from geekandpoke

I’m just in the midst of reading this ITHAKA S+R report on the sustainability of digital “projects.” It’s one of those reports where the basic ideas are so simple, but you didn’t realize that you knew them until you read it. Among the things that they suggest are vital to sustainability of projects:

• Dedicated and entrepreneurial leadership (this could also be ongoing leadership: how many digitization projects do you know of that fell apart or became static after the project manager left)?
• A clear value proposition (as in clear evidence of the value of the project)
• Minimizing direct costs (hello appropriate outsourcing!)
• Developing diverse revenue sources (of course that’s a dirty word in some parts of the academy)
• Clear accountability and metrics for success

The question I am increasingly coming to grips with is: In an era of “Do More with Less” what priority does digitization take in the grand scheme of library work? Especially since a lot of us are still out there at the grass roots level trying to raise support. We know that there is a future for this material, but in some cases our faculty don’t yet fully realize what they can do with it (Digital Humanists aside). They may be pleased to be able to replicate as much of their traditional research paradigm online as they can, but it’s hard to argue that we need twice as many resources so we can provide redundant online and in-house services. The small but growing field of Digital Humanities can be effective partners, but they are just one group. Even our own fellow librarians may not be able to grasp how it is more than “putting pictures online”.

In the face of possibly taking another 10% budget cut here that will reduce the staff even further, is digitization the priority? If we do have to cut back, what do we deem the essential activities:

• Digitization, but less robust metadata
• Digitization and metadata but little to no preservation activity
• Very limited further development of repository tools (this includes both public and administrative tools)

Obviously, a lot of work done by the digital curation communities (DigCCurr, DCC, and ICPSR being among the most prominent) can be a guide, but studies of sustainability seem to reinforce the idea that we can’t cut back, that the only way to ensure that these materials meet their potential is to continue to invest resources into maintaining them, and even to increase those resources into the future. So instead of cutting back as above, should I as project manager begin looking into more diverse and creative ways to find funding outside of my organization’s budget? Is it time to create the “digital swear jar” that Ann and I used to joke about (in which we would put an online donation link in the repository and ask people to donate a dollar every time they swore)?

By Flickr user cdw9

I had the distinct pleasure of attending three RDA webinars in the last month and found them alternately informative, entertaining and frustrating. Here’s the lowdown:

Informative: The quality and knowledge of the speakers was great. Having a basic understanding of all of the concepts, I was not overwhelmed but got a greater view into some specifics of RDA that I was lacking. There has obviously been a lot of attention to RDA in the Tech Services world, but not as much in Digital Collections-y worlds, I guess because we probably don’t always deal as directly with the big thugs like MARC and AACR2. However, I’ve been wondering for a while now why more digital libraries (especially open-source and homegrown ones like ours) are doing more experiments with RDA, RDF, and especially linked data. Here at ECU we grab a lot of records from the catalog and cataloguers create the metadata in our MODS/METS records, so we are not immune to this change. I am really anxious for us to do something in this vein. The possibilities for broadening the use of our repository and for enriching it are just too good to ignore.

Entertaining: Again while the presenters were great, the entertaining part was to be found in the simultaneous chat. Now I don’t want to be uncharitable towards my colleagues, but there were comments there that were so clichéd and clueless I thought it had to be sarcasm. I’m not trying to stifle debate or legitimate dissent, but arguing that maybe libraries purposely SHOULDN’T keep up with the times to preserve our “ambience” and saying in one breath that cataloguers were too busy to learn new things and in the next that they were afraid they were no longer needed (but of course the idea of learning to skills to remain viable in a new information environment was out of the question), was astonishing to me. However, the entertainment soon led to…

Frustrating: I’m not the only one in library-land to have ended up slightly bewildered by the reaction at this webinar. My own frustration had a few different sources:

1. It was unfortunate that many of the participants did not have a firm grasp of concepts like FRBR, the difference between data standards (XML, RDF) and content standards (RDA, AACR2), and individual metadata standards (Dublin Core). The webinar introduced concepts but didn’t cover them in depth and the resulting confusion led to a lot of misinterpretation.
2. I wished that there were separate webinars for those with differing levels of expertise, and with different job functions. I’m all for cataloguers having a basic understanding of data formats and system designers understanding content standards, but perhaps addressing the needs of each separately would have been more productive.
3. On the other hand, it’s not like RDA was dreamed up yesterday. If you are a professional in this field and you don’t get it by now, it’s not like there haven’t been plenty of opportunities.
4. Finally, I think some of the examples of this great new information environment do more harm than good. The attendees get too stuck on individual examples of what could be done, pick apart it’s flaws, and perceive it as a threat to “THE CATALOG.” Meanwhile, the point is to make the catalog BETTER. There were multiple comments on data deluge and the importance of catalogs due to some of the examples used (mashups of data from multiple sources), demonstrating that participants were so caught on that they missed the central message…that the changes will make catalogs easier to use, for both librarian and user.

