education
past CONFERENCES
Digital Directions
Fundamentals of Creating and Managing Digital Collections
May 27 – 29, 2009
San Diego, California
Wednesday, May 27, 2009 |
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Address: The Digital Calf-Path: Growing and Sustaining Digital Collections Martin Halbert, MetaArchive Cooperative The early 21st century marks an unprecedented historical moment in which libraries and other cultural memory organizations now regularly seek to grow and sustain digital collections, ranging from the output of analog-media digitization projects to the administration of born-digital materials. The genesis of these collections is often a series of iterative and cumulative digitization efforts with idiosyncratic and ad-hoc data creation workflows and storage structures. Much like the wobbling path that becomes a standard route followed and solidified by others over centuries in the poem by Foss, the early idiosyncrasies embedded in these collections’ data structures can become a torturous pathway upon which an organization’s digital infrastructure and its management workflows continue to be built. Such infrastructures often cause curators enormous problems when they engage in systematic efforts to scale workflows and digitally preserve the content of growing collections. This keynote will examine these issues and the current state of digital collections from the wide-ranging perspective of an international digital preservation collaborative, the MetaArchive Cooperative. Now engaged in preserving digital content from hundreds of collections in many organizations across three continents, the cooperative has closely studied the question of best practices for growing and sustaining digital content using shared infrastructures and has come to some surprising conclusions. |
Planning a Digital Project |
| Prospecting for Imaging Competency: Discovering digital gold in the wilderness of technological jargon David Mathews, Northeast Document Conservation Center Are your digital files fool’s gold or prized nuggets? Why are digital files ephemeral? How do image files differ? What's all the fuss about image quality and format versatility? This session unravels the mystique of imaging systems and explores reformatting issues for large and small collections. Topics include key performance concepts, useful tips, hybrid solutions, performance matrices, and input & output referenced models, as well as the how, why, and when of panning for digital wealth. A broad range of imaging examples will be presented, spanning a wide diversity of collection criteria for everyone from the digitization beginner to the advanced library, archive, or museum imager. |
Just Shoot Me Now! Understanding the Role of Standards and Best Practices Navigating the digitization chain is hard enough, but it seems to grow exponentially more difficult when you encounter the host of standards and best practices you're told you need to follow as a part of every project. If you look hard enough, you can probably find close to 100 standards that are in some way applicable to digitization projects. Do you need to know all of them to be successful? If so, Just Shoot Me Now! Thankfully, the answer is NO! |
The Role of Metadata Metadata makes the (digital) world go ’round, but what is it, really? What does it look like and where does it come from? How do we make, manage, and maintain our “data about data”—which is essential for supporting discovery, access, preservation, and reuse of digital objects and collections? By defining and identifying metadata in its various forms and exploring metadata sources, standards, schemas, and services, this session will help you better understand the role of metadata in your digital endeavors and provide a foundation for making good metadata choices for your digital program. |
Day Two: Thursday, May 28 |
Outsourcing and Vendor Relations Early in project planning, critical decisions must be made that will affect the outcomes and success of digitization projects. Earlier sessions in the conference will provide guidance related to managing projects, selection, and digitization quality and cost issues. Another key consideration that must be addressed is whether to tackle the entire project in-house or outsource some functions to service providers. Certainly the early inclination is to tackle the project in-house, mainly because people assume that the "learn-by-doing" method is the best way to tackle digitization projects, especially a first project. That assumption however, is not always correct. In many instances, there are very valid reasons why outsourcing at least some services makes more sense. This session will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing, consider what questions need be asked to determine whether outsourcing will help you best achieve your project goals, and provide guidance on establishing and maintaining positive vendor relations. |
Concurrent Breakout Sessions: This session discusses selection of materials for digital conversion within a preservation context. Careful selection is important as the first step in planning a digitization project or program and prevents wasting time and effort digitizing the wrong materials or digitizing for the wrong reasons. A variety of rationales for digitization are discussed. Selection criteria guide evaluation whether materials should be digitized, whether they may be digitized, and whether they can be digitized. Criteria include whether the item or collection has sufficient value to justify digitization, whether digitization is appropriate for materials of this type, whether digitization can achieve the desired goals, whether the institution has infrastructure to carry out a digitization project and preserve the digital product, whether it has the intellectual property rights to create and disseminate digital versions, and whether the cost is appropriate. Each institution must develop strategic plans and priorities for digital conversion