The Devil's Tale
Duke University Libraries
Skip to content
  • Blog Roll
  • Commenting Policy
descriptive image
Digital Collections, Featured, From Our Collections, Human Rights Archive, Manuscripts, Radio Haiti, Technical Stuff

Providing Access to Radio Haiti Through Multilingual Metadata

November 19, 2018 mlp60@duke.edu

Post contributed by Maggie Dickson, Metadata Architect, Digital Collections and Curation Services

As the metadata architect in the Digital Collections and Curation Services Department at Duke University Libraries, I have the opportunity to work on the design and development of many fabulous digital collections. This includes the Radio Haiti Archive, which has been one of the most interesting—and challenging—projects I’ve worked on throughout my 10+ years of working with digital collections.

Over the past few years, we’ve been standardizing our metadata practices across digital collections so that they will be more scalable and sustainable—we’ve learned the hard way that the more specialized a collection is, the more prone it is to breakages and difficulties over time. The Radio Haiti project needs are really specialized, and the metadata (description) is rich, granular, and multilingual. So, striking the right balance between standardization and specialization is definitely a challenge.

One of the foundational goals of the NEH grant we received for our work with Radio Haiti is to make sure that the collection is accessible to people in Haiti as well as the Haitian diaspora, and therefore we needed to provide description in three languages: English, Haitian Creole, and French. While we’d worked with metadata in multiple languages before, we’d never worked with trilingual content, and the technology we use to present and manage our digital collections doesn’t accommodate multilingual metadata in a sophisticated way. To get around this, rather than create lots of custom metadata fields just for this collection, we decided to use our standard fields, such as title, description, and subject, to store the multilingual content. The metadata displays in the item record and is keyword searchable and, in the case of subjects and formats, faceted. This isn’t the most elegant solution, but it works, and when the digital library community develops support for multilingual content, we will be ready!

Subject headings in English, French, and Haitian Creole.
Example multilingual subject headings.

 

Beyond figuring out how to present the metadata to users of the archive, it has also been an ongoing challenge to figure out how to manage the workflow for the development of the metadata—not only is it complex, it is voluminous! Created iteratively by project archivist Laura Wagner and her team of intrepid translators, the metadata passes through several hands and undergoes quite a few transformations before it is ready to go live on the website. Therefore, it has been critically important that we continuously review and revise our process to make sure nothing gets lost or distorted along the way. So many spreadsheets!

Spreadsheet with complex metadata.
An example snapshot of one of our many spreadsheets.

Through much careful consideration and many meetings with project staff, I think we’ve achieved a good balance between meeting project needs and being responsible to the long-term health and sustainability of this and other digital collections. That being said, we still recognize the inherent limitations to providing broad accessibility to this important content—despite the inclusion of multilingual metadata in the digital collection, it is still embedded in a predominantly English language website for an academic research institution located in the United States. And as project archivist Laura Wagner stated in an earlier blog post, “Radio Haiti’s digital archive is not only for scholars writing about Haiti; it isn’t even principally for them. It is for everyone.”

We’re experimenting with a few options to try to address this limitation, including engaging in ‘digital repatriation’ by distributing flash drives loaded with content to cultural heritage organizations in Haiti, standing up pilot collections of the content to reach a broader audience using YouTube and the Internet Archive, and improving the performance of the digital collection in low-bandwidth environments.

Working on the Radio Haiti Archive has been a challenge both in technological ways as well as how we think about collections, collecting, and access. Providing broad, equitable access to our digital collections, through our use of metadata and otherwise, is an intense and critical challenge, but one which we are beginning to tackle with intentionality and enthusiasm.

The processing of the Radio Haiti Archive and the Radio Haiti Archive digital collection were made possible through grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.




Related posts:

Digitizing the LCRM Update #10: A Project Milestone and an Iconic Signature
Raphael Lemkin’s Contribution to Describing Duke University Library's Collection of Soviet Posters
The Good, The Bad, and The Just Plain Weird
accessibilityHaitimetadatanational endowment for the arts

Post navigation

Previous Post“Since the war began ‘times ain’t what they used to be:’” Life at Trinity College During the Great WarNext PostYour Obedient Servant: Hamilton and Burr Letters at the Rubenstein Library

Dispatches from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University

Welcome to the blog of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.

Questions? Contact us!

Search The Devil’s Tale

Categories

Connect with Us

Rubenstein Library Website

RL Magazine


  • Rubenstein Library
  • Sallie Bingham Center
  • Franklin Research Center
  • Hartman Center
  • University Archives

  • Rubenstein Library
  • Bingham Center
  • Duke University Archives
  • Franklin Research Center
  • Hartman Center

  • Rubenstein Library
  • Duke University Archives
  • Franklin Research Center


Tag Cloud

  • 2011acquisitions
  • 2012acquisition
  • 2013acquisition
  • activism
  • advertisements
  • advertising
  • African American history
  • artistsbooks
  • civil rights
  • civilwar
  • conservation
  • digitization
  • documentary
  • dorisduke
  • dukehistory
  • durhamhistory
  • economists
  • events
  • exhibits
  • film
  • fullframe
  • Haiti
  • Heschel
  • history of medicine
  • holidays
  • human rights
  • JHF@100
  • lisa unger baskin collection
  • literature
  • longcivilrights
  • madmen
  • Mad Men
  • madmenmondays
  • medicine
  • movediary
  • photography
  • recipes
  • renovation
  • rubensteinstaff
  • scrapbooks
  • students
  • valentinesday
  • women's history
  • World War II
  • zines

The Devil’s Tale Archive

RSS New Archival Collections at the Rubenstein Library

  • L'auscultation médiate peut-elle servir aux progrès de la médecine pratique? / thèse présentée et soutenue à la Faculté de médecine de Paris, le 16 juin 1821, pour obtenir le grade de Docteur en médecine par Mériadec Laennec, de Nantes, Département de la Loire-Inférieure.
  • Ethiopic MS 36.
  • Ethiopic MS 52.
  • Ethiopic MS 51.
  • Ethiopic MS 50.

RSS New Books and Other Publications at the Rubenstein Library

  • Buyer behavior : theoretical and empirical foundations / edited by John A. Howard, Columbia University, and Lyman E. Ostlund, Columbia University.
  • Tips and pointers for underwear salesmen : knowing half the subject isn't much better than not knowing it at all, it's always the other half which you need.
  • The presages of life and death in diseases : in seven books, in which the whole Hippocratic method of predicting the various terminations and events of diseases, is in a new and accurate manner illustrated and confirm'd, not only by the sentiments and opinions o fthe ancient physicians, but also by a long course of attentive observation and experience / by Prosper Alpinus, professor of medicine and philosophy in the University of Padua ; translated from the last Leyden edtion, revised and published by Gaubius, at the request of Dr. Boerhaave by R. James, M.D.
  • Begnning German : a series of lessons with an abstract of grammar / by H.C. Bierwirth, Ph.D., assistant professor of German in Harvard College.
  • Eat, drink and be wary / by F.J. Schlink, co-author of "100,000,000 guinea pigs".

RSS New Rubenstein Library Materials Added to the Internet Archive

  • Grammatica lotuxo March 13, 2023
  • Important speeches of Jawaharlal Nehru ... 1922 to 1946 March 13, 2023
  • The Federal bulldozer; a critical analysis of urban renewal, 1949-1962 March 13, 2023
  • Concerto in C major for violoncello and full orchestra, op. 40 : written in honour of Casals March 2, 2023
  • Unified program, land use planning, Caswell county, North Carolina February 28, 2023

Learn more about our commitment to inclusive description of library collections.


The Devil's Tale