Jessi Fishman Blog 7: Harvard's Open Collections Program

Through Harvard's Open Collections Program (OCP), Harvard aims to advance "teaching and learning on historical topics of great relevance by providing online access to historical resources from Harvard's renowned libraries, archives, and museums". The program was established in 2002, and started providing access to three main collections in 2004, Women Working (1800-1930), Immigration to the United States (1789-1930), and Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics. Harvard Libraries are also currently in the progress of creating a fourth online exhibition for this program called the Islamic Heritage Project. Since we got on the subject of home economics last week, I wanted to focus on the Women Working collection, which explores women's roles in the US economy between 1800 and the Great Depression. According to the main site, "working conditions, conditions in the home, costs of living, recreation, health and hygiene, conduct of life, policies and regulations governing the workplace, and social issues are all well documented by original source material." The collection is made up of 500,000 digitized pages and images, including 7,500 pages of manuscripts, 3,500 books and pamphlets, and 1,200 photographs.

Collection Principles
Now, I was surprised by this exhibition, because for one thing, it's Harvard and so I was expecting to be blown away, but also, from the description that Harvard gives to this Open Collections program and its exhibits on the main site ("well-documented", "offer a new model for digital collections", etc.), I was expecting that this would be an extremely well-organized, easy-to-maneuver site with clear collection principles. Well, it's not. Once you actually get into the Women Working section, it doesn't tell you anywhere how they decided on the materials to digitize or why. You can search or browse, but there is no listing anywhere of everything that is actually in the collection (I know I said last week that I didn't like just lists of stuff, like in ContentDM, and I don't, but I do think that if you want to "browse", you should be able to browse both by topic, format, etc, and by a list of thumbnails and descriptions so you can get a feel for what is available.) The browsing capabilities on this site seem like they're really varied and useful, but when it comes down to it, it's pretty confusing and there doesn't seem to be any explanation or reasoning behind why what is there is there. For instance, I was trying to just browse by photographs, to get pictures to pretty up this blog entry, and when you click Browse Photographs it makes you choose from one of the three institutions from where they got their materials, but doesn't explain really what's in there, and then when you click on one of them, it makes you choose from another whole list of topics, so you can't really just look around. You have to know exactly what you are looking for, and search for it by exactly how it's labeled in this exhibition, and I don't think that's the greatest way for an online collection to be.

Object Characteristics
Harvard uses their own "image delivery service" to display the images in their open collections program. This allows for zooming, rotating, resizing, all that good stuff, but we don't know how they did it, or how this service could work with other institutions or programs. It's also confusing because you have to actually click on the "Display Full Record" link to get to the metadata...if you just click on the image, which I did the first few times, you only get to this image delivery service, which means you lose out on all of the metadata and descriptive information. Now, I figured this out, but would the everyday user? Maybe not. Also, some of the objects, like whole digitized magazines, go directly to the delivery service as well and there doesn't seem to be any metadata available at all. I don't see any qualities contributing to interoperability and reusability, the titles are sometimes really long and inconsistent, and the only kind of naming scheme I can ascertain is linking up the files to another metadata list (containing all the same information) in the Harvard University Library VIA, or Visual Information Access record, which I guess is just another catalog that was already there, so they thought it would be useful to link up to. Again, no real explanation there.

Metadata

The metadata for the digital objects in this collection is pretty good...there are fields for title, name/creator, VIA id (as stated above), physical location, creation date, form/genre, subject titles and in some cases a small description, and a thumbnail of the image. However, like I mentioned before, the titles are really weird...some of them are just what is going on in the picture with brackets around the words ([sorting books], for example) and then some are what is going on in the picture with no brackets around the words, and some read like lists of sentence fragments. For instance, for this image right here, the title is: "Housing, Conditions: United States. Wisconsin. Milwaukee. Tenements: Housing Conditions: Milwaukee: Family living room in the building. Social Museum Collection" and I have no idea why all that stuff needs to be in the title. It seems that the site is much more friendly to people who have an exact search in mind, because spread throughout the collection are pretty detailed sections on specific people or events, complete with links to resources to learn more about them. I don't think the site was meant to be a great, easy to use by anyone digital collection. Which leads me to...

Intended Audience
Harvard states on this site that its goal for Open Collections is to "offer a new model for digital collections that will benefit students and teachers around the world". And in fact, the Women Working section does have a detailed "Teacher Resources" section, where all of a sudden you can look at five subcollections, that are organized more cohesively by subject, and primary sources that will be interesting to students, but you never would have known these organized, interesting things were here unless you were a teacher and clicked on this link. For this reason, I would venture to say that Harvard was aiming this collection at teachers from the beginning, and so didn't really care if the rest of the site was impossible to maneuver around. The site could also be useful for students or researchers with specific information goals in mind, but overall it's not that welcoming to the average user.