karyn blog #2: Through the Lens of Time

Through the Lens of Time: Images of African Americans from the Cook Collection of Photographs

This collection is composed of photographs taken by George and Huestis Cook. Huestis was one of the first Southerners to photograph African Americans in a realistic or natural setting. Some of the photographs are staged, while others are completely spontaneous.

Collection Principle

Two Williamsburg authors, Alfred Kocher and Lawrence Dearstyne, were referred to Huestis Cook for illustratiions of their nineteenth century book. They discovered numerous negatives and prints in his attic and put together the Southern Exposures Exhibition in 1952 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. In 1954, 156 of the photographs were printed in a book called Shadows of Silver. The Valentine Richmond History Center bought the collection from Cook’s widow in the 1950s. This collection of 291 images represents the “under-documented” community of African Americans in Central Virginia from the late eighteen hundreds through the early nineteen hundreds. This collection introduces an overlooked, yet very important link in the Virginia population. This is a joint project between VCU Libraries and the Valentine Richmond History Center.

There are no restrictions to the images in this collection. According to Virginia Commonwealth University, the images may be printed, reproduced, and used for non-commercial, personal, or educational purposes.

Object Characteristics

To view the images, you can either browse the collection and select individual photographs, or you may view the collection slideshow. The individual images are thumbnails listed numerically, then alphabetically with 20 per page. Each image has 3 categories: title, handwritten notes, if any, and subject or what the image is about. Clicking on the thumbnail provides a closer view, which is a JPEG. Zooming is not an option. However, you are given the option of adding images to a list of favorites. Also, VCU provides information for ordering copies of the photographs.

In RealPlayer, the slideshow displays 10 images, while a voice-over talks about the collection.

Metadata

Each enlarged image has these details attached to it: title, photographer, date, location, subject, contributors, negative number, negative type, image size (in inches), type, format, ordering information, and collection. The photographs with handwritten notes have that field in the metadata also.

Intended Audience

The intended audience for this collection is everyone from historical researchers to school children. VCU and the Valentine Richmond History Center want people to access and gain knowledge from this collection.

All the information, aside from the images, is on the same page. This almost guarantees that you cannot get lost or confused while browsing. The VCU Digital Libraries Collections use contentDM which allows the user to adjust their preferences. This was a great idea until I changed a few settings. Either the images did not show up on the page or the page still looked the same. Other than that, this small, simple collection was very well put together.

Cschley Blog 4: Smithsonian, American Discovery Galaxy, Zoos: A Historical Perspective

Collection Principles. Zoos: A Historical Perspective is a digital collection of excerpts from pamphlets and guide books published by zoos over the past century that have been collected by the National Zoological Park branch of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. The collection is an online sample of those publications, including maps, drawings and photographs of zoos from over 30 states and 40 countries, which illustrate the variety of roles that zoos have played and the many facets of their operation and promotion. As noted in the introductory text by the institution’s National Vertebrate Librarian, the guides to wildlife conservation parks and descriptions of early animal collecting expeditions by zoo curators give some insight to the roots of modern animal study. Some of the photographs of animal enclosures, restraint devices and mock theatrics may be unsettling to some, but are nevertheless an important part of the history of human-animal relations. The promotional nature of the items in this collection also demonstrates the history of graphic design, illustration and advertising used by public and private institutions throughout the years.
Many of the items in this collection were collected by former National Zoo directors and staff or accumulated over the years as zoos routinely mailed their publications to and among one another. Those materials were filed and maintained for many years by former National Zoological Park librarian, Kay Kenyon. Because annual reports were retained for each year, the collection grew enormously. A consolidation of the files resulted in the October 2002 online exhibit presented here.

Object Characteristics. Thumbnail images drawn from the pamphlets and guidebooks include photographs, drawings, paintings, and maps in jpeg format, largely in black and white grayscale, with a few dull color photographs. The thumbnails are 200 x 125 pixels with click–to-enlarge to full-scale images at 483 x 359 pixels.

Metadata. The choices in the main menu provide links to an Introduction, Explore the Collection, National Zoological Park Library, and the SIL Digital Library, of which this digital collection is a part. The Introduction section presents additional resources for "Zoos: a Historical Perspective" with a link to an internet site for historical zoo images from the Library of Congress' American Memory Web site, as well as a list of related books and articles, with a link to the most recent article from 2002. The collection is presented in a country-by-country listing in alpha order, with varying types of associated metadata, including the apparent name of a pamphlet and author, if any, for the pamphlet or guidebook, with a title for the image, but in many cases, very little additional information to indicate the origin of the image itself, whether a photo or painting or drawing, except, in the case of the US ones, to note the annual report from which the image is drawn. Dates are provided only occasionally.

Intended Audience. The introduction indicates that the collection is intended to highlight the value of this digital pamphlet and guidebook resource for both zoo and cultural historians. The collection could also be of interest and use for the student (high school and college) interested in researching the history of zoos, early animal conservation parks or animal collecting expeditions. Graphics artists, or at least those who study the history of graphic design for zoos or other public institutions, may have an interest in the images and graphics presented.

