What is truly ours that’s unique and what do we have an obligation to preserve?
—Frank Somers, Adult Services Librarian, Bethlehem Public Library, New York
Something wonderful may be stored behind a locked door, in a filing cabinet, or in a basement at your institution. You know more people would like to be able to access this material but due to their condition or other issues it is only made available to patrons on request and cotton gloves may be required to handle the item. These materials could be a scrapbook with the photos falling out from use by generations of students or a bound newspaper that may crumble with one more turn of the page. It could be a series of handwritten letters or a collection of photographs that are completely unique to your library. Selecting the material to be digitized may be one of the simplest parts of the digitization process. Every library potentially has something that it wishes to share more broadly but for various reasons cannot. Digitization allows more patrons to see photographs from your collections, or a local history pamphlet, without the risk of damage or loss.
Every step of your digitization process will be determined by the collection. An important question to consider is whether or not the material is too rare to leave the library. There are some materials you may not be willing to trust with the postal service or strangers at a company providing digitization services. It may be a Civil War diary, rare glass-plate photographic negatives, or a painting by a local artist. The item may be too large to safely ship, such as oversized atlases or even furniture. If you are afraid to let an item leave the library you will need to consider the equipment and staff available at your institution.
If your collection is large, such as long runs of newspapers, reports, or rolls of microfilm, outsourcing to a digitization vendor may be an option. Depending on the services offered by a vendor, your library may need to provide descriptive metadata, but scanning and even storage may be handled off-site from your library. Another important question to consider is whether you are willing to trade control of a collection in order to have another entity deal with management of the digital files. If you work with a consortium which hosts the files and provides access, you may not be able to alter metadata yourself. This may be a minor inconvenience when compared to managing the online access or paying for a content management system like CONTENTdm.
The creation of your digital collection will be guided by the reason behind its development and the intended use. Asking yourself why you want to digitize and what you hope to accomplish are an important part of the pre-digitization process. If you are pulling together materials to celebrate an anniversary, subject, or event, your project may have a fixed date of completion with no intention to add to the collection beyond a certain point. You will not need to consistently find funding to add material on an ongoing basis. If the collection is opened with the intention of growing, regular funding, staff and ongoing equipment purchases need to be considered. Some libraries start with a limited plan but will expand to include more materials. Other libraries may be content to have a finished project.
Other considerations:
▪ If the intention is to improve access, how will users locate the collection?
▪ Will there be a link on the library’s main page, in catalog records, or included within a subpage such as “local history”?
▪ What level of metadata will be included to make the materials more searchable, and will text documents have optical character recognition (OCR) allowing searching within the text?
▪ Do you have a plan to promote the collection before and after it is available?
▪ Will there be restrictions to access?
▪ If you are using digitization as a preservation tool, what kinds of digital files will you create and how will you maintain them?
▪ Does your intended audience require any special or unique presentation, access features, or functionality?
▪ Based on your intended audiences, what kind and how much metadata will you need to include for searching and discoverability?
One of the most important issues to consider when looking for a collection to digitize is if the material is unique, rare, or of strong local interest. Photographs, postcards, letters, journals, scrapbooks, newspapers, booklets on local history, high school yearbooks, and other materials may only be found in your library. If the materials were created by a member of your community, the chances are good that yours is the only library which has that material.
A collection is not just a stack of papers or a selection of objects, but also a connection to the community and a story waiting to be told. Strong candidates for digitization include materials that focus on something unique to your city or collection. Many libraries are digitizing materials that are important to the community and in doing so show how much the library values local history, stories, and people.
If you had to evacuate and knew there was a chance your home would be destroyed, what would you take with you? There are a number of lists compiled by government agencies that include radios, food, medication, and water, but what items are irreplaceable? Many people would include photo albums, and a camera or hard drive with documents and photos. Images are important links to the past, a way to leave one’s mark, to document and capture moments fleeting in time. During the creation of a photograph the click of the shutter, the image exposed to film or translated to pixels suggests a level of fidelity. The image is expected to accurately portray the moment and the flaws. Eyes caught in mid-blink and the blur of movement reinforce this sense that the image is true. The interest in the image is enhanced if there is a personal connection. Family photo albums are cherished items, something to be rescued from fires and other disasters as irreplaceable. The value is personal memory caught on paper.
A popular item or collection can be damaged by repeated use. Making the material available online can increase access while reducing the number of hands on the original materials, which can thus be kept more secure. According to Kathy Robins, library information systems coordinator at Billings Public Library in Montana, her best candidate for a digital project was a collection of photos of the “people who came here with the railroad: merchants and bankers and people who started businesses and ranches.” These original images capture the faces of people who came west in hopes of a better life, work, and riches in Montana. Users were required to request these images, which were kept under lock and key, and were then left alone with the photos in the Montana Room. Library staff did not believe they were losing many or any of the images with this arrangement, but they felt that this was not the most secure manner for handling these one-of-a-kind items.
