|
 | |||
| Lopez Island | Orcas Island | Visitor's Guide | ||
| Email this page to a friend | ||
| ||||||||||||||||
SAN JUAN ISLAND LIBRARY |
Related pagesSan Juan Island Library Web site Previous columns |
|
Creating Digital Access in a Digital World
This week you won't see much of me unless you stop by the Historical Museum. I'm over there working with their folks, our folks, and Laura Robinson from the State Library. As part of the State Library's Washington Rural Heritage initiative we've been working to pull together materials about Jim Crook and put them online. For those of you who don't know who Jim Crook is, he's the guy who lived out at British Camp after the Pig War and before the National Park Service took over. But more about Jim Crook when are ready to unveil our work. For the moment I'm focused on the actual process of digitizing materials. Let me tell you, it's not quite as easy as you may think. The first step before you can even start the technical process is selecting what to digitize. Unfortunately it doesn't make sense to just start grabbing things and creating random digital copies. You do need to decide what you want to digitize. Do you want to digitize materials about one subject such as a person, a place, a time, an event? Or do you want to digitize unique items that don't necessarily fall neatly into one discrete group? Once you have an idea about that you have to locate, gather, and select which specific items will work. Then there is trying to secure copyright permission to reproduce an item. Sometimes it's straightforward. On some of our items, we knew the person who created it and we simply contacted them and asked if we could use it. Then it started getting a little more difficult. Sometimes we knew who had copyright of an item such as a book or newspaper article, but getting permission wasn't quite as easy as a simple phone call. More often than not we had no idea who created an item or had copyright or we had a name that no one recognized and nothing more. In these cases we just have to do our best research, document what we did, and make a decision if we should reproduce it or not. After all of that we finally got to start creating digital copies. Again some items are pretty straightforward. These include average sizes photographs that are in good condition. We follow established standards and scan in the item. Then there are flat items that are too big for the scanner. And then there are items that are three dimensional such as Jim Crook's lawn bowling balls. All I can say is good thing the State Library has sent Laura Robinson to help us out. She has been able to set up the camera, lights, screen, and everything else to give us a good digital copy. After this week our next step will be to create catalog records for the digital items so they can be searched and found. We plan to complete the cataloging and have them available online by August. We'll be sure to let everyone know when this is live. It's been a great learning experience for us and something we plan to build upon. To see the Rural Heritage Collection so far go to: washingtonruralheritage.org/ You will see that one of the beta sites, Ritzville (located about 50 miles west of Spokane) is already up with an interesting selection of items from their A.M. “Bert” Kendrick and Library Cornerstone collections. Way to go Ritzville!For more information about Washington Rural Heritage initiative go to: www.secstate.wa.gov/library/libraries/projects/rural.aspx
|
|
|
SAN JUAN ISLANDER © 2008 |
|