Tami Blog 4: African Vision: The Walt Disney-Tishman African Art Collection

African Vision: The Walt Disney-Tishman African Art Collection

African Vision: The Walt Disney-Tishman African Art Collection is an exhibit that recently showed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art from February 15, 2007 to September 7, 2008. The Tishmans began collecting African art in 1959 and over the next 20 years built one of the greatest private collections in existence. The Walt Disney Company bought the collection in 1994 with the intent to permanently house the exhibit at Epcot Center. Although it was never publicly display while at Walt Disney, the collection was made available for exhibition loans and publications both in the US and in Europe. Then, in 2005 Walt Disney World Company gave the 525-piece collection to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.

Collection Principles

This exhibit displays 88 objects from the Tishman collection. It is divided into five sections – “Follow the Art,” “Masks,” “Ideal Figures,” “Power & Prestige,” and “Explore African Art.” These sections can be reached by clicking on a drop-down menu at the top right of the page. There was no indication of why these particular pieces were chosen or any explanation of the chosen titles for each section. For example, in the “Masks” section, is this every mask in the collection or just certain pieces? Also, there are figures exhibited in the “Power & Prestige” section. What makes them different from the figures shown in the “Ideal Figures” section? The section entitled "Follow the Art" is essentially a timeline of important events concerning African art.

Object Characteristics

Perhaps the decision to not place any informational data on the section page was a conscious one, as the result is a very powerful visual of a large photo of a piece of African art when you click on a section. Additional pieces of each collection are exhibited in thumbnails to the left of the large photo. Once you click on a piece of art, that piece is then shown in a large jpeg in the middle of the page. Each piece has at least one accompanying jpeg that shows greater details of the object. None of the photos can be zoomed.

Metadata

The metadata in this exhibit is very good. Accompanying each piece is information listing the African people from which the piece came, when it was created, its composition, size, unique number, and catalog number. In addition, each jpeg has the name of the object and the number of viewable photos available embedded in the frame of the photo. You can also click on More/Less Information and find out what the object is and how it was used. There is no discernable way to search the collection.

Intended Audience

This is a beautiful collection that would be of interest, not only to connoisseurs of sculpture, African art, or ethnic art, but also to the general public as it generated interest in the in-house exhibit. In addition, the last section of the exhibit (“Explore African Art”) includes a pdf document of fun games, such as word searches, puzzles, and Q&A’s, that could be utilized by teachers and their students. This site would also be useful to researchers studying African peoples and their art and customs.

Geoff Willard Blog #5: Coney Island History Project

This "award-winning website" features all things related to the playground of the world, Coney Island, focusing particularly on oral histories, photographs, and ephemera. The digital asset management management back-end of the site is the open source OpenCollection.  

Collection Principles

Along with the run-of-the mill statement of purpose ("our mission is to record, archive and share oral history interviews; provide access to historical artifacts and documentary material through educational exhibits, events and a website, etc."), the Coney Island Project also "teaches young people the techniques of oral history" and serves as something of a community organizer. I assume that the project focuses only on the playground, and not the general neighborhood, based on the collection materials.

While the descriptive image metadata is moderately deep (as one might expect for a DAM system), the oral histories are not transcribed and the images are displayed using Flash. Audio playback (also Flash) does not feature a volume control, nor is it easy to scrub, both of which are personal pet peeves. 

Object Characteristics

All of the audio is streamed, although this could be a rights issue. Unfortunately there is no rights information attached to the object from a user's perspective, so were I to capture the audio with a stream ripper, I have no idea if I can repost it on my own site. 

The photo-zooming that they're employing with OpenCollection seems quite cool - not quite Luna Imaging cool, but better than most of the other digital collections I've looked it. You can zoom from 1% - 600% on an image, but anything over 100% becomes increasingly pixelated. There's an option for labels (maybe something like the labels on a Flickr image?), though none of the images appear to have them. Every photo has a unique ID number. I am admittedly too lazy/cheap to download a program to suck up Flash images, so any further structural components are a mystery to me. 

Metadata 

I can't comment on whether they're using controlled vocabularies, but their descriptive & structural metadata is quite good. Most photographs and ephemera have thorough descriptions, description sources (marked with a code), hierarchical relationship data, physical dimensions, creation date, and the aforementioned ID number. Oral interviews are noticeably briefer, only listing the interviewer, interviewee, location, and a brief description of the interviewee's relationship to Coney Island. 

Intended Audience

Coney Island enthusiasts or information seekers should flip over this collection, as well as general amusement park enthusiasts/historians (there must be amusement park historians, right?). Fans of the movie The Warriors might dig it too...

Sarah Weinblatt Blog 4: The Fitzwilliam Museum: French Impressionists

The Fitzwilliam Museum is located in the United Kingdom. The foundation of the collection is from a the collection of Richard, VII Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion who, in 1816, left his art works and library to the University of Cambridge. He also left funds to build an institution to house his collections. The Impressionist paintings at the Fitzwilliam have mainly been acquired through gift and bequest. The first paintings entered the museum when a man named Frank Hindley Smith gifted 30 paintings and drawings. The French Impressionists online exhibition is one of many found on their website.

