Al Hirschfeld at the LC

The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Collection presented an exhibition in 2001 with the assistance of the Caroline and Erwin Swann Memorial Fund for Caricature and Cartoon. The Swann Fund supports an ongoing program at the Library of Congress of preservation, publication, exhibition, acquisition, and scholarly research in the related fields of cartoon, caricature, and illustration.

1) Selection decisions
These drawings were selected from a donation by Hirschfeld to the LC in celebration of the library's centennial as well as the LC's existing collection. The set is meant to reflect Hirschfeld's career and recall his professional start. The exhibition was/is funded by the Swann Memorial Fund which means it is sustainable and is in keeping with their interests in preservation and exhibition of these types of works.

2) Metadata
The metadata provided for each piece is very extensive; however, information for the digital object is limited. Each piece is accompanied by a brief paragraph, locating the work within Hirschfeld's history. We also learn the construction of the drawings, whether watercolor or etching, for example. Finally, we know the year it was created and learn about the subject, as well as how the work arrived at the LC (gift or purchase) and the LC unique identification number.

3) Object Characteristics
The digital objects are all JPEGs and are accessed from one folder with sequential filenames. You can click on the thumbnail to see the larger JPEG which first appears at 87%. If you click again it will move to full-size.

4) Intended Audience
The intended audience would be those conducting scholarly research in the area of caricatures, cartoons and illustrations, as well as those interested in their preservation and exhibition - all of this is derived from the mission of the Fund that enabled this exhibition.

The National Archive (UK) paleography tutorial

The National Archives of the United Kingdom is a government department under the Secretary of State for Justice. One of its missions is to "bring history to life for everyone," thus explaining why one of its online exhibitions includes "Paleography: reading old handwriting, 1500-1800; a practical online tutorial". This project was a joint collaboration between the National Archive and the School of Library, Archive, and Information Studies at University College, London.

From the main page, the practice paleography documents can be found under "Tutorial" and "Further practice". Under the former, the 10 documents are arranged according to level of difficulty to decipher while those in the latter are ordered according to when they were written (e.g., 16th century). The documents appear to be chosen by several criteria: variety (for instance, some are court documents, others are recipes and songs), level of difficulty for the modern reader to read, and era written. The below left image is a detail from a 1554 letter written in the italic hand from Elizabeth I to Queen Mary I. This document is considered the easiest to read of the ones offered. In contrast, the image below right is 1760 parliamentary document written in the Chancery hand is considered difficult to read.

The National Archive did an excellent job of offering the user a variety of methods to practice paleography. She can participate through the "Interactive transcribing exercise" that goes line-by-line through a document in JPG format, and lets the user know how accurate she was in her transcription. The user can also look at the document as a JPG in a separate window. All of the lines have been numbered (obviously something not possible with the physical documents) and allow the viewer to scroll around sections of the document and zoom in quite close. However, this does require the installation of Adobe Flash Player 9. The zoom capability is crucial for the user to be able to see individual characters on the documents. The archive has also offered the possibility of printing out the document as a PDF.

The metadata for each document is scattered around and not always apparent. When a user selects a document, she will get a brief historical background on the document type, subject matter, and handwriting style. However, to see the catalog reference number and the copyright/author information, the user must scroll over the image detail or view the un-zoomed image in a pop-up window. I believe such metadata is not considered crucial for the purposes of this digitization project. Rather, the user is more interested in the handwriting rather than the textual content. No information on how the documents were scanned is provided.

This digitization project is intended for those who are interested in English history and/or handwriting. The project is designed for continuous usage, as there are many lessons that clearly would take many hours and a great deal of mental effort. The National Archive tries to make it fun and interactive through the interactive transcribing exercises and the slightly morbid ducking stool game (save a 17th-c. woman from drowning by correctly transcribing words!).

The English Emblem Book Project

Maintained by various faculty and library staff at Penn State, the English Emblem Book Project aims to digitize the 'core' of the university's collection of English emblem books. It's a valuable project, and the books are striking (if you've never looked at emblem books before, you should take a look; it's a pretty powerful form of instruction), but it seems to only go half-way towards its potential as a scholarly resource.

1. Selection Decisions
There's little mentioned about the selection procedure. In fact, it's never mentioned explicitly which collection these books come from, though it's possible, by looking at the credits and what little introductory material is provided, to assume that they were determined, most likely by the Penn State scholars involved with the project, to be the 'core' volumes in the university's collection. There is no historical or cultural context given for the books themselves, but a very brief introduction to the importance of emblem books as scholarly sources is given.

2. Metadata
Full title, author, and publication data is given (as presented on the title page), as well as a detailed collation. General notes are provided about the book itself and anything of special note about the scans (though these notes are brief, fairly casual, and inconsistent), and detailed scanner settings are given for each book.

