Online Archive Of California Research Articles

A Portal to Dutch Academic Heritage: www.academischecollecties.nl

The UNICUM development project, commissioned by the Dutch Academic Heritage Foundation (SAE), has been carried out by the five classic Dutch universities in 2010-12. UNICUM, short for ‘University Collections and University Museums’, has received a national government grant to create a digital portal to Dutch academic heritage. The portal, which can be reached via www.academischecollecties.nl, presents both academic archives and museum and library collections. Images, collection metadata and items can be found on one site. The UNICUM idea is inspired by the Online Archive of California. The project is important because it crosses the traditional sector boundaries between museums, libraries and archives; it creates awareness of the opportunities that this cross-sectoral approach offers; and it retains the context of – and the relation between – objects within collections as a whole. Moreover, the joint effort brings to light the importance of creating metadata according to international standards to stimulate re-use and exchange of content. In addition, UNICUM was intended to be a technical project in which multi-level descriptions are presented and can be browsed in a structured way (collections linked to objects, and archives linked to separate documents). Now that the project is finished, the focus will shift to generating content. UNICUM aimed to create structured and integrated access to academic heritage by: - using international standards (CCO and CDWA Lite) to stimulate exchange of metadata; examining the potential of EAD as an exchange standard for (non-archival) collections and for structuring related items; - determining a common method and creating an online input module for registration at collection level using ‘Best Practice Guidelines’; - developing an integrated format and online input module for thematic and highlight descriptions; - choosing available and established thesauri which cover all aspects of the future content; focusing on the interrelation between items on one hand and collections as a whole on the other, and - vice versa; an interrelation that tells the story of, and gives meaning to cultural heritage; harvesting of the aggregation’s content by Europeana.

Notes for Notes

Notes for Notes Honora Raphael and Ray Heigemier The Walter W. Gerboth Music Library of Brooklyn College is the recipient of a significant gift of 1,026 scores and books from the collection of Professor Emeritus Douglas F. Hedwig, recently retired from Brooklyn College, having taught in its Conservatory of Music since 1985. Professor Hedwig established the Conservatory Brass Ensemble in 1985, serving as its director and leading it in concert and educational tours of England, Switzerland, and Germany. He was also a member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra for twenty-seven years and has over forty commercially-released recordings to his credit. The donation is a collection of brass ensemble and trumpet music scores as well as books about brass instruments, collected during Professor Hedwig's forty-year career as a musical performer and educator in New York City. The collection includes works, many of them autographed, composed for and dedicated to Doug Hedwig. There are also several unpublished works for trumpet and brass ensemble by composers of note. Honora Raphael Brooklyn College Stanford University's Archive of Recorded Sound has completed the processing of four significant collections under the sponsorship of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Ambassador Auditorium Collection, and the Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999), Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987), and Lawrence Tibbett (1896-1960) collections all have California connections, but their work and influence extended far beyond state borders to distant regions of the world. The finding aids for these collections may be viewed on OAC: Online Archive of California: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/institutions/Stanford+University::Stanford+Archive+of+Recorded+Sound. The processing archivist was Frank Ferko, with assistance of Anna Graves. Located in the city of Pasadena, the Ambassador Auditorium hosted many of the most highly regarded concert musicians and popular entertainers in the world. From its opening night on 7 April 1974 to its closing in May 1995, the Ambassador, often called "the Carnegie Hall of the West," presented a veritable who's who of luminaries in the world of music, dance, and popular entertainment. Among those who performed there were Artur Rubinstein, Leontyne Price, Victor Borge, Andrés [End Page 268] Segovia, Barbara Cook, the Juilliard String Quartet, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Yo-Yo Ma, Bob Hope, Marcel Marceau, Claire Bloom, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Ravi Shankar, the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and many others. The Ambassador Auditorium Collection consists of thousands of documents related to the business, marketing, publicity, and promotion operations of the hall, as well as photographs (many of which are autographed), posters, concert programs, commissioned original artwork, and perhaps most important of all, hundreds of audio and video recordings of live performances. Spanning seventy-five years, the career of Yehudi Menuhin included work as a virtuoso violinist as well as a highly respected conductor. The Yehudi Menuhin Collection, assembled by his family, consists of fifty-four 78 rpm recordings from 1938 through 1950 of Menuhin performing violin works, often accompanied by his sister, Hephzibah. The Jascha Heifetz Collection, donated by the violinist's longtime friend and record producer at RCA Victor, Jack Pfeiffer, includes not only Heifetz's own performances but also his personal collection of recordings made by other artists. The Heifetz Collection, consisting of over a thousand discs and reels produced from 1911 to 1972, includes the rare, privately made recording from 1920 of Heifetz's teacher, Leopold Auer, among other treasures. The Lawrence Tibbett Collection consists of ninety-eight recordings documenting the middle years of the career of the baritone, who sang for twenty-seven seasons at the Metropolitan Opera (1923-1950). The collection contains an outstanding performance of a pre-premiere recording of Howard Hanson's Merry Mount from January 1934, and also contains Tibbett's well-known renditions of popular songs, such as Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' " and Harold Arlen's "Accentuate the Positive," performed on live radio programs in the 1940s. Ray Heigemier Stanford University From the editor: Notes readers may or may not have noticed the quiet disappearance of the "MLA Administrative Structure" from its former regular place in the September issue of the...

