It is graduation week here at Duke and everyone is scattering about like pollen in the air. There are large tents popping up, students taking pictures in gowns, and people taking long walks across campus. These students, like the groups before them, are embarking on new territory.
They are setting out into the world as adults preparing for the rest of their lives. For four years, they have been studying, partying and sleeping their way through life as pseudo grown ups, but now they have reached an unfamiliar page in their lives. They are being faced with societal expectations, financial obligations, and a world that is still in progress. How will this fresh batch of individuals fit into our ever changing society? I’m sure people have been asking this question for decades, but in asking this question I managed to find some digital collections featuring people who contributed to society in various ways.
Judy Richardson took part in the Civil Rights Movement through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Deena Stryker went to Cuba in order to document the Cuban Revolution.
H. Lee Waters travelled through the South to film and showcase the daily lives of Southerners.
All of these individuals went out into the world and gave something to it. For the past four years, our country has witnessed copious changes. We have seen serious adjustments in political climate, social activism, and technology. It will be interesting to see where the 2018 Duke graduates will go and what they will do in their open future.
As a recent first-time parent, I’m constantly soliciting advice from other more experienced people I meet about how best to take care of my baby. I thought it might be fun to peruse the Duke Digital Collections to see what words of wisdom could be gleaned from years past.
This 1930 ad, part of the Medicine and Madison Avenue collection, advises that we should make regular visits to the doctor’s office so our baby can be ‘carefully examined, measured, weighed and recorded.’ Excellent – we’ve been doing that!
This one from 1946 offers the ‘newest facts and findings on baby care and feeding.’ Overall the advice largely seems applicable to today. I found this line to be particularly fun:
Let your child participate in household tasks — play at dusting or cooking or bedmaking. It’s more of a hindrance than a help, but it gives the youngster a feeling of being needed and loved.
Baby strollers seem to have many innovative features these days, but more than 100 years ago the Oriole Go-Basket — a ‘combined Go-Cart, High Chair, Jumper and Bassinet’ — let you take your baby everywhere.
I’m a puzzled father of a rather young child — it’s like this 1933 ad was written just for me…
Of all the digitized materials in the collections I searched through, this 1928 booklet from the Emergence of Advertising in America collection seems to hold the most knowledge. On page 15, they offer ‘New Ways to Interest the Whole Family’ and suggest serving ‘Mapl-Flake’ and ‘Checkr-Corn Flake’ — are these really Web startups from 2005?
And finally, thanks to this 1955 ad, I’m glad to know I can give my baby 7-up, especially when mixed in equal parts with milk. ‘It’s a wholesome combination — and it works!’
What could me growing up in South West Virginia have to do with an itinerant photographer from Durham who was born in 1877? His name was Hugh Mangum and he had a knack for bringing out the personalities of his subjects when, at the time, most photographs depict stiff and stoic people similar to the photograph below.
Hugh Mangum N475
We all have that family photo, taken with siblings, cousins or friends, that captures a specific time in our life or a specific feeling where you think to yourself “look at us” and just shake your head in amazement. These photographs trigger memories that trigger other memories. The photo below is that for me. These are my siblings and cousins at my grandparents’ house in the early 90’s. My siblings and I grew up on the same street as my grandparents and my cousins in the town of Blacksburg Virginia. It seemed like we were always together but oddly there are very few pictures of all of us in one shot.
Adamo siblings and cousins circa 1990.
Even though this photograph was taken only a few decades ago a lot has changed in the lives of everyone in this photograph and also in the world of photography. This picture was taken using ‘traditional’ film where, after taking the picture, you had to rewind the film, drop it off at the Fotomat to get your film processed and prints made before you could even see the images! We never knew if we had a “good” shot until days, sometimes weeks after an event.
Here is where my path intersects with Hugh Mangum. We recently digitized some additional glass plate negatives from the Hugh Mangum collection. Hugh was an itinerant photographer that traveled throughout North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia. In Virginia he traveled to Christiansburg, Radford and Roanoke. These cities surround my hometown on three sides (respectively 8, 15 and 38 miles away). These images were taken from 1890 to 1922. This would put him in the area about 100 years before the family photo above. I wonder if he passed through Blacksburg?
Hugh Mangum negatives N574, N576, N650.
