I think the most important thing if you’re interested in doing this is being sure that you have other people from the start to help support you.
—Patricia Johnson, director, Stewartville Public Library, Minnesota
You work on the reference desk all day. How do you have time to start something like a digitization project? There are few people who work in libraries who have time to spare. How do you take on an additional project when you already are working the reference desk, fund raising, planning events, and tackling the many other projects that end up in your list of duties? How can you add more without breaking the camel’s back?
Does your library have the staff and equipment to create digital versions of your important collections? Staffing, expertise, and equipment need not remain barriers to creating digital collections. Collaborations and partnerships can help make digital projects possible. There are already many examples of cooperation among libraries, from interlibrary loan agreements that make a world of information available to shared catalogs that reveal the combined collections within a system, state, and beyond. The tradition of cooperation among libraries naturally extends to digital projects.
Libraries all over America have found partners whose expertise, resources, and shared knowledge make digitization projects successful. Universities, state libraries, historical societies, and local institutions are often willing to scan, provide metadata for, and host digital items for libraries that have interesting collections but may not have all the resources needed to present a searchable collection to the public. These partnerships can supplement your library’s expertise, staff, and funding to make your collections widely available online.
State libraries have often taken the lead in these types of cooperative arrangements. An Institute of Museum and Library Services survey found that State Library Administrative Agency (SLAA) “funded or facilitated digitization or digital programs and services for different users, including” 40 state libraries, 16 other state agencies, and 31 libraries or library cooperatives.1 These programs typically offer a combination of training, scanning, metadata, and hosting services. Federal funding in the form of IMLS and Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grants distributed by these agencies are a couple of the main sources for funding digital projects.
Having the support of like-minded institutions can be vital for making your digital dreams a reality. One partnership which resulted in a successful collection was between the Nebraska Library Commission and the Fairmont Public Library. Wanda Marget, director of the Fairmont Public Library, was able to develop a collection while working part time as the library director, taking care of the local cemetery, maintaining the town website, and editing a monthly newspaper. Fairmont is a town of 600 located 60 miles southwest of Lincoln, Nebraska. When the Nebraska Library Commission began offering grants that would provide her with the opportunity to create a digital collection, Marget accepted the funds. Digitization was completed by the Nebraska Library Commission, which sent an individual to the library to scan images. The library remained responsible for the metadata. In some cases Marget relied on her knowledge of the community to locate individuals who could provide details for the history of the images. One photograph of the telephone office led her to four women who had worked for the telephone companies. The resulting metadata from this effort is a short history of the telephone and telegraph offices in the town. All four women in the photograph were named, the telephone office identified, and the rivalry between the different companies, the locations of those offices, and company mergers are described.
When the project was completed there were almost fifty images available in the digital collection. Images ranged from an aerial photograph of the city to an interior view of Mrs. Tony’s Café. Because Marget was able to work with the Nebraska Library Commission, the only aspect of the digitization process she needed to complete was the metadata, and in that effort she was aided by community members.
This example of one person’s efforts leading to a wonderful digital collection was made possible due to a number of factors. The library was able to get a grant through a state-level agency and that agency provided digitization services. The library did not have to host the materials which are available on the site: Nebraska Memories. This type of collaboration paired with grant opportunities can be vital to getting your library’s collections online.
Digitization, or scanning, is one of the first steps in creating a digital collection. Depending on the equipment used, the type of image, the fidelity of the scan, and the number of items in a collection, it can be a long and sometimes tedious process. The cost of scanners and scanning services has dropped in recent years, but the time required to scan a whole collection may not be feasible for some libraries.
Prices will vary depending on the type, size, and number of items to be digitized. There are businesses and organizations which offer a variety of options for digitization projects. There may be an organization, such as a digitization hub, in your state that can provide support. If your library would like to establish a more formal arrangement with an institution that can assist with one or more phases of the creation of a digital collection, investigate opportunities to partner with either a larger public library or a local university. In many states larger libraries and universities have developed digital collections programs aimed specifically at assisting smaller public libraries and other local institutions with digital projects.
In Ohio the state library has provided LSTA grants combined with funds from the Ohio Public Library Information Network for four public libraries to purchase equipment necessary to become digitization hubs. These regional hubs, which include the Columbus Metropolitan Library, Cleveland Public Library, Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, and the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library, will work with historical societies, libraries, museums, and other institutions to scan collections, provide metadata, and host materials. Hosted collections may eventually be included in the Digital Public Library of America. By taking on all aspects of digitization projects, from digitization to metadata to hosting, these hubs help ensure consistency and quality within and across the digital collections they create. Offering this level of support will require more work for the hubs but will help them meet the need for high-quality scanning and consistent metadata.
The Columbus Metropolitan Library (CML) is one of the libraries that has taken on this role. It provides assistance with planning, scanning, rights management, and metadata. Angela Oneal, manager of local history and genealogy at the CML, is in charge of developing these services. The digitization efforts at CML date back to 1998 when the library started with small-scale projects. The library hosted its own collection until a collaboration in 2006 with the Columbus Historical Society led to the creation of Columbus Memory. The new equipment and funds that resulted from this partnership allowed the library to increase its digitization efforts and create sub-collections such as one focused on African Americans, which contains newspapers, photos, and pamphlets.
