Sarah Weinblatt Blog 8: Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture

Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture is the online version of the current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. I just saw this exhibition two weeks ago and decided to see if there was an accompanying online exhibition.

Collection Description

"By interweaving the three themes of poster art—celebrity, promotion, and advertising—this exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery’s collections examines how a famous face can enhance a poster, and, conversely, how posters have defined reputations of prominent Americans. These images remind us of the ubiquitous presence of visual messages outside the world of fine art. Widely disseminated forms of popular portraiture—like the poster—remain a profound influence in our culture."

You can take an audio tour of this collection narrated by the curator or you can browse through each image.

The site is divided into 8 different sections: Broadsheets and Show Posters, The Poster Craze, Wartime Propaganda, Export of American Culture, The Product and the Promise, Politics and Protest, Postermania of the 1960s, and Film and Music Advertising.

On each of the pages there is a description of the content along with the images.

Object Characteristics

The images on the site can be enlarged via Flash Player. Once you click on the image a new screen pops up that allows you to view the image and click on a tab for the accompanying text describing that image.

You can also view images of the actual galleries at the NPG.

The site does not display all 60 posters found in the exhibition. I was disappointed to find that they did not have an online image of the my favorite poster from the exhibit of the Hitchcock film, Notorious.

Metadata

The metadata that is available for the objects include: the title, persons portrayed, artist, year, media type, dimensions, home within the Smithsonian Museums/Libraries/Archives and provenance.


Intended Audience

Anyone interested in poster art, portraiture etc... Or just a visitor to the NPG's website.

Jesse Blog #6: Senator Joe McCarthy: Audio Excerpts, 1950-1954

Senator Joe McCarthy: Audio Excerpts, 1950-1954 - home page

This collection of 35 audio clips, culled from the Senator Joe McCarthy collection, is held and was digitized by the Marquette University of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. These have been posted on the e-Archives website, a portion of the Special Collections & Archives division of the university library using ContentDM.

Selection Decisions:
The audio clips presented here were taken from the archives' expansive collection sound recordings within the full McCarthy Papers. The full collection of audio recordings appear to include over 100 hours of audio, ranging from the 1950's through the 1960's. The "About The Project" notes that this is a small fraction of the total audio available form the collection, yet give no details as to how the excerpts were selected. The clips cover range from 1950-1954, and concern mostly percieved communist threats to the United States, as well as McCarthy's concern about homosexuals working in the state department and other topics. The "about" page acknowledges that some topics discussed by McCarthy are today considered greatly offensive, and that he is still controversial figure in American history.

Metadata:
For each digitized clip, the archives has included a robust metadata set including: title, date, description of contents, keywords/subjects, location of recording, length of recording, original format, reproduction notes, information on location within full collection, and a link to the transcript. The metadata is able to be searched either via text search or year.

Object Characteristics:
The original recordings were digitized from the original 1/4" tape (although wire recordings also exist in the collection). The transfers were recorded in Adobe Audion at CD quality (16-bit/44.1Khz) wav files. These files are delivered in ContentDM via Apple Quicktime. The default action for the audio files is to stream, however, by right-clicking they can be downloaded to the users local computer as a Quicktime mov file. Transcripts are delivered via pdf downloads. Unfortunately, the naming conventions between the mov and pdf files are not standardized, so it would be difficult to keep track of the relation between files if downloading more than a few at a time.

Intended Audience:
From the website itself, it is unclear to who this collection is intended to serve. It would not be terribly useful to a serious reseracher, due to the incompleteness of the audio clips. However, the presence of the clips may serve to lead those wishing to do more complete reserach to the collection, based on the web presence. One group who may find the collection useful would be students of 20th century American history who are reseraching the cold war and it's effects, as McCarthy was a major figure during that era.

Kempleel blog 8 - Advance Australia

Since I was beaten to the punch on the national archives exhibition of "Running for Office," How about a completely different take on the political process? Advance Australia: South Australian and Federation is a production of the South Australia State Library and is notable mostly for it's uselessness.

Collection Principles: The website is intended mainly as a bibliographic resource for the Australian Federalist movement in the late 19th century, with additional digitized material, namely photographs, cartoons, posters and fliers, as well as some sample text documents. Thus most of the content they're conveying isn't even on the site. However, if a source relates to a digital document, there is a link - but most of the links are broken.

Object Characteristics: Objects are contemporary images and photographs relating to the people, places and issues surrounding the federalist movement in Australia and the emergence of the Australian constitution. It's difficult to say how many images there are, since they're linked different places and there seems to exist to comprehensive image index. Most come in a single resolution, making some that contain text completely illegible. The site is searchable, but only to a point. Images are not separately searchable, although the can be viewed by topic section.

Metadata: Extremely minimal - Images usually only include a title and an original source, i.e. for cartoons the original paper of publication and date. No where could I find any information for most images about the original artifact digitized, it's author, its place of holding, etc, etc. Many broken links, but a few images did link to catalogue records in the Mortlock Library of South Australia, the Rare Books and Named Collections of the Library of South Australian, and the South Australia Parliamentary Papers. However, there is no way of telling whether most other images belong to any of these collections.

Intended Audience: Those with an interest in Australian political history, students, teachers, etc. Honestly, I had previously been completely unaware that Australian had had a contentious constitution making of it's own, or that Women in South Australian could vote in 1897. I just wish they had included more resources!

karyn j blog 6; William F Boyd Photo Album

The William F. Boyd Photo Album is a collection of 43 images taken by one of Seattle’s earliest and most important photographers. This collection depicts views of Seattle and the Puget Sound Area. The images capture the aftermath and devastation of the Seattle Fire on 6 June 1889, as well as notable events, such as President Harrison’s visit in 1891, and popular sights and scenery from the area and the other parts of the state.

Collection Principles

The about the database page for this collection does not give the reasons for the digitization of this collection. Nor does it explain why only 43 of the 104 “vintage photographic prints” were chosen and used in this collection. It does, however, tell us that “the information for the William F. Boyd Collection was researched and prepared by the UW Libraries Special Collection staff in 1998.” The original physical collection can be found in the University of Washington Libraries Manuscripts, Special Collections, University Archives Division as the William F. Boyd Album Collection no. 34. This collection uses CONTENTdm Digital Asset Management format.

Object Characteristics

The images are listed alphabetically based on the title. Each thumbnail has a title, date/approximate date, and place the picture captures. When you click on the thumbnail, it takes you to an enlarged image which is at 100% with the metadata beneath it. You may also view the photograph at 25%, 50%, or 75% (there are no other options). There are also options to fit, rotate, clip the image, or hide/show the thumbnail. Because the photographs could not be directly scanned, the images were scanned from recopied 35mm color transparencies and are viewed as JPEGs.

Metadata

The metadata for this collection is helpful. The metadata for the images uses these descriptors: title, photographer, date, notes, subjects, location depicted, collection, order number, ordering information, repository collection, object type, digital reproduction information. The subjects for each image are determined using both LC subject headings and the LC Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (you can also search using both of these subject terms). There is no mention of copyright information (perhaps because it is in the public domain). However, the metadata does a good job of telling who took the picture, when and where it was taken, what is depicted, and where the physical piece can be found.

Intended Audience

The intended audience for this collection is the casual browser or researcher interested in Washington around the turn of the century. It is not directed towards scholarly researchers. Overall, this site is okay. While browsing the collection, there is no easy way to return to the collection homepage without pressing the back button. I also think it would be beneficial to the user if information concerning how and why the collection came about was included.

John G. Blog #5 Musicians and Their Pets

Musicians and Their Pets

Musicians and Their Pets is a collection of digitized photographs from the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library from Yale University. I found this collection on the Smithsonian's "Library and Archival Exhibitions on the Web" link. As the title of the collection implies, the collection includes photographs of various musicians and their pets. Unfortunately, this is all that the collection includes.

Collection Principles

I was unable to locate any information about the collection principles. Based on the photographs that are included in the collection, one can only assume that these photographs have been digitized and put into a collection because they come from notable musicians in history. There was no "About" page on this website. There is only an email included Julie.Niemeyer@yale.edu for contact information.

Object Characteristics

The collection only includes photographs. No other types of media or art are included. Photographs from the following musicians are included in the collection: Benny Goodman, Charles Ives, Deems Taylor, Vladamir and Wanda Horowitz, John Kirkpatrick, Cole Porter, Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, Fred and Rose Plaut, Virgil Thomson, David Stanley Smith, Horatio Parker, and Robert Shaw. Oh, and "Staff Pets" are also included in the collection. Unfortunately, there was very little bibliographic information for the staff's pets as well.

Metadata

There is very little metadata presented for each photograph. Each photograph has a title and sometimes includes a brief description or annotation specifying which collection the photograph comes from. I was disappointed to see that such little information was included for each photograph. It is unknown if the bibliographic information does not exist or if there was no effort put into the collection since it involves such a random and obscure topic (Musicians and Their Pets). It is a little shocking to find that this collection, which is associated with Yale University, is so poorly put together. I was expecting more from them.

Intended Audience

Well, since there was such little information about the collection posted, one has to assume that this collection was intended for music historians and aficionados. I don't know of anyone else who would be interested in learning about the pets of deceased musicians.

Emily - Blog 8 - Running for Office

Appropriately timed, The National Archives is currently hosting an online exhibit titled Running for Office, which showcases political campaigns through the years of 1898 - 1948, particularly focusing on political cartoons drawn by Clifford K. Berryman.

Collection Principles
The collection principles for this exhibit are clearly outlined, as they limited themselves to a particular artists drawing about a particular subject matter. I thought there selection was excellent - and showed a good variety of his work through the years.

Object Characteristics
This site had excellent quality, the best part being that there was an option to Click to Enlarge, as well as Download and Print - which I haven't seen often on archive Web sites.

Metadata
Metadata was the only field I thought could be improved on this site. The metadata only included the very general location of the item ("U.S. Senate Collection
Center for Legislative Archives"), but no call number or other information.

Intended Audience
Voters all over the US would find this site interesting!

Lauren Blog 8 - Newton Owen Postcard Collection

The Newton Owen Postcard Collection, found online at the University of Louisville, represents nearly a century in the life and travels of an extended Kentucky family. The 781 cards include souvenier travel cards and greeting cards. Some of the items date back to the late 19th century and stretch into the 1980s, but the bulk of the collection is from 1900-1940.

Collection Principles

Of the 781 items in the collection, 579 have been digitized. The About section reveals that items were left out due to copyright constraints, though as an educational institution it seems U of L could argue fair use. Another interesting note from the About section of the website states that the collection contains stereotypes of Dutch and African American people that may be offensive to many viewers. While the University does not endorse these depictions, the curators write that "the cultural record would be incomplete -- and we would not be honest with ourselves and our past -- if these images were omitted." I think this is the correct stance and is very well explained.

Object Characteristics

Lots of lovely metadata lets the visitor know that the images were selected and scanned by Caroline Daniels in 2006-2007 on a Epson Expression 1680 flatbed scanner as a 600 dpi TIFF image in 24-bit RGB color. "Daniels converted the images to JPEGs of 'maximum' quality and resized them to 600 pixels in the longest dimension using PhotoShop versions 7 and CS2. The images were then uploaded into CONTENTdm (versions 4.1 and 4.2)." This means that the postcards show up on my screen looking slightly larger than life size and showing excellent detail. The database looks like ContentDM and can be searched easily and favorite images can be saved. The collection also features a mapping feature that shows some of the Louisville images on a GoogleMap. I was really excited about this feature, until I realized it was only for 11 images, but this would be a really great tool for exploration if expanded.

Metadata

The metadata here is great. Each record has a lot of information about the physical object and its digital surrogate. The "About" section of the site also provides a lot of background on how the items were digitized.

Intended Audience

The postcards are largely from Kentucky, Indiana and the Southeastern U.S., so they would be of interest to people studying the changing landscape and architecture of that area. However, the cards also give a great deal of insight into the family life and popular culture of the era. Unfortunately, features like the Googlemap of Louisville narrow the audience that might be interested in the collection.

Meghan C. Blog 7: VIVA2

VIVA2 or The Visual Index of the Virtual Archive 2 is a wonderful site full of interesting innovations of the web. The archive consists of 3D representations of Manhattan, New York City. The original archive, or The Visual Index of the Virtual Archive version 1 created by the Skyscraper Museum in Manhattan was an actual archive which they digitized and created a a virtual world for people to travel through. The original collection is based on over 500 photographs and scrapbooks and papers of skyscrapers in New York and beyond. VIVA2 is comprised of these photos and other memorabilia to create a very comprehensive and intuitive database which is at times hard to search through, but very appealing to those that wish to gain a better understanding of the pieces that make up the Big Apple. This project was funded by a grant given by the IMLS foundation.

