CSchley Blog 7, Julia Child’s Kitchen at the Smithsonian

Collection Principles. The French Chef Julia Child’s kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts was donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 2001. The online exhibit features information about Ms. Child’s kitchen in both text and flash format that appear to serve as a teaser for the actual Smithsonian exhibit, “Bon Appétit: Julia Child's Kitchen at the Smithsonian” which opened in Washington, D.C. in 2002. The text format lists selected objects from the kitchen under “View Selected Objects”, while “Explore the Kitchen” includes a list of facts about the kitchen and “Sample Stories” list 18 stories relating to the French Chef. In the text version, through the link at the bottom of the page for FAQs there is a description of when and how the kitchen was obtained by the Smithsonian, with additional links for a number of related topics such as how museum staff inventoried the kitchen, conducted the interview, packed and shipped the kitchen to Washington, processed the collection, and developed the actual exhibition. The text version of the online exhibit provides images of selected photographs of the actual exhibit kitchen with brief descriptions under the “Visiting the Museum” link at the bottom of the home page/text version.

The flash version requires a download of Adobe Flash Player and opens with an audio of Ms. Child’s in her well known staccato saying that “We are very proud indeed” to have donated her kitchen to the Smithsonian and welcoming you to share her kitchen in the exhibit . The flash version enables you to view selected kitchen exhibits in thumbnail images with accompanying descriptive text for such things as a fruit bowl, her Cordon blue diploma, blowtorch and the like. The “Explore the Kitchen” is a flash player that presents a 360 degree panoramic image view of the actual exhibit (which is apparently enclosed in Plexiglas at the Smithsonian) that you click at particular buttons to learn more. The 18 sample stories from the French Chef are grouped into five categories –Life, Love and Food; The French Chef; Cooking Lessons; Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom; and Julia’s Kitchen Stuff.

Object Characteristics. Because the site’s information is available on flash player or in text version there are different characteristics for the objects. Only in the text version could I open the links to the FAQs, Events, Share Your Thoughts, What’s Cooking, Visiting the Museum, Resources, and Credits items listed at the bottom of the Home page. Perhaps that was because my home computer could not handle the further add-in. The text version’s link to Visiting the Museum does provide jpeg images in varying pixels for a photo tour of the actual exhibition. In the flash player version, the selected objects are small thumbnail images that do not expand into very large images but do have “learn more” buttons that describe the image. The flash version’s 360 degree panoramic view in Explore the Kitchen enables you to click on various buttons in the kitchen to zoom into a fixed image with a brief comment about what you are seeing.

Metadata. Most of the descriptive metadata for the images is brief and either commentary or merely a description of what the object is. Other descriptive metadata as to origin and ownership of the photographic images, the various story and object images and the editors, curators, designers and website development is provided under the “Credits” link at the bottom of the homepage. There is a very good list of further resources under the “Resources” link on the homepage that list Books by Julia Child, About Julia Child and her kitchen, Public Television Series with Julia Child, references for American Food History, Web links, and a Children’s Bibliography (that includes cookbooks, non-fiction, fiction, and a related Website).

Intended Audience. This site is for potential visitors for the Smithsonian’s Julia Child Bon Appétit exhibit in Washington, D.C. for which this online exhibit is really a teaser for that actual exhibit. People who like to cook and who also want to know more about a cookbook’s author will only find this site disappointing because of the limited amount of information about Julia Child, the French Chef. A parent or teacher of children’s cooking might find good resources in the Children’s Bibliography section of the Resources link; but otherwise, this online site has very little for the scholar or student of the culinary arts, except perhaps the references for American Food History in the References link.

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.

Claire B. Blog 6: Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings

The Strachwitz Frontera Collection of commercially produced Mexican and Mexican-American Recordings (the Frontera Collection) is owned by the Arhoolie Foundation, which was established to preserve regional vernacular music created in the United States. Some of the collection has been digitized, but the project is still underway. The Arhoolie Foundation in El Cerrito, California is managing the project, and the UCLA Music Library hosts. The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center is heavily involved as well with arranging funding and, presumably, tailoring the digitization project for specific audiences.