Fast forward to 2018. We carry computers in our pockets that have cameras that can capture every aspect of our lives. We have social media sites where we post, share, tag, comment and record our lives. I bet that even though we can now take thousands of photographs a year there are still the keepers. The ones that rise to the top. The ones that capture a moment in such a way that the younger generations might just say to themselves one day “look at us” and shaking their heads.
Snow is a major event here in North Carolina, and the University and Library were operating accordingly under a “severe weather policy” last week due to 6-12 inches of frozen precipitation. While essential services continued undeterred, most of the Library’s staff and patrons were asked to stay home until conditions had improved enough to safely commute to and navigate the campus. In celebration of last week’s storm, here are some handy tips for surviving and enjoying the winter weather–illustrated entirely with images from Duke Digital Collections!
Stock up on your favorite vices and indulgences before the storm hits.
2. Be sure to bundle and layer up your clothing to stay warm in the frigid outdoor temperatures.
3. Plan some fun outdoor activities to keep malaise and torpor from settling in.
4. Never underestimate the importance of a good winter hat.
5. While snowed in, don’t let your personal hygiene slip too far.
6. Despite the inconveniences brought on by the weather, don’t forget to see the beauty and uniquity around you.
2017 has been an action packed year for Digital Collections full of exciting projects, interface developments and new processes and procedures. This blog post is an attempt to summarize just a few of our favorite accomplishments from the last year. Digital Collections is truly a group cross-departmental collaboration here at Duke, and we couldn’t do complete any of the work listed below without all our colleagues across the library – thanks to all!
New Digital Collections Portal
Regular visitors to Duke Digital Collections may have noticed that our old portal (library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/) now redirects to our new homepage on the Duke Digital Repository (DDR) public interface. We are thrilled to make this change! But never fear, your favorite collections that have not been migrated to DDR are still accessible either on our Tripod2 interface or by visiting new placeholder landing pages in the Digital Repository.
Audiovisual Features
Supporting A/V materials in the Digital Repository has been a major software development priority throughout 2017. As a result our A/V items are becoming more accessible and easier to share. Thanks to a year of hard work we can now do and support the following (we posted examples of these on a previous post).
Model, store and stream A/V derivatives
Share A/V easily through our embed feature (even on Duke WordPress sites- a long standing bug)
Finding aids can now display inline AV for DAOs from DDR
Clickable timecode links in item descriptions (example)
Display captions and interactive transcripts
Download and Export captions and transcripts (as .pdf, .txt.,or .vtt)
Display Video thumbnails & poster frames
Rights Statements and Metadata
Bitstreams recently featured a review of all things metadata from 2017, many of which impact the digital collections program. We are especially pleased with our rights management work from the last year and our rights statements implementation (http://rightsstatements.org/en/). We are still in the process of retrospectively applying the statements, but we are making good progress. The end result will give our patrons a clearer indication of the copyright status of our digital objects and how they can be used. Read more about our rights management work in past Bitstreams posts.
Also this year in metadata, we have been developing integrations between ArchivesSpace (the tool Rubenstein Library uses for finding aids) and the repository (this is a project that has been in the works since 2015. With these new features Rubenstein’s archivist for metadata and encoding is in the process of reconciling metadata between ArchivesSpace and the Digital Repository for approximately 50 collections to enable bi-directional links between the two systems. Bi-directonal linking helps our patrons move easily from a digital object in the repository to its finding aid or catalog record and vice versa. You can read about the start of this work in a blog post from 2016.
MSI
At the end of 2016, Duke Libraries purchased Multispectral Imaging (MSI) equipment, and members of Digital Collections, Data and Visualization Studies, Conservation Services, the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing, and the Rubenstein Library joined forces to explore how to best use the technology to serve the Duke community. The past year has been a time of research, development, and exploration around MSI and you can read about our efforts on Bitstreams. Our plan is to launch an MSI service in 2018. Stay tuned!
Ingest into the Duke Digital Repository (DDR)
With the addition of new colleagues focussed on research data management, there have been more demands on and enhancements to our DDR ingest tools. Digital collections has benefited from more robust batch ingest features as well as the ability to upload more types of files (captions, transcripts, derivatives, thumbnails) through the user interface. We can also now ingest nested folders of collections. On the opposite side of the spectrum we now have the ability to batch export sets of files or even whole collections.
