Tag Archives: dukechapel

In 2016, after we launched the first iteration of the Duke Chapel Recordings Digital Collection in the Duke Digital Repository (DDR), we began a collaborative project between Digital Collections and Curation Services, University Archives, and the Duke Divinity School to enhance the metadata. The original metadata was fairly basic and allowed users to identify individual written, audio, and video sermons based on speaker, date, title, and format. All good stuff, but it didn’t allow for discovery based on the intellectual content of the sermons themselves. So, it was decided that, at the same time Divinity School staff listened to and corrected machine-generated transcripts for each sermon, they would also capture information that is useful from a homiletic perspective.

At the very beginning of the project, the Divinity School convened two focus groups of preachers from a variety of denominations and backgrounds to ask them how they would like to be able to discover and use a digital collection of sermons. These groups developed a set of terms/categories based on which they would like to be able to identify sermons. From there I worked with the project team to begin thinking about what kinds of fields they would want to capture, and determine whether or how those fields could map to the existing metadata application profile that we use in the DDR.

It quickly became clear that this project was going to require the creation of new metadata fields in the DDR application. I try to be really judicious about creating new fields (because otherwise, you end up doing this), but in this case, I felt that the need was justified: homiletic metadata is fairly specialized, and given Duke’s commitment to this collecting area, making adjustments to accommodate it seemed more than reasonable. Since I always like to work with best practices, I attempted to identify any extant metadata schemas that might already exist for working with biblical metadata. I felt pretty confident that I would find one, considering that the Bible is actually one of the oldest books out there. While I did find some resources, they were pretty old (think last-updated-in-2006), and all of them were oriented towards marking up actual Biblical texts, rather than the encoding of metadata about those texts.

Screen capture of the OSIS (Open Scripture Information Standard) in the Wayback Machine.

With no established standards to work with, we set about determining what the fields should be, using the practice of homiletics itself as a guide. We also developed a workflow for the capturing of this metadata, using a google spreadsheet with conditional formatting and pre-developed drop-down lists to control and facilitate data entry. And starting from the set of terms/categories developed during the focus groups, we came up with a normalized set of Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) for staff to choose from or add to, as needs arose.

Example of subject headings applied to a sermon, available at https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r41r6nf5b

Working with LCSH was in itself a challenge, as it required us to navigate the tension between the need to use a standardized set of headings while also include concepts that weren’t themselves well represented in the vocabulary. In some cases we diverged from LCSH in the interest of using terms that would be familiar, expected, and recognizable to practitioners of homiletics. One example of this is the term ‘Community’, which has a particular meaning in a Biblical context, but which, were we to have used the LCSH term ‘Communities’, loses its intent.

We rolled out the new metadata properties and values in early August so they could be available for use by attendees at the international homiletics conference, Societas Homiletica, which was held at Duke University August 3-8, 2018. Now, users of the digital collection can facet and browse by: Liturgical Calendar, Biblical Book, Chapter and Verse, and Subject. We’ve also added curated abstracts, and key quotations from the sermons, which are free-text searchable.

The enhanced metadata makes for a much more meaningful experience using the Duke Chapel Recordings, and future plans involve the inclusion of sermon transcripts, as well as the development of a complimentary website, maintained by the Duke Divinity School, to provide even more information about the speakers and their sermons. With these enrichments, we are well on our way to having an unparalleled free and open resource for the study of homiletics, and hopefully, in so doing, we will facilitate the discovery and study of preachers whose voices have traditionally been underheard.

Conferences, Digital Collections

Blacklight Summit 2016

November 13, 2016 Cory Lown

Last week I traveled to lovely Princeton, NJ to attend Blacklight Summit. For the second year in a row a smallish group of developers who use or work on Project Blacklight met to talk about our work and learn from each other.

Blacklight is an open source project written in Ruby on Rails that serves as a discovery interface over a Lucene Solr search index. It’s commonly used to build library catalogs, but is generally agnostic about the source and type of the data you want to search. It was even used to help reporters explore the leaked Panama Papers.

At Duke we’re using Blacklight as the public interface to our digital repository. Metadata about repository objects are indexed in Solr and we use Blacklight (with a lot of customizations) to provide access to digital collections, including images, audio, and video. Some of the collections include: Gary Monroe Photographs, J. Walter Thompson Ford Advertisements, and Duke Chapel Recordings, among many others.

