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SAA2007: Archives and E-Commerce, Three Case Studies (Session 404)

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George Washington US DollarDiane Kaplan, of Yale University Library’s Manuscripts and Archives unit, started off Session 404 (officially titled Exploring the Headwaters of the Revenue Stream) by thanking everyone for showing up for the last session of the day. This was a one hour session that examined ways to generate new funds through e-commerce . Three different e-commerce case studies were presented, followed by a short question and answer period.

University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center

Mark Shelstad‘s presentation, “Show Me the Money: Or: How Do We Pay for This?”, detailed the approach taken by the University of Wyoming‘s American Heritage Center (AHC) to find alternate revenue streams. After completing a digitization project in the fall of 2004, the AHC had to figure out how to continue their project after their original grant money ran out.

Since they didn’t have a lot of in-house resources, they chose Zazzle.com for their effort to profit from their existing high resolution images. They can earn up to 17% from the sales through a combination of affiliate sales and profits from the sale of products featuring American Heritage Center images.

They had a lot of good reasons for choosing Zazzle.com. Zazzle.com already had an existing ‘special collections’ area, meaning that their images would have a better chance of being found by those interested in their offerings (for example – take a look at the Library of Congress Vintage Photos store). Zazzle.com also did not require an exclusive license to the images. The American Heritage Center Zazzle on-line store opened in 2005.

Currently they are making about $30 a month in royalties from 200 images. Mark pointed out that everyone needs to keep in mind that the major photo provider, Corbis, has yet to turn a profit in online photo sales. He also mentioned a website called Cogteeth.com that lets you click on any image and use those images on t-shirts, mugs.. etc.

Near the end of his talk, Mark shared an amazing idea to create a non-profit that would be a joint organization for featuring and selling products using archival images. I love it! It is easy to see that many archives are small and don’t have the infrastructure to create and run their own e-commerce websites. At the same time, general sites that let anyone set up a store to sell items with custom images on them threaten to loose the special nature of historical images in the shuffle. Even the special collections section of Zazzle lumps the American Heritage Center and the Library of Congress collections with Disney and Star Wars. I would love to see this idea grow!

Minnesota Historical Society

Kathryn Otto of the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) spoke next. She first gave an overview of traditional services provided by MHS for a fee, such as photocopies, reader-printer copies, microfilm sales, media sales, inter-library loan fees, classes and photograph sales. MHS also earned income via standard use fees and research services.

The first e-commerce initiative at MHS was the sale of Minnesota State Death Certificates from 1904 – 2001. Made available via the Minnesota Death Certificate Index they provide the same data as Ancestry.com, but the MHS index provides a better search interface. They have had users tell them that they couldn’t find something on Ancestry.com – but that they were able to find what they needed on the MHS site.

To their existing Visual Resources Database, MHS also added a buy button for most images. Extra steps were added into the standard buy process to deal with the addition of a use fee depending on how the purchaser claims the image will ultimately be used. One approach that did not work for them was to offer expensively printed pre-selected images. The historical society sells classes online and can handle member vs non-member rates. TheVeterans Graves Registration Index is a tiny database that was created by reusing the interface used for the death certificates.

The Birth Certificate Index provides “single, non-certified copies of individual birth certificates reproduced from the originals” via the website.. while “[o]fficial, certified copies of these birth certificates are available through the Minnesota Department of Health.” The MHS site provides much faster and easier service than the Department of Health as can be seen from this page detailing how to order a non-certified copy of a birth record from the DOH – which requires printing, filling out and either faxing or snail mailing a form.

Features to keep in mind as you branch into in e-commerce:

  • Statistics – Consider the types of statistics you want. Their system just gave them info about orders – not how much they made.
  • Sales tax – Figure out how is it handled
  • Postage/Handling fees – Look at the details! The MHS Library-Archives was stuck with the Museum Store’s postage rates because the e-commerce system could not handle different fees for different types of objects.
  • Can’t afford credit card fees? Consider PayPal.
  • Advertise what you are selling on your own website.

Godfrey Memorial Library, Middletown, CT

The final panelist was Richard Black, Director of the Godfrey Memorial Library in Middletown, Connecticut. The Godfrey is a small, non-profit, genealogical research library with approximately 120,000 genealogical items. They currently have 5 full time staff and 60 volunteers.

Services they provide:

About 3 years ago they had exhausted all of their endowment money and faced the strong possibility of closing the doors. They were down to one full time librarian and a few volunteers and were dependent mostly on donations and some minor income from other sources/services.