grounded in its mission and goals. Examples drawn from several different types of institutions are discussed. Budgeting Budgeting for a digitization project is an iterative process. This session will focus on methods for developing a budget and identifying possible sources of funding for your digital project. How do you estimate the cost of various project activities? What if you determine that the cost for what you want to do exceeds available funds? What can you do to adjust the cost of the project lower? You will learn ways to adjust your project plan and your budget as you move them into alignment with one another. Finally, the presentation will address preparing budget documents that will help you make a compelling argument to funding agencies. Language is a living thing. The static handwritten and typeset characters that have recorded it can come to life in amazing ways in a digital, networked environment. Current and imminent technology offers us unprecedented opportunities to deliver, download, store, share, index, cross-reference, analyze, and annotate the written word. To take advantage of these opportunities, digital text objects must be created and nurtured appropriately. Page images, machine-readable characters, and robust, well-formed metadata are respectively, the body, mind, and soul of well-rounded and well-behaved digitized text. The formative technical processes and associated costs involved in each of these aspects will be discussed by pulling the curtain back on some selected examples of digital text projects— revealing how they were created, why (or if) they work, and what their goals and motives seem to be. Participants will have a better sense of the options available and steps involved for creating digital text and thus, a better-informed process for determining goals, hopes, and dreams for their own projects. |
| Concurrent Breakout Sessions: As a part of the selection process, material condition as well choices related to the digitization setup and use of metadata are all weighed. In this presentation, participants will learn about material handling and preparation for digitization, potential need for conservation work, equipment choices based on material selection and condition as well as the positive benefits of digitization for the original materials. Based on condition of the original, choices related to digital restoration for access will be discussed. This session will discuss successful approaches to finding resources to pay for digital library projects, and it will demonstrate that there really is “fun” in “fundraising.” Using the Grateful Dead Archive as a case study, the presentation will share the strategies used by the University of California, Santa Cruz, Library to acquire the archives of the legendary Grateful Dead band and to raise money to process, digitize, and store this substantial collection. The program will outline lessons learned in the development of outreach models to generate broad interest and stimulate donations for the long-term care of the collection and will highlight techniques for donor identification, cultivation, and stewardship. The presentation will also include discussion of ways in which the Web, social networking, merchandising, and volunteers can contribute to the fundraising process. Why should you give a DAM? The bottom line is: you really should give yourself a DAM. It’s one thing to create thousands of digital images, but quite another to find them again when you need them—and when you do find them you need to know what you are looking at! Digital Asset Management (DAM) has achieved buzzword status in the digital community, and the term is often evoked in diverse and creative ways. Managing our digital assets is indeed a broad topic, with little consensus even among imaging professionals as to the “best practices.” DAM systems can cost from nothing to millions of dollars to implement, and they can sit on a single desktop computer or be spread over multiple servers worldwide. It can be fairly simple to implement a DAM, or it can be vastly complex. This session will detail why it is essential to implement a DAM at some level and will provide an overview of options available—both large and small. We will discuss types of DAM systems, descriptive metadata schemas, security models, integration with collection management systems, and the role of a DAM in digital preservation. Awaken your inner librarian and discover the joys of managing your digital assets. |
Essentials of Delivery Systems While there is no single “best” solution for delivering digital content online, there are a number of opportunities, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. This session will examine the interrelationship among content creation, management, and delivery and discuss some strategies to consider when developing a digital content delivery system. As we go, we will discuss some specific software and technology systems that manage and deliver digital content. We will also look at some examples of how the “What should I do?” question has been answered at a variety of institutions from libraries to archives and cultural heritage institutions. |
Day Three: Friday, May 29 |
Applying Copyright Law: A Practitioner's Perspective When selecting material for digitization, copyright law can be an area of great uncertainty and risk. Even in the best of circumstances, the copyright status of some material, or the legality of a repository making the material available on the Web, will be uncertain. The safest course would be to severely limit the type of material made available via the Web, even though this approach might be in opposition to a broader institutional mission. This session will explore the strategies a digitization program can follow to minimize the risks inherent when publishing material on the Web. It will present a workflow that you can use to help you assess copyright issues in selected works. It will also discuss what options you have to protect your own interests in digitized work. Throughout, the presentation will emphasize that digitization project managers need to work with their administrators to establish a mutually acceptable level of institutional risk. |