Collection Principles

According to The Fitzwilliam Museum website, the foundation of this online exhibition is a selection of works by French Impressionist painters. The entire collection at the museum consists of more than one hundred paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures. The online exhibition contains forty highlights from the collection such as works from Seurat and Cézanne.

There is no explanation as to why these forty objects were selected for this exhibition. The site only states that these are the highlights from the collection.

A history behind the Impressionist collection is available as well.

Metadata

The metadata that is available for each of the forty paintings in this online exhibition includes:

• Title of painting
• Painter
• Year(s)
• Medium
• Dimensions

There is also information regarding how the painting was acquired into the collection.

Catalogue records are available for these paintings which include: Title, Maker, Category, School/Style, Technicque, Dimensions/Description, Date, Provenance, Inscriptions, Marks, Documentation and Accession Number.

A description of each of the paintings is included like a label that would be found in a museum setting. These descriptions include a brief history about the painting.


Object Characteristics

The scanned images of the paintings are jpg files. One is able to access a larger version of the painting by clicking on the object which then directs you to a new window. However, this new window does not allow you to zoom in or out on the object.

In order to access the collection, the viewer must click on the link "Artist's Gallery." From there one can click on links that separate the paintings by painter. For example, to view paintings by Pissarro you would click on his name. The result would be 4 images with the title and painter's name listed below the image. Once you click on the image you are taken to a page that has the metadata previously discussed along with a image that you can enlarge by clicking on it.

You can also click on the link to the catalogue record. I found the catalog records very interesting because of the listing of the provenance of the painting. This is not often seen in online exhibitions and is rarely provided on a museum label but is very important information. I also liked the inclusion of any stampings or markings on the paintings because these are often hard to decipher from an online image especially when one cannot zoom in on the object.

Intended Audience

The intended audience for this online exhibition is anyone interested in the French Impressionists. A brief introduction to who the Impressionists were is included on the site for those visiting not familiar with the Impressionist movement.

Overall, I found this online exhibit very easy to navigate and very user friendly. I liked that the catalogue record was included for the extra information regarding provenance and markings as well.

Jonny Grass Blog 3, California Digital Newspaper Collection

The California Newspaper Digital Collection is a digital collection of newspapers from California from 1849-1911.  It is housed at the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research (CBSR) at UC Riverside and is a part of the National Digital Newspaper Project (NDNP).  NDNP is a “joint venture of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress to create a national digital newspaper resource representing papers from all states published between 1836-1922.”

 

Collection Principles:

The CNDC aims to digitize and catalog California newspapers from 1836-1922, so these are the broadest geographic and temporal parameters of the collection objectives.  This time period has been divided into manageable chunks, each of which will be funded by a grant.  The first grant covered newspapers published from 1900-1910, while the second grant targets 1880-1910.  The project is intended to be completed over 20 years and include one million digital pages; the CNDC has received grants for 2005-2009 and plans to apply for further funding.  Based on the funding of past grants, the project has digitized issues of the Alta California, the San Francisco Call, the Amador Ledger, the Imperial Valley Press, and the Los Angeles Herald.  It is not explicitly stated why these newspapers were selected first, but the project, which began with the Alta California as a test case, has emphasized preservation as a primary objective from the start, with searchability and research access as other goals.  The CNDC site directed me to the site of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), the parent project, for more information.  This page explained where each state’s project searched for its materials, stating that the project “inventories holdings in public libraries, county courthouses, newspaper offices, historical museums, college and university libraries, archives, and historical societies.”

 

Metadata

The collection has its own search engine that enables a keyword search or advanced searches that allow users to set search limits.  When I conducted a keyword search, particular articles were listed along with headline, newspaper, date, and content type.  When I selected an article, the portion of the newspaper featuring that article was displayed; the article was highlighted in gray and the keywords of my search were highlighted in yellow.  A ‘newspaper info’ tab reveals the newspaper, issue date, edition, volume, issue number, and page number.   These records can also be retrieved by using a calendar function —which allows a user to select a date and view all newspapers available from that date —or a browse function —which allows a user to select the newspaper they want and scroll through the dates available.  Technical information includes the site’s creators and their contact information, as well as the resources they used to build the site.  While the source code is available, no technical metadata is easily or conveniently located on the page.

 

Object Characteristics

The newspapers are presented pan-scans (I believe they are jpegs and were scanned as gifs) as framed images on the page that can be clicked and dragged in order to see a different part of the page.  I could not find an easy way to zoom in or out.  The page can also be viewed as a PDF, which allows the user to highlight, copy, and paste text in a way that is not available with the jpeg.  A text only option is also available, which lists just the text of the particular article the search has yielded.

 

Intended Audience

The intended audience of the site is the general public, although the research community is clearly a priority.  In addition, the managers of the project clearly intend this project to be an example for other digital collections, as they document the project overview and recommendations for others who intend to implement of similar projects.