Collection Principles

This collection is the largest repository of Mexican and Mexican-American vernacular recordings in existence, and contains many one-of-a-kind recordings whose publishing companies no longer exist or, if they do, lost or melted their metal masters in the earlier twentieth century. The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center is digitizing the first section of the collection, consisting of 78 rpm phonograph recordings. Once in digital format, this vast collection of approximately 30,000 performances, primarily in Spanish, recorded during the first half of the twentieth century, predominantly in the United States and Mexico, will be available to researchers and the general public.

Digitization began on October 15, 2001. The production team first cataloged the entire collection of over 100,000 individual recordings on cassettes and 78 rpm, 45 rpm, and 33 1/3 rpm long-playing (lp) records using "specialized equipment" (not sure what, exactly).

The Strachwitz Frontera Collection contains three sections, roughly divided by era. The early-twentieth century section includes approximately twelve thousand 78 rpm recordings of Mexican vernacular music recorded from around 1905 to 1955. These performances document many types of popular lyric songs, including the first recordings of corridos (narrative ballads on topics of the day), canciones, boleros, rancheras, and sones, as well as many types of instrumental music, including the first recordings of norteño and conjunto music. In addition, this section includes many spoken performances, such as patriotic speeches and vernacular comedy skits. The late-twentieth century section contains approximately fourteen thousand 45 rpm recordings dating from around 1955 to the 1990s. These include recordings by a wide range of small regional firms created to serve the musical interests of the growing immigrant population in the United States, especially along the border. The last section of the collection includes approximately three thousand 33 1/3 rpm recordings from around 1955 to 1990, demonstrating the continuity of styles and regional traditions into contemporary times.

Object Characteristics

Music is available as .ram files, easily played on Real Player. Anyone can listen to a 50-second sample of songs, but full access to the piece is limited to people affiliated with UCLA only. I found this really disappointing, frankly.

Metadata

The site offers extensive searching and browsing. Records for items include song titles, creators, subjects, music genre, recording notes, and then a space for viewers to add their own notes. These notes actually go right onto the record page as a "user note" (I found this out by adding a note of my own, one that adds no value whatsoever to the record, so apologies to the metadata team over there). One neat feature is that users can create their own virtual collection, basically tagging recordings to go into this collection. Then you can save the collection, email the titles, or clear your personal collection and start over. Browsing can be done by alphabetical listing of titles, or subject listings (e.g., animals, advice, adultery). Users can search and browse in English or Spanish.

Intended Audience

The site is geared, obviously, toward musicians and people interested in Mexican American music in the twentieth century. But the UCLC Chicano Studies program is interdisciplinary and hopes to offer this collection as a means for analyzing "issues critical to Latino communities" - this could appeal to almost any academic discipline focusing on these communities in the US (history, sociology, anthropology, ethnomusicology, etc). It is a pretty cool site to just browse through anyway, though, even though non-UCLA types only get 50-second segments.

John G. Blog# 4: !Del Corazon! Latino Voices in American Art

!Del Corazon! Latino Voices in American Art was originally a website created in 1996 to feature the works of Latino Artists. It has since been converted into a digital collection for the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM).

Collection Principles

According to the information in the "About" page, the collection was converted to continue to feature the work Latino artists and to show their relevance and importance in the history of American culture. It was also converted because the website became outdated. There are 12 works of art in this digital collection with links to other artworks and art collections in the Smithsonian by these and other Latino artists. There is a brief artist biography and narrative about each piece of artwork that provides helpful information for visitors. The collection also provides photographs, videos, and other resources to showcase the works of these artists and to connect Latino art to the history of American culture. The six Latino artists that are featured are: Maria Castagliola, Pepon Osorio, Carmen Lomas Garza, Agueda Martinez, Maria Brito, and Patssi Valdez.

