographs, which can often prove to be forgeries. Twenty-eight names are listed to the right of this introduction (on a cranberry background, making them difficult to read) and include such notables as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, and Mary McLeod Bethune.

Object Characteristics

The design of this Web site is problematic for many reasons. One, there is no information supplied about the digitization project, the type of equipment used, the criteria used for selection decisions, etc. Two, there is no administrative, technical, or descriptive metadata provided for the images. Three, the haphazzard manner in which the digital objects are displayed. All of these issues contribute to a lack of context for the digital items leading to questions about the items' authenticity and reliability. An example: clicking on Mary McLeod Bethune sends you to a page with minimal information: a one-word description of the individual and the birth and death dates. Following that is a magnified image of the actual autograph and an image of the autograph source, typically a letter. One is unable to click on the autograph for a greater enlargement. Clicking on the autograph source provides an enlarged image of the letter. In most cases, the letter can be magnified, but only to one additional degree. In Bethune's case the body of the letter is cut out, leaving only the letterhead and the bottom of the letter with the signature. This is, to say the least, bad practice. If the entire letter wasn't able to be published on the Web due to privacy issues, then it seems that perhaps the item shouldn't have been included or the entire letter should have been published, but with the sensitive elements blacked-out. Associated links, biographies and photos, are provided, but they often do not work. There is also a link to relevant library materials about or by the individual.

Metadata

There is none! Though this is intended to be a currated exhibit, some minimal descriptive metadata should be included at the very least.

Audience

Kansas City citizens, school children, anyone