Digital Collections

Museums and archives all over the world digitize their collections and provide online access to heritage material. But what factors determine the content, structure and use of these online inventories? This book turns to India and Europe to answer this question. It explains how museums and archives envision, decide and conduct digitization and online dissemination. It also sheds light on born-digital, community-based archives, which have established themselves as new actors in the field. Based on anthropological fieldwork, the chapters in the book trace digital archives from technical advancements and postcolonial initiatives to programming alternatives, editing content, and active use of digital archives.

Libraries recognize the importance of digitizing archival material to improve access to and preservation of their special collections. This book provides a step-by-step guide for creating digital collections, including examples and practical tips that have never been published before. Illustrates concepts with an on-going case study at the end of each chapter Provides detailed technical information and practical experience Discusses practitioners’ insight in digitization Can be used as a guide for creating digital collections

Suzanne Keene's pioneering book shows how museums and other cultural organizations fit into the new world of information and electronic communications and, most importantly, how they can take advantage of what it has to offer. By using new technology museums can build knowledge bases around information about collections. A collection object can be the central link for information about past and present, places, people and concepts, technologies, ways of working and evidence of the natural world. 'Digital Collections' explains how this vision can be realized. Sound, video and animations can be digitized and developed as a central resource that can be drawn on for many varied access routes: via the World Wide Web; CD ROMs; through on-gallery screens, and other future products still in development. These technological capabilities raise many compelling issues that need to be understood in order to successfully develop information collections. In this book Suzanne Keene reviews these issues clearly and comprehensively. Her accompanying Click-Through Guide provides the latest news and links to Internet information. Suzanne Keene is a senior manager of museum collections and information at the Science Museum, London. She led the UK LASSI project to select a collections information system for UK museums. This, with her experience in directing information technology and multimedia projects, means that she is accustomed to translating the highly technical concepts of information technology into high level issues for senior and strategic management.

Since it was first published, LIS students and professionals everywhere have relied on Miller’s authoritative manual for clear instruction on the real-world practice of metadata design and creation. Now the author has given his text a top to bottom overhaul to bring it fully up to date, making it even easier for readers to acquire the knowledge and skills they need, whether they use the book on the job or in a classroom. By following this book’s guidance, with its inclusion of numerous practical examples that clarify common application issues and challenges, readers will learn about the concept of metadata and its functions for digital collections, why it’s essential to approach metadata specifically as data for machine processing, and how metadata can work in the rapidly developing Linked Data environment; know how to create high-quality resource descriptions using widely shared metadata standards, vocabularies, and elements commonly needed for digital collections; become thoroughly familiarized with Dublin Core (DC) through exploration of DCMI Metadata Terms, CONTENTdm best practices, and DC as Linked Data; discover what Linked Data is, how it is expressed in the Resource Description Framework (RDF), and how it works in relation to specific semantic models (typically called “ontologies”) such as BIBFRAME, comprised of properties and classes with “domain” and “range” specifications; get to know the MODS and VRA Core metadata schemes, along with recent developments related to their use in a Linked Data setting; understand the nuts and bolts of designing and documenting a metadata scheme; and gain knowledge of vital metadata interoperability and quality issues, including how to identify and clean inconsistent, missing, and messy metadata using innovative tools such as OpenRefine.

This easy-to-follow guide to digitization fundamentals will ensure that readers gain a solid grasp of the knowledge and resources available for getting started on their own digital collection projects.

This unique guide offers you a thorough understanding of multilingual information access (MLIA) and services and related concepts, such as database design, information retrieval, machine translation, and natural language processing. Written for digital library developers, library and information science graduate students, and information professionals serving international information users, this book defines multilingual information access (MLIA) and discusses the importance of enabling international users to access digital collections. Based on a systematic review of the research and development carried out on cross-language information retrieval, machine translation, and case studies of current multilingual digital libraries, the author clearly explains what you need to know about technologies for building MLIA function for digital collections. The book leads you through an examination of Internet language services and tools that are useful for developing multilingual digital libraries and for assisting international users in accessing digital resources. Content is further clarified by two research projects that are presented to demonstrate the application of technologies used to build MLIA functions and multilingual user interfaces. The book concludes with possible strategies for using Internet language services and tools to implement MLIA function for digital collections.

As digital collections continue to grow, the underlying technologies to serve up content also continue to expand and develop. As such, new challenges are presented which continue to test ethical ideologies in everyday environs of the practitioner. There are currently no solid guidelines or overarching codes of ethics to address such issues. The digitization of modern archival collections, in particular, presents interesting conundrums when factors of privacy are weighed and reviewed in both small and mass digitization initiatives. Ethical decision making needs to be present at the onset of project planning in digital projects of all sizes, and we also need to identify the role and responsibility of the practitioner to make more virtuous decisions on behalf of those with no voice or awareness of potential privacy breaches. In this book, notions of what constitutes private information are discussed, as is the potential presence of such information in both analog and digital collections. This book lays groundwork to introduce the topic of privacy within digital collections by providing some examples from documented real-world scenarios and making recommendations for future research. A discussion of the notion privacy as concept will be included, as well as some historical perspective (with perhaps one the most cited work on this topic, for example, Warren and Brandeis' "Right to Privacy," 1890). Concepts from the The Right to Be Forgotten case in 2014 (Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v Agencia Españla de Protección de Datos, Mario Costeja González) are discussed as to how some lessons may be drawn from the response in Europe and also how European data privacy laws have been applied. The European ideologies are contrasted with the Right to Free Speech in the First Amendment in the U.S., highlighting the complexities in setting guidelines and practices revolving around privacy issues when applied to real life scenarios. Two ethical theories are explored: Consequentialism and Deontological. Finally, ethical decision making models will also be applied to our framework of digital collections. Three case studies are presented to illustrate how privacy can be defined within digital collections in some real-world examples.