Digitization in the Real World

Digitization on a Dime: How a Small Library and a Big Team of Volunteers Digitized 15,000 Obituaries in Just Over a Year

The following chapter excerpt is from the first section of Digitization in the Real World; "Small is Beautiful: Planning and Implementing Digitization Projects with Limited Resources."  Download the entire chapter for free (PDF) or purchase online at Amazon.com.   

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Author

Elisabeth Goldman (Kingston Frontenac Public Library)

Abstract

In 2006 and 2007, Chelsea District Library, a small public library in Chelsea, Michigan, digitized a collection of 15,000 obituaries on a small budget by using a staff of nearly 50 volunteers and open source software. The author describes the research and planning that led up to the project; unique aspects of the staffing and technology for the project; and the resulting database, which contributed to the library being named “Best Small Library in America” for 2008 by Library Journal. The database continues to be updated, expanded, and improved, and the use of volunteers as the primary workforce has had long term rewards for the library. The chapter demonstrates the accessibility of digitization projects to libraries, even those without pre-existing expertise, large staffs, or big budgets. 

Introduction & Background

Especially in small towns, the public library may serve multiple roles as library, museum, archives, and community center. In many cases, libraries accept donations of rare or unique historical material from families in the area with little thought for long-term maintenance. Technological advances in the last few decades have given libraries new options for preserving local history collections and making them more accessible through digitization. While even the smallest libraries have staff educated in reference and circulation procedures, however, relevant training in archival methods and technology is rare, making the prospect of a digitization project overwhelming. At the same time, small public libraries often have little or no funding for such projects.

Chelsea District Library is a single-branch public library serving 14,000 people in southeast Michigan, about 50 miles west of Detroit. The library was established in 1932 by the local Women’s Club and, in 1999, became a district library system serving both the town of Chelsea (population 5,000) and surrounding townships. The earliest settlements in the Chelsea area date back to the 1830s and many local families can trace their roots back to the town’s founders, resulting in a rich history. From its earliest days, the library served as a repository for local historical and genealogical material, housing a local history room on the cramped third floor of the McKune House, its location from 1959-2000. In 2006, after extensive renovations and additions to the McKune House, the library moved from temporary quarters back to its historic home on Main Street in Chelsea, leading to renewed interest in the local history collection.

A collection of about 50,000 index cards known as the Family History Index made up a major component of the local history material. A retired lawyer and amateur genealogist named Harold Jones started the collection as a hobby, clipping obituaries from the local Chelsea Standard newspaper and other sources and pasting them onto 4 x 6 index cards, along with cross references that allow women to be located by maiden name. Upon his death in 1987, Jones’ family donated the collection to the library, where it received extensive use by local and visiting genealogists. Library staff and volunteers completed a project from 2000-2002 to clean up and update the collection, since then volunteers have continued adding new clippings.

As part of a planning process leading up to an election to fund an expansion of the building and the staff, the library identified local history as a priority for Chelsea area taxpayers and the Family History Index as a prime candidate for digitization work. At the time, the professional librarian staff consisted of the director, three department heads (adult services, youth services, technology services), and a part-time librarian, leaving few resources to focus on a project of this scope. In the spring of 2005, the library replaced the departing part-time librarian with a full-time librarian (the author), adding additional duties of managing the library’s website and digitizing the Family History Index.

This paper will describe how a librarian and a team of four dozen volunteers completed the digitization of 15,000 records from the Family History Index in just over a year, resulting in a highly usable database that helped Chelsea District Library earn its distinction of “Best Small Library in America” for 2008 from Library Journal and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The first section will describe preparation for the project, including research in archival standards and digitization techniques, as well as the recruitment and training of the volunteer workforce. Section two will describe the decision-making process that went into the choice of open source software in order to create a user-friendly, free database of the records on a limited budget, as well as the work of developing and testing the database itself. Section three will offer an overview of the workflow for staff and volunteers as they did data entry, scanning, and proofreading of the records. Finally, the paper will describe the resulting database, current upkeep and expansion, and how the project served as a model for additional digitization work.

