Digitization in the Real World

Building the ALBA Digital Library (at NYU's Tamiment Library)

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 the book online at Amazon.com. 

Access the collections here.

Author

Jill Annitto (Archivist)

Abstract

This chapter serves as a case study of how a professional digital library can be successfully built with a small staff and budget. It discusses the planning and experiments with beta versions of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) Digital Library, the final version of which is available on ALBA’s website, through Metropolitan New York Library Council’s (METRO) Digital Metro New York program, and OCLC WorldCat. The sensitive issues of digitizing another institution’s collection while maintaining ownership of the final product are also explored.

In 1979, recognizing the vital importance of their radical history, and the need to collect writings, letters, photographs, oral histories and artifacts that would preserve their story, the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the American volunteers who fought with Republican forces against Generalissimo Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA). Today ALBA lends its name to a major archive at New York University's (NYU) Tamiment Library and independently supports cultural and educational activities related to the war. The ALBA collections are the most requested at the Tamiment Library. ALBA’s relationship with NYU is non-traditional, which makes the ALBA Digital Library unique. NYU owns and maintains the Archives and hosts many of ALBA’s programs, yet the ALBA name gives a different impression.

This chapter explores the challenges of digitizing a collection that is owned by another institution and how to overcome working with a limited budget, dated technology, and minimal staff to produce a professional digital resource. The ALBA Digital Library (Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, 2008) evolved from an ineffective form-based website tool to a fully indexed resource using CONTENTdm in a matter of months.

ALBA Goes Digital

Until a full-time Executive Director was hired in 2007, ALBA was initially run by a group of volunteers followed by a string of part-time administrators. The ALBA Board of Governors hired me as the Assistant Director in May 2008 just as they began reconsidering their outdated website, a major step for the small organization.

By June 2008 the Executive Director had resigned, leaving me as ALBA’s only employee. It provided me with a great opportunity to help redesign the website alongside a subcommittee of the Board of Governors. The Web Committee, consisting of four history professors living across the United States, set a timeline of four months for the site’s overhaul, with an anticipated launch date of early October. The Board wanted to stake a claim as the premier electronic resource for information on the Spanish Civil War.

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

References

Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. (2008). ALBA Digital Library. Retrieved March 30, 2010, from http://www.alba-valb.org/ resources/digital-library

Dublin Core metadata initiative. (2010). Retrieved March 30, 2010, from http://dublincore.org

New York Heritage. (2008). Retrieved March 30, 2010, from http://www.newyorkheritage.org

Simkin, J. (1997). Spartacus educational. Retrieved March 30, 2010, from http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Spanish-Civil-War.htm

University of California, San Diego. (n.d.). Southworth Spanish Civil War Collection. Retrieved March 30, 2010, from UC San Diego Libraries website, http://libraries.ucsd.edu/locations/mscl/ collections/southworth-spanish-civil-war-collection.html

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (n.d.). Spanish Civil War Collection. Retrieved March 30, 2010, from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Rare Book and Manuscript Library website, http://www.library.illinois.edu/rbx/SCWPeople.htm

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. (2006). Transportation around the World, 1911-1993. Retrieved March 30, 2010, from Digital Collections -Transportation around the World, 1911-1993 website, http://www4.uwm.edu/libraries/digilib/transport/index.cfm

Picturing the Past and Planning for the Future: Central Florida Memory

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 the book online at Amazon.com.

View the collections here.

Author

Lee Dotson, Selma Jaskowski (University of Central Florida Libraries)

Abstract

Central Florida Memory is a collaborative digitization project to create a collection of primary sources related to Central Florida’s history that provides a compelling look at Central Florida before the area became a tourist destination. Through cycles ranging from limited resources to ample grant funding, the collaboration has grown from a small pilot project with three partners to over 80,000 images contributed by seven partners. Organized for the user, the website has been enhanced to create more user friendly methods of access and includes storylines, lesson plans, and links to other sites of interest. This paper provides lessons learned about how to incorporate a variety of materials from diverse institutions into a single digital collection.  

The Beginning -- 2002

When the directors of the University of Central Florida Libraries and the Orange County Library System came up with the idea for Central Florida Memory (CFM) over drinks in 2001, it seemed like a friendly way for the two institutions to collaborate on a project that would serve both academic and public library patrons and foster inter-institutional understanding.