Access to the library’s hundreds of images was limited to patrons who were physically present and knew to ask for them. The library felt the collection “should be available online and also by doing that we would be able to preserve them in case they disappear.” Once digitized, details in photographs can emerge as the viewer zooms in on faces, clothing, shoes, or other objects. Billings Public Library has made available over 600 photographs in the Montana Memory Project. In one photograph, an enlarged portrait of early resident Henry G. Williams reveals the pattern on his tie. In another, a portrait of Mrs. Williams shows a blouse with pleats, two different types of lace, and an intricate broach studded with seed pearls. The images may be useful for those studying fashion and design, but they also reveal personal details. Fraternity pins often indicate social connections. The clothing or favorite pieces of jewelry likely held meaning for the wearer who chose those articles for a formal portrait. Jennie Appelman, an older woman with a heavily lined face and snow-white hair, sports a small jeweled brooch, a corsage of what may be violets and two strands of very small, narrow conical shells.1
The Billings Public Library has helped to preserve the original images by creating digital surrogates. This has improved access by allowing more users to directly access the materials online. This is reflected in the statistic for the collection which shows over 10,000 page views since the collection was made available. Furthermore, now students and researchers can enlarge images to see details and print their own copies.
Digital copies can help reduce wear and tear on original photographs, but in some cases the digital version is created with the goal of saving an image. The materials and processes used to create photographic images can lead to a number of preservation issues ranging from cracked glass-plate negatives to the breakdown of binders and emulsions, UV damage, tarnish, and acid damage from scrapbook papers, glue, tape, and humidity. In some cases there may be no way to arrest the deterioration. For libraries that consider themselves to be guardians of the past, digitization is a process that can be used to capture images for preservation purposes and safeguard local history when physical preservation methods no longer suffice.
The Georgetown County Library in South Carolina is in an area vulnerable to hurricanes, and there is a real danger that images and documents could be lost in a natural disaster. The library has a digital collection titled the “Georgetown County Hurricane Collection” documenting the destruction, including the two most destructive storms: Hurricane Hazel in 1954 and Hurricane Hugo in 1989. Flooded streets only recognizable by lines of trees, roofless homes, and beach houses cracked in half are testimony to the sudden violence of storms which have the potential to hit each season. With each storm there is a possibility of lost mementos and history.
The library recognized the preservation potential of digitization when it scanned the Morgan-Trenholm collection of photographs. According to digital librarian Julie Warren, Georgetown Mayor W. D. Morgan hired a photographer to document the community in the early years of the twentieth century and during a large exposition in Charleston. The images of new sidewalks and recently planted trees promoted Georgetown as a modern and attractive community. Images of everyday activities provide a brief glimpse of the lives of regular people. These photographs, once intended to promote a city looking to the future, now document the history of the Georgetown community, allowing users to see what has changed or remained the same over the years.
Looking beyond its own materials, the Georgetown County Library also works with local museums on projects where the community is invited to bring their family photographs to the library to be digitized. The efforts are intended to preserve copies of the images before disaster strikes. Photographs are returned to the owners in archival envelopes. This service creates goodwill in the community by demonstrating that the library values and invests in personal and community history. Julie Warren described one interaction where a regular patron brought some images to the library. Some of these were in scrapbooks, others were loose in a cardboard box. After scanning, these items were returned in archival boxes and the woman was “just thrilled” with the new packaging and the digital copy of her material. Warren considers this service to be mutually beneficial to the library and to the community. Should there be fires or floods those precious images which are stored by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) and the library both on- and off-site will still be available to families and friends. The library is considering additional storage locations outside of Georgetown for additional security. Warren jokes that should the community be hit by another hurricane she will have to flee with copies of the files, but the library is serious about keeping backups and doing all it can to protect Georgetown’s history.
Photographic images provoke curiosity, stir emotion, and are powerful reminders of the people and events in a community. One collection which shows the daily life of a town, the horrors of war, and the dedication of a local celebrity can be found at Flora Public Library, in a small town with a lot of community pride located 100 miles east of St. Louis, Missouri. When the library felt the need to develop a digital collection, the work of one man was the obvious choice, and the library developed the Charles Overstreet collection.
Overstreet lived in Flora for most of his life. He was a character and, in the 1970s, mayor and a local celebrity after the town garnered national attention with the creation of a rap video in a bid to have a prison constructed there.2 Overstreet was widely respected in the community, and the librarians knew of his collection, part of which had been compiled into two books titled Charley’s Flora (2000) and More Charley’s Flora (2007). The librarians determined his work would be of local interest and of considerable historical value. Images taken during his service in World War II would also be in demand with the approaching anniversary of that war.
Overstreet regularly gave talks about his experiences in the war to school children and was seen at most community functions with his camera. His love of photography may have begun during his service in the war when as a corporal and army photographer he documented his experiences in Europe. His photographs from that time period show the people he served with, the crumbling ruins of bombed-out buildings, and the massacre of prisoners at the German prison camp Gardelegen. Deploying in 1943 with the 252nd Field Artillery Battalion, he left his new bride, Catherine, behind. On October 9, 1944, his unit landed on Omaha Beach in France, and from there he would travel through France, Belgium and finally through Germany with the Ninth Army.3
The variety of photos, spanning decades and covering both the war in Europe and life in Flora, meant Overstreet’s images would likely be of interest to a wide audience. Dona Cory, director of the Flora Public Library, explained that “it wasn’t just a Flora collection, it was something that people everywhere could be interested in.” The materials in the Overstreet collection were so far reaching that the librarians felt it would give them a great chance to secure grant funding. The need to digitize the materials was also influenced by the pressure of time. The librarians knew they would need Overstreet’s knowledge of the photos’ subject matter to create and compile accurate metadata. Perhaps even more importantly, they wanted Overstreet to be able to see his collection online and experience how much the community appreciated his many years spent documenting life in Flora.