Download the entire chapter for free (PDF) or purchase online at Amazon.com.

References

Chelsea District Library. (2009). Chelsea District Library Family History Index Online. Retrieved on Jun 30, 2010 from http://fh.chelsea.lib.mi.us/

Collaborative Digitization Program. (2008). Western States digital imaging best practices, version 2.0. Retrieved on March 31, 2010 from http://www.bcr.org/dps/cdp/best/wsdibp_v1.pdf

Michigan State University Libraries. (2005). The making of modern Michigan: Digitizing Michigan's hidden past. Retrieved March 15, 2010, from http://mmm.lib.msu.edu/.

Cornell University Library. (2010). Moving theory into practice digital imaging tutorial. Retrieved March 15, 2010, from http://www.library.cornell.edu/preservation/tutorial

National Information Standards Organization. (2007). A framework of guidance for building good digital collections. Retrieved March 15, 2010, http://framework.niso.org/

Collaborative Digitization Goes Local (at Middle Tennessee State University)

The following chapter excerpt is from the fourth section of Digitization in the Real World; "One Plus One is Greater Than Two: Collaborative Projects." Download the entire chapter for free (PDF) or purchase online at Amazon.com.

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Author

Ken Middleton, Mayo Taylor (Middle Tennessee State University)

Abstract

This chapter describes our efforts to build a digitization program in spite of limited funding. By obtaining small grants and forming partnerships with other campus units and institutions in the Middle Tennessee region, we have developed modest yet engaging collections and planted the seeds for additional partnerships. The article will also highlight the use of graduate students, efforts to streamline the digitization process, and lessons learned. 

Introduction

In an era when many libraries are struggling to stay relevant to today's Facebook generation, digital projects have injected new purpose into Middle Tennessee State University's Walker Library. Staff members are excited about digitizing oral histories of pioneering women on campus, documenting the agricultural history of a neighboring county, or preserving seminal research on local rare plants. The digital collections under development by the Library have required collaboration with other campus entities and external institutions. Few of the digitized objects have come from the Library’s own collections. In this chapter, we will describe the benefits of these partnerships and how they can be nurtured. We will also explore many of the practical issues that new digitization programs face, such as securing staff, streamlining the digitization process, handling diverse file formats, and customizing collections.

Efforts to collaborate with area institutions began as a natural extension of Walker Library’s involvement in Volunteer Voices (http://volunteervoices.org), Tennessee’s statewide collaborative digital project. MTSU librarian Ken Middleton served as the co-principal investigator of a three-year “Building Digital Resources” grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) that coordinated the gathering of historical materials from organizations and institutions statewide. That project, based at University of Tennessee-Knoxville, focused on Tennessee history. Staffs were placed in each area of the state (west, middle and east) with a charge to collect unique photos, documents and other materials from cultural institutions. Selected items featured both major trends and figures in Tennessee history (e.g. early settlement, Ida B. Wells), and significant local items (e.g. Bradley County Courthouse). An important component of the project was to relate the digitized objects to the curriculum followed by schools in Tennessee. Walker Library was a satellite digitization center for the middle Tennessee region (Conner, Middleton, Carter, & Feltner-Reichert, 2009), with several librarians and staff participating.

As the IMLS grant project ended, Walker Library began exploring ways that it could build its own digital skills while continuing to assist area archives, libraries, and museums to digitize unique collections. We would quickly lose skills and momentum if we did not build on our Volunteer Voices experience by securing the institutional support to initiate our own projects. Noting that a key mission of the University is to develop “mutually beneficial partnerships” (Middle Tennessee State University, 2002) we examined appropriate models among more experienced institutions.