With the addition of the Orange County Regional History Center, the three institutions had the necessary resources to begin building an exciting digital collection. In 2002, the group began meeting to evaluate the collections of the three partners and determine what materials in each collection would provide the most compelling and engaging look at Central Florida’s history.

Coming from very different missions and working environments, the partners recognized early on that this collaboration would take some work. Staffing, funding, and the capacity for participation needed to be discussed and an understanding of each institution’s identity and purpose gained. Through quarterly meetings where brainstorming was center stage, the group identified the strengths each partner could bring to the project. Committees were formed and populated with members from each institution to foster communication among participants as well as organize functional responsibilities. While the full group discussed and agreed on overall structure and support, the committees focused on operational tasks such as selection, metadata and cataloging, storyline, marketing, and evaluation and assessment. The scope of the project was defined, collections examined and material chosen for inclusion in what was hoped would become the definitive site on the history of Central Florida.

Pilot Project -- 2002

When the directors of the University of Central Florida Libraries and the Orange County Library System came up with the idea for Central Florida Memory (CFM) over drinks in 2001, it seemed like a friendly way for the two institutions to collaborate on a project that would serve both academic and public library patrons and foster inter-institutional understanding.

With the addition of the Orange County Regional History Center, the three institutions had the necessary resources to begin building an exciting digital collection. In 2002, the group began meeting to evaluate the collections of the three partners and determine what materials in each collection would provide the most compelling and engaging look at Central Florida’s history.

Coming from very different missions and working environments, the partners recognized early on that this collaboration would take some work. Staffing, funding, and the capacity for participation needed to be discussed and an understanding of each institution’s identity and purpose gained. Through quarterly meetings where brainstorming was center stage, the group identified the strengths each partner could bring to the project. Committees were formed and populated with members from each institution to foster communication among participants as well as organize functional responsibilities. While the full group discussed and agreed on overall structure and support, the committees focused on operational tasks such as selection, metadata and cataloging, storyline, marketing, and evaluation and assessment. The scope of the project was defined, collections examined and material chosen for inclusion in what was hoped would become the definitive site on the history of Central Florida.

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

References

Book 24: Carey Hand Funeral Home records, April 1, 1924 - August 21, 1924. (n.d.). Central Florida Memory. Retrieved August 14, 2005, from http://www.cfmemory.org

Central Florida Memory grant writing committee. (2004). Central Florida Memory. [Institute of Museum and Library Services grant proposal]. Orlando, FL. Retrieved December 1, 2009, from http://www.cfmemory.org/Share/About/Narrative.pdf

Central Florida Memory website. (2003). Retrieved May 11, 2003, from http://centralfloridamemory.lib.ucf.edu.

Central Florida Memory website. (2005). Retrieved September 20, 2005, from http://www.cfmemory.org

Central Florida Memory website. (2009). Retrieved March 13, 2010, from http://www.cfmemory.org

Digitization Spec Kit. (2005). Retrieved March 20, 2010, from http: //www.cfmemory.org/Share/Workshop/DigitizationSpecKit.pdf

Digital Services Tracking Database. (2005). Internal tracking database used at University of Central Florida Libraries. Orlando, Florida.

Dotson, L. (2005). See how it’s done. Central Florida Workshop for Museum & Library Personnel. Retrieved March 5, 2010, from http://www.cfmemory.org/Share/Workshop/Behind%20the%20Scenes%20I.ppt

Dunlop, D. (2005). How it all connects II. Central Florida Workshop for Museum & Library Personnel. Retrieved March 19, 2010, from http://www.cfmemory.org/Share/Workshop/ Metadata%20Part%202.ppt

Florida digital archive. (2010). Retrieved March 8, 2010, from http://www.fcla.edu/digitalArchive/.

Gronlund, G. (2005). Weaving the story. Central Florida Workshop for Museum & Library Personnel. Retrieved March 27, 2010, from http://www.cfmemory.org/Share/Workshop/CENTRAL%20 FLORIDA%20MEMORY%20WEAVING%20THE%20STORY%209%2030%202005%202.ppt

iArchives process. (2010). Retrieved February 20, 2010, from http://www.iarchives.com/process.shtml

IMLS National Leadership grants. (2010). Retrieved February 17, 2010, from http://www.imls.gov/applicants/grants/ NationalLeadership.shtm.

