LIS 644: Digital Collections Evaluation

Assignment 1: Digital Collection Evaluation

According to Marchionini and Fox (1999), there are four dimensions of digital libraries: Community, Content, Services, and Technology. They are all inextricably linked, as you cannot have one without the others.

For this project, I chose the Digital Collections of Special Collections and Archives at Z. Smith Reynolds Library (ZSR), the library on the campus of Wake Forest University (WFU).

Community

Community is an important aspect of Wake Forest and ZSR. ZSR wants to be the major hangout place on campus, complete with Starbucks and comfortable chairs. Humans vs. Zombies is a fairly common attraction at the library, as seen through their social networking sites.

Mission Statement and Audience 

The mission statement of the Digital Collections at the Special Collections and Archives at Z. Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University is [that]:

Special Collections & Archives and the Digital Scholarship Unit are committed to digitizing and digitally preserving ZSR Library’s rare and unique materials in order to broaden access and use. This effort includes the creation, distribution, management, and ongoing preservation of digitized and born-digital materials for administrative, teaching, research, and public service needs (Digital Collections).

This shows how ZSR is committed to the community, which composes basically anyone who can access the collection. ZSR itself is primarily for the Wake Forest community, which includes students, faculty, staff, and non-WFU researchers. This is especially true for the rare books and the North Carolina Baptist Historical Collection. K-12 teachers are also part of the audience for the digital collections, as they could perhaps use the collection for their classes, depending on the subject. People working in public service are also part of the audience, as there is a lot of history recorded in the Howlers (Wake Forest’s yearbooks), the Wake Forest Magazines, and the Baptist Collection (Digital Collections).

I have chosen a few collections to show the breadth of the collection, as well as the scope of the audience. People looking for notes written in Venice may find what they are looking for in the Casa Artom (Venice House) Scrapbook Collection, as people are encouraged to leave notes in the visitors’ books. Someone interested in the history of Duke Tobacco may be interested in the Duke Tobacco Company Cigarette Cards, which were trading cards found in cigarette packs. There is a collection of oral histories of people associated with Wake Forest, which include service in World War II. There is a large collection of music manuscripts, with signatures, playbooks, and scores to look through. There are a number of civil war letters and diaries, perfect for someone just learning about the civil war in history class or the devoted researcher looking for family or just researching a specific battle. There are digitized copies of The Old Gold and Black, the student newspaper, which also covered current local events. There are digitized copies of the Wake Forest Magazine, which features stories about students, faculty, staff, and sometimes the community. And, as always, there is the North Carolina Baptist Historical Collection, which contains countless boxes of materials about the Baptist Convention and Baptist churches in North Carolina (Digital Collections, Casa Artom Scrapbooks, The North Carolina Historical Collection, Lipe Family Civil War Letters).

Who Created and Maintains the Collections

The digitized materials were created by ZSR, usually by students. The collection is maintained by ZSR and WFU. Some of the materials are more digitized than others, depending on a number of factors. Some materials are housed in much larger digital libraries or digital repositories, such as the Digital Library of Georgia, Digital North Carolina, and Digital Forsyth. WFU contributes digitized materials to large digital libraries, such as Religion in North Carolina, which are maintained by the hosting site (in this case the Internet Archive) (Digital Collections).

How is the Digital Collection Funded?

There is very little information about the funding. Wake Forest is a private institution. Some of the digitization is grant funded, such as the Biblical Recorder Collection, which is housed off of the WFU web. Some specific collections may have been grant funded, and may say that, but there is very little on the start and landing pages about the collections. Most would be funded by WFU, donations, or from payment from a researcher who wants materials digitized for research purposes (Special Collections and Archives charge $1 per page for digitization). (Digital Collections, the Biblical Recorder, ZSR Special Collections Reference Desk: Forms and What to Do with them)

Content

What is available from the Digital Collections at ZSR? What type of materials are available? How is it organized? Where are the physical materials housed?

Types of materials

There are numerous types of materials contained within the Digital Collections. I have listed some of them below.