Meghan C. Blog 4: Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive Project

The IVRLA project began back in 2005 as a way to educate people on the culture and history of Ireland. It is a five year project that is still going today. The collections are apart of The University College Dublin and consists of 15 different digitized groups, and is still growing. The contents range from manuscripts, photographs, paintings, audio, maps, and other documents that were kept. Many of the pieces are photographs of James Joyce and W.B. Yeats along with other famous Irish peoples, which is very interesting. The project uses the Fedora Commons open source architecture to help distribute their information and create an accessible database for their repository.

Collection Principles
The collection was digitized in order to protect the materials, in many cases, that were beginning to deteriorate with overuse and age. The digitization also began as a way to increase the amount of educational information on the country of Ireland, and through the collections they can make this information that much more accessible to many more people within the communities of Ireland and elsewhere. Some issues I have with this particular collection is that although the initial site that it is contained in is very attractive and easy to navigate, the Fedora Commons level of digitization requires an extra plug-in in order to view the images associated with the project. It is a little alienating for people studying this collection who are working from public computers that are not capable of downloading. It also is preventative due to its extra step, users may stray away if they have little scholarly interest in the materials on the site. On the other hand the images look great!

Object Characteristics
The documents were scanned and made into TIFF files and then later compressed into smaller JPEG files for view on the internet. The TIFF files were made using 24-bit color at 450 dpi. There was a backup made on DVD for each of the TIFF images created. In some cases the documents were scanned twice. When clicking on an image, you can create a border and zoom into the picture that way. It is very accurate and very well done. Once again, the use of the DjVu plugin is a little frustrating, especially since it takes up about 18mb on the hardrive.

Metadata
The metadata is very readable. It is laid out in such a way that general persons could easily identify the information that they are looking for. On the main page for each of the collections they discuss some of the reasoning behind the way they catalogued each image and where it is located in its physical form. The most interesting part of this site is that it claims to be very accepting of tagging being made by individuals, or so the site claims on its background page. There is also a bookmarking function on the site for each image for those doing some research.

Intended Audience
It seems like the audience would be the university community consisting of the faculty and student body, yet it is made explicit that the university is trying to appeal to the community as a whole, to bring Ireland together. It is a very noble project, and there is a generous amount of information contained in the collections that they have digitized. It would be nice to revisit this site in two years to see the progression of the project and to see the impact that it is making on the community.

Jessi Fishman Blog 4: Yale University's Medical Library's Digital Collections

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University's School of Medicine has a number of online digital library collections and they are adding to them continually to expand access to the library's unique collections for scholarly research and life-cycle management of digital objects. The collections are powered by Greenstone digital library software. One of these collections, the Pathology Teaching Collection, contains over 600 digitized images of pre-photography medical drawings that were used to document and explain anatomy and medicine.

Although the collection includes illustrations done by a number of creators, the bulk of the drawings were done by Armin B. Hemberger (1896-1974) who worked at Yale for most of his career and created very scientifically accurate medical images in pen and ink, pencil, gouache, and watercolor.

Collection Principles
For this particular collection, the principles are clearly stated in an extensive "about" section. This section provides a detailed history of medical illustration as a profession in general, and limits the scope of the collection to images created at Yale, focusing on images that were a particularly important resource regarding unusual cases, providing doctors with a rare opportunity to view medical conditions that they would be unlikely to encounter on a regular basis. The library also provides the reasoning behind the digitization of the other collections, including historical artifacts relating to the library's namesakes and a collaboration to electronically publish the full text of Yale medical students' theses. The site gives clear directions on how to use all the search functions, and keeps a permanent background with links to all pertinent sites in the Medical Library realm.


Object Characteristics
Although the actual digitization technique is not stated anywhere completely conspicuously, the images are clear and easy to see, with two options for viewing (one with higher ppi). All the images open in a new tab, which I always approve of, but the title bars for them only have the identifier number, which is not very useful when examining a lot of pictures at a time. The objects are zoomable and they all have associated metadata. Although, as stated, it is not that clear how they did their digitization or how long the images will be accessible for, considering that this is Yale's med school, they probably have a good backing for the collections.

Metadata
The metadata for each object is adequate. The title given to each object is usually taken from the title that the artist gave the drawing in the first place, which helps ensure validity that the object is what it purports to be. However, the "other title" and identifier fields are unclear, and do not provide much assistance to researchers. There is also a rights holder field and a repository field, so the physical locations of the objects can be determined, and a "notes" section which usually involves the medium of the drawing (i.e. pen and paper, watercolor, etc). I would expect that a website from Yale using Greenstone digital library software would associate more metadata with each object, but I suppose the necessary fields are filled in.

Intended Audience
The Pathology Teaching Collection, according to the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library site, is still widely used as a teaching resource in Yale's medical school. The main intended audience, therefore, would be students and researchers at Yale, specifically those looking for detailed illustrations on various pathologies—some related to WWI and WWII chemical warfare. Other intended users would be scholarly researchers focusing on pre-photography medical teachings, detailed medical drawings, or the art of Armin B. Hemberger.
I would also see a wider audience for this type of collection, as the images themselves are vivid and extraordinarily done, and lend themselves in a slightly eerie way to the understanding of the human body, and the digitization is clearly well done as well. In this manner, any number of people might be interested in using this collection, including digitization specialists (or fans) or just people who like sort of creepy old timey drawings.

Hannah Norton Blog 3: Villanova University Digital Library – Sherman Thackara Collection

This collection contains family papers and personal correspondences of Eleanor (“Ellie”) Mary Sherman Thackara, daughter of Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, and Alexander Montgomery (“Mont”) Thackera from 1854 to 1897. It includes, among other information, descriptions of Mont’s service in the Navy in the 1870s, daily life in Eastern Pennsylvania and the Main Line during the latter half of the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession, and Ellie and Mont’s courtship.

Collection Principles and Organization

The digital collection includes the entirety of the physical collection, including 2115 documents. The Sherman Thackara Collection was donated to Villanova University by Eleanor Sherman Thackara in 1897, and thus represents her decisions regarding what information about her family would be interesting and appropriate to share with the public, rather than any particular collecting policy on the part of the university. The collection is accessible through two points of entry: the digital library search page and a separate finding aid. The digital library page allows for both browsing and searching by keyword, title, author, date, or publisher. The finding aid presents the documents as they are in the physical collection: boxes are arranged thematically, with correspondence grouped by author and recipient, and within folders documents are arranged in chronological order. The finding aid does link directly to the digitized documents.

Object Characteristics

The majority of documents in this collection are handwritten letters of correspondence between various members of the family. Other types of documents include photographs, receipts and business letters, a diary, some books, newspaper clippings, and family documents. Unfortunately, the text of these documents is not searchable – no OCR coding has been done and no separate transcripts are available. This means deciphering handwriting and, in some cases, is further complicated when both sides of the paper were written on and ink bled through from one side to the other. Some zooming capability is available, but it’s rather awkward. As far as I could tell, you could either look at the document filling the screen or zoom in all the way – there is no intermediate level of zoom. For letters, the zoomed in view allows only 2-10 words on the screen at a time, making it even more difficult to read actual texts. All of the images appear to be jpegs.

Metadata

For each document, a separate “details” tab provides metadata including a document identifier, permanent link, date, creator, publisher, subjects, and source. These fields are common across all collections in the Villanova University Digital Library and contain much more complete information in this collection than some of the other collections. Interestingly, the metadata available in the “details” tab refers to a “creator” of each document, while the search tabs looks for an “author” – presumably the term creator is meant to comply with Dublin Core or other standards while the term author is deemed more understandable to the user. Another interesting quirk of the way the metadata is presented is that the document identifier, which includes box/folder/document number and call number for the collection as a whole, is not labeled but simply appears as a header for the rest of the metadata. So it is possible for users to identify a document from the digital collection and find it in the physical collection, but only if they recognize a number like “7/3/18 OM E467.S53” for what it is.

Intended Audience

The intended audience of this collection is presumably the Villanova University community of students, faculty, and staff. For the casually interested user, I think the digital collection contains a lot of interesting information to browse and could be a great hook for users to become aware of the physical collection. As a scholarly resource, however, it falls short, due to the inability for full-text searching and constrained zoom capabilities described above.

Lauren A Blog 4: IN Harmony

IN Harmony: Sheet Music from Indiana is an IMLS-funded digitization project hosted by Indiana University and combining materials from the Indiana University Lilly Library, the Indiana State Library, the Indiana State Museum, and the Indiana Historical Society. Though the collection is Indiana-related, it includes important names like Hoagy Carmichael and serves as a snapshot of American popular music during the first half of the 20th century.

Collection Principles
The abstract of the IN Harmony IMLS grant (found on the website under Project Information) explains that the pieces in the digital collection were selected for digitization based on composer, subject, arranger and publisher. Collection librarians and specialists were then consulted to select additional items based on genre or theme. The collection was created based on the goals of:
- fostering collaborative digital library development by partnering with institutions with complementary collections.
- digitizing a portion of these institutions' collections and making them available to the public free of charge on the web.
- bringing the materials and their metadata together on a single website, to offer federated searching and searching of individual collections.
- testing the hypothesis that approximately 90 percent of copyrights for materials published between 1923 and 1964 have not been renewed.

Object Characteristics
The object scans differ based on their copyright status. Copyrighted items show only a small image of the sheet music’s first page. Underneath is the message "Under copyright protection. Images not available on this site." The user must contact the holding institution to view this material. All other materials have the option of either viewing the sheet music pages online or downloading a PDF. Online, the viewer is allowed to zoom in once. In the downloaded PDF the viewer can zoom in many times, however quality begins to suffer. The PDF is also printable, an important feature for musicians who will probably want to print the sheet music.

Under Project Information there is an entire page on the digitization process, methods of quality control, web derivatives and PDF creation. Here is just a sample: "All images are created at 400 dpi. All covers as well as all pages with color are scanned at 24-bit color with imbedded Adobe1998RGB color profiles. All other score pages are digitized at 8-bit grayscale with the imbedded profile of Gray Gamma 2.2. The inclusion of the profiles helps ensure that the image will reproduce as accurately as possible.”