When the opportunity arose for the library to join other Ohio public libraries becoming digitization hubs, the CML had the staff and experience not only to be a leader, but to be an active resource for other libraries. Transitioning to a hub was a natural evolution in the library’s services. According to Oneal, “the hubs project offered us an opportunity to institutionalize a regional approach and offer some services beyond what we were already doing at our library.” The grant provided funding for new equipment, allowing the library to provide improved services. The library already takes advantage of a shared licensing agreement for hosting materials, but the new equipment will be central to facilitating the digitizing of collections as well. The change in services, the acquisition of new digitization equipment, and the influx of a larger variety of material formats and sizes in other institutions’ collections has required a close evaluation of workflow and changes in the way the library handles different projects.
As a hub the CML supports other institutions at a number of different levels. It provides training that includes how to plan a digital project, the goals for the collection, and how those goals will impact the project. For example, if a library is creating a digital collection to accompany an anniversary celebration where access and timeliness are the main considerations, the training may not include in-depth information about digitizing for preservation. Participants will be walked through the planning process, and CML staff will work with the library to determine how it can be supported and the plan completed. Training is offered for those willing to learn the digitization processes of scanning and adding metadata.
The CML has reevaluated collection selection, prioritization, digitization, and metadata. Previously the library was able to prioritize digital projects based on patron needs and the historical significance of collection materials. Now the CML accepts projects that meet the library’s selection criteria of material relating to central Ohio. With the selection criteria in mind, the staff look for items of unique historical importance with a connection to the region. Copyright, technical considerations, and whether the owning library can handle some aspects of the digitization process are also considered. If a library cannot help with metadata or scanning and the material falls within its collection requirements, the CML will consider taking on the whole project in order to preserve and increase access to those materials. The CML is working to digitize as much as possible while stretching budgets and staff.
To streamline the process each item received will be accompanied by an intake form recording descriptive information necessary for metadata entry. The information provided may go beyond Dublin Core requirements by including detailed descriptions which read like short histories. A photograph titled “Charles Grossman and Theresa F. Grossman” provides detailed information on the couple, their clothing, when they immigrated to the United States, how many children they had, and some history regarding the photographer.2 An image from 1969 of a sign reading “Free X-Ray Today” was loaned by the Breathing Association and provides a short history of that organization’s efforts to prevent and control tuberculosis.3
The physical intake form stays with the materials throughout the process. The document is sometimes completed by having a staff member sit down with the owner and fill out the form. When working with an institution rather than an individual from the community, training sessions on how to fill out the forms are offered if needed. If an institution cannot provide anyone to become familiar with the forms, materials or doesn’t have the staff available to enter detailed information, the basic information is provided and CML staff will fill in the remainder of the metadata. Forms submitted are double-checked by CML staff who work with the donor to help them determine if the material is really theirs (family photos) or if they own copies of someone else’s work. To avoid managing rights for the many personal collections, the library will not provide high-resolution copies of materials loaned by private individuals. When working with other libraries there is a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the libraries explaining how the CML will handle the digital collection. A rights statement is included in the object description: “A user of any image in this collection is solely responsible for determining any rights or restrictions associated with the use, obtaining permission from the rights holder when required, and paying fees necessary for a proposed use.” This statement leads the users back to the source library.
The intention of the CML is that the library, historical society, or other institution will become actively engaged in the process and that the contributing institution’s strengths will be utilized. Although the library is willing to perform all aspects of the digitization process, contributions in the form of metadata, digital files, and other resources are welcomed. The library wants to develop a hybrid model where it offers “a little bit of everything depending on what resources the partner brings to the table.” If the contributing institution has digital files and metadata, the CML will upload the material into the Columbus Memory project. This will help the library take on more projects by supplementing library staff, allowing the CML to assist more libraries.
Are you ready to host your own collection? Hosting requires space, maintenance of files, and an access point. Not all libraries will have the means to maintain digital collection platforms and files and may instead seek to partner with a hosting institution. State libraries, universities, and historical associations have been developing consortium agreements to pool resources and to offer centralized online locations for state collections. Public libraries, academic libraries, museums, and historical associations can then contribute collections to a single, digital collection platform, resulting in a large collection comprised of smaller holdings. Members may become digitization hubs, but more commonly these groups serve as content holders, providing access to diverse digital collections related to a state or region.
You don’t have to have a single large organization like a state library or a university to generate the resources to support digital collections. There are many cooperative organizations which have combined their resources and developed conglomerate collections. The New York Heritage Digital Collections hosts the collections of over 200 New York institutions with content ranging from images to letters and photographs.4 The Galway Public Library brought together a collection of ten historic images of Galway from the Galway preservation society and from community members. Some of these images subsequently made their way into Reflections of Galway, a Galway Public Library and Galway Central School Collaborative book and website. The Bethlehem Public Library has contributed forty-four photos, letters, and legal documents to the New York Heritage Digital Collections. The Clifton Park-Halfmoon Public Library has contributed over 500 items, including a letter from 1855 complaining about a highway worker who never appeared for work, photos of Depression-era amusement park concessionaries, sepia-toned images of the construction of a reservoir, and family photos documenting generations of local families. The many collections, large and small, are available via an online digital collections platform containing hundreds of thousands of items. Distinct pages provide information about each contributing institution and where original documents are located.
