MHGS Digitizing Project -- Choosing Our Platform

We've known since we started the redesign of our society website that one of the purposes was to display digitized resources.  Unfortunately, we found that WordPress, while terrific for all our other purposes, wasn't really right for a digital collections home.

Why not?  Well, first consider what we wanted to do.  In our minds, a digital collections home needed to host a variety of digital file types -- documents, photographs, sound and video.  We needed to be able to attach a significant amount of metadata to these files -- labels with the people, places and things included, plus information about where the items came from, copyright information, etc.  All this needed to be searched easily from within the site and from Google.  Everything had to display quickly and with a minimum of fuss.  It had to handle lots and lots of files -- we have thousands of photographs alone.  And finally, we wanted it to look at least semi-professional, which we think will help convince local organizations to let us digitize their archival materials.

So what were our problems with WordPress?  First, terrible search.  Sorry WordPress, but it's true. The site searching capabilities are awful.  Second, WordPress isn't really set up to handle a database of images like we wanted. We didn't want to write individual posts about each photograph, which would take forever.  The album plug-ins we found were targeted more for art photographers, so the image display was lovely, but didn't handle the metadata we wanted to include.  And nothing seemed ready to scale to thousands of images, videos, documents and recordings.  We couldn't figure out how to make a WordPress option look professional.

So then we started looking in the archive community.  Once we ruled out the options we couldn't afford (PastPerfect), we were left with DSpace, Greenstone, and Omeka.  All three are open source programs, which means that the software is free, and targeted toward the academic archival market.

Greenstone was the first program I installed and tested.  At the time (mid-2015) it appeared to be the least supported and functional of the programs.  It was a possibility until we found something we liked better.

DSpace  is probably the most widely used among the big boys.  It actually seemed a bit too big for our purposes.  (Frankly, it intimidates the heck out of me.)

Omeka was kind of the Goldilocks product for us. Although it is used by professionals in the field, it is explicitly designed for those with very little technical experience.  There is even a version you can use for free without having to install it on your own website, although you lose some control.  It is actively under development and there's a good user-support base.  It's not perfect, but it's what we selected.

Planning a digitizing project

Our society has thousands of photographs stuck in boxes and file folders.  We decided we needed to locate them, digitize them, and put them in archival storage.  Such a simple idea.  Such a hard thing to do.

After almost a year of planning, we have finally started our project.  I thought I'd write up some of what we encountered -- perhaps we can cut some of the work for other societies?

The issues we had to address:

• What are we going to scan?
• How do we scan the items?  What kind of scanner?  What resolution?  What workflow?
• How do we manage the digital files?  How to edit?  Metadata?  How to display on our website?
• What is the impact of copyright and privacy laws and norms?
• What do we do with the physical items after scanning?
• Should we just scan the items that have been donated to us, or should we develop an action plan for identifying and acquiring/borrowing other items?

At the time we started creating a new society website, we formed a committee and had meetings.  It didn't work very well.  For this project, we had one person who pushed the project (me, the librarian,) one person who handled the technical issues, a group of regular library volunteers and patrons who acted as a focus group, and the board, who made the policy decisions.

For a project like this, I find it helps to start a "policies and procedures" document at the start.  At first, all you can add are the major section headers, but as you research and experiment and decide, you start filling things in, so it always reflects your current understanding of the project.  Ours is in a Google docs file accessible to the librarian, the tech guy, and the president.  At several points during the year, I have printed it out and distributed it to the board.

Sections so far:

• Overview -- our goals and some guidelines
• Process -- soup to nuts, from scanning to putting on the web to storage
• Photograph Scanning Standards (there will also be a document scanning section)
• Metadata Standards
• Copyright and Privacy Standards
• Contributed Items (policies about items we don't own)
• Appendix A: Julia's Notes on Copyright and Privacy 
• Appendix B: Resources