In 2002, The University of Pittsburgh’s Digital Research Library began a two-year project to digitize a collection of 7,000 historic Pittsburgh images in partnership with the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the University's Archives Service Center (Galloway, 2005). As evidence of the continued success of this approach, they have added three more partner institutions over the last five years and now have more than 14,000 images in the collection (University of Pittsburgh Digital Research Library, 2010). The Digital Research Library has also collaborated with University of Pittsburgh faculty to create such projects as American Left Ephemera and Visuals for Foreign Language Instruction (Galloway, 2009). This program offers home pages for each of its 70 digital collections; each collection home page offers search and browse options, and a link to the partner institution’s home page.

IUPUI Library’s Program of Digital Scholarship has collaborated with an impressive array of campus and local institutions. The collection websites and promotional material give every indication that the Program of Digital Scholarship treats these institutions as equal partners: the “Partners” page provides background information about each institution; logos of relevant partners appear on each collection home page; and a link for contact information appears in each record. Its list of partners continues to grow. Building on its initial collaboration with Conner Prairie Museum that features textiles from the museum’s collection, the Library recently announced two Conner Prairie collections based on 3-D imaging technology.

After touting the benefits of such collaboration (e.g., cost-effectiveness), Bishoff (2004) offers further guidance for librarians who want to forge lasting partnerships with other cultural heritage institutions: involve all partners from the start; respect each institution’s mission and culture; and ensure that each partner benefits from the end product.

Building on these models we outlined a vision for our own digital project design and received the support of our Dean to purchase a server, large flatbed scanner and a license to CONTENTdm software. We then leveraged that support to secure a $5000 grant from the University Special Projects Committee to fund graduate students for our first project, MTSU Memory. More on that collection will follow.

Download the entire chapter for free (PDF) or purchase online at Amazon.com.

References

Bishoff. L. (2004). The collaboration imperative. Library Journal 129 (1), 34-35.

Conner, T.R., Middleton, K., Feltner-Reichert, M., and Carter, A. (2009). Volunteer voices: Tennessee's collaborative digitization program. Collaborative Librarianship, 1 (4), 122-132. Retrieved from http://collaborativelibrarianship.org/index.php/jocl/ article/view/38/26

Galloway, E. (2005). Historic Pittsburgh image collections. D-Lib Magazine, 11 (11). Retrieved from: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/ november05/11featured-collection.html

Galloway, E. (2009). Challenges of creating digital libraries: Digitizing, organizing, storing, accessing content. 2009 CSE Annual Meeting, May 5, 2009. Retrieved from: http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/events/annualmeeting09/presentations/galloway.pdf

IUPUI University Library. (2009). Library grant makes more Indiana history accessible to all. Retrieved from http://www-lib.iupui.edu/node/1306

Middle Tennessee State University. (2002). Academic master plan: Middle Tennessee State University 2001-2012. Murfreesboro, TN: Author.

Tzoc, E. (n.d.). Re-Indexing CONTENTdm metadata. Retrieved from http://staff.lib.muohio.edu/~tzocea/files/CONTENTdm/re-indexing/

University of Pittsburgh Digital Research Library. (2010). Historic Pittsburgh image collections. Retrieved from: http://images.library.pitt.edu/pghphotos

 

Digitization of the Yale Daily News Historical Archive

The following chapter excerpt is from the third section of Digitization in the Real World; "The Digital Campus: Digitization in Universities and Their Libraries." Download the entire chapter for free (PDF) or purchase online at Amazon.com.

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Author

Kathleen Bauer, Ian Bogus, Karen Kupiec (Yale University Library)
Jennifer Weintraub (UCLA Library)

Abstract

The Yale Daily News is Yale University’s independent student run newspaper. Founded in 1878 it is the oldest continuously published daily newspaper at a United States university.  From the initial print volumes until digital versions started in 2000, the entire run of the printed paper consists of 122 volumes and approximately 100,000 pages. In 2007, Yale University Library was asked to create a pilot project to digitize and make available an initial set of ten years of the newspaper with a $50,000 start-up budget. In this article, we will discuss how the project began, and issues that developed during the process related to copyright, interface design, workflow, quality control, and fundraising. This project helped Yale University Library, a large, strongly hierarchical institution, to develop workflows that allow its staff to develop new skills and work across traditional departmental boundaries. Library staff that have traditionally performed tasks related to our print collections or for smaller digital projects have developed new skills and methods for workflow, metadata creation and quality control for a large-scale digital project. 