New York Heritage is a project of the NY 3Rs Association that brings together regional digital collections from nine councils, including Central New York Heritage, Western New York Legacy, Capital District Library Council Digital Collections, Long Island Memories, North Country Digital History, and others. When collections are brought together there are benefits for the public as well as for the participating libraries. Researchers spend less time locating and searching a large number of collections. The collections are easier to find and instruction for use is simplified because the aggregated collections can be searched in the same way. It is also easier for users to remember the location of a single resource rather than locations for many diverse collections. The aggregating hubs also take responsibility for keeping the materials available.
If your library is interested in digitizing but unsure about how to provide and maintain a digital collections platform, collaboration with a hub or collaborative collection may be a good solution. Contact your regional or state collaborative group to learn about contributor requirements, guidelines, and to find out if they are accepting new content. The Library of Congress’s State Digital Resources: Memory Projects, Online Encyclopedias, Historical & Cultural Materials Collections lists digital collections initiatives for all fifty states plus twelve multi-state collections. Your state’s memory project may offer grants or be willing to assist with digitization, metadata, and hosting services for your collection.
There may be support for your library based on the type of material you are digitizing. StoryCorps, a nonprofit, started in 2003 and has worked to record over 50,000 interviews, 45,000 of which are housed with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.5 A portion of these recordings are broadcast on National Public Radio and are available online or through partners. A 2014 pilot study with the American Library Association (StoryCorps @ your library) resulted in ten libraries receiving support in the form of training and online tools. This program will continue in 2015 with another ten libraries selected to participate.
The Nashville Public Library participated and “chose to specifically record and preserve the oral narratives of the city’s Latino, Somali, Laotian, Kurdish, Vietnamese, Sudanese, first-generation and other foreign-born, immigrant, diverse communities.”6 The library partnered with Lipscomb University, specifically with Professor Richard Goode’s United States History course. Students registered family, friends, and community members for the project and conducted interviews. This was the second time students from Professor Goode’s class had assisted the library. Previous students had collected interviews for a collection focused on first-person accounts of a devastating 2010 flood.
The Nashville Public Library also collected oral histories and documents from 400 veterans. This was in response to a call for partners from the Library of Congress (LOC). Support from the LOC was primarily in the form of “partner packets” with instructions on how to conduct the interviews, collect materials, and complete forms. If the library had a question it could call the LOC and receive assistance from a staff member. The library found the overall experience to be good.
Small segments of some of these interviews are available on the library’s website. These snippets of narratives range from under a minute to three minutes and provide an example of the types of stories told. The samples were kept short due to the amount of server space available, to make the audio clips user-friendly, reduce the length of transcripts required for each piece, and to focus on interesting stories appropriate for a diverse audience. One consideration was that the stories shared were of war experiences, which could be graphic and not appropriate for young students and some content might be edited out from the sample.
According to the special collections division manager, Andrea Blackman, The Flood 2010 NS Storycorps @ Your Library projects led to the Nashville Public Library working with ten new community partners. With the Flood project partners included the mayor’s office, the Matthew Walker Comprehensive Health Center, McGruder Family Resource Center, and the YMCA Fifty Forward. With the Storycorps project the library worked with Conexion Americas, Casa de la Cultura, the Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee, Lipscomb University, Brentwood Library, Belmont University, and the Mayor’s Office of New Americans.
The stories presented online are primarily from World War II veterans. When the collection was first made accessible online the program had only recently started interviewing veterans from Vietnam, but the material available encourages the curious to dig deeper into the collection. The library’s participation in the Veterans History Project ended in 2012. The congressionally mandated program has, with the help of numerous partners, collected over 68,000 interviews.7 More than 7,000 of those are available online at the Veterans History Project website.8
Newspapers offer wonderful insights into the past, but the volume of the material might make a digitized collection seem infeasible. Hosting for such large collections is also a challenge. Chronicling America provides a single source for multiple collections of newspapers. The service is the product of a partnership between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and has its origins in the United States Newspaper Project, which started in 1980 and ended in 2007. That project sought to locate and preserve American newspapers and resulted in a “bibliographic description of over 140,000 newspaper titles and the creation of close to one million local holding records.”9 This project created an index of library holdings which, while not complete, served as a powerful research tool and source of data for the eventual digitization project. The National Digital Newspaper Project (NDNP) started in 2003 to “provide permanent access to a national digital resource of newspaper bibliographic information and historic newspapers, selected and digitized by NEH-funded institutions (awardees) from all U.S. states and territories.”10 Like other initiatives, this project draws from large collections and cooperative digitization efforts such as the Oregon Digital Newspaper Project.
Current expectations for the NDNP program include digitization from microfilm holdings and newspapers that were published before 1923. This cutoff date is to limit holdings to public-domain materials. As of August 8, 2014, there were 8 million newspaper pages available from thirty-seven states, one territory, and the District of Columbia. South Dakota and Nevada are two of the more recent additions to a program which is “encouraging interoperability and providing the tools to make it possible to have produced many instances of collaboration that have widened each institution’s coverage, expanded the content of their holdings, and provided a support network.”11 Eighty percent of the cultural institutions contributing to the North Dakota collection have collaborated with other organizations, and 65 percent have partnerships outside of the state. One of the benefits of this program is that the partnering institute is often the repository of master microfilm copies of newspapers. This allows libraries to focus on the grant writing necessary to pay for digitization while the rest of the work is performed by the partner working with its own microfilm. The distribution of work takes the full burden off of a single library.