• Confederate broadsides from the Civil War
• Reel-to-Reel tapes
• Books and manuscripts
• Scrapbooks (such as the Casa Artom Scrapbooks)
• Interviews with Gandhi (collected by alums)
• Printing blocks from Dublin’s Dolmen Press
• Cigarette cards from Duke Tobacco
• Civil War Diaries
• Film stills (Guiseppe de Santis)
• Oral Histories
• Music manuscripts (letters, postcards, business cards, photographs, and programs
• Paintings (Joseph Severn)
• Photographs (Lloyd Winchall Biebigherser)
• Baptist records
• Newspapers (the Old Gold and Black)
• The Ronald Watkins Collection
• Theatre Prints
• Video from Voices of Wake Forest
• Interviews, and
• Copies of the Wake Forest Magazine (Digital Collections).

Collections Development Policy

The collection development policy is at the bottom of the collection development page. There are two main reasons for something to be digitized

1. Ongoing digitization - an entire collection is being digitized, for example the magazines or Howlers.
2. Patron requests - patrons can request digital reproductions of materials.

There are, of course, considerations as to what gets digitized, which includes the condition of the item in question, the legality of digitizing the item, and the resource use required to digitize the material(s). (Collections Development Policy).

Who can add items to the Digital Collections

Who can add items to the digital collection? That would be the staff of Special Collections and Archives, with emphasis on the Digital Scholarship Initiative, who digitizes the material (learned during practicum with Special Collections and Archives, Summer 2016).

Organization of the Digital Collections

The Digital Collections are organized alphabetically by the name of the collection. Those collections housed outside of ZSR are listed in alphabetical order below the list of ZSR-held collections. Within the collection, there is a brief overview/summary, and then a few of the most recent additions to the collection. If you click on “see more” the results display in alphabetical order. One can search by keyword within the collections, and results are shown in order of “relevance,” but can be changed to “title.” Searching and browsing will be covered in more detail under “services.” (Digital Collections, Casa Artom).

Relationship to the physical library? 

The Digital Collections are almost completely comprised of digitized objects for which the original resides within ZSR or an off-site storage facility. Some materials were born-digital, as there are several collections of audio/visual materials, including interviews, for which there is no physical copy. One collection in particular is not housed in ZSR, nor even North Carolina. The Casa Artom Scrapbooks are housed in Casa Artom, Venice, Italy, and reproductions are housed within ZSR. (Casa Artom, NCBHC)

ZSR also has a lot of digitized materials housed in much larger Digital Libraries. For example, the Civil War in the American South Collection is housed with the software Galileo, through ASERL and the Digital Library of Georgia. Digital NC houses digitized copies of both the Howler and the Student, and ZSR is a major contributor to the Digital Forsyth collection (Civil War in the American South, Digital NC, and Digital Forsyth).

Services

What sort of services are offered? How can the materials be accessed? How does one search? Can one browse? Are the materials findable via a major search engine?

Who can access it and how can it be accessed?

Everything can be accessed via the WFU website: www.wfu.edu, or through ZSR’s website: zsr.wfu.edu. At the far bottom left, under Special Collections, the first hyperlink is to Digital Collections.

ZSR’s Digital Collections can be accessed by just about anyone with an internet connection, though the Story Corps collection can only be accessed from WFU. Some of the non-WFU hosted collections may be blocked by content blockers, though Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools (WS/FCS) does not appear to block any of them (Digital Collections).

Browsing, searching, selecting

Mentioned above under content was browsing and searching. One can search by any number of keywords, and the results will display in the order of relevance (easily changeable to title or date). Searching by keyword may cause one to miss something, if it wasn’t tagged with that keyword. One can also search by author, title, or subject. Under “author,” those entered as “author” show up in alphabetical order by the author’s Library of Congress Authority File, with the number of works appearing next to the name. There appears to be no section of “unknown” for a work with no known author. Under “title,” everything appears alphabetical by title. There does not appear to be a heading for non-titled works. Under “subject,” one finds Library of Congress Subject Headings, and the number of materials which would be filed under that heading. For example, two works fall under: Baltimore (Md)--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Songs and music [2] (Confederate Broadsides).

