1. Digital Collections at the University of Oregon
Presented by Carol Hixson
Head, Metadata and Digital Library Services
University of Oregon Libraries
at the
American Library Association Midwinter Meeting
January 16, 2005
Prepared for presentation at ALA Midwinter, 2005

2. University of Oregon Libraries Digital Collections http://libweb
This is the home site for all our public digital collections. The majority of
these use CONTENTdm software. But there are a handful of other
software packages being used, including home-grown applications.

3. What, Why, and How Glimpse of some of our collections
Our organizational impetus for digital collections
Why we chose CONTENTdm
Highlights of our implementation process
How we handled metadata, importing/exporting, training, publicizing collections
How the collections are being used
Challenges
Future plans
In addition to showing some of our collections, I’ll discuss:

4. Descriptions of UO Digital Library Collections http://libweb. uoregon
We currently have 6 public collections using CONTENTdm software. This
site describes those collections, as well as collections using other
software and collections that are under discussion.

5. Tour of UO Digital Libraries http://libweb. uoregon
We’ve built a quick tour of numerous images from our digital collections to
give people a sense of the variety of materials we have available.
Gertrude Bass Warner hand-tinted slides

6. Tour of UO Digital Libraries
Clarence Andrews, photographer,

7. Tour of UO Digital Libraries
Angelus Studio – before the Columbia was dammed and the falls were inundated

8. Tour of UO Digital Libraries
1906, Skagway, Alaska, C.L. Andrews collection

9. UO’s Impetus for Creating Digital Collections
To provide access to and awareness of under-utilized materials
To provide access to and awareness of under-utilized materials (special collections)

10. Provide access to and awareness of under-utilized materials
Materials in Special Collections, such as 400,000 photographs,
Medieval manuscripts, unique manuscripts such as Oregon
Trail diaries

11. UO’s Impetus for Creating Digital Collections
To provide access to and awareness of under-utilized materials
To broaden access to physically fragile materials
To broaden access to physically fragile materials (glass
plate negatives, manuscripts)

12. Broaden Access to Physically Fragile Materials
This is an image from a collection of medieval manuscripts that we
are building with the collaboration of several key faculty. The goal is
to allow more people to have access to these kinds of rare or unique
materials, including scholars from around the world who might
otherwise not be able to study them at all.

13. UO’s Impetus for Creating Digital Collections
To provide access to and awareness of under-utilized materials
To broaden access to physically fragile materials
To preserve at-risk materials
To preserve some at risk materials (glass plate negatives – making contact
prints and master negatives

14. Preserve at-risk materials
This is an image that was scanned from a glass-plate negative. In addition
to creating a digital image of this negative, we have created contact prints
and production and master negatives for the selected images so that the
original glass plates do not need to be handled and again and so that
the photographer’s work will not be lost if the
original is damaged or destroyed.

15. UO’s Impetus for Creating Digital Collections
To provide access to and awareness of under-utilized materials
To broaden access to physically fragile materials
To preserve at-risk materials
To strengthen and build partnerships and collaborations with other cultural heritage institutions
To strengthen and build partnerships and collaborations with other
cultural heritage institutions (TCI, Museum, sister libraries)

16. Strengthen and build partnerships
This image is from our Picturing the Cayuse collection which represents a
unique partnership with the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

17. Strengthen and build partnerships
This image represents a collaborative project with the University of Oregon’s
Museum of Natural History where we are helping them to build a digital
collection of some of their artifacts. We are teaching them how to use
CONTENTdm, teaching them about scanning and metadata standards,
and we are mounting the collection for them.

18. UO’s Impetus for Creating Digital Collections
To provide access to and awareness of under-utilized materials
To broaden access to physically fragile materials
To preserve some at risk materials
To strengthen and build partnerships and collaborations with other cultural heritage institutions
To explore new delivery mechanisms for content
To explore new delivery mechanisms for content (full text searching of text)

19. Explore new delivery mechanisms
Full-text searching of digitized text allows us to provide deeper access
to some traditional materials, such as texts.
CONTENTdm’s compound object feature allows you to replicate
the structure of a book and provides for full-text searching
within a document, if you have added in the OCR in a
full-text field for the page.

