Digitization in the Real World

Using Omeka to Build Digital Collections: The METRO Case Study

The following chapter excerpt is from the fourth section of Digitization in the Real World; "One Plus One is Greater Than Two: Collaborative Projects." A version of this article originally appeared in the March/April 2010 issue of D-Lib Magazine.  Download the entire chapter for free (PDF) or purchase the complete book online at Amazon.com. 

View the collections here.

Authors

Jason Kucsma (Metropolitan New York Library Council)
Kevin Reiss and Angela Sidman (City University of New York)

Abstract

The digitalMETRO project was born from the Metropolitan New York Library Council's (METRO) 2007-2010 Digital Library Services Plan. The plan serves as a guiding document for METRO's work in helping member libraries build and maintain unique digital collections and provide access to them online. Since 2005, METRO has provided over $300,000 in digitization grants to fund over 30 digitization projects. METRO also provides a diverse curriculum of workshops focusing on digital conversion, metadata for digital collections, digital collection management software, and related areas of emerging technologies for libraries. In addition to ensuring these programs continue to provide training and resources to member libraries, the Digital Library Services Plan also recommends the creation of a directory of digital collections in the METRO membership.

With the charge of creating a directory of digital collections, Jason Kucsma, METRO's Emerging Technologies Manager, served as Project Manager and assembled a small project team to begin working on the directory in October 2008. He recruited Angela Sidman, then a Metadata Librarian at the Mina Rees Library at City University of New York's Graduate Center, to serve as the Metadata Librarian for the project. Kevin Reiss, then the Systems Librarian at the Mina Rees Library, was recruited as the project's Web Developer.

Choosing Omeka

One of the first decisions we had to make was which collection management system we would use to build and deliver the directory on the web. We considered three different options. METRO licenses a hosted CONTENTdm (CDM) instance from OCLC, so that was first considered as an option. Sidman and Reiss had worked extensively with CDM to build the METRO-funded Digital Murray Hill Project. While CDM is a system that supports collections with robust metadata and that contain a wide array of digital formats it lacks some characteristics that are desirable in a modern web digital exhibition tool. The out-of-the-box CDM user interface makes it difficult to browse collections by subject and set, and CDM does not support any of the interactive features that many users expect in a web interface such as tagging, social networking, and a mechanism to accept end-user feedback on the web. Though CDM does provide a basic Application Programming Interface (API) that allows for some modification of default CDM behavior, we felt that this API was an inadequate tool for building the types of features we wanted to include in the digitalMETRO website.

Our interest in deploying a feature-rich digital exhibition tool next led us to consider Omeka, a relatively new open source collection management system that was created by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. The Omeka software was the closest option to another open-source web content management system,WordPress, that we considered using for our project. WordPress has well-documented theme mechanisms for customizing the display of WordPress content, and an expanding pool of plug-ins that be used to modify content behavior. Unfortunately, WordPress does not have a well-developed mechanism for supporting the types of collection-building workflows and metadata-creation common to archives and libraries, and creating a plug-in to support these activities was beyond the modest scope of this project. Our exploration of potential content management systems overlapped with the Fall 2008 release of the 0.10 beta version of Omeka, and the growing number of projects using the system in beta made it worth considering.

Additionally Omeka's developers appear to have taken design inspiration from the highly successful general purpose open-source content management system Wodpress. Wordpress is widely known for it's ease of install and high-level of functionality. In this vein, Omeka developers have touted the platform as a "next generation web publishing platform for museums, historical societies, scholars, enthusiasts, and educators." Our project team thought libraries might also fit into that family, particularly smaller libraries with limited technical staff or financial resources to build and deliver digital collections online. The simplicity of installing and configuring the Omeka system rivaled WordPress's ease-of-use, leading CHNM Director Dan Cohen to suggest Omeka is “Wordpress for your exhibitions and collections.” Omeka also utilizes the same theme and plug-in mechanisms Wordpress utilizes to provide omeka users a means to customize and create new system behavior. 

According to the CHNM website: "Omeka provides cultural institutions and individuals with easy-to-use software for publishing collections and creating attractive, standards-based, interoperable online exhibits. Free and open-source, Omeka is designed to satisfy the needs of institutions that lack technical staffs and large budgets."  

