Planning Local History Projects on the Web
I always thought that the best way to launch a big undertaking like creating the Cleveland Memory Project was to get all the issues planned in advance, to secure major outside funding, to research and select the best hardware and software, to train the staff in the new technology, to perform some dry runs and then digitize thousands of items before announcing the product. I call this the "Spanish Armada" approach, acknowledging the similar preparations that must have gone into sending that massive fleet off to war.
Lacking the patience to do things the "right" way and eager to see what would work, I just started doing some local history web work in 1996 and gradually recruited other kindred souls on the CSU Library staff to join in. We made mistakes, back-tracked to undo unwise decisions, digitized whatever our whimsy led us to and generally made it up as we went along. I call that the "Dunkirk Model," where you just find something that will float and start paddling like crazy.
Our goal was to reach the New World of digital history as fast as possible. At any moment in the following decade, we expected to hear of a local Spanish Armada being launched, which would blow our effort out of the water, but it never sailed. Instead our fleet of collaborators just keeps growing and we're still operating in a whimsical fashion to a large degree, but we've discovered that this process is a whole lot more fun and is more sustainable, as we're not always worrying about where the next big grant's coming from to keep us afloat.
One outgrowth of this has been the Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium, which will be meeting next on November 5th. The Consortium was formed from a meeting at CWRU in 2004 to help local institutions mount resources on the web about the region's history. Email me for details if you're interested.
Labels: Cleveland history, Cleveland Memory, digital humanities, Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium, projects
Tomorrow's GCHDLC Meeting
The next meeting of the Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium will be held tomorrow, Thursday the 30th, at Heights Library. The GCHDLC is made up of librarians, historians, and others interested in presenting local history on the Web.
The theme of this meeting is the collaborations going on up on the Heights, involving a cast of people from the various historical societies, public libraries and governmental units. Roy Larick will be giving a presentation on what he and Steve Titchenal have been doing around the topic of Bluestone Heights, tracking historic terrain and watersheds using Google Earth and historic map overlays. We will also hear about a project to add 3-D models of the North Union of Shakers community buildings to Google Earth, involving the Shaker Historical Society and the Shaker Heights Public Library in partnership with an architectural class at the University of Cincinnati. Our host is Debbie Rossman, late of the Westlake Porter Public Library and now with the Heights Library, who will tell us of their plans to work with Cleveland Hts. organizations, such as the City of Cleveland Heights, in building a wider presence in Cleveland Memory.
If you wish to join us at this great meeting, which incidentally is the 5th anniversary of the founding of the GCHDLC, please send me an email at w.barrow@csuohio.edu.
Labels: Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, GCHDLC, Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium
Mash-ups of historic and contemporary maps
The
Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium (GCHDLC), an informal network of historians, librarians and others interested in presenting Northeast Ohio's historic resources in digital format, will be meeting July 30th to learn more about collaborative projects in the Heights which center around historic maps. The group's map committee has previously conducted workshops on how to overlay digitized historic maps onto contemporary maps and aerial photos in Google Earth and now some actual projects have come forth in Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights that will be demonstrated. Dr. Roy Larick and Steven Titchenal will present their work on a "Bluestone Hts." use of this technology and we will also see what's been done in Shaker Heights, particularly a further development using the Sketch-up program to create 3D models of North Union Shaker settlement buildings.
For more information, contact Bill Barrow, at w.barrow@csuohio.edu.
Labels: Cleveland history, Cleveland Ohio, Google Earth, Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium, maps
Digital Library Consortium takes it to the bank
The
Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium met at the Federal Reserve Bank in downtown Cleveland this afternoon, to hear Angela O'Neal share the latest news from Columbus and to tour the Fed's new
Money Museum and Learning Center.
Angela is the Digital Products Manager for the Ohio Historical Society, where she runs the Ohio Memory project, is the Vice-President of the
Society of Ohio Archivists and is associated with the
Ohio Digitizers Interest Group, so she touched on all these areas of her professional interest during her talk. I was particularly happy to hear that the
Ohio Historic Markers Program has made it to the web and discovered that people are encouraged to submit photographs of markers in their community to this site. She also reports that proposals are being accepted for papers or sessions at the
MAC/SOA Spring Meeting, in May of 2007.
The tour of the Money Museum was a lot of fun. It is designed to explain the nature of money to all age groups, but we had particular fun using a series of rubbing stations to create our own bills. The
Federal Reserve Bank Building itself is truly impressive -- it was specifically designed to awe, so people would feel assured that their money was in the hands of banking gods -- and we so grateful to Lynn C. Sniderman and the bank staff generally for making all of this possible!
Labels: Cleveland history, Cleveland Ohio, Federal Reserve Bank, Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium, Money Museum
Next meeting of the Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium
The next meeting of the
Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium will be held at 1:00 on Thursday, April 27th, at the
Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University.
