Announcements, Trumpet of Conscience

Sam Reed and the Trumpet of Conscience

In late-March 2009, we proudly published a digital collection entitled: Sam Reed and the Trumpet of Conscience. This collection documents the life and work of activist and organizer, Sam Reed, and the organization and publication, the Trumpet of Conscience, he founded in Durham, N.C., 1987-2000. The Trumpet of Conscience worked for social justice and to improve race relations, and the group’s mission was “To come together, to listen to one another, to strive toward reducing and eliminating the root causes of crime and divisiveness in our midst.”

TOC was open to all and attracted active involvement from numerous Duke University and North Carolina Central University faculty, as well as local Durham residents. According to William Willimon, former Dean of Duke Chapel, Duke and Durham’s Martin Luther King Day celebrations were established, in large part, because of Reed’s efforts. The Sam Reed and the Trumpet of Conscience digital collection includes newsletters, planning documents, photographs, awards, speeches, and interviews created and collected by Sam Reed. The collection also includes articles by and about Dr. John Hope Franklin.

Announcements, Deena Stryker Photographs

Deena Stryker Photographs of Cuba

We’re very excited to announce the Deena Stryker Photographs digital collection. It includes approximately 1,850 photographs shot in Cuba between 1963 and 1964, processed by Alberto Korda on the island. The collection features photographs of Fidel Castro and Raúl Castro, as well as other major figures in the Cuban Revolution, including Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Celia Sánchez, and René Vallejo. In addition to images of key members of the Castro government at work and relaxing, the collection documents everyday life in Havana and in rural Cuba, focusing on farms, development projects, and schools.

Announcements, Protestant Family

Images of the Protestant Family

Learning the Christian WayIn our March build, we collaborated with Duke’s Divinity School Library to republish a collection entitled Images of mainline Protestant children and families in the U.S., which features articles and advertising images of children and families in the U.S. from Protestant-supported or targeted magazines.

The collection includes images depicting family size and health, articles and advertisements on scientific nutrition, and other images directly related to scientific progress and domesticity. Also included are images depicting families in Protestant mission settings. Content for the collection was selected by Dr. Amy Laura Hall and Andrew Keck in the Duke Divinity School.

We acknowledge the generous support of the ATLA/ATS Cooperative Digital Resources Initiative (CDRI), funded by the Luce Foundation, and the Valparaiso Child in Religion and Ethics Program, funded by the Lilly Foundation.

The collection is also part of the American Theological Library Association and the Association of Theological Schools Cooperative Digital Resources Initiative.

Broadsides, Trident

Building the Broadsides Collection: Conservation

What happens when an entire collection goes through the Conservation Department to be processed so that it can be digitized?  What do these collections look like through the eyes of a conservator?  What level of conservation work should a collection get? How long does it take to process a collection?  These are some of the common questions asked of the Conservation Staff.  In our second installment of Digital Collections “Behind the Scenes” we will explore these questions and more.  Below is an overview of the process which is explained in detail in the embedded video.

Overview:
1.    Sort
2.    Remove Mylar
3.    Assess collection for repair
4.    Repair
5.    Flag problem items for the Digital Production Center
6.    Re-house
7.    Repeat

The next stage of the process is digitization — coming soon!

metadata, Presentations

LAUNC-CH presentation on Metadata Librarianship

Noah Huffman and I (that would be Rich Murray), the two Metadata Librarians working on the Digital Collections team at Duke, spoke about our jobs at the LAUNC-CH conference in Chapel Hill on March 9 as part of a panel called “New Titles, Changing Workforce.” Thanks to everyone who attended, and to the conference organizers who invited us! As promised, here are the slides from our presentation.

Interface Features

Digital Collections… on Paper!

Have you ever tried to print out anything from our Digital Collections site, like a cool historic advertisement, an old documentary photograph, or a list of search results?  If so, you probably got a printout with some less-than-ideal formatting and some extraneous near-blank pages.

Today, we implemented a print-specific stylesheet, so give it another try and let us know what you think!

One of our core aims for our system is to be able to deliver items from our collections in the formats that are most ideal for the various ways people will use them.   Lots of people print web pages, and what works on-screen isn’t always best on paper.

Here were our goals for the print styles:

  • maintain branding for Duke LIbraries, Digital Collections Program, and individual collection
  • remove interface elements like search boxes and facets that do not provide value on paper
  • write out the URL of copyright & reproduction information for items
  • eliminate unnecessary page breaking
  • support landscape & portrait orientation
  • support all major browsers/platforms
  • make table headers repeat on subsequent pages

There’s another feature we’re working on implementing (in the not-too-distant future) that should also make things easier to print:  PDF generation.  It should be especially useful for multi-paged items. We’ll keep you posted on this blog about all coming interface updates…

Happy printing!

Assessment, Presentations

Presentation to Duke Libraries (2008 Usage Stats)

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I presented this morning (March 4, 2009) at our monthly First Wednesday library IT presentation series about Digital Collections stats from 2008 server logs (slides below):

The slides are very basic. Included are some figures extracted from previous blog posts (http://library.duke.edu/blogs/digital-collections/category/assessment/) as well as ‘greatest hits’–the most-accessed item from each collection.

Assessment, Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive

Video Discovery Stats for DSVA: A First Look

Our Diamonstein-Spielvogel video archive collection, comprised of about 130 videos, was introduced this past fall and represents our first digital video collection. Our Digital Collections system (Tripod) does not yet support discovery within a video collection, so in the interim, we are using two external video services in tandem to host the collection and are relying on their native interfaces for search and retrieval.

  • videos uploaded to iTunes U the week of September 21, 2008
  • videos uploaded to YouTube the week of December 14, 2008

Each service provides some distinct advantages over the other. A basic matrix of differences can be found here:
http://www.oit.duke.edu/web-multimedia/multimedia/YouTube/index.html#faq

Usage

To gauge use, we looked at about 8 weeks of data in both systems following the publication of the videos in YouTube. There were 16,412 YouTube views, 993 iTunes downloads, and 392 iTunes previews.

Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive Usage Stats
Dec 14, 2008 – Feb 8, 2009

Continue reading Video Discovery Stats for DSVA: A First Look →