Omeka was also an attractive choice because the strong and flexible approach to metadata representation built into the software. Additionally, Omeka Developer Dave Lester affirmed an advantage Omeka has for use in libraries and archives over a general-purpos CMS like WordPress on his blog, Finding America, “WordPress doesn’t use structured metadata the way that scholars, libraries, and archives do. We have controlled vocabularies, 50 ways of classifying the same thing, and need a system that allows us to easily do that.” 

While Omeka does not currently support controlled vocabularies in the sense that catalogers use to maintain authority control for records, comments like this marked what we felt was a shift within the Omeka developer community from a focus on archives and museums to the digital collection building pursued by libraries. This, combined with the fact that Omeka appeared to be quickly developing a community of users and developers actively creating new features and posting improvements to the software, reinforced our decition to adopt Omeka for the digitalMETRO platform. Also, this relatively low-risk project would allow us to test the viability of Omeka as a collection building and exhibition platform that could be recommended to METRO members and othes small and medium libraries and archives.

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

References

2006 Digitization Survey Report. (n.d.). Retrieved September 22, 2009, from http://www.metro.org/images/stories/pdfs/ 2006_digsurveyreport.pdf

Digital Services Plan 2007-2010. (n.d.). Retrieved September 22, 2009, from http://www.metro.org/images/stories/pdfs/2007_digplan.pdf

Cohen, D. (2008, February 20). Introducing Omeka. Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities Blog. Retrieved September 22, 2009, from http://www.dancohen.org/2008/02/20/introducing-omeka/

Dave Lester’s Finding America. New Omeka Release 0.10 Beta. (n.d.) Retrieved September 22, 2009, from http://blog.davelester.org/ 2008/11/12/new-omeka-release-010-beta/

digitalMETRO. (n.d.). Retrieved September 22, 2009, from http://nycdigital.org/dmetro/

Explore Murray Hill through images and maps. Digital Murray Hill. (n.d.) Retrieved September 22, 2009, fromhttp://murrayhill.gc.cuny.edu/

Model–view–controller - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (n.d.). Retrieved September 22, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93controller

Omeka | Documentation - Omeka How To. (n.d.) Retrieved September 22, 2009, from http://omeka.org/codex/Documentation

Omeka | Home. (n.d.). Retrieved September 22, 2009, from http://omeka.org/

OpenURL ContextObject in SPAN (COinS). (n.d.) Retrieved September 22, 2009, from http://ocoins.info/

The April 16 Archive. (n.d.) Retrieved September 23, 2009, from http://april16archive.org/

WordPress Blog Tool and Publishing Platform. (n.d.) Retrieved September 22, 2009, from http://wordpress.org/

Zend Framework. (n.d.) Retrieved September 22, 2009, from http://framework.zend.com/ 

From Argentina to Zambia: Capturing the Digital A to Z’s of a Child Art Collection

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 C. Lonbom, Milner Library (Illinois State University)

Abstract

 The International Collection of Child Art, residing at Illinois State University’s Milner Library, is a collection of artworks produced by children and adolescents across a range of cultures and time periods, primarily mid to late 20^th century. This chapter discusses the collection’s background and its role as a culturally expansive primary source. Information is provided about the Library Services and Technology Act grant funding awarded through the Illinois State Library to support the digitization project, Imagine Illinois and Beyond: Celebrating Creativity Through the Eyes of Our Children! The benefits and challenges of the digital conversion are discussed. Finally the chapter will look at alternate methods of image access, specifically audio description, to facilitate information discovery for viewers with a print disability such as vision impairment.

Collection Background

The International Collection of Child Art (ICCA) is a resource comprised of artworks created by children and adolescents from around the world. This cultural heritage collection reflects the visual expressions of young artists who capture themes from the fantastical to the familial and a myriad of themes that fall between. The collection was initiated more than forty years ago at Illinois State University (ISU), Normal, Illinois, and is now curated and administered by the University’s library. This primary source includes over 8,600 accessioned children’s artworks, from approximately 58 countries and cultures. The collection celebrates the creativity and innovative work produced by children with a multicultural perspective. The resource serves multiple audiences including students, academic scholars from across disciplines, and a wider public interested in viewing, learning about, and appreciating the imaginative vision that shapes a child’s creative pursuits.