They had only a few options open to them:

  • find more money from other sources
  • merge with another library
  • close the doors
  • sell some of the content
  • others??

The first approach to raise funds was to create a subscription website. The Godfrey acquired Heritage Quest census records and added other databases as resources allowed. Subscriptions were sold for $35 a year. The board thought they might be lucky to get 100 subscriptions.. but they actually got approximately 14,000!

Now the portal provides access to sites for which a premium has been paid (so that subscribers don’t have to pay), sites that are available free on the Internet (but made easier to find) and sites unique to Godfrey, including digitized material in the library and other material that has been made available to them. They just added 95,000 Jewish grave-sites – brought to them by a local rabbi. Another recent addition was a set of transcriptions of a grave-site made as an Eagle Scout project. They also negotiated to have their books digitized for them for free. The company performing the digitization will pay a royalty to Godfrey as the books are used.

The costs to acquire data for the portal includes $60,000 a year for access to premium sites, the cost to digitize and transcribe unique content (there are opportunities to partner and reduce costs) and the cost to acquire patrons. The efforts of the Godfrey staff and volunteers is ‘free’ – but costs time.

The Godfrey subsequently lost access to the Heritage Quest material. This was like taking the anchor store out of the corner of a mall. It forced them to diversify their revenue streams and watch for new opportunities.

Current revenue source distribution:

  • online portal 45%
  • annual appeal 10%
  • patron requests 5%
  • contract services 35% (OCLC analytical cataloging that they do)
  • misc 5%

The endowment funds have been restored and the Godfrey’s staff is now growing again.

Questions

Question: Did you meet resistance in your institutions?
Answer: No.. Minnesota said they had such success that the 2 questions they here now are A) What do we put online next? B) How long can they protect their income from the rest of the institution?

Question: (From someone from a NJ archives) Is there a way to do e-commerce with government records and not have the money ‘stolen’ from them?
Answer: Minnesota – The department of health was happy for death and birth certificates business to go away? They do worry about the future when they might try to make a marriage index – because that territory is already ‘owned’ by a group that wants to keep that income.

Question: When you charge for use fees – are there people who don’t pay them?
Answer: Minnesota: Probably – no way to really know.
Mark (American Heritage Center): Our images are public domain – they can do what they like with them.

Question: Do you brand your images?
Answer: Mark: Yes.. a logo and URL goes with the images.

My Thoughts

I was particularly impressed by how much information was conveyed in the course of the 1 hour session. My personal highlights were:

  • As I mentioned above, I want Mark’s idea for a non-profit to sell co-located products based on archival images to gain support and momentum.
  • I was pleased by the point that the MHS makes money from their Minnesota Death Certificate Index partly due to their improved and powerful search interface. The data is available elsewhere – but they made it easier to find information, so they will become the destination of choice for that information.
  • The Godfrey’s story is inspirational. In an age when we hear more and more often about archives and libraries being forced to cut back services due to funding shortfalls, it is great to hear about a small archives that pulled themselves back from the brink of disaster by brave experimentation.

These three case studies gave a great glimpse of some of the ways that archives can get on the e-commerce bandwagon. There is no magic here – just the willingness to dig in, figure out what can be done and try it. That said – there is definitely lots of room to learn from others successes and mistakes. The more real world success and failure stories archives share with the archival community about how to ‘do’ e-commerce, the easier it will be for each subsequent project to be a success.

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2007, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

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Controversial Photos, Archvists’ Choices and Journalism

New York Times Magazine Cover: January 1995The New York Times Magazine published The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal in January of 1995. Still available online, it is a fascinating tale that took reporter Ron Rosenbaum on a wild hunt through multiple archives in a quest for long lost photographs. I spotted a link to the article in a post on Boing Boing – and once I started reading it I couldn’t stop.

The story includes thorough coverage of the research (and the footwork and the paperwork) it took to find the final resting place of some very controversial photographs. Taken as part of the orientation process of new students at Ivy League and Seven Sisters school campuses predominately during the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s, these photos were theoretically taken to screen for students who needed remedial posture classes. William Herbert Sheldon was a driving force behind many of the photos. Best known for assigning people into three categories of body types in the 1940s, Sheldon based his categories of endomorphic, mesomorphic, and ectomorphic on measurements done using the student photographs. Rosenbaum’s quest was to find the real story behind the photos and to discover if any of the photos survived the purging fires at that occurred at many of the schools involved.

