Final Project Web Design

Here is our group project Web Design and research tool with links to create your own Web site. Chris and Colleen

https://sites.google.com/site/musiclibraryproposal/

Research Skills

Badke’s tone adds a little excitement to research. I’ve learned about  online books and to search within a book. Google, Amazon and Microsoft’s Windows Live Search Book Publisher Program+offers search capabilities. Some offer free access to certain books, however, I’ve come into problems where a fee is involved and then I’ll research another service to find what I need.  Badke also writes about journal databases and how to maneuver around all of those.  EBSCO is my favorite.  My problem is narrowing down the subject and then finding a keyword to get me started. And Badke helped here by writing about the portals. Actually, I prefer that. Subjects are organized by the cite. Examples are:History on the Web and Biology Online and academicinfo.net is an educational subject directory. The one we used in class – www.ipl.org and refdesk are both reference sources I found usefull in my searches for the preservation of newspapers. All this is new to me and at least now I can use Badke for my Bible when I attempt to finish my B.S. degree.

Research Materials

I have interesting materials for my paper on newspaper preservation. I received a book yesterday, which is an inter-library loan form Queens College, called, “Who wants yesterday’s papers?” It’s an edited book, on a collection of essays, on the research value of printed materials in the digital age. Also, I have two articles from my search on “Google Scholar”and more articles from a reference book, found in our library and two articles from newspaprers to help me write about newspaper preservation.  My research will try to answer the question, “What is the best strategy to use when preserving newspapers in digital format to ensure access for the general public?” 

There are many issues concerning preservation besides money and storage concerns. Copywrite concerns on a digital format also is something that concerns conservators. Although, I can not cover myriad details on preservation, to allow for an open public system, many pertinent issues have to be co-ordinated between funding sources, librarians, scholars and the needs of the public.

Helpful Search

I used Google Advance Search to start off looking for articles on newspaper preservation. Two articles from two different journals were exactly about my topic on newspaper preservation. Actually, the one article, ” Automatic page analysis for the creation of a digital library from newspaper archives” was written over my head. However, it discussed digital preservation concerning salvation of endangered material (paper) as well as a creation of digital library services that will allow full utilization of the archives by anyone interested. It went into detail about capturing the image and conversion to gray scale and every pixel has an approximation to text, title, pictures, lines and symbols. It discussed the technical difficulties of the layout of the newspaper format. It went into all kinds of detatiled information on building a suitable digital representation for the contents of the article. I certainly got what I asked for! But I don’t understand it. I’ll have to go the graphic art department and ask for translation.

The other article, “The Great Newspaper Caper: Backlash in the Digital Age” I could read with understanding. This article is more or less, what I wanted and it discussed problems with how newsprint was made and how it disintegrates, microfilming newspapers, nature of selection of materials to copy and preserve and how preservation has other priorites such as bibliographic control, access and other problems faced by the repositories holding newspapers. It discusses the cost and other practical issues that librarians must deal with.

When I googled using the advance search technique, I found more articles that I actually could use for my paper. I did compare this google search to my research using reference works available at our library and searching data bases such as JSTOR and Proquest. The Google search was faster and I found there was much less quess-work on my part as far as finding words to come up with in looking for newspaper preservation. Since I’m not familiar with my topic I can’t just bring words up I can use to start my search, such as: digital preservation, retro-conversion-newspapers – page segmentation-identification and reconstruction-conservators, etc. After only reading a few articles did I realize that these articles contain meta data in their abstracts to help me with my search effort.

Proposal for Research Paper

My research paper will be on preservation of newspapers in a digitized format. I will be trying to find out: ” What is the best strategy to use when deciding what newspapers will be preserved in digital format?” Who decides on the selection of the material? What organizational structure is used to scan newspapers? Does a newspaper format present a problem in itself? The first part of the paper I will write on the technical difficulties of creating an accurate digital representation of the papers, storage concerns.

The second part of the paper I would like to write about:” How does one access the written material in these newspapers?” How does one select, capture, catalog and archive in a streamline fashion? How is metadata used in the cataloging process? Who selects the meta data? Is it a librarian or is it a computer?
I will structure my paper by trying to answer many questions concerning the process of copying the printed word into a digital format. And the second half of the paper will be on how to capture and retrieve the material on newspapers.

Research Paper – Preservation

I have gathered a few articles for my research paper. I would like to write on the digitization of print material. I’m finding out how in the past there were all kinds of experiments on preservation and conservation of various print, video, film and various artifacts to preserve the history of a civilization; and preservation always presented many problems. There are presently many groups in this country concerned with the enormous task and time and millions of dollars to accomplish preservation of our printed material. Groups such as Google, Microsoft, Library of Congress, a few universities around this country, including NYU, in our own neck of the woods, are involved in digitizing billions of print material. My trouble is narrowing down a topic and a thesis question to write about. I hope to accomplish this task today in class!

