Geoff Willard Blog #6: Hansen's Sno-Bliz

Being from the north east, I never truly experienced a snowball stand until I arrived in Austin. Casey's New Orleans Snowballs changed all that, and now that they're closed until March I have to wait 6 months before consuming flavored ice again. Hansen's Sno-Bliz, a New Orleans snowball institution, has their very own digital exhibit running on OpenCollection curated by none other than recent iSchool grad Allison King. 

Collection Principles

Allison writes: "For the online exhibit, materials were selected that were representational of the types of items in the collection, the variety of customers, and the span of years that Hansen's Sno-Bliz has been in business." (Hansen's has been open from 1934 to the present day, save for a period of time immediately following Katrina) The collection includes photographs, newspaper and magazine articles, "and other documents related to their business." Any copyrighted materials are property of Hansen's, while everything else is posted under the guise of fair use. Images can be submitted to the webmaster, or submitted to Hansen's Flickr group. 

Incidentally, tagging has essentially been outsourced to Flickr and YouTube rather than kept 'in house' within OpenCollection. Each object has a pointer to its equivalent on a social media site where a user can leave comments.

Object Characteristics

It's so convenient when this information is supplied: "All of the first set of digitized materials, except the collages and audio-visual materials, were scanned using a Brother MFC-465CN scanner at Hansen's Sno-Bliz. The collages were scanned on a DigiBook in the Digitization Center in the PC Library at the University of Texas at Austin. All two-dimensional materials were digitized as 400 dpi lossless TIFFs with 24-bit color depth. The audio-visual materials were digitized at the School of Information's computer lab. Born digital materials, photographs and movies, settings varied depending on the settings of the digital camera."

I do wonder why the capture methodology for audiovisual materials was not described in more detail though. 

Metadata

Most of the fields appear to be derived from Dublin Core, with the notable exceptions being id number and physical dimensions (in.). What's included is exceptionally detailed beyond the baseline of what you would expect - i.e. documents will often have multiple instances of subjects. One potential downside to all of these access points is that search can become unwieldy. A search for 'customers' brings up 54 objects, which should be quite browsable, but not when only 5 objects appear on each page with no option to increase the number. The faceted classification underneath the browse tab exhibits the same problem, although the organization itself is very useful.

Intended Audience

Snowball lovers the world over should feel right at home at Hansen's. Allison has also used Flickr and YouTube as a way to spread the collection and return some visitors to the parent site.