Digitization@METRO

BPL Collection: Sheet Music

Brooklyn Public Library recently launched their latest digital collection titled Illustrated Covers from the Brooklyn Sheet Music Collection, which was funded in part with a METRO Digitization Grant in 2006.

Institution: Brooklyn Public Library (BPL)
Collection: Illustrated Covers from the Brooklyn Sheet Music Collection
Description: The Brooklyn Sheet Music Collection consists of 102 pieces of sheet music from 1869 to 1987, primarily for voice and piano, all celebrating or emanating from the borough of Brooklyn. Contents include marches written in honor of a local person or business, pieces celebrating the whole or a part of the borough, songs from shows and movies set in or about Brooklyn, and pieces from Brooklyn's early 20th-century Yiddish-language theater.

Once again BPL leveraged their other digital collections by linking these sheet music covers to related content from both their Fulton Street Trade Cards Collection and Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online. Here's a good example.

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

Frick Art Reference Library

METRO and a group of eleven members paid a site visit to the Frick Art Reference Library's Digital Lab on November 16, 2006. Don Swanson and his staff talked about their work, demonstrated equipment, answered questions, and left me and others quite impressed with their operation.

The Frick is currently working with ARTstor to digitize thousands of glass plate negatives and interpositives. The glass plate negatives are scanned in-house using a Better Light scanning back and interpositives are sent to an outside vendor for conversion.

The Frick captures materials at 900 dpi, 16 bit grayscale, which results in a file size of around 120 MB.

The scans are then saved to (1) local hard drive (2) cds (3) network server (offsite) and (4) tape (offsite). In addition, the original glass plate negatives are saved in acid free folders and put in cold storage. Four backup copies of the digital image, using four storage formats, saved in three different physical locations, and retention of the original. That's pretty darn good.

These images are available via ARTstor.

In addition to giving us a tour of the digital lab, Don showed us the conservation department where the staff was meticulously piecing together the bindings of old books, the spotless stacks (not even a speck of dust), and the beautiful reading room.

Thanks to Don, everyone at the Frick, and all who attended.

Image: Helen Clay Frick (and dog) c. 1918, scanned from a spoiling nitrate negative

8.6 Gigapixels - Wow!

An Italian company, HAL9000, claims to have created the world's largest digital image measuring 8.6 gigapixels.

The image is of a fresco painted by Gaudenzio Ferrari known as the Vito di Cristo in 1513 which depicts the life of Jesus Christ in 21 pictures. The original fresco measured over 750 square feet.

While the technological achievement is incredible, I am left completely humbled by the attention to detail paid by the artist. Everywhere you zoom, you see something that amazes.

Taxonomy vs Folksonomy

The November 2006 issue of D-Lib includes a commentary by Elaine Peterson, Associate Professor/Information Resources Specialist, Montana State University titled Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy where she challenges the usefulness of folksonomy as a classification tool.

The author discusses several issues she has with folksonomy and concludes that "a traditional classification scheme will consistently provide better results to information seekers."

Want to learn more about folksonomy? Then come join us at METRO for this upcoming program.

Event: Steve@METRO
What: Steve is a social tagging and folksonomy project initiated in order to explore the potential for user-generated subject descriptions of works of art in museum collections. Come learn about the Steve Project and network with your colleagues at the wine and cheese reception.
When: December 6, 2006; 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Fee: No charge but seating is limited and registration is required.
To register for this program click here.

CLOCKSS@METRO Recap

A VERY LARGE crowd (50+), by METRO standards anyway, attended yesterday's CLOCKSS@METRO event which was co-sponsored by our friends at the New York Public Library.

CLOCKSS or Controlled LOCKSS or Controlled Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe (try saying that three times fast) is a not-for-profit community partnership among publishers and libraries that is developing a distributed, validated, comprehensive archive that preserves and ensures continuing access to electronic scholarly content.

It was a huge honor to have Victoria Reich, Director, LOCKSS Program, Stanford University Libraries, come all the way from California to explain CLOCKSS and LOCKSS to our members. If I had to choose one word to describe her presentation, it would be candid.

You can find a lot of information about CLOCKSS and LOCKSS on their website so I'm going to just add a couple of notes that I jotted down.

You could really tell that Vicky cherishes and values the role that libraries play in preservation. She noted how print libraries served as a great model of preservation and were both resistant to attacks and were self healing and that these two principles were carried over to LOCKSS and CLOCKSS.

Another thing that struck me was her comment about the unintended consequences of libraries which no longer build their collections but instead just rely on resources available on the internet. She equated those types of libraries to coffee shops with internet access.

The final thing I have in my notes is to remember to send Vicky the cat jumping photos. Done.

Thanks again to Vicky Reich and David Rosenthal from Stanford University for presenting, Barbara Taranto of NYPL for the idea and co-sponsoring, METRO's Deidre Hoguet for organizing, and all who attended.

LACUNY Digital Projects Workshop

I would like to thank the folks at LACUNY (Library Association of the City University of New York) for inviting me to a program titled Digital Projects Within CUNY Libraries, Archives, And Special Collections. The program was presented by the LACUNY Archives & Special Collections Roundtable and held at Baruch College on November 10, 2006.

