The 1905 to 1939 Chronicle issues are now live online at the Duke Chronicle Digital Collection. This marks the completion of a multi-year project to digitize Duke’s student newspaper. Not only will digitization provide easier online access to this gem of a collection, but it will also help preserve the originals held in the University Archives. With over 5,600 issues digitized and over 63,000 pages scanned, this massive collection is sure to have something for everyone.
The first two decades of the Chronicle saw its inception and growth as the student newspaper under the title The Trinity Chronicle. In the mid-1920s after the name change to Duke University, the Chronicle followed suit. In Fall of 1925, it officially became The Duke Chronicle.
The Nineteen-teens saw the growth of the university, with new buildings popping up, while others burned down – a tragic fire decimated the Washington Duke Building.
In the shadow of the Great Depression, the 1930s at Duke was a time to unite around a common cause – sports! Headlines during this time, like decades to follow, abounded with games, rivalries, and team pride.
Take the time to explore this great resource, and see how Duke and the world has changed. View it through the eyes of student journalists, through advertisements and images. So much occurred from 1905 to 1989, and the Duke Chronicle was there to capture it.
Post contributed by Jessica Serrao, former King Intern for Digital Collections.
Audiovisual materials account for a significant portion of Duke’s Digital Collections. All told, we now have over 3,400 hours of A/V content accessible online, spread over 14,000 audio and video files discoverable in various platforms. We’ve made several strides in recent years introducing impactful collections of recordings like H. Lee Waters Films, the Jazz Loft Project Records, and Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South. This spring, the Duke Chapel Recordings collection (including over 1,400 recordings) became our first A/V collection developed in the emerging Duke Digital Repository platform. Completing this first phase of the collection required some initial development for A/V interfaces, and it’ll keep us on our toes to do more as the project progresses through 2019.
Preparing A/V for Access Online
When digitizing audio or video, our diligent Digital Production Center staff create a master file for digital preservation, and from that, a single derivative copy that’s smaller and appropriately compressed for public consumption on the web. The derivative files we create are compressed enough that they can be reliably pseudo-streamed (a.k.a. “progressive download”) to a user over HTTP in chunks (“byte ranges”) as they watch or listen. We are not currently using a streaming media server.
Here’s what’s typical for these files:
Audio. MP3 format, 128kbps bitrate. ~1MB/minute.
Video. MPEG4 (.mp4) wrapper files. ~17MB/minute or 1GB/hour.
The video track is encoded as H.264 at about 2,300 kbps; 640×480 for standard 4:3.
The audio track is AAC-encoded at 160kbps.
These specs are also consistent with what we request of external vendors in cases where we outsource digitization.
The A/V Player Interface: JWPlayer
Since 2014, we have used a local instance of JWPlayer as our A/V player of choice for digital collections. JWPlayer bills itself as “The Most Popular Video Player & Platform on the Web.” It plays media directly in the browser by using standard HTML5 video specifications (supported for most intents & purposes now by all modern browsers).
In the Duke Digital Repository and our archival finding aids, we’re now using the latest version of JWPlayer. It’s got a modern, flat aesthetic and is styled to match our color palette.
Playlists
Here’s an area where we extended the new JWPlayer with some local development to enhance the UI. When we have a playlist—that is, a recording that is made up of more than one MP3 or MP4 file—we wanted a clearer way for users to navigate between the files than what comes out of the box. It was fairly easy to create some navigational links under the player that indicate how many files are in the playlist and which is currently playing.
Captions & Transcripts
Work is now underway (by three students in the Duke Divinity School) to create timed transcripts of all the sermons given within the recorded services included in the Duke Chapel Recordings project.
We contracted through Popup Archive for computer-generated transcripts as a starting point. Those are about 80% accurate, but Popup provides a really nice interface for editing and refining the automated text before exporting it to its ultimate destination.
One of the most interesting aspects of HTML5 <video> is the <track> element, wherein you can associate as many files of captions, subtitles, descriptions, or chapter information as needed. Track files are encoded as WebVTT; so we’ll use WebVTT files for the transcripts once complete. We’ll also likely capture the start of a sermon within a recording as a WebVTT chapter marker to provide easier navigation to the part of the recording that’s the most likely point of interest.
