Hallgren Papers

COLLECTION PRINCIPLES

• The goal of the collection is to give people a "small picture of life before, during, and after World War II." The collection sticks to that goal quite well; the collection is small but does offer some information that's not widely publicized. Nothing outside of papers and photos that were owned by Major Hallgren's wife are included.
  
• The individual pages within the site clearly state what has been digitized, whether it's all or part of that particular type of media within the collection, so the scope is readily apparent from withing the collection.
• There is very little or no information on the original file formats, resolution, or digitization process.
• The Restrictions on access statement – stated on the item search result detail page (only).
• Ownership – The information is included that the collection is owned by Combined Arms Research Library, which is part of the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College
• Authenticity Information – The provenance of the documents is explicitly stated.
• Integrity & Interpretation Information – Not stated, there were a few likely errors in the text transcripts of handwritten documents, but most of it appeared to be accurate (although with the quality of the scanned images it’s impossible to tell for sure) and the transcripts were apparently complete, including text in the document that had been written and then crossed out by the original author.
• Sustainability over time – Probably a very high likelihood of sustainability considering the institution: Combined Arms Research Library of the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College, part of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center (CAC), which is in turn a major subordinate headquarters of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command. The CAC and its predecessor organizations have been in existence since 1882 and the CAC is in charge of preparing the Army and its officers for war. In addition to being educational, this collection can also be viewed as being good PR for the Army.
  
• Broadly available, accessibility information – Broadly available, Section 508 compliance required by federal law but they may have fudged a bit on the alt text; the alt tags for the images is almost always either the name and size of the image file or, in the case of the thumbnails, the name and size of the image file linked to. The thumbnail image captions convey some of the information but not exactly the information that a visually impaired user would desire; the captions don’t convey the information that’s provided visually to the sighted user.
• Respects intellectual property rights – Yes (CARL has the rights), “Approved for public release distribution is unlimited.”
• Usage data mechanisms – None apparent though they almost certainly have server stats.
• Fits into larger context of significant related national and international digital library initiatives – Yes, part of the CARL digital library.
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OBJECT CHARACTERISTICS

• Produced in a way that ensures support of collection priorities while maintaining good interoperability and reusability characteristics. Interoperability is quite impaired by the poor metadata.
• The institution does apparently intend that the object will remain accessible over time despite changing technologies.
• The files are either jpeg images or web pages and therefore exchangeable across platforms and broadly available. No information is available on higher resolution images or the digitization process.
• The individual identifier is that web page URL; there is no apparent stable, persistent, unique identifier for the individual items within the collection; the identifier is the web page URL.

METADATA

• Metadata? What metadata?! The main body of metadata is only accessible through the initial search page and it consists of metadata for the collection itself, not individual objects; there is no such page for the individual components of the collection, blocking the search for individual objects and eliminating the possibility of searching for individual objects within the Hallgren collection itself.
  
  The metadata listed for the collection consists of the collection name, the collection title, an abstract, keywords, date of the original, year of digitization, resource type (“Textual, Photographs”), format (“HTML”), Call number (the URL for the collection homepage), language (“eng”), release statement, and Repository.
  
  The metadata accompanying images on the thumbnail and individual pages mainly consists of the caption and the basic image properties, nothing more.
• Good metadata supports interoperability.Not much help here!
• Hard to impossible to collocate individual objects from the search page.
• Long term management will probably suffer from the lack of metadata.

INTENDED AUDIENCE

• The intended audience is the general public; I feel the quality of the images, some apparent inaccuracies within the transcripts, and the small collection make it poor material for scholars and researchers if they're only accessign the material online.

Ann Dobbs