3. Object Characteristics
The scans vary in clarity. A single scanner setting seems to have been used throughout the scanning of each book, regardless of varying page contrasts, degradation of the images, etc. The images are given in one size, which is adequate for reading and getting a sense of the emblem riddles, but is not appropriate for any detailed scholarly work.

4. Audience
Given that the full content of these books is presented, they're presumably being presented as appropriate for study, rather than simply advertising highlights of the school's collection. The introduction seems aimed at a lay audience, however, and it might be hoped that these books would serve as an introduction to the study of or interest in emblem books in general. Again, as with the Apiculture site, this exhibit seems to exists somewhere in-between general introduction and scholarly resource.

The Living Room Candidate

Museum of the Moving Image
The Living Room Candidate Online Exhibit
http://www.movingimage.us/site/online/index.html

The online exhibit is a collection of political issue/presidential candidate television ads that were aired from 1952-2004.

Collection Principles
There doesn’t seem to be much information about how these ads were selected. It seems that the political television ad was born in the 50’s when television became a major source of advertising. These ads reflect the times and fashions of their era. But, not much is given to the user about what it took for a specific ad to make it into this collection. What is interesting is the inclusion of “The Desktop Candidate.” The exhibit takes into consideration the new political ad delivered via the internet recognizing the web as a viable and powerful tool.

Metadata
This exhibit is poor in metadata. The political party that produced the ads are listed, and that’s about all the information the user is given. Under each video that is played there is a short blurb about the issues that were important in relation to that presidential election. The ads do come with transcripts which can come in handy especially when viewing the clip of Jackie Kennedy speaking Spanish, trying to encourage the Spanish speaking voter to support JFK on Election Day. (I’m guessing she was not a fluent Spanish speaker).

Object Characteristics
The user is not given information about the actual footage. Is it taped on a video camera? Digital camera? We don’t know.

Who is the intended audience?
This exhibit is for the casual browser. Although the ads are interesting the lack of supportive metadata does not provide much research material.

Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939-1943 (Library of Congress Exhibition)

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/boundforglory/glory-home.html

Bound for Glory: America in Color is the first major exhibition of the little known color images taken by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI). Comprised of seventy digital prints made from color transparencies taken between 1939 and 1943, this exhibition reveals a surprisingly vibrant world that has typically been viewed only through black-and-white images.

Approximately one dozen photographers were employed by the Farm Security Administration (FSA), and its successor agency, the Office of War Information (OWI), from 1935 through 1944. The original goal of the government project was to record through documentary photographs the ravages of the Depression on America's rural population and were intended to spur Congress and the American public to support government relief efforts. Over the years, with an improved economy, increased industrialization, and the onset of World War II, the photographs increasingly focused on an America that was productive, beautiful, and determined. The photographs originally intended to have a narrow focus developed into a noteworthy broader national record.

The curators selected 70 photos out of 1,602 color photos originally taken. The images selected seem to well exemplify each year the collection spans, as well as images which seem to best represent the themes of the collection: the Great Depression, rural American life, wartime industrialization, etc.

Thumbnails range from 20x150-130 pixels, with the full-sized image being relatively large at 640x430-500 pixels. I’d imagine the full-sized images are approximately the same as the original color slides.

Metadata for the thumbnails is very extensive, including photographer (if known), title, place of origin, year (and sometimes month), medium, Library of Congress call numbers for both the original and digital images, and mentions it’s part of the FSA/OWI Collection. The entire collection is noted as such:

Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939–43. New York: H.N. Abrams in association with the Library of Congress, 2004.

The site also lists a link to the entire photography collection http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html.

I believe the intended audience is certainly American, perhaps students of American history, people interested in WWII or the Great Depression, or people who lived during these times.

Cartoons Against the Axis

http://www.moccany.org/axis/index.html

Cartoons Against the Axis was an exhibit which originally occurred at the time of World War II. It circulated through a number of galleries, including MoMA, and from what I gather, was a humble offering to boost patriotism, morale, etc.
The widow of the artist who spearheaded the original exhibit contacted the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) in New York, and they agreed to "re-mount" a portion of the exhibit.

SELECTION DECISIONS:
The original exhibit consisted of over 200 pieces. In its current form Cartoons Against the Axis displays roughly a quarter of those. MoCCA enlisted the aid of Art Spiegelman (who, incidentally, is the author/artist of "Maus"--an award-winning graphic novel pertaining to the Holocaust) to help select which of the pieces to re-mount. In an article linked to the website, Spiegelman comments on the history of the exhibit, as well as the selection process:

"Culled from the over 200 cartoons in the 1942 exhibit, the current show has tried to retain some of the xenophobic—even racist—anti-Japanese images, as well as some of the embarrassingly blunt propaganda and even some rather clunky drawings in order to offer a genuinely fair sample of what cartooning and our nation were like in their glory days."