Introduction

A newspaper digitization project is one that every library, public or academic, can undertake. It is often not hard to get the rights to a local or small paper and an academic or public library has a built-in audience for this type of project. Local researchers will love having it online and genealogists from further afield will bless you.  And yet, newspaper digitization, while having recently come into its own, has been somewhat difficult for libraries. Newspapers are crucial to research, providing detailed local and international accounts of events; these incredibly important primary source materials are made of poor quality material that will last a relatively short period of time. Newspapers are hard to digitize because they are published daily with hundreds of issues a year, comprised of various individual sections, and then individual articles, oversized, delicate, and contain thousands of words and pictures that require careful quality assurance. In addition they have unusual layouts, and articles often are split across two or more nonconsecutive pages. There can be numerous contributing authors, syndicated cartoons, advertisements, supplements, and even the occasional joke issue.

Fortunately, newspaper digitization is not new. Many organizations have taken on newspaper digitization and the major national and regional newspapers are now available for licensing by libraries. While many projects focus on digitization of newspapers from microfilm, there is also an increasing number of digitization projects that begin with the original paper. One important clearinghouse for information and best practices for newspaper digitization is the National Newspaper Digitization Program (The Library of Congress, 2009). This program, a joint effort between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities uses the power of grant dollars to enable proper newspaper digitization, research in newspaper digitization and access to the digitized papers through a central resource.

The Yale Daily News, Yale University’s student run newspaper, is 132 years old and is the oldest continuously published daily newspaper at a United States university. In 2007, Yale University Library (YUL) was asked to create a pilot project to digitize the newspaper with an initial $50,000 start-up budget provided by the Yale Daily News’s parent foundation (the Oldest College Daily Foundation) and YUL. In this article, we will discuss how the project began, and issues that developed during the process related to copyright, interface design, workflow, quality control, and fundraising.

This project helped YUL, a large, strongly hierarchical institution, to develop workflows that allow its staff to develop new skills and work across traditional departmental boundaries. Staff across the Library who have traditionally performed tasks related to our print collections or for smaller digital projects have developed new skills and methods for workflow, metadata creation and quality control for a large-scale digital project.         

The Yale Daily News (YDN) is staffed and produced by student volunteers. The paper is not owned by Yale University, and the student reporters and editors are advised by the independent Oldest College Daily Foundation (OCD). OCD is comprised of former YDN staffers and Yale graduates. In 2005 the OCD came to the YUL with an idea for a project to digitize the Yale Daily News archive and provide access on the Internet.  The OCD realized the complexity of the proposal especially considering they did not own a complete run of the newspaper. They asked the YUL to partner with them as OCD owned the rights to the content while YUL had the expertise and the means to make it accessible. To start the pilot project, OCD and YUL contributed $25,000 each to finance a pilot project. YUL decided that for the pilot project we would not digitize anything for which there was an existing digital edition (the YDN has been available online since 2000). Thus, we still had to choose a small amount of material from 120 years of print issues, or a fraction of the 100,000 pages in the entire run, for our initial digitization pilot.

This type of partnership, between an external group owning copyright and the campus library, can be useful for both parties. It is a good way for library staff to gain experience with a complex digitization project and digital collection building, it provides useful material for fundraising for technology projects, it enables the library to provide a useful resource to the campus community, and it enables both the newspaper and the library to create an online product with research value freely for a product that may not have a large sales market.

