SAA Annual Conference August 15, 2009 Barbara Aikens aikens@si

Going With the Flow Going With the Flow

Mass-tering Digitization at the Mass-tering Digitization at the Collection Level: Workflow at Collection Level: Workflow at the Archives of American Art the Archives of American Art

SAA Annual ConferenceAugust 15, 2009

Barbara Aikens [email protected]

Collections Onlinehttp://www.aaa.si.edu/collectionsonline

• 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 accessContextual display &

navigation Effective and efficient

integration of existing archival descriptive practices

Automated workflowPrimarily grayscale, 300 dpi –

some color Easy to operate equipmentRepurpose 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

<c01 level="series"><did><unitid>Series 1: </unitid><unittitle>Biographical Material, <unitdate>1928-1954, undated </unitdate></unittitle><physdesc>(Box 1; 8 folders)</physdesc></did><scopecontent> <p>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.</p> </scopecontent>

<c02><did><container type="box">1</container><container type="folder">1</container><unittitle>Address Lists, <unitdate>undated</unitdate></unittitle><physdesc></physdesc></did></c02>

<c02><did><container type="box">1</container><container type="folder">2</container><unittitle>Annotated Catalog with Prices, <unitdate>1929</unitdate></unittitle><physdesc></physdesc></did></c02>

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 For more Information Karen Weiss

Information Resources ManagerArchives of American Art,

Smithsonian [email protected]

Barbara AikensChief, Collections Processing Archives of American Art,

[email protected]