If your state does not have a digitization hub or other partnership opportunities there are a number of for-profit companies which provide digitization services. The benefits of outsourcing scanning include not spending limited funds on equipment, having items professionally scanned, and saving the efforts of library staff and volunteers. Although someone will still need to inventory, pack, and ship materials to the vendor and to review the quality of the digital files provided by the vendor, in-house digitization requires in-house expertise and equipment that may not be available.
If you are considering outsourcing scanning, metadata, or hosting, check other libraries’ collections. When you find an example that you like, contact the library and ask about the vendors they used. Ask if they would recommend the vendor or if they have any suggestions about how to make the experience of working with a vendor as productive as possible. By asking colleagues or using electronic discussion lists you can limit yourself to companies that have experience with libraries and obtain the opinions of trusted individuals. There are organizations that collect information on vendors, such as the Association for Information and Image Management, which maintains a directory of companies.
Before contacting a vendor, know the size, number, format, and any special requirements for the materials to be digitized. If there are fragile materials that need special handling, you will need to know how the vendor will digitize them without damaging the originals. How do you expect your users to interact with the collection? Will you need to have materials undergo OCR (optical character recognition) scans searchable by specific categories, or accessible for individuals with disabilities? You will need to decide what types of files you will want and how they will be made available. Confirm with the vendor that it can provide the file types you want and can deliver them on the hardware that you specify.
Ana Krahmer of Northern Texas University Libraries reminds librarians in Texas to make sure that the vendors they use will create files that will meet the quality standards required for inclusion in the National Digital Newspaper Project. She has seen cases where a vendor promised a level of quality that it could not provide. Not all vendors will offer the same service or provide the same level of results.
Senior Special Collections Librarian Jeremy Drouin of the Kansas City Public Library in Missouri says his library has outsourced the majority of its digitization projects and has “used a variety of vendors, just depending on what is to be scanned.” Individual vendors have been found to work with oversized materials, fragile items, and other formats. Large-format materials are best scanned using equipment that has been designed to accommodate those sizes. Fragile, bound materials require a book scanner that supports the binding, and these types of scanners are more expensive than a good flatbed, desktop scanner. The library will digitize a small number of items in-house but will outsource the scanning if the collection contains a large number of items. Many of the library’s collections contain large numbers of items, with 650 advertising cards, 432 images in the Askren Photograph Collection, 605 assorted photographs, 1,200 autochrome photos, 318 biographies, and 23 other collections focused on regional history.
Librarian Craig Scott from the Gadsden Public Library in Alabama realized that with their level of staffing they could not spare anyone to scan their collection of photographs. Instead they contacted a company in Provo, Utah. This company sent a staff member with two scanners. Instead of sending the collection of irreplaceable photos across the country the library reserved a space for the woman who would scan the materials. For two full weeks, from eight in the morning till eight at night, she digitized all 4,500 images. Before the woman arrived the library staff had already started working on the metadata, which was entered into Excel spreadsheets. This arrangement offered several benefits. The material stayed in the library, library resources were not used, and staff could focus on metadata creation. Because the person who was scanning the images brought her own scanning equipment, regular library activities were not interrupted. Scott was relieved that library equipment would not be “disconnected and moved into the conference room and disrupt our own operation here while they brought everything, they brought their own scanners, the equipment.” After the scanning was complete the company matched the metadata to the images at its site in Utah.
For the Gadsden Public Library, using a professional company saved staff training time, met their quality requirements, and was generally a good experience. As with any vendor, experiences can vary, but there are steps your library can take to ensure desired results.
▪ Find information about the history of the company, the size of its staff, and the age and type of equipment they use.
▪ If you are sending material to a vendor, learn how the transportation will be handled, how your materials will be stored, and if there is any security.
▪ Ask for a detailed quote on the cost including the per-image cost, shipping, and data transfer.
▪ Make sure the vendor understands the “project scope, details, and output specifications, and confirm that the vendor can support them.”12
▪ Ask for a sample based on your material.
▪ Ask the vendor for a list of references, and contact them.
▪ Clarify expectations, including the amount of time needed for completion. This will help to ensure that your library’s expectations are met.
Volunteers can be a considerable force within a library. In 2012 it was the volunteers who were used as a reason to prevent the privatization of the public library in Oceanside, California.13 In many libraries volunteers are necessary to meet the day-to-day needs of the library. According to a 2006 IMLS study, “among the public libraries that have digitization activities, 17.2 percent train current staff to perform digitization activities and 9.1 percent use volunteers.”14 Volunteers already fill many of the library’s needs, and digitization is another area where a volunteer can contribute. With training and support, your volunteers can take charge of entering metadata, scanning, and website maintenance.
