Stone Readers: Digital Librarians in the Cemeteries

Friday 2:00pm
Stone Readers: Digital Librarians in the Cemeteries
Presenters: Jim Keenan & Kathy Meagher - Billerica Library Website (presentation on homepage - Monday)

Digital projects are a way to share unique collections while helping to physically preserve the originals.

This session discusses the Billerica Library Cemetery and Vital Records project:
How it was conceived, how it was carried out, where it is now, where it may be going next.

"Who the hell is Sheila Shea" is an actual epitaph on a gravestone in Billerica.

What can we learn in order to do our own local projects?

Origins...Greg & Kathy (local history librarian)-their ideas, trials and perils. They were trying to find a small cemetery in the woods behind some railroad tracks to catalog. They were almost hit by a train, devoured by bugs and vanquished by heat, but they finally found the cemeteries and used a digital camera to take pictures of gravestones and copied epitaphs into notebooks as exactly as possible. It was the first of many cemeteries that they would visit.

Some Terms...Digital Project - data stored in a database that people can access, Digital Object - consists of digital image and metadata, Metadata - information describing a digital object (who owned it and made it, where is it now, what size is it, etc...).

Types of Projects...projects to share widely and projects to preserve and share locally (example of archival scanning for a collection of collapsible lanterns at the highest possible resolution, without concern for sharing the images on the Internet).

In his resources links there will be information about how to build a bed for book scanning (cheaper than buying one).

Types of Digitized Materials...Books, pictures, maps, video, audio & metadata (don't need to limit your possibilities to just books).

Digital Resource Creation...Scanning originals, converting paper data into electronic data, creating objects out of composite materials, why? to share.

Creating exhibitions...Special occasion digital exhibition, "permanent" digital collections (for instance all the cemeteries, gravestones, epitaphs in Billerica with maps, metadata, etc... for research purposes), revolving collections, special purpose exhibitions.

Storytelling...to highlight features of the history of your locality and the people who lived there. An example is 1816 - the year without a summer or the Flu pandemic of 1918. Vital records can help tell the story.

Toothaker dies in prison...he had bragged about using reverse witch craft on a witch...and was later imprissoned. He was the only male healer accused of witchcraft and he was from Billerica. His family was buried in a small cemetery. Toothaker's wife Mary was later accused of witchcraft. She claimed that she made a deal with the devil to protect her from Indian raiders when she was interrogated. She was safely in prison when several homesteads near her home were attacked. Her testimony is digitized and available to read.

What you need...needs change based upon the type of project you are doing, but there will always be these four: people (interested enough to take on the project), time, software (Billerica project used Excel Spreadsheets) and hardware. You also need local support (library director, community, etc...).

Planning a project...The Cemeteries and Vital Records Project...the first surveys, there were no maps, if you find there are no existing resources, don't be afraid to be the one who creates them.

Local Involvement...the historical society, town cemetery department, boy scouts and data entry volunteers.

First Results...rough hand drawn maps and notes, photographs, transcriptions, the "archival" binders (organized information to correspond to maps).

Publicizing and Popularizing...begin telling your stories and sharing your data as quickly as you can. When people start getting excited about something they want to get involved.

Digital Commonwealth will host your collections and link to them. Digital Treasures is another resource focused on central and western MA. You can also share metadata - creating a static repository to share OAI compliant metadata.

Fundamental Checklist...Plan to start small (the journey can be the destination), Work on paper then on computers, Organize your labor, Publish early - publish often - incremental growth is good, Identify your software learning needs (spreadsheet, web page creation, database), Identify your hardware needs (scanner, camera, recorder, video, web site, server), Do It!

Keeping Collections Open: The Boston Library Consortium and the Open Content Alliance Join Forces

Keeping Collections Open: The Boston Library Consortium and the Open Content Alliance Join Forces

Speakers: Maura Marx, Digital Services Manager, Boston Public Library

Cathy Norton, Director, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole

Barbara Preece, Executive Director, Boston Library Consortium, Inc.

Wednesday 2:45-4:00

Here are a couple of links on the Boston Library Consortium

http://www.blc.org/

http://www.blc.org/library_user_services/user_guide/user_guide.html

And a couple of links to the Open Content Alliance

http://www.opencontentalliance.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Content_Alliance

I also included a link to BHL

http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/

and the Internet Archive: Biodiversity Heritage Library http://www.archive.org/details/biodiversity

Open Content Alliance—OCA

Why OCA? Why not Google or Microsoft? Barbara Preece drank from the proverbial koolaid.