Project Management
The Digital Collections Advisory Committee and Implementation Team are always looking for more efficient ways to manage our sprawling portfolio of projects and services. We started 2017 with a new call for proposals around the themes of diversity and inclusion, which resulted in 7 successful proposals that are now in the process of implementation.
In addition to a thematic call for proposals, we later rolled out a new process for our colleagues to propose smaller projects in response to faculty requests, events or for other reasons. In other words, projects of a certain size and scope that were not required to respond to a thematic call for proposals. The idea being that these projects can be easily implemented, and therefore do not require extensive project management to complete. Our first completed “easy” project is the Carlo Naya photograph albums of Venice.
In 2016 (perhaps even back in 2015), the digital collections team started working with colleagues in Rubenstein to digitize the set of collections known in as “Section A”. The history of this moniker is a little uncertain, so let me just say that Section A is a set of 3000+ small manuscript collections (1-2 folders each) boxed together; each Section A box holds up to 30 collections. Section A collections are highly used and are often the subject of reproduction requests, hence they are perfect candidates for digitization. Our goal has been to set up a mass-digitization pipeline for these collections, that involves vetting rights, updating description, evaluating their condition, digitizing them, ingesting them into DDR, crosswalking metadata and finally making them publicly accessible in the repository and through their finding aids. In 2017 we evaluated 37 boxes for rights restrictions, updated descriptions for 24 boxes, assessed the condition of 31 boxes, digitized 19 boxes, ingested 4 boxes, crosswalked metadata for 2 boxes and box 1 is now online! Read more about the project in a May Bitstreams post. Although progress has felt slow given all the other projects we manage simultaneously, we really feel like our foot is on the gas now!
You can see the fruits of our digital collection labors in the list of new and migrated collections from the past year. We are excited to see what 2018 will bring!!
Brief summaries of articles pulled from a future digitized issue published by The Chronicle, as part of the 1990s Duke Chronicle Digitization Project
The time has come for the temperature to drop, decadent smells to waft through the air, and eyes become tired and bloodshot. Yep, it’s exam week here at Duke! As students fill up every room, desk and floor within the libraries, the Digital Collections team is working diligently to process important projects.
One such project is the 1990s decade of The Duke Chronicle. By next week, we can look forward to the year 1991 being completely scanned. Although there are many steps involved before we can make this collection available to the public, it is nice to know that this momentous year is on its way to being accessible for all. While scanning several issues today, I noticed the last issue for the fall semester of 1991. It was the Exam Break Issue, and I was interested in the type of reading content published 26 years ago. What were the students of Duke browsing through before they scurried back home on December 16, 1991, you may ask…
There were several stories about students’ worst nightmares coming true, including one Physical Therapy graduate student who lost her research to a Greyhound bus, and an undergraduate dumpster diving to find an accidentally thrown away notebook, which encompassed his final paper.
A junior lamented whether it was worth it to drive 12 hours to his home in Florida, or take a plane after a previous debacle in the air; he drove home with no regrets.
In a satirical column, advice was given on how to survive exams. Two excellent gems suggested using an air horn instead of screaming and staking out a study carrel, in order to sell it to the highest bidder.
This is merely a sprinkling of hilarious yet simultaneously horrifying anecdotes from that time-period.
Updates to Existing Collections
Digital collections, originally located on the old Digital Collections website, now have new pages on the Repository website with a direct link to the content on the oldwebsite.
In addition to The Chronicle, Emma Goldman Papers, and other new projects, there is a continued push to make already digitized collections accessible on the Repository platform.Collections likeBehind the Veil, Duke Papyrus Archive, and AdViewswere originally placed on our old Digital Collections platform. However, the need to provide access is just as relevant today as when they were originally digitized.
As amazing as our current collections in the Repository are, we have some treasures from the past that must be brought forward. Accordingly, many of these older digital collections now possess new records in the Repository! As of now, the newRepository pages will not have the collections’ content, but they will provide a link to enable direct access.
The new pages will facilitate exposure to new researchers, while permitting previous researchers to use the same features previously allowed on the old platform. There are brief descriptions, direct links to the collections, and access to any applicable finding aids on the Repository landing pages.
