Behind the Scenes, Digital Collections, Projects, User Experience

Who, Why, and What:  the three W’s of the Duke Digital Collections Mini-Survey

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My colleague Sean wrote two weeks ago about the efforts a group of us  in the library are making towards understanding the scholarly impacts of Duke Digital Collections.  In this post, I plan to continue the discussion with details about the survey we are conducting as well as share some initial results.

Surveying can be perilous work!
Surveying can be perilous work!

After reviewing the analytics and Google Scholar data Sean wrote about, our working group realized we needed more information.   Our goal in this entire assessment process has been to pull together scholarly use data which will inform our digitization decisions, priorities, technological choices (features on the digital collections platform), and to help us gain an understanding of if and how we are meeting the needs of researcher communities.    Analytics gave us clues, but we still didn’t some of the fundamental facts about our patrons.   After a fervent discussion with many whiteboard notes, the group decided creating a survey would get us more of the data we were looking for.  The resulting survey focuses on the elemental questions we have about our patrons:   who are they, why are they visiting Duke Digital Collections, and what are they going to do with what they find here.

 

The Survey

Creating the survey itself was no small task, but after an almost endless process of writing, rewriting, and consultations with our assessment coordinator we settled on 6 questions (a truely miniature survey).  We considered the first three questions (who, why, what) to be most important, and we intended the last three to provide us with additional information such as Duke affiliation and allow a space for general feedback.  None of the questions were considered “required” so respondents could answer or skip whatever they wanted; we also included space for respondents to write-in further details especially when choosing the “other” option.

Our survey in its completed form.
Our survey in its completed form.

The survey launched on April 30 and remains accessible by hovering over a “feedback” link on every single Digital Collection webpage.  Event tracking analytics show that 0.29% of the patrons that hover over our feedback link click through to the survey. An even smaller number have actually submitted responses.  This has worked out to 56 responses at an average rate of around 1 per day.  Despite that low click through rate, we have been really pleased with the number of responses we have had so far.  The response rate remains steady, and we have already learned a lot from even this small sample of visitor data.  We are not advertising the survey or promoting it, because our target respondents are patrons who find us in the course of their research or general Internet browsing.

Hovering over the help us box reveals expectations and instructions for survey participants.
Hovering over the help us box reveals expectations and instructions for survey participants.

Initial Results

Before I start discussing our results, please note that what I’m sharing here is based on initial responses and my own observations.  No one in digital collections has thoroughly reviewed or analyzed this data.  Additionally, this information is drawn from responses submitted between April 30 – July 8, 2015. We plan to keep the survey online into the academic year to see if our responses change when classes are in session.

With that disclaimer now behind us, let’s review results by question.

Questions 1 and 4:  Who are you?

Since we are concerned with scholarly oriented use more than other types in this exercise, the first question is intended to sort respondents primarily by academic status.   In question 4, respondents are given the chance to further categorized their academic affiliation.

Question 1 Answers # of Responses %
Student 14 25%
Educator 10 18%
Librarian, Archivist or Museum Staff 5 9%
Other 26 47%
55 100

Of the respondents who categorized themselves as “other” in question 1, 11 clarified their otherness by writing their identities in the space provided.  Of this 11, 4 associated themselves with music oriented professions or hobbies, and 2 with fine arts (photographer and filmmaker).  The remaining 5 could not be grouped easily into categories.

As a follow up later in the survey, question 4 asks respondents to categorize their academic affiliation (if they had one).  The results showed that 3 respondents are affiliated with Duke, 12  with other colleges or universities and 9 with a K-12 school.   Of the write-in responses, 3 listed names of universities abroad, and 1 listed a school whose level has not been identified.

Question 2:  Why are you here?

We can tell from our analytics how people get to us (if they were referred to us via a link or sought us out directly), but this information does not address why visitors come to the site.  Enter question 2.

Question 2 Answers # of Responses %
Academic research 15 28
Casual browsing 15 28
Followed a link 9 17%
Personal research 24 44%
Other 6 11%
54

The survey asks that those who select academic research, personal research, and other to write-in their research topic or purpose.  Academic research topics submitted so far primarily revolve around various historical research topics.  Personal research topics reflect a high interest in music (specific songs or types of music), advertising, and other various personal projects.  It is interesting to note that local history related topics have been submitted under all three categories (academic, personal and other).  Additionally,  non-academic researchers seem to be more willing to share sharing their specific topics; 19 of 24 respondents listed their topics as compared to 7 out of 15 academic researchers.

Question 3:  What will you do with the images and/or resources you find on this site?

To me, this question has the potential to provide some of the most illuminating information from our patrons. Knowing how they use the material helps us determine how to enhance access to the digitized objects and what kinds of technology we should be investing in.  This can also shed light on our digitization process itself.  For example, maybe the full text version of an item will provide more benefit to more researchers than an illustrated or hand-written version of the same item (of course we would prefer to offer both, but I think you see where I am going with this).

In designing this question, the group decided it would be valuable to offer options for the those who share items due to their visual or subject appeal (for example, the Pinterest user), the publication minded researcher, and a range of patron types in between.

 

Question 3 Answers # of Responses %
Use for an academic publication 3 6%
Share on social media 10 19%
Use them for homework 8 15%
Use them as a teaching tool in my classes 5 9%
Personal use 31 58%
Use for my job 2 4%
Other 10 19%
53

The 10 “other” respondents all entered subsequent details; they planned to share items with friends and family (in some way other than on social media), they also wanted to use the items they found as a reference, or were working on an academic pursuit that in their mind didn’t fit the listed categories.