OCA means:

Bibliographic Accuracy

Ability to repurpose/reuse as needed

Free to All

Internet Archive Scanning Experience would only cost .10 a page

EasyAccess and storage files

Life time management of files

Serve up files or download them

Boston Public Library and Open Content Alliance (BPL and OCA)

Maura Marx

“Free to All”

What did this decision look like for one organization, especially a public research institution? The iconic frieze carved over the McKim building in Copley Square says “Free to All,” the motto which dictated in the decision to join OCA. Google, Microsoft and Thomson Gale were banging on the door of the BPL to get them to digitize their collection. It was difficult to get information on the digitization project. What would it mean to force users to use one search engine to have access to collections? What would it mean if a single commercial entity controls access to the content of the world’s libraries?

Deep soul searching by the Boston Public Library found that:

Digital is preferred access format

BPL has the technology skills and expertise to perform work

Commercial vendors may monetize this at some point, but have access

Detailed comparison really pounded the mission statement “Free to All”

Reality Check—colleagues who were working with Google—like feeding a fire brigade. Working with Google was like working a on schedule with commercial interest with a library that didn’t have staff to work on this.

Openness wins. BPL took root and set-up scanning center in house using scanners.

Funding for BPL came from the Sloan Foundation, responsible for funding many open access ventures.

$170,000—Sloan Foundation @3000, @750 total

Regular upload to archive.org and LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com/)

Great for John Adams scholarship—ability to research like never before

GOV Docs next big project $250,000 came from Kahle/Austen foundation

Big call for participation to help scan—massive project.

Entire 60 million pages of government documents to be scanned

Cost $6M to scan BPL’s collection of government documents

Scanning project led to scanning of other projects—a lot of genealogy, a lot of history, and some literature based on circulation numbers. BPL gathered an implementation team

Cathy Norton—Encyclopedia of Life, Biodiversity Heritage Library

E.O. Wilson wanted to create an encyclopedia of every living being on earth—free and authoritative

Create these single websites for every known species—BHL raised $50M dollars—Got money from Sloan foundation (interested in open source)

BHL has 10 libraries including the BHL.

BHL Mission: Provide open access to biodiversity literature

Publish core literature and put it on the web for all users around the world

Use internet archive Biodiversity domain that will digitize

over 5.4 million books dating back to 1469

800,000 monographs

40,000 journal titles

50% pre 1923

Taxonomists and other scientists will have access to biodiversity literature globally

Provide developing world with access to historical literature

Scientists working in many biological domains will get access

The advantages quickly became obvious; there is less space needed for library collections

Now key partner in encyclopedia of life

Scribe scanners installed at Natural History Museum in London, NYC and in Boston

Citation upsurge

Long term management of the digital assets is provided by BHL at no cost

Content will be integrated into EOL project through TI nomenclatural linking.

BHL is also developing a strategy to employ taxonomic intelligence scientific text parsing as part of their digitization initiative. The digitization of the published literature of biodiversity held in their respective collections are made available through a global “biodiversity commons.” The digitized texts are being archived here: http://www.archive.org/details/biodiversity

Here are a few more links for reference

http://www.ubio.org

http://www.eol.org

http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org

Keeping Collections Open: The Boston Library Consortium and the Open Content Alliance.

Keeping Collections Open: The Boston Library Consortium and the Open Content Alliance.
Wednesday 2:45
Barbara Preece, Executive director BLC. Maura Marx Digital Services Manager, BPL, and Cathy Norton Director MBL/WHOI

Internet Archive Scanning Eperience.
13 sites, doing projects via the Open Content Initiative @ BLP

Why OCA, not google? 2005 GoogleBooks approached BPL. Harvard, Michigan, Oxford , Stanford, NYPL all signed to indivitual restrictions. Google access only. BPL could not put collections out on their web or in any other way than through Google.