Online Archive of California

Online Archive of California

California Cultures: Implementing a Model for Virtual Collections

SUMMARY This article highlights the California Cultures Project as a case study examining the architecture and framework required to support the deployment of digital objects as virtual collections at the California Digital Library. Chronologically arranged, it describes the Online Archive of California (OAC) Working Group's functional requirements for access to digital objects independent of parent finding aids, and the development and implementation of infrastructures supporting this vision. Discussion includes project organization and content selection for digitization, Web site service vision for K-12 teacher target audience, best practices for encoding, data standards, lesson plans, metadata requirements, METS creation tools, project manuals, repositories, search engines, tools enabling customizable interfaces, user assessment, and usability testing.

Regional Oral History Office . Created and maintained by Laura Gonzalez for the Regional Oral History Office, in cooperation with the On-line Archive of California. Reviewed May 21—July 4, 2002

Regional Oral History Office . Created and maintained by Laura Gonzalez for the Regional Oral History Office, in cooperation with the On-line Archive of California. Reviewed May 21—July 4, 2002

MOAC - A Report on Integrating Museum and Archive Access in the Online Archive of California

MOAC - A Report on Integrating Museum and Archive Access in the Online Archive of California

Museums and the Online Archive of California

The Online Archive of California (OAC) is a digital information resource that facilitates and provides access to materials such as manuscripts, photographs, and works of art held in libraries, museums, archives, and other institutions across California. "Museums and the Online Archive of California " (MOAC) is a series of projects enabling museums to participate in the OAC. This paper describes MOAC from an operational as well as theoretical point of view, forming a case study in large-scale integration of access to museum and archival materials.

Feeding America: Lessons from a Project Demonstration

The Online Archive of California (OAC) is a digital information resource that facilitates and provides access to materials such as manuscripts, photographs, and works of art held in libraries, museums, archives, and other institutions across California. "Museums and the Online Archive of California " (MOAC) is a series of projects enabling museums to participate in the OAC. This paper describes MOAC from an operational as well as theoretical point of view, forming a case study in large-scale integration of access to museum and archival materials.

Museums in the Online Archive of California (MOAC): Building Digital Collections Across Libraries and Museums

Providing a context for establishment of the Museum Online Archive of California (MOAC) project funded by IMLS, this article describes the history and recent development of the Online Archive of California (OAC) and its mandate to create digital content and make it accessible online. The article explores the contributions of MOAC to the OAC including pioneering implementation of EAD in the museum community, development of standards and best practices, creation of metadata tools, and inclusion of complex digital objects.

Building Digital Collections at the OAC

Providing a context for the exploration of user defined virtual collections, this article describes the history and recent development of the Online Archive of California (OAC). Stating that usability and user needs are primary factors in digital resource development, issues explored include collaborations to build digital collections, reliance upon professional standards for description and encoding, system architecture, interface design, the need for user tools, and the role of archivist as interpreters in the digital environment.

The Online Archive of California

SUMMARY The provision of universal union access to archival and manuscript resources is one reason to utilize Encoded Archival Description (EAD) for finding aids. A consortial approach to the encoding oI archival finding aids offers efficiencies of scale, expertise, infrastructure, and funding. In addition, the consortial approach facilitates the formation of a union database of finding aids. The Online Archive of California (OAC) is a consortium of special collections repositories whose finding aids are integrated into a single, searchable database which describes the contents of primary source collections throughout California. Formed in September 1995, the OAC's initial goals are: (1) to create machine-readable versions of all existing finding aids; (2) to encode all existing finding aids according to EAD; and (3) to create the OAC union database of finding aids: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/cgi-bin/aac.

Access to art collections using Encoded Archival Description and beyond: the future of large-scale consortium projects

In a Herculean effort to distribute information about art collections on a previously unknown scale, museums, arts organizations, libraries, and archives have been hard at work developing standards and implementing testbed projects, large-scale union databases which integrate and disseminate information. Two such projects are ‘Conceptual and Intermedia Online’ (CIAO) and ‘Museums and the Online Archive of California’ (MOAC), both using the Encoded Archival Description to describe and provide access to art and other cultural collections. But what is the future of such collaborations and the content portals they spawn? Will they be able to scale up to include hundreds or thousands of institutions, using current models? What are the limitations for such consortia? What are the limitations for participating institutions? Several options appear on the horizon, and one simple need suggests looking to decentralization, and back to the individual institution, for the solution to sharing art and cultural content on a truly vast scale.

Evaluation Design for Large-Scale, Collaborative Online Archives: Interim Report of the Online Archive of California Evaluation Project

Ongoing evaluation should be a critical aspect of anydigital access project because of the importantinsight it can bring to strategic decision-making andassessment of data integrity. From a systemsdevelopment perspective, iterative design processesdepend upon evaluative feedback from users on issuessuch as interface design and retrieval strategies inorder to refine and enhance prototype and maturesystems. A broader rationale for rigorous andreplicable evaluation is the current absence ofreliable benchmark data drawn from the experiences ofdigital archives projects, especially thoseimplementing Encoded Archival Description, againstwhich other such projects might be assessed. Thispaper reviews considerations that went into the designof a multi-faceted evaluation of the Online Archive ofCalifornia by a team of researchers within theDepartment of Information Studies at the University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles and provides a progress reporton findings. Based upon what they have learned fromconducting this evaluation, the evaluation researchteam will refine the evaluation design and theresearch instruments into models that might be appliedin the collection of benchmark evaluative data byother large-scale, collaborative online archives.