Blacklight has also been selected to replace the aging Endeca based catalog that provides search across the TRLN libraries. Expect to hear more information about this project in the future.

Blacklight Summit is more of an unconference meeting than a conference, with a relatively small number of participants. It’s a great chance to learn and talk about common problems and interests with library developers from other institutions.

I’m going to give a brief overview of some of what we talked about and did during the two and a half day meeting and provides links for you explore more on your own.

First, a representative from each institution gave about a five minute overview of how they’re using Blacklight:

Cornell
Stanford – searchworks.stanford.edu, exhibits.stanford.edu
Michigan
NYU – http://geo.nyu.edu
Temple
Alberta – https://www.library.ualberta.ca, https://era.library.ualberta.ca/
Brown – Discovery at the Library (production) and VIVO with Blacklight (in early development)
Boston Public – https://digitalcommonwealth.org
Indiana – http://iucat.iu.edu
Yale – Discovery (production) http://search.library.yale.edu; Digital Collections (production) http://findit.library.yale.edu ; Avalon (Beta) http://avalon.library.yale.edu
William Patterson
Princeton – Search at Princeton
North Carolina State
Duke (https://repository.duke.edu/dc https://github.com/duke-libraries/ )
METRO NY – https://afternoon-shelf-4328.herokuapp.com
UPenn
Linn-Benton Community College – (http://libfind.linnbenton.edu/ / https://github.com/sandbergja/discovery_layer)
Penn State – http://scholarsphere.psu.edu
Columbia (http://bit.ly/2eUkTf1)
Ex Libris
Chemical Heritage Foundation
Texas A&M University Libraries
Bard Graduate Center
UNC – Chapel Hill

The group participated in a workshop on customizing Blacklight. The organizers paired people based on experience, so the most experienced and least experienced (self-identified) were paired up, and so on. Links to the github project for the workshop: https://github.com/projectblacklight/blacklight_summit_demo

We got an update on the state of Blacklight 7. Some of the highlights of what’s coming:

Move to Bootstrap 4 from Bootstrap 3
Use of HTML 5 structural elements
Better internationalization support
Move from helpers to presenters. (What are presenters: http://nithinbekal.com/posts/rails-presenters/)
Improved code quality
Partial structure that makes overrides easier

A release of Blacklight 7 won’t be ready until Bootstrap 4 is released.

There were also several conversations and breakout session about Solr, the indexing tool used to power Blacklight. I won’t go into great detail here, but some topics discussed included:

Developing a common Solr schema for library catalogs.
Tuning the performance of Solr when the index is updated frequently. (Items that are checkout out or returned need to be indexed relatively frequently to keep availability information up to date.)
Support for multi-lingual indexing and searching in Solr, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages. Stanford has done a lot of work on this.

I’m sure you’ll be hearing more from me about Blacklight on this blog, especially as we work to build a new TRLN shared catalog with it.

Behind the Scenes, Collections, Digital Collections, Projects

Lessons Learned from the Duke Chapel Recordings Project

July 15, 2016 Molly Bragg

Although we launched the Duke Chapel Recordings Digital Collection in April, work on the project has not stopped. This week I finally had time to pull together all our launch notes into a post mortem report, and several of the project contributors shared our experience at the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) Annual meeting. So today I am going to share some of the biggest lessons learned that fueled our presentation, and provide some information and updates about the continuing project work.

Chapel Recordings Digital Collection landing page

Just to remind you, the Chapel Recordings digital collection features recordings of services and sermons given in the chapel dating back to the mid 1950s. The collection also includes a set of written versions of the sermons that were prepared prior to the service dating back to the mid 1940s.

What is Unique about the Duke Chapel Recordings Project?

All of our digital collections projects are unique, but the Chapel Recordings had some special challenges that raised the level of complexity of the project overall. All of our usual digital collections tasks (digitization, metadata, interface development) were turned up to 11 (in the Spinal Tap sense) for all the reasons listed below.