Large institutions have been using volunteers to help process and add metadata to their digital collections. In 2010 the Australian Museum used volunteers to scan and enter short records for 16,000 insect specimens.15 Smaller institutions can rely on volunteers for digital projects such as the Chelsea District Library in Michigan, where a librarian with almost fifty volunteers digitized 15,000 records from a family history index.16 The collection consisted of 4 × 6 inch index cards on which obituaries were pasted. This popular local history index took two years to complete, from October 2005 to October 2007. The public can now search a database of names and locate citations or obituaries for families.
The Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana has two important strategies for success in dealing with volunteers, one of which is to have a volunteer coordinator who works in recruitment for the whole library system. When a volunteer is needed, this coordinator is contacted. The coordinator then reaches out to the local historical associations and genealogical societies as well as to other organizations for interested volunteers. The support in the community is strong enough that up to 100 volunteers can be mobilized at once.
The second strategy for the success of the volunteer program is the way the library treats the individuals who donate their time. Volunteers are trained and supported like other staff members. Staff work with them to determine their areas of interest and any training needs, and then matches them with a project they will find rewarding. Each project is explained in terms of both the needs of the job and the importance of the material. High-interest items such as World War II letters, photographs, and materials with local meaning are offered. Volunteers are valued, mentored, trained, complimented, and encouraged the same way as the library’s paid employees are. Individuals start slowly and receive regular training, feedback on their work, and correction when needed. This method of training at the beginning of a project ensures that volunteers know the correct procedures, develop confidence in their skills, and have a high quality of work. By working closely with the volunteers at the start of a project, the comfort level and the interest of a volunteer can also be evaluated to make sure the project will be a good fit or to find other options if the work is not right for that person.
The primary work phases of a digital project include scanning, metadata creation, and uploading metadata and digital files to a digital collections management system. The volunteer is asked what they would like to do but are not required to perform only one task. They can switch to different work if scanning or metadata entry becomes too monotonous. This flexibility helps to prevent burnout and keeps volunteers interested in their work. Once a volunteer is trained they may be moved from one project to another if a need arises. When a local church disbanded and approached the library about scanning its historic documents, there was a time limit; the library would only have the church’s materials for thirty-one days. Because of this deadline some volunteers were shifted from different projects and others were called in to scan the materials. In this instance the focus was on scanning as many documents as possible. Little metadata was entered with the expectation that the information would be added later.
The Allen County Public Library’s Genealogy Center has one volunteer who has made a highly significant contribution to the library’s digital collections. In a perfect pairing of interest and knowledge, this volunteer has single-handedly scanned and provided metadata for a collection of over 9,800 images. Librarian Curt Witcher found a super volunteer, “a retired firefighter who just happened to be a professional photographer as well.” This gentleman offered his own collection of photographs as well as the collection at the local fire museum. The volunteer, Donald Weber, had a large personal collection with images of parades, anniversaries, fire houses demolished and opened, fund-raisers, and burning homes; this personal collection was further augmented with older materials through Weber’s connection with the local firefighters and the fire fighter museum. The Clay School fire of 1894 shows a three-story building wrapped in smoke. The 1947 Cilppinger Studio fire shows wet, dark-suited men climbing a ladder to a window as thick, billowing smoke pours over them. There are photos of school children attending educational programs in the 1950s alongside color photos of fashion shows from 1975. Due to Weber’s knowledge of the fire department, the equipment, and the town, he has been able to provide detailed descriptions of events from ladder training to traffic accidents.
Entering metadata into the content management system was not something with which Weber was originally comfortable. A self-described Luddite, he was not initially interested in working with the available data-entry technology. The library does what it can to match the available technology with the comfort levels of the volunteers, so an Excel spreadsheet was set up for his use, which could then be uploaded into the system. Eventually, Weber was open to trying the system again and became proficient with the software. According to Witcher, over fifteen years Weber “has personally scanned and keyed the metadata because he knows all the material. He either took the picture or worked with the fire museum.” This one volunteer has scanned and provided metadata for over 9,800 fire-related photographs. Weber may jokingly refer to himself as an “old man” or claim that “I don’t do that computer stuff,” but the collection he has created is a testament to his dedication and his skills. Thanks to his efforts the community he cares about is well represented in the library’s collections.
Witcher is proud of the library volunteers and understands the value of these dedicated individuals. The library staff work with the volunteers to find areas of interest which will make their jobs interesting and rewarding. Sometimes these matches are obvious. In the case of Weber, he had an interest in sharing his collection and having the work he has devoted much of his life to represented in the library’s collection. The library’s dedication to the volunteers is reflected in the way the volunteers take their work and the library very seriously.
Witcher feels that volunteers are worth the investment of time and training in them. He understands that some libraries may perceive “volunteers as people who can do something useful but they take a lot of time and it’s just not worth the trouble,” but his experience at the Allen County Public Library has shown him the value in treating these core library supporters like library staff. The time investment has paid off and produced thousands of images now in the Allen County Community Album, a testament to their efforts.
Students receiving internship credits by working at a library can be wonderful, dedicated workers. Palin Bree at the Boyce-Ditto Public Library in Mineral Wells, Texas, had a high school student who “would plug in her MP3 player and scan for a couple of hours each week.” This individual followed the parameters required by the University of North Texas Libraries’ Digital Projects Unit, and produced consistently good work. The student scanned the majority of the first items in the library’s collection but eventually left for medical school.