Of course there is plenty of frustration on the side of the debate, obvious to anyone familiar with the petition against the RDA test which grew out of OCLC-CAT discussions. *sigh…

Be sure to checkout the Continuing the Conversation posts about the webinars at the ALA Techsource blog.

Let Me Tell You about My Grandpa: a Content Analysis of User Annotations to Online Archival Collections by Jessica Sedgwick, Archivist for Women in Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

(I’ve just been informed, as well, that this presentation was actually given at SAA last year)…

The research presented investigates how users interact with digital archives when they are given the facility to comment. The results of her analysis are interesting. While I’ve observed the same things, I’ve never thought about quantifying it like this. I think it’s also interesting that the site with the sparsest metadata had the highest number of comments, but the site with the most metadata had the highest proportion of corrections.

Anyway, just for your reading pleasure…

Recently, I’ve been mulling over a collection we’re in the process of digitizing through our ASGII grant. It’s a group of 1960s urban development reports from our state publications collection. Partially funded through a federal urban planning grant under the Housing Act of 1954, these reports were the product of efforts by the Division of Community Planning under the North Carolina Department of Conservation (now the Department of Environment and Natural Resources). These reports deal with local areas – counties, towns, and even lakes or neighborhoods. They have titles like “Land use plan, Goldsboro, North Carolina” and “Population and economy of Forest City, N.C.”

Have your eyes glazed over yet? Here’s the issue – these reports are great! Urban planners went out and scrutinized a community, reporting back with demographics, maps, photographs, personal interviews, and projections for the future that included jaunty stick figures walking down updated main streets. The reports talk about areas of urban blight, have high level surveys of historic buildings, and even include soil and traffic maps. If you want to see what downtown Graham was like in 1967 (someone does, right?) and what they predicted for that area at that point in time, these reports are a valuable resource. The materials inside could really be of interest to genealogists, archaeologists, historians, local leaders – all user groups whose eyes will probably slide right over the words “land use plan.”

So what have I been mulling over? How do we draw people into a collection like this? More specifically: with mass digitization, or even moderately-large-scale digitization, how do we leverage information inside of digital objects when the usual amount of metadata won’t cut it? In some ways, this is the traditional archival processing conundrum of item-level vs. folder-level vs. collection-level description. But I’m not trying to justify item-level description here, I’m trying to bend my brain to think of ways we can draw the inside information out.

My first thoughts centered on doing some TLD (tender loving description) on the maps, which represent a pretty significant and useful subset of pages within these reports. But that sort of care isn’t something I believe should be part of our priorities here. Then I thought “What I really need is more progressive OCR and presentation of digitized statistics.” This sort of technology development is pretty well beyond my current capabilities and resources. Finally, I pondered the current go-to idea for digital librarians: tagging and other social phenomena that shift some of the description burden to the users. While interesting in many respects, it wouldn’t get me the high quality, across-the-board coverage I’m after (assuming our users would even help us out).

As you can see, my first reaction is to throw more words at this challenge. I think we sometimes try to tack on as much metadata as we can, as quickly as we can, all in the hopes of vying for fickle user attention. I’m not sure throwing words at the items or the users is truly the most effective way to make inroads into our digital collections, but I certainly haven’t figured out what the most effective way is. I’m still negotiating the line between a level of curatorial care that I don’t believe we can or should maintain, and the library equivalent of those web pages that simply load their white space with words to catch the search engines. I’m sure these urban development reports won’t be the last things I see that make me think “There’s great stuff in here!” I’m sure some librarian standing in front of a stack of scrolls thought the same thing. What I’m not sure about, but am still working on, is how to get that inside information out.

I think the simple, sensible North Carolina Dublin Core schema is a great starting place for any discussion about sharing metadata and digital objects among repositories in the state. Is anyone actively mapping your fields to this? (Then again, the schema is simple enough that it could be done after the fact, but I’m curious anyway about whether or not people are looking at NCDC.)

Which leads to my next question: who’s sharing metadata, and who are you sharing it with? Some UNC collections (but not all, at least not yet) are harvested by OAI, which is fantastic, though OAI, like WorldCat, has the potential to get so large that only pretty specific searches or very patient browsing are rewarded. It would be great if, in addition to OAI and other national union catalogs, we could share metadata among North Carolina digital collections. Many of us are publishing materials that strongly complement (and in a few instances, duplicate) the work that others are doing. If we just shared among ourselves (that is, collections focusing on North Carolina content), would we be able to use a shared schema that is more robust than some of the national initiatives Gretchen mentioned earlier? I’m not suggesting we try to duplicate or avoid some of the bigger efforts, but if we start amongst ourselves, would that be more achievable, or would we be better off just sticking with the existing/emerging standards already out there?