Observations

As I said above, these survey results are cursory as we plan to leave the survey up for several more months.  But so far the data reveals that Duke Digital collections serves a wide audience of academic and non-academic users for a range of purposes. For example, one respondent uses the outdoor advertising collections to get a glimpse of how their community has changed over time. Another is concerned with US History in the 1930s, and another is focused on music from the 1900s.

The next phase of the the assessment group’s activities is to meet with researchers and instructors in person and talk with them about their experiences using digital collections (not just Duke’s) for scholarly research or instruction.  We have also been collecting examples of instructors who have used digital collections in their classes.  We plan to create a webpage with these examples with the goal of encouraging other instructors to do the same.  The goal of both of these efforts is to increase academic use of the digital collections (whether that be at the K-12 or collegiate level).

 

Just like this survey team, we stand at the ready, waiting for our chance to analyze and react to our data!

Of course, another next step is to keep collecting this survey data and analyze it further.  All in all, it has been truly exciting to see the results thus far.  As we study the data in more depth this Fall, we plan to work with the Duke University Library Digital Collections Advisory Team to implement any new technical or policy oriented decisions based on our conclusions.  Our minds are already spinning with the possibilities.

Behind the Scenes, Digital Collections, Technology, User Experience

The Tao of the DAO: Embedding digital objects in finding aids

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Over the last few months, we’ve been doing some behind-the-scenes re-engineering of “the way” we publish digital objects in finding aids (aka “collection guides”).  We made these changes in response to two main developments:

  • The transition to ArchivesSpace for managing description of archival collections and the production of finding aids
  • A growing need to handle new types, or classes, of digital objects in our finding aid interface (especially born-digital electronic records)

Background

While the majority of items found in Duke Digital Collections are published and accessible through our primary digital collections interface (codename Tripod), we have a growing number of digital objects that are published (and sometimes embedded) in finding aids.

Finding aids describe the contents of manuscript and archival collections, and in many cases, we’ve digitized all or portions of these collections.  Some collections may contain material that we acquired in digital form.  For a variety of reasons that I won’t describe here, we’ve decided that embedding digital objects directly in finding aids can be a suitable, often low-barrier alternative to publishing them in our primary digital collections platform.  You can read more on that decision here.

ahstephens_screenshot
Screenshot showing digital objects embedded in the Alexander H. Stephens Papers finding aid

 

EAD, ArchivesSpace, and the <dao>

At Duke, we’ve been creating finding aids in EAD (Encoded Archival Description) since the late 1990s.  Prior to implementing ArchivesSpace (June 2015) and its predecessor Archivists Toolkit (2012), we created EAD through some combination of an XML editor (NoteTab, Oxygen), Excel spreadsheets, custom scripts, templates, and macros.  Not surprisingly, the evolution of EAD authoring tools led to a good deal of inconsistent encoding across our EAD corpus.  These inconsistencies were particularly apparent when it came to information encoded in the <dao> element, the EAD element used to describe “digital archival objects” in a collection.

As part of our ArchivesSpace implementation plan, we decided to get better control over the <dao>–both its content and its structure.  We wrote some local best practice guidelines for formatting the data contained in the <dao> element and we wrote some scripts to normalize our existing data before migrating it to ArchivesSpace.

Classifying digital objects with the “use statement.”

In June 2015, we migrated all of our finding aids and other descriptive data to ArchivesSpace.  In total, we now have about 3400 finding aids (resource records) and over 9,000 associated digital objects described in ArchivesSpace.  Among these 9,000 digital objects, there are high-res master images, low-res use copies, audio files, video files, disk image files, and many other kinds of digital content.  Further, the digital files are stored in several different locations–some accessible to the public and some restricted to staff.

In order for our finding aid interface to display each type of digital object properly, we developed a classification system of sorts that 1) clearly identifies each class of digital object and 2) describes the desired display behavior for that type of object in our finding aid interface.

In ArchivesSpace, we store that information consistently in the ‘Use Statement’ field of each Digital Object record.  We’ve developed a core set of use statement values that we can easily maintain in a controlled value list in the ArchivesSpace application.  In turn, when ArchivesSpace generates or exports an EAD file for any given collection that contains digital objects, these use statement values are output in the DAO role attribute.  Actually, a minor bug in the ArchivesSpace application currently prevents the use statement information from appearing in the <dao>. I fixed this by customizing the ArchivesSpace EAD serializer in a local plugin.

file_version_aspace_example
Screenshot from ArchivesSpace showing digital object record, file version, and use statement

 

duke_dao_code
Snippet of EAD generated from ArchivesSpace showing <dao> encoding

 Every object its viewer/player

The values in the DAO role attribute tell our display interface how to render a digital object in the finding aid.  For example, when the display interface encounters a DAO with role=”video-streaming” it knows to queue up our embedded streaming video player.  We have custom viewers and players for audio, batches of image files, PDFs, and many other content types.

Here are links to some finding aids with different classes of embedded digital objects, each with its own associated use statement and viewer/player.

The curious case of electronic records

The last example above illustrates the curious case of electronic records.  The term “electronic records” can describe a wide range of materials but may include things like email archives, disk images, and other formats that are not immediately accessible on our website, but must be used by patrons in the reading room on a secure machine.  In these cases, we want to store information about these files in ArchivesSpace and provide a convenient way for patrons to request access to them in the finding aid interface.

Within the next few weeks, we plan to implement some improvements to the way we handle the description of and access to electronic records in finding aids.  Eventually, patrons will be able to view detailed information about the electronic records by hovering over a link in the finding aid.  Clicking on the link will automatically generate a request for those records in Aeon, the Rubenstein Library’s request management system.  Staff can then review and process those requests and, if necessary, prepare the electronic records for viewing on the reading room desktop.