Metadata
The collection can be searched by composer’s name, song title, year, instrumentation, genre or subject. The homepage also features thumbnails of featured sheet music for browsing. The featured sheet music seems to have been selected based on illustrations. A few interesting pieces of metadata, included with each item and unique to sheet music, are the instrumentation the first line of the song and the first line of the chorus. These seem like they would be extremely helpful search tools for those of us with poor music memories.

The metadata for each physical object is available alongside the digital image, however the metadata of the digital object is not supplied. In the Project Information section there is also a page devoted to how the project's metadata was created. User studies were employed and a custom cataloging tool was developed that would meet the needs of the diverse institutions supplying the collection (some focus more on the musical content, some on the arrangement and organization of a collection by its compiler, and some on the cover art). The metadata is mapped to Dublin Core and will soon be made available for OAI harvesting.

One major critique I have is that rights metadata is not given for any of the sheet music. Even for the copyrighted material, which cannot be viewed online, no further information is given aside from a link to the holding institution's website. The name of the holding institution is given in the metadata, along with an "IN Harmony ID" number, but it's unclear if this would be enough information for the institution to quickly find the item. This would again be especially crucial for the copyrighted materials, which cannot be viewed online.

Intended Audience
The project seems like it would largely appeal to music historians and scholars or nostalgic adults. There are no educational activities or lesson plans to help bring teachers or students to the site. Getting these regional collections on the web will expand the audience of each institution by making the sheet music more readily available to the nation and the world and bringing in people already using their sister collections.

karyn j. #1: African American Women Students at the University of Iowa 1910-1960

The African American Women Students at the University of Iowa 1910-1960 is a collection of newspaper articles, photographs, correspondence, oral histories, and other primary sources documenting the experiences of African American women students while attending the University of Iowa. This subcollection is a part of the larger African American Women in Iowa Digital Collection. I chose to write my blog on the subcollection as opposed the collection that it is part of because I found this one to be more interesting and the topic was more specific. It is based on research done by Dr. Richard M. Breaux’s study of African American women students at The University of Iowa and information contributed by several Iowa repositories, namely The Iowa Women’s Archives, The University of Iowa Archives, The State Historical Archives, and The African American Historical Museum and Cultural Center.

Collection Principles

This digital collection was funded by an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant and was created for a fellowship project in digital librarianship by the university’s School of Library and Information Science. It is based on research done by Dr. Richard M. Breaux and several other scholars’ study of African American women students at The University of Iowa and information contributed by several Iowa repositories, namely Iowa Women’s Archives, University of Iowa Archives, State Historical Archives, and the African American Historical Museum and Cultural Center. All of this information can be found on the “About the Collection” page.

There were no impediments to the use of this collection. Everything is accessible to anyone browsing through this collection (assuming you have Audio Player and Adobe).

Object Characteristics

The objects in this collection are listed based on where they fall in the timeline of events. When you click on a year, there is a blurb that tells you what happened in that year. In every blurb, there is a link that sends you to items that are related to the event, person, or group discussed in the blurb. The links in the blurb are basically the same as the thumbnails shown in the section under the blurb called related artifacts. The only difference is that the links in the blurb take you directly to all related artifacts while, clicking on the thumbnail then takes you to all the related artifacts, which are opened in a new tab. Each of the thumbnails can be clicked on to zoom in. You then have the option of zooming in further. All the items are jpegs and the oral histories are opened in audio player.

There is also a section under the blurb that gives you related sources for further information. If you click on the source, it either sends you to the university’s library catalog or the collection where the item can be found.

This collection is very-user friendly and easily navigable, but can be confusing if you are looking for the screen to take you to a new page. Any time you click on an item or want to search, a new tab will appear.

Metadata

The metadata was very well done. There is an abundance of information such as title, original item date, digitized date, topical subject, what digital collection it belongs to, and the collection’s location, just to name a few. Also, many of the metadata fields are linked to more information about the field.

Intended audience

The intended audience of this collection is anyone interested in the experiences of African American women attending the University of Iowa between the years of 1910-1960. Anyone who wants to know more about what happened during those years and in some cases, what happened after they left should check out this collection.

Meghan C. Blog 3: Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) Photographs

(Photograph)

The University of Washington Libraries has digitized this collection of photos from the New Deal era of American history in Seattle, W.A. and the King County area. The photos depict the lives of Americans just trying to make through the rough times of the depression and finding ways to combat the economic situation by doing work within their communities. The collection includes photographs of people working on bridges, schools, park grounds, and other building constructions, as well as people doing general trade work like making furniture and sewing. The FERA collection details an important period in this communities history and gives photographic evidence of how much of the area came to be constructed. The digital collection consists of 274 images that were selected from over 800 different photographs.


Collection Principles
It seems as though the collection was narrowed down due to the situation with the Crossing Organizational Boundaries IMLS Grant. This grant was given to the King County Snapshots digital collection, which encompasses 13 different organizations that helped create the overall collection which the FERA collection is apart of. The images were selected mostly by importance to the collection as a whole and the lack of funding to support digitizing the entire collection.

