Going With the Flow Mass-tering Digitization at the Collection Level: Workflow at the Archives of American Art SAA Annual Conference August 15, 2009 Barbara Aikens

Collections Online Entire collections vs. selected items Built upon fundamental archival approaches 76 collections; 512 linear ft.; 673,000 digital files

Collections Online: Scaling Up Digitization of Special Collections No item level access Contextual display & navigation Effective and efficient integration of existing archival descriptive practices Automated workflow Primarily grayscale, 300 dpi – some color Easy to operate equipment Repurpose traditional archival practices and workflows

Archival Processing Workflows Support Digitization???

Re-purpose Traditional Archival Methodologies Program relies upon existing processing, arrangement, description Processing activities already supported microfilming operations Descriptive and contextual metadata can be derived from the structured and tagged data found in EAD finding aids Integrate digitization workflows into processing workflows

Series 1: Biographical Material, , undated (Box 1; 8 folders) Biographical Material includes various address lists and business cards kept by Calder, his passport, notes, a catalog with handwritten prices, and other writings. Also found are a French tax document and other ephemera. 1 Address Lists, undated 1 2 Annotated Catalog with Prices, 1929 Sample XML Encoding for Collection to be Scanned

Technical MS SQL Server database stores all of the data tables Adobe ColdFusion programming (with some Java programming) Structure based on function (i.e. EAD ingestion, PDF creation, image processing, deployment, etc) EAD XML file is passed through parser, transforming the XML data into an EAD Document Object Descriptive data from EAD is stored in various tables: Finding Aid table; Series table; Container table Image converting, resizing, and watermarking is batch automated on a collection-wide level

Archival Appraisal and Approach Use your processing archivists ‘ skill set Take advantage of their appraisal skills and archival expertise Allow them to identify privacy and ethical issues, and non-archival materials while processing Make scanning decisions while processing the collection

What About MLP? Does processing for large scale digitization of entire collections support Minimal Level Processing? No. Does integrating processing workflows and archival approaches into the digitization workflow support Minimal Level Digitization or MLD? Yes.

Gears Keep Turning Integrate item-level digitization with Collections Online Integrate audio-visual digitization Needs web 2.0 enhancements Explore open-source programming potential and partnerships Explore with processing at less than full level (i.e. preliminary finding aids or inventories)

Just Let Go and Do It !

For more Information Karen Weiss Information Resources Manager Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Barbara Aikens Chief, Collections Processing Archives of American Art, Smithsonian