Thursday, December 4, 2008
Introduction
Purpose of this blog:
I am a student at the University of Texas at Austin. I'm currently working on my Master of Science in Information Studies within the School of Information at the University. This semester I had the pleasure of taking 385T; Creating Sustainable Collections. This course provided basic instruction on the digitization of both still and moving images, as well as the issues surrounding their preservation and management. As part of my course completion requirements I have digitized a collection of documents and photographs that are part of a larger collection obtained from the Blanton Museum of Art. This site has been created to walk the reader through my observations while working on my final project experience in the class.
Curatorial Issues/Observations
The items digitized by myself for this project were assigned by Professor Maria Esteva. As a student, this is of course to be expected for the learning environment. However, if we were truly in a professional setting and had the ability to provide input on the what collections should be digitized for a particular institution; then I would not have chosen this particular collection for digitization at this point. This collection is not cataloged at this point within the Blanton or UT Library System. Therefore there is no already existing metadata for these items. Should these collections be in fact published on the web, there will be no catalog pointing to the online collection and no other record for accessibility. This may make the visibility of the collection very minute and difficult for UT students and professors to find.
Technical Aspects of Digitization and Project Management
- All items were digitized using 400 dpi resolution and a 24 bit color scale. All master copies were saved as a .tif file.
color bit scale for all scanned items, weather black and white or in color. This was decided
off the suggestion of the PCL's digitization center's director - Uri Kolodney. Since learning more about digitization I have been playing around with old family photos. In my own observation, using a bitonal grayscale for black and white photos seems to maximize the quality of the finished project. If I were to do this again, I believe I would choose a grayscale for the black and white photos in my collection (*I would play around with the objects and our equipment before deciding of course).
- All scanners and monitors were callibrated before use.
- An inventory of all items were documented in an excel spreadsheet that included the: file name, condition notes (such as tearing, scratches, folds, stains, etc.), material type (i.e. photograph of artist), treatment, receive date, and return date. This type of inventory is necessary in digitization centers to not only keep track of the items in the collection but to hold the employees responsible for handling the materials with care.
- All scanned items and documentation were saved on UT server space set aside for this specific project. There was an overall folder for the finished project entries and subsets that kept individual students' work separate for easy access and organization.
- All digitized items were reviewed and edited in Photoshop for quality control and then saved as a .jpeg file for publication on the web.
- All students in the class had to come up with a naming convention for the digital records so that consistency was maintained.
blam_exhib_0003_1969_m_001.tif
The first four letters indicate the BLAnton Museum. The next section identifies the collection as an exhibit. Each exhibit was assigned a number, that we came up with in class, and this is indicated in the next section. The year of the exhibit was including to also give the items more identifying information just by glancing at the file name. The next letter indicates the type of material. For this, we conformed to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center's convention for file-naming construction: a = Art: sketches, paintings, engravings or woodblock/metalblock prints, posters, etc. m = manuscripts (correspondence, letters -- handwritten or typed, pamphlets, brochures, telegrams, drafts, legal agreements, etc.); and p = any photographic material (slides, negatives, photographs, etc.). The number of the individual objects were indicated using a three digit standard and then of course the file type finished off the file name.
Early on we had discussed a letter extension that indicated if you were scanning the front and back of your item. We decided against that and just increased the total number by one if you had to scan the back of an item, or an item had more parts to it (such as a pamphlet or a document with several pages stapled together).
We really should have decided on this earlier in the process, and stuck by our decision so as to save time overall. It was a good learning experience nonetheless.
- All students created a MODS record of their collection.
Sustainability
- Metadata is incredibly important when it comes to the sustainability of a collection. Future users need to be able to identify what the objects are, where they came from, how they were digitized, where the originals are stored, etc, etc, etc.
- Preservation of the digital objects is and will be an ongoing problem within the world of digitization. Changing technologies provide better quality and better methods of digitization, but also provide a headache in terms of migrating already digitized objects to upgraded and new technologies. This is my biggest concern and frustration with digitized records. The problem is so overwhelming that it seems futile to even try sometimes! But as librarians we must keep reinventing ourselves and how we can maximize the availability of accessible information for the public.
- Money unfortunately is the biggest problem in sustainability. Often times finding funding to get a project off the ground is not difficult, but the continued upkeep of the project once it is digitized is often overlooked by donors who are unaware of the problem. Money also affects the quality of equipment purchased and time spent perfecting the project. I learned firsthand just how much time can be spent on just a few items. When managing thousands of items it's overwhelming to fathom how much more problematic the funding is.
- And what about where do we store the original physical objects. Users have the mistaken notion that once something is made available on the web, the original can be done away with. The lifespan of a physical piece of paper far outweighs a digital object or even technology such as a video tape or a dvd. It is because of this that we MUST store these objects in a safe environment for future use if necessary.
Conclusion
I wish I'd had this class before I attempted to build an online collection this past summer! I would have saved myself a tremendous amount of time and heartache. However I'm excited to have these new skills under my belt so that I can revisit that project and tackle new ones. I also can't wait to start digitizing my family's home videos!
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