Collection Principles

The collection principles were to digitize everything, I believe. They found a way to market all of their collection by creating an interesting a new way of looking at the information which was originally just kept in a finding aid and within the museum itself. The amount of access to these documents was limited due to this, and by creating this website they have given even the most uninteresting items life! I believe that the website is an item in the collection as well, it is very interactive, and the principles behind it seem to be ones for harvesting interest within a community of educators and travelers. Problems I see with this site are its uses of advanced programs on the internet which require newer machines with more capabilities. The use of Flash seems to be the greatest deterrent for those who can't afford a top of the line PC which would allow them to view some of these spectacular images and interactive functions, like the viewing of Manhattan over many periods and additions to the city's skyline, or the viewing of the worlds tallest buildings back to back.

Object Characteristics

The original finding aid states that the images were only digitized as TIFF's at 8 bit color depth, which is not quite up to standards. The original digitizing occurred around 2001, so maybe this is the reason why. It is a bit disappointing, I find that the images are not poor, but small. There isn't a very intuitive way of enlarging the images either, after right clicking one can zoom in as many times as one wants but the image then lacks any definition due to the pixelation. It is unfortunate that this collection cannot work as individual documents, but must remain a part of the overall site in order to deduct real meaning from the photographs.

Metadata

The metadata on this site was really fascinating. It is not contained with the images but rather on a separate finding aid page, which provides a comprehensive list of attributes and keywords for the collection, not necessarily every item. What is interesting is that within the composing of this information on their site they have created little blurbs about the buildings themselves which incorporates the metadata into a narrative. Within the Flash diagrams of the information you can search the archive for keywords and genres of the information. I liked that the flash incorporated this into it. I found that the metadata could have been a bit more accessible to the more scholarly folk who would wish to peruse this site for credible documents, unfortunately this isn't so. I think that the format of this site has a lot of potential within the world of Web 2.0 in creating more interaction between people and their information, but this has been somewhat neglected. Possibly one day other sites will learn from the lessons and innovations of this site.

Intended Audience

As I postulated earlier, I believe that the intended audience for this collection is most likely young students and tourists, as well as some curious members of the community within New York. This is made evident by the different options created for children and other adults wishing to search the interactive archive. Hopefully they might do better to incorporate other pieces of the metadata to make this site more operable.

Claire B. Post 7: The Cornell University Witchcraft Collection

The Cornell University Library Witchcraft Collection is a digital sampling of titles from the Cornell University Library's collection of materials on Witchcraft. According to Cornell, the collection documents the earliest and the latest manifestations of the belief in witchcraft across a range geographies, with works on canon law, the Inquisition, torture, demonology, trial testimony, and narratives.

Collection Principles

The majority of the Witchcraft Collection was acquired in the 1880s through the efforts of Andrew Dickson White, Cornell's first President and an active scholar and book buyer, and his first librarian, George Lincoln Burr.
The collection contains early texts from the period when the theory of the heresy of witchcraft was being formulated, including fourteen Latin editions of one of the more sinister works on demonology, the Malleus maleficarum, which codified church dogma on heresy. Four of these Latin editions were printed in the fifteenth-century, most notably the scarce first edition printed before April 14, 1487.

The collection also contains other texts of the doctrinal discussion of demonology, as well as the works of theologians who opposed the Inquisition, for example Cornelius Loos, the first theologian in Germany to write against the witch hunts. The project's claim to fame is its court records of the trials of witches, including original manuscript depositions taken from the victims in the torture chamber. One example is the minutes of the witchcraft trial of Dietrich Flade, a sixteenth-century city judge and rector who spoke out against the persecutions in the 1580s. The manuscript was discovered in Germany and acquired by Andrew Dickson White in 1883.

Object Characteristics

The current digital collection contains 104 monographs (23,220 pages of material). Pages are viewed as GIF images, or as long formatted pages of the text taken from the pages with a manual delineation of pages. You can save or print images, and also add them to your "bookbag" where your searches are saved. Once saving in the bookbag, viewers can email the links of the items of interest to themselves or others.

Metadata

The volumes are viewable as "body of text" (scanned pages) or viewers have the option of "view entire text" which shows a long page of all text from all pages together. Any item that is available is available in its entirety, so it takes a while to load some of the enormous volumes. Then you can do a text search, or copy and paste text as needed. Metadata includes author (if known), title, publication information. Browsing is available by author or title. This can be challenging if you do not read Latin.

Intended Audience

The Witchcraft Collection is a rich source for students and scholars of the history of superstition and witchcraft persecution in Europe. The site's documentation page claims that the collection "focuses on witchcraft not as folklore or anthropology, but as theology and as religious heresy," but I imagine that folklorists or anthropologists, as well as literary scholars, would still find some interesting materials here.

Jonny Grass Blog 6, Charlotte, the Vermont Whale

Charlotte, the Vermont Whale

Charlotte, the Vermont Whale is listed as an electronic museum on the icom site of virtual museums, though its digital collection is not well curated. It was created in 1993 by the Computing and Information Technology department at the University of Vermont to highlight the 1849 discovery of a fossilized beluga whale near Charlotte, VT.  The site contains an “Introduction to the Story,” a “Directory of Exhibits,” and an “About the Project” page.  Due to curtailed funding, the site remains incomplete.

Collection Principles:

The virtual museum is based on the fossil of a whale that is housed in Burlington, presumably at an institution affiliated with University of Vermont.  While it is not clear where the fossil is housed, the site was founded and managed by UVM, so it is likely that this is where the physical object is located.  It is not clear how the photographs that were used for the digital images were selected; the site is derived from a slideshow the curator, Jeff Howe, compiled for a traveling presentation.  However, it is not clear that the digital images were part of his slideshow, or why he chose these images in the first place.

Object Characteristics

Within the exhibit directory, an image is displayed with one or two sentences.  The description usually includes at least one term with a hypertext link to a page explaining that term, also with an image and a couple sentences.  Presumably the exhibit is this one image, plus the single images on linked pages.  The images on some of the pages are clickable in order to open better resolution images in another window.  These new images are roughly 600 pixels x 200-400 pixels.

Metadata

There is little metadata for the images.   The rights information is provided, but that is it.  The site is descriptive about the events surrounding the finding of the fossil, as well as relevant subjects, such as beluga whale.  However, descriptive metadata about the images or the fossils doesn’t seem to be available.

Intended Audience

The intended audience is school children, though the site does not state what age this means.  It seems like it is geared toward younger elementary school kids; the site was constructed to supplement traveling presentations by its curator to Vermont schools to tell children about the fossil.

CSchley Blog 8 American Wine and Thomas Jefferson’s Dream

Collection Principles. This online exhibition, “Doubtless as Good: Thomas Jefferson’s Dream for American Wines Fulfilled” is a production of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History that describes the development of the American wine industry from 1776 to 1976. The tale is told in four “chapters” linked from the exhibition’s home page. Each chapter opens to text and images focused on: Jefferson’s Dream 1776; Growing Gains, Growing Pains; The Paris Tasting, 1976; and American Viniculture & Viticulture. There are also links to “Bibliography & Credits” that provide list of books containing more information (but no links!) on viniculture, historical works and other related cultural works, and “Links to Related Sites” for more information on wine, Prohibition, Thomas Jefferrson, etc. However, none of the books are more recent than 1995, and many of the links in the Related Sites are no good, broken or out of date. Although all the information on the exhibtion’s site is related to the growth and development of the American wine industry, the information is dated and focused primarily on the California development.

Object Characteristics. The text on the various web pages for each “chapter” is in Times New Roman bold with images in thumbnail jpegs that are click to expand and accompanied with a sentence describing the image. Most images are in black and white, although the California and the few Virginia wine labels under American Viniculture & Viticulture are in dull colors. There is very little metadata for the images, and no metadata as to the origin, ownership or rights with respect to the content of the image. For example, the image for Washington’s Coaster includes only the statement, “This engraved, openwork plated silver and wood coaster was used to hold wine bottles at George Washington's Mount Vernon estate. It probably was made in Sheffield, England, about 1765.”

Metadata. As noted above, there is very little metadata for the jpeg images. And very little for the text descriptions for each “chapter.” However, the dated bibliography appears to have a solid listing of wine and related texts, but they have no links. The “Credits” information on the Bibliography page lists the curator, the project manager and others as well as the Web designer for the online exhibition; there is no contact information, however. There is no statement of the date of the exhibition (although is looks to be around 1996), nor any information about rights or usage, other than the copyright symbol on the bottom of each page next to the name National Museum of American History. The pages do contain an email sign up section at the bottom of each page for a “customizable monthly newsletter to keep you informed about activities that interest you.”

Intended Audience. This is not for the serious wine lover who has an interest in the U.S. wine industry. Nor is it for the student or scholar. The information is too dated and there is too little of what there is on the few pages of this online exhibition. Perhaps this would be of interest as an initial resource for a high school student’s short paper on how wine has developed in the US since Jefferson’s time. But he or she would have to do much more research for current articles.

Yunmeng Du Blog 4:Asian Ethnographic Collection

I found Asian Ethnographic Collectionthrough the National Science Digital Library. This collection is part of the online collections supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which encompass digital images of artifacts, documents, and photographs.

Collection Principles

Asian Ethnographic Collection contains 44,598 objects with images and 49,624 images in total. From 1897 through 1902, Berthold Laufer, Waldemar Jochelson, and Waldemar Bogoras launched a collection of more than 15,000 objects from Siberia and China. In recent years, a host of objects from Vietnam have been added to this collection resulting from curator Laurel Kendall’s fieldwork in the ethnic groups of that country.

Metadata

Metadata has been assigned to every object such as catalog number, culture, country, material, dimensions and a short description of the object as the object name. The search function for this collection is very powerful. On the left hand of the homepage, users can do a free-text search within each field of metadata. Such fields include object name, material, locale, catalog number, accession number and donor name. There are more limiters like country and culture under the search box. You have six options to sort the results. On the center of the page is the image in gallery view with another search box at the bottom of the page, which allows users to refine the search. Each search box is followed by either brief search tips or a link to help.

Object Characteristics

16 images are displayed on each page in gallery view. They are grouped by different catalog number, the default index setting. The original setting for presenting images is gallery style, which means users can only see thumbnails and names once they conduct a search. But there is an “information view” link at the bottom of the page in order to let users view more descriptions of each image. A “print page” button also placed along with the information view so you can easily print out something from this page. When you click through each object, you can always go back to the original catalog page by clicking on the link above each image. This is another display option to let you view objects with nearby catalog numbers. No button or link can you use to go back to your previous page. However, since each image page is opened automatically in a separate window or tab, you will always have the homepage opened in a window or a tab. There is no zoom in/out function for this collection.

Intended Audience

This collection is launched by the Division of Anthropology at American Museum of Natural History. According to its mission statement, this collection can provide a window into the lives of the people who produced them, and they are resources answering those questions about the human experience. I would say this collection can be attractive to students or faculty who are doing research on anthropology, or to those who feel interested in human lives in a particular area.

Katie R - Blog 7 - Seeing is Believing: 700 Years of Scientific and Medical Illustration

This online exhibit, Seeing is Believing: 700 Years of Scientific and Medical Illustration, compliments a physical exhibition of the same name at the NYPL in 1999-2000. This website is apparently from 2001, although looks much nicer than some newer online collections. The exhibition is meant to highlight the scientific prints in NYPL's collection. Since printing processes enabled medical and scientific information to be distributed, these illustrations are important in the spread of knowledge.

Collection Principles:
My first reaction to this exhibit was that it was comprehensive with interesting illustrations, and that it placed a heavy emphasis on printing processes. Since I love printmaking, I was very excited to see this explication. And then I realized that basically was the exhibit. I was expecting the exhibit to focus more on a cultural aspect, such as how the advances in printing led to the spread of medical knowledge, etc. Not so much. However, the succinct descriptions of printing processes and a small bit of its history did warm my heart. I think the physical show included more items from the NYPL's collection than the online exhibit (I should hope so, anyway). The exhibit was curated by two rare book and manuscript librarians, who I'm assuming knew the collection very well an chose the best examples of relief, intaglio, lithographic, and photographic illustrations.

Object Characteristics:
The images are jpegs. If you access the images through their respective process using the top menu bar, you can just enlarge the item into a new window. If you access the images through the Illustrative Processes page, then the site gives the option of clicking on an area of the image and seeing a close-up of that section, called Detail Studies. When clicking around to different pages, many phrases are links, but I found they all just lead you in circles or down an avenue from which it is difficult to return. Not very handy. Nice features include Links and Suggested Readings. I have no idea if this site uses a particular data management system.

Metadata:
The information with each image is basic but complete, including the artist, title, year, print process, what collection it's from within the NYPL, and the digitial size (not physcial, interestingly) of the image. I don't think there is any exceptional 'behind the scenes' data, since there are no search options. There is a link to "more information about this image" with all images, which brings up a short paragraph about the artist, scientist, or work of art. This seems like it is from the placards from the physical exhibit. The link to the rights of reproduction is prominant on any page with an image.