The online exhibit is only a sampling of the MoCCA exhibit--one cartoon from each artist. I assume they chose the most recognizable or engaging from each.

METADATA:
The metadata varies from piece to piece. Each offers at least the artist. Some also include a title, year, and materials used (pen, ink, whiteout, etc.). Additionally, linked to that metadata is a brief bio of the artist.

OBJECT CHARACTERISTICS:
The website is relatively easy to navigate. One can choose either to "Stroll through" the online gallery, or navigate by artist or thumbnail of the featured cartoon. The size of the images themselves do leave some to be desired, especially in certain cases where captions are featured. While on the one hand the images are probably larger than one would most likely see them in the physical gallery, it's not so in depth that one would be able to distinguish brush strokes and the like.

INTENDED AUDIENCE:
My guess is that MoCCA created this online exhibition in an attempt to advertise the physical one in the gallery, as a sort of bait for people who may be interested in the history of comics or popular history of the World War II era. Being a smaller, niche museum I would assume their funding is significantly less than other larger museums, and so they may be more heavily reliant on admission and membership fees.

Stamps Take Flight

http://www.postalmuseum.si.edu/stampstakeflight/index.html

Stamps Take Flight

An exhibition of selected materials from the Postmaster General's Collection

This is a Digital Collection apparently made in conjunction with a physical exhibit of the same name that was up from March 15, 2005 - March 19, 2006. Its purpose is to use US stamps and related artifacts in the Postmaster Generals collection, depicting air and space subjects to illustrate the process of creating and printing stamps. It is presented by the National Postal Museum.

1. Selection decisions
It looks to me that everything that was in the actual exhibit is also in the digital exhibit. In addition there does not appear to be any stamps on the air and space topic missing from the exhibition. I should know, I have a collection on the same subject at home. In addition to the stamps themselves, it also shows, amongst other things, earlier designs, proofs and production methods.

2. Metadata
In the Gallery of Air and Space stamps meta data is limited to Subject, year of issue, Scott number and method of printing. File name is the Scott number, the unique identifier. The Illustrations available to illustrate the rest of the online exhibit have at the very least denomination, year and subject. Plus a standard caption in some cases. Captions themselves are short as most of the information is available on the exhibition page the image is linked to.
There is a bibliography and credits page for the exhibition itself.

3. Object Characteristics
The Stamp images in the Gallery are small and cannot be zoomed in on. They are there only to show what the stamp looks like not to allow detailed analysis. The stamps used as illustrations are in JavaScript and are slightly larger at 100% and can be zoomed in on, but there is a corresponding reduction in quality.

4) Intended audience
The intended audience is amature Stamp Collectors and any members of the general public who are interested in the subject. The exhibition is of no use to experts who probably know all the information presented already and own most of the stamps shown anyway, except for the really rare stuff.

Whistler Interactive at the Freer & Sackler Galleries

Whistler Interactive is an online exhibition about the artist James McNeill Whistler. It is an exhibition to give an overview of his life and artwork using digitized materials from the art collections and archives of the Freer & Sackler Galleries.

Go to: http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/current/whistler.htm The link for the interative exhibit is at the top right corner. The museum's main digital collection is at: http://www.asia.si.edu/collections/default.htm

Selection Decisions: The Freer & Sackler Galleries seem to have an extensive digital collection with over 6,000 objects online and a note mentioning that more objects are posted every month, but this Whistler exhibit was one of the few interactive online exhibits I noticed on their site. This exhibit does not contain all of their Whistler collection, but I imagine a curator has chosen the highlights from their collection that best give an overall view of Whistler's work. The exhibit also features photos from their archives, and images of his letters, books, etc.

The exhibit has different topics to look at (biography, artwork, related musuem exhibitions, and resources), each with subsections as well as a timeline so you can jump to the topic you are most interested in. I found this easily navigable, although a little slow to load sometimes. There are also downloadable PDFs of the written exhibit content.

Metadata: Every digitized image has a little information button you can scroll over. When your mouse hits it, it reveals: name/title of object, artist/author, date, material (for artwork), size, the collection it belongs to and the accession or catalogue number.

Object Characteristics: Unfortunately the digital images are not very large and cannot be made larger. If the exhibit focuses on a detail of the image, you can click to see the whole image, but it still is not very large. If you leave this mini-exhibition though and go back to the searchable online collection of the museum and find the images there, you can see them larger, copy or save the JPEG file and order rights to reproduce copies. I could find the artworks, however, I had trouble finding archive materials this way.