Major search engine 

I decided to try to find the Casa Artom Scrapbooks, using only keywords and Google. In order to make sure that there were no saved cookies affecting my results, I used a different browser - FireFox.

Figure 1: Casa Artom Scrapbooks

The first search was a test search, where I searched the name of the collection, which also happens to be what is contained within the collection - Casa Artom Scrapbooks. The first result on Google is for the digital collection, the second is for the finding aid to the physical collection.

Figure 2: Casa Artom

In the first ten results, there is nothing about the scrapbooks, though there are a lot from Wake Forest sites, which may put someone on the right track.

Figure 3: WFU Scrapbooks

Fourth result, and two of the top three results also ZSR Scrapbook collections (result two is a blog entry about the restoration and preservation of a collection, including scrapbooks).

Figure 4: Venice House

For a lot of people, Casa Artom is referred to as “Venice House,” as it is WFU’s house in Venice, much like Flow House (Vienna) is often referred to as “Vienna House.” There were Image results of houses in Venice, and Venice House seems to be a fairly common name for pizza restaurant.

Figure 5: Venice House WFU

This search brings back two study abroad pages (one via the provost and one from admissions), and the next two are Casa Artom. Nothing about the scrapbooks, though.

Figure 6: Venice House Scrapbooks

These results speak for themselves, as they have nothing to do with Casa Artom. While it may be possible for the Casa Artom Scrapbooks to be in the results, they would be buried under scrapbooking and Pinterest pages.

Figure 7: Venice House WFU Scrapbooks

The person running this search would know what they are looking for, but not necessarily that they could do this through ZSR’s website. The first two results are the scrapbook collection, and the next two are information about Casa Artom. The first result is the finding aid for the physical scrapbooks and the second is for the digital collection.

Figure 8: Grand Canal WFU

This search returns nothing about the scrapbooks, but a lot about Casa Artom itself, as Casa Artom is situated on the Grand Canal. This shows that the people creating the metadata were thinking about how people search.

Figure 9: Grand Canal WFU Scrapbook

The first result is the finding aid for the physical copies of the scrapbooks, held as reproductions in ZSR. The second result is the finding aid for the digitized copies of the scrapbooks. The third result is a blog post by SCA, about the scrapbooks, and contains a hyperlink to the digital collections page, for better browsing of the scrapbooks.

In conclusion, the Casa Artom Scrapbooks are findable via a major search engine, but one would need to know what they are looking for, as totally generic keywords (scrapbook, Venice, Grand Canal, etc) wouldn’t return the Casa Artom Scrapbooks. If someone were to search for them using those keywords and “WFU,” it would greatly increase their chances of getting the results that they were looking for.

Technology

What sort of technology is used? Are there outside links to other Digital Libraries, if the material crosses over to that library’s collection?

Hardware/software Used 

Most of the digital collections do not mention what software they use. However, the collections held off of WFU (the shared collections) do. For example, the Biblical Recorder Collection was created using Olive, and Civil War in the American South was created using Galileo, in conjunction with the Digital Library of Georgia. Digital NC (Howler, Student, Catalogs and Bulletins, and Commencement Programs) uses ContentDM for their software. Religion in North Carolina (a collaborative effort between Duke University, Wake Forest University and UNC Chapel Hill) is run through the Internet Archive. Digital Forsyth does not mention what software they use on their website.

Links to other Digital Libraries

As mentioned, there are many links to larger digital libraries, including Digital North Carolina, Digital Forsyth, and the Digital Library of Georgia. This made me wonder if there were any connections between ZSR’s digitized materials and UNC Greensboro’s digital collections.