Lavoie, J. (2005). Showing it to the world. Central Florida workshop for museum & library personnel. Retrieved February 23, 2010, from http://www.cfmemory.org/Share/Workshop/ Showing%20it%20to%20the%20World.ppt

Library services and technology act grants. (2008). Retrieved January 14, 2010, from http://dlis.dos.state.fl.us/bld/grants/LSTA/ LSTAinfo.pdf

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

 Orange County voter registration. (n.d.). Central Florida Memory. Retrieved August 15, 2005, from http://www.cfmemory.org

PALMM documentation. (2010). Retrieved March 11, 2010, from http://fclaweb.fcla.edu/node/572/

Success story: Central Florida Memory. (2009). In A new story based approach to digital collection [OCLC CONTENTdm brochure]. Retrieved March 5, 2010, from http://www.oclc.org/us/en/services/brochures/211595usc_F_CentralFloridaMemory.pdf

 

New Jersey Digital Legal Library

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 the book online at Amazon.com.

View the collection here.

Author

Wei Fang (Rutgers University)

Abstract

The New Jersey Digital Legal Library (NJDLL) was launched in 2003 and it’s been up and running since then. NJDLL has sixteen collections with about 500 video clips and 20,000 electronic documents. It has served over 300,000 visitors and is popular among legal professionals and researchers. The goal of this project is to create a Web-based digital library where patrons can browse and search for previously unavailable New Jersey legal information. In this article, the author presents the background history of the NJDLL, how it was constructed, workflows, and how problems were solved in depth. Future development suggestions are also discussed.  

Introduction

As part of the Rutgers University School of Law, the Rutgers University Law Library – Newark with its more than half a million volumes of printed books is the largest law library in New Jersey. Its collections include state and federal statutes and court decisions, federal and New Jersey regulations and administrative decisions, federal and New Jersey legislative history materials, the codes of ordinances for many New Jersey municipalities, Anglo-American legal periodicals, the primary materials of international law, extensive historical materials on English law, and a special collection of criminology and criminal justice materials. The library has served the law school and the surrounding legal community for more than a century. Our law librarians wanted to share the unique collections that the law library had with others in the world and the only way to do it was to convert the collections into digital documents and host them online via the Internet.

The NJDLL project focuses on legal materials related to New Jersey. The target audience groups are legal professionals, historians, researchers and the general public.  After more than five years of development, its collections include electronic legal documents as well as New Jersey Supreme Court oral arguments archives. The NJDLL project was first proposed in the fall of 2000 by Paul Axel-Lute, the collection development librarian, and was initialized in spring of 2002 with hardware and software funded by Rutgers University. In April 2003, the digital library was inaugurated with three collections: 1) New Jersey Administrative Reports 2) New Jersey Executive Orders and 3) New Jersey Attorney General Opinions.  In 2005, the law library negotiated with the Supreme Court of New Jersey to be the host of its Oral Argument video clips using Microsoft Windows Media Video technology. We are also hosting the digital collection of the New Jersey Council On Affordable Housing’s decisions. The NJDLL has now grown to become a popular digital library with sixteen collections ranging from year 1779 to present.

  Download the entire chapter for free (PDF). 

References

Adobe Acrobat Professional. (2009). Adobe and PDF. Retrieved from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/adobepdf.html

Any2 DjVu Server. (2002). Welcome to the DjVu Any2Djvu Server. Retrieved from http://any2djvu.djvuzone.org/index.html

Borgman, C. (2000). From Gutenberg to the global information infrastructure: access to information in the networked world. Cambridge, MA, USA. MIT Press.

Drupal. (2009). About Drupal. Retrieved from http://drupal.org/about

EAD. (2002). Encoded archival description version 2002. Retrieved from http://www.loc.gov/ead/

Fang, W. (2007). Using Google analytics for improving library website content and design: A case study. In  Library Philosophy and Practice, Annual Vol. 2007 (Special Issue Libraries and Google) Retrieved from http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/ ~mbolin/fang.pdf

Fang, W. (2009). Online law school video repository: The flash way. Computers in Libraries, Vol. 29, No. 6.

Google. (2009). About Google Analytics. Retrieved from http://www.google.com/analytics/

Makri, S., Blandford, A., & Cox, A. (2006). Studying law students’ information seeking behaviour to inform the design of digital law libraries. Paper presented at the Alicante, Spain.

METS. (2007). METS schema, & documentation. Retrieved from http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/mets-schemadocs.html

Notepad++. ( 2009). About Notepad++. Retrieved from http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

P5. (2009). TEI: P5 guidelines. Retrieved from http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P5/

Swish-e. (2009). About Swish-e. Retrieved from http://swish-e.org/

Ubuntu. (2009). What is Ubuntu. Retrieved from http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu

WMM. (2004). Windows Movie Maker 2.1 Download. Retrieved from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/ updates/moviemaker2.mspx

 

Building a Virtual Library – A Case Study at The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary

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

Access the collections here.