Several basic principals helped guide the development of the Yale Daily News Historical Archive. Open or commonly used standards for our digital files were important in the event content needed to be migrated to new interface software in the future. We wanted to digitize each newspaper in its entirety, thereby preserving the historical context provided by editorials, cartoons and advertisements. Therefore it was important that we capture the images on each page, not only the text. Another key principle was our requirement that the Yale Daily News be freely available on the Internet. Finally, we wanted the newspaper to be fully searchable, browsable, and to include advanced search features such as byline and title searches. These principals are similar to those elucidated by NDNP and other newspaper digitization projects.

Download the entire chapter for free (PDF) or purchase online at Amazon.com.

References

Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, Second Edition, 2002 Revision, 2005 Update. (2005) Chicago, IL: American Library Association.

Fair use (2009). Retrieved December 11, 2009, from U.S. Copyright Office website, http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

MARC standards. (2010). Retrieved December 11, 2009, from the Library of Congress – Network Development and MARC Standards Office website http://www.loc.gov/marc/

METS. Metadata encoding and transmission standard (2010). Retrieved December 11, 2009, from the official web site http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/

MODS. Metadata object description schema. (2010). Retrieved December 11, 2009, from the official web site http://www.loc.gov/ standards/mods/

Orphan works: Statement of best practices (June 2009). Retrieved December 11, 2009, from Society of American Archivists’ website http://www.archivists.org/standards/

RLG/OCLC Working Group on Digital Archive Attributes (2002). Trusted digital repositories: Attributes and responsibilities. RLG, May 2002. Retrieved December 11, 2009 http://www.rlg.org/ en/page.php?Page_ID=583

SAA: Describing archives: A content standard (DACS) (n.d.). Retrieved on May 1, 2010 from http://www.archivists.org/ governance/standards/dacs.asp

Schaffner, Jennifer. (2009). Metadata is the interface. Better description for better discovery of archives and special collections, synthesized from user studies. Retrieved December 11, 2009, from the OCLC website http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/

Session 49: More product, less pixels: Alternate approaches to digitization and metadata. (2008). SAA Annual Meeting, August 26-30, 2008.

Technical guidelines for digitizing archival materials for electronic access: Creation of production master files – raster images. (2004). Retrieved December 11, 2009, from the National Archives website http://www.archives.gov/preservation/technical/ guidelines.html 

 

The In-House Digital Laboratory: Possibilities and Responsibilities (at the Center for Jewish History)

The following chapter excerpt is from the second section of Digitization in the Real World; "A Diverse Digital Landscape: Digital Collections in Public Libraries, Museums, Cultural Heritage Institutions, and Knowledge-Based Organizations."  Download the entire chapter (PDF) or purchase online at Amazon.com.

View the collection here.

Author

Andrea Buchner (Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory, Center for Jewish History)

Abstract

The Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory at the Center for Jewish History has been building sustainable digital collections since 2005. It has worked on more than 100 different projects and digitized a wide variety of materials. This chapter highlights projects that include the digitization of books, photographs, and archival collections. It covers digitization from start to finish, touching upon the selection of materials for digitization, digitization practices and workflows, the management of digital assets, online delivery and users’ reactions to digital collections. It concludes with a discussion of the feasibility of an in-house digital laboratory for archives and libraries in general. 

Introduction

The Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory at the Center for Jewish History was established in 2005 with the generous support of the Gruss Lipper Family Foundation. Today, the lab is at the center of a digital program whose mission is to preserve the digital assets of the Center and its five partner organizations and to ensure long-term access to them. Since 2005, the digital lab has been involved in more than 100 digitization projects and has created more than 68,000 high-quality digital images. It has also created 300 hours of high-quality digital audio files by digitizing oral histories and Sephardic music stored on cassette tapes and reel-to-reel tapes.

The digital lab manages all digital assets via ExLibris’ DigiTool, a digital asset management system for libraries and archives (http://www.exlibrisgroup.com). The public interface is CJH Digital Collections (digital.cjh.org). The digital collections are an integral part of the Center’s Online Public Access Catalog (catalog.cjh.org). This catalog provides access to the Center’s and partners’ archival collections and library holdings. If a digital reproduction exists in CJH Digital Collections, the respective catalog record links to them. As of December 2009, 21,000 digital objects were accessible. In 2009 alone, 174,000 users requested digital objects. All materials are accessible to the public free of charge and the collections are constantly growing.

