Digital Projects end-of-year update, 2013-2014

At the end of the academic year, we do a report to the Digital Projects Priorities Team on the past year's activities. This is an edited version of that report. It was a very productive year.

My thanks to the team: to Erica Rau and Kathy Howard in Digital Projects, who did such great work on so many projects; to Callie Coward and Anna Craft from Cataloging; and to Scott Hinshaw, Kathelene McCarty Smith, and everyone else in the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives. Thanks as well to the department where Digital Projects "lives", Electronic Resources and Information Technology, for a level of support that goes far beyond the call of duty. We couldn't so many great projects without a real collaborative team and I really appreciate the way everyone pulls together to accomplish all our goals!

Special thanks to Stephen Catlett, who completes his tenure as Textiles, Teachers, and Troops project manager this week after doing some amazing work over the past two years. Stephen did an incredible job working with our partners and students on TTT as well as with community outreach on our CBR/local history grant project and coordination of displays and our launch event in April. We are very much going to miss having him around and hope we can rectify that situation soon!

Also, many thanks to this year's team of student workers (Evan Chu, Megan Coker, Tatiana Cox, Rachel Sanders, James Stewart, Phil White, and Hayley Whitehead) and our volunteers (Larry Daniels, Bernitae Reed, and Touger Vang). Your efforts are much appreciated and we couldn't do any of this without you!

An announcement of this year's approved and continuing projects will be available in the next few weeks.

2013-2014 Project Status:

• American Publishers Trade Bindings Phase 6: Complete and online (159 images).
• Campus Life Photos: In progress (322 images).
• CBR Project/Community Collections: Complete and online (1137 images).
• Class of 1951-present: Complete and online (11031 images).
• Creative Writing Manuscript Collections: Nearly complete, mostly online.
• Robert Watson Papers: Complete and online (5973 images).
• Randall Jarrell Papers: Nearly complete, partially online. Should be fully online by September. (6544 images to date).
• Ege Manuscripts: Complete and online (101 images).
• Home Economics Pamphlets Phase II: Scanned, should be online by early July at the latest (8184 images).
• Lois Lenski Rare Books: In progress. 13 books scanned. Should be online by fall. (625 images)
• Manuscript Collections Scrapbooks: In progress, many already online. Probably 15-20 remain. All should be online by December. (10159 images this year)
• Music and Theatre Productions: Nearly done, many already online. Should be completely online August at the latest (2843 images to date).
• Oral History Collections: Approximately 20 new interviews online.
• Textiles, Teachers, and Troops: Substantially complete and online (no annual breakdown, approximately 15000 images in-house plus 125000 items from the Charles Duncan McIver Records outsourced this year, two-year total of approximately 180000 images).
• Women Veterans Historical Project: Approximately 15 new oral histories online, 100 other items.

Other Projects:

• DigitalGreensboro.org interface completed by ERIT Development Team.
• Civil Rights Greensboro Migration To CONTENTdm: Complete and should be live this summer.
• Women Vets Migration: Data dump and work plan complete. Target date for completion: early October.
• Worldcat Integration: Most collections now included in Worldcat. 
• DPLA Submission: Most collections now included in Digital Public Library of America. We are currently the third largest contributor in the state (24641 items) with three times as much material as number four.
• Creation of CONTENTdm landing pages based on priority focus areas:
• Local and Regional History
• Performing Arts
• University History
• Women's History

Some Numbers:

We now have 251003 digital files in CONTENTdm, our digital content management system, making 25243 items and spanning nearly a thousand years of history...although most are admittedly from the past 150 years or so.

Included are:

• 8243 newspapers
• 4968 photos/photo folders
• 2223 clippings/folders and items containing clipping
• 1529 pamphlets
• 928 pieces of correspondence
• 702 music scores

March Update: Preserving Local History

After a long and crazy winter (weather-wise), the Preserving Local History team is hard at work completing our research and getting ready for a series of presentations and meetings.  The Undergraduate Research Expo, which is coming up in the next few weeks, is one presentation that I in particular am excited to participate in – more details on those preparations and results will come over the course of the next few weeks.

In the meantime, I have been making calls and sending emails to organizations that we have identified as potential survey contributors.  This process is challenging, because most of the calls being made are cold calls – we have not spoken with these organizations before.  There has, however, been a lot of progress made and a lot of people seem interested in participating in the project.  Many people seem to be surprised at the prospect of a community website/database – many are also surprised that this research group is providing the services and advice free of charge.

Stephen and Megan are hoping to  visit a few of the local organizations that completed the survey during the fall to further assess their needs and to digitize a few items as well as collect information on their overall  archives. I have not had as much of a role as far as field visits or meetings because of my schedule (I am tied up with student teaching at Northwest High School – GO VIKINGS! – this semester).  However, I know that progress is being made, and if my data and work are any indication of what is going on with the other members of the team, I feel certain that we will have a successful and informative semester.

If you know of a local organization or group that would be interested in participating in our study, please email preservinglocalhistorygso@gmail.com for more information.

