Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio

Educating the 21st century librarian

Funded by a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian grant , our new digital library fellows have been tracking their progress with a suitably 21st century learning tool: the blog. During the next two years of their program, these students will be blogging their way through a series of half-time clinical rotations in various departments and programs around campus. The four fellows who have chosen to start their work projects in DLS will learn how to build a digital collection from the ground up: from artifact selection to production to collection launch and promotion. By documenting their experiences online, they’ll be better able to articulate what they’ve learned, while also creating a record to help current and future students navigate their way through similar situations.

We encourage you to bookmark the sites below and enjoy vicariously as our intrepid fellows battle forces like scope creep, copyright restrictions, and obsolete AV formats on their paths to becoming digital librarians.

— Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian

Student: Shawn Averkamp
Project: African American women students at The University of Iowa, 1900-1950
Blog: Digital Library Seminar
“I learned from Wikipedia that scope creep ‘refers to uncontrolled changes in a project’s scope. This phenomenon can occur when the scope of a project is not properly defined, documented, or controlled. It is generally considered a negative occurrence to be avoided.’ Over the course of the next week, I would learn how easily scope creep could, uh, creep into a digital library project.”

Student: Jane Monson
Project: Recipe pamphlets in the Chef Louis Szathmary Collection of Culinary Arts
Blog: Notes From the Library
“Now begins the time consuming task of poring over the thousands of pamphlets, in search of the most interesting and informative ones to include. It feels a little like digging through a treasure chest. I was very excited about a Wrigley Spearmint gum pamphlet from 1915, which features a ‘spear-man’ reciting nursery rhymes. I’m trying to muster the same enthusiasm for the kitschy ads of the 50s and 60s…they’re less unique, and I’m easily distracted by more arcane products like the Air-O-Mix ‘Whip All’ food aerator (which, according to early 20th century experts, makes food somehow magically more nutritious).”

Student: Bryan Stusse
Project: Artists’ Television Network
Blog: IMLS Fellowship
“The most significant problem facing this project is that of copyright. I searched to print materials associated with this collection for a few days and finally came across some University of Iowa documents from when the collection was being built and funding secured stating that artists would retain all copyrights unless otherwise noted on the tapes. I did find release waivers from Gregory Battcock and Steven Poser, who were involved in discussions and interviews. Basically this means I will need to start contacting artists directly for reproduction rights.”

Student: Jill Wehrheim
Projects: Iowa Civil War Diaries; Iowa Railroad Depots
Blog: Jill’s Weblog
“The biggest challenge I’ve encountered so far (besides being from Illinois and having to take a little extra time learning about towns and counties in Iowa) has been figuring out where towns are that are not on current maps. Of the approximate 60 photos of depots in Dallas County, there are about 10 towns with depot pictures that are not on current maps. Although this makes my task harder and take longer, I have enjoyed the challenge of tracking down where the depots once existed.”

IDL’s CONTENTdm collections: new look; new location

Big changes this week for the Iowa Digital Library. A major redesign (completed with the help of Scott Fiddelke, Linda Roth and DLS student assistant Julia Bleeker) has been applied to CONTENTdm templates. This means no more navy blue headers for local collections, and a more uniform look and feel when using The University of Iowa Libraries digital collections.

On the system side, CONTENTdm has moved to a new server, so the URLs of IDL’s CONTENTdm collections now have the domain name digital.lib instead of the previous cdm.lib, which ties the site together in a better way. Additionally, we’ve taken this opportunity to upgrade to the most recent version of CONTENTdm: 4.2. Among the list of enhancements are a couple that stand out in their impact on using the system.

First, hyperlinked metadata is not constrained to searching just within a collection.One of the great properties of digital collections is that similar materials from multiple collections can be pulled together to facilitate new learning, and this enhancement allows for results to come from all CONTENTdm collections when navigating using hyperlinked metadata.

Secondly, we have more control over how compound objects (postcards, scrapbooks, documents, just to name a few) display in results sets. Previously items within compound objects showed following a search creating large, unwieldy results (think of every page of a book showing as a separate result rather than just the book itself). By suppressing pages of compound objects, result sets show just the compound objects themselves, all of which makes using the system more manageable and understandable to the user.Although we’ve gone live with these enhancements and redesigns, we still anticipate to fix things in the coming weeks and months.

