LIS 644: Digital Collection Project - Progress Report

For this assignment, I was asked to create a progress report for my digital collection for my Digital Libraries class. I had to create a digital collection. I chose a personal collection of photographs. 

Digital Collection Project : Progress Report

25 September

• Started going through the boxes of photographs

I made my first foray into the boxes of photographs in the basement. Unfortunately, I was only able to go through one of them, as it was the only box I could reach. This is probably a common complaint amongst shorter special collections librarians and archivists. I was able to get help getting the boxes down and on the floor so I could go through them. In this first box, I only found a few items - a high school diploma, a passport, and a framed wedding photograph - that I wanted to use on this project, among a truly random assortment of the ephemera of life and photograph collections. Which included photographs from a romantic trip to possibly the Poconos and what was later revealed to be a wedding dress. Despite initially deciding against it, I later decided that I also wanted to use and digitize the wedding dress. It was my great-grandmother’s (my grandfather’s mother’s) and I have a photograph of her wearing it.

04 October

• Went through several boxes of photographs in basement
• Need a family tree to remember who is who, and what side of the family they are on
• Found many photographs of family and family friends

I discovered that I can’t remember who everyone is, and I’ll need a family tree to help me figure out who is who and where they belong, both in my family and for this project. NAB helped a bit, going through the photographs and identifying people, places, and attempting to put dates on them. One of the photographs that we found was of Martin J. Coyne, Sr., at the Hatteras Lighthouse, which almost made NAB cry. The photograph that we found of her father at his favorite place (Myrtle Beach) did make her cry.

11 October

• Found Nellie’s photograph collection
• Search became a lot slower - NAB was attempting to identify people in pictures
• NAB going through all photographs

During this search, I discovered Nellie Wackowski’s photograph collection. Nellie was my great-grandmother, so her photographs are more or less perfect for this project, as she lived in Braddock for most of her life. Her husband (Walter) died when my grandmother was young, so there are only a few photographs of him in existence. NAB helped me go through the photographs and wanted to identify everyone in the photographs. We found some great photographs, including what we think is the wedding of my great-great-grandparents (Nellie’s parents). There is an inscription on the back of the photo, presumably wishing the couple good luck. However, it’s written in Polish, as that side of the family is Polish. In fact, my grandmother was an English as a Second Language student in K-5, as they spoke Polish at home.  

13 October

• Went through the rest of the photos

I was able to go through the rest of the photographs. I was working alone, which made the work a lot faster, but also that much more frustrating. I never met many of the people in these photographs, which means I have no way to identify them. For example, on the very first day I went through the photographs (one box), I found a passport, a high school diploma, and a wedding photograph. I looked at the wedding photograph, and thought, “that’s [Martin J. Coyne] Senior” but I wasn’t sure. It was, as I cleared up his identity from his passport picture - it was my great-grandfather, after all.

Analysis and Progress Report

During the last few weeks, I went through the boxes of photographs which make up my grandmother’s photograph collection. A few years ago, when she started through the process of selling her house, she decided that she wouldn’t have room for the collection in her apartment and asked my family if we would be willing to keep the collection. We took the photographs from her basement and from under her bed. These photographs were in non-archival boxes and covered in dust, pet dander, steel dust, and coal dust.

We took the photographs, and put the vast majority of them into plastic tubs, to protect them from critters and weather. Theses tubs were then placed in a basement closet.

After deciding on this project, I pulled the tubs out and went through them, looking for two things - first, what did we have, and second, what cohesive story could be told.

The first part of this cohesive whole is the story of Martin J. Coyne, Sr. Senior, my great-grandfather, left Ireland as a very young man in the 1920s, and went to the Pittsburgh suburb of Braddock, PA, where he worked at a steel mill for probably more than thirty years. He married my great-grandmother and they had my grandfather (Junior) in the years leading up to World War Two. Senior, though able-bodied, did not fight in WWII, as he was a skilled laborer in a necessary industry. My grandfather went to Catholic school, before going to Duquesne University.

My grandmother’s family is Polish, and three great-uncles (my great-grandmother’s brothers) fought in WWII. One in the army (died on the European front), one in the Navy (lost at sea in the Pacific), and one in the Air Force (family discharge after the deaths of his two brothers). Uncle Stanley (the eldest) was apparently a force to be reckoned with.

Some issues include the emotional aspect of going through a relative’s photograph collection. I found purple heart citations for Louis and Walter Miara, who both died in WWII, as well as photographs of Louis in uniform, and Walter’s funeral. I found a photograph of my grandmother as a baby, in a family photograph with her mother and grandfather. I found senior yearbook photographs, with notes written to my grandmother. They all a variation of “luck with Marty” (my grandfather, with whom she was dating), and my grandfather wrote, “luck with Marty” on the photograph he gave her. I found a photograph of my great-grandfather standing in front of the Hatteras Lighthouse. I found a photograph of my uncle, at his christening, held in the arms of his grandfather.