20. UO’s Impetus for Creating Digital Collections
To provide access to and awareness of under-utilized materials
To broaden access to physically fragile materials
To preserve some at risk materials
To strengthen and build partnerships and collaborations with other cultural heritage institutions
To explore new delivery mechanisms for content
To help shape the digital landscape
To help shape the digital landscape (participate in standards testing
and development)

21. Help shape the digital landscape
Through some of our collaborative projects, such as the Western Waters Digital
Library which we are developing as members of the Greater Western Library
Alliance, we are working with other institutions to refine digitization and
metadata standards.
The aggregated collection uses CONTENTdm’s multi-site server.
In a recent presentation at CNI, I and a colleague talked
about some of the challenges regarding metadata and
others aspects that such a project faces.

22. Why We Chose CONTENTdm Accepts variety of digital formats
Allows for submission item-by-item or batch loading
Highly customizable
Growing body of users
Underlying mapping to Dublin Core
Supports controlled vocabularies for any field, according to your specifications
Some of the reasons we chose CONTENTdm software are:
Growing body of users within the Pacific Northwest of the
United States – means that we have a lot of people to
ask questions of and also increases opportunities for
collaboration
supports mapping to simple and qualified Dublin Core,
although we’d like it to support mapping to encoding
schema for subject, as well

23. Highlights of our Implementation Process http://libweb. uoregon
Our Metadata Implementation Group began work in November 2002,
charged by the Digital Library Initiative Group to implement a digital
collection using CONTENTdm software. Originally, this group was
charged only to look at metadata but a separate implementation
group never got off the ground and this group evolved into an
advisory group for the development of any collection being built
using CONTENTdm software.

24. Highlights of our Implementation Process
The first project the Metadata Implementation Group worked on was
the Picturing the Cayuse collection, a grant-funded project that paired
us with the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute of the Confederated Tribes of
the Umatilla. The group became aware of the project in February 2003,
two months before the grant was finished – and before any work had been
done. The group and the former Catalog dept (now Metadata and Digital
Library Services) swung into action to rescue the grant.
I’ll go into this collection in greater detail and explore some of the
specific issues we dealt with through this first collection.

25. Case Study of One Collection
To tell you about how we handled metadata, importing/exporting, training
and publicity, I’m going to talk in more depth about one collection:
Picturing the Cayuse, Walla Walla, and Umatilla Tribes.

26. Subject Analysis Guidelines http://libweb. uoregon
When we started work on images, we realized that we knew nothing about
how to analyze the content. We did some reading. We found the article
"Analyzing the Subject of a Picture: A Theoretical Approach, " by Sara
Shatford, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, v. 6(3), Spring 1986
to be especially useful to help us begin to understand the issues
and complexities.
Subject terms were created by consulting TGM1, LCSH, and also supplied
locally when no appropriate term seemed to be available. These
terms are in addition to the terms and classes supplied by TCI. This list
is dynamically generated based on descriptions of images added to the collection.
In early discussions about controlled vocabularies for digital
collections, MIG members acknowledged that image description
would be carried out by a variety of staff, from students up through
collection curators. The group settled on principles, which you can read
about on our site..
Prior to the grant-funded partnership with the UO Libraries,
TCI had described nearly 900 of their Moorhouse images in a local database
using PastPerfect software which comes equipped with The Revised
Nomenclature for Museum Cataloging

27. Metadata Issues for Picturing the Cayuse
Project goal to provide native peoples the opportunity to describe images in their own words
Also wanted to provide UO descriptions
Devised separate metadata fields for each, mapped to same DC fields but with distinct labels
Prominence given to native peoples’ descriptions
We imported a lot of descriptive metadata from TCI spreadsheets initially. We still
follow this model for other projects, so that scanners are capturing a lot of technical
- and sometimes descriptive – metadata which we then import with the images when
we upload them to a collection.
Each collection has different metadata issues. Target audiences are different and materials
being presented require some unique approaches. We have found that one size does not
fit all.

28. Poker Jim, Chief of Round Up, Pendleton, OR
One of the images from the collection. The way a tribal member would
describe and understand this image is very different from the way that
a non-tribal member would.

29. TCI Metadata from Poker Jim Image
This shows the non-subjective descriptive metadata for the
image, along with the descriptive information
supplied by members of the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute.
The default view is to show just the TCI metadata.

30. Complete Descriptive Metadata View
One of my staff, Corey Harper, developed a toggle switch to hide or display
the UO descriptive metadata.

31. View of Technical Metadata for Image
Corey also developed a toggle switch to view or hide the technical
metadata. The default view hides it but we wanted it to be available
for specialized users or other developers of digital collections.