–Mark F. Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian

DLS Year One: expansion and collaboration

Although it’s hard for us to believe, the end of Fiscal Year 2006/07 marks only the first full year of Digital Library Services’ existence as a departmental unit. See below for a list of some of our accomplishments, compiled for the upcoming Libraries’ Annual Report . But there’s no rest for the digital, so we’re launching into more of the same, along with new projects like implementing an upgrade for our digital asset management software, loading our digital collections data into the Libraries’ in-development Web 2.0 resource discovery tool , and planning for four (!) new half-time digital library fellows . Stay tuned for an even more expansive and collaborative FY07/08.

–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian

DLS FY2006/07 Annual Report
For its first full year in operation, Digital Library Services underwent a period of growth and transition. DLS began fiscal year 2006/2007 with a reorganization in reporting structure, shifting from the Collection Management department to the newly-formed Library Information Technology division. Paul Soderdahl was promoted to Director of LIT, but also retained his duties in DLS as Acting Head until new hire Nicole Saylor took over this role in April 2007.

Throughout this period, DLS continued to develop departmental infrastructure, policy and procedures while building innovative digital collections. The unit’s primary repository, the Iowa Digital Library , grew from 16 collections housing nearly 82,000 items to 32 collections containing over 145,000 items. A few of this year’s highlights from IDL include:

The Dentistry College Class Photographs Collection
Collaborating with the College of Dentistry to commemorate its 125th anniversary, DLS and the Libraries’ Preservation Department worked on preserving and providing digital access for a collection of faculty and students photographs dating back to 1883.

The Mildred Wirt Benson Collection
DLS coordinated the digitization of the papers of Mildred Wirt Benson, UI alumna and original ghostwriter for the Nancy Drew novels. The collection, including hundreds of items of correspondence, short stories, scrapbooks, and ephemera, also featured an expanded home page contextualizing the items and their significance.

The University of Iowa Press Digital Collection
As the inaugural project in a partnership with the Libraries to make the Press’ out-of-print titles available online, DLS digitized 19 books from the Iowa Short Fiction Awards series.

Continuing its role to provide outreach and leadership for digital initiatives on campus, DLS worked with faculty and staff from the University of Iowa Museum of Art and the School of Art and Art History on the migration of existing data to develop a cross-searchable art digital collection. When completed, it will feature thousands of digitized art objects by local artists and UI graduates, as well as the entirety of the museum’s holdings.

Digital Library Services also expanded its collaborations within the Libraries. In addition to working with content providers in departments such as Special Collections, University Archives and the Iowa Women’s Archives and branches such as the Rita Benton Music Library, DLS began mainstreaming some of its processes into regular library workflows in order to improve efficiency and accommodate our growth. This included working with Web Services on the design of collection home pages, consulting with Public Relations to develop a coordinated plan to promote our collections and services, and beginning a pilot project with Central Technical Services on metadata production.

Redesigns improve access, aesthetics

If you haven’t noticed already, two of Iowa’s largest digital libraries—Iowa Digital Library (IDL) and Iowa Heritage Digital Collections (IHDC)—have updated looks. The changes, put in place in July, are not just cosmetic; the improvements aim to increase access to a trove of unique documents from and about Iowa.

First, a point of clarification. Ever since I arrived in April, I’ve found that many people use the terms Iowa Digital Library and Iowa Heritage Digital Collections interchangeably. They are, in fact, two separate digital libraries, even though some of the same UI collections (those with an Iowa history emphasis) can be accessed from both places. Iowa Digital Library contains digital collections generated at University of Iowa—primarily digitized artifacts from UI Libraries and UI faculty research. On the other hand, Iowa Heritage Digital Collections is a statewide consortium that encourages Iowa libraries, schools, historical societies, museums, archives, and other cultural heritage organizations to create and mount digital collections that highlight the state’s history and culture. UI Libraries helps provide server space and technical support for both efforts. Our unit manages the Iowa Digital Library while Nancy E. Kraft, the head of Preservation at UI Libraries, leads Iowa Heritage.

OK, back to the redesigns. The new Iowa Heritage Web site features rotating images from the collection along with a search box and allows users to search across collections. Some of the most popular search topics—aviation, football, and maps—are accessible with one click.

The new Iowa Digital Library Web site now includes a link from the main page to all digital collections. All collections, in turn, now have an introductory or “splash” page that provides a description of the digital collection and links to the content provider(s) and physical collection finding aids. Also, new collections get special prominence on the left side of the page while the DLS blog powers a News section where we push new developments about digital projects and related issues to interested parties. A new banner that will soon display offers not only a better look—out with the blue, in with gold—but better options to navigate between pages. Well-deserved credit for the Iowa Digital Library redesign goes to outgoing Web Services head Scott Fiddelke, DLS student worker Julie Bleecker, Webmaster Linda Roth, and DLS librarians Jen Wolfe and Mark Anderson. We hope you enjoy the changes!