Object Characteristics
The 274 photographs were scanned at 3000 pixels on an 8 bit grayscale. The images were saved as TIFF's and then later re saved as JPEG files for use on their website. They were re sized to 640 pixels and linked through contentdm. The images are nice, but I feel a little let down by their lack of zoomability. When clicking on an image it brings you to its largest possible view and below that is the title, description and metadata for the scanned image. Yet, I wish there were more. The website does offer some information on the time period from which these photographs were taken, which is very helpful to anyone wishing to do some more extensive research.

Metadata
The metadata seems very inclusive with a lot of links and controlled vocabulary, helping the user better acquaint themselves with the research or images they are looking for. The information included is a little bit redundant, including much of the information that is on the homepage of the site. It is good for those that are unaware of this, but this information is repeated on every single image. It seems slightly unnecessary, but still someone encountering this information through a link would, I'm sure be very appreciative of it. The metadata also contains information on how to attain copies of the images, and a request link which is nice.

Intended Audience
The audience for this particular site and collection would most likely come to it by way of the community, wishing to track down images of their family members or former residences, or the academic body wishing to do research on the vast topics of life during the depression in the King County area. The collection seems as though it is very organized towards the development of awareness towards this time frame and community in general.

Kempleel Blog 3: A Nation of Shopkeepers

A Nation of Shopkeepers: Trade Ephemera from 1654 to the 1860 in the John Johnson Collection of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University is, like many of these projects, mean to accompany or document a physcal exhibition, this one shown in 2001. The exhibit is meant to be a visual chronicle of the mercantile society in great Briatain during the specified time periosd.

Collection Principles:
The objects in the exhibit are all part of a special collection held at the library, the John Johnson Collection, consisting of about 1 million printed "ephemera" or printed material not meant to be kept - advertisements, pamphlets, packing paper, cheap popular entertainments, etc. Dr. Johnson collected in the first half of the 20th century, and the material itself dates from the 16th century until 1939. This particular digital repository, is an on-line copy of a physical exhibit, complete with pictures of the exhibit space and how the materials were physically displayed. Specifically British, the collection is meant to illustrate the merchant state of the British empire. As explicitly stated in the introduction

"The aim in focussing on the ephemera of trade is twofold: to show something of the way in which printed ephemera helps us piece together our social history and to demonstrate how (with the aid of new technology in both cataloging and digitisation) these bibliographically challenging materials can be made more accessible and thus more useful, both to the academic researcher and to the casual web surfer"
In addition to the exhibit, the entirety of the Johnson collection is searchable on the web through a separate catalog page, though that displays only the metadata and not the images.

Object Characteristics:
The exhibit contains 338 individual scans of ephemera, as well as 4 "Supplemental images" and a number of pictures of the physical displays. The pictures are in jpeg format, and are not standardized - some resolutions are vastly higher than others. Clicking on a thumbnail leads to a larger picture of the images, but despite the presence of a zoom button, images cannot be further enlarged. Each object is displayed with a brief essay detailing what the image shows and its probable origins and usage. Supplemental images are tied back to other images in the collection, but are otherwise devoid of description. The collection is navigable as a whole, and is also broken down into different sub-headings by category (shop signs, trade cards, etc.)

Metadata:
All the images are presumable of objects held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The objects are titled with their name, trade, trade sign, town (if not London) and date, and are numbered in the order in which they appeared in the physical exhibit, as well as their shelf mark from the collection. As mentioned above the collection catalog is searchable through a sperate web portal, and displays the MARC records, but is in no way linked back to the images.

Intended Audience:
The collection is intended, as stated in the introduction, for both scholars of British history and the casual web browser, who might be interested in the material. It is clearly supposed to promote a somewhat obscure collection and the Bodleian Library, including linking the a store where one can buy a paper copy of the exhibit's catalog (although the link is broken). The exhibit is 7 years old now, and the pages have not been updated, lending the whole enterprise a very out-dated visual style completely different form the library's newer web portal.

Geoff Willard Blog #4: Indianapolis Museum of Art

Stumbled upon the IMA in one of our readings for this week. I got a huge kick reading the descriptive tags added by visitors in the sub-section on Contemporary art. Is it weird that I'm more interested in how people are talk about an object than the object itself? 

Collection Principles

The IMA seems to be a "general" art museum in the strictest sense of the word. Their collections span the globe and cut across time, with the only stipulation being that the collected works serve "the creative interests" of the museum's communities. It is unclear why certain pieces were picked as representative samples for their categories, beyond being of that time, region, or style. I'm always frustrated by broad headings such as "Asian art." Can't they drill down just a little bit?

Copyright is explicitly stated for each piece of art. 

Although the IMA allows tagging, they enforce it with a captcha. In my eyes, that's an impediment to use. Like DRM, the people who want to break it will, leaving the casual users struggling to decipher and type words they can barely see. I would encourage more tags, not less, by not using captchas. 

Object Characteristics

The website allows one level of zoom on all of their jpgs, and all of these larger images have an IMA watermark. Dragging and copying a jpg to the desktop reveals the file name, which is a long string of alpha-numeric characters separated by dashes. (It's meaningless to me, but perhaps on their end each chunk of the name subscribes to a naming convention they've developed.) Within the administrative metadata there is a direct link to where the image is stored on the IMA's servers.

