Digitization@METRO

METRO Annual Meeting: Lee Rainie

Around two hundred people attended METRO's 42nd Annual Meeting which was held at the Brooklyn Museum. Those who came were treated to an informative and entertaining keynote presentation by Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The title of Rainie's presentation was Digital Natives: How Today's Youth Are Different From Their 'Digital Immigrant' Elders and What That Means For Libraries

It was clear from the outset which side of the digital youth/immigrant fence this audience stood on when Rainie asked if anyone would be blogging his presentation and only a couple of people raised their hands. You can read one of those blogs here. [Found this related post on the 2 Cents Worth blog from someone who didn't attend the meeting but saw the slides.]

Moments later, the audience's digital immigrant status was reaffirmed when Rainie asked how many people played online games like World of Warcraft and seemed truly surprised when only two out of two hundred raised their hands.

[One online game that librarians may want to know about is Second Life and the work being done by the Alliance Library System and OPAL with their Info Island project .]

Other interesting bits:

- iPods rule. Rainie recently gave a presentation to a class at George Washington University where all 45 students had an iPod, not just any old mp3 player but an iPod.

- Email is out. Young people think of email as formal communication reserved only for parents, teachers, and the like. Skype, text messaging, and instant messaging are used for communicating with friends.

- Be careful what you post on social networking sites. Rainie talked of professors who will pick students for oversubscribed courses based on their Facebook profiles. If their profiles are cool, they're in.

- Gen X and Boomers have merged? One slide showing how different people use the internet in different ways broke down the different people into three groups: (1) Young (2) Gen X/Boomers and (3) Seniors. When did Gen X get lumped with Boomers?

Thanks again to Lee Rainie for the great presentation, Brooklyn Museum for hosting the meeting, and all who attended.

The slides of the presentation are available here and the podcast here.

BPL: Fulton Street Trade Cards

Need an idea for a Halloween costume? Then how about dressing up as a witch on a flying owl? This image comes from the Brooklyn Public Library: Fulton Street Trade Card Collection which was a project funded by a METRO digitization grant in 2005.

Institution: Brooklyn Public Library (BPL)
Collection: Fulton Street Trade Card Collection
Description: The Fulton Street Trade Card Collection consists of 245 late 19th and early 20th century illustrated trade cards, all emanating from businesses in Brooklyn's historic commercial thoroughfare. The cards combine humor, bright and elegant graphic design and typography to promote a wide variety of wares and services. The Fulton Street trade cards are among the many collections held by the Brooklyn Collection, Brooklyn Public Library's local history division, and the world's largest public archive for the study of Brooklyn's social and cultural history.

The cards are both beautiful and interesting and I particularly like the way BPL linked the trade cards to related content from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online. View all the Fulton Street Cards on BPL's website or on METRO's CONTENTdm site.

Great job by Susan Benz and everyone at Brooklyn Public Library who worked on the project.

Brooklyn College: Democratic Party Scrapbooks

With election day soon approaching, I thought it would be timely to highlight this wonderful collection of Democratic Party campaign materials digitized by the Brooklyn College Library who received a grant from METRO in 2005.

Institution: Brooklyn College Library
Collection: Brooklyn Democratic Party Scrapbooks
Description: A selection of materials dated between (1898-1927) from the the George A. Wingate, John B. Johnston, and Patrick Quinn Scrapbooks contained in the Records of the Brooklyn Democratic Party at the Brooklyn College Library, which document the development of the powerful Democratic political machine in Brooklyn.

The image is of a sample Democratic ballot from November 4, 1918 and includes Ten Reason Why You Should Vote for Alfred E. Smith for Governor including:

Reason Number 2: He secured the Fifty-Four Hour Law making a shorter work day for women in factories and stores.

Reason Number 9: He will vigorously suppress all profiteering in the necessities of life.

Click here to read the rest. And, in case you were wondering, he won.

Great job by Marianne LaBatto, Edythe Rosenblatt, and everyone at Brooklyn College who worked on the project.

Greenstone Training

Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies (QCGSLIS) will be offering a course on Greenstone Digital Library Software in Spring 2007. Those interested in registering may call the QCGSLIS office at 718-997-3790 for additional information.