• how do you move from an initial catalog record (such as MARC or EAD) to your final metadata format, and is the record enhanced along the way?
• for metadata that’s created from scratch (or from a non-digitized record, such as a catalog card), where’s the first place data is entered?
• how do you incorporate metadata from different departments in your institution (such as the descriptive metadata that might come from cataloging and preservaton metadata from digitization staff)?
• and, for those of you working on collaborative projects, how do you bring in metadata from partners?

I don’t mean this to sound like a formal survey as much as just a place to start the discussion. I know we all want to end with elegant, portable METS records (if we’re using METS), but I suspect we all take different routes to get there.

1. their architecture (physical)
2. their librarians (departments)
3. their collections (special -> digital)

The most flexible and adaptable of these differentiating factors, then, will most likely be our websites and digitized items (eventually, perhaps, our “linked data”). Certainly the physical architecture of the libraries will change most slowly, but with an average website “face-lift” occurring — let’s say — every three years, presently it may actually be the case that the average time frame of personnel shift amongst libraries/departments is approximately equal to any major attention lavished on the website and/or the addition/migration of major digitized collections. But soon, surely, it will be indisputable that it’s our digital collections alone that will be our most adaptable differentiating factor.

As such, it will equally be the most powerful method to level the variances between our libraries (think “open source software”) and, paradoxically, also the most powerful method to differentiate our libraries (think local developments on top of “open source software”). Furthermore, though our digitized surrogates will certainly retain the provenance of their real-world counterparts by means of metadata, my contention is that in the eventual wake of the mass digitization of special collections, major research libraries will only be distinguishable by — not three — but just two things:

1. their architecture
2. their librarians

And so, as our most unique resources become de-referenceable, these acts will slowly but eventually erase all differences in our collections (barring, of course, or perhaps only being slowed by, forced authentication and registration of online “researchers”) and return libraries to a pre-website state.

Rather than being feared, however, this should be our ultimate goal. Though universities will certainly retain their differences and specialties, the special collections of the libraries (those available online) will become the collections of all (of course, libraries will still need to maintain these collections, but it’s likely that they’ll perform this as a shared and proportionally balanced duty).

I should clarify, though: being returned to a “pre-website state” will not mean that a library will suddenly cease to exist online. Rather, the library’s online existence will no longer be controlled and contained, at least not in the same manner (and the site, as we know it now, might simply not need to exist).   And this, finally, brings me back to Flickr, a small but timely example of the changes ahead.

But first, I should say, I had little to no experience with Flickr when setting out to include a sample of ECU’s digital collections  (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ecu_digital_collections). I mention this at the onset to highlight Flickr’s ease of use and, also, the potential reasoning behind my false steps along the way, especially since I ended up working through the necessary steps in, literally, a backward fashion.

What follows is a bullet-list summary of my experience in the process so far (and please feel free to ask me about any particulars).

Basic steps:

• Requested a free, non-commericial API from Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/services/api/)
• Selected public domain/copyright free items to share
• Batched and resized images to save space (wanted to be under the free account’s 100 MB/month cap)
• Wrote an XSLT stylsheet to remove just a few pieces of data from our METS record
  1. Title
  2. Description
  3. Date
  4. Persistent URL
• Added just one or two tags to each image based on “format” and “virtual collection” (opted not to add our subjects as tags or to display them at all)
• Used a text editor to take the output and put into a Python file, generally making sure that I wrapped strings in triple quotes
• Finally, I used “Beej’s Python Flickr API kit” for the mass upload and user authentication

Next steps:

• Update my old images with “machine tags“, as I neglected this in my first round
• Add a new set (the free account lets you have up to three)
• Get the Pro account
• Use the API to funnel the comments and tags from Flickr to our site, thereby linking user-supplied data from this Flickr image to that same image in our digital repository, which doesn’t yet have that comment or tag.
• Join The Commons on Flickr if approved

And things to consider if you set up a Flickr account:

• Don’t select a birthday that would make you under 18, or else you’ll need to use a credit card to verify parental consent (as if that alone won’t make everyone underage grow up quite quickly)
• If you’re using a free account, remember that though you’re able to upload 100MB a month, only your 200 most recent images will be displayed

Some interesting Library/Flickr articles to read:

• Historical Photos in Web Archives Gain Vivid New Lives by Noam Cohen
• Developing an Academic Image Collection with Flickr by Jeremy McWilliams

And finally:

As our collections continue to disperse in the digital age, and as our collections begin to arrive in a predominately digital format, it’s my hope that we’ll be able to receive donations that can be shared online without restrictions.

At the same time, SAA and archivists in general will need to vigilantly campaign against the potential misappropriation of our collections. Though commercial partners and vendors might not offer to digitize our special collections for free, they will certainly come knocking on the doors soon enough, explaining that they can host our vast collections; but in this respect I hope that we do not yield. If we do, we’ll surely trap not only our libraries, but also our users; and, being a trap, the situation won’t come equipped with something as user-friendly as the Flicrk API to permit the free passport of our collections and users. Certainly, then, there’s no reason that we shouldn’t already be imagining the equivalent of the Hathi Trust for our special collection materials.

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.