Here’s where we need your help (and I was able to work in reference to the term “crowdsourcing”).

We need a name that makes it clear that we aren’t NC ECHO, the Digital Heritage Center, or NC State (all of which either are in some way related to the State Library or State Archives or have the words “North Carolina” and “State”  in their name). The name should (a) make reference to the Archives & Library or (b) be completely neutral (and I think that we prefer a “neutral”  name as it allows our partnerships to grow, potentially).  We’ll be providing access to the historic and contemporary records and publications of state government (as we do now), and the name needs to reflect that (probably).  These materials can be as diverse as the Library’s 2003 document about prosecuting computer crimes from the Department of Crime Control and Public Safety to the Archives’s Black Mountain College publications and promotional photographs from the Department of Tourism. And, we’re both divisions within the Department of Cultural Resources, so there is some question as to whether we need to work a reference to that in?

Now, I realize that a name containing all of this information would be ridiculous, but I’m providing this information to give you some background.

OK. Let the crowdsourcing begin…

Ms. [Victoria] McCargar [a digital preservation consultant] estimates that 20,000 people work in the field today — plus others in related areas — and she expects that to triple over the next decade, assuming that economic conditions stabilize before long.

I suppose that amidst budget cuts and hiring freezes all over the place, we should consider this good news. I would definitely say there’s a big difference, though, between the jobs of digital collections managers in libraries/archives and those in the private sector, for instance, for “experts on digital copyright and other issues tied to the migration of legal documents from filing cabinets to databases.” The following quote from Jacob Nadal at UCLA struck me:

“We belong to the people of California and hold our collections in trust for them and for future generations of students, scholars and members of the public,” he said. “Public-sector institutions just strike me as far, far cooler. They have better collections, obviously, and they are innovative, connected and challenging in ways that seem more substantial to me.”

I now realize that nearly everything you do like this is going to take a long time, if: a) you want to do it right and b) your institution won’t quit asking you to do other projects!

All joking aside, we are enormously proud of our repository. The guiding principles were:

• one common database and infrastructure that could be utilized for multiple “collections”
• Collections are nice and we do like them, but we will always have “uncollected” items in there and we need to design it so that you can still discover these
• This repository will gather everything digitized for a patron request, for an exhibit, for a book, for preservation, or because it would be cool to digitize it

Based on the above principles we used a back-end XML database (TextML) and a METS/MODS record for every object. In addition, we included Dublin Core records in the METS (scripted from the MODS) for the purposes of OAI harvesting, appropriate admin metatadata (MIX in most cases since we have a lot of images), and even the full text of TEI records when those were available. To date we only have one audio object, but should be ingesting another 20 or so by March.

We had the details of the backend database worked out in the first third of 2008, and then set ourselves to the task of figuring out how to present this stuff to people who would have no idea what the site was, and in many cases, who ECU and Joyner Library were. We took the approach that the site had to invite people into the content — we had to have lots of ways that they could come to page, click on one thing and get to content.

So we created “subject clouds” and created collections post-hoc (i.e. we picked some relevant themes, then looked at what we had and organized them together). Both of these things were created on the premise that the organization of physical items in the library isn’t necessarily the best organization for things on the web. The web can do both more and less than that.

We also provided more tools for navigating through materials once you found some by including hyperlinks in the records, and a faceted drill-down of the subject headings. These, as well as the subject cloud and the organization of the post-hoc collections, were all based on LCSH subject headings. A simple look at size of the facet list or the subject cloud gives you a good indication of both the benefits and drawbacks of this approach. But we figured we would use what we had and I think in some sense it is successful.

What is most interesting to me, is that many of these design elements were things that I’ve been thinking about since my days at UM. Being able to realize them here with a fresh new project was really exciting. Certainly, it isn’t perfect, but I think it’s all too rare in our jobs that we get to come up with an idea, implement it, and then evaluate how it worked out. We are often saddled with maintaining past projects and living within the bounds of past decisions. Of course, admitting that means that I must acknowledge that one day the decisions we’ve made on this project will limit us somewhere else. But I think we’ve created enough leeway and enough to think about, that we should be busy for quite some time.