JWPlayer displays WebVTT captions (and chapter markers, too!). The captions will be wonderful for accessibility (especially for people with hearing disabilities); they can be toggled on/off within the media player window. We’ll also be able to use the captions to display an interactive searchable transcript on the page near the player (see this example using Javascript to parse the WebVTT). Our friends at NCSU Libraries have also shared some great work parsing WebVTT (using Ruby) for interactive transcripts.
The Future
We have a few years until the completion of the Duke Chapel Recordings project. Along the way, we expect to:
add closed captions to the A/V
create an interactive transcript viewer from the captions
work those captions back into the index to aid discovery
add a still-image extract from each video to use as a thumbnail and “poster frame” image
offer up much more A/V content in the Duke Digital Repository
A broadside is a single-sheet notice or advertisement, often textual rather than pictorial. The historical type of broadsides called ephemera (the Latin word, inherited from Greek, referred to things that do not last long) are temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away.
The Broadsides and Ephemera Collection (David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University) captures written and printed materials of widespread and short-lived use; items, such as event announcements, letters, tickets, posters, social notices, or printouts on current political affairs whose impact was not meant to sustain the test of time. These are the materials that I want to bring to your attention.
The collection includes items from more than 28 countries. The material is quite heterogeneous in terms of content and historical periods. From the Viceroyalty of Peru, to the tensions between Japanese and American soldiers in the early 1940s in the Philippines, one feels a bit like a time traveler without much of a compass, navigating across a sea of material of daunting complexity. After the first scroll through the many rows and tabs in the collection’s Excel sheet, I began questioning, amidst gallons of coffee, the romantic view of the cataloging librarian as a detective of knowledge long lost. Voltaire’s words at the beginning of The Age of Louis XIV regained strength: “Not everything that is done deserves recording”.
Yet, as I delved deeper into the collection, I quickly discovered that Ephemera provides a unique window to understand much about the working of human communities all over the world. In fact, the range of common themes emerging is sort of striking given its geographical and temporal scope. It is actually fun. Let me focus on three themes that consistently emerge across the different sections of the international broadsides.
Ephemera work first as a record of the basic organization of social communities. In these instances art becomes a tool to highlight key moments in the everyday life of very diverse communities. The contrast between the 1932 poster for the “Feria de Abril” in Seville, Spain and the 1946 University of Oxford’s Almanac is very telling in this regard. The former serves to mark the most important week in any given year in Seville’s life: around Easter, the city turns into a mixture of art, devotion, and excess in a perfectly balanced and stratified way (different sectors, businesses and social classes get together to party at night after taking part in the parades or processions thanking and honoring the patrons/matrons of the different churches in the city).
The Almanac provides a list of the head of colleges and the university calendar, making public the key milestones in the life of the university. While the purpose and activities highlighted by these two items could not be more different, their basic function is the same. Both convey useful knowledge about the life of two cities driven by very different pursuits. I know where I would rather study, but it is also quite clear where one ought to go to have some real fun.
A second function of the sort of items included in the international broadsides is to offer a glimpse of political and social relations in many different places. The records on England, for instance, include a letter from subjects to the new King, William of Orange, thanking him for the removal of a the “hearth tax” in 1689, or a piece capturing neatly the scope and goals of the chartist movement in their quest for universal male suffrage, the secret ballot, and annual Parliament elections among other things.
The contrast between these two documents (William of Orange order for taking off the Chimney-Money, and the Birmingham Reform Petition) captures nicely the road traveled in England from the Glorious Revolution at the end of the 17th century, to the forefront of economic and political modernization in the 19th century, when the Chartism took place.
On a grimmer note, the records on Germany capture effectively the rise of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (commonly referred to in English as the Nazi Party) in the interwar period in cities like Heidelberg, and the consequences that ensued in terms of mass casualties for ones or exile for others.
But the richest and most comprehensive theme that gives coherence to the records across different countries is the one of war and political persuasion/propaganda. Persuasion comes in very different forms. It can be intellectually driven and directed to small circles: the English records feature letters from American activists to English political philosophers such as John Stuart Mill in a quest for support for the anti-slavery movement. Or it can be emotionally driven and directed to broad populations. It is in this particular variety of ephemera where Duke’s International Broadsides Collection really shines.