Conclusion

While we continue to tweak our finding aid interface and learn our way around ArchivesSpace, we think we’ve developed a fairly sustainable and flexible way to publish digital objects in finding aids that both preserves the archival context of the items and provides an engaging user-experience for interacting with the objects.  As always, we’d love to hear how other libraries may have tackled this same problem.  Please share your comments or experiences with handling digital objects in finding aids!

[Credit to Lynn Holdzkom at UNC-Chapel Hill for coining the phrase “The Tao of the DAO”]

Uncategorized

The Elastic Ruler: Measuring Scholarly Use of Digital Collections

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Our Digital Collections program aspires to build “distinctive digital collections that provide access to Duke’s unique library and archival materials for teaching, learning, and research at Duke and worldwide.” Those are our primary stated objectives, though the reach and the value of putting collections online extends far beyond.  For instance, these uses might not qualify as scholarly, but we celebrate them all the same:

Digital Collections items pinned on Pinterest
Digital Collections items pinned on Pinterest

Regardless of how much value we assign to different kinds of uses, determining the impact of our work is a hard problem to solve. There are no simple instruments to measure our outcomes, and the measurements we do take can at times feel uncertain, as if taken of a moving object with a wildly elastic ruler.   Some helpful resources are out there, of both theoretical and practical varieties, but focusing on what matters most remains a challenge.

Back to our mission: how much are our collections actually used for the scholarly purposes we trumpet–teaching, learning, and research–versus other more casual uses? How do we distinguish these uses within the data we collect? Getting clearer answers could help us in several areas. First, what should we even digitize? What compelling stories of user engagement could be told to illustrate the value of the collections? How might we drum up more interest in the collections within scholarly communities?

Some of my Duke colleagues and I began exploring these questions this year in depth. We’ll have much more to report later, but already our work has uncovered some bits of interest to share. And, of course, we’ve unearthed more questions than answers.

Analytics

Like many places, we use a service called Google Analytics to track how much our collections are accessed. We use analytics to understand what kinds of things that we digitize resonate with users online, and to to help us make informed improvements to the website. Google doesn’t track any personally identifiable data (thankfully); data is aggregated to a degree where privacy is protected yet site owners can still see generally where their traffic comes from.

For example, we know that on average1, our site visitors view just over 5 pages/visit, and stay for about 3.5 minutes. 60.3% of visitors bounce (that is, leave after seeing only one page). Mobile devices account for 20.1% of traffic. Over 26% of visits come from outside the U.S.  The most common way a visit originates is via search engine (37.5%), and social media traffic—especially from Facebook—is quite significant (15.7% of visits). The data is vast; the opportunities for slicing and dicing it seem infinite. And we’ll forever grapple with how best to track, interpret,  report, and respond to the things that are most meaningful to us.

Scholarly Traffic

There are two bits of Analytics data that can provide us with clues about our collections’ use in scholarly environments:

  1. Traffic on scholarly networks (a filtered view of ISPs)
  2. Referrals from scholarly pages (a filtered view of Referrer paths)

Tracking these figures (however imperfect) could help us get a better sense for the trends in the tenor of our audience, and help us set goals for any outreach efforts we undertake.

Screen Shot 2015-06-26 at 4.41.52 PM

Traffic on Scholarly Networks

One key clue for scholarly use is the name of visitors’ Internet Service Provider (ISP). For example, a visit from somewhere on Duke’s campus has an ISP “duke university,” a NYC public school “new york city public schools,” and McGill University (in Canada) “mcgill university.” Of course, plenty of scholarly work gets done off-campus (where an ISP is likely Time Warner, Verizon, AT&T, etc.), and not all network traffic that happens on a campus is actually for scholarly purposes. So there are the usual caveats about signal and noise within the data.

Alas, we know that over the past calendar year1, we had:

  • 11.7% of our visits (“sessions”) from visitors on a scholarly network (as defined in our filters by: ISP name has universit*, college*, or school* in it)2.
  • 74,724 visits via scholarly networks
  • 4,121 unique scholarly network ISPs

Referrals from Course Websites or Online Syllabi on .Edu Sites

Are our collections used for teaching and learning? How much can we tell simply through web analytics?

A referral happens when someone gets to our site by following a link from another site.  In our data, we can see the full web address of any referring pages. But can we infer from a site URL whether a site was a course website or an online syllabus–pages that’d link to our site for the express purpose of teaching?  We can try.

In the past year, referrals filtered by an expression3 to isolate course sites and syllabi on .Edu sites

  • 0.18% of total visits
  • 1,167 visits
  • 68 unique sites (domains)

Or, if we remove the .Edu restriction2

  • 1.21% of total visits
  • 7,718 visits
  • 221 unique sites (domains)

It’s hard to confidently assert that this data is accurate, and indeed many of the pages can’t be verified because they’re only accessible to the students in those classes. But regardless, a look at the data through this lens does occasionally help discover real uses for actual courses and/or generate leads for contacting instructors about the ways they’ve used the collections in their curriculum.

Other Methods

We know web analytics are just a single tool in a giant toolbox for determining how much our collections are contributing to teaching, learning, and research. One technique we’ve tried is using Google Scholar to track citations of collections, then logged and tagged those citations using Delicious. For instance, here are 70 scholarly citations for our Ad*Access collection. Among the citations are 30 articles, 19 books, and 10 theses. 26 sources cited something from the collection as a primary source.  This technique is powerful and illuminates some interesting uses. But it unfortunately takes a lot of time to do well.