The World War II segment of the collection has received international attention. A man in Germany contacted the library after he found a photo of his grandparent’s home. A woman from Wisconsin who had accessed the collection online contacted the library after finding a picture of her father who served with Overstreet. Other images are heart-wrenching, such as documentation of the overt horror and inhumanity at Gardelegen. Captured in stark black and white, these may be some of the most accessible images showing the remains of over 1,000 people murdered by Nazis as U.S. troops advanced to the prison camp. Flags were lowered in Flora when Overstreet passed away in 2010. Flora lost Charlie Overstreet, but his collection remains available to the community and to the world. With the anniversary of World War II, and the loss of veterans, these images are of increasing interest and importance.
At the Nisqually Tribal Library in Olympia, Washington, there is a photograph collection documenting a modern event. The Canoe Journeys started in 1989 with “Paddle to Seattle” and has continued with 60−80 canoe groups participating each year. A local photographer, Allen Frazier, had photographed the journeys for eighteen years and was willing to work with librarian Faith Hagenhofer to determine which images could be digitized and to provide metadata.
The Nisqually Tribal Library was awarded a grant for the collection to be added to the Washington Rural Heritage Project (WRHP), which is managed by the Washington State Library to provide a platform for the collections of small, rural libraries and cultural institutions. Coordination activities, scanning, and metadata entry tasks were all performed by library staff. The description of the collection from the WRHP site states: “The Tribe’s pride of place and history are once again enriching the lives of young and old alike. The Nisqually Canoe family has learned and taught many of the older skills, and these practices are once again taken up by community members.”4 The event and collection are important to the community. One of the advantages of making these images available online is that they can be shared with outsiders who cannot attend or may have never heard of the event. The Canoe Journeys are a combination of cultural, social, political, and spiritual practices, and portions of the event are not intended to be shared outside of the community. What images are shared depend on the mindful and respectful curation of the material. Hagenhofer and Frazier selected images that represented the event, but also excluded images intended to be viewed only by tribal members.
According to Hagenhofer, in creating this collection the library has altered its image from one of a place that collects information to one which also actively engages in creating content from a Nisqually perspective. This content reflects and increases awareness of the importance of local events. This was a very intentional decision on the part of the library. The Canoe Journeys were determined to be different from other collections currently available online, and Hagenhofer wanted more than a collection of materials relating “to known historical events. We really wanted to start with something that was locally really important but not necessarily well known.” Awareness of the event has grown since the first journey. According to Fawn Sharp, president of the Quinault Nation, the event is seen as “a touchstone gathering for the tribes of the Pacific Northwest—one of the largest traditional gatherings of indigenous people anywhere in the world.”5 Now, thanks to the efforts of the Nisqually Tribal Library and the generosity of Allen Frazier, the world can see the canoes and people involved in this wonderful celebration.
You open the book and see rows of smiling faces. Hair, glasses, and clothing give a quick clue about the age of the photographs. You are looking at a high school yearbook, a record of students, fashion, and a time capsule for a single year. Yearbooks are great local records that are often found only in schools, public libraries, and the collections of former students. They are excellent examples of unique, high-interest items found in many public libraries.
Yearbooks are often some of the most popular items in a library, especially among alumni and genealogists. When Geoff Kirkpatrick, director of the Bethlehem Public Library in Delmar, New York, considered a number of different items for a digital collection, he was looking for something that couldn’t be found anywhere else. The library has a number of older books but these materials were not unique, and as Kirkpatrick explained, if the collection was destroyed they could “call Baker and Taylor and say, ‘give us a new book collection’ and most of it would be replicated very easily, but there are some things that just aren’t and you need to focus on that.” He also considered large books of county property records. The documents themselves were physically impressive, large volumes of county plats, but again, these were not unique since the county clerk also had a copy. For Bethlehem Public Library there were two important factors under consideration; what materials were unique and what the library had an obligation to preserve. Two items stood out as being hyper-local and of strong interest to genealogists and the community: a newspaper titled The Spotlight, and a collection of high school yearbooks.
The library had several copies of most years of the local high school yearbook, the Oriole, going back to 1929. The project at first seemed overwhelming in size, but for several years volunteers have been scanning and indexing one volume at a time and now there are over sixty years’ worth of the books online. The yearbooks are searchable by name, and search results are linked directly to the pages where the name appears. Users who once would have needed to browse through years of books can now locate their own image or that of family or friends within a few seconds. This has been of great use to those who no longer live in the area or state. One woman had been hoping to find a photo of her father who died when she was a child. She didn’t live in the state and was unsure of when he worked for the school. Before the collection was digitized the library staff had been unable to locate the correct book. Once the documents were scanned and described, however, she was able to quickly locate his photo.
Scanning documents can be expensive, but a number of libraries are now using a service from the Oklahoma Correctional Industries (OCI) to scan their yearbooks. This department of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections employs 1,499 offenders in a number of industries including metal fabrication, furniture, clothing, and records conversion and scanning. The scanning service is offered for free to schools and libraries to assist in the preservation of local, historic documents. The service showcases the work done by OCI and generates goodwill. OCI pays for shipping the books to and from the Oklahoma facilities and ensures the materials are returned to the library in the same condition as received.