The records contain dozens of art manifestations from pro-Axis actors in Italy, Germany, and Japan, as well as efforts from the British and U.S. armies to undermine the morale and support of Japanese troops in the Philippines after 1945. Among the former, who knew that the motto of House Stark in Game of Thrones (Winter is coming) was to be found in a piece of political propaganda from Italian fascists against the Allies? Or that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s virtuous smile was wider the more missiles fell on the Italian cities? Or that the good children of Italy were at risk of being pulled apart by the three evils of Communism, Judaism and Freemasonry? Or that the Australian soldiers would do better to return home to protect their women from the American soldiers’ predatory behavior?
Finally, another good example is this tricky Japanese leaflet. At first, it appears to show just an soldier and his wife embracing under the beautiful moon, but when it is unfolded, although we can still see the soldier’s undamaged legs, we see that he is dead on the battlefield near a barbed wire.
Regardless of their goals, values, and motives, and our views about them, it is remarkable to observe how all parties involved use popular forms of art and imagery to appeal to their constituencies’ worst fears and prejudices about the other and to present themselves as the more humane side.
As you can see there is much to learn and enjoy by delving in collections such as the international broadsides. Along the process, the metadata librarian confronts an important trade-off between efficiency and usefulness, between speed in processing and detail in the amount of information provided for the prospective user. If we want the collection to be useful for students and scholars, it is necessary to provide a minimum of contextual information for them to be able to locate each item and make the best of it. Yet in many instances this proves a challenging task, one that may well require hours, if not days, of digging into every possible angle that may prove helpful. At the extreme, this is bound to pose too much of a burden in terms of processing time. At this point, I do not have a magic formula to balance this trade-off but I tend to lean on the side of providing as much detail as required for a proper understanding of each piece. Otherwise, the digitally processed item will fail to meet Voltaire’s criteria for what deserves to be recorded. A record in a vacuum, whether in bites or ink, hardly allows users to appreciate those “little things” that, as Conan Doyle’s axiom has it, “are infinitely the most important”.
The Digital Projects and Production Services is excited to announce that the 1940s and 1950s Chronicle are now digitized and accessible online at the Duke Chronicle Digital Collection. These two new decades represent the next installment in a series of releases, which now completes a string of digitized Chronicles spanning from 1940 to 1989.
The 1940s and 1950s took Americans from WWII atrocities and scarcities to post-war affluence of sprawling suburbias, mass consumerism, and the baby boom. It marked a time of changing American lifestyles—a rebound from the Great Depression just ten years before. At Duke, these were decades filled with dances and balls and Joe College Weekends, but also wartime limitations.
A year before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Duke lost its president of thirty years, William Preston Few. The Chronicle reported Few to be “a remarkable man” who “worked ceaselessly towards [Duke University’s] growth” during a time when it was “a small, practically unheard-of college.” While Duke may have been relatively small in 1940, it boasted a good number of schools and colleges, and a lively social scene. Sorority and fraternity events abounded in the 1940s and 1950s. So, too, did fights to overhaul the fraternity and sorority rushing systems. Social organizations and clubs regularly made the Chronicle’s front page with their numerous events and catchy names, like Hoof ‘n’ Horn, Bench ‘n’ Bar, and Shoe ‘n’ Slipper. These two decades also saw milestone celebrations, like the Chronicle’s 50th anniversary and the 25th Founders’ Day celebration.
Sports was another big headliner. In 1942, Duke hosted the Rose Bowl. Usually played in Pasadena, California, the game was moved to Durham for fear of a Japanese attack on the West Coast during World War II. The 1940s also saw the rivalry between Duke and UNC escalate into violent outbursts. Pranks became more destructive and, in 1945, concerned student leaders pleaded for a “cease-fire.” Among the pranks were cases of vandalism and theft. In 1942, Duke “ramnappers” stole what they believed to be Carolina’s ram mascot, Rameses. It was later discovered they heisted the wrong ram. In 1949, unknown assailants painted the James B. Duke statuein Carolina blue, and Duke administration warned students against retaliation. As one article from 1944 informs us, the painting of Duke property by UNC rivals was not a new occurrence, and if a Carolina painting prankster was captured, the traditional punishment was a shaved head. In an attempt to reduce the vandalism and pranks, the two schools’ student governments introduced the Victory Bell tradition in 1948 to no avail. The pranks continued into the 1950s. In 1951, Carolina stole the Victory Bell from Duke, which was returned by police to avoid a riot. It was again stolen and returned in 1952 after Duke’s victory over Carolina. That year, the Chronicle headline echoed the enthusiasm on campus: BEAT CAROLINA! I urge you to explore the articles yourself to find out more about these crazy hijinks!