I am hoping to use IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) Core Standards for photographic metadata on the photographs themselves, as these standards make for more searchable metadata. These standards allow for the person in the image to be identified, as well as the photographer and other people involved. Some content management systems (eg. Flickr) will pull metadata from an image, as long as it is in IPTC standards. This is also why some images will upload with caption and metadata and some will not - for example, an image uploaded to Flickr with a caption will retain that caption in Flickr.

Most of the information is the same for Dublin Core and IPTC Core, but there are different fields. Most likely, I will end up combining the two standards in a way that makes sense from a metadata standard, as this will allow the information to be the most correct. I do need to work on my Dublin Core, as I’m still not so sure what anything means or what I need to do to make it work.

Part of the issue for this progress report is the lack of, well, demonstrable progress (I have yet to create a ContentDM Collection). As I am working on my own project, I am working possibly a bit slower than my classmates. I am also working with more items, as I chose more than I needed for this project. I saved 420 individual photographs from when I digitized the materials. This is not very representative of how many items I digitized, as there are at least two photographs of each item (front and back) and some items were also photographed with a size reference. Also, there were at least two items for which each page was digitized, as the entire item contained information. Some items were also photographed as a reference to another photograph. For example, one of the diplomas wouldn’t stay open, so I had to carefully hold it open during the digitization project (which is something I would not do in an archive); I took a photograph of it self-closing as an explanation of my fingertips.

Over the weekend, I digitized all of the images, using a camera and an inverted on a tripod set-up - it would be easier and faster than trying to hand-hold the images. All of my photos were taken upside-down, as the camera was upside-down. Once I had digitized the items, I downloaded the cards (backed them up), and started with my next phase - editing. I took multiple photographs of each item, so I had to choose the best one for this project. I also needed to remove the early photographs (they were out of focus), and the color-test ones.

Once all of the photographs had been returned to right-side-up, I needed to start the rest of the editing. Some of the photographs are tiny, wallet-sized photographs, while others are larger than 8x10. For some of the smaller ones, I used a yardstick to show size. It also meant that I needed to crop out the non-photograph area in the image. All of the items were not plumb straight so I had to straighten them, as well. The results could be rather funny, if I straightened the image, but not the contents of the image. Therefore, I made the decision to straighten the contents of the image, if it would be otherwise odd for the background to be tilted an unusual angle. This is the case with all of the photographs containing the Hatteras Lighthouse - the image wasn’t straight to begin with, so I oriented the image so the Hatteras Lighthouse is straight, as opposed to the image being straight.

In order to get the best color and show off the photographs, I placed the photographs on a black 8x10 foamcore matte. This meant that I had to crop out the black matte during the editing process. It seems to be taking forever, the editing, rotating, and cropping. Once everything has been cropped, I will need to go back through and see if anything needs any tweaking. I don’t think so, as they should be seen as they are.

As for my metadata, I will be using dates and names written on the back of the photographs (my mother, my grandmother and my great-aunt are remarkably good at recording pertinent caption information on the backs of photographs). I can also guesstimate years, given the age of the various babies in the photographs (eg: if there are only three Coyne babies in the photo, it was taken between July 1965 and October 1966) or other identifying information (eg: if my grandfather is wearing a wedding ring, the photograph was taken after June 1961). I also have the option of asking my grandmother for help with identifying people or places for the caption and keyword information. When in doubt, I will use the date written on the back on the photograph.

This weekend, I finished up the rotation and cropping of the photographs, and was able to remove a handful of duplicates which were missed the first time. After that, I started going back through the photographs, adding metadata and tags to the images in Lightroom. That metadata will be exported with the photographs when I start the process of uploading to ContentDM. This also means that I will know who is in the photographs, as I will be able to look at the metadata in Lightroom when adding metadata to the ContentDM collection.

I was also able to get some names and dates from my grandmother, as well as a reason for why we have her mother’s photograph collection, but nothing from my grandfather’s family. Basically, my great-grandmother’s family didn’t like my great-grandfather’s family and therefore didn’t have much to do with them.

All and all, I think I am a good place for finishing up the project by the end of the semester – I have all of the material digitized, and have given keywords to just shy of half of them. Unfortunately, the items that will need the longest captions are still to come. This is because these are the items which would never pass Optical Character Recognition software and I have been transcribing the handwritten captions into the caption field in Lightroom. One of the items is a baby book, which my great-grandmother handwrote in all of the information about her new baby. Another item is an Irish Free State passport, with everything either handwritten, in Irish, or both.