Carolyn Tremblay, a reference librarian at Dover Public Library in New Hampshire, learned about OCI’s Yearbook Project from the Swiss Army Librarian blog where an e-mail had been posted outlining the services OCI offered, including free digitization and the creation of digital files that the library was free to use however they wished.6 The Dover Public Library established contact with OCI and put the digitization project in motion. The library received packing labels, packed the books with inventory lists, and sent them to OCI. Around five weeks later the books were returned in the same condition along with ten DVDs containing the digital copies. As a result of this program the library was able to offer the community digital access to a popular collection at limited cost to the library and without adding to the workload of an already busy staff. The paper collection was also less likely to be targeted by former students, armed with scissors, seeking to remove their photograph from specific yearbooks.
The Nicholas County Public Library in Kentucky has a collection of newspapers it scanned itself with a micro-format scanner, but the library also took advantage of OCI’s services. Although originally hesitant about the free service, the library did send its yearbooks and has made the resulting files, dating back to 1948, available through its website. The collection is presented as a series of files organized into a range of years.
The files are not searchable but are available for browsing. Each page is a separate file and each image is in color with enough detail that the texture of the paper and the pores of real leather and fabric of the fake leather covers is presented. Although some websites may be more visually appealing or more complex, this library’s web page offers a simple form of digital access to users.
Local newspapers are an important source of information for current and future researchers. If your collection is only available as original paper in either bound or loose form, it can be damaged as the paper becomes brittle over time or it may suffer from patrons who remove articles. Microfilm created before 1980 can also degrade over time, it is more difficult to use compared to electronic documents, and its use is limited to institutions with micro-format readers.
Digitization can be part of a larger strategy (with micro-formats) to preserve and improve access and discovery of the detailed depictions of daily life found in local newspapers. In January 1960 a boy stole twenty-nine light bulbs from an outdoor tree; a color film of an all-girl safari was shown at Bethlehem Central Junior High school to support multiple sclerosis research; a new library card program was being implemented at the library; and a 1956 Ford cost $895. These details of town life were found in the January 7, 1960 volume of The Spotlight.
When the Bethlehem Public Library was considering digitization of The Spotlight, theft was a significant issue. According to Frank Somers, adult services librarian, “When the newspapers were on the public floor people were going to the bound volumes and cutting out articles and pictures . . . and we wanted to protect them from that.” As the only repository for these papers, the library felt responsible for preserving and providing access to the newspapers. Preserving The Spotlight required scanning of the paper for a microfilm copy and the creation of an electronic version. This required special equipment the library did not have. The scanning work was outsourced and paid for through funding from the Friends of the Library and from a local nonprofit organization that dissolved and donated its remaining funding to the library. The Spotlight is still a functioning newspaper and the owners supported the library’s efforts.
The newspaper, which started in the mid-1950s as a circular, had been of interest to local genealogists and historians. For years the obituaries, wedding announcements, and articles were used but had never been digitized and The Spotlight was not available in any database. With no other copies in existence, the need to preserve these materials was strong.
The Spotlight is now only published in digital format and the library still works to preserve access. Regarding the new format, Somers found the publisher happy to send PDFs of the current paper and “they maintain the copyright but they were very willing to let us share the newspaper.” The publishers understand that there may be people who do not respect their copyright, but they feel the risk of sharing the content online is acceptable if it results in the community having access to an important historical resource. The library is providing access to current issues of the newspaper up to one year after the original publication date.
The materials chosen for digitization are unique to the Bethlehem Public Library, and as Library Director Geoff Kirkpatrick stated “there is no one else who is going to preserve these hyper-local resources.” These efforts are appreciated by users inside and outside of the local community, including the newspaper’s owners, who appreciate the access and the publicity that comes from working with the library.
The Bethlehem Public Library was able to work with the owners in a manner that has allowed the library to continue to preserve the newspaper while respecting the copyright and distribution needs of the owners. Newspapers and magazines published after 1923 may still have copyright limitations or may have been digitized by another institution. A number of libraries have participated in the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America project, which includes newspapers from around the country spanning the years 1836 to 1922. Users can access 1,770 newspapers on the Chronicling America website. The collection is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program and the Library of Congress. Funding is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It should be noted that this is not a complete collection of American newspapers, and while participating libraries are given funding to digitize 100,000 pages, there are many papers and date ranges that are not included. An important feature within the Chronicling America website is the newspaper title directory of over 140,000 titles created through a national program to locate and create records for newspapers held by libraries around the country. The directory offers information on digitized and non-digitized papers and the libraries which house the materials. A directory of the U.S. Newspaper Program Participants provides information on the digitized material, the library that received the grant, and the amount of funds received.
Many states have “memory” projects where libraries collaborate to create an online repository of materials. Most of these projects are hosted by state-level agencies such as archives, universities, and collaborative library groups. These should be referenced before starting a newspaper digitization project. In many states successful newspaper digitization projects are the result of collaboration with multiple agencies or institutions, but there are many public libraries which have a collection which is not attached to a larger project, such as the Jefferson Parish Library’s collection of the daily French language newspaper, the New Orleans Bee (1827–1925).7 Other resources to search before beginning a newspaper digitization project are the Digitization Projects Registry (a Federal Depository Library Program resource), Internet Archive, and Google News Archive. The Google News Archive will now only search news for the last thirty days, but there is also a list of hundreds of digitized newspapers from L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orleans (1862−1870) to the Youngstown Evening Vindicator (1891−1893). This list of resources is an index of digitized newspapers from free and subscription sites compiled by Google and unveiled in 2006.8 These newspapers are no longer searchable through the general Google News search box but can be accessed by entering the URL (news.google.com/newspapers) or searching for “Google historic newspapers.”
