This presentation focuses on the second question — after, 'Should we give this a shot?' — that libraries, archives, and museums ask when starting a web archiving program: 'Now what?'
Your boss is on board. You've received approval from key stakeholders. You've chosen a vendor. But have you decided what — and what not to — collect? To begin: I will discuss strategies I employed at my organization as I developed its inaugural web collection. Examples range from the more traditional — stakeholder input, advice from other information professionals — to the more creative — reading newspapers, talking to neighbors, turning to social media — in nature. The presentation will also consider the topic of inclusivity and diversity of web archives: is there a way to assure that your collection reflects the people and community you serve, and not the person — or people — who created it? To wrap, I will discuss the labor — and staff time — involved in the proper upkeep of web collections, and tools libraries can either purchase — or develop — in an effort to automate the collection process.
Attendees will walk away from this presentation with their own ideas about the way that web archiving intersects with their community, as well as knowledge of the tools and practices currently used by web archivists in support of well-established web archiving programs, and the idea that collection development policies are possible — and even necessary — when applied to these new collections.
The Jackson County (Iowa) Historical Society keeps among its holdings information regarding burials at Mount Hope Cemetery in Maquoketa, Iowa. This information is valuable to an active community of local history and genealogy researchers as well as to the Mount Hope Cemetery Association, funeral directors, and the community in general. While this information has been held in a database, there has been a need to modernize technology, standardize and enhance the data collected for the burials, and make the cemetery information available online and accessible by browse, search, and map-based discovery.
Mount Hope Cemetery is a nexus for the history of Maquoketa, and as photographs, documents, and oral histories held by JCHS are digitized, they will be linked to the burial records of the individuals connected to those documents to enrich the research and learning experience for those exploring this data and to provide enhanced access to the Society’s collections.
With the availability of new volunteer resources, JCHS has embarked on a project to accomplish these goals. This presentation will provide an overview of the project including:
Goals, scope, and barriers
Methodology, technology platform, and metadata
Progress to date
Lessons learned so far
Planned future enhancements and our wish list for future development
This panel presentation will explore four collaborative projects working with different communities in the Upper Midwest to create, describe, curate, use, and share digital artifacts and collections. Presenters from a variety of academic, public, and state libraries and archives will share their experiences developing digitization initiatives with different local, institutional, and statewide communities to create and share digital collections.
Panelists are:
Jessica English, Digital Initiatives Coordinator at South Dakota State University Archives, is working with campus and community organizations for Preserving Historic Hobo Day, collecting digital materials related to SDSU’s homecoming events in the Digital Library of South Dakota and Historypin.
Stephanie Kom, Digital Initiatives Coordinator at North Dakota State Library, travels with digitization equipment to public libraries around North Dakota for Scan Days to collect digital materials from the public to display in Digital Horizons Digital Library.
Katie Kuntz, Archiving Librarian at Rapid City Public Library, hosted Memory Lab, a digitization program where the community learned about preservation of personal documents and how to digitize their items with a flatbed scanner and digital camera.
Carla Urban, Digital Exhibit Outreach Coordinator at Minitex/Minnesota Digital Library, developed the Scan for Keeps program which brings traveling digitization equipment to public libraries in Minnesota to engage the community in digitizing materials.
OCLC and the Strategic Advisory Group for Digital Collections have created the Metadata Refinery Pilot Study to explore metadata enhancement and the conversion of record-based metadata from CONTENTdm and other digital repositories to entity-based linked data.
The goal of the pilot study is to answer these questions:
Minimal Metadata: or how we sped from 0 to 27,000 images in 1095 days
John Pollitz, University of Wisconsin Eau Claire
In 2013 The University of Wisconsin Eau Claire did not have a digital collection. Nor did we have a pot of money to create said collection. We had fallen behind other universities and we were coming up on our centennial celebration in 2016 when our historical collections would be in high demand. We had to move fast if we were to catch up and be part of the celebration. With a very limited budget but a wealth of material and a clear understanding of our audience we chose an open source tool for our platform. We staffed the project with students, interns and available staff. Perhaps our most critical decision was to create homegrown natural language metadata instead of established controlled vocabulary. We used Excel to create our metadata vocabulary dictionary. This streamlined dictionary allowed us to move quickly from initial scanning to finished product. By February 2014 we had a complete collection our university yearbook from 1917-1995 and our first 300 historic campus photos as a resource for centennial exhibits. By the end of that year we added 1,200 photographs, athletic yearbooks, and a collection of newsletters from the Western Wisconsin CCC camps from 1925-1941. We are currently adding a complete collection of our student newspaper from 1916-2004 in time for our fall celebration. While our metadata may not be as deep as some it has been fine tuned to our campus audience.
Digital Archives in the Literature Classroom
Sarah Dennis, St. Ambrose University
I plan to talk about my experiences teaching with digital archives at St. Ambrose University. I will discuss how my class used online archives to develop arguments about select 19th Century texts and how those archives benefited my classroom practice. I will also talk about how using digital archives in the classroom could serve students well in their future pursuits, such as graduate school or nonacademic careers.
