Recently in digital collections Category

The University Libraries are pleased to announce the launch of a new digital collection:

Southern Nevada: The Boomtown Years 1900-1925
http://digital.library.unlv.edu/boomtown

The LSTA-grant funded, Southern Nevada: The Boomtown Years 1900-1925 digital collection brings together a wide range of original source materials found in the rich collections of UNLV Libraries Special Collections, as well as items from the Nevada State Museum and the Clark County Heritage Museum.

The project contains over 1500 digitized items; including photographs, correspondence, newspapers, maps, and ephemera from several mining and railroad manuscript collections documenting both large historical events, and the more private and social lives of individuals and their communities during the mining boom in Southern Nevada.

Notably, this collection also promotes the use of primary source materials by K-16 educators by providing a wide variety of standards-based teaching activities for elementary and high schoolers.

For more information about the collection, or to share your comments, please feel free to contact me via e-mail at cory.lampert@unlv.edu.

The UNLV University Libraries announces the launch of a new digital collection, Welcome Home, Howard: Or Whatever Became of the Daring Aviator? This collection is an update of a popular Special Collections web exhibit, that has been converted to a searchable digital collection with added functionality and a new look.

The collection features photographic images and portraits documenting the life of Howard Hughes, including images selected from two collections: The Howard Hughes Collection and the Hughes Electronics Collection.

This collection also features several new functions, including a commenting feature and the ability to rate individual items. Search suggestions have been incorporated into the basic keyword search box and there is an enhanced date search that can be found under "Advanced Search". Give it a try!

Visit the collection at: http://digital.library.unlv.edu/hughes/

Comments and feedback are always appreciated!

The Northeast Document Conservation Center has recently released a set of valuable web resources for preservation and digitization. The entire release includes disaster planning, online preservation education curriculum, and a full selection of NEDCC leaflets on a variety of topics.

Of particular note to digitization managers are the two sections on:

* Toolkit: What's Wrong With This Picture which covers creating long-lasting quality digital master images and covers how to preserve these digital images over time.
* Tookit: on Surveying Digital Preservation Readiness This toolkit "contains readings and resources on preservation and digitization of photograph collections, based on a highly successful three-day workshop series" and is chock full of helpful research, conference presentations and reports.

NEDCC also sponsors several on-site professional development opportunities, including Stewardship of Digital Assets: A two-day workshop, Persistence of Memory: Sustaining Digital Collections, and continuing preservation education programs.

It is a commonly held notion that digitization work is done to support learning and to increase access to materials. Cited in the report mentioned below, nearly 80% of large academic libraries either already have or plan to have digital repositories. Sounds great, right?

Well hold on. Ithaka's 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education, presents research highlighting faculty views on the academic library. The report also tracks changes in their views over time (the years 2000, 2003, and most recently: 2006). This very interesting report reveals lots of thought-provoking topics for discussion; but the section on digital repositories was what drew my immediate attention and may be cause for some alarm. Especially this:

"Still, the vast majority - almost two-thirds - of faculty members are not even sure if their institution has a digital repository and less than a third of those aware of a campus digital repository report having ever contributed content to it. It is clear that these repositories have not become embedded in faculty workflows; in fact, many faculty are not even aware of their existence. Faculty of all different disciplines and across different size institutions were relatively equally unaware if their institution has a repository."

Clearly, this is a problem. Considering all the work that goes into repository creation, not to mention the implications for scholarly publishing and the important educational impact; this research certainly calls for a more targeted effort to not only make digital materials accessible -- but to encourage and support their use. Marketing of repositories, education about participation in repositories, and evaluation of repositories are all key areas that need future attention to change the course of the current statistics.

At UNLV, we are just beginning to tap into faculty participation through our subject liaisons and outreach. What techniques have others found to be most effective in this area?

On of the things that can be frustrating and/or exciting (depending on your personality) when you work in the world of digitization is that regardless of how proficient you become at the end of a successful project, the slate always gets wiped clean and you have to return to square one when the next project comes along. The process of determining standards, procedures, and status of items for the project is important and may take up a significant amount of time in planning the digitization process.

I have come across two helpful tools that may come in handy for this planning process. The first one deals with everyone's favorite topic-- copyright. And while, there will never, ever, be a simple solution to any copyright questions, this neat digital slider created by the Library of Congress will at least get you started in the right direction and may help you generate a list of questions to ask in the process.

Once your copyright status is clearer, you might be ready to start scanning, or at least taking a few sample scans to help determine resolution, bit-depth, and pixel dimensions that meet the needs of the project. If you only digitize one type of materials and already have standards to refer to, this process is pretty straightforward. But if you are scanning a new format, a over-sized item, or if you have students working on a project, you may find that the Image Quality Calculator from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a lifesaver. I have found that by walking library staff from other departments through their scanning request using this tool is also a good opportunity for me to teach them that there may not be a one-size-fits-all answer to "how should I scan X?"

Thanks to those that help make all of our lives easier by creating cool tools to aid in digitization planning!