Thursday, September 20, 2007

American Indians of The Pacific Northwest Database

American Indians of The Pacific Northwest Database



The American Indians of The Pacific Northwest Database is an online collection of materials from various libraries and collections that include the University of Washington Libraries, University of Washington Faculty and University Departments. The collection consists mainly of photographs but includes other materials such as associated texts and commentaries of objects, as well as maps.

The Objective of the project is allow greater access to these collections for patrons that otherwise not be able to gain access to these materials. The Collections also states that one of the main users that they have focused on is k-12 teachers and students. As such the photo collection policy asses the usefulness of the objects specifically to to K-12 teachers and students. The collection also is focused on materials that predate 1920, and have made it a goal to not display similar content such as photographs that are similar in content and theme. As for the collected texts, the function of the selected texts were to compliment photographs in some manner of form. The Criteria for selecting texts was to only display content that was free of copyright or other rights management problems.

All photographs were digitized into Jpeg format very basic and stable format. Resolutions ranged from 600 to 400 dots per inch, according to image size. The texts were digitized into GIF format using flatbed scanners and in varying resolutions in both color and greyscale. The authenticity and uncorrupted state of the documented is exhibted by way of the documents resemblance to what one would encounter if they were to view the document in person. The commentary that was written on the photographs shows that this is an actual document that has not been manipulated or corrupted . Although the site states that the images were edited using adobe photoshop but fails to clarify what was edited.

with active links to search It is fairly obvious that the creators of this database made great effort to properly organize and define the characteristics of the collection. The Meta-data for this collection allows users to view associated subject descriptorssimilar objects that fall under the defined categories, Metadata concerning restrictions, format, associated place names, and document type are stated with each object. Also, the creators have included metadata about the object's physical identifiers so that one may look up and request items in person.

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