His first stop was Harvard’s archives:

Harley P. Holden, curator of Harvard’s archives, said that from the 1880’s to the 1940’s the university had its own posture-photo program in which some 3,500 pictures of its students were taken. Most were destroyed 15 or 20 years ago “for privacy scruples,” Holden said. Nonetheless, quite a few Harvard nudes can be found illustrating Sheldon’s book on body types, the Atlas of Men. Radcliffe took posture photos from 1931 to 1961; the curator there said that most of them had been destroyed (although some might be missing) and that none were taken by Sheldon.

A major turning point in Sheldon’s project came in 1950. He went to the University of Washington to further his plans to make an Altas of Women. The families of a few photographed females students at the university questioned the real purpose of the photographs. The resulting upheaval culminated in the destruction of many photographs. A Time article dated September 25, 1950, Revolt at Washington, documents the events in Washington and notes that over 800 photos were burned.

Rosenbaum’s article goes on mention that thousands of photos were subsequently burned at Harvard, Vassar and Yale in the 60’s and 70’s – but he continued to hunt for the ones that some believed had escaped into Sheldon’s private archives. A chain of contacts led Rosenbaum to Sheldon’s former associate Roland D. Elderkin. An elderly gentleman of 84 at the time of the story’s publication, Elderkin spent years assisting Sheldon. He took many of the photographs. And after being turned down by many archives, he found Sheldon’s records, photos and negatives a home in the National Anthropological Archives.

In 1987, the curators of the National Anthropological Archives acquired the remains of Sheldon’s life work, which were gathering dust in “dead storage” in a Goodwill warehouse in Boston. While there were solid archival reasons for making the acquisition, the curators are clearly aware that they harbor some potentially explosive material in their storage rooms. And they did not make it easy for me to gain access.

On my first visit, I was informed by a good-natured but wary supervisor that the restrictive grant of Sheldon’s materials by his estate would permit me to review only the written materials in the Sheldon archives. The actual photographs, he said, were off-limits. To see them, I would have to petition the chief of archivists. Determined to pursue the matter to the bitter end, I began the process of applying for permission.

In their online guide to collections I found the entry for SHELDON, WILLIAM HERBERT (1898-1977), Papers. It notes that the collection is 150 linear feet. It also includes a line that reads “RESTRICTION: The photographic material is not available for research.”

While Rosenbaum’s hunt was for the photographs, some of his most interesting discoveries came from the papers themselves. During his three month wait for permission to view the photos, he reviewed boxes of letters and notes. See Rosenbaum’s article for details – but it was Sheldon’s own words in those papers that revealed he held racist views and that he seemed more concerned with his research than with the psychological impact of his research on the girls whose photos he arranged to take.

When finally Rosenbaum was given the opportunity to review some 20,000 negatives of the photos (no photos and no names) we read:

A curator trundled in a library cart from the storage facility. Teetering on top of the cart were stacks of big, gray cardboard boxes. The curator handed me a pair of the white cotton gloves that researchers must use to handle archival material.

I love it – gray cardboard boxes and white cotton gloves. He even mentions the finding aids and gives examples of how the groups of photos are described. I also appreciate the earlier acknowledgment of the “solid archival reasons for making the acquisition”.

Rosenbaum looked through a lot of the negatives, mostly to verify that what the finding aids claimed were present were in fact in those gray boxes. He was struck by the contrast between the expressions on the mens’ and womens’ faces.

For the most part, the men looked diffident, oblivious. That’s not surprising considering that men of that era were accustomed to undressing for draft physicals and athletic-squad weigh-ins. But the faces of the women were another story. I was surprised at how many looked deeply unhappy, as if pained at being subjected to this procedure. On the faces of quite a few I saw what looked like grimaces, reflecting pronounced discomfort, perhaps even anger. I was not much more comfortable myself sitting there in the midst of stacks of boxes of such images. There I was at the end of my quest. I’d tracked down the fabled photographs, but the lessons of the posture-photo ritual were elusive.

He found the missing photos – but no easy answers. This is a great combination of a compelling story and a realistic representation of archives and archivists. The records don’t always hold the answers to the question you thought you were asking – but sometimes they hold secrets you hadn’t expected.