Losing volunteers is to be expected. Mona Vance-Ali, archivist of the Columbus–Lowndes Public Library in Columbus, Mississippi, often uses students from a local college. The students have focused on scanning, which stops once the student graduates or has finished an internship. A volunteer may be active for four months or several years. They may complete a project or leave before it is done. Although losing a volunteer requires finding a replacement and providing additional training, they remain a valuable resource.
Vance-Ali tries to find one college intern per semester and often draws from the History Department of the local college to find individuals who will be interested in the content and might have some knowledge of the time in which the material was created. She will often have three interns a year. While Vance-Ali understands the value of her volunteers, sometimes it is good to take a break from training and working with interns to focus on other projects “because while it’s fantastic to have both volunteers and interns they do require time for me to manage them.” By using student volunteers Ms. Vance-Ali has the flexibility to focus on digitization or other tasks as needed. When she requires assistance for scanning or other aspects of digitization, she knows she can look to the high schools or the local colleges for volunteers.
Volunteers are often transitory and this is accepted. Students will move on, retirees will have other interests, and community members will have other obligations. Some volunteers will not be suited to a task or may vanish without notice. When these individuals leave, your project may stall until a replacement can be found and trained. If the volunteer was in charge of the website or database, finding someone with experience with your software could be a challenge. The collection at the Billings Public Library in Montana started with “the systems administrator and a volunteer and they scanned everything in and uploaded and it was about 115 items and very little metadata and then it sat there for a few years. Then I [Kathy Robins] got involved with it, it ended up being me and an intern who were involved so again it was just two people.” There is a limited amount of work one staff member and an intern can accomplish.
The success of your volunteers will be based on finding the right volunteer for the job, and providing training, support, and oversight. Expect to take the time to train and check the work of your volunteers. Vance-Ali found that “there’s going to be human error but the quality of the volunteer or intern really is imperative.” It is always better to perform quality control and guidance early in a project than to have to go back and fix or redo a large amount of work.
CASE STUDY
THE POWER OF VOLUNTEERS
According to A Brief History of Madison (New Hampshire) the community was originally part of another town called Eaton, which was named in 1764 after General John Eaton.17 Madison was created as a separate entity in 1852. A main feature of the community is Silver Lake, described in 1925 as a place where “one may lie in a boat and gaze into summer skies fringed with majestic mountains, and for the time be beguiled into thinking he is in fairyland.”18 The lake, where poet E. E. Cummings had a summer home, still attracts many summer tourists, as do a number of impressive features such as the largest known glacier-deposited boulder of granite.19
Before 1995 the library was housed in what had been a one-room schoolhouse. Private donations led to the building of the current library, a two-story, white, cape-style structure. Library collections, the children’s area, two work tables, four computers, and the reference desk are on the second floor, which is about 2,000 square feet. The first floor has a meeting room which can accommodate forty people. Madison has a population of around 2,500 and a library budget of $76,136.20
The digitization projects at the Madison Public Library prove that you do not need an army of volunteers to have great digital collections. Much of the scanning and metadata work has been completed by five volunteers. Current projects have at least five volunteers: one person who scans, two people dedicated to transcribing vital statistics, and two people transcribing town newspaper columns. Because Madison attracts people who enjoy the lake in the summer and skiing in the winter, the volunteers change with the seasons, but the library normally has around five volunteers at any given time, allowing for consistent progress on the projects. Former library director Mary Cronin understands that these individuals are valuable and a highly sought local resource. The library has limited staff and the community members who volunteer their time “are also volunteering at about ten other things. There’s only so much so many people can do.” Being in a small town with a population that fluctuates with the seasons is a challenge for the library, which is competing with other local institutions for volunteers.
The library uses various methods to find volunteers, but the most effective tool has been the library newsletter. According to Cronin, her most successful method of finding volunteers includes calls in the library newsletter with descriptions of current projects and promises of training. When a potential volunteer contacts the library, Cronin would learn the person’s interests, skills, and what type of training they would be willing to complete. She then would match that person with a project. Recently this has led to a volunteer with good technical skills offering to edit audio files from oral history interviews. Another tool for finding volunteers is the library’s web page for the digital collections. An open solicitation for items of local historic interest is posted with links to digitized materials.
There is a consistent source of people with time and interest in local history. When looking for volunteers, Cronin often looks for individuals who have recently retired, are open to learning new skills, and “have a lot of energy.” Often these volunteers come with skill sets and experience with different technologies. One of the skills many volunteers have is typing. The modern keyboard is based on a configuration that is over 100 years old.21 If your volunteers were born after 1890 there is a good chance they have used a keyboard before and can enter metadata. These individuals are also familiar with handwritten documents, which is an important skill for creating transcripts.
One of the successful strategies employed by the Madison Library involves the way volunteers are trained. All volunteers will benefit from training, and at the Madison Library each worker gets personal attention. Cronin, in part due to the size of the library, notes that “everything we do is one-on-one as far as training goes”; this includes learning what skills the person has, what they are interested in learning, and matching them to a project. This personal, hands-on approach allows Cronin to find that area of interest that results in volunteers who enjoy the work and are less likely to burn out on a project. The limited number of people working on the projects leads to a strong sense of ownership among the volunteers, who see the progress for which they are responsible.
