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Today, we'll look at what happens after last week's Imaging and Conservation Activity. At this point, an imaging technician, archivist, or vendor has created a set of digital images. These files might be sitting on a hard drive, a production server, or somewhere else at the institution. They've been named, likely organized into folders, but they’re not accessible to users yet.
So, what happens next? How do we move from having digital files to preparing these for discovery and access?
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We will be looking at a particular example, the Bayou City Digital Asset Management System (BCDAMS), used by the University of Houston (UH) Libraries. In late 2015, UH made an institutional commitment to migrate the data for its digitized cultural heritage collections to a group of interoperable open source systems.
Here, we have a workflow diagram created by the University of Houston, representing their digital preservation workflow that we are going to break down into something more digestible and understandable.
A code4lib article provides additional details: https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12342#unit5
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The University of Houston uses a preservation systems “ecosystem” of both open-source and homegrown applications and tools, each working in concert with one another to fully or partially automate the entire digital preservation-to-access workflow.
UH uses three open-source tools:
- ArchivesSpace: Used by archivists to describe collections and produce finding aids.
- Archivematica: Used to automate workflows into and from the digital repository.
- Hydra-in-a-Box (aka Hyku): open-source digital repository software platform that allows institutions to manage, preserve, and provide access to digital collections.
UH also uses a number of homegrown tools:
- Carpenters: an internal staff interface used by digitization staff to manage digitization workflow and preservation ingest.
- Brays: a metadata management system used by staff working with digital objects to view files and create metadata in preparation for ingest into HyKu
- CEDAR: A linked data vocabulary manager
- Greens: A persistent identifier minter
- HALLS: HALLS (stands for Houston Area Library Automated Network Delivery System) is a front-end interface for searching and discovering content from various digital repositories and collections maintained by the libraries in the Houston area
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This is a screenshot of the Carpenters interface, with the “Selection” tab open, which is where the archivist works to import the finding aid components and hierarchy.
As you can see, Carpenters allows preservation administrators to organize digitized content into hierarchies that preserve the contextual linkages and provenance of the original archival collection.
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In this screenshot, we are looking at the Carpenters interface “Files” tab, which is where Digitization Unit staff work. Each row has a box and folder listed, followed by the name of the collection and series title. Here, they can click on the plus sign next to the derivative file type, such as Preservation Master, and add the filename. In this way, they are connecting image captures to archival objects in the finding aid.
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Yale uses Handle, another kind of persistent identifier. It's pretty similar to ARK, but notice that the URL uses handle.net to resolve, rather than a Yale-hosted domain.
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This is the Brays metadata creation staff interface. On the left-hand side, you see a list of all the digital preservation objects, in order. You can click into any one of them, and open up a descriptive metadata record. This record is connected to the CEDAR linked data vocab, which provides controlled lists, metadata validation and type-ahead suggestions.
The access portion of the workflow begins when Metadata Unit personnel loads the Carpenters DIP in the Brays descriptive metadata editor and creates descriptive metadata for all objects.
Brays suggests controlled vocabulary terms from the Cedar linked data vocabulary manager and validates the record against their descriptive metadata specification.
Brays dynamically reads and writes to a metadata CSV file included in the DIP.
Color coding in the metadata creation interface indicates to staff which fields are required, recommended, and optional.
Additionally, once the record contains all required fields, the object name in the object viewer turns from red to green.
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You can also use BRAYS to view a copy of the preservation file in full screen mode, so you can toggle back and forth between the image and the description quickly and seamlessly.
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This image is a screencapture of two medieval manuscripts, each held by a different repository: one from the Bodleian Libraries, the other from St. Gallen. Along with side-by-side comparisons or two high-resolution images from their digital collections, IIIF viewers allow deep zoom to see exacting/tiniest details, which supports research, scholarship and interest.
Read more here: https://blog.digitizedmedievalmanuscripts.org/iiif-international-image-interoperability-framework/
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These takeaways were derived from Joyce Celeste Chapman’s article “Observing Users: An Empirical Analysis of User Interaction with Online Finding Aids” in the Journal of Archival Organization (JAO), 8:4–30, 2010 (DOI: 10.1080/15332748.2010.484361)
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Accessibility is essential to building access platforms
Most institutions’ accessibility expectations will be informed by federal law, state law, and/or institutional best practices. Section 508 Standards for Accessible Electronic and Information Technology, the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and PDF-UA (ISO 14289-1) are the most common tools used to build digital accessibility policies.
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"a href" broken down is the <anchor> tag (represented by "a") and its attribute "href" which stands for "hypertext reference". See https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp as well as https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/ftpqlo/a_anchor_tag_etymology/ (regarding the origin of the "a" in "a href")
You can read it like "anchor this URL to this particular text".
In the early days of the web, this was kind of it. Before the days of hyperlinked text documents, what might you have had to call up other associated resources? One example would be an index at the back of a book, or the chapter page at the front (the book referencing itself).
Another example would be a bibliography; but that would just give you a citation, that you would then need to physically find (and sometimes your library might not have it!)
When you think about it, the web really set the tracks for making information immediately accessible, and started to, through the use of hyperlinking, structure relationships between documents on the web in the form of a link.
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This definition is gleaned from Digital Preservation Framework Linked Open Data page: https://www.archives.gov/preservation/digital-preservation/linked-data
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Definition derived from https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3484398
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A leaflet about a strike at FIAT (copyright: Fondazione Istituto piemontese Antonio Gramsci Onlus).
Transcription/Translation:
FIAT WORKERS
Why do students participate in the workers' struggle?
In these months of struggle in the schools, students have begun to fight against the power of the professors: they are tired of having their heads filled without being able to discuss or decide.
But through this struggle, they also realized that fighting in the university and in school is not enough. Authoritarianism, meaning that a few command while many are oppressed, exists not only in school: it is present throughout society and especially in the factory.
FIAT is the most typical example.
For this reason, even if students manage to obtain a less tyrannical school, this is not enough: because after school, students enter the workforce, and this generally means becoming a teacher, a technician, or an office worker in a factory. In the first case, students do not want to become like those authoritarian professors they fought against for years. In the second case, they do not want to become the boss’s henchmen, who follow his orders and oppress the workers according to the management’s directives.
Therefore, it is not enough to change things in the school; we must change them everywhere. For this reason, everyone who wants to change things, everyone who is tired of enduring impositions, must unite and fight together.
Circled in red:
For this reason, we are in front of the factories: our participation in the picket lines is a first step toward connecting students and workers, to discuss and decide future actions together.