The articles highlighted here are only the tip of the iceberg. The 1940s and 1950s Chronicles are filled with entertaining and informative articles on what Duke student life was like over fifty years ago. Take a look for yourself and see what these decades have to offer!
Back in the fall, we convened a Metadata Task Group (which I chair) charged, in part, with defining, overseeing, and performing the work necessary to remediate Duke University Libraries’ digital collections metadata in preparation for migration from our old technical platform to the Duke Digital Repository. This involved an intensive analysis and review of our existing metadata field usage, and documentation of that analysis as well as recommendations for remediation. Before we truly engaged with this work, however, we defined a set of guiding principles to provide ourselves with a context for completing our tasks.
The first guiding principle we defined was that of Fitness for Purpose. As applied to metadata work, fitness for purpose entails that metadata be appropriate for user and system needs, both now and, in as much as it can be predetermined, in the future. This is an overarching principle which informs subsequent guiding principles. It seems like a pretty basic concept, but I think it is all too easy to lose sight of who will be using the collections we create metadata for (which is a difficult question to answer anyways), and of course, it’s always important to ensure that the metadata specifications take into account the technical environment in which it will live.
Our next guiding principle is Broad Applicability. Over the past 20 years, digital collections at Duke were developed often in an ad hoc way, each digital collection’s metadata specifications being created in a somewhat isolated fashion. Now that we have a dedicated staff person (me!) to take a comprehensive look at metadata practices at DUL, we are very interested in developing guidelines and specifications that can be applied broadly, across a variety of collections and materials. This is especially important considering the breadth and variety of collections that will live together in the Duke Digital Repository.
Along with Broad Applicability, Broad Shareability is equally important. With the formation of metadata aggregators such as the Digital Public Library of America, the possibilities for sharing our metadata and thus our resources broadly is much greater than in the past, and therefore metadata must be remediated, created, and mapped to widely used standards in ways that allow for clear, meaningful sharing. As much as possible, we are aligning our metadata practices with the DPLA’s Metadata Application Profile.
And, of course, our guiding principles wouldn’t be complete without a nod toward the future: our last principle is that we be Forward-Thinking. Change is a constant when working with metadata/digital resources, and so we must do our best to develop recommendations and guidelines that allow for this eventuality, e.g., adopting standards and practices that have the greatest staying power and allow for the adoption of new technologies. Specifically, we should be aware of linked data technologies and make recommendations that are linked-data aware and/or ready.
At the outset of this project it had felt a little bit like, “well, duh”, to develop these broad guiding principles, but at 6+ months in, I am really glad we took the time to define them – I have referred back to them periodically as we tackle each task in our charge, and find them helpful not just when communicating outside our group but as a way to provide a sort of intellectual context internally as well.
To recap, EDTF is a machine readable date encoding standard that enables us to record dates with various levels of precision and certainty — important for cultural heritage collections.
One challenge of working with EDTF formatted dates is that it’s not necessarily obvious to humans what they mean. To the best of my knowledge, the available tools for working with EDTF dates are intended for parsing EDTF strings into objects that are understandable to programming languages. This is great for working with EDTF dates if you want to have the software do things like sort a list of items into date order or provide a searchable index of years. These tools are less helpful for outputting human readable versions of EDTF encoded dates, such as for an item’s metadata record display.
For instance, many of the photographs in the Alex Harris collection are dated with a season and year, such as “summer 1972.” EDTF specifies that “summer 1972” should be encoded as “1972-22.” This is great for our digital collections software, which knows what “1972-22” means (thanks to the EDTF gem). However, people unfamiliar with the EDTF standard will likely not understand what the date means.
But in the metadata display in the digital repository’s public interface we want to display the date in a more human friendly format:
Because EDTF is machine readable it’s possible to create a set of rules for transforming the dates for display. These rules can get complicated so I wrote a Ruby Gem that masks some of the complexity and adds a humanize method to any EDTF date object. This makes it simple to transform any EDTF encoded date to a human readable string.
