Digital Surrogates Research Articles

Project Digitization, Bibliographic Description and Research of Texts Written in Glagolitic, Croatian Cyrillic and Latin Scripts Until the End of the 19th Century in the Zadar and Šibenik Area (Written Heritage)

Croatian written heritage has a rich corpus of manuscripts written on three scripts – Glagolitic, Latin and Croatian Cyrillic, and in three languages – Church Slavonic, Croatian redaction of the Church Slavonic and Latin. Those manuscripts are often hard to access, or even completely hidden. The aim of the project Written Heritage is to provide digital surrogates of Glagolitic manuscripts, online Glagolitic manuscript catalog, bibliography, and a watermark database. Within the project, the main focus is on providing solutions regarding the machine-readable cataloging of Glagolitc manuscripts, including research and normative work in the field of cataloging of old and rare books.

The Deep Freeze Redux: Cold Storage Packaging of Ektachrome Color Film

At the 2017 SPNHC meetings in Denver, a five-minute Storage Techniques for Art, Science and History (STASH) talk was presented on the cold storage of film-based media. Herein, a more in-depth presentation of the Smithsonian's archival project with a status update is provided. In February 2016 world-renowned ichthyologist John E. Randall (Jack) donated his 10,559 film-based slide collection of fishes to the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). Beginning in the 1970’s, Jack used predominately 120mm Ektachrome film to photograph marine fishes. The first-generation slides were stored in cool storage, approximately 40F/4.5C, for much of their lives, thus preserving film color quite well as well as extending the life expectancy of film. Although digital surrogates of the slides have been created, the Division of Fishes intends to ensure the stabilization of the original color film by placing the slides in cold (-4F/-20C) storage. Color dyes used in Ektachrome slide film are fairly fugitive, and a known strategy to slow the rate of fading is to store slides in the coldest storage possible. NMNH Division of Fishes rehoused slides based on methods developed by the US National Park Service and the US National Gallery of Art. Prior to placing into cold storage, the slides were rehoused using archival supplies. The packaging methods we used are to prevent or reduce inherent deterioration as well as to help prevent any condensation buildup during the acclimation period that can occur when moving between quite differing temperature environments. In this discussion, I will evaluate the processes and materials used as well as to reflect on post-mortem takeaways.

Managing 3D Collections Data: Developing Systems and Metadata for 3D Digitization at Scale

As 3D digitization becomes more common in collections documentation and research, there is a growing need for tools which address the special needs of 3D data stewardship. Systems are needed to manage both the scan data collected during digitization activities, as well as the 3D models generated from that data. These systems need to be able to preserve and make transparent the complex relationships inherent in the data created from 3D digitization activities. They need to connect digital surrogates back to the objects they represent as well as provide an easy way to discover and retrieve that data for research, conservation, and public access. At the core of such systems there needs to be metadata models that can account for the intricacies and specific needs of managing 3D data. This year, the Smithsonian Institution will be deploying new infrastructure which does just that, based on a metadata model developed by a cross disciplinary working group comprised of content experts from across the institution. The platform, which not only manages scan data, but also automates the processing and delivery of 3D digitized content, is open source and is built around modular design principles for easier adoption. This talk builds upon last year’s SPNHC presentation “Automating 3D collection capture: Developing systems for 3D digitization at scale” as it addresses the information systems and infrastructure needed to support the management and delivery of 3D data at scale. We will cover the basic functionality of the Smithsonian’s 3D data repository, how it facilitates data administration, the workflows involved in managing and processing data, and how it connects to the larger Smithsonian infrastructure. As part of this, we will explore the metadata model behind the system and how the model can support greater usability and transparency when sharing and working with 3D scan data.

Grants and Acquisitions

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has been awarded $1.12 million by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to implement a sustainable, extensible digital library platform and set of curatorial processes to federate records relating to the cultural heritage of the Middle East. CLIR and its Digital Library Federation program will work with technical partners at Stanford University and content providers worldwide to build on the Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME) prototype and create processes to extend the DLME. DLME is envisioned as a nonproprietary, multilingual library of digital objects providing greater security for, preservation of, and access to digital surrogates of cultural heritage materials.

