For all of those aspiring librarians who want to work in special collections or archives, there is a new trend of digitization and a little program of ContentDM that we must endure. When I first decided I wanted to become an archivist when I was an undergraduate at Western Carolina University, I thought the wave of the future would be digitization and I couldn't be more happy. In the summer of 2011, I had an internship at Hunter Library working with a special set of Civil War letters that the library had. They had already been scanned and uploaded, and it was my job to identify as much as I could from the letters and provide background. I thought it was the greatest job in the world!
Now, as both a student of Library and Information Science and a budding archivist, I know so much is done to make a single collection available online. Looking back, I was more concentrated on the history side of special collections and while that is still my love, I understand much more has to happen before you get the core of history. Digitization is a process that can either be painful or fun. It is painful because it takes time to get high resolution documents and photos. I've been digitizing things my whole life -- my first job was to scan a collection of 5,500 slides from a esteemed professor at Wake Forest University. It was the greatest and worst job on the planet...the scanner took FOREVER to scan. Four slides would take the better part of a half hour but on the bright side, Netflix was my friend through the slow and painstaking process. Then I upgraded to a new scanner that could do fifty slides at a time....but it took an hour and a half and let me tell you paper slides and this machine were incompatible. Back to the point, scanning is a process that must be endured, for as much as the historian in me would like to keep everything for as long as possible, documents, books, and photos disintegrate over time. Scanning is step one. Step two goes into metadata. You're taking a single item and having to catalog it to the best of your ability. People try to label things but not everyone can be librarians and meticulously label and catalog everything the first time so it becomes the job of the person digitizing the item to find as much as possible. Most of the time, if you look at a picture of a rock, all you are going to assume about the picture is that is a rock, not that it is some place special or a particular date or if it a specific type of rock. Metadata seems daunting at first, as quite frankly, a rock looks like a rock in a slide and trying to pry information out of thin air or in this case, a photo, gets frustrating. Librarians are tasked with the duty of pulling as much information from the item itself -- the dimensions, the type of photo, date if possible, what collection it came from, etc. Historians and librarians must fuse together to extract the information as one depends upon the other. ContentDM is the program I have used concerning the basics of metadata (not the coding of it but the fields needed to give as much information as possible). It used to rank up there with nails on chalkboard for me when I briefly worked on a project at Western as I did not fully understand the need for all those fields and what the heck most of the fields meant. Now, after attending a conference with the Appalachia College Association, I know understand the importance and more importantly, its purpose. Metadata is essential for users to be able to find what they are looking for. A photograph doesn't usually contain many words so metadata acts as those words, make the photograph searchable. There are those people who like to find what they need as quickly and efficiently as possible and those who like to browse in order to find what they are looking for and ContentDM makes that possible for both types of user. My area of history is the United States Civil War and most documents and pictures from that area are looking at their 150th anniversary and access is becoming more and more difficult. It is heartbreaking to watch a document fall apart in your hands because of age and extended use. Time no longer has to be the enemy as digital projects are preserving these and making them widely available for many users. A good example is the United States census as it is fully digitized and searchable through HeritageQuest. So as much as I initially hated ContentDM as I thought it was an impossible program that spoke a different language all together has earned my respect and I now know it is an integral part of the digitization process. If you ever asked yourself, "What in the ContentDM?" remember it is a stepping stone for your users to unlock the secrets of their own past and our collective history.
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AuthorA public and academic librarian shares her views, thoughts, and tales of being a budding librarian in the 21st century Archives
November 2017
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