Notes on Research Paper- Preservation

My initial research started with a trip to our library. I initially found a book/journal that contained a number of articles that started me out on reading about preservation and conservation of print, video, multimedia and old recordings from phonographs to tape recorders, to digitized material.

The initial articles I found discussed the deterioration process of print materials. It discussed how the Library of Congress is experimenting with various types of chemical treatments to extend the life of books that have not become so brittle that something can be done to save our past history. It also mentioned how microfilming became one of many solutions to preserve the printed material. Other articles dealt with how institutions have a moral responsibility to preserve great book collections.

At this point in time, I have not decided on a narrow topic I will write about in my paper. I started out looking for digitized preservation but found my self reading up on past preservation techniques and the problem that librarians to historians have, on preserving all types of multimedia materials, in their attempts to preserve all types of visual material giving a glimps into all areas of everyone’s life.

I’m sick today so I’m staying home and reading articles I will start blogging on. Maybe today I can narrow my topic for a research paper as a write about the articles I’m reading.   Colleen

 P.S. Actually, I’m glad I have no choice but to stay home. I’ll get alot of reading and research started on the internet today seeping on my tea and honey and my kids are in school.

Storage and Access Management

Managing content in a rich media world by Dan Goodin, brought up many positive points concerning the vast storage of all sorts of media – print, images, audio, video etc. Companies are created, to not only store the vast data, but to manage it and disperse it. This presents some challenge.
Technical experts have to scan material, reproduce it in another format accessible on various servers and browsers. Metadata has to be created to organize all the material so people can find the data that they are looking for. Storage systems or repositories for all this data need a location for a home base. Trained individuals or computers have to select the multimedia, digitize the content, catalog it in an organized and findable fashion and transform all this in a language computers can read and regurgitate it at the press of a few buttons on more than a few computers.
This is alot of time consuming work that requires computer technicians, librarians, experts and professionals in many fields to certify authenticity of data, maintain security systems set in place, not only to protect the data imput but to prevent changes and corruption of data.
It certainly is a growing industry and our economy certainly could use a million new jobs to digitize, store and disseminate trillions of bites of data on images, print, video, film, DVDs, cassettes, recorded sound and all sorts of multimedia.

Lost in Translation

The Importance of Preserving Paper-Based Artifacts in A Digital Age, by Robert Bee, discusses the issue of maintaining a sense of history through the preservation of original paper documents. Books, newspapers, comic books, journals, pamphlets, diaries, accounting ledgers, attendance records, birth records, death certificates, tickets to ball games, tickets to the movies, report cards, baseball cards, birthday cards, award certificates, diplomas…all provide a link to the past. The medium in which the printed material presents itself with various graphics, colors, design features emboldened on a cover or book jacket, for example, can all be lost in the transfer of that material from a paper product to a microfilm version or a digital version. The written information , the text in itself, can easily be transferable but the encompassing product can never be duplicated. Bee continues to write that even the printed word sometimes fails to find its path to the microfilm or digital version and somehow is lost in translation. The dilemma Bee writes about is how to find an adequate solution to preserve all paper-based products in the original package because each paper product provides a historical timeline to our past.

Actually, before I read this article I did not realize how important preservation technology was in the restoration of all types of print material. Even with microfilm and digitalization of the massive print material, voluminous works on paper disappear. Librarians certainly have their work cut out for them. Preserving works in their original form, be it print or in digital format is not only an art, in itself, but a permanent note in our American history.

Question: How are original paper literature and various print artifacts actually preserved? Paper decomposes eventually. I’d like to see the process. Where can one go? Are there national archives of our past printed material?

Research – To fund or not, on what?

Brian Martin’s chapter 7, “The politics of research” discusses the “Catch 22” of where the money comes from in supporting research endeavours useful in the business world, military, medical, law, engineering and other professional, commercial and industrial enterprises. The majority of any type of research is targeted to a specifically stated goal in mind, for those people or groups of people, in a business or corporation paying the researchers to look for (or research) a method, to look for a specific stated outcome, to look for a more efficient way to make a product, etc., to ultimately improve their own business and in turn to bring in more money for their own special interests. In the words of Brian Martin, “The work of professional researchers is strongly influenced by funding, disciplines, hierarchy and competition.”

Besides the “dog eat dog” side of the professional researchers overall view of things, Brian Martin explores and examines alternative strategies for a more inclusive take on the community activists /researchers involvement with practical applications providing useful tools for the general public and community at large. Martin’s model of research includes community participation and control. Martin states, “Community control means that funding and accountability would be in the community’s hands.” Citizen groups could organize and decide and fund research on matters that directly affect them in their daily lives as far as housing, transportation, commercial and industrial concerns directly impacting the community, access to medical care, attaining electrical and water sources, for examples. Martin advocates for an entire community funded and community involved research system to bring to light a plan to have all types of people generate their own project and put it into action.

I think communities could do this. However, the biggest obstacle is to find where the money is coming from.
Colleen