Digital Object Cloud for linking natural science collections information; The case of DiSSCo

DiSSCo(The Distributed System of Scientific Collections) is a Research Infrastructure (RI) aiming at providing unified physical (transnational), remote (loans) and virtual (digital) access to the approximately 1.5 billion biological and geological specimens in collections across Europe. DiSSCo represents the largest ever formal agreement between natural science museums (114 organisations across 21 European countries). With political and financial support across 14 European governments and a robust governance model DiSSCo will deliver, by 2025, a series of innovative end-user discovery, access, interpretation and analysis services for natural science collections data. As part of DiSSCo's developing data model, we evaluate the application of Digital Objects (DOs), which can act as the centrepiece of its architecture. DOs have bit-sequences representing some content, are identified by globally unique persistent identifiers (PIDs) and are associated with different types of metadata. The PIDs can be used to refer to different types of information such as locations, checksums, types and other metadata to enable immediate operations. In the world of natural science collections, currently fragmented data classes (inter alia genes, traits, occurrences) that have derived from the study of physical specimens, can be re-united as parts in a virtual container (i.e., as components of a Digital Object). These typed DOs, when combined with software agents that scan the data offered by repositories, can act as complete digital surrogates of the physical specimens. In this paper we: investigate the architectural and technological applicability of DOs for large scale data RIs for bio- and geo-diversity, identify benefits and challenges of a DO approach for the DiSSCo RI and describe key specifications (incl. metadata profiles) for a specimen-based new DO type.

Հայաստանի առաջին հանրապետության մամուլը

The First Republic of Armenia initiated a series of activities for building Statehood and its legislative and executive bodies. Periodiclas were playing a crucial role in this process. At that time, in Armenian cities such as in Yerevan, Alexandrapolis, Goris, Kars, Echmiadzin 50 titles of periodicals representing Government, political parties, professional organizations, youth and education were published. Some of these periodicals are preserved in the collections of the National Library of Armenia, some in other organizations; such as in the National Archives, in the Repository of the Ancient Manuscripts - Matenadaran, in the Museum of Literature and Art Towards 100th Anniversary of its First Republic the National Library of Armenia has initiated digitization of periodicals of the First Republic, and the digital surrogates are available from the database http://tert.nla.am.

On Digital-Medieval Manuscript Culture: A Tentative Manifesto

This essay will examine what we define as digital-medieval manuscript culture, the production, dissemination, and use, scholarly or otherwise, of digital surrogates of medieval manuscripts. As we argue here, digital-medieval manuscript culture is continually in process and changing, as our tools, like those of the Middle Ages, evolve. In order to theorize digital manuscript surrogates—which need not be facsimiles, but rather any digital text or object intended to represent the contents and/or physical presence of a manuscript—as hyper-remediations that foreground medieval technologies in new media, we consider five interrelated aspects of digital-medieval manuscript culture: likeness, tangibility, presence, time, and intention(s).

Artists’ Books and the Problem of Digital Preservation

Abstract:Artists’ books have become a popular genre for many institutions collecting art objects and unique books. The attempt to preserve the physical artists’ books often competes with the desire to extend user access to these highly tactile works. Partial digitization of artists’ books has allowed many institutions to cultivate an online presence for these collections, increasing access without compromising the physical integrity of the objects. However, creation of digital surrogates for artists’ books often sacrifices the authenticity and access to the intellectual content of the work. The challenge of digital preservation for artists’ books demonstrates the shortcomings of digital reformatting for works that may be intellectual and artistic.

Digital access to culture: copyright in photographs of two-dimensional art under Australian copyright law

Photographs of cultural collections are an essential means of disseminating art and democratizing access to culture. This article reviews the policies of five major Australian galleries on access to their collections. It finds they tend to claim copyright in photographs of their collections, including of public domain works. This reflects a perceived entitlement to control access to their digital collections, often bolstered by a misstatement of copyright exceptions, restrictive quasi-copyright contract terms, licensing practices, and physical property rights in photography's appurtenances. This curbs the emancipatory potential of digitization, generating a conflict between the property interests of cultural institutions and the public interest in enhanced access to culture. The problem is particularly acute with respect to images of public domain art, exclusive control over which diminishes the public domain. This article considers the novel question of whether copyright subsists in photographs of two-dimensional art under Australian law, arguing that such photographs lack the originality indispensable to copyright subsistence. This conclusion significantly undermines cultural institutions’ licensing models and challenges misconceptions of property rights in the photographic surrogates of two-dimensional cultural objects. The article urges cultural institutions to liberate the digital surrogates of public domain art to enhance access to cultural capital.

