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

Wichita Women's Groups

Yowza, it's been a while since I last posted.  My excuse?  The stuff I've been doing with my genealogy time, while worthwhile to me, is unutterably dull to write about.  I've been labeling vacation photos and making backup disks at home, and conducting inventory at the genealogy library.  Yawn, right?

Anyway, I don't want to talk about that stuff now.  Tuesday, while I was staffing the front desk at the library, I was asked a question I totally failed to answer.  And, since I hate being clueless, I've been doing a little research.

The question:  Could I help identify this picture?

Known:  The known woman in this picture moved to Wichita in the late 1910s and died in 1942.  The picture has a Wichita photographer stamp on the back.  The woman's husband worked for a railroad.

Observed:  The dresses are almost identical, the women each have a dark ribbon tied in a bow on the left shoulder, they don't seem to have any other common jewelry or insignia, and the room looks more like a hotel banquet room than a church or home.

Answer: I have no idea what group this is.  It appears to be an organized group, and, if they went to the trouble of matching dresses, it's probably an on-going group.  The women are too old to be graduating from high school.  The consensus of the folks at the library was that it is probably some sort of women's group, like Eastern Star.

So what women's groups were active in Wichita during the 20s and 30s?

The History of Wichita and Sedgwick County, published in 1910 by Orsemus Bentley, provides a whole chapter on Wichita women's groups.  These include the Hypatia club, started in 1886 (and only recently ended), the Twentieth Century Club, the Wichita Musical Club, the South Side Delvers, the DAR, and the Fairmount Library Club.

There were many Masonic lodges in Wichita, and many wives and daughters joined Eastern Star.

There were trade organizations, with female auxiliaries, including the Peerless Princess Lodge auxiliary of the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, and the Peerless Princess Division auxiliary of the Order of Railway Conductors.

Many of the same organizations are mentioned in Helen Winslow's Official Register and Directory of Women's Clubs in America from 1913.

So, I have the beginnings of a list of possibilities, but no pictures, which might help narrow things down.
I'll have to keep looking in to this...

I Can't Believe a Word I Say

If you were reading this blog (both of you ) a few months ago, you will remember my rant about remaking my local genealogy library. prompted by the resignation of the librarian.  You might even remember this line:  I have zero interest in the job


You can see where this is going, can't you?  Yup!  I'm now the "associate librarian," which means that I've agreed to take on about half of the librarian's responsibilities for the rest of her term, with the understanding that I will most likely run for and be elected librarian at the next election (the librarian is an elected member of the society board.)  I did this partly because the current librarian is suffering from a severe mismatch between the workload and her available time, and partly because it turns out I kinda like being a librarian, especially the organizing part.  I've also found that several other members of the society have been harboring some of the same ideas about change, and we've already started to implement some of the smaller, easier ones.  


Wish me luck!  And don't believe anything I say...

Progress on the Sorting Job

Well, after two weeks, I've made a lot of progress on my sorting job for MHGS.  As things stand now, I have:

• half a paper grocery bag of church directories, yearbooks and other things that will go into the general library resources
• half a bag of things to sell, including some 1970's Bollywood postcards, one of which I found listed on EBay for more than $50!
• about a linear foot of genealogically-useful things sorted into surname folders for the library vertical files
• and a full tub of pictures that still need organizing.

If you're in the Wichita area and are interested in the Posey or Stockert families, there's some great stuff here.

One of the things in the photo tub is a photo album of pictures of Warren and Nancy Burbank, mostly taken on a 1951 car trip through Hannibal, MO, Wichita and Dodge City, KS, Colorado, and Nevada State Park.  There is an envelope with a San Francisco return address.  Every! photo is labeled, but they were taped into the album so many are stuck together.  I'm not finding any Wichita link, other than a couple of vacation photos, so we'd like to return the album to its family rather than store it on the off chance a Burbank wanders into the library.  Contact me!

MHGS Jubilee

The MHGS Jubillee was yesterday, and it was fun!  At our building, we had hotdogs, antique bicycles, a book sale and ongoing demo of the new Quiring Collection of monument purchase orders (I was astonished at how much work it took to get ready for use.  The woman who took primary responsibility worked pretty much all her waking hours for more than a month, and several other people put in significant time, as well.)  The trolley ride to TKAAM and the library was fun too, and it looked like TKAAM was doing wee with their Fall Festival.

I didn't remember to take any pictures, but I did come home with a souvenir, of sorts.

A couple came into the MHGS to ask if we wanted a bunch of genealogy material collected by Ethel Posey Anderson Brown.  Because one of the items was a typewritten autobiography and the family had owned businesses here since the early 1900s, we said yes, we'd take it, with the understanding that we'd probably keep only a fraction of the material.  Somehow, in the excitement of looking at the old pictures, I volunteered to take a stab at evaluating and cleaning it up.

My current system involves five "buckets"

• a plastic tub for stuff that makes it to the second round
• a trash bag (two have already gone outside, including magnetic photo albums and someone's empty used envelop collection)
• a bag of unrelated books and magazines to sell (anyone want an Oct 1953 copy of Motion Picture Magazine?  They're going on eBay for $10!)
• a bag of things that might be good resources for the library, like yearbooks
• and a bag of things I don't think we should keep, but which aren't indisputably trash (like a dozen photos of someone's new puppy.)  

My tentative goal is to trim it to the autobiography, a binder of interesting photos, and a binder of genealogically useful things like birth certificates.

Has anyone out there done this? Any suggestions?

Also, if there are any relatives of Ethel who want some of this stuff, either physically or digitally, email me.  Please!

MHGS New database

The Midwest Historical and Genealogical Society has acquired approximately 25,000 purchase orders from a major cemetery monument company (and it's predecessor companies) in Wichita.  Some of these records date back to 1919!   There's an index on the website, and copies of the files are available for a small fee.  Very exciting!

MHGS Jubilee Oct 22

Yesterday, while playing genealogy librarian (do you ever get to feeling like you know enough about a library to be a legitimate librarian?), I volunteered to help with the Family History Month Jubilee on October 22.  It sounds like it's going to be cool -- hot dogs, antique bicycles, a trolley between the MHGS, the Wichita Public Library, the Sedgwick Co Historical Museum and the African American History museum.  If you're in the Wichita area, you should come check it out!  I'll be the one playing sheepdog to get people on and off the trolley at the MHGS stop.

I'm a Genealogy Librarian!

Well, I'm an assistant librarian at a genealogy library, which is not exactly the same thing.  I did my first shift this morning as a volunteer at the Midwest Historical and Genealogical Society in Wichita. We weren't busy this morning, so I split my time between administrative things like learning to use the copy machine and exploratory things like poking through the library catalog and the piles of data CDs next to the computer.  The main librarian left us the task of checking a few of the obituary binders for missing pages and I was blown away by how much work the society has done on them, clipping obituaries, death notices and miscellaneous articles about accidents and murders from the Wichita Eagle and Beacon newspapers since 1955.  The binders take up a whole bookcase.

It seems that local genealogy libraries have to split their focus to serve two different audiences -- those who live in the local area and want to research their lines, which requires resources about other areas, and those who are researching lines in the local area, but may not live there.   The MHGS library reflects this -- the basement is devoted to Wichita and the surrounding areas, and includes resources the society has acquired, like city directories, and resources the society has created, like the obituary binders.  The other two floors are more outward looking.  Before joining the society, I had not appreciated how much material they have accumulated on other states; I had always assumed that, because my family arrived in Wichita in the 60's, local libraries wouldn't really have much to offer me.  I stand corrected!