ISU’s Milner Library acquired the ICCA in 2000 from the ISU School of Art, which inherited the resource following the closing of the University Museum in 1991. The collection had been stored in a classroom until the college could no longer accommodate it due to space constraints, lack of support staff, and less than optimal conditions for storing and maintaining this resource.

Virtual Shift: The Digital Project's Genesis

University libraries holding collections with parallel cultural and historical value have grappled with similar challenges and opportunities presented by the digital conversion of a unique resource. Questions, both philosophical and practical, invite those embarking on a digital project to entertain a range of considerations perhaps not previously attached to the physical collection. Digitization of the Eastern North Carolina Postcard Collection project members recognized the ambiguous nature of assigning subject headings to a stand-alone image, relatively free of contextual information. The postcards in this collection usually were accompanied by text caption, but did not always have context provided by a monograph (Dragon, 2009). Colorado State University’s project to digitize the University Historic Photographic Collection emphasized the collaborative process of converting a historic resource under a controlled timeline. The conversion involved a variety of project partners learning to speak each other’s professional language including archivists, metadata librarians, and digital project managers (Hunter, Legg & Oehlerts, 2010).). A Latin American political poster collection, part of the University of New Mexico Libraries Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections, speaks to digitally documenting the transient nature of a resource by preserving ephemera such as posters. Similar to children’s art, posters are not typically created to last through time, but document a specific and often meaningful moment in time situated at the edge of societal mainstream perspective (Stephenson, 2006). Clifford Lynch’s discussion of digitizing cultural heritage materials comments broadly on the discovery aspect of placing resources in an open electronic environment where unexpected and at times serendipitous communities form around such a collection. Lynch posits it is the objective of a digital library, expansive in its capacity to “enable and facilitate implicit communication” to provide a construct for the community building that develops around a collection (Lynch, 2007).

The move to consider digitization of the ICCA was rooted in curricular needs to accommodate a generation of users already vested in electronic access. By virtue of the resource’s sheer size, aging condition, and location, physical access is limited. The collection of two dimensional artworks is stored in a multi-use university warehouse that also serves as the library’s storage site for a collection of less frequently used volumes and is the home of University Archives. The warehouse is off campus and largely off limits to the public. Although slides of the artworks were created in the 1970s to support teaching and study of the collection, the analog format was no longer a viable option to support use of the collection in the 21^st century academic environment. Included in the collection are sixteen thematic traveling exhibits that have been displayed widely and have garnered attention for the resource. Several hundred of the slides, selected from the collection’s traveling exhibits, were converted to digital format in 2003, but overall the condition and quality of the slides was questionable and each image required color correction. The conversion of this small sample to a digital format brought attention to the collection when the images were mounted on the ICCA website and provided the spark that ignited the pursuit of funding to digitize the collection. Art, art education, English, and children’s literature faculty actively using the collection in classes were supportive advocates for moving the resource into a fully accessible digital format.

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

References

Audio description Illinois. (2009). Retrieved March 13, 2010 from http://www.alsaudioillinois.net/

Best practices for creating digital files. (2010). Retrieved March 9, 2010 from http://www.cyberdriveillinois.com/departments/ library/what_we_do/servicestechnologygrant.html

Dragon, P. M. (2009). Name authority control in local digitization projects and the Eastern North Carolina postcard collection. Library Resources and Technical Services. 53 (3), 185-196.

Dublin core metadata initiatives; Dublin Core metadata element set, version 1.0: Reference Description. (2009). Retrieved March 15, 2010 from http://dublincore.org/documents/1998/09/dces/ 

Educating Illinois 2008-2014: core values. (2008) Retrieved March 22, 2010 from http://www.educatingillinois.ilstu.edu/plan_sections/core_values.shtml

Hunter, N.C., Legg, K, & Oehlerts, B. (2010). Two librarians, an archivist, and 13, 000 images: Collaborating to build a digital collection. Library Quarterly, 8 (1), 81-103.

