Assignment 1 Briefing Paper on the Pratt Archives Digitization Projects

Transcription

1 Twila Rios Digital Preservation Spring 2012 Assignment 1 Briefing Paper on the Pratt Archives Digitization Projects The Pratt library digitization efforts actually encompass more than one project, including two METRO grant funded projects in 2005 and 2006, digitization efforts of their Visual Resources Center prior to the two grants, and ongoing digitization efforts after the completion of the grants. This paper is based on a paper about the grant funded projects written by Pratt s archivist, Paul Schlotthauer (2010), presentations in 2012 by Paul Schlotthauer and the current Visual Resources Center Curator, Johanna Bauman, and my own impressions from one afternoon s digitization session at the library. I will first outline the original and ongoing projects in terms of the elements to be considered in a project plan. In other words, the who, what, how and why questions of a project plan. I will then include my own observations of the processes I participated in, and make some observations about preservation of their digital collection. In 2005 the Pratt libraries applied for and received a digitization project grant from METRO (The Metropolitan New York Library Council) to digitize works relating to the theme Treasures of New York. (And in 2006 they applied for a second grant to do further work on the same themes with similar goals). They had already been digitizing for some time, and already had a Visual Resources Center. However, they saw the grant as a way to fund upgrading their equipment and software while also updating and streamlining their procedures. It was their own mandate to digitize items for educational and research purposes, to digitize items as well that showcased the breadth and strengths of the Pratt collections, and to digitize items that showed Pratt s importance and influence in education, and the fields of art, architecture, fashion, and design. For the specific Metro grant project they wanted also to showcase Pratt s importance in the New York and Brooklyn communities and some of the uniqueness of the historic

2 neighborhood, Clinton Hill, where Pratt s main campus exists. These were their main reasons for digitizing. Their audience, therefore, was the Pratt Faculty, staff and students, researchers from without Pratt, and also the general public. The institution s archivist, Paul Schlotthauer, was tasked with selecting the materials to digitize per the various goals stated above. For the first grant he chose a variety of materials, including historic photographs (prints and negatives), items from Pratt s collection of historic fashion plates, and items from Pratt s collection of bookplates. The fashion plates and bookplates were of particular interest for researchers and students, while the photographs were of interest to historians, students and anyone with an interest in the history of New York, the history of Brooklyn, Pratt s specific history, or the history of education. For the second grant he chose to complete the digitization of the bookplates collection. He continues to select items for ongoing digitization now. For the purposes of the assignment I digitized historic black and white photos from prints. While for the most part decisions on what types of items to digitize were informed by the reasons for digitization stated above, in his presentation Schlotthauer did emphasize a few specific criteria for selection, including 1) preservation: some items were in poor condition and would not last much longer; 2) uniqueness and representativeness of the items: some items could be rejected because similar items were already available in the image database, while other items would be chosen because they were not yet well represented; 3) characteristics of the item: some items would require more time and effort to digitize than others; and 4) interest: items with a chance of long-term interest to the audience would take precedence over those with a more ephemeral interest. While I don t recall his mentioning it, I would guess that copyright considerations were also important to the selection of what would eventually be displayed on a public website. In addition he mentioned it was important to consider what Pratt had to offer uniquely that had not already been digitized by some other institution. And finally he mentioned that the desire to make some unknown or underutilized

3 items more accessible played a role in some of his choices. In fact, his biggest issue was choosing more than could actually be done within the limitations of the project, and thus having to continually cut and cut again his selections. They set their head of the Visual Resources Center as the project manager for the first digitization grant, and set the institution s archivist (Paul Schlotthauer) to curate and select materials for digitization. Later Schlotthauer took over the management of the grant projects when the previous project manager left the organization. They planned to use student workers from Pratt s Library Science school to do some of the work and student workers from Pratt s design school to aid in re-designing the archives website for the new material. They also recruited and hired a catalog librarian to deal with the metadata needs of this project. As they saw the project as a way to streamline and improve their standards, and a way to bring in some works that currently did not have good metadata, working with the metadata would be a time consuming but important task. In 2012 they have a different Visual Resources Center Curator who manages the digitization they do and also manages the metadata creation. They continue to have student workers; and Paul Schlotthauer is still curating and selecting materials for digitization as part of his regular duties. For equipment they use an Epson XL flatbed scanner, but also have a digital camera which I did not see or use in my session. They use an ImacG5 computer and adobe Photoshop software for correction of the images scanned. They used the North Carolina ECHO (Exploring Cultural Heritage Online) digitization guidelines (2007) to inform their decisions about staffing, training and procedures. The nature of the materials scanned determined some settings such as color or grayscale, ppi, etc. However, for every item their procedure was and still is to create one uncorrected TIFF file scan which contains a ruler and colorscale sheet and clear indication of the margins of the item. This

