Foundations of Digital Libraries

Over the course of this summer, I will be taking two courses relating to digital libraries and digital collections at CUA, and though no a stranger to blogging (I've been doing this since 1999), I saw this as an excellent opportunity to fall back into the practice.

One of the courses I am taking is Foundations of Digital Libraries. Though the title of the course is about digital libraries, I engaged in a debate of semantics with my fellow classmates and the professor: what exactly is a digital library, and unless we properly define it and narrow the scope, how could we hope to have a course which focused on it.

As it stands, we are learning about digital project management, and the steps involved in planning a digital collection up to the creation of our own digital collections through the use of CONTENTdm. For me, this serves as a bit of a refresher. I worked with CONTENTdm for about two years before coming to the Library of Congress, and it is an excellent tool for developing digital collections. Plus, just as is the case with image manipulating software or word processors, once you develop proficiency with one, using other programs is not too difficult.

I enjoyed using CONTENTdm. While metadata entry itself was often time-consuming and involved heavy editing to provide just the perfect description or summary, I was drawn by the quest for more information--particularly when it came to locating information on mysterious photographs of the landscape. 

Then, that Sherlock Holmes (or Greg House) instinct kicked in, and I looked for clues--was it at a beach? Did the buildings look familiar? Were there any signs? If there were roads, were street names visible? Any kind of name helped, because then I could go to the city directories and go through the process of elimination and look for dates and streets and then cross-reference the city directory with maps and see if dates on the insurance maps indicated that, yes, a structure did exist in that location in that year matching those dimensions. 

Sometimes family files held clues. Maybe a local family owned a business, worked for a company, or resided at a particular address. 

Maybe a sentence or two of descriptive metadata would come of it, but the hunt for that information and finding it was, for some reason, immensely rewarding. (The itch had been scratched.)

I'm looking forward to doing that again next month.

The other class I am taking is called... let's see here... Digital Collections in Libraries, Archives, and Museums. This is a one-week course taught all day over at the Library of Congress. There's an emphasis on digital asset management systems (DAMS), but the structure and syllabus suggests that we will be seeing how local institutions (the Library of Congress, Smithsonian, etc.) digitize their items, enter metadata and go about preserving the digital content. I see this as both an excellent companion to the digital libraries course and also, because of the location, a great chance to network with others in the field of digital cultural heritage.