Illinois digital archives guidelines for images. (2010) Retrieved March 14, 2010 from http://www.idaillinois.org/cdm4/guidelines/

Illinois general assembly. (2007). Illinois information technology accessibility act. Retrieved on March 14, 2010 from http://ilga.gov/legislation/publicacts/95/PDF/095-0307.pdf

Illinois state library: Library services technology act review criteria and rubric. (n.d.). Retrieved on March 22, 2010, from http://www.cyberdriveillinois.com/departments/library/what_we_do/pdfs/lsta10_rubric.pdf

Institute of museum and library services: our mission. (n.d.). Retrieved on March 22, 2010, from http://www.imls.gov/about/about.shtm

International collection of child art digital collection. (2009). Retrieved on March 21, 2010, from http://tempest.lib.ilstu.edu/index_icca.php

International collection of child art: research. (2008). Retrieved on March 20, 2010 from http://www.library.ilstu.edu/icca/research/

Lynch, C. (2007). Digital collections, digital libraries, and the digitization of cultural heritage information. In D.Kresh, (Ed.) The Whole Digital Library Handbook. Chicago: American Library Association.

Stephenson, N. K. (2006). Preserving dissent: The Sam L. Slick collection of Latin American and Iberian posters. Art Documentation. 2 (1), 20-24.

Van Den Bosch, A., Van Den Herik, J., & Doorenbosch, P. (2009) Digital Discoveries in Museums, Libraries, and Archives: Computer Science Meets Cultural Heritage.  Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 34, (2/3) 129-138. doi 10.1179/174327909X441063

Ronchi, A.M. (2009). eCulture: Cultural content in the digital age. New York: Springer.

Snyder, J. (2008). Audio description, the visual made verbal. In J. Cintas (Ed.), The didactics of audiovisual translation (192-197). Philadelphia , PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Still Image Working Group. (2009). Digitization activities project planning and management outline. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Retrieved March 12, 2010, from http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/stillimages/documents/ Planning.html

Collaborating for Success: A Cross-Departmental Digitization Project (at Oregon State University Libraries)

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 complete book online at Amazon.com. 

View the collections here.

Authors

Sue Kunda (Oregon State University Libraries)

Abstract

In 2007 Oregon State University Libraries acquired the personal collection of Gerald “Jerry” Williams, a native Oregonian and former national historian for the U.S. Forest Service. The collection contains personal papers, historic images, serials, monographs, oral histories, maps, moving images, political posters, ephemera, and artifacts of the U.S. Forest Service and Civilian Conservation Corps. Four library units collaborated to catalog, digitize, and make available online more than 1700 (and counting) items from the collection. In this chapter are descriptions of the planning process, workflows, policies and procedures. The author documents technical and procedural obstacles, methods used to overcome these difficulties, and lessons learned in working through the barriers.

Introduction

In 2007 the Oregon State University Libraries (OSUL) acquired the personal collection of Gerald “Jerry” Williams, a native Oregonian with a lifelong passion for Pacific Northwest history. Williams began his career with the U.S. Forest Service in 1979, working as a sociologist with the Umpqua National Forest located in southern Oregon. After stints with the Willamette National Forest and later the Pacific Northwest Regional Offices, Williams was appointed, in 1999, national historian for the U.S. Forest Service.  Throughout his career Williams was a prolific author and avid collector of Pacific Northwest historical documents, images, and artifacts.

The Gerald W. Williams Collection includes 35 years of Williams’ personal papers related to his more than 75 publications, 3100 monographs and serials, and over 6000 copies of documents from the papers of Gifford Pinchot, the first U.S. Forest Service chief. In addition, Williams collected more than 24,000 historic photographs, including photographic prints, postcards, sterographic images, and glass lantern slides. The voluminous collection also includes oral histories, maps, moving images, political posters, and ephemera from the U.S. Forest Service and the Civilian Conservation Corps. (2008). After inspecting the collection and consulting with on-campus stakeholders about its value to the OSU academic community, OSUL purchased everything but several works of art and a group of miscellaneous artifacts.

Once the collection was transported to OSU library administrators agreed digitization of the textual items and historic images would take precedence over the digitization of other components. Many of the monographs and serials had no copyright restrictions and the OSUL Digital Production Unit (DPU) already had a well-established digitization workflow for printed matter. The historical photographs were compelling and had considerable potential value for researchers. In addition, University Archives and DPU worked together on a daily basis to digitize and make available online photographs and other images.