Now that the semester has wound down to a semi-quiet lull of fattening foods, awkward but friendly functions, and mental recuperation, I urge everyone to take a moment to not just look at what was done, but all the good work you are planning to do.
Based on what I’ve observed so far, I’m looking forward to the new projects that Digital Collections will be bringing to the table for the Duke community next year.
References
Kueber, G. (1991). Beginning of exams signals end of a Monday, Monday era. The Duke Chronicle, p. 26.
Robbins, M. (1991). Driving or crying: is air travel during the holidays worth it? The Duke Chronicle, p. 13.
The Duke Chronicle. (1991). The Ultimate Academic Nightmares – and you thought you were going to have a bad week! pp. 4-5.
Over the course of 2017, we improved our capacity to support digital audiovisual materials in the Duke Digital Repository (DDR) by leaps and bounds. A little more than a year ago, I had written a Bitstreams blog post highlighting the new features we had just developed in the DDR to provide basic functionality for AV, especially in support of the Duke Chapel Recordings collection. What a difference a year makes.
This past year brought renewed focus on AV development, as we worked to bring the NEH grant-funded Radio Haiti Archive online (launched in June). At the same time, our digital collections legacy platform migration efforts shifted toward moving our existing high-profile digital AV material into the repository.
Closed Captions
At Duke University Libraries, we take accessibility seriously. We aim to include captions or transcripts for the audiovisual objects made available via the Duke Digital Repository, especially to ensure that the materials can be perceived and navigated by people with disabilities. For instance, work is well underway to create closed captions for all 1,400 items in the Duke Chapel Recordings project.
Captioned video displays a CC button and shows captions as an overlay in the video player. Example from the AdViews collection, coming soon to the DDR.
The DDR now accommodates modeling and ingest for caption files, and our AV player interface (powered by JW Player) presents a CC button whenever a caption file is available. Caption files are encoded using WebVTT, the modern W3C standard for associating timed text with HTML audio and video. WebVTT is structured so as to be machine-processable, while remaining lightweight enough to be reasonably read, created, or edited by a person. It’s a format that transcription vendors can provide. And given its endorsement by W3C, it should be a viable captioning format for a wide range of applications and devices for the foreseeable future.
Text cues from a WebVTT caption file for an audio item in the Duke Chapel Recordings collection.
Interactive Transcripts
Displaying captions within the player UI is helpful, but it only gets us so far. For one, that doesn’t give a user a way to just read the caption text without requiring them to play the media. We also need to support captions for audio files, but unlike with video, the audio player doesn’t include enough real estate within itself to render the captions. There’s no room for them to appear.
So for both audio and video, our solution is to convert the WebVTT caption files on-the-fly into an interactive in-page transcript. Using the webvtt-ruby gem (developed by Coconut) , we parse the WebVTT text cues into Ruby objects, then render them back on the page as HTML. We then use the JWPlayer Javascript API to keep the media player and the HTML transcript in sync. Clicking on a transcript cue advances the player to the corresponding moment in the media, and the currently-playing cue gets highlighted as the media plays.
Example interactive synchronized transcript for an audio item (rendered from a WebVTT caption file). From a collection coming soon to the DDR.
We also do some extra formatting when the WebVTT cues include voice tags (<v> tags), which can optionally indicate the name of the speaker (e.g., <v Jane Smith>). The in-page transcript is indexed by Google for search retrieval.
Transcript Documents
In many cases, especially for audio items, we may have only a PDF or other type of document with a transcript of a recording that isn’t structured or time-coded. Like captions, these documents are important for accessibility. We have developed support for displaying links to these documents near the media player. Look for some new collections using this feature to become available in early 2018.
Transcript documents presented above the media player. Coming soon to AV collections in the DDR.
A/V Embedding
The DDR web interface provides an optimal viewing or listening experience for AV, but we also want to make it easy to present objects from the DDR on other websites, too. When used on other sites, we’d like the objects to include some metadata, a link to the DDR page, and proper attribution. To that end, we now have copyable <iframe> embed code available from the Share menu for AV items.
This embed code is also what we now use within the Rubenstein Library collection guides (finding aids) interface: it lets us present digital objects from the DDR directly from within a corresponding collection guide. So as a researcher browses the inventory of a physical archival collection, they can play the media inline without having to leave.
