Lauren Blog 9 – World’s Columbian Exposition Books

The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 is a Web site of the Illinois Institute of Technology that hosts digital copies of four nineteenth-century books about the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. The online collection consists of over 12,000 illustrations and full-text images.

Collection Principles
All of the four books digitized in this project were published in the two years immediately following the fair. These books were chosen for digital preservation importance in Illinois and American history as it hosted “Chicago's debut on a world stage as a locus of great architecture and burgeoning economic power.”

Object Characteristics
Each page of the books has been scanned and OCR’d to make it searchable and more easily readable. The images are available in several different resolutions, including very high resolution. Though the digitization of the books is versatile and high quality, the Web site hosting the project is very poorly organized. The images are essentially organized by hierarchal indexes, descending from an alphabetical site map to individual books to chapters and to pages, which have been given titles. The pages of the books can also be clicked through in numerical order. Additionally, some interactive features have been added to the books, like a “clickable” maps of the grounds that links to images of specific buildings. However, these maps not highlighted on the homepage or anywhere else on the Web site, I merely stumbled upon them in an index of that book’s chapters. Sadly, a search feature supplied by Google is the easiest way to find a specific image or topic. Also strangely, all the websites reside under the same address, so you cannot hyperlink to specific pages.

Metadata
Metadata is scattered at best. The bottom of each webpage states that the image is “Copyright, Paul V. Galvin Library, Digital History Collection” and gives the date the page was created. Some of the scanned book pages credit their photos; others do not. An APA citation is listed for each of the books in the about section. The only information given about the digital objects is that they were created by Luna Imaging Co. as the result of an Illinois State Library FY98 Educate and Automate grant.

Intended Audience
The site is quite narrowly intended to make the materials easily and immediately available for “Illinoisians”. An emphasis is placed on the linear readability of the texts, implying that they will be used primarily for historical research.