"HEARTH is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines. Titles published between 1850 and 1950 were selected and ranked by teams of scholars for their great historical importance. The first phase of this project focused on books published between 1850 and 1925 and a small number of journals. Future phases of the project will include books published between 1926 and 1950, as well as additional journals. The full text of these materials, as well as bibliographies and essays on the wide array of subjects relating to Home Economics, are all freely accessible on this site. This is the first time a collection of this scale and scope has been made available."
Collection Principles
The materials gathered in this collection are all centered around Home Economics. It is located at Cornell University, and as such, the objective is to provide research materials to scholars interested in the subject. With that in mind, the collection is integrated into the University library system, and the site suggests other online collection with related content: "Additional information, images and readings on the history of Home Economics are also available at the Cornell University Library's Rare and Manuscript Collections site, 'From Domesticity to Modernity: What Was Home Economics?' as well as the Human Ecology Historical Photographs collection." Current online holdings: Pages: 399,732 Books: 950 (1003 Volumes) Journals: 9 (222 Volumes).
Object Characteristics
The Hearth website gathers together bibliographies and essays based on and including historical sources. This page gives a narrative of the process for developing this project; here is an excerpt:Pages were scanned as 600 dpi bitonal images and in some cases as 400 dpi gray-scale images. All images are TIFF 6.0 and compressed using ITU Group 4. Minimal document structuring occurred after conversion, primarily linking image numbers to pagination, tagging self-referencing portions of the text, and identifying authors and titles of articles for journals. Page image files were processed to generate OCR and XML that enable searching and navigation. Full-text searching is provided via the OCR'd text.
The present access system was first built for the Making of America project by the University of Michigan's Digital Library Production Service. Cornell University Library has used this system for its own Making of America collection. The system and its user interface have been modified somewhat for the HEARTH materials.
There is very little metadata associated with individual digital objects. The end of every page indicates that the photos are: "Photo © Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell UniversityLibrary." But there is no title, caption, or cataloging information fo
r any of the images. The downloadable PDFs have embedded title and date metadata, viewable under "properties" in Acrobat, but there is nothing more than that.Intended Audience
The resources included in this collection are clearly directed toward an academic audience, both for undergraduate students seeking starting points for primary-source research, to more accomplished scholars seeking patterns and perspectives, these bibliographies could prove valuable to a variety of disciplines.
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