This chapter will examine a variety of projects. They illustrate approaches to the digitization of different types of materials: books, photographs, and archival collections. This chapter will also discuss digital asset management, online delivery, users’ reactions to digital collections, and the feasibility of an in-house digital laboratory.

The Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory

The Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory (digital lab) is a department within the Center for Jewish History.

The Center for Jewish History is the home of five prominent Jewish institutions dedicated to history, culture, and art. They are the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), the American Sephardi Federation (ASF), the Leo Baeck Institute (LBI), the Yeshiva University Museum (YUM), and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (YIVO). The combined holdings of the partner organizations bring together the rich variety of Jewish historical experience, ranging from Eastern European Jewry, Sephardic Jewry, German-speaking Jewry, to the American Jewish community.

 The collections include more than 500,000 volumes, 25,500 linear feet of archival documents, and thousands of museum objects. Since its opening in October 2000, over 40,000 researchers have visited the Center and roughly 210,000 patrons have attended various public exhibitions, conferences, and other events that the Center and partners held.

The Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory, a department of the Center, collaborates with all five partner organizations in numerous ways by digitizing their collections, managing the resulting digital assets, and providing digital consultancy services. During the first two years of the lab’s operation it was fully funded through the grant from the Gruss Lipper Family Foundation. When this period ended in 2007, the Center made the digital lab an integral part of its functions and services and continued to offer the lab’s digital collections building services to the partner organizations. In order to defray some of the costs, however, the digital lab charges for its services whenever external funding becomes available to the partners. When this is not the case, the lab provides pro bono digitization services.

A typical digitization project starts with an idea put forth either by Center or partner staff. This is followed by discussions, examinations of materials, and following established procedures (including the completion of forms) to ensure that materials arrive in the lab that have been thoroughly vetted in regard to their value, physical condition, rights, and available metadata. Once the selected materials have been prepared and arrive in the lab, the process of digitization begins. Projects may involve one or multiple partner organizations.

 Download the entire chapter (PDF) or purchase online at Amazon.com.

References

Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, Second Edition, 2002 Revision, 2005 Update. (2005) Chicago, IL: American Library Association.

Fair use (2009). Retrieved December 11, 2009, from U.S. Copyright Office website, http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

MARC standards. (2010). Retrieved December 11, 2009, from the Library of Congress – Network Development and MARC Standards Office website http://www.loc.gov/marc/

METS. Metadata encoding and transmission standard (2010). Retrieved December 11, 2009, from the official web site http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/

MODS. Metadata object description schema. (2010). Retrieved December 11, 2009, from the official web site http://www.loc.gov/ standards/mods/

Orphan works: Statement of best practices (June 2009). Retrieved December 11, 2009, from Society of American Archivists’ website http://www.archivists.org/standards/

RLG/OCLC Working Group on Digital Archive Attributes (2002). Trusted digital repositories: Attributes and responsibilities. RLG, May 2002. Retrieved December 11, 2009 http://www.rlg.org/ en/page.php?Page_ID=583

SAA: Describing archives: A content standard (DACS) (n.d.). Retrieved on May 1, 2010 from http://www.archivists.org/ governance/standards/dacs.asp

Schaffner, Jennifer. (2009). Metadata is the interface. Better description for better discovery of archives and special collections, synthesized from user studies. Retrieved December 11, 2009, from the OCLC website http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/

Session 49: More product, less pixels: Alternate approaches to digitization and metadata. (2008). SAA Annual Meeting, August 26-30, 2008.

Technical guidelines for digitizing archival materials for electronic access: Creation of production master files – raster images. (2004). Retrieved December 11, 2009, from the National Archives website http://www.archives.gov/preservation/technical/ guidelines.html