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.