D-Lib Magazine
October 1997
ISSN 1082-9873
Clips and Pointers
October 14, 1997, San Francisco. The newly-created California Digital Library aims to integrate the holdings of the nine universities of the UC system and provide international access to the collections via the Internet. The university also announced plans to join with the California State Library, the California Library Association, and the California Library Services Board to extend the new digital library into development of similar services for the state's library users. The charter collection of the new service will focus on science, technology, and industry, building on existing technologies (e.g., MELVYL) and digitized materials, such as those at UC Berkeley (see, for example, The Bancroft Library Pictorial Collections), UC Santa Barbara, and the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside. There has been substantial interest in creating and managing digital content at many institutions in the state, such as initiatives undertaken by The Getty and the College of Siskiyous, which has converted portions of John Muir's diaries; future partnerships with other organizations are also envisioned.
Richard E. Lucier, university librarian at UC San Francisco, will be the founding university librarian and executive director of the new digital library, which he sees as a "collaborative effort among all the campuses." UC is spending $1 million this year to launch the effort and in the next budget cycle will seek $3 million in general funds from the state to be matched by $1 million from the university.
The Library of Virginia has been awarded a grant of $270,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a digital initiative that will make the records of the Virginia Historical Inventory (VHI) accessible to the public on the Internet. By the year 2000, researchers who currently have to visit the Library in person to use this valuable resource will be able to search the VHI collection from their homes and offices anywhere in the world.
The Virginia Historical Inventory, part of the 1930s Works Progress Administration (WPA) Virginia Writers' Project, is an incomparable collection of photographs, maps and detailed reports documenting the architectural, cultural and family histories of thousands of 18th- and 19th-century buildings in communities across Virginia, many of which do not survive today. Workers for the Virginia Historical Inventory photographed and assessed early structures creating a pictorial and textual prism through which architects, economists, social historians, journalists, researchers and the general public can study a unique record of Virginia's past.
For example, in one report on a house in Botetourt County, a twenty-three-year-old woman provided location, the probable date of construction (circa 1813), a detailed chronological list of owners, an extensive transcription of a family will, and a description and history of the property. Also included was a list of "informants" and citations to deed books and other primary sources needed to complete the seven-page, single-space report.
Every structure's file also included a summary sheet, providing details on the structure's size and roof type, weatherboarding, cornices, shutters, porch, and entryway, as well as on interior features such as the stairway, basement, and styles of doors. In many instances, confronted with marvelous or unusual detailing, field-workers added pencil or pen-and-ink sketches to their reports.
There are approximately 20,000 survey report files containing approximately 60,000 to 90,000 total images.
There are approximately 5,000 to 7,000 photographs of structures. The views are predominantly in three-by-five-inch format, with some five-by-seven sizes, and a few as large as eight-by-ten.
Maps are a vital component of the VHI collection and document the location of every site studied. The maps range in size from twenty- two by twenty-three inches to thirty-eight inches square. Each map includes a series of circles, each containing a survey report number, with a line connecting the numerical identification to the location of the subject. This feature in particular will aid researchers in locating sites of structures and other features no longer extant.
Bibliographic MARC records will be created for each survey report. Fortunately, because of the standard structure of the actual survey report forms, it is possible to create data fields in the records for all of the critical information in each report. Search capabilities will be provided for, at a minimum, the following data elements:
The reports will be scanned by an operator on-site. The digitized images of the reports will be linked to these bibliographic records via the 856 Field for retrieval and viewing.
A bibliographic record will also be created for each photograph, indicating its subject matter and its corresponding survey report after the photographs are identified and matched to their survey reports. At the same time, each image will be re-photographed to create 35mm slide negatives. Each slide will be labeled according to a file-naming protocol for later linking to the bibliographic records. The slides will be scanned to Kodak Photo CD and the base images will be manually enhanced and converted to low level surrogates and compressed in the JPEG format for access over the Internet. The images will then be programmatically linked to the 856 Field in the bibliographic records, which will enable researchers to search the database then retrieve the relevant image(s).
The maps will be digitized to provide full interoperability between the survey report map locator numbers, the photographs, and the survey reports. A bibliographic record will be created for each map, with the map images linked to the records via the 856 Field.
Finally, the bibliographic databases will be integrated to include crosslinks for all components. Thus, a researcher may search the survey report database, view the image of the report, then retrieve the corresponding map and the photograph. Or, the researcher may search the map database to locate a specific geographical location, and then search for the specific survey report for that site. Or, a researcher may search the photograph database, and retrieve the corresponding survey report to get a context for each image.
Work on this digital initiative, which will be incorporated into the Library's ongoing Digital Library Project, will begin December 1, 1997 and last for approximately two years. While the primary objective is to increase the public's access to this rare collection, the Mellon Grant will allow the Library to create a model for comparing the costs of storing and assessing the collection in both traditional media and digital format. The Library will evaluate the use and acceptability of digital and printed versions of the VHI reports and will test the long-term economic viability of maintaining and serving these digital collections. The findings of this evaluation will be shared with other organizations contemplating digitization of collections. The Library of Virginia, located in downtown Richmond, Virginia, has served the archival and research needs of Virginians since 1823. Established as the reference and research library at the seat of government, it holds Virginia's official records from 1607 through the present day. It serves as the official repository for state and local government records.
