Minutes 1.23.04

CDC Digital Collections Task Force meeting

Our guest today was Martha Smalley from the Divinity Library.

Website for Divinity Library Projects: http://www.library.yale.edu/div/digiproj.html

The Divinity Library projects began with the creation of the Yale Divinity Digital Image and Text Library, which contains the Eikon Image Database for Biblical Images and the Ad-Hoc Image and Text Database on the History of Christianity. These were established with the support of Faculty Support grants, Library, ITS, and the Lilly Funded Wabash center at the Div. School.

They were established for images and texts used in classes by faculty. They are currently maintained by Suzanne Estelle-Holmer, the instructional services librarian there. They provided the Divinity Library with experience that they’ve been using for other projects. Faculty choose the material and staff and students enter them into the database. Faculty are able to do data entry themselves but few choose to do so.

Originally this database was on a Filemaker Pro database on a Mac server. A year and a half ago, they migrated it to an ITS system, using Postgresql, MS Access front end, and ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity). The web interface is Java. The library uses a similar system for its other databases.

Another project, not class based, is the China Christian Colleges and University Image Database. This is a grant funded project, with money donated by the university whose archives are at Yale.

A collaborative project that has taken up a lot of Martha’s time is the Internet Mission Photography Archive (http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~gainer/impa/). USC hosts this Getty funded projects with 5 different institutional partners. Divinity received some money for equipment and wages but no overhead, and so does the work with students. The project uses a Dublin Core-based metadata set with the UNESCO thesaurus. It is a 3 year grant. Martha edits all the students’ work. They scan the material using the USC guidelines and enter metadata into a web form that has been set up at USC. She feels that her time spent on this project helps her understand the missionary collections better. Their contribution will consist of 2000 images. The grant page contains many interesting documents that would be beneficial for Yale to consider, such as a scanning style sheet and many documents about metadata.

Over the last 5 years, the Divinity school has received about $50,000 in grant money and accomplish most of their projects with student work. Faculty can write these projects into their technology grants. Two kinds of faculty seem interested: junior faculty and the head of the Divinity School who helped start the initial database.

Other things we discussed:

-USC has a good infrastructure in place for information and technical help, which is needed at Yale (ie. the style sheet, metadata assistance, etc.)

-Dublin Core and image cataloging in the Internet Missions project: see

http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~gainer/impa/metadata/MP012a.doc

and the value of metadata.

-relative usefulness of this collection being cross-searched with Yale collections or with other subject related collections.