NCLA Part 3: Statewide public library, statewide digital heritage?

At NCLA, everyone was buzzing about the possibility of a statewide public library…and, separately, the possibility of a statewide digital heritage center.

While UNC Chapel Hill has been relatively quiet about the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center (see previous post), there certainly were special collections librarians and archivists at NCLA who were curious to know more about how such a program might work. They will likely have a Program Coordinator early next year. With the NC ECHO statewide survey of cultural heritage institutions and the NC SHRAB’s Traveling Archivist going out to community groups to consult on preservation, the NC DHC stands as the next big effort to democratize efforts to make accessible the heritage of North Carolina.

En route to Greenville, one of my colleagues mentioned a recent meetup at a “Library Cooperation Summit” to discuss the potential for statewide collaboration to increase public access to state resources. One major idea that emerged from the summit: a statewide ILS using open-source software such as Evergreen. On Thursday, David Singleton, Director of Library Experiences at the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County, discussed his experience with Evergreen in the state of Georgia, where the software originated to support the PINES project. Users of PINES can check out materials at any participating library across the state and return the materials to any other library across the state, using the same library card. Studies showed 90-95% user satisfaction with the open-source ILS. As for North Carolina, the State Library representative in the audience was a bit hesitant to respond that they hope to have a statewide system in place by late 2010.

NCLA Part 2: Twenty-first century reading rooms

On Thursday, the Round Table on Special Collections presented a panel entitled “21st Century Reading Rooms: Interacting with Special Collections Online.” The panel included Mark Custer from ECU, Nick Graham from UNC Chapel Hill, and Kevin Gilbertson from WFU. Although Kevin was unable to present due to illness, the other two gave fantastic presentations about digital collections online.

Nick Graham, North Carolina Maps Project Librarian at the Carolina Digital Library & Archives at UNC Chapel Hill, discussed interactive GIS applications on NC Maps. He explored points, polygons, and georeferencing. Points are latitude and longitude, expressed in decimal degrees. If you can see a point on a map, you can see it in context among other locations — such as Historic Des Moines‘ pushpins feature that shows where historic photos were taken. Polygons are, essentially, shapes. At least three points encompassing a shape can be used to search without text — instead, users can create bounding boxes (or other shapes) to view particular areas. Nick mentioned the Kentucky Geography Network as an advanced version of what NC Maps aims to do, which is better demonstrated through the UNLV’s Interactive Spatial Image page, which “searches by spatial coverage.” And finally, georeferencing is matching up points on a given map to the same points on another map. With historic maps, this is groundbreaking — users can now take a historic map and put it over a modern map to compare development, ecology, land ownership, etc. NC Maps has already started doing georeferencing. Overall, the goal for NC Maps is for interactivity, accessability, and usability by the public.

Mark Custer, Markup & Text Coordinator for Joyner Library Digital Collections at ECU,  discussed the Daily Reflector Image Collection, which has over 7000 images from Greenville’s local newspaper. Mark’s focus was on identifying ways that the collection has been shared with the public. His argument: seek out familiar places and hosting — don’t create new (and therefore unfamiliar) frameworks. The Daily Reflector images are available through ECU’s Digital Collections portal, through the Daily Reflector newspaper’s website, as well as on Flickr. Mark described the ease of extracting metadata from their images and batch uploading to Flickr. Of the 200 photographs uploaded to Flickr, the images have been seen by over 800 people — without advertising of any kind. Over 550 comments have been made to Daily Reflector digital images.

Overall, both presentations highlighted new developments in interactive special collections, aka digital collections. Perhaps the ECU Digital Collections portal could be explored in greater detail for its usability (I explore it in some depth for the upcoming issue of the Journal for the Society of North Carolina Archivists). A number of librarians/archivists in the audience were interested in the ways these resources are discovered, particularly ways repositories can share their resources. The NC Digital Heritage Center came up in a question, though there was little information available about how the Center will work to create greater access to widespread resources. These are exciting times to be a special collections librarian…

After archives inventory, then what?

I came to my job as a special collections librarian in an urban public library with grand ideas about interactive finding aids, MARC records linking to HTML or EAD finding aids or maybe a catablog, digitized content in a DAM system or collaborative project, and envisioning our first born-digital acquisitions. What I found: tens of feet of unprocessed manuscripts, rare books, objects, and ephemera without printed finding aids or even donor agreements; uncataloged maps and card catalog-indexed vertical files, uncataloged microform, and a backlog “closet of doom.”