-Rachel Sanders-

Preserving Local History Update

We have had some exciting developments with the Preserving Local History project since our last post. We finished our photography and scanning of the items at CPUMC and have proceeded with the next steps in our process. We sent out an online survey several weeks ago asking about the needs and wants of local organizations in terms of preservation and potential cooperation with other groups. We received quite a few responses and part of the process was a planned meeting with interested groups.

 

On Tuesday, November 19 we held a community meeting at College Place United Methodist Church. We invited those who had participated in our survey to come to CPUMC and learn more about our process, expectations, and progress so far on this project. We had a great response – close to twenty people from eight organizations attended the meeting! There were representatives from churches, schools, and neighborhood organizations, which is what we were hoping for. All of the members of our team came away from the meeting with a very good feeling about the direction that the project is going in. The representatives from the different groups had a lot of energy and questions, and we had a time of sharing where they could make recommendations to us as well as to one another. After the meeting – as part of our idea for an incentive to get better participation in our project – we held drawings for local charities. One of the five $50 donations went to the UNCG Spartan Food Pantry, which operates out of CPUMC.

We are still hoping to get more responses to our survey and to see which groups and organizations are interested in the possibility of sharing their materials and preserving them in a digital format. I will be making a lot of follow up calls in the months to come and doing some work with data to see what types of needs exist in the community and what can be done to help meet those needs. Next semester Megan, along with other team members, will be visiting organizations who expressed an interest in the team seeing their situation, which will include continued camera testing by digitizing two or three of their items. There are a lot of exciting opportunities coming our way.   

Preserving Local History Update (October 4, 2013)

The last three weeks have been exciting and enlightening for our team.  We’ve started the process of photographing some of CPUMC’s documents.  A big part of the process is setting up the tripod and camera that we’re using and making sure that it’s square so that it will be easier to crop and manipulate later. We have chosen several items to be photographed based on the requests of the staff at CPUMC and based on our own interests/curiosities, and they have proven to be perfect for our tests.  There are a variety of documents and photographs, and even some of the church’s building plans.  All of these items have to be treated with great care and need to be squared in the camera so that cropping them will be easier to do later on.  We have a chart on which Stephen is recording how long it takes us to record each item, the type of camera we’re using, and notes on what we’re liking about our process or what might make the process more efficient.  One of the bigger challenges that we are facing is with the larger items.  As you can see in the pictures here, the architectural elevations are oversize, and instead of laying them on the table, as we do with our small materials, we have devised a system for hanging the large items on a bulletin board and taking the pictures that way.  It was rough at first, but we finally have it figured out.

The reason that we’re so careful to record everything is that eventually we are going to create a best practices manual for groups that choose to participate in the project, which will give them advice and instructions on how to best preserve and record things of value.  The idea is to make the process as simple and inexpensive as possible for these groups, which is part of why we are testing several different models of cameras.  Right now we’re working with the small Sony camera, which has been great – there is a grid and an excellent auto-focus feature on this camera.  Later we’ll be testing other types, including an iPhone camera and a professional model.  All of this is in an effort to preserve their materials, and to hopefully create an easy way for groups to preserve as much as possible in order to make the materials accessible to everyone that the groups choose to share it with.
         
 This is promising to be an exciting project – keep watching for more details!

-Rachel Sanders-

OLSL & CPUMC ... our other partners

We should have included a link in our first post on the "Preserving Local History" project to the six additional Community-Based Research Grant recipients for 2013-2014. When you read the descriptions on the Office of Leadership & Service-Learning department's website you will see why we feel very honored to have been selected this year. These are really dynamic projects and represent UNCG well in the community.

In addition, you should check out the College Place United Methodist Church website. What you will not find on their site, however, is a "History" tab. This is partly because they have not had the resources or expertise to digitize their archival material.  We hope our project can help to change that in the near future, in part by teaching them how to "fish"!  We appreciate the shout out they gave us on their Facebook page on  September 5th.

First CBR project meeting

We are off and running on the Community Based Research grant, “Preserving Local History: A Field-Based Digitization Pilot Project” as first publicized in the Friends of the Library blog.

Team members David J. Gwynn, J. Stephen Catlett, Megan E. Coker and Rachel Sanders met on the 12th with Pastor Jason Harvey and church historian Carol Deaton of College Place United Methodist Church (located across from Aycock Auditorium and Weatherspoon Art Museum) . 

It was a very productive conversation about the nature of the project, our expectations of each other, and included a nice overview of the history of their collections and the extent to which they have been utilized, or not, over the years. 

We were given a tour of their archival material, which includes a lot of interesting and valuable items, such as original architectural plans and elevations for their buildings; the church dates to 1899, and there are plans by noted architect Harry Barton and Albert C. Woodroof. We discussed and finalized days/times for our upcoming camera digitizing sessions, and set the date for the important community group/organization meeting to be held at the church on Tuesday November 12th at 6:30pm. 

Stay tuned for periodic updates on project happenings, as we work through the technical issues of testing several cameras for digitizing materials, which will become part of the project’s “best practices” manual. We will also be finalizing our survey questions within the week and sending invitations to groups and organizations whom we hope will participate in the survey as well as the November meeting.

- Posted by Stephen Catlett