Intended Audience: I think this exhibit would best serve the general public or someone with a little interest in art but not a lot of background or training. The information gives a good overview but is not very detailed. It does give a good idea of the scope of the museum's Whistler collection. Someone wishing to do more serious research would probably just use the museum's general digital collection which is categorized and searchable and has larger images. For very detailed research or to obtain better images, you would have to contact the intsitution, but that information is also provided.

ADS Digital Library

The ADS Digital Library is a project within the Astrophysics Data System (ADS)- a NASA funded collection of astronomy, astrophysics and physics documents. The ADS collection consists of over 5.6 million records, and primarily holds bibliographic records and full-page scans of astronomical literature. Specifically, within the Digital Library there are full scans of 16 books, which vary in format (some PDF downloadable files, some clickable image links, etc.).

1) Selection Decisions

The reasons behind selecting the 16 books are not made clear on the website. There are two old books included in the collection, and it is implied that they were included due to historical relevance (as they are from their "Historical Literature Collection"). These 16 books are the only full books in the database (the other records are articles and abstracts), but the significance of these texts is not apparent. The books cover varied astronomy topics, and appear to be mostly "foundation" and "fundamental" type texts. The books may be significant handbooks in the astronomy field, but this is not explicitly detailed.

2) Metadata

Each of the 16 books are listed on the home page, along with a bibliographic reference line- including author/editor, publisher, and year of publication when available. After clicking on the book title, you receive further information about the item, such as copyright information, number of pages, and who provided the digital copy. Also, on some items a brief description of the book or project is included. The metadata provides a satisfactory amount of information, and includes reference data if further research is desired.

3) Object Characteristics

By clicking on an item you are given the option to search the book's table of contents. To view individual pages you can select either a chapter or a range of pages. The scanned pages are either in a pdf format that automatically downloads to your computer, or a clickable link that leads you to a scan located on the internet. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell which is going to occur when you click on the link. The books that are linked on the internet are much easier to maneuver. You can click on a page to go directly to it, or you can start at the beginning and click "next page" to go through the pages in order. There is also a very handy printing tool at the bottom of each page that allows you print a page individually or a range of pages. The bibliographic reference information is also at the top of each of these pages. If all the books were in this format, the site would be much more accessible.

4) Intended Audience

The intended audience for this digital library seems to be researchers who are looking for access to particular astronomy texts. The information is printable and searchable, allowing for researchers to pull information and use it in their work. The metadata provided is detailed enough for researchers, and the scans are a high enough quality to print and use as a regular text.

Jane Johnson Manuscript Nursery Library

This week, I looked at the Jane Johnson Manuscript Nursery Library (ca. 1740-1759), a collection of the Lilly Library at Indiana University. This collection is made up of educational materials created by Jane Johnson for the instruction of her children. It consists mostly of cards (similar to flashcards) which teach the alphabet and language skills.

Selection Decisions: There is no indication on this site, as far as I can tell, as to whether the entire collection has been digitized or not. It says that there are 438 items in the collection, and that there are 381 items online, but some of the items have been condensed into single digital objects, as in the case of Set 7, which is made up of dozens of small flashcards in a paper box.

Metadata: There is no detailed information about the technology or particulars behind the digitization project (scanning resolutions, etc.), but there is a very detailed description of each item in the database, including the written information, a description of any drawings, and the description of the material. There is no specific date information for each individual item, but the collection is treated almost as a single item, having been given one approximate date. I'm impressed by the amount of descriptive information provided in the form of a scope and content note, but I would definitely like to see more solid fact (that is, if any specific facts about the collection are known).

Characteristics of the Digital Object: Images are almost all clear, high-quality scans. The items that are not available for flat scanning, like the paper box in Set 7, are displayed in the form of digital photos taken from several angles. They're all very easy to see and read. However, it is somewhat disappointing that a user cannot zoom any further than enlarging the image to full screen. While that magnification is good enough for me, a scholar with very specific interests might like a little more zooming capabilities.

Intended Audience: As far as I can tell, the intended audience is primarily academic, as the images are part of a university library system. These scholars are probably studying history, women's issues, mother-child issues, moral and religious education, or language learning.

"Drawing from Life"

"Drawing from Life" is an online exhibit featuring a selection of caricatures and cartoons from The American Art/Portrait Gallery, a branch of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries.

Selection Decision: The special collection at the gallery contains about 450 caricatures and cartoons in their special collection. It seems as though they digitized just a representative sample of their collection. Their selection includes the works of about a dozen historical influential cartoonists.

Metadata: There is very minimal metadata presented with this collection. Each cartoon image is shown with a list of subjects, the title of the book that the image came from, and the date of the cartoon.