So many elements tie back to the choices made by individual archivists – sometimes made in the heat of the moment or under great community pressure. I think this story is a particularly poignant example of the downstream effects of these sorts of hard choices. It isn’t often that we can see cause and effect this clearly.

What would you have done? Would you have burned the photos or stored them away? Would you have stepped forward to take Sheldon’s records? If something like this happened today – what do you think the future of these photos might be?

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Public.Resource.Org: Creative Financing and Public Domain Content

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Sunrise on Malibu Lake by Charles O'Rear (National Archives photo no. NWDNS-412-DA-15109) Public.resource.org is dedicated to using funds contributed by individuals to buy public domain content. This content is then released online in multiple locations such as the Internet Archive and Google Video for use by anyone. I love their tag line: Underwritten By The Feds! Overwritten By You!

I spotted this in boingboing’s post Liberated public domain government docs surfacing online and I was immediately intrigued. This isn’t really an archiving issue exactly – though you could decide that it takes more of a LOCKSS approach to preservation. I also wonder how this approach could be used to finance the digitization of other public domain materials.

The website explains on their About Us page that they have recently applied for non-profit status with the IRS, so soon the purchase price of these materials could become a tax deduction for those who file US Tax Returns. They feature materials from 54 different US Federal agencies – from the Fish and Wildlife Service to the IRS. There are materials on the Environment, Public Health, Flying and many more.

But that isn’t all they are tackling – back in May they issued a message to The Internet discussing their attitude toward (and frustration with) the Smithsonian Images website. It begins:

We write to you today on the subject of SmithsonianImages.SI.Edu, a government ecommerce site built on a repository of 6,288 images of national significance. The site is breathtaking in scope, with imagery ranging from the historic cyanotypes of Edward Muybridge to historic photos from aviation, natural history, and many other fields. If the Smithsonian Institution is our attic, these photos are our collective scrapbook.

However, the web site imposes draconian limits on the use of this imagery. The site includes a copyright notice that to the layman would certainly discourage any use of the imagery. While personal, non-commercial use is purportedly allowed, it requires a half-dozen clicks before the user is allowed to download a low-resolution, watermarked image. An image without the watermark and at sufficient resolution to be useful requires a hefty fee, manual approval by the Smithsonian staff, and the resulting invoice specifically prohibits any further use without permission.

The letter goes into great detail about why they disagree with how things are being done – take a look if you are curious. Also -they didn’t just create this letter – they also created a free to download book titled Public Domain Prospectus which they declare as a tool for those researching the public domain status of the 6,288 images included (in their low resolution watermarked versions).

I went hunting on the Smithsonian Images site to see for myself. I found a few things. While the prices for prints or digital files do seem expensive to my eyes – there is the following note included in the Product and Pricing Information:

Special Note on Pricing: Smithsonian Photographic Services, as an instrument of the Smithsonian Institution, is a non-profit entity. Fees associated with the delivery of images represent material fees only and go to support the broader mission to create, archive, and preserve images associated with the Institution and it’s holdings.

That page also includes some information about how the images may be used, but for the full story I headed over to the Copyright Policy. That is when I started to get confused. The copyright policy on that page talks about “Use of text, images and other content on this website…”. Does that mean these same rules apply to the images you purchase as well?

Let’s take a closer look at one of the pages about a specific image. Here is a nice one of Fireworks over National Monuments. I click on the tempting ‘Download Image’ button and now I see more about what the Public.Resource.Org folks are talking about. One more click and I finally find what appears to be the official Commercial Use of Smithsonian Images page which concludes with:

Commercial distribution, publication or exploitation of Smithsonian files is specifically prohibited. Anyone wishing to use any of these files or images for commercial use or publication must first request and receive prior permission by contacting [Smithsonian Institution Office of Imaging & Photographic Services]. Permission for such use is granted on a case-by-case basis. A usage fee may be involved depending on the type and nature of the proposed use.

There is a special policy for school, teacher and student use of the watermarked versions of the images for free (with the right citations of course).

If I understand the Public.Resource.Org’s issues, it isn’t predominately with the price of the high resolution digital versions or even the print versions of these photos (though they DO touch on it in their letter and I think I side with Smithsonian Images on that aspect – it does cost money and time to make all that available). Rather it is with the firmness that Smithsonian Images claims that you must request permission to use any of the images you purchase for anything beyond personal or educational use. I think I like what NARA has on their website concerning the publication of their still photos which begins with these two paragraphs:

Generally, photographic records copied and sold by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) may be published without special permission or additional fees. NARA does not grant exclusive or non-exclusive publication privileges. Copies of Federal records, as part of the public domain, are equally available to all.