Intended Audience:
This online exhibit might attract those interested in science, but it should ultimately be geared toward printmakers or those interested in rare books and prints. The scientific/medical aspect of the exhibit is so basic and historically limiting that it would probably not be of interest to an historian. The digital exhibit could be a platform for the library to highlight its rare collections, there for the public and researchers to see and browse without too much effort.

Sarah Weinblatt Blog 7: Contagion: Historical Views and of Diseases and Epidemics

I wanted to examine this digitization project, Contagion: Historical Views and of Diseases and Epidemics, because it uses OpenCollection. We are using this OpenSource software at the HRC to catalog our movies posters. This project is based at Harvard University, and the Harvard University Library is involved in this project along with a team of others. The items found in this digital library are a part of the collections of the Harvard Library system.

Collection Principles

The website states,"Harvard’s new “open collection” contributes to the understanding of the global, social–history, and public–policy implications of diseases and offers important historical perspectives on the science and the public policy of epidemiology today."

You can search a broad overview of the site by using the links on the left side. These links provide information on 9 different epidemics. One can also search and browse through the collections in the catalog records or through full text. The browse options provides a list of genres and topics from which you can search. There is also the option of searching using a Google toolbar.

Once you click on a disease link you are brought to a page with text about this epidemic. There is also a list of selected additional resources.

There is also a timeline that provides links to the materials found on this site.

Metadata

According to the site, in most instances, you can access the digitized materials through a hyperlink in the items's catalog record.

When you click on the browse by genre link, you are given the metadata about the various objects found on the site such as title, creator, date and a link to the object. You are also given the option to display a full record. This provides information regarding the location of the object, the subjects, categories, forms/genres, publishers, language in which it is published, and a description of the item.

Object Characteristics

The items that can be found in this digital library include: books, manuscripts, maps, broadsides, and images. The images in this collection can be enlarged by clicking on them. This takes you to a separate record where the images can be enlarged or decreased. For example, when I clicked on an image in teh cholera epidemic, I was taken to a digitized book from which this image was pulled. The text in these digitized resources is able to be searched.

Intended Audience

I really like this digital library because not only do they tell you about the contributors to the project, but there is also a help page that tells you how to search the collection. The intended audience of this digital library includes people interested in the history of diseases such as my fiancee who is in medical school. When I told him about this site, he said that sounded right up his alley.

Geoff Willard Blog #8: The Freesound Project

The Freesound Project, a project of the Music Technology Group of Pompeu Fabra University, is an extremely cool database of Creative Commons licensed audio samples. The site's strengths lie in its extensive searching & browsing and object metadata. Kudos to them for explicitly stating, "Samples are useless without good descriptions and tags."

Collection Principles

Any and all samples are welcomed into Freesound's repository, as long as they're a) released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License, and b) not copyrighted. The CC license they've chosen allows users to download the samples, remix them, and use them in noncommercial distributed works with attribution (assuming it's not advertising). Each sample displays download metrics, a permalink, and allows for commenting, rating and tagging. Freesound allows browsing through a conventional keyword search, a tag cloud, by user name, geographic location (samples are geotagged), and a clever Remix! tree. Their "similarity searches" are based on the sound's semantic information. Neat.

Object Characteristics

When you download a sample, it's unique ID is appended to the file name. As best as I can tell, all samples are either in FLAC (lossless), AIFF/WAV (uncompressed lossless), or MP3/OGG (compressed). Freesound is the first digital repository that I've seen use a waveform display to depict frequency information through color - colors towards blue are low in frequency and colors toward red are high in frequency. Recording methodology is left up to the submitter; some provide it and some don't. Freesound encourages thorough documentation ("your descriptions need to be as precise as possible"), so the structural and descriptive metadata on each sample more often that not looks like this.    

Metadata

I'm in love with this metadata. Seriously, it's fantastic. Sample pages list the audio format, frequency, bit rate, channels (mono or stereo), duration, file size, CC license, and user supplied tags and description. There's even a forum post dedicated to describing a sample based on four levels: macro (broad description), meso (description broken up into smaller events), micro (the sample's spectromorphology), and technical (what technology was used to create the sample).

Intended Audience  

Anyone in the market for sound effects for any media application - film, music, radio, Web, etc. - should find this site useful. Creative Commons advocates will probably be drawn in because Freesound trumps CC's horn to no end. 

Jessi Fishman Blog 8: NYPL Digital Gallery: American Popular Song Sheet Covers, 1890-1922

I found this online exhibition, American Popular Song Sheet Covers, 1890-1922 simply by going to the New York Public Library website and browsing through their online digital collections. I really liked the idea behind this collection because it showed a super early example of amazing organization and metadata skills: "Totaling more than 400,000 titles, the collection came to the Library in 1966 from the estate of George Goodwin (1900-1966), a radio station director who developed the Tune-Dex, a comprehensive 25,000 card catalog index of popular songs... The information on the cards was nearly exhaustive, documenting composer, publisher, licensing and copyright information as well as the song's words, music and chords, all on two sides of 3x5 inch index card!"

Collection Principles
According to the "background" section of this online exhibition, "Before the Music Division acquired the Goodwin collection, it regarded the collecting of popular sheet music as a secondary endeavor, but the Goodwin acquisition immediately made NYPL a major source for popular songs and remains so today. Wide in scope, the up-to-date collection encompasses early musicals, ethnic songs, presidential ballads, war songs, parlor songs, and even popular lead sheets. The collection's immense depth allows researchers to view a wide array of social, political, and historical moments in time in a way that only a contemporary piece of sheet music can provide." The NYPL does a good job with their unique and interesting collections, always making sure there is a cohesive bond and good principles behind the online collections. This is no exception. The NYPL website makes it extremely easy for the user to find out any information they might need about a specific exhibition or about the library, copyright/usage rules, and access in general. This collection is easy to find, and easy to use, and documents the wide scope and breadth of the many NYPL collections.

Object Characteristics
This particular collection doesn't have too many options for browsing and searching, as it is of a somewhat limited scope, but it is easy to maneuever and find interesting items nonetheless. You can either browse, which simply brings up a list of links to the song sheet covers separated by they year they were created, or enter a search term, or "display all images". Also, when you find one you like and click on it there is a "related items" link which makes it easy to find other song sheet covers created in that year so you can follow the history of the creator and of the collection.
From each object's characteristics description, the user can determine the object's origins and structure, see where it can be found physically, understand the NYPL's naming scheme, view associated metadata, and know that the item is trustworthy because the NYPL has high standards and is known for its reliability and quality of information.

Metadata
The only real problem I have with the object's individual pages of metadata and description is that they don't open in a new window or tab. I always prefer for individual items to open in a new tab so I don't get lost or have to always press the back button on my browser. However, other than that little nitpicky issue, the metadata for these objects is of course up to par with NYPL...there are "captions" and "alternate captions", links with breadcrumbs telling you how you got there and how to get out, published date, where it can be found in the library, and information about the digitization of the item including dates and id numbers.

One problem I had with this collection is that if you think of a search you want to perform while you are in the middle of browsing, you have to get all the way back to the front page of the collection to just search the collection...if you use the search box at the top of the page, it will search all of NYPL's digital collections, which can get frustrating. Also, I was hoping that in the metadata sections, it would tell you which genre of music the particular object came from, as I think that would faciliate searching...instead you can only search for words in the title, which is not that useful when it comes to finding information about music.

Intended Audience
This collection goes along with most of the NYPL online collections, that it is good for researchers, with quality information, multiple points of access, and links to other online and print resources that could be helpful to scholarly research. For this reason, the main intended audience for this collection would probably be scholars of George Goodwin and early music categorizing and organizing. People studying music paraphernalia and ephemera would also find this site useful, as would anyone interested in the history of music and music organization.

Tami Blog #7: Documenting the American South: First-Person Narratives Collection

First-Person Narratives Collection

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes 12 thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.

Collection Principles

One of those collections, “First-Person Narratives of the American South," is a compilation of diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives written by Southerners. The majority of materials in this collection are written by those Southerners whose voices were less prominent in their time, including African Americans, women, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans. "First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920" was a 1996/97 Award Winner in The Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library Competition. This award funded the digitization of 101 texts.

Object Characteristics and Metadata

Each narrative contains a clickable table of contents, including the jpeg illustrations from the narrative and a list of subjects in which this narrative belongs. Most of the narratives contain illustrations of the book, spine, frontispiece, title page, and a list of illustrations contained in the narrative. Clicking on the List of Illustrations takes you to a table of content -styled listing of the illustration titles and page numbers. Click on the page number and you are taken to the illustration, which includes the name of the illustration, the page on which it can be found, and a list of additional subjects (metadata) that apply to this illustration. In addition, at the top of every page of the narrative is the title of the narrative, name of illustrator, author, publisher, and publishing year. You also have the option of clicking to the previous or next illustration in that narrative. The jpegs cannot be zoomed but are of good size and can be easily read. The transcribed text of the narrative can be viewed as either an HTML file or an XML/TEI source file. The only disappointment I had with this collection was the inability to search in each individual collection. You only had the option to search through all 12 at one time.

Intended Audience

While appropriate for all, these collections are particularly useful in a classroom environment. The site offers a variety of classroom resources, including a teacher’s toolkit, lesson plans, and guides to other sources. I spent quite a while reading the narratives in this collection and found it fascinating and engrossing. I believe these collections would also be useful to scholars of the South, slavery, and the suffragette movement. It was an interesting and controversial time and I feel that these collections do a good job of representing that era by letting you experience it through the words of the participants.

Yunmeng Du Blog 3: Science and the Artist's Book

Collection Principles

I found this exhibition from Mosaic of Science Galaxy in Smithsonian Institution Libraries. Science and the Artist's Book is an exhibition presented by the Smithsonian Institution Libraries and the Washington Project for the Arts. This exhibition aims at exploring links between scientific and artistic creativity through the book format. The two host institutions invited a group of nationally recognized book artists to create new works of art based on classic volumes from the Heralds of Science collection of the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, which serves as part of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries’ Special Collections.

Metadata

I don’t see any significant metadata in this collection. This collection doesn’t have any search function, as far as I see. All images are sorted by different scientific subject such as Aeronautics, Architecture, Biology, Physics, Medicine, etc. Each image is an illustration from a specific book, which presented under the respective image with the author, title, publication title, location, date and the description of the book. Since there is no search function in this exhibition, any information can only be browsed by users, which means you can only click through each image in order to access them.

Object Characteristics

The resulting artist's books in this collection, each inspired by the subject, theories or illustrations of the landmark works of science with which they are paired, offer a number of witty and imaginative insights into the creative side of scientific research. For example, under Architecture subject, there is one page with one image from a scientific book and the other one from the artist’s book. Full-size JEPGs and GIFs for each image are available and downloadable. However, the image on this page itself cannot be zoomed in or out. There are only two buttons at the bottom of the page—return to the previous section and return to the start of the exhibition. Otherwise, there is no way to navigate from this page to other pages of the collection. This is not a good example of providing online exhibitions to the public. The possible reason may be this is a small exhibition based on very limited collections.

Intended Audience

The intended audience is kind of vague for this exhibition. Since it contains illustrations from both scientific books and respective artist’s books, I assume that the intended audience is people from public who are interested in the illustrations of scientific books, or the professional artists illustrating scientific books.

Hannah Norton Blog 5: Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Animal Behavior Archive

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology houses the world’s largest collection of audio and video recordings of animal behavior. Although not all of their recordings are available online, they are continuously digitizing new material with the ultimate goal of making these recordings available for education, conservation, and research around the world. Along with the recordings themselves, their website contains information about how to make animal behavior recordings, possible uses of the recordings, the history of the archive and potential future directions, and archival methods.

Collection Principles
The online portion of this collection contains streaming audio and video recordings of birds and other animals in nature. Recordings are contributed by staff but also, in large part, by hundreds of amateur and professional “recordists” from around the world. The archive aims to collect the most comprehensive collection of animal behavior recordings possible. Although recordings from contributors are, to some extent, serendipitous in nature, the lab also actively seeks to complete their collection by taking annual “Big Expedition” trips to different regions and by posting a list of “Most Wanted Species.” They also see a value in obtaining numerous recordings for the same species, as this can help highlight different behaviors practiced at different times as well as geographic variation within species. Presumably the lab does have some limitations on the number of duplicates and type of submissions it will accept, but I was unable to find an explicit description of this policy.

Object Characteristics
The archive is an effort of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology; therefore their main strength is in recordings of bird behavior. However, they also have hundreds of recordings of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and insects. Recordings available for streaming are mp3s and QuickTime movie files. The search function brings up records both for digitized recordings and those that have not yet been digitized. Although none of the recordings are immediately available for download, you can order recordings from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for a fee (as a non-profit, this is simply a processing fee, and is discounted for educational purposes); this applies to all recordings regardless of whether or not they have already been digitized.