Object Characteristics: The images initially presented are a cropped portion of the cartoon. The viewer has the option to click on a link to expand the image, which then shows you a scan of the full page from the book. From there you can zoom in on the image.

Audience: It seems like the intended audience would be history buffs specifically interested in this subject. They include a list of book titles for further reading on cartoons and caricatures in general, political cartoons, and biographies on the cartoonists.

Samuel Proctor Oral History Archives

Overview:

The Samuel Proctor Oral History Archives is affiliated with the University of Florida’s History program. They have 4,000 interviews and 85,000 transcribed pages dating from 1953-2006. It is the largest oral history collection in the South. It contains major collections of interviews with Native Americans, African Americans, women, pioneers, and citrus industry workers of Florida.

Collection Principles:

The collection was digitized in conjunction with the history department whose holdings determined what oral histories were transcribed and included in the archive.

The collection may be browsed by date, county, or topic. It is full text searchable with a powerful search engine. There is an advanced search page that allows searching within specific collections and/or within specific portions of the individual record. There are tips for Boolean searching.

Object Characteristics:

Each typed transcript is OCR’d and can be viewed either as a scan of the transcript or a full-text typed page. The scans are viewed as JPGs. Both scans and full-text pages utilize Microsoft Active Server Pages. Page images sometimes include visible editing marks but can not be enlarged. Each document can be navigated by jumping to the first, last, next, or previous page. There is also a drop down menu to jump to a specific page.

Metadata:

You can download the entire 350 page catalog of the oral collection. Each interview is listed in alpha order with unique project number and page number. There are also indexes by project.

Within the digital collection, each resource has a table of contents and a full citation with bibliographic ID, volume ID, title, publication date, source institution, holding location, and attribution statement.

Audience:

As described on the site in the about section, the transcribed interviews are used by:

-research scholars

-students

-journalists

-genealogists

-other interested groups

Researchers have used the oral history material for theses, dissertations, articles, and books.

Conclusion:

This collection is well-organized and usable overall but I wonder why they haven’t included the audio files from which all the transcripts came. I couldn’t find any information about the decision but it would really enrich the content and make it more interesting.

Picturing Words at the Smithsonian

Picturing Words at the Smithsonian consists of a collection of book illustrations. I'm not sure how new it is but it seems fairly recent as the "About the Design Principles" page is still under construction.

Collection Principles
- designed around the theme of book illustrations. They were divided based on inspiration, influence, information, and process
- seems to be an online-only exhibition
- from the Smithsonian's current collection (not borrowed/bought for the exhibit)

Object Characteristics
- all images are JPEGs
- the images are named it appears with sequential numerical names
- no search functionality

Metadata
- metadata for the original object: title, year published, author, and page source are pretty good
- minimal metadata for digital object - no info on process or tools use; perhaps this will be part of the design principles page

Audience
- This would be interesting for someone researching book illustrations, though probably more for inspiration. It's an attractive site, but the usability is somewhat limited - no searching, and lots of scrolling down. Someone who Googled their way to the site would enjoy it - I liked the images, but I kept feeling like I got virtually lost in the exhibit. I think the typical user would be a museum-goer visiting the Smithsonian site who explored the site and stumbled across this. That's how I found it.

The Getty Research Institute: Irresistible Decay

“Irresistible Decay” is a study of ruins taken from materials at the Getty Research Institute. Images of ruins taken from various formats, including etchings, illustrations in books, and photographs, are displayed on the website. An essay which accompanies the images examines the images as symbols of decay and as emblems of continuity over time.

Selection Decisions
The images were taken from multiple collections held at the Getty. They are part of a larger universe of images on this subject that the Getty possesses. The website states that the Institute has tens of thousands of photographs of antiquities from around the world. Only a very small fraction of this total was used to illustrate several themes in the exhibit.

Metadata
The metadata is extensive, though the viewer does not have to see it all if they do not wish to. Small versions of the images appear on several pages within the exhibit, each page devoted to a specific theme. Accompanying each exhibit is brief descriptive data on that particular object; included is the artist’s name (if known), their nationality and dates that they were alive, the object’s title, and Getty catalog number, as well as a very brief description of the ruins that are depicted. By clicking on a link, the viewer is taken to a more detailed narrative description of the object. From this page, one can click on a link to see a somewhat larger digital version of the image. One can also click on a link to see the full catalog record of the item. All of the metadata is about the item that has been digitized; there is no information available about the digital image.

Object Characteristics
The digital images themselves are not very detailed. The largest images that are available allow the viewer to have a pretty good general idea of what is being conveyed, but they do not allow for any in-depth research on the object. The digital objects are present to support the ideas presented in the text, and are really a secondary part of the exhibit.