Walk1916

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate how non-research users access and use digital surrogates from archival collections via mobile walking tour app. Much of the existing literature that discusses outreach for digitised archival collections in libraries, archives and museums (LAMs) reports examples of single outreach events or discusses outreach broadly, without critically exploring the purpose and context of outreach as an activity. Further, these reports generally aim to introduce collections to potential researchers, amateur or professional, without consideration of how the collections could be used for purposes other than research, by non-researchers. The study aims to expand understanding of non-research use of digital surrogates contextualised by mobile technology.Design/methodology/approachUtilising an exploratory approach, Walk1916, a mobile walking tour app of Easter Rising sites in Dublin was first developed. It contextualised digital surrogates from archival collections, along with an audio and a textual description of the image, with augmented reality (AR) and geolocation technology. In all, 15 semi-structured interviews were then conducted to understand how contextualising digital surrogates with these mobile technology features influenced participants’ perceptions of the digital surrogate. Interview transcripts were transcribed and analysed via memoing and coding, using nVivo for Mac 10.2.2.FindingsFindings from interview data suggest that contextualising the digital surrogate with AR and geolocation features allowed participants to perceive of the digital surrogate as enhancing their understanding of the Easter Rising, enhancing life and allowing for increased control of their experience.Originality/valueThis furthers work in the area of how individuals value digital surrogates, in different (non-research) contexts. These findings provide groundwork for the future study of non-research access to and use of digital surrogates held in institutional collections so that LAMs can utilise collections efficiently for a wider user base.

Digital Surrogates

Column description. The Best of the Literature column is intended to keep librarians, administrators, and staff up to date with the most recent, relevant, and useful literature of the field. Columns may focus on a specific theme or topic or they may be a review of significant or interesting resources published within the past year. Columns generally begin with a brief introduction to the topic or theme of the column and include references and annotations for up to between 7–10 different resources. Readers are invited to suggest themes, topics, or resources to Linda Frederiksen.

A Context Metadata Collection and Management Tool for Computational Photography Projects

This paper will present the first module of an advanced set of metadata and knowledge management tools to record a "Digital Lab Notebook" (DLN), the equivalent of the traditional scientist's lab notebook. The DLN:Capture Context (DLN:CC) tool describes the means and context of photographic data capture. The tool is designed for broad use across computational photography technologies. The DLN:CC has already been implemented for Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) and implementation for photogrammetry is underway. The collection and organization of contextual metadata is highly automated, facilitating use during the time the image data is captured and processed, rather than afterward. This project adds ISO-standard compliant metadata, which establishes the provenance of the imaging subject's digital surrogate. The captured photographic sequences and the DLN metadata contain all the information needed to generate and/or regenerate advanced, image-based 2D and 3D digital surrogates, such as Reflectance Transformation Imaging or photogrammetry's 3D models with texture. The DLN also provides each digital surrogate a scientific account of their collection and generation.

An Introduction to Armenian Periodicals of the Eastern Mediterranean: A Bibliographic Study

ABSTRACTThe periodical press of the Armenian communities of the Eastern Mediterranean represents an archive of social, literary, political, and economic expressions of these historical Armenian communities. Despite their large numbers, they remain relatively unknown in North America. This article fills in this gap by addressing what these periodicals were and how the fate of the majority of them was tied to the histories of the communities in which they arose, functioned, and ceased to exist over the 19th and 20th centuries. More importantly, the author provides a cohesive picture about possible access to the digital surrogates of these periodicals.

How recordkeeping ensures trust in digital archives

ABSTRACTImagine a researcher in 2067 examining objects in a digital archive that were deposited in the early 21st century. How can the researcher be assured that those digital materials – whether born‐digital or digital surrogates of analog materials – have not been accidentally or maliciously altered sometime during the intervening decades? Ten archival workers – archivists, metadata specialists, digitization managers and preservation technologists – were interviewed about how contemporary recordkeeping practices ensure the authenticity of born‐digital files and digital surrogates for future users of the archive. This poster presents preliminary results about how archives are adapting to emergent needs for processing digital materials at scale, ensuring that workflows capture entities, activities and agents (provenance information), and ensuring that current systems support migration of provenance information to successor systems.

Basic Project Management for Weeding Government Documents Collections

For as long as academic libraries have participated in the federal depository library program, there has been an inherent conflict between their academic and depository mandates. While state and public libraries are tasked with serving the greater public, academic libraries have an imperative to meet the specific needs of their institutions. As institutional priorities have evolved and new needs emerged, many academic depositories have come to face pressures of staffing and physical space that lead to the desire to downsize their physical government documents holdings in favor of digital surrogates. Because the government documents received through the federal depository library program are not the libraries’ property, withdrawing these materials is a time consuming, labor intensive, costly, and complicated undertaking.