Author

Naomi M. Steinberger  (The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary)

Abstract

The goal of this chapter is to show how a medium-size research library with rich resources in special collections has succeeded in the past decade, in building a digital library. The chapter focuses on building a strategic plan for a digital library and assessing The Library’s collections for digital readiness. Planning the digital library includes making many decisions ranging from software, prioritizing collections to digitizing, metadata schemas, and more. Funding for digitization can be grants, gifts in kind where the funder provides the institution with a digital photographer, to funders who want a specific collection digitized.  There is a discussion of some of the challenges such as hardware capability and staffing. The important lessons learned through experience and plans for the future of the digital program are discussed. 

Introduction & Background

The mission of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the intellectual and religious center of Conservative Judaism, is twofold:  to serve as the pre-eminent center for the academic study of Judaism outside of Israel, as one of the pre-eminent centers world-wide, and as a training center to advance that study; and to educate Jewish professionals and lay leaders in the spirit of Conservative Judaism for the total community through academic and religious programs, both formal and informal.

In accordance with the Seminary’s overall goals, The Library’s mission is to collect, preserve and make available the literary and cultural heritage of the Jewish people.  The collection includes 25,000 rare books, 11,000 manuscripts, 400 archival collections, and many other historically significant items. Among the particular strengths of its collection are its 35,000 fragments from the Cairo Genizah (representing the lives of Jews and others in the eastern Mediterranean from the 11th to the 19th centuries), its collection of ketubot (Jewish marriage contracts)—the largest in the world—and its unparalleled collection of Passover haggadot (the traditional text of the holiday, combining narrative and ritual). The Library is also home to the world's largest collection of Hebrew incunabula (early books printed before 1501).

The Special Collections are open to students and researchers from around the country and the world. Scholars of Jewish history specializing in virtually any period or place rely on the Library’s unique holdings. Scholars of American Jewry are particularly reliant on The Library’s archives. The Library is also the center for scholarly dialogue within The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) and the focal point for numerous public events devoted to Jewish culture and books.

Currently, The Library employs 15 librarians, five subject specialists and eight support staff. JTS has 40 faculty and 200 staff serving 500 students.  In fiscal year 2010, after budget reductions, The Library’s operating budget of $1.7 million plus approximately a half-million dollars in designated funds each year.  Budget designated to digital collections is lest than $12,000 per year.

In The Library’s 2005 strategic plan, digitization is emphasized as a method of preservation of the original item, because “more damage is done to rare materials through human handling than by any other means.” “The more readers can gain access to images of rare materials and forego handling the materials themselves,” the document continues, “the better they will be preserved.”  (Strategic Plan, 2005.)

Large external digitization projects such as The Google Book Project (Google Book, 2010) and the licensing of the Otzar Ha-Hochma collection of 19,000 fully-digitized Hebrew Books and HebrewBooks.org are viewed as efforts to take care of the need to digitize modern printed books, allowing the Jewish Theological Seminary library to focus resources on only digitizing materials unique to the library’s collection.

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

References

About DSpace. (n.d.). Retrieved March 9, 2010 from  http://www.dspace.org/about-dspace/introducing/

Clareson,Tom and Kim, Richard. (2006). Digital Program Survey Final Report from April 5, 2006 Visit. 

Dublin Core metadata initiative. (2010). Retrieved March 30, 2010, from http://dublincore.org

ExLibris DigiTool. (n.d.) Retrieved March 9, 2010 from http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/DigiToolOverview

Genizah project, executive summary. ( n.d.) Retrieved March 30, 2010, from http://www.genizah.org/about-Executive_Summary.htm.

Google Books. (2010). Retrieved March 13, 2010 from http://books.google.com/

Greenstone digital library software. (n.d.). Retrieved March 9, 2010 from http://www.greenstone.org/

Lacinak, Chris and O’Neill, Kevin. (2008). Sound Recording Consultation Final Report, June 26, 2008

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

Strategic Plan. (2005). The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary. 2005.

The NINCH guide to good practice in the digital representation and management of cultural heritage materials. (2002). Retrieved May 9, 2010 from http://www.nyu.edu/its/humanities/ninchguide/