We’ve also recently launched a survey on our website that gathers some basic information from visitors about how they’re using the collections. And we have done some outreach with instructors at Duke and beyond. Stay tuned for much more as we explore the data. In the meantime, we would love to hear from others in the field how you approach answering these very same questions.

SLA3935

 

Notes

  1. Data from July 1, 2014 – June 26, 2015.
  2. We had first looked at isolating scholarly networks by narrowing to ISP network domains ending in “.edu” but upon digging further, there are two reasons why the ISP name provides better data. 1) .EDUs are only granted to accredited postsecondary institutions in the U.S., so visits from international universities or middle/high schools wouldn’t count. 2) A full 24% of all our visits have unknowable ISP network domains: “(not set)” or “unknown.unknown,” whereas only 6.3% of visits have unknown ISP names.
  3. Full referrer path: blackboard|sakai|moodle|webct|schoology|^bb|learn|course|isites|syllabus|classroom|^class.|/class/|^classes.|/~CLASS/
Collections, Digitization Expertise, Equipment, Technology, Uncategorized

…and We’re Putting it on Wax (The Frank Clyde Brown Collection)

My last several posts have focused on endangered–some would say obsolete–audio formats: open reel tape, compact cassette, DAT, and Minidisc. In this installment, we travel back to the dawn of recorded sound and the 20th Century to investigate some of the earliest commercial recording media. Unlike the formats above, which operate on post-WW2 magnetic and optical technology, these systems carved sound waves into stone (or, more accurately, wax) behind strictly acousto-mechanical principles.

Thomas Edison is credited as inventing the first phonograph (“soundwriter”) on July 18, 1877. It consisted of tinfoil wrapped around a hand-cranked metal cylinder. Sound waves would be funneled through a horn, causing a stylus to vibrate and indent a groove around the outside of the cylinder. The cylinder could be played by reversing the procedure: By retracing the groove with the stylus, the sound would be amplified back through the horn and heard as a rough approximation of the original sound.

cylinder2

Alexander Graham Bell quickly improved the innovation by introducing wax as a superior material for the cylinders and using a needle to scratch the sound waves into their surface. He called his device the “Graphophone”. By 1888, Edison had also adopted wax as the preferred medium for recorded cylinders and a patent-sharing agreement was signed. In 1889, the wax cylinder because the first commercially marketed audio medium.

cylinder1

Initially, the cylinders were installed in the ancestors of jukeboxes in public places. Drop a coin into the slot, and the machine would magically dispense a song, monologue, or comedy routine. The technology was soon adapted for home use. Consumers could purchase prerecorded cylinders to play on their machines. Perhaps more amazingly, they could buy a home recording attachment and cut their own content onto the wax.

[PAUSE—shift from PLAY to RECORD mode]

nc_folklore

Biographical and Historical Note

Frank Clyde Brown (1870-1943) served as a Professor of English at Trinity College, Duke University, from 1909 until his death. A native of Virginia, he received his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1908. While at Duke University he served in many capacities, including being chairman of his department, University Marshal, and Comptroller of the University during its initial construction. These aspects of his life are chronicled in his papers held by the Duke University Archives.

This collection of materials, however, is concerned with activities to which he devoted equal time and energy, the organization of the North Carolina Folklore Society in 1913 and his personal effort to gather and record the nuances and culture of “folk” of North Carolina and its near neighbors, which occupied him from 1912 until his death. Under the impetus of a 1912 mailing from John A. Lomax, then President of the American Folklore Society, Brown as well as other faculty members and other citizens in North Carolina, became interested in folklore and organized the North Carolina Folklore Society in 1913, with Brown as secretary-treasurer. As secretary-treasurer of this organization from its inception until his death, he provided the organizational impetus behind the Society. Through his course in folklore at Duke, he also sent class after class out to gather the folklore of their locales, both during their studies and afterward. And virtually every summer he could be found in the most remote parts of the state, with notebook and recorder — first a dictaphone employing cylinders, and later a machine employing aluminum discs provided for his use by the University. The result, by 1943, was a collection of about 38,000 written notes on lore, 650 musical scores, 1400 songs vocally recorded, and numerous magazine articles, student theses, books, lists, and other items related to this study. The material originated in at least 84 North Carolina counties, with about 5 percent original in 20 other states and Canada, and came from the efforts of 650 other contributors besides Brown himself.

[STOP]

cylinder4

cylinder5

[POWER OFF]

Thanks to our Audiovisual Archivist, Craig Breaden, for the excellent photos and unused title suggestion (“The Needle and the Damage Done”). Future posts will include updates on work with the Frank C. Brown Collection, other audio collections at Duke, and the history of sound recording and reproduction.

 

Collections, Digital Collections

Mini-memes, many meanings: Smoking dirt boy and the congee line bros

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Children are smoking in two of my favorite images from our digital collections.

One of them comes from the eleven days in 1964 that William Gedney spent with the Cornett family in Eastern Kentucky. A boy, crusted in dirt, clutching a bent-up Prince Albert can, draws on a cigarette. It’s a miniature of mawkish masculinity that echoes and lightly mocks the numerous shots Gedney took of the Cornett men, often shirtless and sitting on or standing around cars, smoking.

At some point in the now-distant past, while developing and testing our digital collections platform, I stumbled on “smoking dirt boy” as a phrase to use in testing for cases when a search returns only a single result. We kind of adopted him as an unofficial mascot of the digital collections program. He was a mini-meme, one we used within our team to draw chuckles, and added into conference presentations to get some laughs. Everyone loves smoking dirt boy.