—Nicki Saylor
Head, Digital Library Services

JPEG: The Next Generation

It’s early July, which in the library world means post-ALA. I was one of over 21,000 attendees to descend on Washington D.C. and the American Library Association annual conference. For a Digital Initiatives Librarian, the selection of sessions and meetings at the conference is not as broad as for public librarians, school librarians and other academic librarians, but one group I have enjoyed meeting with for the last two years is the JPEG2000 Interest Group.

What is JPEG2000? JPEG2000 (aka JP2 or J2K) is a digital image format developed to be the next generation image format. Slow to be generally adopted, JP2 may not fully replace JPEG as the standard compressed image format or TIFF as the standard archival image format, but rather be a third option. JP2’s strength is in its flexibility: it can be uncompressed like a TIFF or compressed like a JPEG, although when compressed, its quality is much higher than a JPEG due to the wavelet compression technology on which JP2 is based.

OK, enough techno-speak. The main topic of discussion at the interest group meeting was whether JPEG2000 should actually replace TIFF as the preferred archival image format for digital library initiatives. Far from being a settled issue, some leading institutions such as the California Digital Library have made the switch completely, while the Digital Library Federation still recommends TIFF as the archival format. Some attendees of the interest group such as Harvard weren’t even at liberty to discuss the decisions they’ve made due to their mass digitization program agreements with Google.

A sub-issue was whether switching to JPEG2000 and its smaller file size would allow more full-color scanning of textual materials, which is central to the debate between the importance of the content vs. the artifact. I.e., is it enough to scan a diary in grayscale to capture just the content, or should full-color scanning be employed to capture the color of the page, the color of the ink, and therefore a truer representation of the artifact. There are those that feel strongly on both sides, but the adoption of JPEG2000 may allow content and artifact to live together in harmony.

An interesting side note to the discussion of digital images is that a motion JPEG2000 format has also been developed motion pictures, and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) has already selected the format for direct transmission to cinemas. (No indication yet as to when we’ll say goodbye to film reels and hello to 1’s and 0’s).

Like many other digital libraries, here at Iowa, we have been using JPEG2000 primarily for map images, where we want to display a high resolution image at a smaller file size. We may however be a long way off from adopting JPEG2000 as the archival format for all of our digitization activities and throwing away the TIFFs.

All in all, meeting with this small group of a dozen people and discussing how the slow adoption of JPEG2000 will impact our work was rewarding in ways that the huge lecture sessions at
ALA were not. I hope future ALA conferences will include more of these interest groups for digital initiatives librarians, but I’ll always make room on my schedule for this one.

–Mark F. Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian

Haunted by Nancy Drew

Ghosts abound in our new digital collection about University of Iowa alumna Mildred Wirt Benson, the original author of the Nancy Drew mystery novels. Titles for the biographical articles “The Ghost of Ladora” and “The Ghost of Nancy Drew” play off Benson’s role as a ghostwriter. Teen sleuths confront the supernatural in novels like The Ghost of Blackwood Hall, The Haunted Bridge, and Quarry Ghost, although (spoiler alert!) a few hours spent in the Special Collections reading room would show that the heroines inevitably unmask the ghostly disguises of much more human criminal elements. And for me, working on the digital collection invoked personal ghosts as I handled the same titles that I used to find peeking out of Christmas stockings and wrapped up next to birthday cakes for so many years in my pre-teens.

But while studying the Libraries’ subject files on Benson and reading the publications of those who have used her collections, I also felt haunted by the ghosts of researchers past. The UI, like academic libraries everywhere, is working on the enormously complex problem of mainstreaming, standardizing and enhancing access to its rare and unique archival collections. In the meantime, a comprehensive search of these materials can require a considerable amount of time, patience and luck. For the Benson collection, I consulted a number of finding aids, catalogs and inventories – taking the same steps and compiling the same materials as many other scholars have done before me.

Now that these items are being digitized and collocated online, we hope to save the time of users (to cite another personal hero). And in addition to improving access to the materials, we’re also enhancing the usability of the artifacts themselves. With the help of optical character recognition software that makes items such as Benson’s short stories and journalism scrapbooks full-text searchable (as well as image zoom functionality that allows users a closer look at her diving technique), the digital collection becomes a much more powerful tool to help scholars solve their research mysteries.

