Anniversary celebrations provide archivists and librarians with many unique opportunities to build public support for their programs. Archivists, in particular, are expected to be a resource for such events. Handled adroitly, anniversary programming can offset the “dusty shelf” stereotype that frustrates many professionals. Moreover, resource allocators planning an anniversary are likely to look to their archives for ideas and special projects, initiatives that may result in additional financial and staffing resources. Describing the positive public relations value of anniversaries, archivist Tim Ericson has gone so far as to suggest “The Archivist\u27s First Law of Outreach”:
Human beings are unable to resist celebrating any anniversary divisible by twenty-five

Blessing, Matt

Lowrey, James

English

epublications@Marquette

Marquette Universitye-Publications@MarquetteLibrary Faculty Research and Publications Library (Raynor Memorial Libraries)1-1-2006An Anniversary Opportunity: Digitization ofStudent YearbooksJames LowreyMarquette UniversityMatt BlessingMarquette University, matt.blessing@Marquette.eduPublished version. Microform & Imaging Review, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Fall 2006): 129-133. DOI. © 2006Walter de Gruyter. Used with permission.An Anniversary Opportun ity: Digitization of StudentVearbooks by James Lowrey and Matt Blessing Anniversary celebrations pro-vide archivists and librarians with many unique opportunities to build public support for their programs. Archivists, in par-ticular, are expected to be a re-source for such events. Handled adroitly, anniversary program-ming can offset the "dusty shelf" stereotype that frustrates many professionals. Moreover, resource allocators planning an anniversary are likely to look to their archives for ideas and spe-cial projects, initiatives that may result in additional financial and staffing resources. Describ-ing the positive public relations value of anniversaries, archivist Tim Ericson has gone so far as to suggest "The Archivist's First Law of Outreach": Human beings are unable to re-sist celebrating any anniversary divisible by twenty-five. ' In 2005 administrators in Ray-nor Memorial Libraries began considering dig itization projects that might serve as a contribu-tion to the Marquette Univer-sity's upcoming 125th anniver-sary. Special funding was being made available to departments developing anniversary projects and related programming . Like many comparative aca-demic libraries, the Raynor Me-morial Libraries at Marquette do not have a unit or depart-ment dedicated to digitization initiatives.2 Nonetheless, archi-vists from the Department of Special Collections and Univer-sity Archives have collaborated with staff from Library Systems to digitize parts of several im-portant photographic collec-tions. Staff gained valuable ex-perience in developing these projects; they obtained training in CONTENTdm, the data-driven system selected for digital proj-ects; researched scanning stand-ards and taught graduate stu-dents the finer points of prepar-James Lowrey (jim./owrey@ marquette.edu) is Head of Li-brary Systems at the Raynor Memorial Libraries at Marquet-te University. Matt Blessing (matt.blessing@marquette. edu) is Head of Special Collec-tions and University Archives, also at Marquette University. ing high-resolution scans; and developed metadata fields and standards for digital collections. Selecting a Project Online photo collections have been described by some as "Web-site eye candy," 3 expen-sive digital products that some critics suggest contain nominal research value. Although those working on Marquette's digital collections disagreed with this one-size-fits-ali assessment, ar-chivists and systems librarians were interested in moving be-yond item-level cataloging of photographs in order to make a larger amount of their historical collections available to online users. As Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner - the afore-mentioned critics - have persua-sively argued, "good processing is done with a shovel" - not a tweezers. 4 Greene and Meiss-ner were writing about tra-129 -- -' . ~!' .. James Lowrey and Matt Blessing • Hilltop __ 'Hillto • 19'8O,-voL 66lt:!Le!'.~!'1e + Cove r ' _ lo .... ':!ilPJL, • Cov., 0'1900 Hilltop , iIntroduction '-'- -- .front p.i.~c,e . }II!~.2jp_~, .. Introduction ... content.: ... Introduction - Th. TtfJltOry ' lfu,trod;:,~tion . _ 1JIntroduction b.I~.~~........... .. , __ }!P!X.~jp9 .. ! blank _ _ III! .lll.!ijpg • PI:"t 4 • P.g.