The Library's Digital Library Project <http://leo.vsla.edu>, started in 1995, now includes more than 2 million digital images and more than 70 electronic finding aids and catalogs. The Library also sponsors the Virginia Library and Information Network (VLIN), providing Internet access and services to more than 570 public, special, institution and state agency libraries. For more information on the VHI Project, contact Elizabeth Roderick, project director, at 804/692-3761 or [email protected].
The
Report of the Santa Fe Planning Workshop on Distributed Knowledge Work Environments: Digital Libraries (March 9-11, 1997) sets forth the principal findings of this two-day workshop. It describes many of the experiences of the first round of funding for digital libraries under the Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) and makes recommendations for both the structure and programmatic content of a similar, future initiative.
The
Proceedings of the Second IEEE Metadata Conference, held September 16-17, 1997, in Silver Spring, Maryland, include the full texts of the papers, a list of authors, the final conference program, and a search capability. The conference had a strong focus on issues related to mass storage, multimedia and imagery, and distributed systems.
The
Heinz Electronic Library Interactive Online System (HELIOS) at the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries provides access to the congressional papers of the late Senator John H. Heinz III. The system relies on CLARITweb, an advanced
search system from CLARITECH Corporation, which supports natural language full-text retrieval over the
contents of one or more databases. Responses to queries are prioritized by relevance ranking. Other objectives of the research component of the project are to address issues in preservation, access, and support for
scholarship.
Educom's
Instructional Management Systems (IMS) Project is developing a set of standards and tools that will enable educators, developers of educational software, and providers of educational content to create, manage and access on-line materials. A draft metadata specification for this class of materials has been released; an on-line tool for working within this proposed standard is in the
Technology Spotlight this month.
The French Ministry of Culture has sponsored two important web sites that enable users to search the collections of the great national art museums of France and visit a virtual museum created from items in the catalog, which have been embedded in explanatory narratives; the search engine is Z39.50-compliant. The integrated
catalog contains records for 130,000 paintings for which there are 849 images. The search page supports fielded searches by such categories as "artist" or "location" for which there is an authorized thesaurus; it also allows users to limit the search to those for which images are available. The intent is to enable users to create virtual collections of their own, and an example, The Age of Enlightenment in Paintings of France's National Museums, is available in
French and
English.
The Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)
Second Annual Users Meeting and Training Conference, DTIC '97, "Information in the New Millennium," will take place November 3-6, 1997 in Arlington, Virginia. Among other topics covered will be a discussion of the resources of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), remote learning, and current developments within DTIC.
The
Twelfth International Unicode/ISO 10646 Conference and Computing Showcase, "Software and the Internet: Creating a Unicode(r) Foundation," will be held April 8-9, 1998 in Tokyo, Japan. It is an official pre-conference event of the Seventh International World Wide Web Conference (http://www7.conf.au/) and will address various technical topics with particular emphasis on the use of Unicode in East Asia and the Pacific Rim. The Call for Papers closes November 14, 1997.
| College of Siskiyous | http://www.siskiyous.edu/ |
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Conference on Scientific and Technical Data Exchange and Integration December 15-17, 1997 National Institutes of Health Bethesda, Maryland |
http://www.nas.edu/cpsma/specproj.htm |
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Digital to Microfilm Conversion A Demonstration Project, 1994-1996 |
http://www.library.cornell.edu/preservation/com/comfin.html |
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Faxon Institute's Second Annual Colloquium on Scholarly Communication Issues January 7-8, 1998 New Orleans, Louisiana Registration |
http://www.faxon.com/html/fi_frm.html |
| French Ministry of Culture | |
| The Age of Enlightenment in France's National Museums | |
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| The Getty | http://www.getty.edu/getty.html |
| Heinz Electronic Library Interactive Online System (HELIOS) Carnegie Mellon University Libraries |
http://heinz1.library.cmu.edu/HELIOS/ |
| Instructional Management Systems (IMS) Project | http://www.imsproject.org/ |
| International Symposium on Research, Development & Practice in Digital Libraries : ISDL'97 November 18 - 21, 1997 Tsukuba Science City, Japan |
http://www.DL.ulis.ac.jp/ISDL97/ |
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Library of Virginia Library Virginia Historical Inventory (VHI) Digital Library Project |
http://leo.vsla.edu |
| PreText Magazine: Intelligence on the Web | http://www.pretext.com/ |
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Proceedings of the Second IEEE Metadata Conference September 16-17, 1997 Silver Spring, Maryland |
http://computer.org/conferen/proceed/meta97/ |
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Scholarly Communication and Technology Papers from the Conference Organized by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation at Emory University April 24-25, 1997 |
http://arl.cni.org/scomm/scat/ |
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Report of the Santa Fe Planning Workshop on Distributed Knowledge Work Environments: Digital Libraries (March 9-11, 1997) |
http://www.si.umich.edu/SantaFe/ |
| Seventh International World Wide Web Conference | http://www7.conf.au/ |
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SIGIR Workshop on Networked Information Retrieval July 31, 1997 Proceedings |
http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/nir97/ |
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Twelfth International Unicode/ISO 10646 Conference and Computing Showcase "Software and the Internet: Creating a Unicode(r) Foundation" April 8-9, 1998 Tokyo, Japan Call for Papers |
http://www.unicode.org |
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University of California The Bancroft Library Pictorial Collections |
http://library.berkeley.edu/BANC/pictorial.html |
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University of California Riverside California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside |
http://cmp1.ucr.edu/ |
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University of California Santa Barbara The Alexandria Digital Library Project |
http://alexandria.sdc.ucsb.edu/ |
hdl:cnri.dlib/october97-clips