Report on Yale Divinity Library digital library projects

This report describes two small-scale digital library initiatives of the Divinity Library: the Ad Hoc Digital Library and the UBCHEA Image Collection. These projects may be of interest as examples of subject-specific, purpose-driven, low-cost digital initiatives. The Ad Hoc Digital Library was established in July 1997, entirely funded by a $10,000 ITS/Library Faculty Support Grant. The UBCHEA project piggybacked on the same hardware and software used for the Ad Hoc project, requiring a minimal amount of additional programming. Both projects reside on a server at the Divinity Library that is a Macintosh-compatible Power Computing PowerCenter Pro 210 with 4 GB Hard disk capacity and 176 MB of RAM. Three other text-based web-searchable databases also reside on this server. The server uses WebStar 3.0 webserving software and Tango 3.0 as the interface between WebStar and the various Filemaker Pro databases that make up the various projects. As far as exportability is concerned, I am told that FileMaker is not "ODBC compliant" but the information in the FileMaker databases is easily exportable as a tab-delimited text files, which can be imported into other databases.

The Ad Hoc Digital Library (http://adhoc.divinity.yale.edu)

The Ad Hoc Digital Library is a structured, web-searchable database of digital images, maps, and texts for use in the teaching of the history of Christianity. The Digital Library now includes more than 1500 images, maps, and texts relating to early and European Christianity. It is important to note that the Digital Library has been imagined as a selected rather than comprehensive body of images and texts. Just as we don't add just anything to our various library collections, but rather have a selective collection development policy, so a case can be made for developing a set of digital images that forms a rationalized collection.

A website related to teaching and research on the history of Christianity has been under development by the faculty and library of the Divinity School for the past two years. (The website is also called Ad Hoc with the "Hoc" standing for "history of Christianity.") This Ad Hoc website (http://www.yale.edu/adhoc) has included course websites containing links to images and electronic texts, as well as a compilation of Internet links related to the history of Christianity. As the Ad Hoc site grew, so did the realization of the need for an overall library-like structure and searching capability for the digital images and texts being collected. Images, maps, and texts gathered for one course might well be useful in another context, yet knowledge of their availability was not widespread. The web interface of the Ad Hoc Digital Library was created to facilitate the identification and sharing of images and texts.

Through the Ad Hoc Digital Library, faculty members and others can use a user-friendly web interface to search for electronic resources related to relevant individuals, geographical areas, events, time periods, and subjects. The online images, maps, and texts brought up by a search of the database are available for linking from course websites and syllabi, and for utilization in electronic class presentations. The searchable digital library is available to the entire Yale community and non-copyrighted portions of it are available to the general public over the web. Records can be added to the database or edited via a password-regulated web interface. The fields available for entry are listed below, with an explanation of their content.

• Source: [This field has a pop-up menu of sources to choose from, the source being the book or collection from which the image or text has been taken. There is a separate database where sources must first be entered, in order to be sure that a standard form is used for each source.]
• Reference within source: [i.e. page number, or box and folder, etc.]
• Author/Creator: [This field has a pop-up menu of author/creators to choose from. There is a separate database where author/creators must first be entered, in order to be sure that a standard form is used. We use the Orbis entry for an author/creator as our standard.]
• Title/Brief description: [This is free text.]
• Date: [Year date or n.d. entered, or historical period, taken from AAT]
• Provenance: [This is the original location of creation of the object or text. It is entered in the form of country first, then town if available.]
• Object Type: [The choices provided in the pop-up menu are: text, image, video, and audio]
• Object Subtype: [The choices provided in the pop-up menu are object subtypes taken from the Art and Architecture Thesaurus.]
• Object Location:[This field is used if, for example, an art object is located in a place differing from its place of provenance.]
• File Location: [This is the name of the image or text file on our server. The (pretty loose) naming convention for image files has been related to the source of the images, i.e. images provided by faculty member Lester Ruth have names like ruth0001.jpg or ruth0055.jpg and images taken from the Roland Bainton Papers have names like bainton1.gif. We have limited the file names to 8 characters because of the workstations in use at the library.There is a mixture of .jpg and .gif files depending on the characteristics of the original image. Text files are in text format in a separate directory on the server.]
• Subject headings: [This field has a pop-up menu of subject headings to choose from. There is a separate database where Library of Congress subject headings relevant to the subject matter of the Ad Hoc Digital Library have been entered. Subject headings are designated as topical, personal, or geographical and an html page is generated for each category that lists all the subject headings that have been used, so that researchers can get a sense of the content of the database (e.g. the list of topical subject headings.]
• Commentary: [This is free text commentary on the image or text that generally is supplied by a faculty member.]
• Author of Commentary: [Generally the name of the faculty member who has provided the commentary.]
• Title for Text Display: [This gives the title of a text as we wish it to display on the public interface, which may differ from the standard form.]
• Acknowledgments:[Free text]
• Admin Notes: [Free text; this is where we put what class the image or text has been used for, etc.]
• Access: [The choices here are "Yale" or "public". Some copyrighted material is restricted to use by the Yale community only.]
• Show in public site: [The choices here are "Yes" or "No". This enables us to store copyrighted material in the database for future use without providing public access, or to keep problematic records off the public site.]

The UBCHEA Image Collection (http://ubchea.divinity.yale.edu)

The Archives of the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia (YDSL Record Group No. 11) contain more than 8,000 photographs and films related to various colleges and universities established in China with the support of the Board. The Board was interested in having detailed access to these photographs for publicity and alumni/ae-relation purposes, so they provided money for a staff person to enter records for each photograph or film into a FileMaker Pro database that could be mounted on our server. At this time only 500 of the 8,000 images have been scanned; the remaining images have only text descriptions in the database. It is important to note that the images in the UBCHEA Image Collection database are very specific images of college buildings, faculty, students, etc. and might well seem like clutter in a university-wide digital library collection. The primary access to this image database is through the online finding aid (HTML and SGML versions) for the UBCHEA archives. The database enables us to have an integrated access system for a heavily-used archival collection, with links from the online finding aid to the objects themselves.

As in the case of the Ad Hoc Digital Library, records can be entered and edited in the UBCHEA Image Collection via a web form. The fields available for entry are listed below, with an explanation of their content.

• Country: [This field has a pop-up menu of countries for which images are available.]
• Source: [This field has a pop-up menu of the thirteen colleges and universities for which images are available. The English language forms of these college names have been used rather than the Chinese language forms used by Orbis.]
• Brief description: [Free text.]
• Date: [in a Year, Month, Day format, e.g. 18 Oct 1941]
• Subject headings: [A pop-up menu of subject headings that are entered in a separate database. We have used Library of Congress subject headings, but have used the English language form of the colleges' names.]
• Format:[The choices provided are film, photo, slide, video]
• Location: [This is the physical location of the photograph or film, i.e. a box and folder number within Record Group No. 11.]
• Digital location: [This is the file name for the digital image. The naming convention is ubc0001.jpg, ubc0002.jpg, etc. We have used all .jpg files in this database. There are also check boxes to indicate whether 1) a negative is available, 2) a digital image is available, and 3) whether it is a color image.]
• Other info: [Free text, a place for administrative information.]