Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition and History

The Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition and History (HEARTH) is a digital collection of books and journals depicting home economics and related disciplines. This archive is a project from Cornell University, and includes titles from between 1850 and 1970. The collection is comprised of 950 books and 9 journals.

1) Selection Decisions

The material chosen for this collection were texts deemed "electronically essential and influential" by scholars. A time period of inclusion was determined- 1850 to 1970- and widely available, commercial, and scholarly materials were considered. A system was established that identified and ranked texts in the field of home economics, and then determined relationships between sub-categories. The system used to determine what materials would be digitized was used due to it's successful implementation on other projects.

2) Metadata

The descriptive metadata included with each item is brief, and includes title, author, and print source. The administrative metadata is more thourough- copyright statements are included in the scanned pages and information on image properties, selection criteria, and the phases of project creation are provided. The structural metadata provides a navigation link on each page that shows the user what page number they are on, as well as clickable links to other pages within the document.

3) Object Characteristics

It is stated on the website that the images were scanned as 600 dpi bitonal images, and are available on the website as TIFF files. Pages were processed to create OCR and XML, both of which allow for search within the documents. There is a search field at the top of each document that allows the user to search both the collection and the individual document. There is also an option to view the document as either an image, text, or a pdf.

4) Intended Audience

The intended users of this collection are scholars looking for subject specific research, or users interested in historical texts (as the collection goes back to 1850). The inclusion of journals demonstrates this scholarly focus.