32. Technical Metadata
Includes administrative metadata to help us manage the collections
Also includes metadata designed to assist in preservation and long-term access to collections
Informed by work of RLG/OCLC, Digital Preservation Coalition, NEDLIB, etc.
After reviewing a number of standards concerning administrative and technical
metadata, the team concluded that the NISO data dictionary of
technical metadata for digital still images , though still in draft form,
is the most thorough. The project team identified the elements in the
NISO dictionary that were relevant to the methods and materials of the
project, many of which are common to the TIFF 6.0 Specification
and Harvard’s Administrative Metadata for Digital Still Images.
These elements were incorporated into the project’s data dictionary
in blocks relating to image attributes, image production, and image
source. In some cases the team merged metadata from multiple
elements into a single field, but retained the granularity of the NISO metadata
by creating structured data values with standard delimiters. The
encoding standards and controlled vocabularies of these elements
were retained without exception. A crosswalk will guide the
export of metadata in keeping with those standards.

33. Publicity: Oregon Quarterly http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/%7Eoq/
The Autumn 2004 issue of the Oregon Quarterly featured a two-page ad on our
digital collections, as well as a feature article on the Picturing the Cayuse
collection.
We have also done a number of presentations at regional, national, and
international meetings, as well as targeted presentations on campus
to donors and alumni.

34. Use of the Collections
This is a slide from our use statistics for the CONTENTdm collections. We can track
who is using our collections, how often, what they’re using and how they find us.
Google is bringing a lot of users to us.

35. Tracking Use: Interactive Comment Form
One of the key aims we had was to allow native peoples to interact with the collection.
With TCI we developed a comment form that could be opened up while viewing
any item. The form pulls in a jpeg of the item, as well as some of the basic
descriptive metadata to help identify it. Since the comments may have bearing for
the tribes or may relate to some technical aspect of the collection, the output
from the form gets submitted to an archived list to which the TCI editors
and the UO project coordinators are subscribed. When comments are received,
the group decides what action needs to be taken.

36. Portion of Comment Received on an Image
Photo Number: PH036_4392 Comments about the image or metadata: I am browsing the collection to look for any relations to my fiance (Umatilla Tribal Member), and came across this photo. I was touched by the sweet little dog in the photo asleep on the blanket, and wondered why he was not mentioned in the description.  I know it took a long time to pose for these photos, and merely getting the scene right must have made the baby and dog both exhausted.
There is a mixture of information in this comment (our first)- some of it
relevant to TCI, some of it perhaps pointing up a need to describe the
image more fully. There was additional information that asked for
contact by the tribes elsewhere in the comment form.
We are making the comment form available in all of our collections, with the output
going to whoever the project leaders are for that collection.

37. Comment Received via Web Form on This Image

38. Challenges Public interface – Web design Context for collections
Building multiple collections simultaneously
Preservation
Web design – we don’t have specialized staff for this – we’re learning
as we go along and doing it ourselves

39. Public Interface: Browsable Subject Lists for the Collections
This is one of the specialized interfaces we’ve built on top of CONTENTdm.
You can build any kind of a web interface on top of the server.
We have also built pages that allow us to browse through a collection
by sub-collections (historical photos) or by format (Western Waters)

40. Public Interface: Drop-down Navigation Bars at Top
Another example of different search interfaces we develop. While we’re trying to
impose similar design principles for the interface, each collection has a different target
audience and calls out for different search interfaces. It is easy to construct web-based
search interfaces using search queries from CONTENTdm.

41. Context for Collections
This is just one page of the contextual information we provide about the collection.
Contextual information is written by members of the UO Libraries or by TCI,
with the other group offering feedback. Every piece of the development
represents intensive collaboration.
Getting collection curators and project participants to follow through and provide
the context is challenging.

42. Building multiple collections simultaneously
Project management is a challenge when you are building multiple collections
at once and each collection involves different partners. This screen was captured
on December 30 and there are already two more public collections that we’ve
brought up.

43. Links to Digital Preservation Resources http://libweb. uoregon
These are some of the standards that we are utilizing to decide
on the types and format of metadata to collect for preservation purposes.
We have recently convened a group to work exclusively on
digital preservation.

44. Digital Content Coordinators http://libweb. uoregon. edu/diglib/digcon
This is the group that is dealing with digital preservation. We are writing policies,
setting standards for digital collections, and are currently working on a survey
of the digital content we have created or are responsible for managing within
the library. We consider digital preservation to be the single greatest challenge we
face.

53. Future Goals Keep building collections Expand training to more staff
Make processes more routine and less dependent on a few key staff
Build new partnerships to involve a wider group of people in the library and beyond

54. Contact Information
Carol Hixson
Head, Metadata and Digital Library Services
University of Oregon Libraries
1299 University of Oregon
Eugene, Oregon
(541)