More stakeholders: Usually there is one person in the library who champions a digital collection, but in this case we also had stakeholders from both the Chapel and the Divinity School who applied for the grant to get funding to digitize. The ultimate goal for the collection is to use the recordings of sermons as a homiletics teaching tool. As such they continue to create metadata for the sermons, and use it as a resource for their homiletics communities both at Duke and beyond.
More formats and data: we digitized close to 1000 audio items, around 480 video items and 1300 written sermons. That is a lot of material to digitize! At the end of the project we had created 58 TB of data!! The data was also complex; we had some sermons with just a written version, some with written, audio, and video versions and every possible combination in between. Following digitization we had to match all the recordings and writings together as well as clean up metadata and file identifiers. It was a difficult, time-consuming, and confusing process.
More vendors: given the scope of digitization for this project we outsourced the work to two vendors. We also decided to contract with a vendor for transcription and closed captioning. Although this allowed our Digital Production Center to keep other projects and digitization pipelines moving, it was still a lot of work to ship batches of material, review files, and keep in touch throughout the process.
More changes in direction: during the implementation phase of the project we made 2 key decisions which elevated the complexity of our project. First, we decided to launch the new material in the new Digital Repository platform. This meant we basically started from scratch in terms of A/V interfaces, and representing complex metadata. Sean, one of our digital projects developers, talked about that in a past blog post and our TRLN presentation. Second, in Spring of 2015 colleagues in the library started thinking deeply about how we could make historic A/V like the Chapel Recordings more accessible through closed captions and transcriptions. After many conversations both in the library and with our colleagues in the Chapel and Divinity, we decided that the Chapel Recordings would be a good test case for working with closed captioning tools and vendors. The Divinity School graciously diverted funds from their Lilly Endowment grant to make this possible. This work is still in the early phases, and we hope to share more information about the process in an upcoming blog post.

Duke Chapel Recordings project was made possible by a grant from the Lilly Endowment.

Lessons learned and re-learned

As with any big project that utilizes new methods and technology, the implementation team learned a lot. Below are our key takeaways.

More formal RFP / MOU: we had invoices, simple agreements, and were in constant communication with the digitization vendors, but we could have used a more detailed MOU defining vendor practices at a more detailed level. Not every project requires this kind of documentation, but a project of this scale with so many batches of materials going back and forth would have benefitted from a more detailed agreement.
Interns are the best: University Archives was able to redirect intern funding to digital collections, and we would not have finished this project (or the Chronicle) with any sanity left if not for our intern. We have had field experience students, and student workers, but it was much more effective to have someone dedicated to the project throughout the entire digitization and launch process. From now on, we will include interns in any similar grant funded project.
Review first – digitize 2nd: this is definitely a lesson we re-learned for this project. Prior to digitization, the collection was itemized and processed and we thought we were ready to roll. However there were errors that would have been easier to resolve had we found them prior to digitization. We also could have gotten a head start on normalizing data, and curating the collection had we spent more time with the inventory prior to digitization.
Modeling and prototypes: For the last few years we have been able to roll out new digital collections through an interface that was well known, and very flexible. However we developed Chapel Recordings in our new interface, and it was a difficult and at times confusing process. Next time around, we plan to be more proactive with our modeling and prototyping the interface before we implement it. This would have saved both the team and our project stakeholders time, and would have made for less surprises at the end of the launch process.

Post Launch work

As I mentioned at the top of this blog post, Chapel Recordings work continues. We are working with Pop Up Archive to transcribe the Chapel Recordings, and there is a small group of people at the Divinity School who are currently in the process of cleaning up transcripts specifically for the sermons themselves. Eventually these transcriptions will be made available in the Chapel Recordings collection as closed captions or time synced transcripts or in some other way. We have until December 2019 to plan and implement these features.

The Divinity School is also creating specialized metadata that will help make the the collection a more effective homiletics teaching tool. They are capturing specific information from the sermons (liturgical season, bible chapter and verse quoted), but also applying subject terms from a controlled list they are creating with the help of their stakeholders and our metadata architect. These terms are incredibly diverse and range from LCSH terms, to very specific theological terms (ex, God’s Love), to current events (ex, Black Lives Matter), to demographic-related terms (ex, LGBTQ) and more. Both the transcription and enhanced metadata work is still in the early phases, and both will be integrated into the collection sometime before December 2019.

The team here at Duke has been both challenged and amazed by working with the Duke Chapel Recordings. Working with the Divinity School and the Chapel has been a fantastic partnership, and we look forward to bringing the transcriptions and metadata into the collection. Stay tuned to find out what we learn next!

Digital Collections, Technology, User Experience

Web Interfaces for our Audiovisual Collections

June 10, 2016 Sean Aery 1 Comment

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.

A video recording in the Duke Chapel Recordings collection. — A video interface in the Duke Chapel Recordings collection.