A portion of the photographs among our holdings are or may be subject to copyright restrictions. The National Archives does not confirm the copyright status of photographs, but will provide any information filed with the photograph. It is important to note that all of the digital images that are available on our website are in the public domain.

I can see how it might seem safer (from a “don’t sue us” point of view) to force a search by hand for each and every image as users request to use them. At the same time I would like to think that the folks over at Smithsonian Images already know which images are in the public domain. Maybe I am oversimplifying this, but I want to believe that the details of copyright are part of the metadata that could be supplied along with the date, photographer’s name and description.

I prefer the National Archives’ approach of stating clearly that they do not confirm the copyright status of photographs. They put it in the hands of the entity who wants to use the materials – though that might be small comfort to the average citizen not well versed in copyright rules.

The Wikipedia page on Copyright status of work by the U.S. government includes sections about digital historical material as well as work produced by government contractors. Reading through this makes me realize how quickly the copyright status of images such as those provided by Smithsonian Images and NARA can get confusing.

I think what Public.Resource.Org is doing with their propagation of public domain materials to locations where the public can actually get at them easily is interesting. I want to check back in a year and see how much they have set loose – and what materials they are asking for help to liberate. As I mentioned above, I think there could be some interesting models of individuals donating money to finance the digitization and of public domain materials. Something like what Fundable does to take pledges toward a specific fund-raising goal – and then only turn those pledges into funds if the goal is reached.

As for their great frustration with Smithsonian Images? Well, I see Public.Resource.Org’s side. In this age of Flickr.com – people are growing used to watching for Creative Commons Licenses. With so much out there with liberal Creative Commons Licenses and in the Public Domain, why struggle with images that are copyright protected unless you really need to?

I would like to think that rights management is one of the first things that would get sorted out before a large image collection is put online – especially if the goal is to produce a revenue stream. That said – I would love to know the real story here. I can imagine that the rights on many of those images are not clear cut. But if the Smithsonian Image people know that some of them are in the public domain – then why would they go through all that extra trouble to force a rights search for every image? Why not distinguish the ones which require research from those that don’t? Couldn’t it only help support the work of the Smithsonian to have their images used by as many projects as possible? Anyone reading this have an answer for us from the inside?

About the image above: Given that I prefer images without watermarks (as provided by Smithsonian Images) and that I know that the images on NARA’s site are in the public domain I went hunting for something pretty – and found the image I feature above. To find it yourself do a search for [Sunrise on Malibu Lake] in the Archival Research Catalog (ARC). These are the details included with the image:

Sunrise on Malibu Lake in the Santa Monica mountains near Malibu, California, which is located on the northwestern edge of Los Angeles County. The mountains contain the last semi-wilderness in Los Angeles County. This area so far has escaped development pressure. Some 84 percent of the state’s residents live within 30 miles of the coast and this concentration has resulted in increasing land use pressure. Several commissions have been authorized by the legislature to restrict coastal development, 05/1975.

Item from Record Group 412: Records of the Environmental Protection Agency, 1944 – 2000. NARA NAIL Control Number: NWDNS-412-DA-15109. Photograph by Charles O’Rear.

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Amazing Visual Tools

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This has been a great week for exploring new visual tools. This post will look at one new tool that can compare photos to find images that have similarities to one another, another that creates 3D photo montages and a third that presents grouped keywords for image browsing.

First there is Riya, a visual search engine still in beta. I was especially intrigued by the Riya Personal Search that will let you use “face and text recognition to auto tag your photos”. Imagine a collection of 10,000 photos that include many combinations of the same 25 people. instead of going through and hand tagging them all – you should be able to use this feature to select good examples of each of the 25 people’s faces and let Riya’s magic do the busywork for you.

Over on Research Buzz they talk about Riya’s first commercial venture Like.com in Visual Search Engine for Finding Items by Photo. Basically this site lets you find clothing and accessories based on images in celebrity photos. What about buildings? What about automatic tagging of location by recognition of landmarks with distinctive shapes?