Intended Audience
The audience will not consist of anyone who wants a detailed look at the objects. Instead, viewers who visit this exhibit will do so because of interest in the subject matter that is discussed. This exhibit (and others like it on the Getty website) are a nice way to provide exposure to materials that may not see the light of day very often. There is no discussion of the sources that the various objects came from, though. While this is a creative way to join materials that would otherwise never be used together (16th century German woodcuts of ancient Roman ruins are combined with postcards depicting the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, for example), each item is divorced from the context of its own creation. Ultimately, we have learned very little about the individual items, and are instead subjected to the musings of the exhibit’s curators.

State Hermitage Digital Collection

The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia began a partnership with IBM in 1997 to create an online digital collection consisting of high-resolution images of artwork from throughout the museum. The digital collection consists of hundreds of searchable images of two and three-dimensional artifacts from 12 categories including sculpture, arms and armour, textiles, and paintings, prints, and drawings.

Selection Decisions
There is a good description of the partnership between IBM and the museum through a link at the bottom of the page, although it doesn’t go into any detail about their selection policies. It is difficult to determine what percentage of the collection has been digitized or even the number of images that are now online. It does appear from the categories that the images are at least a representative sampling.

Metadata
The metadata that accompanies each work is what one might expect to see in person – culture, dates, material, dimensions, and style followed by a concise description. There are some links within the description to definitions of specialized terms. The IBM search capabilities are fascinating. One can browse the collection by type of art and country of origin, conduct a quick or advanced search using more in-depth information such as genre, date, and author, or use the intriguing QGIB search. QBIC (Query by Image Content) is an experimental search system whereby someone recalling the layout or coloring of a work of art can find artwork with similar characteristics. In practice, however, the color search system is fairly awkward. I wonder how often someone can recall the percentage of various colors in a painting. The layout approach allowed me to draw a rudimentary version of what I wanted to find using only circles and boxes. The results were far from what I envisioned.

Object Characteristics
Each image has the option of two resolution settings – 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768. The zoom function only allows one to toggle between these two sizes. Although the resolution might be better, the images themselves are clear and crisp. Three-dimensional objects are sometimes represented from more than one angle.

Audience
The site is an overt advertisement for IBM’s tools and expertise. Throughout the site, IBM points out the functionality of each tool and the importance of their work. The QBIC search is still in the demo stage, and other sections suggest that IBM could do more if they had the resources or interest. There are a number of options that would be useful to researchers if they could figure out how to access them. For instance, the site promises extreme resolution for researchers to study the fine details of some of the works, but I couldn’t seem to access this option. On the whole, the site is aimed at the general public and those interested in soliciting IBM’s help in a digitization project.

Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS) -- Cross Catalog Searching Center

The SIRIS Cross Catalog Searching Center is a new feature for online Smithsonian content. As described on the main search page, the catalog allows users to search the 1.7 million records from all the various museums, libraries, research centers, and archives of the Smithsonian.

For my initial search, I looked up "elephant". I chose to search only for "documents" with images, and I received 283 results. The results are sortable by title or relevancy. They are also viewable by list, which includes metadata about the objects such as title, medium, and subject headings, or by grid, which shows the images. With the grid view, the metadata can be obtained by selecting an image. The provided metadata depends entirely from which museum the object originated and the whims of the cataloguer and digitizer. Unfortunately, other than the category for "data source," there is no information provided about the digital object.

Some images can be enlarged -- for example, the image to the left from the American History Archive Center can be enlarged from 371 x 573 pixels to 582 x 900 pixels. I think the scan is quite good -- you can clearly see the stains on the pages and the type font. Other images, such as a series of scanned stereo photonegatives (example at right) from same archive, are only 400 x 300 pixels when viewed and would probably be needed to be seen in person for research purposes.

The SIRIS Cross Catalog has definitely borrowed its "look" from Google. There does not seem to be a way to refine a search through categories such as date ranges, media type, or museum location until after a broad search is conducted. For instance, after entering "elephant," I can then sort my results by place, culture, and so forth. If the Smithsonian wants the catalog to be a one-stop search place for users (probably not, as each museum has its own catalog), then they need to add more search features to the main page. The site, while it has the appearance of being scholarly, with not a lot of design frills and quite a bit of metadata, requires some effort to narrow down the search to a specific topic or image. I would imagine this site would be ideal for someone who wants to search for a single topic that may be found across a wide range of subject areas. There is, however, no guarantee that the resulting electronic images will be useable beyond references for further research.

The Earlham School of Religion's DQC (Digital Quaker Collection) at http://esr.earlham.edu/dqc/.

Collection

The collection onsists of over 500 individual Quaker written works from the 17th and 18th centuries, selected from the Friends Collection of Lilly Library of Earlham. Collection consists of full text and page images of the works.