Metadata
The metadata provided is more robust for certain recordings than others, but overall is sufficient. Search results include the catalog number, common name of animal subject, scientific name of animal subject, location of recording, recordist’s name, date of recording, length, and quality rating for each recording. Further metadata is provided through a link to the catalog number, including confidence rating (confidence that the recording is a representation of the animal it purports to be), further information about the geographic location (such as elevation, latitude, longitude), what kinds of sounds can be heard (eg. clicks, whistles), person who identified the species, and date of species identification. Records also contain an icon indicating that more information is available and accompanied by the following blurb: “Over time, new fields will become public as we check our records for quality. Please contact us if you would like to view the full data.” Users are able to search by many of these parameters under the advanced search option. One problem I experienced in using the basic search function was that in some cases I searched by common name and found no results, even though a search for the same species by scientific name did bring up results (and these results included the common name!). When this happened, I did receive a tip to use scientific names.

Intended Audience
The intended audience for this website is very broad encompassing educators, researchers, environmentalists, commercial businesses, and members of the general public. The page “How to Use the Archive” details what potential uses fit under each of these categories and provide links to some case studies that other organizations have done with these recordings. The site also contains a list of scientific publications that resulted from work making use of these recordings.

This is a really interesting site! The fact that the lab receives many of its recordings from individuals not on staff means that the website is very inclusive, with lots of helpful information about how to make recordings and what you might do with recordings. Another interesting feature that I didn’t mention was their “RavenViewer” application. This is a free plug-in for QuickTime that allows you to see the spectrograms and waveform patterns of the sounds as they are played. (Having recently gone to a talk in the biology department about bird songs, I know this is one of the ways that researchers analyze these sounds.) In all of the places that I saw problems (search snafus, places where more metadata would be appropriate), there were messages indicating that these problems were in the process of being solved. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has funding lots of major sources for this archive, and they seems genuinely committed to expanding and improving it.

Kempleel blog 7: Acadian Heartland

Acadian Heartland: Records of the Deportation and Le Grand Derangment, 1714-1768 is a project by the Nova Scotia archives to digitize a number of their records with regards to the political situation and eventual expulsion of the Acadian French from Canada after Britain took over the region in the early 18th century. This subject is surprisingly obscure in the modern United States history curriculum, though doubtless given far more attention in Canada.

Collection Principles: "this Website presents documentation which began as primary records, written down at the time and preserved in the years afterwards; these documents provide a factual account of events leading up to the Expulsion, first-hand descriptions of the Expulsion itself, and additional relevant documents from the aftermath years." They also claim to have the largest digital collection of archival sources for this subject/period.

Object Characteristics: For the largest digital collection, they only have five digital books, all of which were published more than a century after the period (although the first few books are reprints of much older records). They were all scanned with corrected OCR, and are full-text searchable. No images of the original pages are viewable, just the text. There is also a collection of images relating to the period, including portraits of major players and a lot of romantic engravings used to illustrate the poem "Evangeline." The text is presented in pages, a similar format to JSTOR, and the images can be enlarged from a thumbnail, but do not otherwise have a particularly stellar resolution. There is even a map, of old Acadie, but you have to download viewpoint mediaplayer to view it.

Metadata: Presumably, all the materials are held by either the Nova Scotia archives, the progenitors of this project, or their allies the Nova Scotia’s Office of Acadian Affairs and the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society. The books are sited as sources, but are not cataloged for where they may be found in a collection. Image metadata is more inclusive but still fairly sparse, detailing the artist/progenitor, the date, the medium, and the collection they are housed in.

Intended Audience: The website mentions the archives desire to bring these somewhat obscure documents to a wider audience. I'm sure that given the popularity of genealogy projects, there are probably many Acadians in North America who might wish to utilize this, as well as students of early North American history. The website lists many, many links to other web sources of information about the period.

Lauren Blog 7 - Center for Civil War Photography Stereo Cards

The Center for Civil War Photography is a non-profit organization that creates physical and digital exhibits using images from individual private collections and the public domain.

I set out to write this blog about the Center's Digital Archive Project, which, as described on the website, sets out to digitally secure, preserve, organize, create a database of, and make available online every image pertaining to the American Civil War. The archive will include all formats of photography as well as select sketches, drawings, woodcuts and engravings. You'll notice I say "will" because, as I was disappointed to learn, this project has not been completed. It's start and expected completion dates are unclear. So I've decided to consider the 3D Photographs Exhibit, one of two online exhibits, get a handle on how the archives database might improve over their current online materials.

Collection Principles
This exhibit is a selection of Civil War stereo views from the collection of Bob Zeller. Its purpose seems simply to let people know that such images exist and to let them look at civil war images in a new way. No overview is given of the history of stereo images or how they were traditionally viewed.

Object Characteristics
Many of the stereo images here were featured in a book called The Civil War In Depth. Owners of this book are instructed to use its viewer to look at the images in 3D. But I'm guessing that quite a lot of people do not own this book and thus just see two very similar photographs side-by-side. The exhibit consists of 22 thumbnails of stereo cards with short description. Clicking one of these takes you to two medium-sized images (500 x 249 pixels) of low resolution, one of the front of the stereocard and one of the back.

Metadata
For each image, there is a paragraph of historical narrative. No further information is given about the physical artifact. No metadata is given about the digital images.

Intended Audience
Largely, the websites seems aimed at increasing awareness about the vast visual resources that exist from the civil war era. The homepage points out that "new photographic finds from our nation's greatest conflict are still being made on a regular basis. Nearly every Civil War soldier had his photograph taken by one of the more than 5,000 American photographers active at the time, and a select group of documentary photographers took thousands of images on the battlefields and in the army camps, often in 3D." The intent here seems to be to show people what images are available to them and to increase preservation of these images.

Based on the limited resources currently available from CCWP, I really hope they follow through on the goals for their digitization project, which includes metadata creation, high resolution files, a searchable database and an online reference library. These images really are amazing, but they deserve to be high resolution and easily accessible. However, since the CCWP will be pulling these images from various private and public collections, some probably already in digital form, it seems unlikely that they will be able to set image standards.

karyn j blog #5; African American Portrait Collection

The African American Portrait Collection consists of 129 photographs of African Americans in Missouri from 1880-1920. For many of the people in the photographs, it may have been one of the first time posing for portraits. This was made possible by the introduction of the cabinet card, which made portrait photography affordable for African Americans.

Collection Principles

The images in the African American Portrait Collection were purchased by the Missouri State Museum in 1999. Several photo albums were located by museum curators and contained unidentified African Americans from areas throughout Missouri and Louisiana and were loaned to the Missouri State Archives to be copied and scanned. The 129 images were loaned to the Missouri State Archives specifically for the purpose of making them more widely accessible. The majority of the physical collection is in the form of albumen print cabinet cards.

There are no restrictions to the access of this collection. Because some of the images are unidentified, it is suggested that the best way to access the images is to browse. However, there is also an option for a keyword search. There is also a section on the about page that gives you a list of additional resources.

Object Characteristics

Each thumbnail image has 3 pieces of information: a title, a date/time period, and “view details”. When you go to “view details,” you are given the metadata about the image and an option to enlarge the image. When you click to enlarge, a new window opens and with most images, you have the ability to zoom one time. Each image is a JPEG and depending on the image, stains, written words, and discolorations are visible.

Metadata

Each image has these descriptors for the metadata: record group, series title, title, collection title, date of image, description, subject, image size, color, box, folder, shelf, copyright. If the name of the person in the image has been identified that information can be found in the subject. Also, because each image was most likely taken before 1920, everything is in the public domain. The metadata is very helpful in that the user can pinpoint exactly where the item is if they want to see the physical piece.

Intended Audience

The intended audience for this collection is the researcher and casual browser. It may be beneficial to people doing genealogy research or interested in the lives of African Americans in Missouri before and after the turn of the century. Overall, the collection was okay. The one thing that really bothered about this collection was the generic titles for the images (African American Man, Woman, Boy, Girl). By giving each image a title, the collection would be easier to browse and each image would have an individual quality.

CSchley Blog 7, Julia Child’s Kitchen at the Smithsonian

Collection Principles. The French Chef Julia Child’s kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts was donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 2001. The online exhibit features information about Ms. Child’s kitchen in both text and flash format that appear to serve as a teaser for the actual Smithsonian exhibit, “Bon Appétit: Julia Child's Kitchen at the Smithsonian” which opened in Washington, D.C. in 2002. The text format lists selected objects from the kitchen under “View Selected Objects”, while “Explore the Kitchen” includes a list of facts about the kitchen and “Sample Stories” list 18 stories relating to the French Chef. In the text version, through the link at the bottom of the page for FAQs there is a description of when and how the kitchen was obtained by the Smithsonian, with additional links for a number of related topics such as how museum staff inventoried the kitchen, conducted the interview, packed and shipped the kitchen to Washington, processed the collection, and developed the actual exhibition. The text version of the online exhibit provides images of selected photographs of the actual exhibit kitchen with brief descriptions under the “Visiting the Museum” link at the bottom of the home page/text version.

The flash version requires a download of Adobe Flash Player and opens with an audio of Ms. Child’s in her well known staccato saying that “We are very proud indeed” to have donated her kitchen to the Smithsonian and welcoming you to share her kitchen in the exhibit . The flash version enables you to view selected kitchen exhibits in thumbnail images with accompanying descriptive text for such things as a fruit bowl, her Cordon blue diploma, blowtorch and the like. The “Explore the Kitchen” is a flash player that presents a 360 degree panoramic image view of the actual exhibit (which is apparently enclosed in Plexiglas at the Smithsonian) that you click at particular buttons to learn more. The 18 sample stories from the French Chef are grouped into five categories –Life, Love and Food; The French Chef; Cooking Lessons; Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom; and Julia’s Kitchen Stuff.

Object Characteristics. Because the site’s information is available on flash player or in text version there are different characteristics for the objects. Only in the text version could I open the links to the FAQs, Events, Share Your Thoughts, What’s Cooking, Visiting the Museum, Resources, and Credits items listed at the bottom of the Home page. Perhaps that was because my home computer could not handle the further add-in. The text version’s link to Visiting the Museum does provide jpeg images in varying pixels for a photo tour of the actual exhibition. In the flash player version, the selected objects are small thumbnail images that do not expand into very large images but do have “learn more” buttons that describe the image. The flash version’s 360 degree panoramic view in Explore the Kitchen enables you to click on various buttons in the kitchen to zoom into a fixed image with a brief comment about what you are seeing.

Metadata. Most of the descriptive metadata for the images is brief and either commentary or merely a description of what the object is. Other descriptive metadata as to origin and ownership of the photographic images, the various story and object images and the editors, curators, designers and website development is provided under the “Credits” link at the bottom of the homepage. There is a very good list of further resources under the “Resources” link on the homepage that list Books by Julia Child, About Julia Child and her kitchen, Public Television Series with Julia Child, references for American Food History, Web links, and a Children’s Bibliography (that includes cookbooks, non-fiction, fiction, and a related Website).

Intended Audience. This site is for potential visitors for the Smithsonian’s Julia Child Bon Appétit exhibit in Washington, D.C. for which this online exhibit is really a teaser for that actual exhibit. People who like to cook and who also want to know more about a cookbook’s author will only find this site disappointing because of the limited amount of information about Julia Child, the French Chef. A parent or teacher of children’s cooking might find good resources in the Children’s Bibliography section of the Resources link; but otherwise, this online site has very little for the scholar or student of the culinary arts, except perhaps the references for American Food History in the References link.

Jessi Fishman Blog 7: Harvard's Open Collections Program

Through Harvard's Open Collections Program (OCP), Harvard aims to advance "teaching and learning on historical topics of great relevance by providing online access to historical resources from Harvard's renowned libraries, archives, and museums". The program was established in 2002, and started providing access to three main collections in 2004, Women Working (1800-1930), Immigration to the United States (1789-1930), and Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics. Harvard Libraries are also currently in the progress of creating a fourth online exhibition for this program called the Islamic Heritage Project. Since we got on the subject of home economics last week, I wanted to focus on the Women Working collection, which explores women's roles in the US economy between 1800 and the Great Depression. According to the main site, "working conditions, conditions in the home, costs of living, recreation, health and hygiene, conduct of life, policies and regulations governing the workplace, and social issues are all well documented by original source material." The collection is made up of 500,000 digitized pages and images, including 7,500 pages of manuscripts, 3,500 books and pamphlets, and 1,200 photographs.

