Collection Principles
This large archive owned by the Cline Libray of Northern Arizona University contains a lot of well-organized material that documents the history and culture of the Colorado Plateau and Northern Arizona University. It contains " thousands of vintage and contemporary photographs, diaries and letters, oral history interviews" concerning the Colorado Plateau and NAU, some digitized and some digitally born."New material is added weekly." All of the material that I ran across did seem to fit that definition; although it's an expansive definition and a huge amount of material, they seem to stick to their goal pretty well and there's always some background information on each collection viewed. As far as ownership/intellectual property rights, they repeatedly display information such as the following:
"The Library offers access to these archival resources for purposes of education, scholarship, and personal enjoyment. Commercial or other for profit use may require payment of license fees. Some items presented may be protected by U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S.C.). It is the responsibility of the user to secure any necessary permissions regarding copyright prior to use. The Library is eager to hear from copyright holders who are not properly identified." There are additional specific instructions for the order form and other pages and links on almost all pages to either the information just quoted or to pages with prominent links to it.
Funding doesn't appear to be a large issue since it's never mentioned and is probably funded by NAU; the only donations it mentions are Deeds of Gifts to obtain more material. The archives is part of the Special Collections & Archives Department, Cline Library of Northern Arizona University.
Accessibility is good in a number of ways but could be a bit better; enlarged versions of thumbnail images don't have attached alt tags, the video files may not be accessible, but the web pages usually are, although they're html, not xhtml. It's a lot better than many sites though and is impressive considering the size and variety of the objects in the archive.
Object Characteristics
Images are jpeg thumbnails and jpeg 72ppi images derived from master images of at least 300ppi, text items are scanned in as jpg images and the larger jpeg files are displayed at a sufficient size to make them legible. I didn't see any machine readable versions of those pages
Oral histories are available in video and audio in rm (RealPlayer) files and are often accompanied by a transcript in the language spoken. Unfortunately, there aren't English translations available for a number of the native-language transcripts of interviews of Native Americans. The audience for those interviews is therefore highly limited.
It was a bit difficult to discern the characteristics of the master files for the objects, probably due to the size of the collection and variety of objects within the collection. Judging from the quality of detail on the versions displayed on the website, the master files all seem to be of good-to-excellent quality. The highest resolution copy available for purchase of still images is 300 dpi but the file format isn't even mentioned. However, videos are available for purchase as VHS, MiniDV, and Beta Video. Audio is available in audio cassettes as well as by online rm file. 35mm slides are available, and digital prints are available as well as digital files on CDs.The objects are all named with a persistent, unique identifier that conforms to NAU's scheme. They are not named with reference to its absolute filename or address as filenames and addresses. The stable identifier can be resolved (mapped) to the actual address. The names are each also all associated with their NAU local call number and with their collection.
The metadata attached to each object is good, uses controlled vocabularies, enables linking to and finding related resources and collections, and gives a lot of information. Example on http://www6.nau.edu/library/scadb/recdisplay.cfm?control_num=14484#items.
Intended Audience:
a) students of various ages
b) scholars
c) general population for personal enjoyment.
Overall a very enjoyable archive.Ann Dobbs
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