~ • p.iI"te ' . P.lgt'1 • p'"te • PoIg,Q • P.I"t10 • PoiI"t11 • P .. ",12 ., P .. "t13 ~ P,gl14 • P.g.1~ ... Strut Lil. ... Th. Rulu ... Thtlnh.bibnts +< TI'.t O.mu .. Hilttop Sbff '"' Tht SurvlvolS ... AlII! You Rudy lorO 1 Street Life 1iStreet Life -t!,age.1 ~.j~ Pa,g. 2 _. [XXllOCOO) I!.!!. Page 17 .Page 18 Page 19 ODXDJ7.jpg ,-1XllDJ21jpg IXllDJ22 .jpg 1XllDJ23.jpg Figure 1 - Rendering of table of contents via Excel ditional arrangement and de-scription of archival records, yet the labor intensive demands of item-level cataloging of photo-graphs might well be viewed as the tweezers approach to dig-itization. Due to the sheer vol-ume of most modern archival collections, preparing item-level metadata remains a major con-cern for archivists facing ex-panding backlogs of unpro-cessed records. The project team at Marquette was thus looking for a "shovel size collection" that would be appropriate for the upcoming anniversary. Marquette's library adminis-tration and archivists considered a variety of possible digitization projects appropriate for the an-niversary, including the student newspaper, the alumni maga-130 zine, and the student yearbook. The decision ultimately came down to cost and complexity. Although both serials spanned more than nine decades, the cost of digitizing the semi-weekly student newspaper was four times greater than the student annual. Developers hoped that successful digitization of The Hilltop yearbooks 5 (1915-1996) might leverage funding for larg-er scale projects in the future. Almost as important as cost and complexity was a desire for a pilot product that would feature a high percentage of the university's 100,000 alumni. Nearly all graduating seniors had their portraits featured in The Hilltop yearbooks. More-over, the student annuals pro-vided the best coverage of Microform and Imaging Review scores of extra-curricular clubs and activities. Most students were featured several times in their annual. The breadth of coverage within the student newspaper was much more lim-ited. Especially for more recent decades, the student newspaper focused coverage on intercol-legiate athletics and student government. Preparing the Collection Outsourcing the scanning and OCR to a vendor was a major decision. 6 While this is a real cost, it also allows an institution to focus more on the subse-quent organization and presen-tation of the publication, often the institution's most important contribution to a digital initia-tive. Unless an organization has a very well-developed infra-structure to support efficient high-quality scanning, OCR, and all the related issues, outsourc-ing is likely to be far cheaper, and perhaps most importantly, may serve to jump start a digital initiative. The receipt of the en-tire run of The Hilltop - totaling over 300GB for 30,000 page im-ages with OCR transcripts - was a great incentive put the project in motion. The CONTENTdm (CDM) im-age management software was the easy decision, due to our ex-isting collections and the emer-gence of CDM as a standard plat-form for presenting image col-lections. In CDM parlance, a year-book is a 'compound object'; a collection of individual items logically related into a single en-tity - other 'compound objects' could be postcards, photo cubes, or issues of newspaper. Once a Vol.35 No.4 compound object is selected a number of decisions must be made to determine how the ob-ject is organized and presented. First, the project team decid-ed to retain the original struc-ture of the individual volumes, seeking to maintain the original 'look and feel' of the volumes. In order to accomplish this, it was necessary to organize each of the 82 sets of scanned im-ages to reflect each yearbook's sections, sub-sections, and in-dividual page titles. Given the options available via COM, the best method to process the i m-ages and to provide the flexi-bility needed for a nested struc-ture was to define each volume with a tab-delimited file, which would then be used to import the images and transcript files and build the logical volume, or compound object. The tab-delimited files were produced from Microsoft Excel spread-sheets, with one sheet per vol-ume, organized into decade-level workbooks. Figure 1 depicts a sample of an Excel spreadsheet and how it renders the corresponding nested structure in COM. The COM_LEVEL column determines the level (9 levels are possible), and COM_LEVEL_NAME deter-mines when the sections break. The other key column is FILENA-ME, which relates the image file to the associated row of meta-data. There are other columns, hidden in the illustration, which carry item-specific meta data. COM also has a template ca-pability to handle unchanging metadata (copyright, publisher, etc.) for every item (a single page from a book). While the idea of preparing 82 spreadsheets to identify eve-ry page of every volume, then reconciling each line with the images, may sound intimidat-ing, in practice it proved very ef-ficient. However, this approach depended upon careful organi-zation, a thorough knowledge of what COM expects, and ex-pertise with Excel. Yearbooks are remarkably similar over the span of decades. The earliest volumes (1915-1935), for instance, often contained tipped-in, unpaged color plates with tissue paper dividers. These volumes some-times exceeded 600 pages. The 'middle' decades (1936-1965) offered much more predictable pagination. Finally, the 'experi-mental' decades (1966-1996) of-fered inconsistent pagination, seasonal supplements, sound re-cordings, and multiple volumes. For every year, this structure of the volume was reflected in the Excel spreadsheet, which was determined by either us-ing the physical volume, an an-notated table of contents pre-pared by a paraprofessional, or, after scanning was completed, by browsing the thumbnails of the pages via imaging soft-ware while Excel was running in an adjacent window (dual monitors are