Nick Fischio, a member of the Library's Technology Team, will give a brief demo of their newly implemented Fedora digital file management and archiving system. This is where the library's digital books now reside. There will also be a tour of the Freedman Center, where items in any format are digitized, including microfilm, LP records, 8 tracks, slides, photos and video. The tour will demonstrate a large format planetary scanner and visit their Preservation Department.
The meeting will also include a brief presentation by Paul McKey, of
Aptigent software's "itemright" metadata program, which several consortium members are signed up to use or are at least considering.
The consortium is made up of representatives from dozens of local libraries, historical societies and others interested in networking local history materials on the web. Their mission statement is reproduced in an earlier blog posting here (below). If you are interested in attending or wish to know more about the consortium, please write to me at w.barrow@csuohio.edu.
Labels: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland history, Cleveland Ohio, Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium, Kelvin Smith Library
The mission of the digital library consortium
The Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium has approved a mission statement, to guide its future activities and help explain its purpose to the wider community. While not as difficult as approving the Iraqi constitution is proving to be, there’s always differing viewpoints on which elements to include and in which order to list them. The final version reads like this:
The mission of the GCHDLC is to build a collaborative infrastructure that provides public access to digitized historical and cultural heritage resources and sustains local history digitization projects in Northeastern Ohio.Some members believed that the wording was too vague, “public access” being something everyone provides on the web, whereas others thought that a certain amount of vagueness freed us from trying to perform the laundry list of specifics that others were putting forth.
One point that came up was a goal of “centralizing” access and/or providing a “portal” for such access. While centralization seems natural enough, it was felt to imply a view of the web and our collaborations that we wanted to avoid. We felt that the strength of the web comes from our ability to create a big, uncentralized, network of resources, which everyone would be free to use and provide access to through the particular lens of their individual interests and purposes. A monolithic entity is not what we’re building, we decided, so we shouldn’t inadvertently use buzz words that seemed to imply that we were.
Anyway, this is the mission statement of the consortium, until such time as it proves inadequate or inspiration strikes someone. The whole process of arriving at this formulation has been beneficial, as it forced us to debate our purpose and our plans, and while the specifics will evolve with time, we hope this statement will be flexible enough to keep pace for a while.
Labels: Cleveland history, Cleveland Ohio, Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium
Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium
The
Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium was formed 2004 to coordinate the local history digitization efforts of its members, to investigate new technologies and standards, to educate its members in best practices and to investigate and conduct collaborative projects. It grew out of an informal meeting between representatives from the libraries at Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland State University, who were coordinating their individual e-book projects (
CSU,
CWRU). That meeting showed enough benefit that they decided to invite more of their colleagues to a larger meeting, including recently hired catalogers at both libraries.
Since CWRU and the Cleveland Public Library had done an earlier e-book project together, and CPL and CSU had done a joint
Cultural Gardens of Cleveland site more recently, CPL was invited to join, as well. Before the organizational meeting could be held, the invitation list had grown to include the Western Reserve Historical Society, the Cuyahoga County Public Library, the Cuyahoga Community College, the Shaker Heights Public Library, and historians from some of these institutions. In all, two dozen people came together from these organizations.
The organizational meeting was held in Special Collections, at the Kelvin Smith Library at Case, on July 28th. There the attendees introduced themselves, reported on projects they were undertaking, or wished to, and discussed how forming a consortium could benefit their endeavors and the public generally. They decided to create two committees: a
Content Committee, to inventory the existing digital and paper-based historical collections that should be brought together on the Web, and a
Technical Committee, to determine how best to catalog, present and provide access to such materials. These goals were incorporated into an
LSTA mini-grant proposal in a subsequent meeting and over the balance of 2004, those committees have been preparing to further these goals of the consortium’s.
Since the organizational meeting, other organizational representatives have joined the consortium. The Bay Village High School librarian saw the benefit of providing historical information to her social studies teachers and her school media library colleagues in the K-12 world, as did social studies professors from Tri-C, Lakeland C.C. and the Intercollegiate Social Studies Association. Other public libraries, such as East Cleveland’s have joined, as has the Tremont neighborhood association, in order to help make historical information about local communities and neighborhoods a part of this consortium’s programs. By the time the second meeting of the full consortium took place on January 27th, at CSU, these new members were on-board and the two standing committees had each formed three subcommittees to further their work. Four representatives from
OCLC come up from Columbus to participate and added a valuable state-wide perspective to the deliberations.
At this writing, the membership of the GCHDL Consortium stands at three dozen, the committees’ agendas are set out for them and we await word on the LSTA mini-grant application, although work will go on regardless. This is an open process and other libraries, historical societies, professional organizations, neighborhood groups and individual historians are welcome to join us by
writing to me, as Chair.
Labels: Cleveland history, Cleveland Ohio, Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium
