The grant allowed WFU and FCPL to purchase equipment for five digitization centers at library locations throughout Forsyth County (Z. Smith Reynolds Library and four FCPL locations: Central Library, Walkertown Branch Library, Lewisville Branch Library, and the Malloy/Jordan East Winston Heritage Center). In addition, it provided funding for guest speakers to do preservation and digitization instruction in a day-long workshop format. The first of the five workshops was a pilot, followed by another session reserved for members of local community organizations (postcard announcements were sent to everyone from the Afro-American Genealogical and Historical Society to the local railroad history appreciation society). Subsequent sessions were open to the general public.

One thing we recognized after the sessions became open to the public was a strong interest in preservation and digitization. Community members brought in yearbooks, photo albums, family bibles, and other items as well as lots of questions about how to use the flatbed scanner, VHS to digital converter, audio cassette to digital converter, and slide scanner. Barry Davis, Digital Production Coordinator at ZSR, helped create online guides to using the equipment and will be posting online videos demonstrating both physical preservation and how to use the equipment. Local families, history societies, and organizations hold small but valuable records of our community’s past — and they want to preserve them.

After demonstrating the use of the digitization equipment, the public was informed that they could participate in Digital Forsyth by sharing their digital and digitized photos through the Digital Forsyth Flickr group (also available through the Digital Forsyth community page). The group’s page notes that images may be harvested for use in Digital Forsyth. We ask participants to post other formats to YouTube, Internet Archive, and Scribd, since we do not provide storage space for these materials. These local digital collections, ideally, can be shared in multiple ways. Training for how to use the equipment will continue through the Forsyth County Computer Training Bridge at various locations around the county.

With the grant wrapping up at the end of this month, I have had time to reflect on how I think the project could have been improved. While organizations and the general public were thrilled with free seminars about hands-on preservation, organization, and digitization, we did not spend much time talking about what would be done with materials post-digitization. Concepts like metadata and digital storage are only briefly touched upon and could be emphasized in the future. In addition, there is still potential for the community to participate in a larger version of Digital Forsyth that collocates multiple digital formats to preserve the many layers of this area’s history and culture. In sum, it has been a joy to experience firsthand the effort to include personal collections and community-based archives in the discussion about digitization.

The project puts online more than 7,000 images taken for the local newspaper, mostly between the late 40s and late 60s. It’s actually kind of a unique collection, since lots of material from this date is all locked up in copyright restrictions.

Although we are kind of trying to get to the point where adding a new collection isn’t all that big of a deal (for example, we also launched three other “collections” in the last month), this one was a little different. First, it makes up roughly 2/3 of the entire digital collection. Second, it’s the result of the first year of a two-year grant project (partially supported with federal LSTA funds made possible through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, administered by the State Library of North Carolina, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources), and finally it’s got it’s own look and feel and lots of contextual features.

The greatest thing for us, is that it is actually just part of Digital Collections, so all the content is findable in our main portal and when you are surfing through the Seeds of Change site, you can easily bounce back to the main site. No more silos! (at least between these two collections…baby steps, you know). This is another example of our overall philosophy of trying to build one great infrastructure so that collections can be as customized (or not) as we want them to be.

Anyway, enough babbling, please check it out and let us know what you think!

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.

I think of mass digitization as scanning from A to Z, churning through large quantities of volumes with little or no thought to selection. This idea may be colored a bit by my understanding of Google’s approach to digitization, which has meant, more or less: Find some libraries, agree on some terms (that seem to mostly benefit Google), and start scanning whatever makes its way from the shelf to the cart to the scanner’s hands. I don’t think I’m alone in this belief. In 2006, for example, Karen Coyle defined the phrase as the “conversion of whole libraries without making a selection of individual materials.”

ECU, the Digital Information Management Program at the State Library, and UNC-Chapel Hill’s CDLA were just awarded an NC ECHO grant to digitize 165,000 pages (about 2,500 volumes) of historic state documents over the next two years. That’s pretty large scale for North Carolina. Heck, it’s pretty large scale for just about anyone (minus the big players – Cornell, Michigan, et al.). So, is it mass digitization?

Compared to Google’s approach, ECU, SLNC, and UNC have (and will continue to) carefully vet the books that will get digitized as part of the grant. The best copy from the three institutions will find its way onto the Scribe book scanner, and ultimately into the American Libraries section of the Internet Archive’s website. We have selected books based on priorities defined through a survey of state agency personnel, by representatives from depository libraries around the state, and from librarians working closely with these materials. Once scanned, each volume will undergo careful quality control to ensure that the best digital capture possible was performed. Full color reproductions, no fingers covering text, no missing pages.

It is our hope to create and provide public access to the best and largest “virtual collection” of historic North Carolina state documents. All of this means a lot of work and care will need to go into the project. But, it also means working fast to ensure that the scanners always have another volume to grab off the cart. It means that many, many books will be available in a short period of time.

But, does it mean “mass digitization”? Stepping waaaaay back and looking at libraries, Google, and similar book digitization undertakings, it is safe to say, I think, that the collective “we” are, in fact, mass digitizing books. If, however, we put that “we” under a microscope to look at all of the individual digitization programs around the library world, our approaches lose their uniformity. I think too many of us care too much about the quality of output and the artifactual nature of the volumes. We are constrained by the per-page scanning costs to even consider the Google approach. So, we’re all finding our own way to digitize what we can, however we can, to the best of our institution’s abilities, whether that’s hundreds of thousands of pages per year or just a couple of books.

I guess I’m proposing a synthesis of traditional librarianship and large scale digitization. In addition to greater access that the Google model offers, how about incorporating our role as collection curators into this mix? Call me what you will, but I like the collective nature of the library world’s approach to digitization. It might take a little longer, it probably won’t be the largest collection, and some might even consider our approach “precious” at times. But, in the end, I think, just as we have always done, we’ll create the most useful collection of resources for the broadest audience of researchers.

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?