> Date.edtf('1972-22').humanize
=> "summer 1972"
Although more work could be done to make it more flexible, the gem is somewhat configurable. For instance, an uncertain date with year precision is encoded in EDTF as “1972~”. The humanize method will by default output this as “circa 1972”:
> Date.edtf('1972~').humanize
=> "circa 1972"
But if for some reason I wanted a different output for an uncertain date with year precision I could modify the edtf-humanize configurations:
The humanize method that edtf-humanize adds to EDTF objects makes it much easier to display EDTF encoded date metadata in configurable human friendly formats.
The edtf-humanize gem is available on GitHub and RubyGems.org so it can be included in any Rails project’s gemfile. It should be considered an early release and could use some enhancement for use cases beyond Duke’s Digital Repository where it was originally designed to be used.
I think I speak for all of us in the Digital Collections Program when I say how excited we are to roll out this complex collection of digitized audio, video, and manuscripts that document sermons at Duke Chapel from the 1940s to early 2000s. You can now watch, listen to, and read sermons given at the Chapel by an array of preachers, including Duke Divinity faculty, and notable female and African American preachers. Many of the recordings contain full worship services complete with music by the Chapel’s 100-voice choir and four pipe organs. There are also special services, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. memorials, Good Fridays and Christmas Eves, Baccalaureates, and Convocations.
Digitization of this collection was made possible through our collaboration with Duke University’s Divinity School, Duke Chapel, University Archives, and Duke University Libraries’ Digital Collections Program. In 2015, the Divinity School received a Lilly Endowment Grant that funded the outsourcing of A/V digitization through two vendors, The Cutting Corporation and A/V Geeks, and the in-house digitization of the printed sermons. The grant will also support metadata enhancements to improve searchability and discovery, like tagging references within the recordings to biblical verses and liturgical seasons. The Divinity School will tackle this exciting portion of the project over the next two years, and their hard work will help users search deeper into the content of the collection.
Back in 2014, digital collections program manager, Molly Bragg, announced the release of the first installation of digitized Duke Chapel Recordings. It consisted of 168 audio and video items and a newly developed video player. This collection was released in response to the high priority Duke Chapel placed on digitization, and high demand from patrons to digitize and view the materials. Fast forward two years and we have upped our game by expanding the collection to over 1,400 audio and video items, and adding more than 1,300 printed sermon manuscripts. Many of the printed sermons match up to a recording, as they are often the exact document the preacher used to deliver their sermon. The online content now represents a large percentage of the original materials held in the Duke University Archives taken from the Duke University Chapel Recordings and Duke Chapel Records collections. Many of the audio reels were not included in the scope of the project and we hope to digitize these in the near future.
The Lilly Grant also provided funding to generate transcriptions of the audio-visual items, which we outsourced to Pop Up Archive, a company that specializes in creating timestamped transcripts and tags to make audio text searchable. Once the transcriptions are generated by Pop Up Archive and edited by Divinity students, they will be made available on the web interface alongside the recordings. All facets of this project support Divinity’s Duke Preaching Initiative to enhance homiletical education and pedagogy. With the release of the Duke Chapel Recordings Digital Collection, the Divinity School now has a great classroom resource to help students learn about the art of sermon writing and delivery.
The release of the Chapel Recordings marks yet another feat for the Digital Collections Program. This is the first audio-visual collection to be published in the new Tripod3 platform in conjunction with the Digital Collections migration into the Duke Digital Repository (see Will Sexton’s blog posts on the migration). Thanks to the hard work of many folks in the Digital Repository Services and Digital Projects and Production Services, this means for the user a new and squeaky clean interface to browse the collection. With the growing demand to improve online accessibility of audio-visual materials, Chapel Recordings has also been a great pilot project to explore how we can address A/V transcription needs across all our digital collections. It has presented us all with many challenges to overcome and successes to applaud along the way.
If you’re not intrigued by the collection already, here are some sermon titles to lure you in!
Last Summer, Sean and I wrote about efforts we were were undertaking with colleagues to assess the research and scholarly impact of Duke Digital Collections. Sean wrote about data analysis approaches we took to detect scholarly use, and I wrote about a survey we launched in Spring 2015. The goal of the survey was to gather information about our patrons and their motivations that were not obvious from Google Analytics and other quantitative data. The survey was live for 7 months, and today I’m here to share the full results.