I decided to focus on ZSR’s Lipe Family Civil War Letters as there is a lot of material, and the Lipe family would have been in North Carolina. I decided to see if I could connect it to the Greensboro History Collection. Perhaps the Lipe Family was from Greensboro or corresponded with someone from Greensboro, and therefore would be in both collections. There were no results in N.C. Runaway Slave Advertisements (so the Lipes either were not slaveholders or did not put advertisements in the paper), nor were there any references to them in city directories. There were some possible results from the Greensboro Patriot, but the text-search feature made it hard to find the result and decide if it was valid (Lipe Family Civil War Letters).

Regardless, there were no outside links to the UNC Greensboro Digital Collections.

There are, as stated above, links to outside collections, but the collection is part of a large collection, not a direct link between the two collections.

Conclusion

As Keith Gorman (Assistant Dean for Special Collections and University Archives at Jackson Library, UNC Greensboro) says, “services drive collections.” He was talking about how Jackson Library decided what to digitize and how to increase the number of users of the Special Collections and Archives at UNC Greensboro, but he was completely right. In this case, the service offered by ZSR’s Digital Collections drive what gets digitized by Digital Scholarship. And, what the community wants drives what content is added, and what services are available. If the users wanted a live chat with a member of SCA staff, that could be added.

In conclusion, ZSR’s Digital Collections are well integrated between community, content, services, and technology. There is a lot of overlap, as content creates the community, but the users also help decide what content gets digitized. The services would not be possible without technology, and the community decides what types of services help them with the content. The collaboratively held collections show just how large the community is, as people in Georgia can use material held at ZSR to help them learn about the Civil War in the American South.

Works Cited Page

Civil War in the American South. (2016 January 01). Z. Smith Reynolds Library (Wake Forest University) All Items. Retrieved from: http://american-south.org/institutions/ewf/items/ ?Welcome.

Digital Forsyth. Digital Forsyth. Retrieved from: http://www.digitalforsyth.org/.

Digital NC. Wake Forest University Magazine. Retrieve from: http://library.digitalnc.org/ cdm/search/searchterm/Magazines+(periodicals)!Wake%20Forest%20University/field/ format!contri/mode/exact!exact/conn/and!and/cosuppress/.

Digital NC. Wake Forest University Yearbooks (Howler). Retrieved from: http://library. digitalnc.org/cdm/search/searchterm/Yearbooks!Wake%20Forest%20University/field/ format!contri/mode/exact!exact/conn/and!and/display/200/order/datea/ad/asc.

Marchionini, Gary and Fox, Edward A. (1999). Progress Toward Digital Libraries: Augmentation through Integration. Information Processing & Management, 35(3), 219- 225. Retrieved from: http://uncg.worldcat.org/oclc/425189741.

Special Collections and Archives – Z. Smith Reynolds Library.  Casa Artom Scrapbook Collection. Retrieved from: https://wakespace.lib.wfu.edu/handle/10339/33254.

Special Collections and Archives – Z. Smith Reynolds Library. Collection Development Policy. Retrieved from: http://zsr.wfu.edu/special/about/collection-development-policy/.

Special Collections and Archives – Z. Smith Reynolds Library. Confederate Broadsides. Retrieved from: https://wakespace.lib.wfu.edu/handle/10339/44.

Special Collections and Archives – Z. Smith Reynolds Library. Digital Collections. Retrieved from: http://zsr.wfu.edu/special/collections/digital/.

Special Collections and Archives – Z. Smith Reynolds Library. Lipe Family Civil War Letters. Retrieved from: https://wakespace.lib.wfu.edu/handle/10339/33600.

Special Collections and Archives – Z. Smith Reynolds Library. North Carolina Baptist Historical Collection. Retrieved from: https://wakespace.lib.wfu.edu/handle/10339/33589

Special Collections and Archives – Z. Smith Reynolds Library. The Biblical Recorder. Retrieved from: http://digital.olivesoftware.com/Default/Skins/WakeforestA/Client.asp?skin=Wake forestA&AW=1473106068256&AppName=2.

Z. Smith Reynolds Library. (2016, September 02). ZSR Special Collections Reference Desk: Forms and What to Do with them. Retrieved from: http://guides.zsr.wfu.edu/c.php? g=109801&p=86061.