Benefits:
· Bibliographic accuracy
· Worked with Mission – FREE TO ALL Everything should be openly available.
· Working with Google was like feeding a fire brigade. Google’s pace, Google’s profit.
· Ability to repurpose/reuse as needed
· Ability to make freely available via web, OAISTER etc.
· The consortium has freedom of self determination

COST to Consortium 10 cents/page
PROJECTS
1. $170,000 Sloan Foundation to scan John Adams persional library - at own library site and at LibraryThing (as part of the DeadPeople group) – scholars can compare what John Adams had to what Thomas Jefferson had. (and LibraryThing has more storage)

2. 2nd big project. Kehle/Austin project Government documents -- (Brewster Kehle and wife) Cost: 60 million dollars.

3. They are paying out of BPL budget $100,000 genealogy and local history. The archives built a download tool to check usage.

Information for potential participants
· Lifetime management, access and storage forever. You can serve them up or download them.
· They are offering scanning to groups outside the BLC. Interested libraries should contact Barbara Preece.
· There is a “basecamp” group of 90 interested persons who receive regular email
· Each book has its own metadata scanned in Boston, scanned in the Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/details/university_of_california_libraries at Cal State Library
· BPL 18 libraries. They do about 1000 books/weeks.

ORGANIZATION
Each institution has a point person.
Libraries pay for transportation for the materials.

The archive hires the staff and implements. There are over 10 SCRIBES. 2 shifts per day do the digitization.

Scan on demand. BPL does this for the BLC. (of which MBL/WHOI and Umass Dartmouth are partners)
BPL wants to digitize orphan (pre23) materials.
Orphan materials bill now in congress.
Consortium raised money for the materials and equipment.

NYT “Libraries shun deals to place Books on the Web” Front page 2007.



MBL/WHOI’S WONDERFUL PROJECT

The Encyclopedia of Life, Biodiversity Heritage Library, Biodiversity Informatics from MBL/WHOI
See this presentation
http://www.slideshare.net/Kalfatovic/global-library-of-life-the-biodiversity-heritage-library/
See their Portal: http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/ They use tag clouds in their portal

They partnered with 10 major museums including the Field Museum, Smithsonian, British Museum… To get the old Taxonomies up on the web. 80% of these holdings were Unique! Researchers before open access had to go to individual museums. 50% is Pre-1923!

The concept and the initial $$$$$
E. O. Wilson won the TET award. His wish was to create an encyclopedia of every species that lives/has lived on earth, which would be authoritative. Single website for every $50 Million Dollars from The Sloan Foundation. Lauch was in MAY beginning with Fish.

Now there is a separate Longevity project mapping genes implicated in the aging process.

· They made a name bank for authoritative taxonomic nomenclature
· Everything scanned can now be stored off site.
· Scientists have access at desktop and in the field.
· Science libraries need to focus on informatics.
· Portal blog http://biodiversitylibrary.blogspot.com/2008/04/bhl-portal-updates.html

Taxonomically intelligent scientific text parsing can increase retrieval dramatically from any name bank.
MBL WHOI has a tool which is open source which can import to ExLibris. Example: There have been many names used for the Blue Fish which are mapped via metathesaurus to the taxonomic authority file. They are developing open source bioinformatics tools.

Also of interest
UIUC is doing harvesting at University of IL http://illinoisharvest.grainger.uiuc.edu/help.asp

Tomthelibrarianblog http://tomthelibrarian.wordpress.com/
Umass Amherst – Fruit notes – another project http://www.umass.edu/fruitadvisor/fruitnotes/FruitNotes.htm

Brenda

Digital Commonwealth: "This is a great opportunity for collaboration"

That's what Steven Dalton had to say about Digital Commonwealth - www.digitalcommonwealth.org

The DC portal will be live around July 2007 - stay tuned! In the meantime, there's plenty of good information on their site.

Digital Commonwealth is seeking member institutions. Please visit their membership page to learn more: http://www.nmrls.org/digitalcommonwealth/fee-schedule.htm

This session is jam-packed with information. Here's a small taste.

Digital preservation - Steven Dalton
DC is *not* providing preservation services, but will provide information resources to help members. Example: http://www.nmrls.org/digitalcommonwealth/digital-preservation.htm

Many things can go wrong

• poor quality image/sound
• inadequate metadata
• obsolescence of hardware/software, or hardware/software failure
• loss of functionality
• proprietary file formats
• deficient back-up, poorly implemented migration strategies
• human interference

How to address these problems?