Collection Principles
Now, I was surprised by this exhibition, because for one thing, it's Harvard and so I was expecting to be blown away, but also, from the description that Harvard gives to this Open Collections program and its exhibits on the main site ("well-documented", "offer a new model for digital collections", etc.), I was expecting that this would be an extremely well-organized, easy-to-maneuver site with clear collection principles. Well, it's not. Once you actually get into the Women Working section, it doesn't tell you anywhere how they decided on the materials to digitize or why. You can search or browse, but there is no listing anywhere of everything that is actually in the collection (I know I said last week that I didn't like just lists of stuff, like in ContentDM, and I don't, but I do think that if you want to "browse", you should be able to browse both by topic, format, etc, and by a list of thumbnails and descriptions so you can get a feel for what is available.) The browsing capabilities on this site seem like they're really varied and useful, but when it comes down to it, it's pretty confusing and there doesn't seem to be any explanation or reasoning behind why what is there is there. For instance, I was trying to just browse by photographs, to get pictures to pretty up this blog entry, and when you click Browse Photographs it makes you choose from one of the three institutions from where they got their materials, but doesn't explain really what's in there, and then when you click on one of them, it makes you choose from another whole list of topics, so you can't really just look around. You have to know exactly what you are looking for, and search for it by exactly how it's labeled in this exhibition, and I don't think that's the greatest way for an online collection to be.

Object Characteristics
Harvard uses their own "image delivery service" to display the images in their open collections program. This allows for zooming, rotating, resizing, all that good stuff, but we don't know how they did it, or how this service could work with other institutions or programs. It's also confusing because you have to actually click on the "Display Full Record" link to get to the metadata...if you just click on the image, which I did the first few times, you only get to this image delivery service, which means you lose out on all of the metadata and descriptive information. Now, I figured this out, but would the everyday user? Maybe not. Also, some of the objects, like whole digitized magazines, go directly to the delivery service as well and there doesn't seem to be any metadata available at all. I don't see any qualities contributing to interoperability and reusability, the titles are sometimes really long and inconsistent, and the only kind of naming scheme I can ascertain is linking up the files to another metadata list (containing all the same information) in the Harvard University Library VIA, or Visual Information Access record, which I guess is just another catalog that was already there, so they thought it would be useful to link up to. Again, no real explanation there.

Metadata

The metadata for the digital objects in this collection is pretty good...there are fields for title, name/creator, VIA id (as stated above), physical location, creation date, form/genre, subject titles and in some cases a small description, and a thumbnail of the image. However, like I mentioned before, the titles are really weird...some of them are just what is going on in the picture with brackets around the words ([sorting books], for example) and then some are what is going on in the picture with no brackets around the words, and some read like lists of sentence fragments. For instance, for this image right here, the title is: "Housing, Conditions: United States. Wisconsin. Milwaukee. Tenements: Housing Conditions: Milwaukee: Family living room in the building. Social Museum Collection" and I have no idea why all that stuff needs to be in the title. It seems that the site is much more friendly to people who have an exact search in mind, because spread throughout the collection are pretty detailed sections on specific people or events, complete with links to resources to learn more about them. I don't think the site was meant to be a great, easy to use by anyone digital collection. Which leads me to...

Intended Audience
Harvard states on this site that its goal for Open Collections is to "offer a new model for digital collections that will benefit students and teachers around the world". And in fact, the Women Working section does have a detailed "Teacher Resources" section, where all of a sudden you can look at five subcollections, that are organized more cohesively by subject, and primary sources that will be interesting to students, but you never would have known these organized, interesting things were here unless you were a teacher and clicked on this link. For this reason, I would venture to say that Harvard was aiming this collection at teachers from the beginning, and so didn't really care if the rest of the site was impossible to maneuver around. The site could also be useful for students or researchers with specific information goals in mind, but overall it's not that welcoming to the average user.

Claire B. Blog 6: Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings

The Strachwitz Frontera Collection of commercially produced Mexican and Mexican-American Recordings (the Frontera Collection) is owned by the Arhoolie Foundation, which was established to preserve regional vernacular music created in the United States. Some of the collection has been digitized, but the project is still underway. The Arhoolie Foundation in El Cerrito, California is managing the project, and the UCLA Music Library hosts. The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center is heavily involved as well with arranging funding and, presumably, tailoring the digitization project for specific audiences.

Collection Principles

This collection is the largest repository of Mexican and Mexican-American vernacular recordings in existence, and contains many one-of-a-kind recordings whose publishing companies no longer exist or, if they do, lost or melted their metal masters in the earlier twentieth century. The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center is digitizing the first section of the collection, consisting of 78 rpm phonograph recordings. Once in digital format, this vast collection of approximately 30,000 performances, primarily in Spanish, recorded during the first half of the twentieth century, predominantly in the United States and Mexico, will be available to researchers and the general public.

Digitization began on October 15, 2001. The production team first cataloged the entire collection of over 100,000 individual recordings on cassettes and 78 rpm, 45 rpm, and 33 1/3 rpm long-playing (lp) records using "specialized equipment" (not sure what, exactly).

The Strachwitz Frontera Collection contains three sections, roughly divided by era. The early-twentieth century section includes approximately twelve thousand 78 rpm recordings of Mexican vernacular music recorded from around 1905 to 1955. These performances document many types of popular lyric songs, including the first recordings of corridos (narrative ballads on topics of the day), canciones, boleros, rancheras, and sones, as well as many types of instrumental music, including the first recordings of norteño and conjunto music. In addition, this section includes many spoken performances, such as patriotic speeches and vernacular comedy skits. The late-twentieth century section contains approximately fourteen thousand 45 rpm recordings dating from around 1955 to the 1990s. These include recordings by a wide range of small regional firms created to serve the musical interests of the growing immigrant population in the United States, especially along the border. The last section of the collection includes approximately three thousand 33 1/3 rpm recordings from around 1955 to 1990, demonstrating the continuity of styles and regional traditions into contemporary times.

Object Characteristics

Music is available as .ram files, easily played on Real Player. Anyone can listen to a 50-second sample of songs, but full access to the piece is limited to people affiliated with UCLA only. I found this really disappointing, frankly.

Metadata

The site offers extensive searching and browsing. Records for items include song titles, creators, subjects, music genre, recording notes, and then a space for viewers to add their own notes. These notes actually go right onto the record page as a "user note" (I found this out by adding a note of my own, one that adds no value whatsoever to the record, so apologies to the metadata team over there). One neat feature is that users can create their own virtual collection, basically tagging recordings to go into this collection. Then you can save the collection, email the titles, or clear your personal collection and start over. Browsing can be done by alphabetical listing of titles, or subject listings (e.g., animals, advice, adultery). Users can search and browse in English or Spanish.

Intended Audience

The site is geared, obviously, toward musicians and people interested in Mexican American music in the twentieth century. But the UCLC Chicano Studies program is interdisciplinary and hopes to offer this collection as a means for analyzing "issues critical to Latino communities" - this could appeal to almost any academic discipline focusing on these communities in the US (history, sociology, anthropology, ethnomusicology, etc). It is a pretty cool site to just browse through anyway, though, even though non-UCLA types only get 50-second segments.

John G. Blog# 4: !Del Corazon! Latino Voices in American Art

!Del Corazon! Latino Voices in American Art was originally a website created in 1996 to feature the works of Latino Artists. It has since been converted into a digital collection for the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM).

Collection Principles

According to the information in the "About" page, the collection was converted to continue to feature the work Latino artists and to show their relevance and importance in the history of American culture. It was also converted because the website became outdated. There are 12 works of art in this digital collection with links to other artworks and art collections in the Smithsonian by these and other Latino artists. There is a brief artist biography and narrative about each piece of artwork that provides helpful information for visitors. The collection also provides photographs, videos, and other resources to showcase the works of these artists and to connect Latino art to the history of American culture. The six Latino artists that are featured are: Maria Castagliola, Pepon Osorio, Carmen Lomas Garza, Agueda Martinez, Maria Brito, and Patssi Valdez.

Object Characteristics

Each digital image allows visitors to zoom, move, download and 8.5 x 11 poster. The site uses Adobe Flash Player 9. Each artwork is described using helpful bibliographical information. Digital representations of a wide variety of artwork is included in this collection/exhibit including: oil paintings, photographs, models, and sculptures.

Metadata

The site provides viewers with bibliographical information including: date created, artist, size, media type, and Smithsonian call/ID number. There is also some interactive information included to help non-professionals. For example, Our Lady of Guadalupe by Pedro Antonio Fresquis (ca. 1780 - 1830), specific information about the painting under "Things to Look for" like the crescent moon held up by the angel.

Intended Audience

The intended audience is anyone who is interested in Latino art. I liked that there was useful information for public viewers and that it wasn't exclusively intended for Academia. I also liked the fact that most of the website or collection resources were both in English and Spanish. I enjoyed learning about the artists and the creative processes that they go through to create their art. As an Educator I also appreciated the Curriculum resources including the lesson plans and resources in PDF files that were provided.

Katie R - Blog 6 - Cartoon America

This Library of Congress online exhibit of The Art Wood Collection of Cartoon and Caricature called "Cartoon America" highlights a small portion of the 36,000 cartoons that make up the collection, now held at the LOC. The works range from political cartoons to comic strips.

Collection Principles:
"Cartoon America" is a curated online exhibit meant to showcase a relatively new special collection at the Library of Congress. Art Wood started collecting American cartoons in his from a young age and into his career as an editorial cartoonist. The curators explain that the "selections reflect Wood's primary collecting interests and strengths and the vitality of an innovative and evolving art form that includes political illustrations, gag cartoons, comic strips, illustrations, animation, and caricature." This online exhibit was originally a "real" show at the LOC, a fact that is hard to establish from the website.

Object Characteristics:
The images in this exhibit are JPEGs, stamped with only somewhat intrusive watermarks. An informative paragraph accompanies each item, detailing the artist or themes therein. The cartoons have been scanned in color, as the discoloration of the paper is evident in black and white cartoons. My favorite part of this exhibit is the fact that many images cannot be posted online. The tag "The Library of Congress does not have permission to display this image online" is used with the main exhibition image when the cartoon is missing. Instead of just taking out the entire object, image and description, they kept it all in, echoing the physical exhibition exactly and not tailoring online aspects. While it's great to have information about cartoonists and such, having no image is pointless.

Metadata:
Very little information is attached to each cartoon, at least up front for the public to see. General information about the author, title, medium, and year are present, along with details about where the cartoon was published (what newspaper). The user must go to the Checklist of Objects page to find information about LC numbering, possibly only of the digital copy, not the original (the "DIG" in the number leads me to believe that: LC-DIG-ppmsca-07517). Copyright information is also listed. A catalog (for sale at the gift shop!) goes with this exhibit, and it seems that the website is just copying the basic information that would be in the book.

Intended Audience:
Since this online exhibition directly copies the actual exhibition, I would say the audience is anyone interested in the collections of the Library of Congress. Artists or historians would like this exhibit, especially the political cartoons in this highly politicized year. I think little thought went in to a virtual audience, and the LOC probably figured (rightly) that graphic objects with few words and pretty pictures will attract most anyone, and I can see the tourists streaming through this exhibit at the Jefferson Building just because they are there. It is a very educational and descriptive show, but with missing images online, the impact is much less for the virtual user.

Meghan C. Blog 6: Internet Archive - Prelinger Archives

The Prelinger Archive was established in 1983 by a man named Rick Prelinger and within 20 years he acquired over 60,000 films. Most of these were ephemeral films produced as advertisements or educational films, some are just amateur works. These films were digitized for scholarly use and to prohibit the loss of history as these films slowly deteriorate and/or just vanish over time. The Internet Archive is the platform on which the Prelinger Collection stands on. Created for similar reasons, the Internet Archive bridges the near past with the present by preserving different works of media to be viewed by a scholarly audience as well. In 2002 the Prelinger film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress and all that remains of the original 60,000 film library is now down to 4,000. The Prelinger Library is located in San Fransisco and the Prelinger Archive contains over 2,000 films all within the public domain for anyone to view whenever they chose.

Collection Principles

They digitized what they believed to be the most important and defined films within their collection. They probably gave special attention to the films that were receiving the most use over a period of time, in order to prevent any further damage to the films as they were. They digitized the pieces of film that seemed to most relevant to the purpose of the Prelinger Archive, to further research and scholarly thought on media art, history, and science. The collection is all within public domain according to the website, so the digitization of the films is not prohibited. In fact the website actually encourages you to make each of the films your own, in a sense, reproducing incorporating, or enhancing them as you see fit. It's a really beautiful thing.

Object Characteristics

Each of the 2,012 films seem to be available in a wide array of formats, making them very accessible to the public. MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4 and others are file formats for the videos. The films themselves are viewable, and at the mid-range of file size appears to have nice resolution, but if blown up, loses much of that visibility. The objects themselves have unique identifiers. It is a little unfortunate that a collection of this size does not label their assets better. It seems to be very easy to contact Rick Prelinger as the need appears to someone in search of a specific film. another interesting feature is the thumbnail clips from the films themselves, I thought this a very nice touch for someone just looking to browse through public domain stills. Although, the images themselves are not the best quality.

Metadata

I found this to be a particularly interesting aspect of the site. On the home page for the Prelinger Archives there is an option to view the keywords for the 2,000 odd films in the collection in a tag cloud, very cool! Some of the biggest ones are consumerism, cold war and social guidance. I really enjoyed looking at this feature. So really the only ways to search within the archive is by keyword or title. So the site is a bit lacking in its ability to appease a scholarly audience. I believe that they should employ some sort of a database to create explicitness in their holdings.