It was probably 3-4 years ago that I stopped using the image to elicit guffaws, and started to interrogate my own attitude toward it. It’s not one of Gedney’s most powerful photographs, but it provokes a response, and I had become wary of that response. There’s a very complicated history of photography and American poverty that informs it.

Screen Shot 2015-06-09 at 11.23.58 AM
Screen shot from a genealogy site discussion forum, regarding the Cornett family and William Gedney’s involvement with them.

While preparing this post, I did some research into the Cornett family, and came across the item from a discussion thread on a genealogy site, shown here in a screen cap. “My Mother would not let anyone photograph our family,” it reads. “We were all poor, most of us were clean, the Cornetts were another story.”  It captures the attitudes that intertwine in that complicated history. The resentment toward the camera’s cold eye on Appalachia is apparent, as is the disdain for the family that implicitly wasn’t “clean,” and let the photographer shoot. These attitudes came to bear in an incident just this last spring, in which a group in West Virginia confronted traveling photographers whom they claimed photographed children without permission.

The photographer Roger May has undertaken an effort to change “this visual definition of Appalachia.” His “Looking at Appalachia” project began with a series of three blog posts on William Gedney’s Kentucky photographs (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). The New York Times’ Lens blog wrote about the project last month. His perspective is one that brings insight and renewal to Gedney’s work

Gedney’s photographs have taken on a life as a digital collection since they were published on the Duke University Libraries’ web site in 1999. It has become a high-use collection for the Rubenstein Library; that use has driven a recent project we have undertaken in the library to re-process the collection and digitize the entire corpus of finished prints, proof prints, and contact sheets. We expect the work to take more than a year and produce more than 20,000 images (compared to the roughly 5000 available now), but when it’s complete, it should add whole new dimensions to the understanding of Gedney’s work.

Another collection given life by its digitization is the Sidney Gamble Photographs. The nitrate negatives are so flammable that the library must store them off site, making access impossible without some form of reproduction. Digitization has made it possible for anyone in the world to experience Gamble’s remarkable documentation of China in the early 20th Century. Since its digitization, this collection has been the subject of a traveling exhibit, and will be featured in the Photography Gallery of the Rubenstein Library’s new space when it opens in August.

The photograph of the two boys in the congee distribution line is another favorite of mine. Again, a child is seen smoking in a context that speaks of poverty. There’s plenty to read in the picture, including the expressions on the faces of the different boys, and the way they press their bowls to their chests. But there are two details that make this image rich with implicit narrative – the cigarette in the taller boy’s mouth, and the protective way he drapes his arm over the shorter one. They have similar, close-cropped haircuts, which are also different from the other boys, suggesting they came from the same place. It’s an immediate assumption that the boys are brothers, and the older one has taken on the care and protection of the younger.

Still, I don’t know the full story, and exploring my assumptions about the congee line boys might lead me to ask probing questions about my own attitudes and “visual definition” of the world. This process is one of the aspects of working with images that makes my work rewarding. Smoking dirt boy and the congee line boys are always there to teach me more.

Behind the Scenes, Digital Collections, Equipment, Technology

Sports Information negatives sneak preview

Image 1 Comment

We all probably remember having to pose for an annual class photograph in primary school. If you made the mistake of telling your mother about the looming photograph beforehand you probably had to wear something “nice” and had your hair plastered to your head by your mother while she informed you of the trouble you’d be in if you made a funny face. Everyone looks a little awkward in these photographs and only a few of us wanted to have the picture taken in the first place. Frankly, I’m amazed that they got us all to sit still long enough to take the photograph. Some of us also had similar photographs taken while participating in team sports which also led to some interesting photographs.

These are some of the memories that have been popping up this past month as I digitize nitrate negatives from the Sports Information Office: Photographic Negatives collection circa 1924-1992, 1995 and undated. The collection contains photographic negatives related to sports at Duke. I’ve digitized about half of the negatives and seen images from mostly football, basketball, baseball and boxing. The majority of these photographs are of individuals but there are also team shots, group shots and coaches. While you may have to wait a bit for the publication of these negatives through the Digital Collections website I had to share some of these gems with you.

Some of the images strike me as funny for the expressions, some for the pose and others for the totally out of context background. It makes me wonder what the photographer’s intention/ instruction was.FlexTight X5

To capture these wonderful images we are using a recently purchased Hasselblad FlexTight X5. The Hasselblad is a dedicated high-end film scanner that uses glassless drum scanning technology. Glassless drum scanning takes advantage of all the benefits of a classic drum scanner (high resolution, sharpness, better D-max/ D-min) without all the disadvantages (wet mounting messiness, newton rings, time consuming, price, speed).   This device produces extremely sharp reproductions of which the film grain in the digital image can be seen. A few more important factors about this scanner are: a wide variety of standard film sizes can be digitized along with custom sizes and it captures in a raw file format. This is significant because negatives contain a significant amount of tonal information that printed photographs do not. Once this information is captured we have to adjust each digital image as if we were printing the negative in a traditional dark room. When using image editing software to adjust an image an algorithm is at work making decisions about compressing, expanding, keeping or discarding tonal information in the digital image. This type of adjustment causes data loss. Because we are following archival imaging standards, retaining the largest amount of data is important. Sometimes the data loss is not visible to the naked eye but making adjustments renders the image data “thin”. The more adjustments to an image the less data there is to work with.

histogram
A histogram is a visual representation of tonal data in an image. This is a histogram of an image before and after an adjustment.