Object Characteristics

Each digital image allows visitors to zoom, move, download and 8.5 x 11 poster. The site uses Adobe Flash Player 9. Each artwork is described using helpful bibliographical information. Digital representations of a wide variety of artwork is included in this collection/exhibit including: oil paintings, photographs, models, and sculptures.

Metadata

The site provides viewers with bibliographical information including: date created, artist, size, media type, and Smithsonian call/ID number. There is also some interactive information included to help non-professionals. For example, Our Lady of Guadalupe by Pedro Antonio Fresquis (ca. 1780 - 1830), specific information about the painting under "Things to Look for" like the crescent moon held up by the angel.

Intended Audience

The intended audience is anyone who is interested in Latino art. I liked that there was useful information for public viewers and that it wasn't exclusively intended for Academia. I also liked the fact that most of the website or collection resources were both in English and Spanish. I enjoyed learning about the artists and the creative processes that they go through to create their art. As an Educator I also appreciated the Curriculum resources including the lesson plans and resources in PDF files that were provided.

Katie R - Blog 6 - Cartoon America

This Library of Congress online exhibit of The Art Wood Collection of Cartoon and Caricature called "Cartoon America" highlights a small portion of the 36,000 cartoons that make up the collection, now held at the LOC. The works range from political cartoons to comic strips.

Collection Principles:
"Cartoon America" is a curated online exhibit meant to showcase a relatively new special collection at the Library of Congress. Art Wood started collecting American cartoons in his from a young age and into his career as an editorial cartoonist. The curators explain that the "selections reflect Wood's primary collecting interests and strengths and the vitality of an innovative and evolving art form that includes political illustrations, gag cartoons, comic strips, illustrations, animation, and caricature." This online exhibit was originally a "real" show at the LOC, a fact that is hard to establish from the website.

Object Characteristics:
The images in this exhibit are JPEGs, stamped with only somewhat intrusive watermarks. An informative paragraph accompanies each item, detailing the artist or themes therein. The cartoons have been scanned in color, as the discoloration of the paper is evident in black and white cartoons. My favorite part of this exhibit is the fact that many images cannot be posted online. The tag "The Library of Congress does not have permission to display this image online" is used with the main exhibition image when the cartoon is missing. Instead of just taking out the entire object, image and description, they kept it all in, echoing the physical exhibition exactly and not tailoring online aspects. While it's great to have information about cartoonists and such, having no image is pointless.

Metadata:
Very little information is attached to each cartoon, at least up front for the public to see. General information about the author, title, medium, and year are present, along with details about where the cartoon was published (what newspaper). The user must go to the Checklist of Objects page to find information about LC numbering, possibly only of the digital copy, not the original (the "DIG" in the number leads me to believe that: LC-DIG-ppmsca-07517). Copyright information is also listed. A catalog (for sale at the gift shop!) goes with this exhibit, and it seems that the website is just copying the basic information that would be in the book.

Intended Audience:
Since this online exhibition directly copies the actual exhibition, I would say the audience is anyone interested in the collections of the Library of Congress. Artists or historians would like this exhibit, especially the political cartoons in this highly politicized year. I think little thought went in to a virtual audience, and the LOC probably figured (rightly) that graphic objects with few words and pretty pictures will attract most anyone, and I can see the tourists streaming through this exhibit at the Jefferson Building just because they are there. It is a very educational and descriptive show, but with missing images online, the impact is much less for the virtual user.