• address digitzation programmatically: know your collections, users' needs, and let products define creative process
• codify selection policy & follow
• comply w/ standards, best practices
• establish quality benchmarks for digital products
• commit to ongoing education

"This is a great opportunity for collaboration"

Decisions to be made

• digitize in-house, or outsource
• build a repository, or outsource

These programs cross departmental, institution, even disciplinary lines - involve appropriate stakeholders!

Virtual archives: Digital collections Gregor Trinkaus-Randall

Benefits

• Users retrieve info w/out human intervention
• Enhance access
• Remote retrieval of images
• Extraordinary image quality
• Possibility of full-text search, cross-collection indexing
• Improve control over collections
• Alternative format for fragile objects

Risks

• Time and money
• Investment in equipment
• Institutional commitment to traditional preservation of source materials
• Commitment to full integration of technology into info management processes
• High risk of loss!

Project considerations

• What purposes will digitized products serve?
• ID characteristics of source docs - size, type, etc.
• Capabilities of available technology
• In-house or contracted out

As a library school student with a keen interest in digital collections, I greatly enjoyed this session. I'm looking forward to seeing the live portal this summer! Thanks very much to our presenters.

Encounters with History: Learning and Teaching from Primary Sources

This was a program of the Boston Regional Library System. I was only able to get to the end of this presentation, so I missed the--already-blogged!--segments from:

Earle Havens, Acting Curator
Rare Books and Manuscripts, BPL
http://www.bpl.org/research/rb/collections.htm

Beth Prindle
Manager, John Adams Library Project
http://www.johnadamslibrary.org/

I came in at the end of the presentation from:

Ron Grim, Curator and Roni Pick, Director
Norman B. Leventhal Map Center
http://maps.bpl.org/
This collection has many maps with birdseye views—users can zoom in on the maps to see buildings, ships, etc.

Marta Pardee-King, Curator of Social Sciences, BPL
http://www.bpl.org/research/socsci/index.htm

Many electronic resources are available from home:
http://www.bpl.org/electronic/index.htm
Using maps with students helps illuminate the events/locations (e.g., when the outline of Boston has changed)
Often the BPL has both scanned images and transcribed text from historic documents; helpful so students can understand the text, but also can see the original.
Marta showed examples and discussed ways to use these documents with students:
:
Textbooks from an older era
Images of people, both old and recent
Examples of changing vocabulary
Political commentary (e.g. cartoons)
Minorities are also represented
For genealogists/beyond the census: Ancestry and New England Ancestors (In library only), city directories, town histories

For a list of primary documents covered by the Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Framework, see:
http://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/hss/final.pdf
Appendix A

An issue brought up during Q&A:
Availability of the online materials/indexes means the use of the physical materials is increasing as well, as users are more aware of what exists in these collections, raising preservation issues.

BPL - Encounters with History

Wow! Ancient books that belong to you!

Earle Havens, Acting Curator at BPL talked about the greatest technology, the book, and held up some rare specimans for the audience, including a page from the first printed Bible, the originals of Shakespeare's works, and a book that saved a life in the Civil War (the gunshot hit the book in the soldier's pocket).

Adams gave his library to the country, Jefferson sold his 6,000 books for $25,000 to refurbish the Library of Congress after a fire. Beth Prindle, Manager of the John Adams Library sees this as a testament to John Adams, the farmer's kid from Braintree, as a true founder of democracy. The Adams Project shows Adams permanent record of his interaction with the book. Hundreds of these books have the mark of the owner: underlining, prices, ownership, and "interpretive commentary" Adams argued with his books. "John Adams never saw a piece of paper, he didn't feel compelled to write on it."

Beth Prindle says: BPL is about access, so they developed two websites:

On the Timeline: Personal context in a chronological order with links to his works and artifacts; His face ages asyou precede on the timeline. World history is also linked to the site to give a framework.

When you hold the book, Beth says, you have a powerful experience of holding the book that Adams held, but by putting these books online, the access and research capibilities are harnessed by the Internet. BPL is offering both experiences. Beth also spoke of exhibitions in other locations and unique things that mark early American history. and how this added curatorial content adds to the enjoyment of history and more research possibilities.

http://www.johnadamslibrary.org

Beth said passionately: If no one knows you have it, what purpose is it?

I had a chance to do a bus tour to BPL this spring so I encourage you to visit the exhibit soon, but for digital excellence also check out the website.