CDC Digital Collection TF minutes

3/19/04

Our guests today were folks from the Walpole Digital Library.

The Lewis Walpole library is a specialized library devoted to the 18^th century and Horace Walpole in particular. When Lewis was establishing his collection in the 1950s, he decided he needed more graphic materials from this period. He acquired many prints, caricatures, and satires. There are now 35,000 prints, about 1/3 satiric, 1/3 topographic and 1/3 portraits.

He also spent time and money getting this collection cataloged. The satiric prints are the best cataloged and the card catalog is the pride and joy of the Walpole. There are up to 40 access points to one print.

When Maggie Powell became the director of the Walpole she felt that scanning the material would fit in with her goal to provide increased access to the collection and the place. She wanted to have the prints cataloged in Orbis, which is currently what is happening. At the same time the Beinecke had started their Digital Studio. The Walpole prints became some of the first material scanned there. The ultimate goal is to have the material in Orbis but connected with the images of the prints in Luna. There are currently 11,000 images up in the Walpole Digital Library, an iteration of the Beinecke DL software.

Defining the collection: Although they thought they wanted to have all of the material cataloged the Walpole still needed to decide which material would be scanned and cataloged first. The satirical prints were chosen because of the extensive cataloging. The easiest to do were the flat, unbound prints. Making these choices allowed the Walpole to come to the decision not to scan the bound volumes, but to catalog the volume instead and stick to digitizing the flat, unique items. In the beginning, the material was scanned rather than photographed. In the future, only the material that is OK’ed by the curator and conservator will be scanned, and most will be photographed.

The next set of material to be scanned will be prints and drawings of Walpole’s house in England. Historians and those studying the decorative arts use this material. There are also books he wrote and printed that are extra-illustrated that would be helpful to have online.

The digital collection has already changed how researchers use the collection. The digitization does reduce the wear and tear on the collection. It also enables researchers to be better prepared when they arrive at the library. MrSID is important to their interface for that reason. The Walpole librarians do not want to be a digital image store for researchers and are curious to find out how much and in what ways online material increases or changes the use of the collection and changes reference questions.

In this project, the cataloging is the new and interesting part. It is also the part that is taking up the most time and is the most labor intensive, so they will probably seek grant money to keep it moving at a steady pace.

We also discussed some of the workflow, which is a bit complicated because it’s a special collection and is sent down here to New Haven, so there is more checking when the material is sent out.