In a nutshell (my post last Summer included many details about setting up the survey), the survey asked users, “who are you,” “why are you here,” and “what are you going to do with what you find here?” The survey was accessible from every page of our Digital Collections website from April 30 – November 30, 2015. We set up event tracking in Google Analytics, so we know that around 43% of our 208,205 visitors during that time hovered on the survey link. A very small percentage of those clicked through (0.3% or 659 clicks), but 20% of the users that clicked through did answer the survey. This gave us a total of 132 responses, only one of which seems to be 100% spam. Traffic to the survey remained steady throughout the survey period. Now, onto the results!
Question 1: Who are you?
Respondents were asked to identify as one of 2 academically oriented groups (students or educators), librarians, or as “other”. Results are represented in the bubble graphic below. You can see that the majority of respondents identified as “other”. Of those 65 respondents, 30 described themselves, and these labels have been grouped in the pie chart below. It is fascinating to note that other than the handful of self-identified musicians (I grouped vocalists, piano players, anything musical under musicians) and retirees, there is a large variety of self descriptors listed.
The results breakdown of responses to question 1 remained steady over time when you compare the overall results to those I shared last Summer. Overall 26% of respondents identified as student (compared to 25% in July), 14% identified as educator (compared to 18% earlier), 9% identified as librarian, archivist or museum overall (exactly the same as earlier), and 51% identified as other (47% in the initial results). We thought these results might change when the Fall academic semester started, but as you can see that was not the case.
Question 2: Why are you here?
As I said above, our goal in all of our assessment work this time around was to look for signs of scholarly use so we were very interested in knowing if visitors come to Duke Digital Collections for academic research or for some other reason. Of the 125 total responses to question 2, personal research and casual browsing outweighed academic research ( see in the bar graph below). Respondents were able to check multiple categories. There were 8 instances where the same respondent selected casual browsing and personal research, 4 instances where casual browsing was paired with followed a link, 3 where academic research was tied to casual browsing, and 3 where academic research was tied to other. Several users selected more than 2 categories, but by in large respondents selected 1 category only. To me, this infers that our users are very clear about why they come to Duke Digital Collections.
Respondents were prompted to enter their research topic/purpose whether it be academic, personal or other. Every respondent that identified with other filled in a topic, 73% of personal researchers identified their topic, and 63% of academic researchers shared their topics. Many of the topics/purposes were unique, but research around music came up across all 3 categories as did topics related the history of a local region (all different regions). Advertising related topics also came up under academic and personal research. Several of the respondents who chose other entered a topic that suggested that they were in the early phases of a book project or looking for materials to use in classes. To me these seemed like more academically associated activities, and I was surprised they turned up under “other”. If I was able to ask follow up questions to these respondents, I would prompt for more information about their topic and why they defined it as academic or personal. Similarly, if we were designing this survey again, I think we would want to include a category for academic related uses apart from official research.
The results to question 2 also remained mostly consistent since our first view of the results last Summer. Academic research and casual browsing were tied at a 28% response rate each initially, and finished tied at a 30% response rate. The followed a link response rate when down from 17% to an overall 11%, personal research also went down from 44% to 36% overall, and other climbed slightly from 11% to 15% overall.
Question 3: What will you do with the images and/or resources you find on this site?
The third survey question attempts to get at the “now what” part of resource discovery. Following trends with the first two questions, it is not surprising that a majority of the 121 respondences are oriented towards “personal” use (see bar graph below). Like question 2, respondents were able to select multiple choices, however they tended to choose only one response.
Everyone who selected “other” did enter a statement, and of these a handful seemed like they could have fit under one of the defined categories. Several of the write-ins mentioned wanting to share items they found with family and friends assumably using methods other than social media. Five “others” responded with potentially academic related pursuits such as “an article”, “a book”, “update a book”, and 2 class related projects. I re-ran some numbers and combined these 5 responses with the academic publication, teaching tool, and homework respondents for a total of 55 possibly academically related answers or 45% of the total response to this question. The new 45% “academicish” grouping, as I like to think of it, is a more substantial total than each academic topic on its own. I propose this as an interesting way to slice and dice the data, and I’m sure there are others.