Intended Audience

The site states that its intended audience is a scholarly one, but I am sure they bring many different peoples. They offer a lot for its users to navigate and interact with their site with, like their commenting and reviewing section as well as a bookmarking option. Both of these really helps make this site feel more like a community. I fear that not every scholarly person would be able to find what they are looking for when encountering this site, it is unfortunate, but the metadata needs a lot of work to create a more accessible place for people to really learn from.

Emily V - Blog 7 - National Archive Experience Digital Vaults

The National Archive Experience Digital Experience is a fancy looking site - using Flash technology lots of images swirl around the screen encouraging the user to interact with the site, explore, the archives, and play exciting archive guessing games... It all seems like a pretty good idea, but somehow it didn't really work for me. I found the Flash, while nice looking, a little annoying - it took for ever to navigate in between pages, and at least on my small-ish laptop screen I didn't find it terribly easy to see and decide which images to choose. 

PS. There is also an archive theme game to play.

Collection Principles

There are no clearly stated principles. I assume that this is just a sampling of everything that has been digitized, but I don't know this for sure... The images seems to be organized thematically and by tag words, though the archive webs can be filtered by the user.

Object Characteristics

Good scans, one can zoom in very close and still get nice clear images. (I think they must be vector images.)

Unfortunately, there is no way to take copies of the picture off the site.

Metadata

Metadata is great for these images. When one finds an image of interest they click on that image, which swirls it to the front (this is time consuming!) then you select to expand, which opens another window where one can read a small blurb about the artifact and zoom in on the image. Also at this point you can "Research the record in ARC" (though this link is not terribly visible or obvious) - this gives you all of the metadata you may need.

Intended Audience

The audience for this site seems to be primarily school children (I am guessing primary school-age and maybe middle-school). The site as links for educators, so their goal seems to be to have this Web site incorporated into history or social studies classes.

Jesse Saunders #5: Lawrence University | Art of the Poster 1880-1918

Lawrence University | Art of the Poster 1880-1918


This collection of poster art is hosted by Lawrence University of Appleton WI, however the originals were collected and scanned by the Minneapolis College of Art & Deisgn of Minneapolis, MN. The artwork reflects the styles and themes during the "Golden Age of the Poster" (1880's through World War I), when zinc plates came into widespread usage and mass production of posters became common throughout Europe and the United States.

Selection Decisions:
Originally containing only sixty pieces, the initial collection was assembled to be used in the teaching of courses in Design History and Graphic Design courses at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design. The posters in this collection were certainly chosen due to their dates of creation (1880-World War I), but throughout the collection, a range of styles and national trends are included. The current collection contains over 160 digitized posters.

Metadata:
Through CONTENTdm, a good amount of metadata has been collected including: the artists name, country of origin, and lifespan; year produced, original material, size, type (poster/advertisement), style, period, rights information, and identifier. The metadata is not strictly uniform in how it is applied though, as some poster's subject sections include translations of the text or short descriptions of the product/venue, while many have only transcriptions of the poster text. Overall the metadata is quite helpful, particularly in identifying the artists, countries of origin, and styles for those who are new to the art included in the collection.

Object Characteristics:
As stated in the introduction, this collection is managed and displayed with CONTENTdm. The search page can give false results, as it defaults to including items from other collections, however, these can be easily de-selected once the user makes a search and sees that here are returned results that are clearly not what they were looking for. Within the website viewer, the tif images are displayed, and can be zoomed in up to 100%. High resolution jpeg images can also be exported at 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100%, via the export link at the bottom of the screen. This link, while not hidden, is placed as only a text link at the bottom of the screen, and not with the other image manipulation tools at the top of the window. Information about the processes and equipment used to create the scans is unavailable, as the About page contains only CONTENTdm's default "what information to place here" jargon.

Intended Audience:
As these were initally collected for art students at MCAD, this group remains it's primary audience base. The collection would be useful, to those who are interested in poster art of this period, particularly due to high quality downloadable scans. That being said, you would need to either know the collection was on the Lawrence website or commit to serious research to find it, as I could not find the collection using several different combinations of search terms in Google.

Sarah Weinblatt Blog 6: The Jim Henson Works

The Jim Henson Video Collection at the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library at the University of Maryland consists of over 70 videos ranging from classics such as Sesame Street, the Muppets and Fraggle Rock to early experimental films. These videos were donated by The Jane Henson Foundation and The Jim Henson Legacy along with funds to create this online collection.


Collection Principles

The University of Maryland hopes to provide a variety of research opportunities with this collection by providing access to Henson's work. This collection as stated previously is housed in the Performing Arts Library at UMD which is a part of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center which focuses on "training future performance professionals and scholars."

"Each resident department of the Center will find its own use for such a collection: the Theatre Department now hosts a Jim Henson Artist in Residence and offers courses in puppetry, the School of Music offers various classes in popular music and culture, and the Dance Department is known for its cutting edge performance program where multidisciplinary projects are encouraged. Yet, elsewhere on campus, this collection will also be of use to UM’s American Studies program where studies in popular culture and humor are offered."

There is no information offered as to why these are the 70 plus videos placed online. One can only view these videos if they visit one of three different libraries on campus. This is extremely frustrating because what is the point of placing these videos online for the public to search if you are only going to provide access at the library. I was incredibly disappointed to discover this after I had searched the site for a video I wanted to watch. I really love the Muppets and thought this was a great project until I couldn't view the videos.

Object Characteristics

The 70 plus videos are searchable through a basic search and an advanced search which allows you to search by title, subject, series, and name. A patron of the library can also search through an online index which divides the videos into six sections: Celebrations, Compilations and Documentaries, Feature and Experimental Films, Fraggle Rock, The Jim Henson Shows, The Muppet Show, and Sesame Street.

Metadata

When selecting the video you would like to view, you are taken to a page with the video screen along with credits for what you are about to watch and a short summary. There are also links to related videos and subject headings. Along with the title of the video, the year and running are also provided in the box that shows the video.

To obtain the full catalog records for each video you can click on the link to UMD's Library catalog that has a full MARC record of each video. The MARC record states that access is restricted to patrons of the University of Maryland.

Intended Audience

Obviously, the intended audience is people who visit the libraries with computers that play the videos. The site says these are on public computers so you don't have to be a student, faculty or staff at UMD to view these videos. UMD hopes these will be educational for students studying the performing arts but never discuss the excitement the general public might receive from seeing videos from their childhood. Therefore, by not placing these online for the public to view I do not believe UMD had this in mind when planning the digitization project. With funds coming from The Jane Henson Foundation to create this project, there might have been some sort of agreement to this nature.

Tami Blog #6: The MacKinney Collection of Medieval Medical Illustrations

The MacKinney Collection of Medieval Medical Illustrations is one of the more recent collections to be digitized and added to the online library collections at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Collection Principles

Dr. Loren MacKinney, a professor of medieval studies at the university, was an avid collector of Ektachrome slides pertaining to medieval medical illustrations, traveling worldwide to add to his collection. In addition to the slides, this exhibit provides extensive information concerning the life of Dr. MacKinney and the process used to digitize the slides. This digitized collection is a subset of the larger MacKinney Collection, consisting mostly of microfilm and Photostats chiefly of medieval medical manuscripts, as well as MacKinney’s extensive research notes on medieval medicine, medieval medical illustrations, and related topics, housed at the university. Given the uniqueness of the slides and their potential for damage, they were digitized from June to August 2007.

Object Characteristics

The slides were digitized using the Nikon SuperCool SCU 9000. To create a master archive of the images at the highest resolution possible, the slides were scanned five at a time at 4000 pixels per inch. Copies of these images were then sharpened, cropped, and color adjusted in Photoshop. These manipulations sought to represent accurately the condition of the original slide and to produce a natural appearance for screen-viewing.

The objects can be manipulated and zoomed in to a level of extreme detail. You can also add items to your “My Favorites” folder and then do side-by-side comparisons of two objects. The images can also be viewed in a slideshow. However, when viewed in this state, the user must choose between viewing the image and viewing the metadata pertaining to the object.

Metadata

This collection provides the best metadata I have come across while looking at different digitized collections for this assignment. From the home page, you can search by illustrator, repository, date, language, subject, text illustrated or you can view the entire collection. Once you click on an image, underneath is a list of metadata concerning the image, including where it can be found in the repository. One of the things I really liked about this site was that when you clicked on the image to enlarge it, the metadata remained. In other collections I have explored this semester, many tossed you into a separate window that held only the enlarged image with no supporting data. Very inefficient to have to go back and forth from metadata screen to image screen.

Intended Audience

The university states in its discourse concerning the collection that the collection was digitized in order to “benefit scholars by providing easy access to the images.” I also believe this collection would be interesting to the general public. I don’t consider myself particularly scholarly and I enjoyed searching and browsing the collection with no real purpose in mind.

Yunmeng Du Blog 2: Digital Arhive Services in Visual Resource Collection at UT Austin

Collection Principles

As slides are continued to be used in classroom teaching and the use of digital images is becoming rapidly the preferred format, The Visual Resources Collection has been producing high quality digital TIFF images since 2004. As of September 2008, circa 33,400 digital JPEG images are accessible via the Digital Archive SErvices (DASE https://dase.laits.utexas.edu ), a password protected site.

The VRC participated in the licensing of the Archivision (Art and Architecture) Collection and the Allan T. Kohl Archive. Both of these collections are accessible through DASE. In cooperation with the Blanton Museum, the VRC is in the process of making the museum's holdings digitally accessible on DASE for classroom teaching.

Metadata

The metadata they used for this particular collection is very impressive. The common fields have been employed, of course, compassing title, authors/works supported, period, location, serial number, original filename, original file checksum and some notes on the scratch pad. The coolest thing is that you can conduct a search by simply clicking through the content under each field. For instance, after an image in Renaissance has been retrieved. The word ”Renaissance”, which will be placed under the field “Period: British”, becomes an active link allowing you click through in order to get a list of everything shown in this collection containing the word “Renaissance”.

Object Characteristics

The Slide Collection, which began around 1940, currently numbers approximately 550,000 35mm analog slides of which circa 218,648 have been entered into a database. Currently, these text records are not available on-line. Electronic access to these text records is only possible in the VRC room. The Collection also houses the Ferguson Collection that consists of over 5000 photographs, negatives, and contact sheets of Mayan sites in Central America.

Each image goes with three display options: small, medium, large and full, which allows users zoom in/out. Another unique function for each exhibit is that two helpful website programming scripts have been elaborated. If a user wants to incorporate the image into a webpage, the easiest way is to copy and paste the scripts into the source codes of the webpage. Two types of scripts have been provided here as HTML and XML. On the page of each image, there are several navigation tabs on the right side. You can go back to your previous searches by clicking “Current Search Results”. This website is also allowing users to create their own collections and slideshows by clicking the “My Collections” and “My Slideshows” buttons on the navigation bar in order to form a list of your preferred images.

Intended Audience

As it’s been clearly stated on DASE’s homepage, the Visual Resources Collection (VRC) affiliated with Art and Art History Department of College of Fine Arts is a teaching resources unit for faculty and students at the University of Texas at Austin. Its mission is to support the teaching needs of the Art and Art History Department.

Since a UT EID is a must to access this collection, I would say their intended audiences are UT faculty, students, staff or any other UT affiliated individuals or organizations.

Elizabeth S. Blog #5: Home Economics Archive

Home Economics Archive
"HEARTH is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines. Titles published between 1850 and 1950 were selected and ranked by teams of scholars for their great historical importance. The first phase of this project focused on books published between 1850 and 1925 and a small number of journals. Future phases of the project will include books published between 1926 and 1950, as well as additional journals. The full text of these materials, as well as bibliographies and essays on the wide array of subjects relating to Home Economics, are all freely accessible on this site. This is the first time a collection of this scale and scope has been made available."

Collection Principles
The materials gathered in this collection are all centered around Home Economics. It is located at Cornell University, and as such, the objective is to provide research materials to scholars interested in the subject. With that in mind, the collection is integrated into the University library system, and the site suggests other online collection with related content: "Additional information, images and readings on the history of Home Economics are also available at the Cornell University Library's Rare and Manuscript Collections site, 'From Domesticity to Modernity: What Was Home Economics?' as well as the Human Ecology Historical Photographs collection." Current online holdings: Pages: 399,732 Books: 950 (1003 Volumes) Journals: 9 (222 Volumes).

Object Characteristics

The Hearth website gathers together bibliographies and essays based on and including historical sources. This page gives a narrative of the process for developing this project; here is an excerpt:

Pages were scanned as 600 dpi bitonal images and in some cases as 400 dpi gray-scale images. All images are TIFF 6.0 and compressed using ITU Group 4. Minimal document structuring occurred after conversion, primarily linking image numbers to pagination, tagging self-referencing portions of the text, and identifying authors and titles of articles for journals. Page image files were processed to generate OCR and XML that enable searching and navigation. Full-text searching is provided via the OCR'd text.

