Southern Oregon Digital Archives

With the aid of a grant from IMLS, the Hannon Library on the campus of Southern Oregon University, in partnership with numerous libraries and government agencies, has built three digital collections – Southern Oregon Historical Collection, Bioregion Collection, and First Nations Collection. Together, these collections make up the Southern Oregon Digital Archives.

Selection Decisions
The goal of these projects is to represent regional history. The project staff has begun with textual documents that they think are of interest to researchers. The documents come from various repositories across the region including the Southern Oregon Historical Society, Jackson County Library, and Josephine County Library, and various government agencies.

Metadata
The website includes the project’s metadata guidelines, which are quite thorough. This document lists and describes all metadata elements for each object. The group used ArchivalWare by PTFS to enter and search metadata in the SODA database.

Object Characteristics
As of September 2006, the archives contained 2200 digitized documents. The collections include oral history transcripts, government documents, maps, correspondence, and other textual documents. These are presented as Adobe Acrobat documents, with both images and OCR text. They can therefore be searched or copied from. The project staff used Prime Recognition as their OCR software, and InputAccel for scanning the images. The images are very clear and easy to read. The project is geared toward both print and digital-born objects.

Audience
In contrast to the other projects I have covered this term, this digital collection is not suited to the general public. There is no browse option, which means that visitors need to have a specific topic or area of interest in mind. In addition, the documents are complete and in a format that facilitates research. The website includes very specific information about the project under the heading “About the SODA Project.”