Concurrent Sessions: Local public libraries are increasingly required to digitize historical materials, often with limited resources. South Pasadena Public Library, a small city public library serving 25,000 residents, was able to digitize over 300 local history images from its collection through the California State Local History Digital Resources Program (LHDRP) and publish them online through the California Digital Library 's Online Archive of California (OAC) and Calisphere Web sites. The resources will also be available via the South Pasadena Public Library Web site. Paula Knop will share South Pasadena's experiences with the digitization initiative, including project management, developing the grant application, working with a community Advisory Committee, selecting images and addressing copyright concerns, working with a scanning vendor, cataloguing and metadata, and publicity. Adrian Turner of the California Digital Library will provide background on the Local History Digital Resources Program and the assistance it provides to libraries, including funding, training, scanning, use of a shared content creation tool (CONTENTdm), online publication, digital preservation, and technical support and consultation. The session will focus on practical aspects of the digitization process and provide plenty of time for questions. Since the objects in a botanical research collection are pressed plants and not documentary in nature, they present a challenge to present online. However, these specimens and the information associated with them are of great interest to other researchers and often to the general public. Scientists from the San Diego Natural History Museum have been exploring and collecting plants and animals in Baja California for more than a hundred years. In addition to hundreds of thousands of specimens, they have amassed associated field notes, photographic slides and prints, maps, drawings, publications, and other documents. Beginning with scattered projects in the 1990s—mostly using volunteer labor—to digitize data for purposes of managing the collection and photographs in order to preserve them, the Botany Department began to accumulate enough digital resources to be interesting to people outside the museum. In 2007 the Museum’s Botany Department began making its data, photos, and documents available via its Baja Flora Web site and recently expanded its role to serve as a clearinghouse for a consortium of institutions on both sides of the border conducting botanical research in the region. Panel Discussion: Collaboration |
Concurrent Sessions: When your department’s mission statement is to “provide accurate information and maximize access to municipal government,” it seems like a no-brainer that online information is a good thing. It provides both internal and external customers with access to important documents from the comfort of their home— or at least from the venue of their choosing—when it’s convenient for them to access those documents. But does the definition of “public record” deserve some scrutiny when access to that information is expanded exponentially? And when does a strict “best practices” approach to records management require some modification? Where do cost and “user” requirements factor into design and access issues? Liz will recount a seemingly straightforward expansion of public access that starts in one place, journeys through the questions raised above, and ends in a place that wasn’t considered at the outset, but that ultimately met both customer needs and process requirements far better than imagined. In a world of limited resources and an increasing public appetite for both service and access, creative solutions and compromise can provide the vehicle for moving forward and overcoming perceived obstacles. Case Study: California Border Region Digitization Project: 1870 – 1939 The primary goal of the LSTA-funded California Border Region Digitization Project: 1870 – 1939 was to improve public access to the earliest images in the San Diego Historical Society’s photograph collection. The Booth Historical Photograph Archives is a vast and diverse collection containing prints and negatives of all formats and types from 1870 to the present. It was from this collection that 3,500 images were chosen to be scanned and catalogued as part of this project. These images were then made accessible on the Online Archive of California (OAC) and Calisphere Web sites. Though many lessons were learned from an earlier project of a similar size, California Explores the Ocean, which was completed in 2001 in conjunction with the University of San Diego, there were still more lessons to be learned on this project. Therese James, former Registrar and Director of Cataloging for the San Diego Historical Society (currently Assistant Registrar with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego), and Chris Travers, Director of the Booth Historical Photograph Archives, will discuss defining the project, image selection, seeking input from consultants, project management, working with an outside scanning vendor, quality control, metadata, what went right, and what didn’t go as planned on a project of this size. Panel Discussion: Rights Management |
Digital Preservation Projects: Present and Future Directions This presentation will focus on current trends in digital preservation projects. Using the Chronopolis Project, funded by the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), the discussion will examine several key elements, including:
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NEDCC gratefully acknowledges support for its preservation services by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this conference do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. |