PLA Blog

The Anne T. Kent California Room (the site being discussed)

Laurie and Sarah did a presentation about the archive they have created which has digital images, maps and audio files. Sorry this post is so bullet point-y but there was a lot of information presented. If you have PowerPoint you can see the presentation here.

Laurie Thompson
Why create an archive digitally? Preservation & dissemination. It’s one of the best ways to share materials that are fragile or hard to access.

1. Assess the materials and the community (and the intellectual of the items in the collection). Good for
   • oral histories, ephermera, historical photos and maps
   • gear archives towards what the population wants and is interested in, outreach opportunity
   • can items be digitzed safely? Are they fragile? Can they be scanned? Will they be damaged with exposure to light? Speaker notes that it’s generally accepted that exposure to light one time won’t damage materials.
   • Copyright issues, speaker mentions “mine field, suggests websites librarylaw, US Copyright Office, public domain chart check agreements with donors and make sure that future agreements you make with donors allow web access to items
2. How to Sell the Vision
   • Make it a special collections project
   • get staff and volunteers who know the stuff to help out as well as help promote
   • preserve rare materials and use the archive as a fundraising tool
3. Equipment
   • scanner, image and audio editing software, Adobe Acrobat, word processor
   • server, computer, monitor, sound card
4. Use it as a fundraiser and to get more grants
   • foundations and civic groups
   • start small and use them to talk about the history of your community “peopel respond on a deep level to images from the past”
   • LSTA grants (they got one for metadata creation)

Sarah Houghton

1. Design Process
   • didn’t want to use the stock County website look and feel, but got someone from the County to buy in to the project
   • went with their own look and feel, background, buttons, etc
   • “you can grab what is already out there, mix and match”
   • uniform look and feel, nav bar and standard footer with library logo, uniform layouts per page
   • PDF and HTML format for text information, so you get a fancy and an accessible version
   • Added Google search, easy, free, fast
2. Workflow - figuring out who does what and when
   • Photos: Special Coll. needs to do their work first: choose photos, catalog with metadata, scan, check the info, re-arrange, write captions, make web-ready (in the future they would have a database-driven model S. says to take better advantage of the metadata)
   • Photos: Webmaster: creates the pages incl. thumbnail pages, move to server
   • Audio: Special Coll staff - backup audio file, backup on server, transcribe interview (time consuming!), choose audio clips, write bio essays
   • Audio: move files to web server, making new web page for oral history and transcript in HTML
3. Publicity
   • library blog
   • email newsletter
   • email to all staff before it goes live
   • ling off library’s main site if appropriate
4. Techie Stuff
   • Make choices that work on all computers, simple simple simple
   • Accessibility: variable fonts, ALT tags for images, reads with a screen reader, W3C standards
   • Online findability, very very important because your collection is unique, get listed in search engines, get visible

Laurie continued with a tour of the site, pointing out some highlights of it, including a feature where they take audio excerpts from some of their files and use them as “answers” to questions that they list, faqlike, on that page. She finished with a what we’ve learned section

1. Laurie: Digital archives require a commitment of time and resources
2. Laurie: maintaining the archive is more labor intensitive than creating it (this didn’t make sense to me) I think she means that it’s an ongiong committment and shoudl be staffed appropriately.
3. Laurie: train staff appropriately and give them training from experienced professionals
4. Sarah: people find these images from search engines and link to them with their blogs
5. Sarah: limitations were due to both an overworked e-services librarian and built in limitations from using county servers (no CSS, no flash originally, etc)
6. Sarah: Next step is database-driven site
7. tips: back-up all digital files.
8. tips: work closely with city IT staff
9. tips: make staff members digital archivist and project manager

Tags: conferences, digital libraries, PLA, PLA2006

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 at 1:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.