Metadata

The descriptive and structural metadata is exceptionally strong, detailing the artist, artist nationality, artist birth-date, creation date, materials, dimensions, credit line, accession number, copyright, the wall label (nice touch!), and my favorite, user tags. At this point I'm not sure how useful the tags are - the tags 'hmmmm' and 'doodle' don't exactly inspire confidence -but that's a problem that can be worked out with scale.   

Intended Audience  

I'm a sucker for most contemporary art, but surely the site also draws visitors in with its Japanese, African, Neo-Impressionist, American Impressionist, and local Indiana art, among other collections. None of the digital collections are particularly extensive though, contrary to their 50,000 physical collection, and maybe that's the point. If the goal is to get bodies through the door (hello $12 tickets!), I can understand the appeal of a handful of teaser exhibits. 

Jessi Fishman Blog 3: Wisconsin Historical Images Cigarette Trading Cards Collection

I found the website for the Cigarette Trade Cards Collection in a rather strange way but I'm glad I did. I searched for "birds" on the Smithsonian Library and Archival Exhibitions on the Web page (because I like birds) and was surprised to see a link to a site about cigarette trade cards (I also like trade cards). So I went to it, and found the very well-designed and full-of-stuff site known as the Wisconsin Historical Images section of the Wisconsin Historical Society. This site has numerous online exhibitions, many of which sound very interesting, but I decided to stick with the trade cards.

Collection Principles
I gathered information about the collection principles behind the Wisconsin Historical Society's Archives right from the "learn about the collections" part of the website..."The Wisconsin Historical Society's Archives collections include approximately three million photographs, negatives, films, cartoons, lithographs, posters, and ephemeral materials from private, business, and governmental sources that document the rich social, economic, and political history of Wisconsin and the upper Midwest... In addition to strong holdings in regional history, the collections have a national focus in the areas of nineteenth century expeditionary photography, Native American images, mass communications, and social action movements, including labor and civil rights." You can really tell from examining this site that the people behind the digitization efforts at the Wisconsin Historical Society are putting a lot of thought into their online exhibitions...the site is clean, aesthetically pleasing, and easy to use, information about permissions and about the opportunity to purchase prints and digital files are readily available, and there are a variety of interesting functions and materials available as well.

Object Characteristics
This is a rather small collection, so all of the objects are listed in alphabetical order, and each has a very lovely thumbnail of the associating image to look at to see if you want to open and learn more about it. Each object is named with a persistent, unique identifier that conforms to the overall naming scheme, and the links to enlarge or buy the image open in a new window for easy viewing. You can also e-mail the image to a friend directly from the object's page. The name and identifying number for each object show up in the title bar of the page to avoid getting lost, and the images are clear, crisp, and beautiful.


Metadata
As to be expected, the accompanying metadata for the objects in this collection is great. There is a large title and description section, followed by the image id, the creator name (if known), the collection name, the genre, and detailed additional information. The search function does not work in individual collections, however, but instead spans the entire online collection, so you usually get more results than you would have hoped for, but still can find what you are looking for and find some other cool stuff along the way. The good metadata records definitely convey that the Wisconsin Historical Society digitization people really know what they're doing and care about the interoperability, access to, and long term management of their materials.

Intended Audience
There are so many interesting collections on the Society's site that the intended audience for the whole thing must be enormous. As for this particular collection, I would say the intended audience could range from serious researchers interested in ephemera from the late 1800s to anyone who happens to like birds and can search in the right places for them. Another intended audience group could be bubblegum (or other trade) card enthusiasts or people interested in the history of advertising.

Emily V - Blog 4 - UT School of Human Ecology Textile Collection Database

                                                        

While not strictly an exhibition, this online database of a collection made me so crazy that I had to write about it anyway. I am currently taking a course in the Textile Department of Human Ecology, as part of this course we are required to use their collection database. Innocent enough, right? 

Collection Principles

None are indicated, the viewer has no idea what the collection's goals are, how the items came to be given to this department, or any other information besides that given in the object file. Other than a brief blurb on the homepage about the diversity of the collection, we have no idea what is in there unless we search item by item.

Object Characteristics

Aside from generally poor picture quality, no ability to zoom in, and no multi-views of the garments is the problem of accession numbers- there are two of them. An "original accession number" and a regular "accession number" - this baffles me.

Also, amazingly, often when you click on an image you are linked to a different image, with no explanation. (That is when the image isn't broken, which 70% are).

Metadata

Oh my. This is what made me crazy, and this is why I had to write about the database. Not only is information incredibly incomplete (if any is given at all) but, the database is CHANGEABLE BY THE USER!!! By any user- no log in necessary. All fields can be edited, including accession numbers.

 No one knew this until I pointed it out yesterday! I have no idea how long this database has been online, though the phrase "long before I got here" has been thrown around by several people. 

Intended User

Apparently, the students of TXA 355 D, though in the end I had to just walk around through closets of garments looking for my objects. I can honestly not guess at who else might find this database useful.

Note:

The images above are screenshots I took so I could illustrate the problem for the class's TA.