Minutes 1.29.04

CDC Digital Collections Task Force

Our guests this week were from the Beinecke Library: George Miles, Ellen Cordes, Brian Kupiec who discussed the development of Beinecke digital collections.

URL: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/

(for access to all the collections and cross-collection searching)

The Beinecke digital projects began as a staff administration project with the Photonegatives database. The Beinecke scanned negatives from photos they had duplicated for patrons (turning them into positive images in the process). These were from all curatorial areas. This collection was chosen because it was a distinct collection with some metadata.

This project gave the people involved experience in the workflow and the IBM system they were using, which was riddled with problems. The IBM system was replaced by the Beinecke Digital Library system.

The second effort created the papyri database. This project was chosen because there was grant money, there was no copyright problem, and the material had been well-cataloged in the 1980s. The data was put into a different database system, dbtext, which was also migrated eventually. The APIS project’s goal is to one day allow fragments of papyri from different institutions to be viewed together.

The third project, the Marinetti Libroni, was the first one where the Beinecke engaged the services of Luna for scanning. The slides had been corrupted by mold and neglect and Luna scanned and color corrected them.

Their current and ongoing project is the Digital Library. The material in this database is scanned from the originals in the Beinecke. The materials are chose from exhibitions, for publications, for patron requests, and for classes and the ELI project. Ellen solicits requests. They can scan 600 scans a week. They now require that there be machine readable metadata because they don’t have a cataloger yet, but that is not part of their real criteria.

The material is scanned at the Beinecke and derivatives are made at Luna and sent back. They preferred to support the scanning knowledge rather than the processing management. This minimizes the transportation of originals.

The Beinecke had a committee that developed this project which also developed a digitization strategy.

http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/brbl/digital/DigitizationStrategy.htm

Thus far the committee has not been called on to make too many hard decisions about priorities because there is enough manpower for the work involved. They’ve dealt with many administrative issues but not the framework.

Topics they could discuss in the future:

-What are they trying to accomplish with digitization and with the DL?

-What is the teaching value?

-What is the conservation/preservation value?

-What is the added catalog value?

The Beinecke has had many discussions about copyright. They rarely own the copyright to the materials in their collection and do not have the power to give or deny permission. The patrons must obtain permission on their own. The images are mounted on the web under "fair use" guidelines for education and research. They used to watermark the material but don’t any more. They will take down material if copyright owners complain. The DL enables ordering of material. The TIFFs may come online with a new storage solution which may complicate things, but may not. Thus far they have had no problems. Audio recordings are an interest but copyright is a big issue there, so do not put it online though some curators allow digital reproduction.

Metadata: the DL has a MARC based metadata record. This metadata is entered into dbtext which is then combined with the derivatives when they return from Luna. One metadata conundrum: how to describe a print that comes from a book, in the case of many prints needing to be described separately but also require that they be understood as part of a whole book.

Electronic text: the library prefers not to get involved with editorial projects. However, they may use XML to coordinate all the data flows they manage for their DL and to connect images with finding aids.