Newsletter
Spring 2009
In this issue:
CDLA'S NEW WEB SITE RELEASE
We are proud to announce a new release of our Web site. The new site has a more pleasant design and includes a comprehensive portfolio of our completed, ongoing, and future projects. It also features sections for the CDLA's units: the Digital Publishing Group, the Digital Production Center, and the Research and Development Group. These sections provide additional information on our services as well as descriptions of programming and digitization technologies used at the CDLA. The new CDLA news page is now the home of our quarterly newsletters; subscribe to an email version via the form found there.
Our plans for future releases of the Web site include the addition of new sections for staff presentations, a page for the CDLA's partners, and more information on the Library's metadata standards for digital projects. Please send comments and suggestions to cdla at unc dot edu.
GOING TO THE SHOW LAUNCHES BETA WEB SITE
"Going to the Show" documents and illuminates the experience of movies and moviegoing in North Carolina from the introduction of projected motion pictures (1896) to the end of the silent film era (circa 1930).
The project highlights the ways that race conditioned the experience of movies and urban spaces more generally for all North Carolinians—white, African American, and American Indian. Its collection inventories every known North Carolina. African American movie theater in operation from 1908 to 1963. A variety of contemporaneous artifacts—newspaper ads and articles, picture postcards of downtown streetscapes, and city directories—support the collection. These and other materials are used in an interpretive case study of the experience of early moviegoing in Wilmington, the state's largest city in 1900. The scholarly advisor for the project is Dr. Robert C. Allen, James Logan Godfrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies, History, and Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"Going to the Show" is made possible by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by the State Library of North Carolina.
NEH GRANT ADVANCES DIGITAL HUMANITIES RESEARCH AT UNC LIBRARY
In March, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded $50,000 to the Library's Documenting the American South (DocSouth) digital publishing program to develop a transcription and annotation tool for historical and literary archives. With the grant, we will seek to address one of the most significant obstacles for students and scholars who wish to study historical manuscripts online—how to pair a high-resolution image with a textual transcription that can be searched and browsed, and how to link both the image and transcription to scholarly annotations. The project staff hope to create a product that will allow librarians to digitally trace handwriting in an original document, encode the tracings in a language known as Scalable Vector Graphics, and then link the tracings at the line or even word level to files containing transcribed texts and annotations.
The research and development project, to be completed May 31, 2010, will use and create entirely open-source technologies, allowing other institutions to adapt and build upon the research. The test bed for the project will be the personal journal of James Lawrence Dusenbery, who graduated from UNC in 1842. Erika Lindemann, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UNC, previously transcribed the journal, which provides insight into antebellum culture and literature, and the academic and social life of students before the Civil War. Professor Lindemann also provided copious scholarly comments and explanations that provide valuable information about the historical, literary and social context of the journal.
OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION (OCR) SOFTWARE AND RESEARCH SUPPORT
In February, the Digital Production Center (DPC) began large-scale experimentation with ABBYYFineReader Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Server Software. In collaboration with Diego Garcia, Assistant Professor of Economics, Kenan-Flagler Business School, the DPC tested large-scale OCR processing of over 200,000 PDF files covering a wide range of economic newspaper reporting from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. Professor Garcia's goal was to OCR the image files and use the OCR text output files for mining "key-word" terms relating to either positive or negative emphasis of the newspaper articles, and their relation to the overall performance of the stock markets at the time of reporting. This project was the first large-scale test of the ABBYY software. The initial test results were very promising and contained a high accuracy rate. Since completing the project, Professor Garcia has produced "Media Content and Stock Returns During Recessions," a working paper written in part with the use of the data produced in the OCR processing tests.
MACKINNEY COLLECTION OF MEDIEVAL MEDICAL ILLUSTRATIONS
The origin of this unique collection has its own fascinating history. As Michael McVaugh, Professor Emeritus of History at UNC, writes, "In the 1930s, a young professor of medieval history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Loren MacKinney (1891-1963), made trips to European libraries and was allowed to take photographs of many of their early medical manuscripts, including those of the rich collections at the cathedral of Chartres. His foresight paid off after World War II, for German soldiers burned the cathedral library before retreating from the city in 1944, and MacKinney's black-and-white Chartres photographs are today the only records surviving of almost two dozen Latin manuscripts dating to the twelfth century and before. After the war, MacKinney turned his attention to preserving the depictions of medical activity preserved in medieval manuscript illuminations, an objective made possible by the popularization of color photography."
The result of this amazing pioneering work is a collection of over 1,000 Ektachrome slides. Stored in tightly-packed cigar boxes, the slide collection was initially given to UNC's Art department by MacKinney's widow, Abigail MacKinney, shortly after his death. Not sure what to do with the collection, the Art department contacted Michael McVaugh when he began teaching at UNC in 1964-65. McVaugh suggested giving the master set to the National Library of Medicine of Bethesda (where it still resides). Since the Art department had no use for it, McVaugh took charge of the duplicate set. Over the next forty years, the slides were occasionally consulted for various purposes, but they were not heavily used and astonishingly have suffered virtually no physical deterioration. Hoping that others might benefit from the collection and concerned about its long-term preservation, McVaugh instigated its digitization. You can view the entire collection of 1,042 illustrations or browse them by author illustrated, date, holding institution, language, subject, and text illustrated at http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/mackinney.
LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR: CDLA'S DIGITIZATION PROGRAM
Major trends in today's library science and scholarly communications fields point to an increasing reliance of students and scholars on the availability of online access to information and on innovative tools that foster resource discovery and learning. Libraries respond to these evolving needs by increased digitization efforts, and by developing new digital programs and services. In doing so, libraries are faced with many challenges, including the high costs associated with digitization and the curation of digital collections, and with those associated with the development and support of a variety of technological infrastructures. Management of increasingly complex and growing digital operations requires the implementation of innovative technologies, new digitization processes, efficient operations, and new forms of collaborative work.
As the CDLA develops its own digitization programs, the primary focus is not on the creation of large quantities of materials, but rather on the quality of those materials; on the introduction of cost-effective and sustainable technologies and workflows; and on building strong working relationships with curators and scholars to establish priorities for digitization. We see the future of the Library's digital operations in the streamlined and efficient programmatic processes that capture and fulfill scholarly needs by providing online access to collections. In this vision, the digital library component is as integral a part of daily library operations as is cataloging or the circulation of print materials.
Our strategy for achieving these goals includes several directions. We first began with the introduction of large-scale digitization technologies such as the Internet Archive's Scribe scanning program. The Scribe venue provides us with control over materials selection and with the opportunity for in-house digitization. Both of these aspects, combined with working collaboratively with curators and scholars, helped us understand the processes better. Among our major goals in the beginning of this program was the investigation of our ability to select and prioritize books for digitization, manage their flow to and from the Scribe station, the linking of digital versions with online catalog records, and finally, a better understanding of the impact of large-scale digitization on collections use and patrons. As we became more comfortable with this process, we invited other libraries to join our efforts in Scribe digitization. Ongoing projects with Duke University Libraries, Louisburg College, and other institutions have opened up new opportunities for collaboratively building online collections while also investigating new digitization technologies. UNC Library's growing collection of books digitized with the Scribe can be found here.
"North Carolina Maps," "Going to the Show" and the "Thomas E. Watson Papers" projects are other examples of our growing capacity to digitize more complex material such as maps and archival collections in the production manner. For the "NC Maps" and "Going to the Show" projects, over 1,900 maps were digitized on the high-productivity BatterLight Digital Back Camera. The "Thomas E. Watson Papers" project has digitized over 45,000 pages of letters and other documents on the overhead Zeutschel scanner. The project gave us the opportunity to explore the opportunities and challenges that large-scale digitization of archival collections poses. You can learn more about these technologies on the Digital Production Center's Web site.
Building on the success of these digitization projects and programs, we are now developing new workflows with the Fujitsu high speed sheet scanner on loose material such as index cards, archival material and disbound material. Using the Fujitsu scanner, we can now digitize in days what used to take months or even years on a flat bed scanner. Coupled with the use of automated batch processing of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, these new technologies demonstrate a great increase in productivity. Our growing expertise in these areas provides scholars with keyword searching functionality for large collections of digitized texts and presents many interesting opportunities for data mining.
We've also learned that effective management of high-productivity equipment and workflows requires a greater degree of project management, planning and inter- and cross-departmental coordination skills. The CDLA staff participated in project management training, and has recently introduced documentation that will help formalize, plan and balance the increasing number of digitization projects. We have introduced a departmental Project Management Librarian position to help with the planning and coordination across various projects, and with our documentation efforts.
We recognize that the CDLA's growing production capabilities have a direct impact on other library departments, especially on the Library Systems Department which supports the Digital Archive and online publishing platforms. As a result, our efforts in this area are aimed at increased levels of effective communication and collaboration between the two offices, and earlier involvement of Systems in the discussion and planning of new projects. The CDLA also maintains ongoing projections for Digital Archive and network space needs to help Systems with long-term planning for these resources.
Using large-scale digitization for online access to library collections is commonly recognized as one of today's "hot" areas for investing a library's scarce resources. Libraries everywhere are looking for ways to increase digitization efforts and to transform these activities from projects based to a more programmatic and streamlined approach. The CDLA sees its priorities in the development of digitization programs which are driven by scholars, the continuous exploration and introduction of cost-effective and high-productivity technologies and workflows, an increased collaboration with colleagues in other library departments and institutions, and the natural integration of new digitization operations and services with traditional library operations.
We'll keep you posted about our progress with these and new projects in the future issues of the CDLA Newsletter. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments. You can contact us at cdla at unc dot edu.
Kirill Fesenko
CDLA Director
Winter 2008/2009
It's been a year since the CDLA opened its doors for the first time in February 2008. We would like to celebrate this anniversary with the release of the first issue of the CDLA's newsletter. Through this and forthcoming quarterly issues, we will be informing you about new electronic collections and services that the CDLA brings to the campus, the citizens of North Carolina, and a global audience. We'll also be reporting on new digitization projects under way, as well as on our efforts in developing online collections, digital humanities, and research computing.
In this issue:
CDLA'S FIRST-YEAR HIGHLIGHTS
Carolina Digital Library and Archives is the UNC Library's major new department established to improve Web access to the Library's rich collections and to help faculty with new digital projects, services, and tools. Among highlights of our first year are establishment of three new units—the Digital Publishing Group, which includes the award-winning digital publishing program Documenting the American South (DocSouth); the Digital Production Center; and the Research and Development Group—as well as investigation of opportunities in large-scale digitization and implementation of the Scribe program. Most important, from our perspective, is that the initial organizational and technological infrastructure was built which now provides increasing digital support to UNC faculty, the Library, and other cultural institutions in North Carolina. We plan to keep friends informed about new digital collections, services, and opportunities through this newsletter, our renovated Web site (coming this spring), and other channels.
SCRIBE DIGITIZATION PROGRAM
December 18, 2008, marked the one-year anniversary of the Scribe digitization project in the CDLA. The Scribe, a high-speed scanner and associated software application developed by the Internet Archive, facilitates high-volume conversion of bound materials to digital format. All books "scribed" at the UNC Library are freely available. (Visit the UNC Library on the Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/unclibraries)
Within the past year, the CDLA has digitized 2,544 books, resulting in the creation of 412,314 page images. These include early Spanish dramas, historic North Carolina business and legislative materials, and an early volume of the UNC student yearbook, the Yackety Yack.
SOUTHERN ORAL HISTORIES PROJECT
"Oral Histories of the American South" is a major digital publishing project undertaken by the University Library and the Southern Oral History Program. In September 2005, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) granted the University funding for an ambitious project: the digitization of 500 oral history interviews covering topics like civil rights, southern politics, and southern women. The "Oral Histories of the American South" digital collection employed a number of open-source technologies to publish online over 500 compelling oral histories that allow users to listen to and read the interview on the same page. The CDLA staff has collaborated closely with colleagues in the University Library (the former Catalog Department, Instructional Services, and Southern Historical and Southern Folklife collections) and with colleagues from the Southern Oral History Program and School of Education.
HARVEY AWARD: "MAIN STREET CAROLINA"
The University's first C. Felix Harvey Award to Advance Institutional Priorities will fund a new Documenting the American South project titled "Main Street, Carolina." Robert C. Allen, James Logan Godfrey Professor of American Studies, History, and Communication Studies at UNC, will serve as the project's scholarly advisor and will lead its content development. A Web-based history project will enable local organizations and individuals to learn about the character and identity of North Carolina towns over the past century. The new digital collection will build on the experimental work of "Going to the Show," a new DocSouth chapter generously funded in 2007 and 2008 by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provision of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by the State Library of North Carolina.
PARTNERSHIP FORMED WITH THE MUSEUM OF EARLY SOUTHERN DECORATIVE ARTS
Old Salem Museum and Gardens and the UNC Library have formed a partnership to develop a collaborative program to make information resources at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) at Old Salem more widely available. MESDA has a large database and collection of information on southern American artisans and their products, including biographical and artifactual information and photographs. In this partnership between MESDA and the UNC Library, the CDLA will provide production operations for the conversion of collections to digital formats and programming and project management services to develop discovery and display interfaces for digital materials.
PILOT PROJECT: HIGH-SPEED SCANNING AND OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION
With the support of the State Library, the CDLA's Digital Production Center has received the new Fujitsu 5900C high-speed, high-resolution sheet-fed scanner. The scanner and ABBYY Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Server software are being installed and configured to support several pilot large-scale digitization and OCR projects. The CDLA will be evaluating this technology as a possible solution to the growing needs of students and scholars for online access to library collections.
We'll keep you posted about our progress with these and new projects in the future issues of the CDLA Newsletter. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.
Cheers,
CDLA team
cdla at unc dot edu
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This page was last updated Thursday, June 18, 2009.