Digitization Project

Project Pre-Planning

With the help of Digital Access Services staff and student workers, the subject librarian for Forestry went through Williams’ shelf lists and notes for the library portion of the collection to ascertain which titles were currently owned by OSUL and/or which titles were possible candidates for digitization. The Forestry subject librarian created a detailed spreadsheet documenting this information and a more general digitization matrix indicating the number of holdings at OSUL and number of items eligible for digitization. These documents were shared with an administrative team (University Archivist, Digital Access Services Head, Cataloging Unit Head, DPU Head, Digital Production Librarian) in order to gauge library resources. The Cataloging Unit Head was assigned project manager while the University Archivist and Digital Production Librarian were given oversight of the digitization of the images and textual items, respectively.

The Cataloging Unit Head facilitated a meeting with Cataloging and DPU staff to hammer out workflows and responsibilities. Attendees brainstormed ideas, devised two separate cataloging workflows, and agreed to do a one-week pilot test of each set of procedures to determine which was more efficient. Workflow #1 required Cataloging staff to organize the library portion of the Gerald W. Collection into the four groups in the Digitization Matrix (Public Domain/Not Held at OSU, Public Domain/Held at OSU, Non-Public Domain/Not Held at OSU, Non-Public Domain/Held at OSU) before beginning the cataloging process. Workflow #2 allowed Cataloging staff to begin cataloging without organizing the collection according to the Digitization Matrix. DPU staff also developed digitization workflows that coordinated with cataloging workflows.

The University Archivist and Head of Special Collections perused the library portion of the collection and flagged items deemed rare and/or valuable. After processing, these items would reside in the OSUL Special Collections rather than the general circulating collection.

Digital Repository Platforms

OSUL currently supports two digital repository platforms: DSpace and CONTENTdm.

DSpace: an open-source institutional repository platform developed by MIT and Hewlett-Packard, was originally designed to manage, archive, and provide access to textual documents making it an obvious choice for the monographs and serials in the collection. DSpace provides full-text searching through the Lucene search engine, which is especially conducive for print materials, and its contents are routinely crawled by search engine spiders. DSpace also offers permanent URLs, licensing, flexible metadata, and multiple digital preservation features.

CONTENTdm: a proprietary-based digital content management system first developed at the University of Washington and later purchased by OCLC Online Computer Library Center, was originally conceived to store and provide access to digital images. The software automatically generates thumbnails, JPEG, and JPEG2000s from TIFF digital files. Users can perform basic editing functions (resize, rotate, sharpen, crop), pan and zoom JPEG 2000 files, bookmark favorites, and create personal slideshows. Because of these more image-based capabilities, OSUL chose to use CONTENTdm to store and display the historic photographs, slides, and artifacts from the Gerald W. Williams Collection.

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

References

Copyright Information Center. (2009). Copyright term and the public domain in the United States, 1 January 2009. Retrieved November 2, 2009, from: http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/ publicdomain.cfm

Oregon State University Libraries, University Archives (2008). Guide to the Gerald W. Williams Collection, 1855-2007. Retrieved November 27, 2009, from http://digitalcollections.library. oregonstate.edu/cdm4/client/gwilliams/index.html

Peterson, K. (2009). OSU enrollment jumps more than 8 percent to nearly 22,000. Retrieved November 28, 2009, from http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/ 2009/nov/osu-enrollment-jumps-more-8-percent-nearly-22000

Simmons, T. (2006). OSU recognized as Oregon’s leading research university. Retrieved November 28, 2009, from:http://oregonstate.edu/events/newsevents/carnegie.html

Springer, M., Dulabahn, B., Michel, P., Natanson, B., Reser, D., Woodward, D. et al. (2008). For the common good: The Library of Congress Flickr pilot project.  Retrieved November 27, 2009, from http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_report_final.pdf

Stauth, D. (2006). OSU College of Forestry viewed as number one in North America. Retrieved November 28, 2009, from: http://oregonstate.edu/dept/nce/newsarch/2006/Oct06/forestryrank.html

The Commons. (2009). Retrieved November 27, 2009, from flickr Web site: http://www.flickr.com/Commons? GXHC_gx_session_id_=6afecb2055a3c52c

United States Copyright Office. (2009). §101. Definitions, Copyright law of the United States of America and related laws contained in Title 17 of the United States Code. Retrieved November 2, 2009, from http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#101