It kind of reminds me of the scene in Shawshank Redemption (spoiler alert) where the warden is in Andy Dufresne’s (Tim Robbins) cell after discovering he has escaped. The warden throws a rock at a poster on the wall in anger only to find there is a hole in the wall behind the poster. An adjusted digital image is similar in that the image looks normal and solid but there is no depth to it. This becomes a problem if anyone, after digitization, wants to reuse the image in some other context where they will need to make adjustments to suit their purposes. They won’t have a whole lot of latitude to make adjustments before digital artifacts start appearing. By using the Hasselblad RAW file format and capturing in 16 bit RGB we are able to make adjustments to the raw file without data loss. This enables us to create a robust file that will be more useful in the future.

I’m sure there will be many uses for the negatives in this collection. Who wouldn’t want a picture of a former Duke athlete in an odd pose in an out of context environment with a funny look on their face? Right?

Announcements, Collections, Digital Collections, New Collections, Uncategorized

Back to the ’80s – Duke Chronicle Style

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Ah, the 1980s…a decade of perms, the Walkman, Jelly shoes, and Ziggy Stardust.  It was a time of fashion statements I personally look back on in wonderment.

Personal Computer Ad, 1980
Personal Computer Ad, 1980

Fashionable leotards, shoulder pads, and stirrup pants were all the rage.  And can we say parachute pants?  Thanks, MC Hammer.  If you’re craving a blast from the past, we’ve got you covered.  The digitized 1980s Duke Chronicle has arrived!  Now you can relive that decade of Hill Street Blues and Magnum P.I. from your own personal computer (hopefully,you’re not still using one of these models!).

As Duke University’s student-run newspaper for over 100 years, the Duke Chronicle is a window into the history of the university, North Carolina, and the world.  It may even be a window into your own past if you had the privilege of living through those totally rad years.  If you didn’t get the chance to live it firsthand, you may find great joy in experiencing it vicariously through the pages of the Chronicle, or at least find irony in the fact that ’80s fashion has made a comeback.

Sony Private Stereo Ad, February 12, 1980
Sony Private Stereo Ad, February 12, 1980

 

Here at Duke, the 1980s was the decade that welcomed Coach Krzyzewski to the basketball team, and made it (almost) all the way to the championship in 1986.  In 1980, the Chronicle celebrated its 75th year of bringing news to campus.  It was also a time of expansion, as Duke Hospital North was constructed in 1980 and the Washington Duke Inn followed in 1988.  President Reagan visited campus, Desmond Tutu spoke at Duke Chapel, and Princess Grace Kelly entertained with poetry at Page Auditorium almost two years to the day before she died.

 

The 1980s also saw racial unrest in North Carolina, and The Duke Chronicle headlines reflected these tense feelings.  Many articles illustrate a reawakened civil rights movement.  From a call to increase the number of black professors at Duke, to the marching of KKK members down the streets of Greensboro, Durham, and Chapel Hill, North Carolinians found themselves in a continued struggle for equality.  Students and faculty at Duke were no exception.  Unfortunately, these thirty-year-old Chronicle headlines would seem right at home in today’s newspapers.

 

The 1980s Chronicle issues can inform us of fashion and pop culture, whether we look back at it with distaste or fondness.  But it also enlightens us to the broader social atmosphere that defined the 1980s.   It was a time of change and self-expression, and I invite you to explore the pages of the Duke Chronicle to learn more.

Fashion Ad, May 10, 1984
Fashion Ad, May 10, 1984

 

The addition of the 1980s issues to the online Duke Chronicle digital collection is part of an ongoing effort to provide digital access to all Chronicle issues from 1905 to 1989.  The next decades to look forward to are the 1970s and 1950s.  Also, stay tuned to Bitstreams for a more in-depth exploration of the newspaper digitization process.  You can learn how we turn the pages of the Duke Chronicle into online digital gold.  At least, that’s what I like to think we do here at the Digital Production Center.  Until then, transport yourself back to the 1980s, Duke Chronicle style (no DeLorean or flux capacitor necessary).

Collections, Digital Collections

Advertising Culture

IMG_1367When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to do while visiting my grandparents was browsing through their collections of old National Geographic and Smithsonian magazines. I was more interested in the advertisements than the content of the articles. Most of the magazines were dated from the 1950s through the 1980s and they provided me with a glimpse into the world of my parents and grandparents from a time in the twentieth century I had missed.

IMG_1369I also had a fairly obsessive interest in air-cooled Volkswagen Beetles, which had ceased being sold in the US shortly before I was born. They were still a common sight in the 1980s and something about their odd shape and the distinct beat of their air-cooled boxer engine captured my young imagination. I was therefore delighted when an older cousin who had studied graphic design gave to me a collection of several hundred Volkswagen print advertisements that he had clipped from 1960s era Life magazines for a class project. Hinting at my future profession, I placed each sheet in a protective plastic sleeve, gave each one an accession number, and catalogued them in a spreadsheet.

I think that part of the reason I find old advertisements so interesting is what they can reveal about our cultural past. Because advertisements are designed specifically to sell things, they can reveal the collective desires, values, fears, and anxieties of a culture.

All of this to say, I love browsing the advertising collections at Duke Libraries. I’m especially fond of the outdoor advertising collections: the OAAA Archives, the OAAA Slide Library, and the John E. Brennan Outdoor Advertising Survey Reports. Because most of the items in these collections are photographs or slides of billboards they often capture candid street scenes, providing even more of a sense of the time and place where the advertisements were displayed.

I’ve picked out a few to share that I found interesting or funny for one reason or another. Some of the ads I’ve picked use language that sounds dated now, or display ideas or values that are out-moded. Others just show how things have changed. A few happen to have an old VW in them.