4 uncorrected image file is stored only. They then create one image from that file which is corrected using Photoshop for color and skew, and cropped, which is also saved as a TIFF file. Any subsequent generations of image files are made from the corrected master file. They originally stored copies on gold CD s and on an external hard drive. Currently they store items on a networked drive that is backed up by the systems department weekly. Their uploads to ARTstor s shared shelf also constitute an offsite backup of sorts, although only for the corrected and cropped images. Metadata is currently kept in ARTstor s shared shelf, as well as their order tracking system database. Originally they planned to use Dublin Core as their metadata scheme. They soon found, however, that this was not adequate for their bookplates. So they created a modified Dublin Core set of metadata. This proved to make things difficult, however, when they attempted to register their data with OAIster and allow for metadata harvesting. Currently they use Visual Resources Core as their metadata scheme, which the Visual Resources Curator, Johanna Bauman, says is more specific to their needs than Dublin Core. They currently upload all new images to Shared Shelf. They utilize, among other controlled vocabularies, the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) for various fields. They maintain some listings of field value choices in excel spreadsheets. And Shared Shelf has some controlled vocabulary pull downs as well on some fields. One of the challenges they have faced is changes in the systems they used for providing access to their images and for keeping metadata for their images. They began the project using Luna Insight, as this was already in use by the institution. Luna Insight was not compliant with OAI metadata harvesting, however. This thus only added to the troubles mentioned above in getting their data harvested into OAIster, although eventually they did iron out the issues.

5 Later, then, Pratt made agreements with ARTstor. At that point they discontinued Luna Insight and moved their images to Flickr and the accompanying metadata to Millennium. Currently they are inputting new items into ARTstor s Shared Shelf product, and moving items from millennium to Shared Shelf, with many items still available via Flickr. Flickr is not compliant with OAI harvesting either, however. But one advantage they discovered with using Flickr was increased traffic to their images. People were accessing their images more than they were when they were only available on Pratt s website. In addition, one point Paul Schlotthauer mentioned that I think is particularly important was that after moving to Flickr he found that requests from Pratt s administrative offices more often came with specific identifiers of what image was needed. In other words, the staff were browsing and finding items they needed themselves, rather than making a general request for the archivist to find something to meet their needs. This indicates that the staff found it useful, and it probably makes their workflow more efficient. That can only help in garnering the support of the institution s administrators for continued digitization. Traffic to the images online and requests for the images is one of the primary indicators of the success of any digitization project. When I did my afternoon of digitizing, I scanned five black and white historic photographs from the 20 th century, stored the uncorrected TIFF on the network, made a corrected TIFF in Photoshop and stored it on the network, uploaded a copy of the corrected TIFF file into Shared Shelf, and input metadata on each photograph in Shared Shelf. I was only required to make very simple corrections. For the metadata I was provided with an extensive instruction sheet for how to enter data for each field. Therefore, overall, I found the tasks to be fairly straightforward. However, I did spend slightly more than my scheduled two hours on the task. This was because I was unfamiliar with the metadata scheme, unfamiliar with using Photoshop, and also unfamiliar with using a Macintosh computer. Ironically I am highly familiar with using PC s, but that meant my automatic keyboard shortcuts and other behaviors that I do unconsciously, were

6 actually a hindrance. I had to mentally remind myself of how to do basic things (like closing a window or saving a file) on Mac. Fortunately this type of issue would soon go away in a normal project, as the scanning technician became used to the systems and procedures. However, it does point out a couple of issues worth considering when planning a digitization project: 1) that a little extra time should be allowed at the beginning of a project for staff to become familiar with the workflow and procedures and to develop habits that will aid in efficient work, and 2) that excessive turnover in staff will delay the completion of the project, as each successive new staff person has to become familiar with the workflow and procedures. In fact, the North Carolina ECHO guidelines specifically mention contentment of personnel as an important issue to keep in mind in project management. (2007). Presumably keeping personnel content reduces turnover and improves efficiency. I found that my ideas of what to put in the description fields differed slightly from the ideas of the Visual Resources Curator, Johanna Bauman. For example, when describing the possible date range of a photograph, she generally would set the dates much wider than I would. For example, she suggested a date range of 1920 s to 1970 for a one photo I was sure came from the 1940 s. Her choice of a wide range would cut back on the possibility of a mistake in identification. But my choice might make the metadata more accurate, if correct. However, I tried to match her preference in my entries. Never-the-less ultimately I felt that my descriptive metadata was not very adequate. I felt that perhaps, with more time, I could have added much more helpful keywords and phrases. I also felt that if I had known more about the history of Pratt and its campus, I could have done a much better job of choosing descriptive metadata. But this too is helpful experience. One could spend much time on creating the most complete metadata possible, but this is usually not necessary or desirable. Sometimes, perhaps usually, one must choose the most important metadata for one s purposes and then move on, so as not to delay the overall completion of the project. Fortunately this too is something that would

