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He’s written a series of tutorials on using the new Google Maps API, which he’s expanded into the recently published book: Beginning Google Maps API 3. All of the code demonstrated in the book is available for free download. I wish I’d had this book when I’d started the project – it would have saved a great deal of trial and error on my part. The author says that even those without much web development experience should be able to get a Google Map up and running. While I don’t disagree with this, the author introduces some advanced JavaScript fairly early in the book. Library staff members can follow the tried and true, copy and paste method, but some of the concepts, like anonymous and self-executing functions, might leave them scratching their heads a bit.

The author begins with a brief history of the Google Maps API and then takes a detour into upgrading from Version 2 of the API to Version 3, which the author recommends skipping if you don’t have any legacy applications to upgrade. However, I found it a useful general overview of the concepts discussed later in the book.

The rest of the book starts with the development of a very simple map. Then each chapter builds on the previous chapter in terms of map features and complexity; including such common mapping tasks as creating clickable markers that open information bubbles and creating polylines and polygons, used to create such things as driving directions, or to highlight specific geographical areas. The author follows the pattern of introducing a chapter’s main concepts and then working through them bit by bit, ending each chapter with the completed code for that chapter. I found this practice quite helpful as I didn’t have to flip back and forth as I have in other technical books to figure out the totality of what was going on.

The author also discusses several other often used features such as using Google’s
Geocoding service to find a user’s location as well as how to create custom markers. One particularly useful feature the author discusses deals with maps with large number of markers, anything above 1000, at which point a map’s performance starts to seriously degrade, particularly in Internet Explorer. This was something I ran up against very early in the development process. The author discusses the pro and cons of the various methods to deal with this problem, enabling a developer to easily choose the one that’s right for his or her particular application without having to code up each option and see what happens.

The book concludes with a very helpful overview of the API features discussed in the book, going over exactly how to use each class and method.

One concept I wish had been discussed in the book was dynamic sidebars, where a user can click a sidebar link to open the info window for a particular point. I found this one of the trickiest parts of developing our application.

All in all, I’d highly recommend Beginning Google Maps API 3 to those looking to develop Google Maps applications with the new API. It’s clearly written with lots of examples and pictures of exactly what the code’s output looks like. If you’re merely looking to embed the location of your library/institution in a Google Map this book is definitely overkill. However, if you plan on working on anything beyond the very basics this book is a definite plus. It will be particularly helpful to those with some previous JavaScript experience.

This report describes blight in Hamlet, NC.

This is the collection I hinted at way back in March (and yes, I’m as enthusiastic about these reports today as I was then).  I haven’t come up with any secrets regarding how to quickly and efficiently draw people to what’s inside; most of my ideas involve a lot of loving description, as I speculated months back. For now, I’m relying on a relatively straightforward web site and word of mouth.

We’re still in the process of scanning and uploading materials, but there’s plenty for people to explore at this point. We won’t get through scanning all of the printed reports as a part of this grant project, but should end up with at least 200-250 in the collection.

I’ve listed some complementary North Carolina collections and resources on the “More Resources” page, but if you know of and can recommend any others send them my way and I’ll make sure they get on the site.  As always, we’d love any feedback you might have.

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…

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.

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.

Content, appearance, and functionality are all being addressed in the overhaul, which is planned to begin this summer and continue for the next year or so. Changes will be prioritized based on feedback from users. We’re hoping to spread the word about the survey, and so I am posting about it here (although it may be slightly off topic) in hopes that readers will (1) take the survey and (2) share the survey with others, especially K12 and undergraduate educators and students. By filling out the brief online survey about interests or information needs as they relate to North Carolina, we hope it will help to improve the eNCyclopedia.

Separate surveys have been developed for adults and for students.

• The main survey, for researchers, librarians, educators and other adults may be found online at http://tinyurl.com/ncency.
• The survey for students is available at http://tinyurl.com/ncstudent.

The surveys will be open through Sunday, June 21, 2009. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Michelle Czaikowski at the State Library (Michelle.Czaikowski@ncdcr.gov).

This work is relevant for several reasons. Someday, these contemporary documents will be historical documents. That is, if they exist at all. If they are not saved, our history goes with them. That’s just a simple fact. But the value of this work goes far deeper. I mean, we preserve the physical (read: paper) copy of the Declaration of Independence to ensure that we do not forget our ideals of democratic government; we preserve Abraham Lincoln’s letters not only as a testament to his strength, influence, and unconquerable spirit, but also for the historical importance of their content in documenting the activities of a sitting president. It is no less important to preserve the intellectual output of our public servants today because they create it with computers and not quill pens. In 2008, we elected the first female governor in North Carolina’s history. Shouldn’t her tenure be documented and saved?

On another level, this work is important for those who cannot (or can no longer) afford to travel to pursue their research. Because of budget cuts, many of us cannot travel right now, no matter how important it is to the work we do. This will continue to worsen before it gets better. For researchers, limiting funds for travel can be devastating. Content offered through digital repositories can play a huge part in aiding these patrons. And, as more researchers opt for online over in-person visits, many of us have begun tracking their needs and digitizing in response to them.

The problem is that many libraries around the country are facing significant budget and staffing cuts. Our own Library is, as well. The funny thing is that many indicators* point to library usage increasing during economic downturns. In this era of online everything, will our web stats increase as much, or more, than our turnstile counts? And if so, are we ready to respond to that usage? How do we offer the services that patrons need with a smaller budget and fewer staff? I’m betting on our online services to help us weather this storm. And, we’ll continue to do our part in preserving democracy by providing free access to government information.

* See, for instance, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008630228_libraries15.html, http://www.wickedlocal.com/braintree/archive/x511410985/Library-use-booms-during-economic-downturn, http://www.stevenspointjournal.com/article/20081215/SPJ0101/812150372/1657, and http://blog.njla.org/archives/2009/01/

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.