Selection Decisions

The primary selection goal is explicitly stated on the About the Project page: "The collection is intended to cover several centuries of Quaker literature, all considered to be in the public domain. It represents works written from a variety of perspectives. The collection include works written by men and women. The geographic range takes in England, Ireland, and America. One can find in this collection journals, histories, doctrinal works, letters, sermons, pamphlets, and proceedings." A good number of the texts are available elsewhere in digital format, but a secondary, but still major goal of selection, was to facilitate research and analysis by using a powerful search function and having a high degree of granularity in the collection's works.

Metadata

Metadata is attached to individual files using XML and TEI Guidelines.

Information attached to most or all objects includes author, author's gender, place of publication, date of publication, related digital or image view of a page, page or image number in the collection, the section of the work that the page resides in, and where the section starts. Metadata attached to the work includes the number of pages in the work.
The collection can be browsed by author or title.
The entire digital text collection can be searched using a full-text search and additional filter possibilities are author, gender, place of publication, and date of publication. Search results are ranked and, if the search results in a large list, the list is broken into short, easily readable pages. (The search term is highlighted in red in the text of the resulting documents.) A search history is easily available for each session. Once a document is opened from the search list, a Hit List view is available, which gives the number of occurences of the search term within the document.
There is no function for viewing related items to the work other than viewing the search history or exploring the current search list. There is no audio version for any of the files, but users with vision difficulties can easily enlarge the images and text or use a reader for the digital text.

Object Characteristics

Some pages are available as digital text, most as both digital text or image,and either can viewed with the click of a button.
The images are scanned in at 400 dpi, the quality of the images are good, and the digital text versions are very accurate.
Page images can be enlarged or reduced in size with the click of the appropriate button.
The software used in the digitization project include both proprietary and open source, but overall, access and search of the collection is by the Earlham School of Religion's proprietary technology, so the individual documents don't show up in the result lists of external search engines such as Google. This impedes a stated goal of the collection, "The Digital Quaker Collection project supports the school’s role as an educator of students at a distance and as a resource for Quaker research to persons around the world." The findability of individual documents in this collection is nonexistent, so unless you do an external search that lists the collection itself or ESR, it's difficult to stumble upon the collection.

Intended Audience

The intended audience includes not only the students and scholars at the school, but also local Quaker congregations and anyone else who would like to study the texts from a distance. The latter includes students in ERS's distance education program, ESR Access.

The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Center

The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Center in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, UK, has a very promising Web site, quirky and colorful as befits its subject. Dahl's archive is the center of the museum, which is a public charity. Overall the Center appeals both to serious researchers, who can examine the archives before visiting, and the online casual visitor. However, these functions are largely separate ones, due mostly to the lack of digitized objects from the archives.

collection principles
The collection is very cohesive, and contains a wide variety of Dahl-related items. The site also includes several well laid-out pages explaining intellectual property as applies to researchers, professional and scholarly. The museum is connected to both the Roald Dahl Foundation and Literary Estate, as well as being registered as a charity, so continued funding should not be a problem.

object characteristics
The description of the Collections Database leads the user to believe that many of the images are available through the Web site: however, in repeated searches I was unable to find any at all. The search function appeared to work well but only calls up the (EAD?) record, and there is no way to search for images only. It is unclear whether this is due to lack of funds or concerns about intellectual property, although the available images are said to be watermarked. Perhaps this adds significant costs to the digitization process?

The "Explore the Writing Hut" feature does include interactive images (through Macromedia Flash) and information described Dahl's relationship to the objects. Close-ups and brief descriptions appear when the images are scrolled over, but there is no data as to the authenticity of the images, or theire arrangement, or when the photos were taken.

metadata
The records contain nothing but metadata, which is quite extensive and intended for retrieval of records from the archives. The Writing Hut images did not appear to include any visible metadata.

intended audience
While the site would most likely be useful for those planning to visit the archives, and the collection guides and user information are well done, the promise of the online exhibit is largely an empty one. However, the few features that are available for the interested amateur, such as the Writing Hut and the drafts of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, are imaginative and contain much promise of innovative features to come.

NYPL Digital Gallery - The Floating World: Japanese Color Woodcuts by Kitagawa Utamaro

http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=arts&collection=TheFloatingWorldJapa&col_id=204

Collection Principles:
This collection consists of 56 original prints by Kitagawa Utamaro, a Japanes painter and woodcut desigern who lived from 1753 to 1806. All of the prints were selected from the NYPL's collection of Japanese ukiyo-e prints, most of which were donated Charles Stewart Smith in 1901. Smith had purchased the 1,763 prints from one Captain Frank Brinkley in 1829, and so the contents of the collection reflects Briknley's personal taste. Though the collection donated by Smith included prints by other artists, the NYPL chose only to digitize those by Utamaro. The reason for this, it seems, is that Utamaro is an important artist of the ukiyo-e school. Of the 123 prints in the collection that are by Utamaro, they chose to include 56 in the digital exhibit. The criteria by which these 56 were selected are not provided. There were not, strictly speaking, any collection principles involved in the creation of this digital exhibition. Rather, the NYPL chose to digitize what they felt were some of the most important pieces in an existing collection.