7 become more efficient as the technician became more experienced in processing items. Soon one would learn what common data was needed and what choices were preferred, and would even learn much about the subjects and selections for the project. Metadata creation would happen much more quickly for each record then. On the other hand, I found the extensive written directions and the pull-down fields, thesauri, and spreadsheet lists very helpful in entering other metadata. I was well aided in choosing most other fields, if not the description field. I also observed that the location for doing the scanning and correction had some issues. There were very large windows letting in a lot light, making it difficult to compare the originals to the digital proxies. This was noted as an issue by both Schlotthauer and Bauman in their presentations, and my personal experience found it to be true. Finally, I d like to comment on preservation of the Pratt digital images archives. Their mandate was for access not preservation; although as mentioned they did consider preservation as one possible criterion for the choice of some objects to be digitized. They do not, however, have any specific preservation policies. Preservation is, therefore, mostly of a passive or inactive variety. For OAIS compliance, which is greatly desirable in a preservation archive, an archive must attend to the processes of ingest, archival storage, data management, administration, and access. They should have policies and procedures for dealing with submission information packages, archival information packages, and dissemination information packages. Preservation metadata should follow an appropriate standard and be added in ingest and in ongoing management of the stored data. Preservation planning should be an over-arching component that applies to all parts of the model. And these policies and procedures should be documented. The Pratt archives has plans, policies and procedures for ingest and metadata

8 standards that are documented to a degree. Indeed, since they are digitizing Pratt s own collections, ingest they have under control. (Although the changes in their access and storage systems and in their metadata standards mean they don t currently have completely standardized metadata.) They also have procedures for access which are less well documented, but never-the-less in place. Where they seem to be lacking is in policies and procedures surrounding the middle elements of the OAIS model: the archival information packages and how they are checked for accuracy, monitored, refreshed, and managed. They don t appear to have any checksums or other methods of guaranteeing fixity and authenticity of their files, or any method of monitoring or checking on the integrity of the files stored. Could an image file that has not been accessed recently become corrupted without their knowledge? Probably it could. Nor did I see any procedures in place to identify damaged files and restore good copies, or even any procedures or policies for checking the success and integrity of backups. I also saw no written mission statement that included a mention of preservation as a goal. Even the instructions and processes they do have in place clearly appear weighted towards access, as one would expect given their original goals in their digitization projects. However, the good news is that they have made the effort to do several things that will aid in putting their data into a preservation archive. First they run a standard, well adopted, lossless file format: TIFF, and use no encryption or compression. They also follow standard best practice of having an uncorrected original file, which is stored untouched, and a corrected master used for making any additional images. Third, they keep some preservation metadata and have metadata standards, such as unique record identifiers that also appear on the original analog items and on all records; file naming standards that include the unique identifiers; tracking of various dates such as date scanned, date cataloged, and date uploaded with date format standards; tracking of file migration events and metadata migration events (but not equipment or storage changes); and tracking of technical metadata such as file format and size

9 and file storage locations. Finally, they schedule upgrades of their servers or technical systems every 2 to 3 years, which implies that files will be migrated to new storage before their systems become obsolete. Therefore technically they do refresh all of their data files and storage media, if only by default as a consequence of upgrading their storage equipment. Their data could be brought into a preservation repository, or their archive transformed into one that also has a preservation mandate. To accomplish this I would suggest that they first work on standardizing all of their data and systems, in other words getting everything into the same systems and with the same metadata scheme. But they are in fact working on this already. Then they would need to establish some data management and maintenance policies and procedures such as the creation of checksums and/or some way to monitor the integrity of the files in storage, schedule refreshment, and stay abreast of any need for file or media migration. They could improve their preservation metadata a bit by including information about storage equipment and systems and any changes to those. They would need to create and/or modify their mission statement to be explicit about the preservation mandate. And finally they would need to create explicit policy and procedure documents that include preservation planning and administration. I found the opportunity to do some actual scanning and data entry that this assignment provided was helpful in illustrating some of the theory I have learned in class, especially for the understanding of metadata choices and entry. The presentations of Paul Schlotthauer and Johanna Bauman, meanwhile, were useful in getting additional perspectives on the same issues we have been discussing in class all semester. Schlotthauer s presentation was particularly helpful in understanding the process of selection, and Bauman s presentation for the details of procedure. And finally, evaluating an actual digitization project was very useful for getting a better understanding of the challenges and choices involved in managing digital archives and of how preservation planning might apply to a digital archive.

10 References North Carolina Exploring Cultural Heritage Online (2007). NC ECHO Guidelines for Digitization 2007 Revised Edition. State Library of North Carolina. Retrieved from Schlotthauer, P. (2010). Pratt Institute: A historical snapshot of campus and area. In K. Bor Ng & J. Kucsma (Eds.), Digitization in the real world: Lessons learned from small and medium-sized digitization projects (pp ). New York: Metropolitan New York Library Council