The Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930, is a collection of digitized material from various collections at Harvard University's libraries, archives, and museums. The collection chronicles voluntary immigration into the U.S. from the Declaration of Independence through the beginning of the Depression. It includes 1,800 books and 9,000 photographs, 200 maps, and 13,000 pages from manuscript and archival collections. It is part of the Open Collections Project, which offers access to Harvard collections--as such, it may the most sustainable of all of the digital projects we have so far examined, since Harvard has tremendous resources.
The site includes a basic timeline of events in US history, but the bulk of the site is made up the material itself rather than explanatory material. There is both a search and a browse function. The search offers full text for the manuscripts and catalog terms for the visual resources. I searched for "somerville" in visual resources (you cannot search both simultaneously) and pulled up visual 4 records that have the site listed somewhere in the record. The full records include extensive metadata, although one of the records I looked at had the fields filled out incorrectly (the Place of Creation was "1930"). The records appear to have been assembled from multiple different sources, which would make sense given the diversity of the museums, archives etc that comprise the collection. The Form/Genre field for my item ( http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUAM:925807 ) includes text/letter/Letters/and print: presumably to aid discovery by any of the above terms, and/or because that is how they were originally described in the holding institution. The Subject and Note fields are quite extensive and inclusive of much hand-generated metadata. It must have been quite labor intensive.
The images themselves are displayed via Harvard's Page Delivery Service, which offers a good deal of functionality. The images have text behind them and are searchable and displayable that way as well. The page can be enlarged or zoomed in upon, or rotated. The zoom feature includes a map of the whole image so that you can keep track of your location in relation to the whole--a feature I have seen in only a few of the digital projects this semester.
The full text search for "somerville" returned 659 items, ranked by relevance (though what this means is not explained). A quick scan through the results show that the bulk of these records are government documents from the of Bureau of Labor Statistics. There is no information as to why exactly these would be included in the online collection--it is all implied--and no metadata record that I could find.
The browse function allows for search by item type or subject, including a long list of topics. Topics include genre (like songs) and type of work (miners) as well as topics such as housing and unions. There is no information included on the ranking of the results or the criteria for inclusion: the results for "Assimilation" include only 17 records, which seems somewhat arbitrarily narrow in a collection of 20,000 pages.
The collection could benefit from more transparency then, in some of these areas regarding the nature of the decisions made both on digitization (what criteria was used for choosing items, and what the methods used were) and the organization of the site. More context would be helpful. However, the primary function of the collection is to display some of the material that resides at Harvard, and presumably for more information the user may contact the institution. For use beyond the strictly educational, for example, users are instructed to get permission from the holding institution within Harvard. In general, this open collection is a useful if somewhat superficial window into these vast holdings. It would be useful for the casual user or the student, or perhaps a researcher at the very beginning of his/her project. As with so many archival digitzation projects, however, serious reserach would still require a trip to the institution for a search through the paper holdings.
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