Newsletter: September 2007
Database remediation
In mid September, Heritage Partners joined Home Team staff in Year III’s first all-day workshop. Project Archivist Ginny Daley focused the morning’s discussion on remediation. Ginny is following up with visits to each Heritage Partner site. The goal of these activities is to eliminate technical inconsistencies from the database in terms of digitization—skewed images, out of focus, poor tonality, etc.—and—on the metadata side—develop a consistent application of the project’s metadata.
Home Team activities
The Home Team has been working on streamlining procedures that move images submitted by Heritage Partners to the database. Tim Carstens, head of HL Cataloging, has teamed up with Ginny to meet the responsibilities of the Metadata Librarian. (HL is actively interviewing for this position.) Melissa Young continues to trouble-shoot technical issues with Content dm. She is also working with the Project Leader to upload new webpages and revamp some of the site’s navigation. Revisions to the site are based on evaluations that highlighted functional use issues. While the report noted problematic navigational issues, we’ve had to come up with our own solutions.
Year-end report
Project Leader Anna Fariello has been finishing up tasks related to the closing of the Craft Revival project’s second year. This includes a year-end budget reconciliation and narrative report. Project Assistant Jason Woolf assisted in developing the report narrative and in collecting statistical data.
Storyboard additions
There are several new pages up on the web…please take a look. Before the next Heritage Partner meeting, we hope to have uploaded George Frizzell’s long-awaited train section and Michelle Francis’s section on Penland. Anna went to the Campbell Folk School to photograph Brasstown carvings and is working on the metadata and corresponding web pages to complete the John C. Campbell Folk School section.
Collection Guides
Heritage Partners are working on Collection Guides that relate to their home collections. A description and scope of each collection will help viewers maximize the use of the project as well as understand the interwoven significance of Partner collections. Ginny is providing guidance to HPs to complete the guides. The group will review draft guides at the October HP meeting.
Collection pages
Anna and Melissa have been revising the header and the look of the database pages. When viewers click on any image or hit “Browse the Collection,” they actually leave the Craft Revival website (located on the WCU server) and move off-site to the Content dm database. Up until now, the move from the site to Content dm has been visually apparent and caused a disconnect within the story. At the September HP meeting, Anna presented revisions to the HPs and solicited input. The new Content dm landing page and header are now visible on the site. Partners and Advisors are invited to weigh. See it at:
http://wcudigitalcollection.cdmhost.com/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/p4008coll2
Copyright statement
The project has received criticism from NC ECHO with regard to the use of a watermark on database images. As a result, HPs are using the watermark more judiciously. The watermark has “copyrighted material” printed across an image. To ensure that copyright restrictions are understood by users, we are adding a small by-line to the footer of each page. We want to keep this simple. HPs and Advisors, please weigh in on your preference. Here are some ideas:
We will also be adding a longer copyright statement on a webpage that summarizes fair use and provides instruction for the legal reproduction of images.
Glossaries
If you have visited the Folk Art Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway, you may have picked up copies of the Southern Highland Craft Guild glossaries that cover various craft media. The Guild has given the project permission to use these. They’ve been formatted for the website and will be available via The Crafts page.
Heritage Partner page
HP directors have been asked to provide a paragraph about their contemporary organizations. These will appear on a new “Heritage Partners” page with links to today’s organizations to give added visibility to Partner sites and contributions.
Request for objects
Heritage Partners, if you are adding to the database, please put craft objects in your upload queue. The project’s focus is heritage crafts and there are relatively few actual crafts items in the database. I remember from the usability testing sessions that craftsmen wanted to see actual craft objects as their first priority. Let’s let the work speak.
Heritage Partners meeting
Advisors, please be patient with us! We will be having one more all-day HP meeting in October to complete database remediation. This has been an intensive process that we hope will have highly visible results. The next HP meeting is Wednesday, October 24th. HPs should respond “yea” or “nay” to Jason with regard to their attendance. We will schedule an Advisory meeting at the end of the remediation process to review changes, progress, and discuss possibilities for next year.
Anna
Hunter Library | Library Insider | Last updated: 10/4/07 Melissa Young