Preserving Digital Collections
For information science students who are interested in digital access and other digitization projects, you might want to check out the following title:Digital Scholarship edited by Marta Mestrovic Deyrup [Dewey ZA 4080 D549 2009].
This book is a collection of essays written by fellow librarians and archivists concerned with digitization efforts. Each essay presents a challenge or success study about establishing and maintaining digital collections in humanities-based environment. All IST tracks will find at least one chapter of interest. Here are some essays of interest in the book:
The “Russian Doll Effect��?: Making the Most of Your Digital Assets/ James Bradley
Bradley studies Ball State University Libraries in Indiana to show that digital objects may have been created to be used in a certain way but were utilized by diverse populations in others ways. He points out that creating any digital object or collection is subject to the Russian Doll Effect: “…objects being utilized outside of their original context, repurposed and embedded within secondary envionrmnets and access by a diverse user group using a variety of ever-changing information pathways and technologies��?.
The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System Online / Bradley L. Schaffner
This chapter discusses a Harvard digitization project dealing with extensive interviews carried out by the Harvard University’s Russian Research Center, studying Soviet Union émigrés who fled to displaced person camps after WWII. This project, known as the Harvard Project on the Soviet System, resulted in over 700 interviews, 60 psychological tests and thousands of questionnaires that sought to understand what life was like in the Soviet Union from 1917-1940.
GIS Technology as an Alternative Way of Access to Historical Knowledge/ Albina Moscicka
This technically-illustrated chapter, perhaps of interest for GIS students, describes how GIS functions can place historical collections and information on a map. Spatial features are studied in presenting researchers with another facet of gaining historical information.
Illuminating the Manuscript Leaves: Digitization Promotes Scholarship and Outreach / Rachel I. Howard, Delinda Stephens Buie and Amy Hanaford Purcell.
For those in the archives track and who love rare books, this chapter will be of interested as it discusses illuminated manuscripts and their digitization. The University of Louisville faced the issue of striking the balance between preserving valuable manuscript leaves and making them highly accessible to anyone, including inner-city school children. Howard et. al. marries these issues with the digitization solution: using ContentDM-based Digtial Collections so valuable manuscripts can be seen digitally in high-enough quality to demonstrate the intricate details medieval manuscripts contain without sacrificing stress on the original manuscript leaf.
This title is currently shelved in the downstairs circulating collection at Dewey. Ask at the Reference Desk if you need any help.
Blog post created by Jill Parsons