Collections, Digital Collections, Digitization Expertise, Projects, Technology, Uncategorized, User Experience

The Value of Metadata in Digital Collections Projects

Before you let your eyes glaze over at the thought of metadata, let me familiarize you with the term and its invaluable role in the creation of the library’s online Digital Collections.  Yes, metadata is a rather jargony word librarians and archivists find themselves using frequently in the digital age, but it’s not as complex as you may think.  In the most simplistic terms, the Society of American Archivists defines metadata as “data about data.”  Okay, what does that mean?  According to the good ol’ trusty Oxford English Dictionary, it is “data that describes and gives information about other data.”  In other words, if you have a digitized photographic image (data), you will also have words to describe the image (metadata).

Better yet, think of it this way.  If that image were of a large family gathering and grandma lovingly wrote the date and names of all the people on the backside, that is basic metadata.  Without that information those people and the image would suddenly have less meaning, especially if you have no clue who those faces are in that family photo.  It is the same with digital projects.  Without descriptive metadata, the items we digitize would hold less meaning and prove less valuable for researchers, or at least be less searchable.  The better and more thorough the metadata, the more it promotes discovery in search engines.  (Check out the metadata from this Cornett family photo from the William Gedney collection.)

The term metadata was first used in the late 1960s in computer programming language.  With the advent of computing technology and the overabundance of digital data, metadata became a key element to help describe and retrieve information in an automated way.  The use of the word metadata in literature over the last 45 years shows a steeper increase from 1995 to 2005, which makes sense.  The term became used more and more as technology grew more widespread.  This is reflected in the graph below from Google’s Ngram Viewer, which scours over 5 million Google Books to track the usage of words and phrases over time.

metadatangram_blog
Google Ngram Viewer for “metadata”

Because of its link with computer technology, metadata is widely used in a variety of fields that range from computer science to the music industry.  Even your music playlist is full of descriptive metadata that relates to each song, like the artist, album, song title, and length of audio recording.  So, libraries and archives are not alone in their reliance on metadata.  Generating metadata is an invaluable step in the process of preserving and documenting the library’s unique collections.  It is especially important here at the Digital Production Center (DPC) where the digitization of these collections happens.  To better understand exactly how important a role metadata plays in our job, let’s walk through the metadata life cycle of one of our digital projects, the Duke Chapel Recordings.

The Chapel Recordings project consists of digitizing over 1,000 cassette and VHS tapes of sermons and over 1,300 written sermons that were given at the Duke Chapel from the 1950s to 2000s.  These recordings and sermons will be added to the existing Duke Chapel Recordings collection online.  Funded by a grant from the Lilly Foundation, this digital collection will be a great asset to Duke’s Divinity School and those interested in hermeneutics worldwide.

Before the scanners and audio capture devices are even warmed up at the DPC, preliminary metadata is collected from the analog archival material.  Depending on the project, this metadata is created either by an outside collaborator or in-house at the DPC.  For example, the Duke Chronicle metadata is created in-house by pulling data from each issue, like the date, volume, and issue number.  I am currently working on compiling the pre-digitization metadata for the 1950s Chronicle, and the spreadsheet looks like this:

1950sChronicle_blog
1950s Duke Chronicle preliminary metadata

As for the Chapel Recordings project, the DPC received an inventory from the University Archives in the form of an Excel spreadsheet.  This inventory contained the preliminary metadata already generated for the collection, which is also used in Rubenstein Library‘s online collection guide.

inventorymetadata_blog
Chapel Recordings inventory metadata

The University Archives also supplied the DPC with an inventory of the sermon transcripts containing basic metadata compiled by a student.

inventorysermons_blog
Duke Chapel Records sermon metadata

Here at the DPC, we convert this preliminary metadata into a digitization guide, which is a fancy term for yet another Excel spreadsheet.  Each digital project receives its own digitization guide (we like to call them digguides) which keeps all the valuable information for each item in one place.  It acts as a central location for data entry, but also as a reference guide for the digitization process.  Depending on the format of the material being digitized (image, audio, video, etc.), the digitization guide will need different categories.  We then add these new categories as columns in the original inventory spreadsheet and it becomes a working document where we plug in our own metadata generated in the digitization process.   For the Chapel Recordings audio and video, the metadata created looks like this:

digitizationmetadata_blog
Chapel Recordings digitization metadata

Once we have digitized the items, we then run the recordings through several rounds of quality control.  This generates even more metadata which is, again, added to the digitization guide.  As the Chapel Recordings have not gone through quality control yet, here is a look at the quality control data for the 1980s Duke Chronicle:

qcmetadata_blog
1980s Duke Chronicle quality control metadata

Once the digitization and quality control is completed, the DPC then sends the digitization guide filled with metadata to the metadata archivist, Noah Huffman.  Noah then makes further adds, edits, and deletes to match the spreadsheet metadata fields to fields accepted by the management software, CONTENTdm.  During the process of ingesting all the content into the software, CONTENTdm links the digitized items to their corresponding metadata from the Excel spreadsheet.  This is in preparation for placing the material online. For even more metadata adventures, see Noah’s most recent Bitstreams post.

In the final stage of the process, the compiled metadata and digitized items are published online at our Digital Collections website.  You, the researcher, history fanatic, or Sunday browser, see the results of all this work on the page of each digital item online.  This metadata is what makes your search results productive, and if we’ve done our job right, the digitized items will be easily discovered.  The Chapel Recordings metadata looks like this once published online:

onlinemetadata_blog
Chapel Recordings metadata as viewed online

Further down the road, the Duke Divinity School wishes to enhance the current metadata to provide keyword searches within the Chapel Recordings audio and video.  This will allow researchers to jump to specific sections of the recordings and find the exact content they are looking for.  The additional metadata will greatly improve the user experience by making it easier to search within the content of the recordings, and will add value to the digital collection.