We’re sure Nancy Drew would approve.

–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian

Why digital collections matter

Craig W. Spotser, A.B., Iowa City, Iowa, 1927

On my drive to work this week the radio told of more soldiers dying in Iraq. Soon, an ambulance whizzed by me—off to save another life. Talk about work that really matters, I thought, as I tootled toward the University of Iowa Main Library for a day of helping lead the charge to digitize a bunch of cool stuff—old photographs, correspondence, maybe postcards or some scrapbooks from library archives. While my work as the new head of Digital Library Services hardly compares to the life-and-death heroics of soldiers or EMTs, I still like to hope it matters. I know it is a whole lot of fun—sure beats flipping pancakes for hire or writing a first-person dog column (“Hello, I’m Scruffy…”), gigs I’ll admit to having some experience with in the distant past.

When I arrive at work it’s not long before I am reminded—repeatedly—why creating these digital collections matters. A quick disclaimer: The bragging I’m about to do has next to nothing to do with me. I just got here. The credit goes to my predecessor Paul Soderdahl, metadata librarian Jen Wolfe, and digital initiatives librarian Mark Anderson in Digital Library Services. The UI Libraries online collection now has more than 75,000 digital objects thanks to their work and that of Nancy E. Kraft, who heads the Iowa Heritage Digital Collection (IHDC), plus the amazing contributions from a wide range of record holders. Impressive, especially if you consider they began this effort less than two years ago.

Online use statistics are the easiest way to see that digital collections are vastly expanding the library’s reach. Not surprisingly, on-campus use is high. More surprising are numbers like this: In April alone, Iowa Public Schools users approached our digital collections 4,834 times. As Mark aptly points out, that is a hit about every 10 minutes, 24 hours a day, during the entire month of April. We not only get hits from places like Iowa State University (more than 6,500 times in April) but from thousands of far-away places like Poland (2,400 hits) and Tuvalu (500), a Polynesian island nation halfway between Hawaii and Australia. Since I arrived I’ve heard a steady stream of stories about how online collections provide instant answers to questions that once took much, much longer. Questions like, where was the old Dresden china store located in Iowa City? Check out the Iowa City Town and Campus Scenes Collection to view a picture of the storefront.

But the most compelling evidence of the power of digital collections arises from stories of people like Craig D. Spotser of Texas. His email, forwarded to us by Susan Kuecker at the African American Historical Museum and Cultural Center of Iowa, started this way: “GOD…..This is a picture of my Grandfather. He passed away when my father was a small boy. I only had a small picture of him, far way, standing in front of his car and home in Iowa. My father, Craig W. Spotser, has never seen a picture of him that close up, but he passed away in February 2002. This is amazing. How can I obtain a copy of the photo of my Grandfather? I was surfing the web, and this is the first time that I have seen this picture. I almost started crying. I look almost identical to him, and so does my son.”

The spitting image looking back at Craig Spotser was C.W. Spotser, a professor at University of Iowa in the 1920s. The picture was found in a scrapbook kept by Althea “Bee” Moore,” an undergraduate student at UI from 1924-1928. Late last year, library assistant Christine Tade worked with the scrapbook owners at the African American Historical Museum and Cultural Center of Iowa to work out the logistics of sending it to UI Libraries for digitization and preservation work. Christine’s resulting digital project was the digitized scrapbook.

This discovery, along with additional help from University Archives archivist David McCartney and others, enabled the Spotser family to locate their grandfather’s grave. They plan to visit soon to make sure he has a headstone, said Chris Spotser, Craig’s brother. If he doesn’t, the family is going to make sure he gets one. I know all of this because Chris called today, out of the blue, to thank us for sending a copy of the photo. “You guys are doing some fantastic work! Even if it’s just helping one person, we’re extremely grateful.” This is why we librarians love what we do, and I’m just grateful to become a part of what’s happening with digital collections at Iowa.

–Nicki Saylor
Head, Digital Library Services

Digital connections: The Dentistry College Class Photos

Although the Dentistry College Class Photos Collection is just over halfway complete, it has already received much attention surrounding the 125th anniversary of the UI College of Dentistry. A University press release highlighted the collection and the excitement surrounding it.

Illustrating the relevance of this digital collection, two people closely associated with its creation found family members on these photo boards. Sally Myers, DLS student assistant and lead scanning technician for the project, identified her father as a dental student. Likewise, Christine Tade, Cataloging Supervisor in CTS and former DLS intern, found her father’s photograph as a member of the faculty.