Observations
My colleagues and I have been very pleased with the results of this survey. First, we couldn’t be more thrilled that we were successfully able to collect necessary data (any data!). At the beginning of this assessment project, we were looking for evidence of research, scholarly and instructional use of Duke Digital Collections. We did find some, but this survey along with other data shows that the majority of our users come to Duke Digital Collections with a more personal agenda. We welcome the opportunity to make this kind of individual impact, and it is powerful. If the respondents of this survey are a representative sample of our user base, then our patrons are actively performing our collections (we have a lot of music), sharing items with family, friends, and community, as well as using the collections to pursue a wide variety of interests.
While this survey data assures us that we are making individual impacts, it also reveals that there is more we can do to cultivate our scholarly and researcher audience. This will be a long term process, but we have made some short term progress. As a result of our work in 2015, my colleagues and I put together a “teaching with digital collections” webpage to collect examples of instructional use and encourage more. In the course of developing a new platform for digital collections, we are also exploring new tools that could serve scholarly researchers more effectively. With a look towards the longer term, all of Duke University Libraries has been engaged in strategic planning for the past year, and Digital Collections is no exception. As we develop our goals around scholarly use, survey data like this is an important asset.
I’m curious to hear from others, what has your experience been with surveys? What have you learned and how have you put that knowledge to use? Feel free to comment or contact me directly! (molly.bragg at duke.edu)
Our new digital collections (the ones in the Duke Digital Repository) have included a prominent link (under header “Source Collection”) from a digitized item to its source archival collection with some snippets of info from the collection guide presented in a popover. This was an important step toward connecting the dots, but still only gets someone to the top of the collection guide; from there, researchers are left on their own for figuring out where in the collection an item resides.
This linkage is powered by indicating an ArchivesSpace ID in a digital object’s administrative metadata; it can be the ID for a series, subseries, folder, or item title, so we’re flexible in how granular the connection is between the digital object and its archival description.
Sticky Title & Series Info
Our archival collection guides are currently rendered as single webpages broken into sections. Larger collections make for long webpages. Sometimes they’re really super long. Where the contents of the collection are listed, there’s a visual hierarchy in place with nested descriptions of series, subseries, etc. but it’s still difficult to navigate around and simultaneously understand what it is you’re viewing. The physical tedium of scrolling and the cognitive load required to connect related descriptive information located far away on a page make for bad usability.
As of last week, we now we keep the title of the collection “stuck” to the top of the screen once you’re no longer viewing the top of the page (it also functions as a link to get back to the top). And even more helpful is a new sticky series header that links to the beginning of the archival series within which the currently visible items were arranged; there’s usually an important description up there that helps contextualize the items listed below. This sticky header is context-aware, meaning it follows you around like a loyal companion, updating itself perpetually to reflect where you are as you navigate up or down.
This feature is powered via the excellent Bootstrap Scrollspy Javascript utility combined with some custom styling.
All Series Browser
To give researchers easier browsing between different archival series in a collection, we added a link in the sticky header to browse “All Series.” That link pops down a menu to jump directly to the start of each series within the collection guide.
Direct Links to Anything
Researchers can now easily get a link to any row in a collection guide where the contents are described. This can be anything: a series, subseries, folder, or item. It’s simple—just mouseover the row, click the arrow that appears at the left, and copy the URL from the address bar. The row in the collection guide that’s the target of that link gets highlighted in green.
We would love to get feedback on these features to learn whether they’re helpful and see how we might enhance or adjust them going forward. Try them out and let us know what you think!
Special thanks to our metadata gurus Noah Huffman and Maggie Dickson for their contributions on these features.
This is a story about how our own digital collections program led us to rediscover an amazing manuscript collection that has been at Duke since at least 1896. The Trinity Archive, now published as The Archive, is a Duke University student literary and cultural journal, first published in 1887 while the college was still based in Trinity, N.C. It is one of the oldest continuously-published literary magazines in the United States. Early editions of the Trinity Archive,held in the University Archives, were digitized through Duke’s digital collections program and are now available through the Internet Archive.