Meghan C. Blog 6: Internet Archive - Prelinger Archives

The Prelinger Archive was established in 1983 by a man named Rick Prelinger and within 20 years he acquired over 60,000 films. Most of these were ephemeral films produced as advertisements or educational films, some are just amateur works. These films were digitized for scholarly use and to prohibit the loss of history as these films slowly deteriorate and/or just vanish over time. The Internet Archive is the platform on which the Prelinger Collection stands on. Created for similar reasons, the Internet Archive bridges the near past with the present by preserving different works of media to be viewed by a scholarly audience as well. In 2002 the Prelinger film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress and all that remains of the original 60,000 film library is now down to 4,000. The Prelinger Library is located in San Fransisco and the Prelinger Archive contains over 2,000 films all within the public domain for anyone to view whenever they chose.

Collection Principles

They digitized what they believed to be the most important and defined films within their collection. They probably gave special attention to the films that were receiving the most use over a period of time, in order to prevent any further damage to the films as they were. They digitized the pieces of film that seemed to most relevant to the purpose of the Prelinger Archive, to further research and scholarly thought on media art, history, and science. The collection is all within public domain according to the website, so the digitization of the films is not prohibited. In fact the website actually encourages you to make each of the films your own, in a sense, reproducing incorporating, or enhancing them as you see fit. It's a really beautiful thing.

Object Characteristics

Each of the 2,012 films seem to be available in a wide array of formats, making them very accessible to the public. MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4 and others are file formats for the videos. The films themselves are viewable, and at the mid-range of file size appears to have nice resolution, but if blown up, loses much of that visibility. The objects themselves have unique identifiers. It is a little unfortunate that a collection of this size does not label their assets better. It seems to be very easy to contact Rick Prelinger as the need appears to someone in search of a specific film. another interesting feature is the thumbnail clips from the films themselves, I thought this a very nice touch for someone just looking to browse through public domain stills. Although, the images themselves are not the best quality.

Metadata

I found this to be a particularly interesting aspect of the site. On the home page for the Prelinger Archives there is an option to view the keywords for the 2,000 odd films in the collection in a tag cloud, very cool! Some of the biggest ones are consumerism, cold war and social guidance. I really enjoyed looking at this feature. So really the only ways to search within the archive is by keyword or title. So the site is a bit lacking in its ability to appease a scholarly audience. I believe that they should employ some sort of a database to create explicitness in their holdings.


Intended Audience

The site states that its intended audience is a scholarly one, but I am sure they bring many different peoples. They offer a lot for its users to navigate and interact with their site with, like their commenting and reviewing section as well as a bookmarking option. Both of these really helps make this site feel more like a community. I fear that not every scholarly person would be able to find what they are looking for when encountering this site, it is unfortunate, but the metadata needs a lot of work to create a more accessible place for people to really learn from.

Emily V - Blog 7 - National Archive Experience Digital Vaults

The National Archive Experience Digital Experience is a fancy looking site - using Flash technology lots of images swirl around the screen encouraging the user to interact with the site, explore, the archives, and play exciting archive guessing games... It all seems like a pretty good idea, but somehow it didn't really work for me. I found the Flash, while nice looking, a little annoying - it took for ever to navigate in between pages, and at least on my small-ish laptop screen I didn't find it terribly easy to see and decide which images to choose. 

PS. There is also an archive theme game to play.

Collection Principles

There are no clearly stated principles. I assume that this is just a sampling of everything that has been digitized, but I don't know this for sure... The images seems to be organized thematically and by tag words, though the archive webs can be filtered by the user.

Object Characteristics

Good scans, one can zoom in very close and still get nice clear images. (I think they must be vector images.)

Unfortunately, there is no way to take copies of the picture off the site.

Metadata

Metadata is great for these images. When one finds an image of interest they click on that image, which swirls it to the front (this is time consuming!) then you select to expand, which opens another window where one can read a small blurb about the artifact and zoom in on the image. Also at this point you can "Research the record in ARC" (though this link is not terribly visible or obvious) - this gives you all of the metadata you may need.

Intended Audience

The audience for this site seems to be primarily school children (I am guessing primary school-age and maybe middle-school). The site as links for educators, so their goal seems to be to have this Web site incorporated into history or social studies classes.