The following is a brief description of the course:

What: Managing Digital Collections With Greenstone
When: Thursdays 6:40 PM-9:15 PM (Spring 2007)
Instructor: Thomas T. Surprenant
Prerequisites: Prospective students should be familiar with digital scanning, Dublin Core metadata and digital best practices
Description: The goal of this course is to provide hands-on experience in the creation and management of digital collections using Greenstone Open Source Software.  Each student will receive a CD-ROM that contains the Greenstone Software as well as tutorials and supporting documentation. Greenstone is a suite of software for building and distributing digital library collections.  Students will contribute to the Waterways of New York postcard project sponsored by the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies.

Lehman College: Bronx Business for Everybody

Since 2005, METRO has provided small grants to help our members digitize their special collections. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to feature these collections in this space.

Institution: Lehman College Library
Collection: Bronx Business for Everybody
Description: The Bronx Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1894 for the purpose of promoting Bronx commercial, industrial, civic and cultural interests. This digital collection includes photographs of Bronx buildings, streets, businesses, recreational sites, organizations, and educational sites as well as selections of minutes, newspaper and magazine articles drawn from the Bronx Chamber of Commerce Collection focusing on the years from the 1920s to the 1950s.

While the images are wonderful, what I like most about this collection is that the website provides context for the digital images. On the website you can find books, web resources, and activities for K-12.

Great job by Lehman College's Janet Munch and Yi Sheng.

Image: 149th St., Melrose Ave. & Third Ave.

Amazon Simple Storage Solution

It became apparent at last week's meeting of METRO's 2006 Digitization Grant Recipients that storage of digital collections is a major concern. One recipient reported that his institution's digital images are around 150 MB each, and that their digital collection is exceeding 1 TB. As someone jokingly stated, "that's a lot of cds."

I previously posted on the San Diego Supercomputer Center's new Data Central Data Allocation program, and today I want to call your attention to a data storage service called Amazon Simple Storage Solution (Amazon S3), as a possible alternative for backing up your digital collections.

Amazon states that this service will utilize the same data storage infrastructure that it uses to run its own business. The service is priced at $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used and $0.20 per GB of data transferred, with no minimum fees or usage. That sounds pretty cheap.

To read more about Amazon S3 click here.

Open Archives Initiative Receives Mellon Grant for Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE)

The Open Archives Initiative recently received a Mellon grant "to develop and promote interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content," which they will accomplish under the aegis of a project titled Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE).

ORE will develop standards to make possible the exchange of information about digital objects among repositories. The two-year project will be coordinated by Carl Lagoze of Cornell University Information Science and Herbert Van de Sompel of the Los Alamos Research Library.

Read the full announcement here.

MODS

METRO is offering a new workshop titled Using MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema) with XSLT on November 29, 2006. MODS is a set of XML markup which can combine selected data from existing MARC 21 records with original resource description and has been adopted by a several academic institutions as well as by the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress.

While this is an introductory workshop to MODS, participants must have a basic understanding of XML and related concepts to follow the demonstration and discussion.

The workshop presenter, Professor KB Ng, is from the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at Queens College, CUNY and the author of Using XML: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians. KB has provided the following resources which will serve as a refresher for those who are interested in taking this workshop.

Learning XML by Erik T. Ray

XML online tutorial: http://www.w3schools.com/xml/default.asp (especially see the links about schema and xsl)

MARC online tutorial: http://www.loc.gov/marc/umb/

MODS overview: http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/mods-overview.html

For more information and to register, please click here.

European Archive

Check out the recently launched European Archive whose Googlesque goal is to work "towards universal access to all knowledge."

The European Archive will focus on the digitization of special collections (books, music, images, and moving images) and has partnered with the Internet Archive to create a European based web archive.

Unfortunately, some of the content won't be be available to those of us outside of Europe, due to, you guessed it, copyright issues.

Digital Audio for Libraries & Archives

If you're currently working on or planning to work on an audio digitization and reformatting project and want to learn more about creating digital recordings -  then this workshop is for you.

Dave Nolan, Audio Archivist at the 92nd Street Y, will be coming to METRO on November 1, 2006 to teach a class titled Introduction to Digital Audio for Libraries and Archives.

For more information and to register click here.