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).

We like JWPlayer because it’s well-documented, and easy to customize with a robust Javascript API to hook into it. Its developers do a nice job tracking browser support for all HTML5 video features, and they design their software with smart fallbacks to look and function consistently no matter what combo of browser & OS a user might have.

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.

JW Player displaying inline video for the Jazz Loft Project Records collection guide.

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.

A multi-part audio item from Duke Chapel Recordings.

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

Stay tuned!

Announcements, Digital Collections, New Collections

Digitizing Divinity: New Duke Chapel Recordings Digital Collection

April 15, 2016 Jessica Serrao 2 Comments

Allow me to introduce the new, and delightfully improved…

…Drumroll please!…

Duke Chapel Recordings Digital Collection!

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.

Divinity student delivers practice sermon before faculty and students, undated

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!

From contemplative, to entertaining, to historical, the sermons cover a broad range of topics. I encourage you to take a look and a listen!

Behind the Scenes, Digital Exhibits, Technology

Chapel Exhibit

March 18, 2016 Michael Daul

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on content for a new exhibit in the library; An Iconic Identity: Stories and Voices of Duke University Chapel. I’d like to share what we created and how they were built.

Chapel Kiosk

The exhibit is installed in the Jerry and Bruce Chappell Family Gallery near the main entrance to the library. There are many exhibit cases filled with interesting items relating to the history of Duke Chapel. A touchscreen lenovo all-in-one computer is installed in the corner and runs a fullscreen version of Chrome containing an interface built in HTML. The interface encourages users to view six different videos and also listen to recordings of sermons given by some famous people over the years (including Desmond Tutu, Dr. Martin Luther King Sr., and Billy Graham) – these clips were pulled from our Duke Chapel Recordings digital collection. Here are some screenshots of the interface:

Detail of audio files interface — Playing audio clips

Video player interface — Playing a video

Carillon Video

One of the videos featured in the kiosk captures the University Carillonneur playing a short introduction, striking the bells to mark the time, and then another short piece. I was very fortunate to be able to go up into the bell tower and record J. Samuel Hammond playing this unique instrument. I had no idea as to the physicality involved and listening to the bells so close was really interesting. Here’s the final version of the video:

Chapel Windows

Another space in the physical exhibit features a projection of ten different stained glass windows from the chapel. Each window scrolls slowly up and down, then cycles to the next one. This was accomplished using CSS keyframes and my favorite image transition plugin, jquery cycle2. Here’s a general idea of how it looks, only sped up for web consumption:

Here’s a grouping of three of my favorite windows from the bunch:

The exhibit will be on display until June 19 – please swing by and check it out!

Digital Collections

Google Analytics and Digitized Cultural Heritage

October 9, 2015 Jessica Serrao 2 Comments

For centuries, cultural heritage institutions—like libraries and archives—monitored the use of their collections through varying means of counting and recording. From rare manuscripts used in special collections reading rooms to the copy of Moby Dick checked out at the circulation desk, we like to keep note of who is using what. But what about those digitized special collections that patrons use more and more often? How do we monitor use of materials when they live on websites and are accessed remotely by computers, tablets, and smartphones? That’s where web analytics comes into play.

Google Analytics is by far the largest analytics aggregator today, and it is what many cultural heritage institutions turn to for data on digital collections. We can now rely on pageviews and sessions, and a plethora of other metrics, to inform us how patrons are using materials online.

Recently, I began examining the use of Duke University Archives’ digital collections to see what I could find. I quickly found that I was lost. Google Analytics is so overwhelmingly abundant with data, what I’d venture to call a statistical minefield (or ninja warrior obstacle course?), that I found myself in a fog of confusion. Don’t get me wrong, these data sets can be extremely useful if you know what you’re doing. It just took me a while to get my bearings and slowly crawl out of the fog.

With that said, if you’re interested in learning more, use every resource available to wrap your head around what Google Analytics offers and how it can help your institution. Google provides a set of tutorials at Analytics Academy. Another site, Lynda.com is a great subscription resource that may be accessible through institutional memberships. Don’t rule out YouTube either. I also learned a lot of the basics from Molly Bragg, my supervisor, who is on the Digital Library Federation Assessment Interest Group’s (DLF AIG) Analytics subcommittee. They’ve been working on a white paper to lay out digital library analytics best practices, which they hope will help steer cultural heritage institutions in the right direction.