People in your local community are also wonderful and unique sources of local history, and many libraries are including oral histories in their digital collections by either converting older recordings on cassette tapes to digital media or recording new oral histories. If the condition of cassettes or reel-to-reel oral histories is a concern, digitization is an initial step in a long-term strategy to preserve those stories for future generations. Magnetic tape, when properly stored, can last for thirty years.9 For cassettes or videotapes which were originally produced in the 1970s and 1980s, digitization may be the only way to save these materials.
When Arizona celebrated its statehood centennial, the state library encouraged libraries to contribute to the Arizona Centennial Legacy Projects. These projects were under the Arizona Centennial Commission (ACC), which was established by an executive order from the governor, and sought to “accurately portray a significant aspect of Arizona history.”10 The ACC worked with the Arizona Historical Advisory Commission to organize centennial projects with a goal of having “all 22 tribes, 15 counties and 120 cities and towns represented with at least one officially designated Arizona Centennial Event and/or Legacy Project that is unique and meaningful to its community.”11 These projects documented ranchers, sports, women, Latino contributions, African Americans, schools, individuals, and artists. The Pima County Public Library responded to this call with a proposal to record oral histories of centenarians. The library felt that collecting stories of some of the people who were present during territorial days or the beginnings of statehood was an excellent way to mark the state’s 100-year anniversary.
Although images and written documents are important links to the past, oral histories provide a different level of connection. The people who collect the stories reach out to the community, and the interview subjects share a glimpse of their lives with others. Jen Maney of the Pima County Public Library recalled, “We recruited people who were thoroughly old and for the most part we went to them and interviewed them in their homes or wherever they were.” Staff were available, some of whom spoke Spanish, to facilitate the interviews and make copies of any images provided. The stories of a local community are likely personal and detailed and offer narratives of daily life by regular people. Celebrities may have their stories told in many forums, but Oscar Montono’s tale of working through the Great Depression and serving in the signal corps, or Dolores Celaya’s stories of making candy from cactus and life on the ranch, are only found in the oral histories collected by the Pima County Public Library. Oral histories provide first-person perspectives of civil rights struggles, war, and other topics with a variety of detail and insight which make these stories a truly unique resource.
The Houston Metropolitan Research Center of the Houston Public Library is an example of an organization that successfully digitized over 200 oral histories from the 1970s and 1980s as part of a larger Houston Oral History Project. The collection at the Houston Public Library contained hundreds of audio recordings dating back to the 1970s. This collection of interviews consists of physical formats that have limited life spans and are already in the process of degrading, including cassettes and reel-to-reel analog audiotape. To preserve and provide access to these materials, about five years ago the library sought to have them digitized and hosted online.
The collection contains stories of civil rights struggles, sports, theaters, schools, and politics. According to Roland Lemonius, digital projects manager, the funding to create what would become the Houston Oral History Project came “through competitive grants and other funding sources.”12 Working with the Soundsafe Archive, an archival audio service now known as the George Blood Audio/Video, the library was able to have a large number of recordings converted. Multiple copies in different formats were generated, including CDs to extend the life of the recordings. The company provided multiple file types including CDs, MP3 files, and preservation-level master WAV files. With these different formats, Lemonius found that “we were able to create streaming media in order to make the recordings available online on our digital assets catalog.”13
The library promotes the continued acquisition of oral histories as well as preservation. The website warns that “if we do not collect and preserve those memories, those stories, then one day they will disappear forever.”14 The digitization process results in more than just transferring the audio signal recording from a degrading reel of tape; it also ensures preservation of and continued access to the experiences of people captured on those recordings.
A significant amount of the daily work performed by librarians, archivists, and museum staff involves the organization and description of materials. In the case of digitization projects the materials selected for digitization may need item-level description. For example, a library’s collection might include a filing cabinet of pamphlets arranged alphabetically by title but never fully cataloged, or materials missed when the catalog went electronic that are still located via a card catalog. Good organization and description are key for efficient digital projects. The existence of an index, cataloging records, or finding aids makes creating additional metadata much easier. If the time needed for cataloging is an issue, identifying materials for digitization that will require less effort to process and describe will save time and frustration. The amount and type of metadata to include is another factor to consider. Digital materials require different metadata from tangible materials. This information can be included in a traditional record by incorporating links, but there are standards and schema which have been developed for different kinds of digital media and digital collections. You will also want to consider how and where you will make your digital collection available. Often, your metadata choices will be limited by the method which you chose to make your digitized items available online.
There are a number of standards you can reference for the collection of this data, and these can differ depending on the format of the material. These standards include RDA, Metadata Encoding & Transmission Standard (METS), and Visual Resources Association Core (VRA). A number of different metadata standards are being used by digital repositories based on the type of files (images, sound, moving images). These standards may incorporate a specific metadata schema or can be broadly applied to different schemas.
The Chelsea District Library in Michigan created an obituary database based on the physical index cards produced by a local genealogist, Harold A. Jones, who had partly compiled the cards by recording information from the tombstones in the local cemetery. The content of the index dates back to the founding of the community in 1834. When Jones died in 1987, the majority of his collection was gifted to the library.15 Over two years (2002−2004) an ambitious volunteer updated and reorganized the files.16 The index was arranged by name and cross-referenced to include women by their maiden names. Attached to some of the index cards are obituary clippings or newspaper notices, many of which were also scanned. As a tangible object, the collection of 50,000 cards was ripe for transformation into an online database.