The library tries to identify and utilize the strengths that each volunteer brings but also wants any prospective volunteer to understand that they do not need to be experts in any field. Working personally with each volunteer will help them to gain the skills they need and make them feel like a valuable member of the team. As they learn new skills they feel pride in their accomplishments and are mentally stimulated. The work is engaging, there is flexibility within the projects, and the importance of their efforts is apparent. Furthermore, being a small library is a strength when working with volunteers because they will know the staff and have a clear perspective on how their work is contributing to the mission of the library and how their efforts make the project possible.
The library also employs several strategies for retaining volunteers, including recognition. Volunteers receive recognition for their work in each metadata record that is created. Records include the names of the person who scanned the image or created the transcript. The rewards of volunteering are often nebulous and depend on the individual—if they feel pride in helping others, if they enjoy learning more about their community or learning new skills. Including the names of the people who are spending their time to type transcripts, scan documents, and input metadata is a simple way to say thank you. Linking the person to the project is also a way to remember various volunteers who can point to the records as one of their accomplishments. When community members see how the library values the efforts of their volunteers, they themselves may be more inclined to join the library’s efforts.
The materials that the volunteers work with are varied and help volunteers maintain interest in the work, which can be repetitive. Cronin has found that “once they start working on them they get kind of fascinated with them, even the vital statistics.” The vital statistic requires the entry of names and dates which could be dull work if not for the fact that the volunteers see the births and deaths of individuals belonging to the same family over a long period of time and engage with the histories. The wide assortment of materials has another goal. Having a variety of items—oral histories, maps, photographs, and transcripts—provides examples of the types of materials the library is interested in digitizing and encourages the lending of materials and inspires people to volunteer.
There are three main projects currently in process: town columns, vital records, and town reports. Town columns are original manuscripts of news columns written in the 1970s and 1980s. These pieces of contemporary history appeared in the local newspaper and describe local events. The original, handwritten manuscripts were donated to the library, which is now working on transcriptions. These short pieces were compiled because they are interesting, and volunteers working on this project enjoy reading these snippets of local history.
The vital records project has been directed by Bobbi Slossar at the New Hampshire State Library, who has trained librarians around the state to create searchable databases that can be combined into a larger collection. Vital records in Madison were first recorded in the nineteenth century when towns were required to provide birth and death information to the state of Maine. The result is a searchable database available on the library website which will eventually be linked to a state-wide database of historical vital records. While working on this project, volunteers noticed that some early records had birth and death records entered at the same time. This occurred frequently for individuals born before birth certificates were common. This was a surprise for the volunteers who, according to Cronin, noticed “especially in the 1920s and 1930s the people who never had a birth recorded.” Birth certificates were issued retroactively when the person died. This information provides insight into how birth records were kept, and entering this information into a database will aid genealogists. The library has transcribed the statistics up to the 1930s. According to Slossar, the transcripts can take between several months and a year to complete.
The town reports also have a long history, with the first report published in 1893. For this project, the library has some external assistance. The library is scanning the reports, which will be hosted by the University of New Hampshire. The university library has been collecting these documents from around the state and is adding them to the library’s collection. In this case Madison is helping the university library by providing the files for a collection to which the university is actively adding. These reports give detailed accounts of the town’s finances and expenditures. Reports from the school district and other agencies are sometimes included and provide details about items such as salaries and the costs of books and heating stoves. The process for getting these reports digitized and online has been slow since the university is working on uploading reports for the whole state, but Madison has been able to help by scanning its documents to the university’s specifications. Community members are entering the metadata for the reports.
The Madison Library accepts items from local community members for inclusion in its digital collections. When library patrons bring material to the library to be added to the digital collections, the library staff collect information about individuals and dates but keep the process simple to encourage the sharing of these items. The materials that are coming to the library are the result of Cronin’s call to the community for “any kind of history, local history items that might work with our history archive.” This includes materials salvaged by sharp-eyed individuals when homes are cleaned out for sale. The library scans the material and returns the original to the owner. Donor information is included in the metadata which is displayed with the digital version.
One distant user found the library’s online collection, which led to the library obtaining original copies of founding documents the owner’s family had possessed for generations. The people who lend their personal treasures are also acknowledged in the notes in the metadata record, where the information they have provided lends insight to the personalities of the people in the photos. One photograph of Lucy (Phillips) Nickerson contains information from a report by a family member: “If you look closely, you’ll notice Lucy is wearing a set of [rose gold] beads around her neck. Joshua gave them to her when they were married; they were passed down through the generations, and I now have them.”22 This type of information provides another level of interest, turning the portrait of an elderly woman into someone with direct and current ties to the community.
The library still has one project that needs an interested community member—the oral history project which is part of the Library of Congress’s American Folkways Center Veterans History Project. The library has a digital recorder and instructions for people to record conversations. The local veterans associations have been approached, but as of this writing the library is still looking for a community member who is interested in capturing the stories of the community. Despite general acknowledgment in the community that these oral histories are important and should be collected, no one has stepped forward to help.