In my own experience scouring usage data from the Duke Chapel Recordings collection, I found many rather predictable results: most users come from North Carolina, Durham in particular.

But then there were strange statistics that can sometimes be hard to figure out. Like why is Texas our third highest state for traffic, with 7% of our sessions originating there?

Of Texas’ total sessions, 22% viewed webpages relating to Carlyle Marney’s sermons. For much of the 1970s, Marney was a visiting professor at Duke’s Divinity School, but this web traffic all originated in Austin, TX. Doing some internet digging, I found that in the 1940s and 1950s, Marney was a pastor and seminary professor in Austin. It is understandable why the interest in his sermons comes from a region in Texas that is likely familiar with his pastoral work.

I also found that referrals from our very own Bitstreams blog make up a portion of the traffic to the collection. That explains some of our spikes in pageviews, which correspond with blog post dates. This is proof that social media does generate traffic!

Once that disorienting fog has lifted, and you have navigated the statistical minefield, you might just find that analytics can be fun. Now it doesn’t look so much like a minefield but a gold mine.

Have you found analytics useful at your cultural heritage institution? We’d love to hear from you!

Behind the Scenes, Collections, Digital Collections, Digital Exhibits, Digitization Expertise, Equipment, Projects, Technology

FY15: A Year in Digital Projects

August 24, 2015 Will Sexton 2 Comments

We experience a number of different cycles in the Digital Projects and Production Services Department (DPPS). There is of course the project lifecycle, that mysterious abstraction by which we try to find commonalities in work processes that can seem unique for every case. We follow the academic calendar, learn our fate through the annual budget cycle, and attend weekly, monthly, and quarterly meetings.

The annual reporting cycle at Duke University Libraries usually falls to departments in August, with those reports informing a master library report completed later. Because of the activities and commitments around the opening of the Rubenstein Library, the departments were let off the hook for their individual reports this year. Nevertheless, I thought I would use my turn in the Bitstreams rotation to review some highlights from our 2014-15 cycle.

Loads of accomplishments after the jump …

Continue reading FY15: A Year in Digital Projects →

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

The Value of Metadata in Digital Collections Projects

May 22, 2015 Jessica Serrao

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.

Collections, Featured Item

Exams? Graduation? Already?

April 23, 2014 Thomas Crichlow

Yes, it is here; exams and graduation. It can be a time of stress, a time to recognize your hard work, even a time of celebration. But first, take a moment for diversion.

On Exams

Feeling stressed?
Learn how to deal with stressful exams through vintage advertising such as this ad for Lifebuoy soap: Whew! This Exam Is A Tough One! At least you won’t lose any dates if you follow their directions.

Tough questions?
Could you pass this 1892 teacher’s examination found in our Broadsides collection? Answers to the math questions have already been filled in. But alas, they didn’t show their work. Shouldn’t that lead to partial credit?

Who had an exam?
We even hear from Thomas Long about “Jesus’ Final Exam.” Can’t anyone get a break from exams? Long’s sermon begins at 32 minutes into the audio recording of this 1986 worship service from the Duke Chapel recordings collection.

Commencement

Once you’ve passed all of your exams, thoughts turn to time-honored traditions of graduation.

52 years ago at Duke
A four-page issue of The Duke Chronicle notes what the Duke community could expect during the four days of commencement activities in June, 1962. But when you still have exams and papers due, graduation can still seem so far away.

Drama at commencement?
This commencement program from June, 1905 for the Memminger High and Normal School Academy of Music highlights not only a valedictory speech, but also the presentation of two essays, five musical performances, and two dramatic plays. Now, what drama would exemplify your academic experience?

Ahhh…

Once you work is done, whether you are graduating or simply completing another year of rigorous study at Duke, it’s time to unwind.

Taking to the streets
This photo from the William Gedney collection shows people celebrating in the streets of Benares, India. Gedney had just told them that you would ace your exams this year and so they started partying. Now that you know how they’ve celebrated your success, how do you plan to celebrate?

Definitely time for cake
Will this vintage Pillsbury commercial from our AdViews collection tempt you into including their Deluxe Chocolate Cake in your party plans? Or, will you resist the cake and simply use the commercial as inspiration for your wardrobe choices for your end-of-year soirées?

May all of your papers, projects and exams go well. Good luck and best wishes from Duke University Libraries.