That leads us to Photosynth from Microsoft Live Labs . Photos are compared and stitched together into 3D models of space. ( Read more about how here.) They claim that the version they have out there now is a ‘tech preview’ or a ‘sneak peak’ at what is being built for real back in the labs. I played with it a bit – and it is very interesting. I love the idea overall – but I wish that there were a mode in which you could see the 3D world with many photos showing at once. Right now it shows you a sort of 3D point plotted version of the physical structures and then ‘hangs’ the individual photos in the proper place to give you a bit of ‘skin’ on the 3D skeleton as you browse through the photos. Take a look and play with it to see what I mean.

My fascination with this (beyond the cool factor) is the idea of feeding in photos taken a long time ago to create a virtual 3D space to walk through. The lower east side of New York City in the early 1900s or New Orleans before Katrina. I also wonder at being able to create 3D environments with a tie into time so that another slider control on the screen could let you alter the time you were viewing such that you could view the same facade change in fast forward.

Finally I wanted to share the approach taken by CSA Images for their Visual Brainstorming Index. They have provided a way to view keywords grouped by topic. Their goal is to inspire their customers by showing them terms that might jump out as being useful. This appears a great way to give users a quick grasp of what sorts of information (in this case images) can be found on this site. If a standard tool could show classified sets of keywords for users to explore it could go a long way to easily communicating the kinds of information available in a digitized archive online – especially if the browsable terms evolved as records were added to the collection. I am sure there are other great ways to communicate the big picture, but I think that a way to browse keywords or tags would give users a handle on the records in a way that a well written finding aid might not manage. Ask 100 users what a finding aid is. Then ask the same 100 users what a keyword or tag is. Moving to a model that users are comfortable with can only increase the use of the records we are working so hard to put online. Of course this assumes that the records in question are assigned keywords, tags or subject terms of some sort – but I think there are many paths to that (including the aforementioned Riya tool).

All three of these creations are interesting steps forward in searching through, processing and understanding images. As archivists make more progress in smoothing out the digitization process (or management of existing digital records), they will finally have more time to consider the wide array of tools that might make accessing those records easier. I hope that it happens sooner rather than later… and that those just starting the process of making archival records available online for research might make their plans with innovative ideas like these in mind.

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SAA2006 Session 305: Extended Archival Description Part II – ArchivesUM

The second part of SAA2006 session 305 (Extended Archival Description: Context and Specificity for Digital Objects) was a presentation titled “Understanding from Context: Pairing EAD and Digital Repository Description”. Delivered by Ann Handler and Jennifer O’Brian of the University of Maryland‘s ArchivesUM project, this talk explained the general approach being used to tackle the challenges of managing item level description of digitized images at a large, diverse institution.

They described the tension between collection level descriptions and the inheritance of attributes by items. With more images being digitized all the time, storing the images on a network drive made them hard to find or inventory. Different departments at University of Maryland described images at different levels and using different software. While one department had just folder collection level descriptions, another set of 3000 photos were described at the item level but without adherence to any standard.

A flat system of description was not the answer because it provided no way to include hierarchical description. Their answer was to combine archival description via finding aids with well structured item level description.

As the ArchivesUM project defines them, an item can be part of more than one collection and could be part of a collection that represents the source of the item as well as an online exhibition. The team also wanted to create relationships between the existing repository of finding aids and new digital objects. In order to accomplish everything they required (and in contrast with the Archives of American Art’s choice of ColdFusion), ArchivesUM selected FEDORA – an open source digital object repository for their development. They created a transitional database using SQL Server to track and store the metadata of newly scanned digital objects to not loose anything while the custom FEDORA system was being developed. The digital object repository uses a rich descriptive standard based on Dublin Core and Visual Resources Association (VRA) Core .

In order to connect to other kinds of objects from non-archival collections and other sources they simply add them in finding aid. To present the finding aid they needed new style sheets. Their improved layout helps user understand the hierarchy of the collection and how to find the individual record they are looking for, lets them move up and down through tree easily to explore and helps user understand the context of the record they are viewing.

One of the questions that was asked at the end of the session related to the possible drawbacks of linking just one or two digitized documents to a finding aid. The concern was that it might mislead the user into believing that these few documents were the only documents in the collection held by the archives. The response was strong, asserting that the opposite was true – that having the link into the finding aid gave users the context they desperately needed to understand the few digitized records and point them in the right direction for finding the rest of the offline collection. This is especially important in the Google universe. Users may end up viewing a single digitized record from an online collection and, without a link back to the finding aid for the collection, not understand the meaning of the record in question.

The ArchivesUM team is currently setting the stage for migration to the live system. I look forward to exploring the actual user interface after it does.

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