Litchfield Unbound: Unlocking Legal History with Metadata, Digitization, and Digital Tools

Notebooks written by students at the Litchfield Law School are among the primary sources for understanding the influence of English law in this country. The notebooks provide rich documentation of how the common law and elements of English law were presented, explained, and compared with American law in a formal classroom setting during the Early Republic. The digitization project described here, the first large-scale digitization initiative undertaken at the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School, with the cooperation of the Litchfield Historical Society, is intended to organize, describe, and analyze those notebooks with a web site containing a database, bibliography, inventory, and links to images. The Litchfield student notebook project was intended not only to create digital surrogates of important historical sources, but also to inform future digital legal history projects at the Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Traces of humanity: Echoes of social and cultural experience in physical objects and digital surrogates in the University of Victoria Libraries

AbstractThe relationships between primary source materials and their digital surrogates warrant consideration about how different materials translate into digitized forms. Physical primary source materials found in library special collections and archives and their digital surrogates challenge the viewer to consider what these objects are communicating through their materiality or lack thereof. For example, how does a clay tablet represent itself digitally, as compared to a parchment manuscript, or a paper accounts book? What qualities, stories or narratives do these resources communicate in their original forms, as digital surrogates, or when engaged with together, and how do these differ? How do both physical and digital resources serve as archival objects with the ability to reflect our social and cultural experiences—and indeed our humanity—back to us? As more and more library and museum resources are digitized and made open to researchers, such questions must be addressed as the use and reuse of digi...

A Classification of Digital Emergence: A Critical Approach to the Production of Digital Objects in Special Collections

This paper examines the infrastructure of digital libraries and teases out the subtle ways their formation and construction is a digital extension and representation of the social, political, and institutional circumstances by which they are created. Building off lessons learned from UCLA Library Special Collections as a case study site, this paper proposes a classification of digital emergence that provides more transparency about how digital surrogates come to exist in digital libraries and how we can use this information to better contextualize the importance of these surrogates within academic library services. The discussion then situates digital libraries as medial interfacing infrastructures that are fundamentally non-neutral social apparatuses that disappear in the course of daily use. Marcuse’s notion of technological rationality is incorporated to illustrate the extent to which technological infrastructures influence and reformulate the way we understand the research process using special collections and archives, and how these infrastructures can function as a mechanism for information control. Finally, Bowker and Star’s text, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences, briefly illustrates how librarians can contextualize the emergence of digital objects, and how this context, and the concomitant technological biases, can be methodologically brought to light using infrastructural inversion.

Will That Surrogate Do?: Reflections on Material Manuscript Literacy in the Digital Environment from Islamic Manuscripts at the University of Michigan Library

The widespread dissemination of digital surrogates for Islamic manuscripts certainly has the potential to impact scholarship both positively and negatively. Realizing a positive impact is contingent on the accessibility and quality of the digital surrogates and the training extended to the scholars working with them. Indeed, while manuscript digital surrogates have the potential to enhance access for those scholars who might otherwise neglect manuscript evidence, they may also enable neglect of material qualities and with them the essential historical context for the content of a codex. This is particularly concerning for the field of Islamic manuscript studies for which so much codicological and palaeographical groundwork is yet to be conducted and ample training in material manuscript literacy is still lacking. Perhaps surprisingly, our experience with manuscript digital surrogates at the University of Michigan has demonstrated that even “materially distant” digital surrogates can actually enhance understanding of manuscript features, including appreciation for material aspects, and help advance the codicological projects of Islamic manuscript studies. The key is introducing basic material manuscript literacy via exposure to physical artifacts and relying on the surrogates as tools for descriptive training.

Teaching Don Quixote in the Digital Age: Page and Screen, Visual and Tactile

This current study describes an object-based learning approach to teaching Don Quixote as part of the curriculum for Spanish majors at a small liberal arts college. In order to maximize students’ engagement with the narrative and the material culture of the novel, students worked with rare books, collaborative translation using Google Docs, digital and computational reading of the novel with Voyant Tools, iPad apps, and objects at the campus museum. The juxtaposition of the narrative, the material book, and the digital surrogates and supplements created a student-directed environment that produced an invigorated approach to textual analysis and a refinement of close reading skills.