It turns out that the Duke University Archivist, Valerie Gillispie, enjoys reading digitized issues of the Trinity Archive. While perusing the December 1896 edition, she found an interesting article: “The Removal of the Tuscarora Indians from North Carolina.” Written by Sanders Dent, then manager of the magazine, the article aims to “arrange some facts found in the old papers of General Jeremiah Slade and, thus, preserve an interesting bit of North Carolina history for her future historian. General Slade was one of the Commissioners appointed by the Legislature in 1802 to settle the affairs of the Tuscarora Indians and from his letters we get most of the material for this sketch.” Dent’s article recounts the history of the Tuscarora in North Carolina in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Following the end of the Tuscarora War in 1713, many Tuscarora fled to upstate New York and joined the Iroquois Confederacy as the Sixth Nation. Those that remained in North Carolina were granted land in Bertie County, but by the late eighteenth century they too were being forced to lease their land to the whites and leave the state for New York.
Dent’s article liberally quotes from letters held in the Jeremiah Slade Papers. Between 1803 and 1818, Slade served as an agent for the Tuscarora, managing their land leases in North Carolina and tracking money owed them by their white tenants. The papers include letters, receipts, and legal documents between Slade and the Tuscarora in Niagara, New York, with several documents signed with an X by the chiefs representing their tribe. Dent adds in a footnote that Slade’s “papers are now in the possession of the Trinity College Historical Society.”
Thanks to Dent’s footnote, Val found that the Jeremiah Slade Papers were now held in the Rubenstein Library (but under his son’s name, as the William Slade Papers). It was an exciting connection to our Rubenstein Library ancestors, the Trinity College Historical Society. Founded by Trinity College students and professors in 1892, TCHS sought to “collect, arrange, and preserve a library of books, pamphlets, maps, charts, manuscripts, papers, paintings, statuary, and other materials illustrative of the history of North Carolina and the South.” It was a history club and a museum and a library all-in-one, and many of the library’s oldest Southern collections were acquired by TCHS before being transferred to Duke’s manuscript department in the early twentieth century. (You can read more about the TCHS here and here.)
How and when the Slade Papers first came to the Trinity College Historical Society is still a mystery. The TCHS records, held by the University Archives, are incomplete for that period. A clue lies in the Slade Papers, with an 1884 item from J.D.B. Hooper, a professor at the University of North Carolina. Hooper writes that “I have consented to receive from Mr. William B. Slade, a Box of Scraps, culled by him, from newspapers, magazines, &c. with a request that I will endeavor to have them received into some library, public or private, where they may, at some future time, become useful…” He goes on to write, “I think that they may furnish materials for interesting Scrap books, when they shall fall into the hands of a person of leisure and literary taste.” Um, sure. Thanks Professor Hooper! (His papers are held at UNC.) The only other hint I have found as to the initial transfer of the Slade Papers to Duke lies in this undated clipping from the collection:
But I can find no record of Slade scrapbooks in our accession logs or catalog records from the 1890s. I can only assume that with the scrapbooks came the box of papers that Hooper mentions. It all must have arrived sometime before 1896, when Dent wrote the Trinity Archive piece.
Since this all came to light after Val’s browsing of the Trinity Archive, we decided to revisit the Slade Family Papers, update their housing, and enhance the collection’s description to reflect contemporary descriptive standards and scholarship interests. The original catalog record had no mention of the Tuscarora, and there was no finding aid or other web presence for the collection. It was really fun to re-process such an old collection and see its contents firsthand. The Tuscarora documents, while fascinating, are only a small piece of the Slade story. The majority of the collection documents the nineteenth-century operations of the Slade plantations, farms, and fisheries around Williamston, N.C. Plus, each generation of the Slade family had many children, so there are a lot of letters between all the siblings and cousins discussing their activities, family life, education, politics, and entertainment. There are also extensive legal and financial documents, including receipts, account books, land deeds, court cases, and other items. I was amazed at the amount of documentation discussing slaves; items recording student life at different North Carolina colleges in the early nineteenth century; letters detailing life in the Confederacy during the Civil War; and materials about postwar recovery and politics, including the new business arrangements between the Slades and their former slaves, now freedmen.
It’s always wonderful to see what sort of research can happen as a result of digitization and online access to our collections. But the re-processing and new finding aid for the Slade Family Papers was special. It is one of those rare projects where it all came full circle: because the Trinity Archive was available online, we rediscovered this collection, and along with it, further evidence of the work of the Trinity College Historical Society. The TCHS acquired the Slade Family Papers, among many other things, over 120 years ago for future historians to study and use. We are active participants in that legacy today.
Notes from the Duke University Libraries Digital Projects Team