Colorado Digitization Project

For my second blog I will discuss the Colorado Digitization Project, which is an attempt to coordinate the resources of myriad archives, historical societies, museums and libraries statewide in an effort to provide the most wide ranging possible collection of Colorado-focused digital objects.

Selection Procedure: The digital objects in the Colorado Digitization project cover 22 different topics, form cattle trails to tourism, one of which is sports. The overall project has links to photographs, maps, documents, and sound recordings. Under the category sports the user can select from 10 different avocations. I chose to look at baseball. There are 781 records under the topic baseball. The images are nearly all in Colorado repositories, but some reside in Utah.

Object Characteristics: At least in the baseball section of the project, black and white images seem to dominate. The ability to manipulate them varies by the institution, though I could not find any that I could enlarge by clicking on them. However, all the images can be saved or printed, and many can be ordered as photographs, just like at the New York Public Library Transit collection which I blogged on previously.

Metadata: Depends on the institution in which the record is found. The first image of the Parker, Colorado baseball team is from the Douglas County History Research Center and has an extensive caption naming all the people on the team, telling the dates, and even mentioning who likely provided the names. An image number is provided as well. There are also links present to help the user browse images from all over Douglas County. Another image that has the logo of the Colorado Digitization Project on its page has metadata including image content, image approximate date, image number, the repository in which it resides, a caption, and links the user can type into their web browser to see thumbnail or enlarged views. One problem with the digitization project is that it uses so many different institutions. For instance, some links to images from the Lafayette, Colorado Library returned an error 404 not found message, so obviously keeping up with all of the repositories involved is a challenge. Nevertheless, I believe it is a challenge worth taking in an effort to provide the widest ranging digital collection possible. A few of the images are from the collection of the Marriott Library at the University of Utah, indicating that the Colorado Digitization Project, while focused on in-state organizations, does not feel compelled to get every image from within Colorado's borders.

Intended Audience: I believe that given both the wide range of topics and of institutions that the Colorado Digitization Project subsumes, that its audience is the public, foremost of Colorado, and secondly on the internet. Coloradans are likely to have the most interest because these are records relating to their home state, whether from state, county or city archives, libraries, or museums. But any user interested in the people and history of Colorado can benefit from the breadth of topics that the objects in the Colorado Digitization Project cover. Since many links to each image allows the user to go to the homepage of the repository in which that image resides, the way the Digitization Project is constructed allows for great possibilities of discovery with regard to the inhabitants and heritage of the state of Colorado, both for residents and others.