The library staff worked with genealogists to determine the database fields that should be created to enhance searching, including fields such as parents, children, cemetery, and obituary source. Understanding that there could be other information that could potentially be useful, library staff designed the database to include a notes field where additional information could be added and this “proved to be invaluable for later expansion.”17 Over fifty volunteers entered information into the database and now a few volunteers continue to add new obituaries. The collection, formally named the Obituary File and now titled the Family History Index, presents the content of each card in a manner reproducing the appearance of the original index card.
Organizing a collection in advance of digitization reduces the amount of work required when entering metadata or deciding on an arrangement. In addition, organizing materials by type or size reduces the amount of time needed to adjust scanner settings and can result in more efficient digitization workflows.
Collections that are already organized and described may save staff and volunteer time by reducing the need to research and identify the content of specific items. When Craig Scott at the Gadsden Public Library in Alabama received the photograph collection of Bobby Scarboro, the donation of over 4,500 images came with their own organization and descriptive system. Located on the edge or back of individual photographs was a number that often was related to a note with more information. Scott describes the nature of this descriptive information as ranging from “basically nothing, maybe a word or two” to very descriptive. Because each image already had a unique number the system was preserved in the metadata generated by staff. The numbers provided by the creator allowed for library staff to maintain the connections between the photographs and the metadata, as well as reduce the chances of misidentification.
An example of these images is one called “Hill City Boat.” Under the image of a long riverboat on a foggy fall day is a handwritten note identifying the thin man in the foreground as Captain William (Bill) Elliott. On the far right of the image is a small label reading “Scarboro Photo Shop, Gadsden, Ala, R-1112.”18 This information on the image provides important identifying information for the patron and cataloger who would also recognize that the “R” in the code most likely refers to an image of the river. If there are two images with the same title the reference numbers help to differentiate the images and can be used to accurately refer to the specific photograph. If your materials are already organized and have a reliable number system it can save a considerable amount of time to utilize that system.
When Janis Arquette, the local history assistant at the Bensenville Community Public Library in Illinois, started her library’s digital collection she developed local categories based on the photographs’ subject matter. Arquette divided the collection of 300 photographs into categories based on common elements, such as if the main subject was a school, church, or person. One category she developed was “used to be” for buildings which had been destroyed. This type of division can be especially useful when paired with good metadata.
Although there were no indexes, there were descriptive materials for the collection in the form of a book of local history that provided the basis for the digital collection. Many of the images in the collection had been used in the book or were copied from it and include a page number and a quote of the text. The original book did not have an index, and Arquette created one to act as a finding aid for both the book and online collection. Between the book, which organized Bensenville history into subjects such as schools and churches, and the categorization scheme that arose as she looked through the photographs for common themes, Arquette was able to organize the collection. The resulting digital collection has a unique visual presentation. The first image users see is a drawing of the historic Korthauer house, which is owned by the library and the local historical society. Instead of a list of subjects or collections, the Bensenville collection is presented with an image of a living room with the furnishing as links to specific areas of the collections. Clicking on the fireplace takes the user to materials relating to the fire department, schools are found by clicking on the pile of wooden blocks, and the quilt hanging on the wall leads to quilt squares created for the nation’s centennial. Those squares that depict buildings are linked to photographs of the same building and location. Images and text are presented in a narrative format rather than a catalog record.
The Bensenville collection is hosted by the library. This gives the library considerable control over the presentation and organization of the materials. Because the library hosts the site, they must also maintain the files and links. Arquette has some training on how to maintain the site, but over time she lost the ability to make changes and fix broken links. Until the library is able to find another IT person the links may remain broken.
If your library is interested in creating a digital collection, look for themes in the material which will help you organize the items. Finding aids or local history may provide additional information or suggest a method of organization. If you are uncomfortable maintaining a website, consider having your material added to a larger collection such as a state or regional digital collection. Hosted sites will reduce the amount of effort necessary to maintain a site but may have a required level of metadata. CONTENTdm sites use Dublin Core schema and the presentation of the metadata is concise, with searchable subject keywords. With this schema the library can goes beyond the fifteen core elements and include the names of private contributors; whether the materials are privately owned; project information if the digitizing was tied to a grant; and decade information. Descriptive metadata can still be evocative, but the presentation is standardized. Having this type of metadata also aids in maintaining files. Should the digitized image be damaged or lost the library will be able to easily locate their master copy.
When choosing a collection for digitization it is important to consider the size of the material both in quantity, physical size, and format. It will potentially take less time to digitize a few photographs than a shelf of genealogies or a full run of magazines. Depending on a library’s resources, the digitization work could be performed by volunteers or outsourced to a digitization vendor. In addition, equipment is currently available that is able to scan microfilmed newspapers at high speeds that are more efficient than scanning individual pages of paper versions.
Murals, posters, paintings, and other large objects will require different equipment than a desktop scanner. The collection of World War I and World War II posters at the Bangor Public Library in Maine required a special vacuum table and a digital photographer to create accurate copies without damaging the original posters. If your library does not have the equipment or staff to digitize a large collection, outsourcing may be an option. Sending microfilmed newspapers to be scanned is a common practice.