Embedded view of a DDR video from the Duke Chapel Recordings collection presented inline in a Rubenstein Library archival collection guide.
Sites@Duke Integration
If your website or blog is one of the thousands of WordPress sites hosted and supported by Sites@Duke — a service of Duke’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) — we have good news for you. You can now embed objects from the DDR using WordPress shortcode. Sites@Duke, like many content management systems, doesn’t allow authors to enter <iframe> tags, so shortcode is the only way to get embeddable media to render.
Sites@Duke WordPress sites can embed DDR media by using shortcode with the DDR item’s permalink.
And More!
Here are the other AV-related features we have been able to develop in 2017:
Access control: master files & derivatives alike can be protected so access is limited to only authorized users/groups
Video thumbnail images: model, manage, and display
Video poster frames: model, manage, and display
Intermediate/mezzanine files: model and manage
Rights display: display icons and info from RightsStatements.org and Creative Commons, so it’s clear what users are permitted to do with media.
What’s Next
We look forward to sharing our recent AV development with our peers at the upcoming Samvera Connect conference (Nov 6-9, 2017 in Evanston, IL). Here’s our poster summarizing the work to date:
A while back, I wrote a blog post about my enjoyment in digitizing the William Gedney Photograph collection and how it was inspiring me to build a darkroom in my garage. I wish I could say that the darkroom is up and running but so far all I’ve installed is the sink. However, as Molly announced in her last Bitstreams post, we have launched the Gedney collection which includes series two series that are complete (Finished Prints and Contact Sheets) and more to come.
The newly launched site brings together this amazing body of work in a seamless way. The site allows you to browse the collection, use the search box to find something specific or use the facets to filter by series, location, subject, year and format. If that isn’t enough, we have not only related prints from the same contact sheet but also related prints of the same image. For example, you can browse the collection and click on an image of Virgil Thomson, an American composer, smoothly zoom in and out of the image, then scroll to the bottom of the page to find a thumbnail of the contact sheet from which the negative comes. When you click through the thumbnial you can zoom into the contact sheet and see additional shots that Gedney took. You even can see which frames he highlighted for closer inspection. If you scroll to the bottom of this contact sheet page you will find that 2 of those highlighted frames have corresponding finished prints. Wow! I am telling you, checkout the site, it is super cool!
What you do not see [yet], because I am in the middle of digitizing this series, is all of the proof prints Gedney produced of Virgil Thomson, 36 in all. Here are a few below.
Once the proof prints are digitized and ingested into the Repository you will be able to experience Gedney’s photographs from many different angles, vantage points and perspectives.
In the past 3 months, we have launched a number of exciting digital collections! Our brand new offerings are either available now or will be very soon. They are:
International Broadsides (added to migrated Broadsides and Ephemera collection): https://repository.duke.edu/dc/broadsides
Orange County Tax List Ledger, 1875: https://repository.duke.edu/dc/orangecountytaxlist
Radio Haiti Archive, second batch of recordings: https://repository.duke.edu/dc/radiohaiti
William Gedney Finished Prints and Contact Sheets (newly re-digitized with new and improved metadata): https://repository.duke.edu/dc/gedney
A selection from the William Gedney Photographs digital collection
In addition to the brand new items, the digital collections team is constantly chipping away at the digital collections migration. Here are the latest collections to move from Tripod 2 to the Duke Digital Repository (these are either available now or will be very soon):
What we hoped would be a speedy transition is still a work in progress 2 years later. This is due to a variety of factors one of which is that the work itself is very complex. Before we can move a collection into the digital repository it has to be reviewed, all digital objects fully accounted for, and all metadata remediated and crosswalked into the DDR metadata profile. Sometimes this process requires little effort. However other times, especially with older collection, we have items with no metadata, or metadata with no items, or the numbers in our various systems simply do not match. Tracking down the answers can require some major detective work on the part of my amazing colleagues.
Despite these challenges, we eagerly press on. As each collection moves we get a little closer to having all of our digital collections under preservation control and providing access to all of them from a single platform. Onward!
In the spirit of Friday fun (and to keep with my running theme of obsolete, obscure, and endangered audio equipment,) I present this gallery of anthropomorphic electronics from Rubenstein Library’s Ad*Access digital collection. Enjoy!
Notes from the Duke University Libraries Digital Projects Team