Nearly one year into my first professional position as librarian-archivist, I have some idea of how I would like to proceed with the unique collections of the North Carolina Room. I decided early on to formulate a structure for our existing archival and special collections materials, but first we needed a place for stuff to go. I got an NCPC grant and had a locking cage built where our department would be moving. Then my colleagues and I started moving collections, objects, and rare books into the cage (photographic and audiovisual materials are kept in a temperature-controlled closet).

The North Carolina Room has officially moved to the ground floor of Central Library, where I am now able to deal directly with the materials in our cage, particularly record groups that need finding aids. Our community organization archives (League of Women Voters, Daughters of the American Revolution, as well as StoryLine) can be kept securely in one place, but no one knows about them. My next step? Create an inventory of fonds (as well as objects, scrapbooks, and other unique materials).

After that, I have to admit I am unsure where to go. Ideally I would work with an IT team and administration to purchase and install Archon/AT and start adding finding aids that can be exported into our catalog as MARC and through our website as EAD/HTML. But we don’t have an IT team, our budget is slashed, and our county government programmers are not interested in supporting a database (yet).

I’ve developed an accession numbering system to go through all of the inventoried “collections” and am creating MS Word-based, very preliminary finding aids that I will hand to our cataloger so we can at least get some “placeholder” MARC records in the catalog. Then I am going to create a catablog and/or create HTML finding aids and investigate the possibility of our finding aids becoming part of ArchiveGrid.

In some ways, I have come to prefer “placeholder” MARC records that can be shared on WorldCat to the multitude of complicated, expensive finding aid programs out there. At UCLA (before AT) we would create a MS Word finding aid, an MS Excel container list, then send these files to an EAD coder who would then program the finding aid and send it to the OAC for harvesting. The Brooklyn Historical Society’s catablog, Emma, combines full-text searchable summary entries with links to PDF finding aids — using a free blog interface.

In my mind, and in line with the now overhyped MPLP method, people prefer to know that you have a group of records about someone/something instead of waiting for a precise description of every single item in a group of records. I see rows of unprocessed scrapbooks, slides, maps, artwork, administrative records, etc… and see a lot of information that isn’t being shared. Basically what I am wondering is: are finding aids in the traditional sense worth it?

Here’s to making things available. Feedback/suggestions are welcome!

One library’s trash…

…is another’s stored collection.

My department has a long history of collecting. Our most recent department head was famous for coming to the local history room at least once a month with a bag or two filled with genealogy manuscripts, rare books, and general curiosities — only to have them placed in our storage closet.

This type of acquisition-based system is not new or unfamiliar to many archivists. Nearly every special collections department has its stored collections, its undocumented acquisitions, its “what is that?” The good news is that processing archivists work hard to inventory and create finding aids for these record groups and objects.

Sometime in the last decade, our department acquired the entire contents of Wake Forest University’s vertical file collection. In approximately 14 banker’s boxes, our library suddenly acquired about 40 years worth of newspaper clippings, brochures, and other ephemera, arranged by topic. Our department has its own sizable vertical file collection that is frequently used to supplement research into old issues of the Winston-Salem Journal and other local newspapers (none of which are indexed).

I have to admit, both the WFU and our own vertical files seemed a bit primitive. “You mean…someone had to go through the newspaper and clip these articles out of the newspaper, then file them by topic?” That, along with the fact that our microfilmed newspapers were not indexed (let alone digitized), seemed hard to believe, if not archivally unsound. Both sets of clippings can be found pasted or Scotch-taped to chipboard or construction paper, but some include photocopies of the original clippings. At least they stopped clipping in the early 1990s, when the Journal started getting indexed online.

It was suggested that perhaps we interfile the clippings from Wake Forest with those of our own…but without knowing what already had been clipped, we would be duplicating our work…and with no more filing cabinets to use, expanding our collection by no fewer than a five thousand clippings seemed impossible. My solution? I created an Access database where our library page, my colleagues, and I could index the title, date, topic (as given), publication and page number for each publication — then toss the originals.

So far we have around 500 records in the database. I am not sure if this is the best solution but it is certainly an affordable one. A speaker at ALA Midwinter in Denver accosted a group interested in local history and genealogy about the benefits of going straight to digitization and OCR — and was unyielding in her argument even when a small-town librarian suggested indexing her clipping files.

Of course, digitizing our newspapers and OCR-ing them is my ultimate goal. North Carolina is working to create an historical newspapers program and I am paying careful attention to it. My goal is to learn how to make our database available for searching on our website…at least until we have full-text out there.

Are vertical files useful today? They can be — just ask the woman who came in a few weeks ago and found a photo of herself under “School Integration” in Winston-Salem. Should we strive to digitize and create full-text searching for our newspapers? Absolutely. Let’s begin by getting our collections out of storage, into finding aids and databases, and into the hands of researchers.