• Duke Digital Collections asking for input on the redesign of their web interface (no comments yet; let’s get going!)
• UNC Libraries’ request for feedback on the newly-launched Hugh Morton digital collection in CONTENTdm

And yes, this is a sneaky way for me to publicize the Morton digital library….

Carolina Digital Library and Archives has broken ground on a new digital project, “Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway,” which will constitute a new chapter in the ever-growing digital publishing program Documenting the American South. This project will present the history of the North Carolina portion of the Parkway from the first proposals for its construction in the 1920s to the 75th anniversary of its completion next year. “Driving Through Time” will also benefit from the work done on the recently completed “Going to the Show” project and the ongoing “North Carolina Maps” project. Some of the technologies utilized there—including geo-referencing and map layering—will provide users with an interactive experience. In addition, the hundreds of maps, photographs, postcards, and newspaper clippings drawn from the Blue Ridge Parkway Headquarters, a part of the National Park Service, the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill, and other institutions will be invaluable resources for scholars, students and teachers as well as an enjoyable and educational experience for casual users. Natasha Smith, Project PI, and Elise Moore, Project Manager, will lead this effort. Anne Mitchell Whisnant, author of Super Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History—published by UNC Press—will serve as the scholarly advisor for the project.

In addition to the existing UNC Scribe digitization program, this project will produce the most comprehensive digital collection to date of core North Carolina state government documents, offering researchers a historical view of the development of the state’s government and infrastructure in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It will enrich the lives of citizens of the State of North Carolina by providing online, 24/7 access to vast offerings of historical, geographic, social, and political information using digitization technology developed by the Internet Archive.

Housed in the Digital Production Center of the Carolina Digital Library and Archives, the UNC Library’s Scribe digitization program has contributed over 4,000 titles to the Internet Archive since December 2007. As a result of the Ensuring Democracy through Digital Accessgrant, a second Scribe scanning station will be added to the Library’s digitization program in July 2009.

This project is in keeping with the UNC Library’s strategic goals to support collaborative collection development and investigation of innovative technologies, including large-scale digitization, to become a regional digitization service center for other libraries and archives, especially in North Carolina, and to develop projects and partnerships that emphasize the potential uses of digital content.

We are excited to partner with East Carolina University and the State Library of North Carolina on this project, and to contribute material from our collections and expertise in the digital area.

While many in the profession are understandably skeptical, there’s no doubt that hobbyists are increasingly doing real, important work in making archival resources more available.

I can speak from my experience with the Hugh Morton collection and blog that there is valuable knowledge out there to be tapped, and that it doesn’t always take a “crowd” to make a significant contribution (take, for example, our prolific blog commenter who was successfully converted into an official volunteer, and who now not only comments on posts but also writes them). We also had a fun in-person crowdsourcing event that resulted in oodles of usable identifications.

I can also speak, however, to the difficult and time-consuming nature of wrangling the metadata that comes from public sources. Usually it’s a relatively simple matter to verify an ID, but not always — incorporating such info into “official” metadata could be a full-time job.

What do you think? Will archives of the future be hiring “Metadata Outreach Specialists”? Maybe those of you who accept comments on your digital collections can reflect on how it’s gone so far?

The first dealt with legal and ethical issues surrounding digitization. While I was prepared for a lot of information about copyright, I was surprised by a lively and enlightening discussion of privacy…something that I have not seen addressed in many other forums.

The second symposium addressed “The sustainability of Large-Scale Digitization of Manuscript Collections.” I arrived expecting to discuss the difficulties many of us are facing in creating long-lasting digitization programs, but instead found that a large portion of the day addressed the mass digitization of books with presenters John Wilkin of Michigan, Oya Rieger of Cornell, and Liz Bishoff of BCR. While they noted that many of the materials being scanned this way are in fact from “Special Collections” in libraries, they are doing a fundamentally different thing (in my opinion!) than the mass digitization of manuscript material.

All of this is not to criticize the coordinators of the symposium — as I’ve found in just about every other venue, when Google Books is in the room, it attains a Paris Hilton-like level of notoriety. Rather, I bring this up to raise the question of why it is fundamentally different?

There are of course the obvious reasons: formats, lack of MARC metadata. Then there are the what I’ll call context-related reasons of archival organization which make fitting into the item-level mold difficult. But I think what is most interesting are the infrastructure reasons: namely, what constitutes “mass” digitization of special collections at all and how our online systems support the presentation and sharing of this information.

