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...