Object Characteristics:
Each digital image is presented on the left side of the page, with the metadata presented next to it on the right of the page. Below the image are options to enlarge the image, add it to selections, pan and zoom, display a printer-frindly version, and to purchase a print of the artwork. The image is identified by a digital ID number, not with filename or address. The user can even modify the image by cropping, and purchase this version as a print. This purchase page contains licensing information as well.

Metadata:
The metadata provided with each image include creator, image caption, created date, medium, specific material type, item physical description, subject(s), additional name(s), notes, provenance, standard reference(s), collection guide, digital ID, digital record ID, and NYPL call number. Notice that the digital image itself and the image's digital record have different identifiers. The main page for the NYPL's digital collections contains information on the conditions of use of these digital objects.

Intended Audience:
I suspect that the intended audience for this digital collection is the general public. The fact that the images are presented with a link to a page where they can be purchases suggests to me that they chose the most attractive/generally appealing of Utamaro's prints to digitize so that the digitial exhibit wold be widely marketable. No one wants to buy prints of ugly artwork, after all. I also don't think that individuals using the digital images for scholarly purposes would be that interested in purchasing physical copies of the images, since the digital format is actually more flexible since the image can be examined in greater detail. Personally, I think providing the option to purchase a print of the artwork, and advertising it with a link directly below the image, is a clever way to make money, and perhaps recoup the cost of digitizing the image in the first place.

Bees Through Time and Space: UMass Amherst, Du Bois Library, SCUA

Bees Through Time and Space

The Apiculture and Culture exhibit curated by Richard Steinmetz at the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Massachusetts collects seminal (and often intriguing) works on Apiculture from the Special Collections, displaying them through short introductions and scans of selected pages.

1. Selection Decisions
Little is explicitly stated about the exhibit's criterion for selection (the introduction to the exhibit is very short, and does not do much to give background to the exhibit's motives, goals, or guiding principles). All the works are pulled from the holdings of the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, which we're told are especially rich in Agricultural literature. The dates range from the late 17th century to 1917, and seem to have been selected in part to illustrate the major divisions of Apicultural work presented by the exhibit (Early Works, Science, Natural History, Metaphors, Americans, and Business).

2. Metadata
The metadata is somewhat detailed. We are given the author, a full title, publication information, collation, and physical description, as well as the book's call number. The description is followed by a very brief historical context and description of the content of the work itself. Both of these elements, the metadata on the volume itself and the text, seem uncomfortably set between a full, scholarly approach and a passing glance at the book. I don't really understand going through the trouble of curating an exhibit, especially one that is both significant (works on apiculture have a long history of mirroring both commonplace and revolutionary ideas about society and nature) and so small (with only thirty books represented) unless one were to give more than simple two-hundred word summaries of the books' interest.

3. Object Characteristics
The exhibit's only serious error is in the presentation of the scans themselves, which is unfortunate, because a lot of the objects being presented are worthy of attention and effective display. The site is a mixture of the good and bad (nice internal typography and balance, horrible menu and splash-page), but it's greatest crime is the navigation of the images. Each work has its own page, and the page scans are, for some reason, set off to the right and down from the top of the page, effectively lost in a corner of the site. For some reason there is also no page displayed by difficult, when the page is first displayed. The image thumbnails down to the right must be rolled over for the larger image to display. Once presented, the large images of the scans are an appropriate size to look at while also reading the descriptive text of the book, but there is no way to obtain a larger image, and the size is inappropriate for any sort of real scholarly study of the page. The scans are of high quality when presented on the screen at their presented size, and have adequate contrast and resolution for reading, seemingly without having been retouched in any sort of disruptive way.

4. Audience
Because of the cursory introductions, the inadequate description of the exhibit itself, and the poor size of the scans themselves, I would say that this site is meant as a quick highlight of the Apiculture holdings in the university's Special Collections. Short of simply advertising highlights of the collection, and giving a very basic introduction to the shape of modern Apicultural thought, a goal of the exhibit may be to draw the curious to the Collections in Amherst to further study the books exhibited. In being so introductory, I think the exhibit has a strange roll. I can't imagine that the site is advertised much beyond the small, specific communities who are already familiar with this branch of Agricultural literature, and for their purposes it does not seem nearly as informative as it could be.