“I have a fantasy about a traveling digitization van (called perhaps the Scooby Van) filled with tech-savvy librarians and tons of equipment that goes from place to place to demonstrate the value of digital collections in libraries,” said Gwen Glazer, staff writer/editor and social media coordinator at Cornell University Library, in introducing the ALA Office for Information Technology Policy’s breakout session, “Online and Above the Radar: Ensuring the Use and Discoverability of Digital Collections,” on Saturday morning. She added, “My other fantasy is a reality-TV show in which archivists live in the van and are videotaped 24 hours a day like the Big Brother series. And if they make digital mistakes, they get kicked off the van like in Survivor. What a way to expose viewers to the wonders of libraries.”
None of the five experts on the panel could top that for publicity potential, but they had some good stories to tell about projects they curated.
Susan Currie, director of the Tompkins County (N.Y.) Public Library, emphasized the value of unique collections held by small or medium-sized public libraries, which have far fewer resources to create a digital library than large academic libraries. She demonstrated some of the local history pages her library created to showcase rare books, genealogy resources, and local newspapers. And the project has been successful. “It’s been up only two years,” she said, “but it’s been accessed some 33,000 times in a county with only 10,000 residents.”
A useful web-development tool called Omeka.net was the topic of the next presentation by Patrick Murray-John, web developer and assistant research professor at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. “The nice thing about Omeka.net is that it’s open source software,” he said. “An institution can determine which features it wants to spend its limited resources on,” making it most useful for small libraries and museums. Some digital collections created by Omeka.net are:
- Florida Memory Project, a vast collection of images, audio, and video with abundant metadata;
- Lincoln at 200 by the Newberry Library in Chicago, which creates a narrative around historical items;
- Postcards from the New York Waterways, 1898–1923, a collection of picture postcards showing the Erie Canal curated by the Queens College School of Library Science; and the
- Texarkana Museums System, which makes use of Omeka.net’s hosting services.
Robert Horton, associate deputy director for library services at the Institute of Museum and Library Services, wound up the session with a description of the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, a collection of some 80 million uncensored digitized pages that came out of tobacco company litigation cases from the early 1990s and later. Originally, the material was supposed to go the Minnesota Historical Society where Horton worked at the time the papers were released. But there was some doubt that MHS patrons would make use of it. “Local K–12 teachers told us they wanted six documents for their kids to discuss, not 60 million,” Horton said, so the collection was transferred to the University of California at San Francisco. There, students and faculty would find value in the archive, and funding agencies would feel more comfortable with it housed in an academic environment. The Department of Justice raised $6 million recently in support of the collection.