The present access system was first built for the Making of America project by the University of Michigan's Digital Library Production Service. Cornell University Library has used this system for its own Making of America collection. The system and its user interface have been modified somewhat for the HEARTH materials.

Metadata
There is very little metadata associated with individual digital objects. The end of every page indicates that the photos are: "Photo © Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell UniversityLibrary." But there is no title, caption, or cataloging information for any of the images. The downloadable PDFs have embedded title and date metadata, viewable under "properties" in Acrobat, but there is nothing more than that.

Intended Audience
The resources included in this collection are clearly directed toward an academic audience, both for undergraduate students seeking starting points for primary-source research, to more accomplished scholars seeking patterns and perspectives, these bibliographies could prove valuable to a variety of disciplines.

karyn j blog 4; Newton Owen Postcard Collection

Newton Owen Postcard Collection

This is a collection of numerous postcards collected by an extended family from Kentucky: the Baynes, Foells, and Owens. The 781 cards in the collection include travel postcards and greeting cards, mostly holiday cards. It displays their travels throughout the United States and Europe. The earliest card dates from the late 19^th century and the most recent card dates from 1980.

Collection Principles

The collection was donated to the University of Louisville Archives and Records Center in 2006 and was processed by the collector’s son (it does not say who specifically donated it). While there are 579 cards in the digital collection, there are 781 cards total in the physical collection. The card in the digital collection were selected based on copyright status. The cards are dated from the late 1800s to 1980. The collection is open to anyone for research purposes and copyright advice was sought in the development of this digital collection.

Object Characteristics

Each image shows up as a thumbnail with a title, subject, and description in alphabetical order according to the title. The images were scanned as TIFFs and were converted to JPEGs. You can click on either the thumbnail image or the title and it will take you to an enlarged image. There is no zoom capability.

There is an option on the introduction page that allows you to “view map of Louisville postcard locations.” This gives you a list of the 12 postcards that show locations around Louisville. When you click on any of these postcards, you are taken to the same enlarged image as mentioned above. It also gives you the option to “view larger map” which takes you to a Google Map of Louisville with the 12 pinpointed locations.

Metadata

Most of the metadata was found on the postcards and through additional research using secondary sources. Titles not found on the cards are enclosed in square brackets. All metadata complies with the University of Louisville Digital Initiatives data dictionary. Each image has these descriptors: title, description, subject, location depicted, date original, object type, source, collection, collection website, digital publisher, format, ordering information, and image number.

Intended Audience

There is no information given about who this collection is specifically targeted to, but I would say the intended audience for this collection is anyone who may be curious or interested in postcards and greeting cards from around Europe and the United States. Anyone who wants to see landmarks, beautiful sights, or greeting cards from different places would also be interested.

This collection was well organized and I like the way it set up. It gives you all the information you need to know, from who did the scans, when, and using what format, to the person who provided copyright advice. It also provides the format for citing any of the images in the collection. Pretty much any information you may need or want to know about this collection can be found in the acknowledgements on the about the collection page.

Kempleel blog 6: Early Las Vegas

Early Las Vegas: A Digital Collection is an online exhibit of a special collection at the University of Nevada Libraries. The collection covers the early days of the city as a railroad company town through the construction of the Hoover Dam and the beginning of Las Vegas' meteoric mid-century rise as the worlds biggest extravaganza.
Collection Principles: Objects are all part of the University of Nevada Las Vegas special collections, and represent primary source materials. there is no explanation or introduction to the collection, but there is a page explaining how to navigate the site. It's worth noting here, that despite it's status as part of the exhibit, the Hoover Dam section is really a complete other site, and therefore has an option to view it in it's entirety, or a stripped down version in keeping with the rest of the exhibits aesthetics.

Object Characteristics: The display is broken down by category, and within categories, one has to side scroll, often for an annoyingly long time, to see the exhibit. The exhibits are set up like exhibits - blurb of text, then some pictures - often multiple pictures layered on each other. However clicking on a picture leads you to a fabulous world of ContentDM, which thankfully allows you access to a lot of metadata and a zoom function. However, many objects cannot be made any bigger than they appeared on the initial page, and all of an annoying red box frame declaring them to be "University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections."

Metadata: Metadata is fairly extensive, but you must click on an individual object to view it's ContentDM page. This is not instantly obvious, unless you find the tiny, unobtrusive "user guide" link. All of the metadata is click-able, however, so can be used as a search for similar images. The search function is also present, but not very emphasized.

Intended Audience: Presumably students of Nevada history, those interested in the architecture of company housing and hydroelectric dams, and 20th century showgirls. Which I imagine, is just about everyone at this point. however, due to the terribly designed side scrolling interface, I'm going to go with "people who are very patient" as the main site users.

Claire B. Blog 5: "Dying Speeches & Bloody Murders"

The Harvard Law Library houses a collection of more than 500 broadsides spanning the years 1707 to 1891. Styled at the time as last dying speeches, these "programs" were sold for a penny or less to the people who gathered to witness public executions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

Published in British towns and cities by printers who specialized in this type of street literature, a typical example features an illustration (usually of the criminal, the crime scene, or the execution); an account of the crime and (sometimes) the trial; and the purported confession of the criminal, often cautioning the reader to avoid the fate awaiting the perpetrator. The title of the collection, "Dying Speeches & Bloody Murders," stems from the criminal theme of the broadsides, which include accounts of executions for such crimes as arson, assault, counterfeiting, horse stealing, murder, rape, robbery, and treason.

Collection Principles

The Harvard Law School Library's collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British crime broadsides dates from 1932 with the purchase from the London bookseller Marks & Company of a folio scrapbook entitled "Executions of criminals: more generally known by the uninviting name of 'Dying speeches.'"

Acquired to supplement the Library's existing collection of eighteen- and nineteenth-century British and American trials, the scrapbook contained more than 280 broadside dying speeches, engravings, newspaper clippings, and holograph pages pertaining to sensational London crimes and executions primarily during the period 1820-1840. The anonymous compiler, states in his introduction to the album that he collected the material to demonstrate the barbarity of public executions. The scrapbook serves as a snapshot of British capital crime of the period. The broadsides selected for digitization, according to Harvard, comprise one of the largest collections recorded and the first to be digitized in its entirety.

Object Characteristics

The broadsides themselves are each a sheet of paper printed on only one side and measuring about 50 x 36 cm. Harvard offers little in the way of documentation of the process, equipment used, or even dates. Their Office of Information Systems has some vague information online of the projects they are working on and some of the metadata standards they use, but it is difficult to find technical information on any one collection.


Metadata

Some item records contain minimal metadata (title, creator if available), and others are more comprehensive, with publisher, form/genre, subject listings, and notes about the item (often notes will dictate the first few lines of text or other parts of the text that may be difficult to read from the image alone). Each record links to a "page delivery service" where you can zoom up to four levels or convert images to PDF for printing.

A basic keyword search is available, as is a category search (where viewers can search by type of crime, year or site of publication, printers, name of person or people condemned, and name of victim. Browsing is possible by title, subject, name, and form/genre.

Intended Audience

This collection seems best-suited to people who know what they are looking for or who are using the collection as a finding aid so they can visit the Harvard library in person. I imagine historians, journalists, and artists would all find the collection appealing, if they are able to get past the unappealing interface. People interested in the grotesque in imagery and text could find some fascinating content here as well.

Geoff Willard Blog #7: Ads of the World

Ads of the world is exactly what it purports to be: a compendium of international ads in various media formats. They call it a "commercial advertising archive," and it's as slick as you'd expect ad archive would be running on Drupal, an open source content management system.

Collection Principles

Their use of the word archive doesn't jive with what we expect from an archives. Ads of the world lacks a collection development policy, description of access rights, and any mention of intellectual property rights. Jupitermedia, a publicly traded for-profit image company, runs this archive, although that shouldn't excuse them from having user-transparent collection principles.

On principle I think rating and commenting systems can be useful, but why can't I sort by highest rated? Or most commented on? Or if I can, why is it not obvious in their browse tab? Their hierarchical keyword organization at the top of each object page is useful for contextual relationships, I'll give them credit for that, but their pseudo-faceted classification is more frustrating than it should be. Not only is it problematic to de-select browse criteria (see here), but I can clearly select a combination of criteria that will throw a big fat '0' for results.

Object Characteristics

The majority of the images are medium-high quality JPEGs (72 DPI, often bigger than 500x500 pixels), with apparently no restrictions for reuse. Images can be zoomed in at 2x and saved without any trouble. Websites are captured with a JPEG screen grab, but a direct link to the site is also provided. Videos & audio are encoded in Flash. I don't see any unique identifiers, either within the page metadata or on the media themselves. Names are concatenated from the title of the image. No textural description is given for any of the objects, nor are there alt tags for the media links - bad for accessibility.

Metadata
Metadata varies across the board, but the Advertising Agency is always included. You may also see listings for directors (creative & art), illustrators, copywriter, managers, and where the media was grabbed from. I would include all of the commentator notes as descriptive metadata as well.

Intended Audience

Ads of the world hope their archive will be "useful for creatives who want to see what their colleagues are doing around the world."

CSchley Blog 6 Pigskin, Passion, and Pride: UT Football, 1898-1998

Collection Principles. This online exhibition is listed under the topic “football” on the Smithsonian Library and Archival Exhibitions on the Web site. The homepage for the “Pigskin, Passion, and Pride: UT Football, 1898-1998” exhibition states that it is an exhibit by UT’s Center for American History and the University Co-Op and lists the Center’s weekly hours and phone number. That is about it for a collection statement! The dates in the title, together with the photo image showing former Coach Darrell Royal celebrating success in the 1973 Cotton Bowl, are the only indicator that what follows may be a retrospective of 100 years of University of Texas football. There is no statement regarding the genesis of the photographs and programs included in the four exhibits, although it is likely that they currently are among the Center’s collections. However, there is a reference to an exhibit curator with a link for further contact. One proceeds quickly through the site using “next page” or “previous page” prompts at the bottom of each page, or is directed to the exhibit image index, also on the bottom of each page, or underneath each enlarged image. Photographs range from the 1898 football team (shown above) to quarterback James Brown throwing a pass in the 1996 Big 12 Conference championship. Along the way are images and text describing halfback Rene Ramirez in 1959, a 1960 women’s intramural touch football game, a 1964 “Scholar-Athlete,” and 1977 Heisman Trophy winner Earl Campbell. The exhibit image index page has a header that provides for a “flash media version” with or without sound. I could only access the “with sound” film, to hear what sounded like fans in a stadium and to watch a cartoonish football field onto which small tumbling characters morphed into letters that repeated the title of the exhibit and the “exhibit by” description found on the home page.

Object Characteristics. The 4 exhibits contain various numbers of color and black and white photograph and game program images in jpeg format in thumbnail size expandable to large images. There is short text accompanying each image in the exhibits; for example, the text for the 1898 team photograph shown above is “The '98 Varsity squad, wearing maroon and orange colors and no helmets, whipped the Aggies 48-0 and launched a new era in UT football.” The arrangement is in chronological order running from 1898 to 1996. Notwithstanding the title of the exhibition, there are no images or text that extends to 1998.The exhibit image index lists what appears to be the subject of the image and a number that is not explained, but is likely to be a box or other reference number at the Center for American History. There is no explanation for such a listing.

Metadata. There is very little metadata other than what is noted above in the way of short text squibs on the subject of each image. There is no information on the origin of the original photos or programs or on any rights with respect to the materials or terms of use. There are no references for further information or research, unless the homepage listing of the address and phone number of the Center for American History is intended for that purpose. All of this lack in metadata is surprising given the association and sponsorship of the exhibition by the University of Texas and its Center for American History. Of course, it may be that all such information as to origin, authorship, rights, etc. is available from the exhibit curator cited on the homepage. I did not make the effort for further contact.

Intended Audience. This site is for the Longhorn football enthusiast—preferably before a football game or tailgating party! The site is not sophisticated enough for the historian or scholar, especially as it lacks so much metadata or further reference sources. It is not even clear whether there is further information at the Center for American History on UT football. The site may appeal to a high school student or teacher searching for a quick and simple summary of UT football from its earliest days through 1996. But not much more than that for students.

Jonny Grass Blog 5, Woody Guthrie Manuscript Collection

Woody Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song: Correspondence, 1940-1950 is a digital library featuring 53 manuscripts from the American Folklife Center’s collection.  The objects are digital surrogates of manuscripts written by, to, or about Woody Guthrie between the years of 1940 and 1950, though the physical collection contains items from 1935-1951. 