The lack of volunteers had not been due to a lack of effort on the library’s part. Cronin has tried to involve the local veterans association in the hope that “vets might be more comfortable speaking to other vets but even that didn’t pan out, not yet anyway.” Not all efforts to recruit volunteers will be met with automatic success. The Madison Library will continue its efforts to find a community member who understands the value of oral histories. It may take time to locate the right person for the job, but it may only take one passionate individual to take this project from start to finish.
Libraries of all sizes are creating wonderful digital collections despite the challenge of staffing. The ways in which these projects are accomplished are as diverse as the libraries themselves. Of the libraries interviewed, those who were creating some of the most impressive collections had certain characteristics in common.
▪ Collaboration: Very few of the libraries interviewed for this book tried to create or host a collection by themselves. Find other institutions or agencies that can help you meet your goals.
▪ Volunteers: These dedicated individuals are important participants in the creation of digital collections. Of the 30 libraries interviewed, 11 used volunteers to help them reach their goal.
▪ Using volunteers: Most volunteers help with scanning and metadata but a few are helping with the library website and databases.
▪ Finding volunteers: Historical societies and schools are good places to find volunteers.
▪ Matching interests: The most successful projects have volunteers who have worked with staff to match their interests to the projects. A volunteer who is interested in the subject matter is more likely to stay with the project, but cross-training can help to prevent burnout.
▪ Training volunteers: Treating your volunteers like employees can provide structure and help the volunteer feel like part of the library team.
▪ Outsourcing: You do not have to do all the work yourself. If you have funding, outsourcing may be an option.
All these resources, volunteers, digitization and hosting hubs, and partnerships make the creation of digital collections feasible for even the smallest libraries. Many libraries have also found that by working with others they can preserve and increase access to important library collections. You can, too.
NOTES
1. D. W. Swan, J. Grimes, K. Miller, and L. Bauer, State Library Administrative Agencies Survey: Fiscal Year 2012 (Washington, DC: Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2014), 19, www.imls.gov/assets/1/AssetManager/2012%20SLAA%20Report.pdf.
2. John A. Pfeifer, Charles Grossman and Theresa F. Grossman, 1881−1890, photograph, Columbus Metropolitan Library, http://digital-collections.columbuslibrary.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/memory/id/19833/rec/210.
3. Free Chest X-Rays Available within X-Ray Cruiser, 1969, 1969, photograph, Columbus Metropolitan Library, http://digital-collections.columbuslibrary.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/memory/id/28185/rec/227.
4. “About,” New York Heritage Digital Collections website, http://newyorkheritage.org/about.
5. “About Us,” StoryCorps, http://storycorps.org/about.
6. Janel Shoun-Smith, “Students Join StoryCorps to Preserve History of Nashville’s Immigrants,” Lipsomb University website, February 26, 2014, www.lipscomb.edu/news/archive/detail/13/27890.
7. Veterans’ Oral History Project Act, Pub. L. No. 106-380 114 Stat. 1447 (2000), www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-106publ380/pdf/PLAW-106publ380.pdf.
8. “Veterans History Project,” Library of Congress website, www.loc.gov/vets/vets-home.html.
9. Mark Sweeney, “The National Digital Newspaper Program: Building on a Firm Foundation,” Serials Review 33, no. 3 (2007): 188−89.
10. “About the Program,” Library of Congress website, www.loc.gov/ndnp/about.html.
11. “Award Recipients,” Library of Congress website, www.loc.gov/ndnp/awards/.
12. Jamie Mears, National Digital Newspaper Program (Impact Study 2004−2014) (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Humanities, 2014), 7.
13. Marisa Ramirez, “Going Digital: Questions to Ask When Outsourcing Digitization,” MLA News 50, no. 1 (2010): 21.
14. Allison St. John, “Oceanside Public Libraries Not Up for Bid.” KPBS, www.kpbs.org/news/2012/mar/16/oceanside-public-libraries-not-bid/.
15. “Status of Technology and Digitization in the Nation’s Museums and Libraries,” (Washington, DC: Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2006), www.imls.gov/assets/1/AssetManager/Technology_Digitization.pdf.
16. Paul Flemons and Penny Berents, “Image Based Digitisation of Entomology Collections: Leveraging Volunteers to Increase Digitization Capacity,” ZooKeys 209 (2012): 203−17, doi:10.3897/zookeys.209.3146.
17. Public Schools of Madison, A Brief History of Madison (Madison, NH: Madison and School Library, 1925−26), www.madisonlibrary-nh.org/madisonhistory/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/brfhist_madison.pdf.
18. Ibid., 3.
19. “Madison Boulder Natural Area,” Parks & Recreation New Hampshire website, www.nhstateparks.org/explore/state-parks/madison-boulder-natural-area.aspx.
20. Strategic Planning Committee and Board of Trustees, Madison Library: Strategic Plan 2015−2017 (Madison, NH: Madison Library, 2014), http://madisonlibrary-nh.org/WP/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Strategic-Plan-final-10.17.14.pdf.
21. Stan J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, “The Fable of the Keys,” Journal of Law & Economics 30, no. 1 (1990): 33.
22. Lucy (Phillips) Nickerson, Madison Library Local History Project website, www.madisonlibrary-nh.org/madisonhistory/2013/03/03/lucy-phillips-nickerson.