The final panel of the syposium featured the excellent Collections Online project at the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art, who have come closest to defining what mass digitization of special collections can really mean. By forsaking item-level metadata, they’ve recreated the experience of browsing through their physical collections in the online environment. The amount of material they have created, while not rivaling that of of Google, is impressive. But more remarkable is the viewpoint they have taken: that digitization of this material isn’t “special” isn’t a “project”, it’s day to day work. Therefore, since they would not describe items in their analog collection at the item level, they do not do so in the online version (providing navigation through the finding aid instead). While I’m not sure that this is the answer at my own institution, thinking of the whole, rather than the parts is what is impressive. In my opinion, it is part of what gives it “mass.”

The issue of sharing was also much discussed at the forum, both in the sense of sharing digitization services and in sharing information in a more open way. John Wilkin made the point more than once that libraries in general need to think outside the box of the ILS. A point of view shared by many of our colleagues, and indeed, one which even has a catchy name attached: the Next Generation Catalog. But where is the next generation catalog for special collections and digital collections?

One reason that Google Books and Internet Archive have been successful, (and, I believe, one reason their mass digitization works) is that they have created a “union catalog” that is universal and reusable to some extent. Google has even done some opening up of their data and offering of APIs to reuse it. So how would a “union catalog” for special collections even work? I know this is a pipe dream anyway, but how would we even began to share on a larger level? Do we have standards in place for this to work? What kinds of APIs would we want for digital collections?

Plan of the City of Durham, N.C., circa 1887

Brian’s post on services dovetails neatly with a topic I had planned to broach — the increasing use of interactive maps in digital projects. According to the 2009 Horizon Report Brian linked to, the time-to-adoption horizon for “geo-everything” is 2 to 3 years, but I would argue that we’re ahead of the game here in North Carolina, at least for geo-some things. One primo example is UNC’s North Carolina Maps project (see above) — a comprehensive, online collection of historic maps of NC, featuring maps from the North Carolina State Archives, the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill, and the Outer Banks History Center. In addition to providing online access to the original maps, this project implements a very cool “Historic Overlay Map functionality” (click on the “Interactive” tab, and be sure to mess around with fading the map in and out and trying different Google Map views).

This overlay tool was developed in the Carolina Digital Library and Archives for another exciting, yet-to-be launched project entitled “Going to the Show,” which will document the experience of moviegoing in North Carolina in the early twentieth century. According to a project summary:

This project has three dimensions: a searchable, relational database containing an inventory of more than 1,000 documented commercial movie theaters in operation in all towns and cities in the state from 1907 to 1930 and an inventory of all African American theaters in North Carolina through the 1950s; 650 digitized and geo-referenced Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps from 1896 to 1922, representing the central business districts of 44 North Carolina cities and towns within which movie theaters and movie going were situated; and digitized versions of a range of documentary materials and accompanying historical commentary (photographs, city directory listings, architectural drawings, postcards, newspaper ads and articles) for individual theaters in selected communities.

Going to the Show will be one of a few free, web-based, public sources for state-wide collections of original Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps and will serve everybody in North Carolina, in the country, and in the world . . . a large component of this project involves experimenting with new and exciting GIS technologies, and as such, we will showcase our early interactive prototypes, including our web interface, which uses the GoogleMaps API and AJAX technology, as well as our stand-alone GoogleEarth objects.

Meanwhile, I have big plans (perhaps bigger than I can achieve) for developing an interactive map for the Hugh Morton photos. It’s likely to involve Google Maps, but another option would be something home-grown, like what Duke did with its Sidney Gamble collection. I heard, though, that this was really time-consuming to develop. Perhaps the Duke folks can shed some light on that?

What are some other geo-related tools being developed by NC digital librarians?

To begin this information sharing among NC digital collections programs, we thought it might be best to start with some kind of web-based communication. We thought having a group blog might be a good way to facilitate this info sharing. The group blog will comment on a trackback to posts from existing blogs (like View to Hugh or Duke Digital Collections blog), as well as allow for authoring posts on digital collections issues for sharing and discussion. If we generate enough interest, we could consider some meet-ups, possibly in conjunction with NCLA or SNCA meetings, or even creating a new interest group for these organizations.

If you work in digital collections in North Carolina, or just interested in the subject, please join in the discussion.

Enjoy!