On this journey through the metadata life cycle, I hope you have been convinced that metadata is a key element in the digitization process.  From preliminary inventories, to digitization and quality control, to uploading the material online, metadata has a big job to do.  At each step, it forms the link between a digitized item and how we know what that item is.  The life cycle of metadata in our digital projects at the DPC is sometimes long and tiring.  But, each stage of the process  creates and utilizes the metadata in varied and important ways.  Ultimately, all this arduous work pays off when a researcher in our digital collections hits gold.

Behind the Scenes, Technology

What’s in my tool chest

I recently, while perhaps inadvisably, updated my workstation to the latest version of OS X (Yosemite) and in doing so ended up needing to rebuild my setup from scratch. As such, I’ve been taking stock of the applications and tools that I use on a daily basis for my work and thought it might be interesting to share them. Keep in mind that most of the tools I use are mac-centric, but there are almost always alternatives for those that aren’t cross-platform compatible.

Communications

Our department uses Jabber for Instant Messaging. The client of choice for OS X is Adium. It works great — it’s light weight, the interface is intelligible, custom statuses are easy to set, and the notifications are readily apparent without being annoying.

My email and calendaring client of choice is Microsoft Outlook. I’m using version 15.9, which is functionally much more similar to Outlook Web Access (OWA) than the previous version (Outlook 2011). It seems to startup much more quickly and it’s notifications are somehow less annoying, even though they are very similar. Perhaps it’s just the change in color scheme. I had some difficulty initially with setting up shared mailboxes, but I eventually got that to work. [go to Tools > Accounts, add a new account using the shared email address, set access type to username and password, and then use your normal login info. The account will then show up under your main mailbox, and you can customize how it’s displayed, etc.]

outlook
Outlook 2015 — now in blue!

Another group that I work with in the library has been testing out Slack, which apparently is quite popular within development teams at lots of cool companies. It seems to me to be a mashup of Google Wave, Newsgroups, and Twitter. Its seems neat, but I worry it might just be another thing to keep up with. Maybe we can eventually use it to replace something else wholesale.

Project Management

We mostly use basecamp for shared planning on projects. I think it’s a great tool, but the UI is starting to feel dated — especially the skeuomorphic text documents. We’ve played around a bit with some other tools (Jira, Trello, Asana, etc) but basecamp has yet to be displaced.

Basecamp text document (I don’t think Steve Jobs would approve)

We also now have access to enterprise-level Box accounts at Duke. We use Box to store project files and assets that don’t make sense to store in something like basecamp or send via email. I think their web interface is great and I also use Box Sync to regularly back up all of my project files. It has built-in versioning which has helped me on a number of occasions with accessing older version of things. I’d been a dropbox user for more than five years, but I really prefer Box now. We also make heavy use of Google Drive. I think everything about it is great.

Another tool we use a lot is Git. We’ve got a library Github account and we also use a Duke-specific private instance of Gitorious. I much prefer Github, fwiw. I’m still learning the best way to use git workflows, but compared to other version management approaches from back in the day (SVN, Mercurial) Git is amazing IMHO.

Design & Production

I almost always start any design work with sketching things out. I tend to grab sheets of 11×17 paper and fold them in half and make little mini booklets. I guess I’m just too cheap to buy real moleskins (or even better, fieldnotes). But yeah, sketching is really important. After that, I tend jump right in to do as much design work in the browser as is possible. However Photoshop, Illustrator, and sometimes Indesign, are still indispensable. Rarely a day goes by that I don’t have at least one of them open.

Still use it everyday...
Photoshop — I still use it a lot!

With regards to media production, I’m a big fan of Sony’s software products. I find that Vegas is both the most flexible NLE platform out there and also the most easy to use. For smaller quicker audio-only tasks, I might fire up Audacity. Handbrake is really handy for quickly transcoding things. And I’ll also give a shout out to Davinci Resolve, which is now free and seems incredibly powerful, but I’ve not had much time to explore it yet.

Development

My code editor of choice right now is Atom — note that it’s mac only. When I work on a windows box, I tend to use notepad++. I’ve also played around a bit with more robust IDEs, like Eclipse and Aptana, but for most of the work I do a simple code editor is plenty.

The UI is easy on the eyes
The Atom UI is easy on the eyes

For local development, I’m a big fan of MAMP. It’s really easy to setup and works great. I’ve also started spinning up dedicated local VMs using Oracle’s Virtual Box. I like the idea of having a separate dedicated environment for a given project that can be moved around from one machine to another. I’m sure there are other better ways to do that though.

I also want to quickly list some Chome browser plugins that I use for dev work: ColorPick Eyedropper, Window Resizer, LiveReload (thanks Cory!), WhatFont, and for fun, Google Art Project.

Testing

I also make use of Virtual Box for doing browser testing. I’ve got several different versions of Windows setup so I can test for all flavors of Internet Explorer along with older incarnations of Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. I’ve yet to find a good way to test for older versions of Safari, aside from using something static like browsershots.

With regards to mobile devices, I think testing on as many real-world variations as possible is ideal. But for quick and dirty tests, I make use of the iOS Simulator and the Android SDK emulator. the iOS simulator comes setup with several different hardware configs while you have to set these up manually with the Android suite. In any case, both tools provide a great way to quickly see how a given project will function across many different mobile devices.

Conclusion

Hopefully this list will be helpful to someone out in the world. I’m also interested in learning about what other developers keep in their tool chest.

Notes from the Duke University Libraries Digital Projects Team