digitization | Digital Collections Blog

[Note: This is a guest post from Rita Johnston, Project Digitization Assistant for the NHPRC-funded ROAD 2.0 project. Thanks, Rita!]

ROAD 2.0 (Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions) is a project to digitize images of billboards described in the ROAD database and match them with existing metadata. What I find interesting about the collection as a whole is that it offers an abundant variety of examples of advertising throughout the 20th century, and the content often uniquely reflects the times in which the advertisements were designed. This WWII-era advertisement encourages citizens to pay their taxes on time by linking paying taxes with the war effort. [ROAD metadata record: AAA0618]

Smash the Axis, Pay your Taxes

Continue reading Outdoor Advertising Images in the ROAD 2.0 Project →

Note: This is a guest post by Kelly Wooten, Research Services and Collection Development Librarian of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture in the Duke University Libraries. Kelly is curator of the Bingham Center Zine Collections.

The Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture has a collection of over 4,000 zines written by women and girls from the early 1990s to the present. So far we have about 2,600 of these issues cataloged in a metadata-only database. At first glance, the zines look like perfect candidates for full-scale digitization. They are frequently used by researchers from around the United States and beyond, have great visual appeal, and often are the only copies to be held in an archives. Digitizing would help preserve zines from heavy use and promote broader access to unique material in a popular collection.

When you take a closer look, digitizing zines becomes a lot more complicated… Continue reading Why We’re Not Digitizing Zines →