Once the collection is digitized the resulting digital files will need to be stored. Digital collections require storage, and external storage services may have limits on the number of items or the amount of data storage space available. Alabama Mosaic’s community space was able to host the Gadsden Public Library’s collection of photographs from Bobby Scarboro, but their CONTENTdm collection was limited to 10,000 items.
CASE STUDY
A COLLECTION IN DELTA CITY
Delta City, Utah, has a population of 3,436 and is a little west of dead center of the state of Utah.19 The city is home to the Great Basin Museum and the Topaz Museum, which has a collection of art and artifacts relating to a World War II internment camp for ethnic Japanese. Outside of the city are rich fossil beds of trilobites and a marker indicating the site of explorer John Williams Gunnison’s death in 1853. Founded in 1907, the city is in the high desert, flat and arid, but the Gunnison Bend Reservoir provides water for the alfalfa fields and dairies surrounding the city. The local economy is supported by a coal power plant and a beryllium mine and the area is rich with other minerals including red beryl (a rare ruby-like gem), geodes, and obsidian.
The town’s library is in a one-story L-shaped building that is also the location of the police department and city hall. In front of the library a bronze sculpture of Mark Twain sits on a bench as if waiting to read a story to someone. Inside the building are eight computers for public use and over 32,000 books. The regular schedule of events includes story time and a Legos club where children work on building projects based on books. The library is doing well, with an annual circulation total of almost 33,000 items. The library has one librarian, Deborah B. Greathouse, and a total staff of five people. Their budget is about $147,000.20 Despite not having a website until fairly recently, the library has established an impressive digitization program.
The digitization program started in 2007−2008 with a grant from the Utah State Library and the University of Utah, which at the time was the only Utah facility to have digitization equipment. All the grants for the library’s digitization projects were written by library director Deborah Greathouse. These include a grant to hire a person to create metadata for an important selection of photographs comprising the Frank Beckwith Collection.
Scrapbooks are a popular item for digitization due to their rich, unique, and personal content. For the Delta City Library the scrapbooks, articles, glass plate negatives, and photos created by Frank Asahel Beckwith were just a starting point. Beckwith had been an amateur geologist, anthropologist, and the editor and publisher of the Millard County Chronicle from 1919 to 1951. Events that Beckwith documented include the construction of the Deseret Melville Abraham and Delta Dam in 1919, which provided water for agriculture and later a power plant. Cultural aspects of the area are recorded in photographs Beckwith captured of petroglyphs, Native American artifacts, homes, Native Americans, and Utah landscapes. The images show the development of the area and the daily lives of residents, from livestock shows in 1954 to floods in 1983. These images are primarily black and white but are full of local color. The project also included digitizing the local newspaper owned by the Beckwith family up to the 1940s. The director of the library is a member of the Beckwith family and had access to many photographs family members had taken while working on newspaper stories. This led to a collection documenting marriages, births, deaths, and other events in the community, including descriptive information for each photograph. The collection is unique to Delta City and full of local interest.
One of the important aspects of this collection was the fact that the materials were already organized. Images taken for the newspaper were accompanied by descriptions, names, and dates as would be found in a newspaper article. Names are provided with positions (left to right), and captions give locations and events (for example, Sevier River Flood, of 1983). The scrapbooks were scanned with the pages intact and dedicated to specific subjects and locations. Many contained title pages with dates, narratives, and the names of photographers with some of the images. The description for one reads “Scrapbook by Frank A. Beckwith describing Arches National Monument, providing the reader with a tour of the area as it was in the 1930s; includes photographs.”21 All this information accompanying the collection made the recording of metadata much easier than if the cataloger had to identify the people and places with assistance.
To promote access to this material locally, advertisements were placed in the local newspaper. These ads were useful for heightening interest in the project and have increased access to general history and genealogy resources. People within the local community and outside of it have been able to find family photos, and the Bureau of Land Management has used the images created by Frank Beckwith to document Indian petroglyphs. Brigham Young University used two images from the collection in a documentary; publisher Gibbs Smith included one of the library’s images in a fourth-grade textbook; and requests to use images have come from as far away as the College of William & Mary in Virginia.
The success of the Beckwith project led to more grants and more historic information being made available to the public. Additional grant funding in 2009 and 2013 led to the digitization of over 5,000 pages of the Millard County Chronicle, extending the holdings from 1910 to 1947. Usage of the newspaper collection increased 13 percent with these additional materials. In a 2013 LSTA grant proposal Greathouse wrote “The back issues of the Millard County Chronicle are not easily accessible to the public after 1943. People have to call the newspaper office and have them do research or try and find the microfilm; either way this process is time consuming and tedious.”22 The grant awarded $6,956 to the library.23
Newspapers tend to be organized by title and date. The collection of the Millard County Chronicle includes individual articles and advertisements within the paper. A user may open an edition and see the title of each article which appears on a page.
Greathouse also contacted local families to acquire additional photographs, which resulted in another eighty images being added to the collection. This local history collection has drawn interest from other states, including a man from Arizona who found a photograph of his parents, siblings, nieces, and nephews that he had never seen before.24 A real estate broker used the collection to help a home-buyer looking to convert a school into a home, and a researcher in Pasadena, California was able to (with the assistance of the library staff) find an article on a Utah archeologist. These newspapers are available on the Utah Digital Newspapers website.