 

Collection Principles

The online collection was created by selecting items from the physical collection that fall between the years of 1940-1950.  These items include manuscripts that are organized in the following order: administrative, song lyrics, writings, correspondence, and oversize material.  The original items in the physical collection were procured from Woody Guthrie himself through his personal relationship with Alan Lomax, who was assistant in charge of the Archive of American Folk Song from 1937.  Most of the items in the collection were added and processed between 1940 and 1951.

 

Metadata

A search page offers descriptive information (metadata) searches and full text searches by keyword.  The digital collection provides a “finding aid,” which consists of collection-level metadata on the physical collection, but not on the digital collection.  It includes an abstract and a “scope and content note” summarizing the collection, a list of applicable subject headings, and the name of the individuals who processed the included materials.  An About the Collection section provides better administrative metadata about the physical collection.  The site offers “Special Presentations,” which are a biography and a timeline of his life.  As for the actual collection items, a chronological list of titles (20 at a time) is available, but not easily browsable.  Each item contains basic metadata, including call numbers and subject headings that are links to a list of items with that subject heading.  

 

Object Characteristics

Manuscripts are presented as jpegs, so it is not possible to search or highlight text.  When you click on a link, a thumbnail is provided with accompanying metadata.  If you click on the thumbnail, a larger jpeg is opened.  If you click on this jpeg, a higher quality jpeg is opened, which is accompanied by a zoom function.  A full text search accessed replicated text, either OCR or keyed text, with an option to view the document as a jpeg.  Information about digital objects is not readily available.

  

Target Audience

The audience of the collection seems to be the general public.  The access is listed as unrestricted, though restrictions apply to use and reproduction of materials.   As a part of the Library of Congress, the general mission to “make its resources available and useful to Congress and the American eople” is applicable to this collection and is stated on the collection’s homepage.

Lauren A. Blog 6: Oldewash.com

The Lee Maxwell Washing Machine Museum online is one man's personal collection of antique washing machines. The online materials are drawn from a physical museum Lee Maxwell operates in Eaton, Colorado.

Collection Principles
The collection seems to be drawn entirely from one man's somewhat eccentric hobby. The earliest machine I was able to find on the site was from 1880. I found one item from the 1960s, but most of the collection seems to be pre 1950s. A "virtual tour" of the physical museum reveals giant warehouse spaces packed with machines. An article I found online in the Journal of Antiques from February 2006 reveals that at that time Maxwell had 999 of his 1,036 machines online. No information is given about why Maxwell began collecting washing machines or why he chose to digitize his collection.

Object Characteristics
The website contains a database of manufacturer information, a database of patent information, a database of digital photos of the machines in Maxwell’s possession and digital images of the machines Maxwell wants for his collection (these are largely historic advertisements for the machines). Most of the images are fairly low resolution JPEGs, which open in new windows. Some machines also have very low-resolution contemporary MPEG videos showing how the machine was used. The main attraction, a database of Maxwell’s machines, is searchable by year, maker, keyword and whether or not they have videos.

Metadata
No information is given about how the website was created. The small and brief clue that the virtual tour is copyright Ulrich Schmitz 2000 does show that Maxwell did enlist some help in putting his online museum together. Each entry in the museum database includes at least one image, the manufacturer’s name, the place and year of manufacture, the model name and a brief description.

Intended Audience
An incredible amount of work obviously went into entering, uploading and organizing this information. The end result is amateurish in its design, but the man still has to be lauded for his efforts. An elderly man from a Middle America town of about 4,000 people, Maxwell is not the typical website entrepreneur. Despite its aesthetic shortcomings and anachronism, the website does its job, making a very specialized collection of antiques to the world. Maxwell seems to want nothing more than to share his love of washing machines. That dream is realized through oldewash.com.

John G. Blog #3 Just Outside Austin: Rural Travis County Communities

I found Just Outside Austin: Rural Travis County Communities on the Smithsonian Institution Library: "Library and Archival Exhibitions on the Web" website. I thought it was interesting to find a local online collection exhibit through the Smithsonian.

Collection Principles
This collection of historic photographs and information about the rural communities of Travis County is sponsored by the City of Austin's "Austin Treasures: Online Exhibits from the Austin History Center". The site provides an "About Us" link that gives general information about the Austin History Center and the collections that it houses. The "Our Collections" link gives the reader generalized information about the collections and implies that since the collections are so extensive, consisting of "more than one million items", it is impossible to provide extensive information about each artifact. Instead it provides information on how the collections are organized and provides several links regarding the metadata standards and collection development policies of the Austin History Center.

Object Characteristics

This collection only contains digitized photographs of the history of Travis County. Although the Austin History Center is also the repository for maps, directories, and other historical information, only photographs are posted in this online exhibition. Viewers can click a link under each photograph for an enlarged image, but aside from an ID number from Picasa Web Albums, no other bibliographic information is available. The exhibit also contains informational narratives that puts the photographs in context, but from the perspective of someone who is not familiar with Travis County, Texas, maps would have been very helpful to see the plotted locations of these historical sites.

Metadata

Each photograph has a brief summary or synopsis but aside from an identification number, mostly a MARC record number, does not have any other bibliographic information associated with it. For example, the photograph to the left contained a brief synopsis describing it as a "photograph from 1937 of the Montopolis old courthouse...the first courthouse in Travis county" but only had "PICA04663" and "Enlarge Image" under the photograph for bibliographic information. I was disappointed to see that the Austin History Center did not provide sufficient metadata to locate the physical photograph in case a historian or researcher was looking for it.

Intended Audience

This collection and online exhibit is intended for historians, interested citizens and researchers. It is also a good tool for the Austin History Center to showcase some of the items in its collection. After visiting the Austin History Center for my project, I think it is wise for the center to post and publish its collection on the web to let the greater public know what types of information are being chronicled. I thought that one of the site's weaknesses is that it provides information from the point-of-view of a local resident of the surrounding areas. I thought that more information could have been provided for the benefit of visitors who had no prior knowledge of Travis County.

Katie R - Blog 5 - YIVO's "People of a Thousand Towns"

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has several digital exhibitions, but the only one with more than 8 images is "People of a Thousand Towns:" the Online Catalog of Photographs of Jewish Life in Prewar Eastern Europe. While searchable, the catalog also offers online albums of thematically grouped photos.

Collection Principles:

The YIVO Institute explains that this group of photographs is strictly of Eastern European Jewish communities pre-WWII, and in many cases are the only documents left of some of the towns that were completely destroyed by the Nazis. The photos range from the late 19th Century to the 1940's. The images available online are not the entirety of YIVO's holdings.


Object Characteristics:

The images in this collection are jpegs, but not scanned from the original photograph but "instead, are JPEGS created in a batch process from the analog videodisc." In the mid-1980's, YIVO received a grant to put 15,000 images on videodisc. Another grant in 1993 led to improvements in the catalog database. The current online catalog metamorphosis of this collection stemmed from a 2002 grant. These different steps in reformatting the photographs is interesting in a preservation aspect, as Best Practices shift and non-profit organizations try to work with the funding and resources available to them (although I have actually never heard of a videodisc being a 'best practice'). It seems that first YIVO was really worried about reformatting the images, then realized the access wasn't at its finest if searching was an issue. Now the online option is having its time in the spotlight. But without exceptional metadata, a new grant should be in the pipeline to index and rescan the photographs.



Metadata:

The images have little information attached to them, but importantly they are linked to the catalog number. Internal information including collection, catalog number, and Record ID is included, as well as date, location and a general description. But for such an important and large collection of photographs, more metadata should be attached to the files in order to sustain this catalog into the future.

Intended Audience:

I would assume the YIVO Institute would want as many people to view this collection as possible, but to actually search the catalog, you must register to login. The online albums are accessible, but this is only a slight fraction of the holdings. Registering allows a user to visit the site/catalog for 7 days, afterwhich you must re-register. Perhaps this is an effort to keep track of users of the catalog and make sure no anonymous mis-use happens. People interested in Judaica, geneology, history, and social sciences would enjoy this collection.

Jessi Fishman Blog 6: Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection

Ah, finally...a good example to show you guys...I bet you were getting sick of hearing me complain, weren't you? Here we have the Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection, part of Indiana University's Digital Library Program. Cushman, an alumnus of Indiana University, took some pretty amazing photographs from 1938 to 1969 around the United States and around the world, and IU did a pretty amazing job of documenting his life and this collection.

Collection Principles
The vast majority of the collection arrived at the Indiana University Archives in October of 1972, four months after Charles' death. There are approximately 14,500 Kodachrome slides, and the collection is organized into four series: Photographs and Negatives, Slides, Correspondence and Papers, and Camera Equipment. Along with the photographic images themselves, IU provides access to notebooks and scrapbooks Cushman used to keep track of his adventures and his work, information about the equipment he used, and links to essays about his work, a detailed biography, a preview of the non-digitized early black and white photographs currently in the physical archive, and detailed information about copyright and usage regulations and how to order copies of his prints. IU really makes sure that the user can discover anything and everything about Cushman's life, work, and the collection overall.

Object Characteristics
Thank you, IU, for telling us your digitization process:
"The slides in the Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection were outsourced to Luna Imaging, Inc., in Culver City, California for digitization. We purchased from Luna one master TIFF file and three sizes of JPEG derivatives (200, 600, and 1000 pixels on the long side) for each of the nearly 15,000 35mm slides in the collection." The Master File specifications were:
TIFF format, 2200 ppi resolution, 24-bit color, no compression, and done so that the color should match the original slide in its original condition. IU conducted vigorous quality control when they got their images back to make sure that all levels were appropriate and they were as true to the original as possible. The site also has a detailed "Technical Implementation" section, in which they convey that "the Charles W. Cushman Collection web site is hosted on IBM eServer pSeries server hardware running version 5.1 of the IBM AIX operating system. The web site was developed in Java, using Java Servlet technology, Java Server Pages, and the Struts Java web application framework.We are using the open source Tomcat application server and Apache HTTP Server software to deliver the web site."

I think the only complaint I have with the object characteristics in this collection is that there is no really good naming scheme...each photo has detailed metadata, and the search and browse capabilities are amazing, but I prefer, when I open one object, for the title of that object to show up in the tab, and clearly over the image...in this case, the title of each window and object you open still remains the same as the home page (Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection) but just adds on where you are. To explain that a little better, when you open an object, the name of it appears to just be "Details". That doesn't help the user know exactly what they are looking at, and if they are doing research, they can easily get lost and that is never fun.

Metadata
According to yet another expertly provided section on the "Project Info" part of the site, "Cushman's notebook annotations and corresponding documentation on slide mounts have been exactly transcribed, even when abbreviations or misspellings are included. These descriptions are keyword searchable. Dates associated with the slides are also searchable. In addition, descriptive metadata for the subject content, geographic location, genre and physical characteristics of each image provides enhanced access to the collection. " Although we may not always know exactly what IU is talking about in the metadata section (the first two labels are always a "Cushman ID" and an "Archives ID"), the metadata provided for each object is thorough and extremely well done. Each image contains descriptive information both from the slide and from Cushman's notebook entry about the photo, multiple searchable subject headings, and information about the camera, roll and frame of film used to take the shot. There are multiple browse and search options to facilitate just roaming around or finding something specific, and with each search I tried I got applicable results.

Intended Audience
Considering the amount of effort that IU put into making this site both user-friendly and extremely well-documented, I would venture to say that the original purpose in creating the site was not only to provide access to a really cool collection (although that is a big part of it), but also to show how good a digital library or online exhibition can be, and make a name for their Digital Library initiative by showing the right way to do this. They provide access to their grant proposal and other papers and presentations on the collection, information about the history of the site and the IMLS grant they received, and immense "behind the scenes" information including technical data, workflow, and project personnel. For these reasons, I would say that the intended audience could include not only Cushman scholars and researchers, but the general public interested in groundbreaking photography and also people interested in (or doing actual scholarly or applied research on) digital libraries.

Claire B. Blog 4: African Poster Collection at Northwestern University

This collection of posters published in Africa is a representative segment of the African poster collection housed in the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University. The digitized posters represent visual images created by governments (independent and colonial) and international agencies, as well as political, labor, social, religious, educational and cultural organizations in Africa from the late 1960s to the 1980s, roughly.

Collection Principles

The Melville J. Herskovits Library is the largest separate Africana collection in the world. This selection of posters from the library's collection was identified in 1995 as ideal material for a digitization project because of their visual interest and the access potential of an online database. The posters were digitized and the site was developed between 1995 and 1998, and from 2003 to 2004 (not sure why there was a break in the work – could be any number of reasons).

The posters generally represent three themes: the 1970's liberation movements in the former Portuguese colonies; the Anti-Apartheid groups flourishing outside of South Africa in the 1970's and 1980's; and political campaign posters from the historic South African election of 1994. The site contains 590 posters, selected as a representative sampling of the collection for searching and viewing.

Object Characteristics

The archival digital images were saved in photo CD format (I’m not too sure what that means, but I think it means a scanning of color negative film and captured onto photo CD disks. This supposedly offers compatibility across platforms and multiple levels