Seen from these two examples, it is likely that this digital collection will have a connection to many Iowans as they discover the rich history of this College.

–Mark F. Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian

“Every book ever published”

Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched on the company’s engine at google.com…
No one really knows how many books there are. The most volumes listed in any catalogue is thirty-two million, the number in WorldCat, a database of titles from more than twenty-five thousand libraries around the world. Google aims to scan at least that many. “We think that we can do it all inside of ten years,” Marissa Mayer, a vice-president who is in charge of the books project, said recently.
— “Google’s Moon Shot: The Quest for the Universal Library” by Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker, Feb. 5, 2007

When Digital Library Services debuted in January 2006, the library world was still reeling from Google’s announcement of plans to scan and make searchable the holdings of five of the world’s major research libraries. Like digital librarians everywhere, the staff of DLS was left with a serious case of existential angst. With a mission to create digital content while guarding against duplication of effort, what were we supposed to do now that every book ever published was being digitized?

The answer turned out to be pretty simple: digitize the nonbook and/or the unpublished. As more libraries sign up with Google and other collaborative mass digitization projects, those of us non-partners have refined our scope to focus on our institutions’ local and unique materials in a variety of formats. As such, most new projects in DLS fall into two categories: those that document the intellectual and creative output of the University, and those that increase access to the Libraries’ rare and valuable research collections.

In support of the former goal, we’ve been working with academic departments to acquire digitized writings and works of art created by University of Iowa faculty and students. Currently in production for Iowa Digital Library are the graduate art archives of the School of Art and Art History; electronic theses and dissertations from the Graduate College; and journal articles authored by faculty members of the Department of Political Science. Although some of these materials are already online elsewhere, inclusion in the Libraries’ digital asset management systems will allow greater visibility, navigability and cross-collection searching.

In support of the latter goal, we’ve been consulting the Libraries’ curators and archivists to prioritize those materials that best support research and scholarship at the University. As far as supplementing digitization projects at other institutions, the Iowa Women’s Archives may offer the lowest risk of duplication of effort. Its focus on women’s history, including that of minority groups, documents a point of view that can be absent in many published works. The digitized audio, correspondence, images and printed ephemera in such IDL collections as African American Women in Iowa, Birkby , Noble Photographs, and Mujeres Latinas can help scholars to achieve a fuller understanding of the past.

The holdings of the University Archives serve as a hybrid to promote both these goals. Digital image collections like Calvin Photographs and Iowa City Town and Campus Scenes will soon be joined by in-progress digital collections of The Daily Iowan and The Hawkeye. These works created by UI faculty and students help to document over 100 years of Iowa history.

By making these materials more readily available online, DLS seeks to enable new scholarship that builds both on primary documents held by and on secondary documents generated at the University. In this way, we hope to ensure the UI’s place in the digital “universal library” of the future.

–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian

Legacy collections: piling on the content

Last year, a friend of mine gave me several dozen CDs that he did not want to store and take care of any more. Most were albums and artists that I liked and might have bought anyway, but his large, one-time donation saved me that time and expense, and obviously caused my music collection to grow.

To date, a majority of DLS projects have involved reformatting physical library materials to digital, and building new collections one-by-one. While this is an important task for making sought-after materials available online for the first time, DLS is most excited when approached by another department or organization with a large collection of digital content in-hand. These legacy collections consist of previously digitized materials, or are born-digital in the case of digital photographs and electronic texts. In any case, the donor, like my benevolent friend, usually does not want to devote time and energy to storing and administering the content.

Since a primary strategic goal of DLS is to develop a full range of digital resources, and make them available online, we actively seek out these legacy collections. When this collection comes with corresponding metadata relating to the content, it becomes even more valuable to DLS and the Iowa Digital Library. Although, that’s not to say it requires no effort to add to the digital collections already managed by the department. Often, file names need to be altered and metadata “massaged” to match our standards. Editing the materials can take many hours of work, but in the end, many more valuable items can be made publicly available for research and scholarship much sooner than with one-by-one digitization.

Our first experience with these collections came in the form of the Calvin Photographic Collection, nearly 1000 photographs of early Iowa City as well as geological formations across the country, given by the Department of Geosciences, which is still a repository of the original glass plate negatives, but partnered with DLS to make the images available online in perpetuity. Currently, DLS is tweaking several more legacy collections numbering in the tens of thousands. Look for announcements on the blog when these become available.

–Mark F. Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian