Exploring our Collections: The Many Colors of the UNT Digital Library
Pamela Andrews, Marcia McIntosh, Shannon Willis
This 24x7 presentation discusses a combination of outreach initiatives to promote use of digital collection items: #ColorOurCollections and Twitter.
A Platform for Exploration: Bringing Together African American History at umbrasearch.org
Sarah Carlson, Cecily Marcus
Umbra Search African American History (umbrasearch.org) makes African American history more broadly accessible through a freely available widget and search tool, umbrasearch.org; digitization of African American materials across collections; and support of students, educators, artists, and the public through residencies, workshops, and events locally and around the country. This presentation will discuss the development of Umbra Search, including the technology and design, the role of collaborative partnerships, and the importance of outreach to enhance access and encourage use with these rich materials. We will also address the unique challenges of thematic aggregations for culturally specific materials and long term sustainability for digital platforms, as well as opportunities for shifting perspectives of collection building, access, and use.
Beyond the Pages: Early Printed Books in Digital Collections
Barbara Laufersweiler
For early printed books, somewhere in the middle ground between simple image display and multispectral imaging, between metadata searches and virtual reality experiences, there are practical, low-cost, high-impact practices available for digitization and in digital collections. They create new possibilities for digital library users to engage with those early printed books more fully, opening the books to new scholarship and new engagement. I will present specific examples and recommendations for low-cost, high-impact practices for digitization and digital collections. To the extent such practices are adopted, digital collections can provide a great deal more information about early printed books, opening them more fully to the world in practical, straightforward ways.
Community Webs: Creating Community History Web Archives
Emily Ward, Kyrie Whitsett, Maria Praetzellis
Many public libraries have active local history collections and have traditionally collected print materials that document their communities. Due to the technical challenges of web archiving, the lack of training, educational opportunities, and an active community of public library-based practitioners, very few public libraries are building web archives. This lightening talk will include a presenter from the Internet Archive and a program participant from the East Baton Rouge Parish Library. Together they will review this grant funded program working with 27 public library partners to provide education, training, professional networking, and technical services to enable public libraries to fulfill this vital role.
Digging into Linked Data: Perspectives from the Long Tail
Paromita Biswas, Andrea Leonard
The success of the semantic web depends on widespread participation by organizations in making connections between open, structured datasets. Large libraries are beginning to make such connections – it’s time smaller libraries take the leap. But do these libraries have the resources? This presentation focuses on a collaborative linked data project between two mid-sized academic libraries--Western Carolina University and Appalachian State University. The presentation will highlight the successes and challenges faced by the presenters and will be a useful learning experience for those who are thinking of venturing into creating access for their special collections using linked data tools.
Box of Chocolates: Surfacing Unique Collections in Small-Bite Form
Jenifer Flaxbart
Hear about the approach the University of Texas Libraries (UTL) is undertaking to create small-scale digital exhibitions. Their “Box of Chocolates” approach serves to introduce a tempting variety of content “bonbons” to scholars, to inform their awareness of lesser known collections and inspire or enrich research, while minimizing workflow impacts.
It also provides a practical solution to collections-focused digital project engagement and discovery-related progress, allowing subject liaison librarians to simultaneously gain skills and promote distinctive UTL content, without over-taxing individual liaison, digitization unit, or UTL IT resource capacity.
Piloting Photogrammetry in Digital Libraries
Shannon Willis, Marcia McIntosh
Building on the 3D scanning and model hosting already developed at the University of North Texas Libraries (UNT), members of the Digital Projects Unit (DPU) piloted a technique new to its digitization lab: photogrammetry. DPU members used special collection holdings at UNT, largely from the Texas Fashion Collection, to test several different methods of photogrammetry. This presentation will focus on these methods for model creation as well as metadata description, uploading, and viewing of the models in the UNT Digital Library.
Buildings of Texas: Supporting Visual Browsing of Geospatial Archival Holdings through Web Mapping
Grace Hansen
Providing access to geospatial archival holdings through visual browsing offers exciting new opportunities for all users. As part of the University of Texas at Austin Libraries' effort to build an infrastructure to support its geospatial data, Hansen is geocoding a dataset representing an archival collection at the Alexander Architectural Archives and creating a web map to provide access to descriptive information. This presentation will discuss both conceptual and technical considerations that went into this project, including the decision to conceptualize the map as a finding aid and the ways in which spatial browsing better supports discovery for geospatial collections.
The Renewed Interest in the Ethnology Teaching Collection
Patrice-Andre Prud'homme
The focus of a collection can change over the course of time. The University Museum at Illinois State University closed its doors in 1991, and many artifacts were relocated. Remaining artifacts would become part of a hands-on teaching collection, now known as the Ethnology Teaching Collection. Through the collaborative partnership between the Sociology and Anthropology department and Milner library, curated objects are being digitized to promote the significant historical and educational enduring value that the collection still exhibits as a teaching tool in contrast to similar objects held in museums.