The program included a keynote presentation titled Digitization 101: The Essentials by Claudia Perry, a professor at Queens College GSLIS. I was glad to hear Claudia emphasize the importance of documenting your project - an area that often gets overlooked. I'm a big fan of the blog as a tool for documenting digital projects. I also liked this nugget of advice she gave to those planning their first digitization project - which is to keep things simple.

It was also nice to hear the presentations by METRO Digitization Grant recipients Ellen Belcher and Ellen Sexton of John Jay College who are hard at work on their Crime in New York 1800-1950 project and Janet Munch of Lehman College who showed off their Bronx Business for Everybody collection.

One thing I noticed during the spirited Q&A and discussion was that confusion abounds when it comes to copyright issues and so I hope that the LACUNY community will register for METRO's upcoming symposium Copyright: The Only Certainty is Uncertainty on February 15, 2007.

NYPL: Early Real Estate Insurance Maps of New York

When most people see a map like this the first thing that comes to mind for them is that it's a Sanborn, which has become synonomous with this style of fire insurance map. But in this case they would be wrong because this is a Perris map created by William Perris, "an English-trained civil engineer and surveyor who originated the format."

Thanks to a digitization grant from METRO in 2005, the New York Public Library was able to digitize over two hundred of these Early Real Estate Insurance Maps of New York and Brooklyn from the 1850s-1860s.

This particular map is of interest to me because it's the exact block (circa 1860) where METRO resides today. And just for fun here's what it looks like in the Google.

Over at the NYPL Digital Gallery, you can use their pan & zoom functionality to see the names of the buildings and the types of businesses that existed back then. Hmm, let's see. There's the New York Society Library which dates back to 1754 over on 13th and University, and over yonder is my favorite Livery Stable on 14th and 4th, and you gotta love the Druggist next to the Coal Yards on 11th and Broadway. And wait a second what do I see over on 12th and 4th? A Starbucks!

Great job by Barbara Taranto, Janet Murray, Matt Knutzen, and everyone else at NYPL who worked on the project.

METRO Metadata Workshops

METRO is closing out the year with a powerful series of metadata programs covering MODS, Tagging, Folksonomy, and OAI-PMH presented by experts like KB Ng and Sarah Shreeves.

METRO invites library students to register for these programs at the METRO member rate.

Workshop: Using MODS (Metadata Objet Description Schema) with XSLT
Presenter: KB Ng, Queens College GSLIS
What: MODS is a set of XML markup which can combine selected data from existing MARC 21 records with original resource description. This workshop covers how to create MODS records for online resource description and present these records over the internet by server-side processing with XSLT.
When: November 29, 2006; 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM
Fee: $75 members; $150 nonmember
To register for this workshop click here. For a list of resources to help you prepare for the workshop click here.

Event: Steve@METRO
What: "Steve" is a social tagging and folksonomy project initiated in order to explore the potential for user-generated subject descriptions of works of art in museum collections. Come learn about the Steve Project and network with your colleagues at the wine and cheese reception.
When: December 6, 2006; 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Fee: No charge but seating is limited and registration is required.
To register for this program click here.

Workshop: Interoperability, OAI-PMH, And Shareable Metadata
Presenter: Sarah Shreeves, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
What: This workshop will describe the OAI protocol (what it is, why it exists, and how it works), discuss options for exposing metadata via the OAI protocol, and describe how to make metadata more shareable for use within the OAI protocol or other sharing mechanisms.
When: December 8, 2006; 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM
Fee: $75 members; $150 nonmembers
To register for this program click here.

METRO Digital Audio Workshop Recap

Over twenty people attended yesterday's Introduction to Digital Audio workshop at METRO presented by Dave Nolan, Audio Archivist at the 92nd Street Y.

The six-hour presentation focused primarily on two areas: archival transfers (migrating from an existing format to a newer and hopefully better format) and creating new recordings of live events, oral histories, etc.

The morning session was spent discussing a slew of digital audio concepts including bit depth, sampling rate, and numerous compression formats.

Part of the afternoon session focused on audio digitization equipment with the presenter demonstrating equipment and offering tips and recommendations in the following areas:

- Computer (Mac is the obvious choice.)
- Analog to Digital Converter/Computer Audio Interface (The single most important link in the digitization chain. If you have extra $, spend it here.)
- Software (Pro Tools is the industry standard. Audacity is free and is also very good.)
- Hard Drive(s)/Digital Storage (Store your archival copy as a broadcast wave file on an external drive rather than on tape or optical (cd, dvd) disc.

The rest of the afternoon covered analog to digital transfer and the creating of new recordings including tips and recommendations on microphones, mixers, PA systems, and digital recorders.

Dave provided attendees with a list of digital audio resources and I've included them here for those who could not attend.

Dave Nolan's Digital Audio Resources as of November 1, 2006

• ARSC - The Association of Recorded Sound Collections
• ARSC-List
• CLIR - Analog to Digital Audio Best Practices
• CDP - Digital Audio Best Practices
• Richard Hess Tape Restoration Resources
• Valerie Forrestal's Audio Archiving Resources

Thanks to Dave Nolan and all who attended.