The digitization of the Beckwith images was completed in 2011, but other efforts are ongoing. The local museum is loaning materials for digitization, and the current challenge is finding more material to add to the digital collection. Greathouse intends to add to the newspaper collection and have the Millard County Chronicle scanned from 1948 to 1953. Another step for the library is to create a policy for use of images now that more agencies and individuals are able to access the collections and are interested in using images for various projects.
Chapter Synopsis
The reasons for creating your collection will have a strong influence on how you proceed with your project:
▪ Preservation: file size, type, storage, and how files will be maintained need to be considered before you start.
▪ Access: The level of metadata, where your collection will be located, and how users will find your collection should be considered before you scan.
▪ Complete or growing: Will your project reach a point of completion or is it a growing collection? If the materials you are digitizing are for a specific event, consider whether or not you want to provide perpetual access to those materials. Growing collections will need attention and have increasing space requirements.
When choosing the collection ask yourself:
▪ Is it unique? If your library is the only source for this material, you may feel obligated to protect and provide access.
▪ Is there interest? Hyper-local materials tend to be unique in nature. No other library will have images of Nesqually Canoe Journeys or Beckwith’s photos of weddings and rodeos. Your library may be the only source for back issues of your local newspaper.
▪ Find a collection that resonates with your community. It may be the collection of a local photographer, a beloved newspaper columnist, or a collection of obituaries. Look for newspapers, photographs, or other material that would benefit from easier access. Consider materials that document recent events.
▪ Is it organized? Collections that are already organized or have a guide to help arrange the materials should be considered. Materials which already have some form of metadata will save time and effort in the process of creating your database.
▪ How large will the collection be? If the material you are digitizing is in a large format or will require a significant amount of digital space, you may need new equipment or you may need to outsource the digitization of the materials. Consider your options for digital storage and if you will have the room and budget to store the items you plan to scan.
NOTES
1. Jennie Appelman, 1930s, photograph, “Billings—Images of People,” Montana Memory Project, Billings, MT, http://cdm103401.cdmhost.com/cdm/singleitem/collection/p103401pblhc/id/408/rec/1.
2. Clay County Advocate-Press, “Obituary: Charles E. Overstreet, 88,” December 9, 2010, www.advocatepress.com/article/20101209/News/312099886.
3. Mark Lambird, “Charles Overstreet, February 12, 1922−December 7, 2010,” Clay County Advocate-Press, December 9, 2010.
4. “The Canoe Journeys ~ A Nisqually Perspective,” Washington Rural Heritage, www.washingtonruralheritage.org/cdm/about/collection/nisqually.
5. Arwyn Rice, “Tribal Canoe Journeys on Hiatus in 2015 after No Host Comes Forward,” Peninsula Daily News, September 16, 2014, www.peninsuladailynews.com/article/20140917/NEWS/309179990.
6. Brian Herzog, “The Yearbook Project from OCI,” Swiss Army Librarian, November 20, 2013, www.swissarmylibrarian.net/2013/11/20/the-yearbook-project-from-oci/.
7. Genealogy, New Orleans Bee, Jefferson Parish Library. www.jefferson.lib.la.us/genealogy/NewOrleansBeeMain.htm.
8. John Markoff, “Google to Offer Print-Archives Searches,” New York Times, September 6, 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/business/media/06google.html.
9. Jean-Louis Bigourdan, James M. Reilly, Karen Santoro, and Gene Salesin, The Preservation of Magnetic Tape Collections: A Perspective (Rochester, NY: Image Permanence Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology, 2006), 6, https://www.imagepermanenceinstitute.org/webfm_send/303.
10. Arizona Centennial Legacy Projects, Arizona State Library, Archives & Public Records, https://www.azlibrary.gov/sites/azlibrary.gov/files/ahac-legacy-projects.pdf.
11. “About,” AZ100years.com, www.az100years.org/about/.
12. Roland Lemonius, personal e-mail with the author, January 8, 2015.
13. Ibid.
14. “How to Create an Oral History of Your Own,” Houston Oral History Project, www.houstonoralhistory.org/create.html.
15. Elizabeth Goldman, “Digitization on a Dime: How a Small Library and a Big Team of Volunteers Digitized 15,000 Obituaries in Just Over a Year,” in Digitization in the Real World, ed. Kwong Bor Ng and Jason Kucsma (Metropolitan New York Library Council, 2010).
16. “Family History Index,” Chelsea District Library, http://storiesofchelsea.chelseadistrictlibrary.org/?page_id=2995.
17. Goldman, “Digitization on a Dime,” 50.
18. Hill City Boat, photograph, Scarboro Collection, Gadsden Public Library, http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/gpl01/id/2097.
19. Delta City, Utah, DP-1 U.S. Profile of General Population and Housing Characteristics: 2010, U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 Census.
20. Delta Public Library, Public Libraries Survey, Fiscal Year 2012, Institute of Museum and Library Services.
21. “Arches National Monument scrapbook,” J. Willard Marriott Library website, http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm/ref/collection/DC_Beckwith/id/2744.
22. Deb Greathouse, “Application for 2013 LSTA Grant,” 2013.
23. “2013 LSTA Sub-Grant Award Recipients,” Utah Department of Heritage and the Arts, http://heritage.utah.gov/wp-content/uploads/USL-2013-LSTA-Grant-Award-Recipients.pdf.
24. Deb Greathouse, “Project Report,” 2010.