ideal for this task). Using Excel fill, copy, and auto-numbering commands, as well as select functions such as MID and CONCATENATE, it was fairly easy to define the sections and their corresponding pages, rep-licate as needed, build the ap-propriate metadata text, and then check that the actual im-ages (numbered 0000001.jpg -OOOOnnn.jpg) corresponded. The major challenges were identify-ing unnumbered pages, plates, fold-out pages, mistakes in printing, or anything else which An Anniversary Opportunity interrupted 'standard' pagina-tion. Within many volumes, for instance, the logical 'page l' was actually the fourth image, so these volumes were defined very quickly. Most volumes re-quired only 10-15 minutes to complete, while the more com-plex years required up to one hour. Following the definition, each spreadsheet was saved as a tab-delimited text file to be used by the COM Compound Object wizard. The wizard required the locations of the text file, the image files, and the transcript (OCR) files. It then builds the volume for review and editing, which was subsequently up-loaded to our server, approved, and published. It was easy to edit the volume metadata after processing, but any substantive changes to the items (pages) or structure is best addressed by editing the spreadsheet and reloading. This digital project also bene-fited from relatively few hands. One staff member performed almost all of the yearbook me-tadata and image reconcilia-tion, the Excel work, and all of the uploading and approving, as well as designing and build-ing the collection page, making the needed changes to COM configuration, and defining the custom queries. While this may not be practical long-term, it did result in an efficient and consist-ent project. Given the range of styles and possible interpreta-tion over the life of the year-books, this type of immersion was valuable as it became easier to predict how a volume would flow, and minimized the need to coordinate checklists, style sheets and other aids. 131 James Lowrey and Matt Blessing Raynor Uemooal1.Jl>r""". prep.re<! ,/lis dlg<teIOCIIot:1JO<Ilo """,mom"""" Mllfquett. Unrve<oitY. 1151/1 .""'''"1$81)''' 200fj.2OIJ7 T~. 0ItIu or 'fl. _, pro_~. *~""., • ..,pporr /l>f IhI ••• IfIIr~I"" About the Hilltop I ObUinlng a V .... rbc>ok 0' PhotognlPh ------------- - --UboIri •• tfomo I Contact lis I MarqueUe Home o 20ClS MaIquette Univemty Figure 2 - Hilltop Entry Page. Users can access this page at: http://digitalmarquette.cdmhost.com/HT. In terms of labor, all 82 vol-umes were defined and pro-cessed over a period of several weeks, on a part-time basis, per-haps averaging 2-4 hours per day. Concurrently, the queries, design, and layout of the page were completed after several it-erations. The volumes were up-loaded to our remote host via unattended FTP at a rate of 3-5 volumes per evening. A local server with a direct connection would reduce this greatly. Evaluating the Process and the Project The Hilltop represented a huge leap forward in both size and complexity when compared to our existing digital projects. The 132 small team of system librarians and archivists who planned and designed the project concen-trated on getting the initiative underway and solved problems as they arose, rather than seek-ing to address every possible problem scenario in planning meetings. As a result, the team needed to reprocess several vol-umes of the yearbooks, but this seemed to be a very reasonable trade-off for the accelerated workflow. It is worth noting that the professionals who worked on the technical aspects of the project were very experienced with Excel. They had also pre-viously built two CONTENTdm collections. This experience with the software was vital to success of the yearbook project. The 82 volumes required an estimated Microform and Imaging Review 60 hours of professional staff time to process, plus an estimat-ed 20 hours for setting up the spreadsheets and managing the file archives. Preparation of the annotated tables of content by paraprofessional staff, intended as a guide for the vendor, re-quired approximately 50 hours. Designing the graphic interface required an additional 20 hours of in-house professional labor. Finally, staff from our instruc-tional media center assisted the project team by digitally refor-matting and streaming two unique items from the univer-sity archives. A 16mm film from the mid-1930s depicted under-graduates distributing and sign-ing yearbooks. In addition, the 1970 edition of The Hilltop in-cluded an 11 minute vinyl disc, a sound recording that cap-tured some campus highlights. Adding a QuickTime movie and MP3 segment served to improve the overall attractiveness of the digital project. Although the Raynor Memo-rial Libraries digitized the year-books primarily to provide more convenient access for alumni and university staff, the search capabilities of the digital collec-tion also improved the efficiency and thoroughness of reference requests handled by archivists. Student employees who might previously have spent two hours scouring a decade of worth yearbooks can now compile a set of photocopies in just a few minutes. Although a relatively minor matter, requests for im-ages found within the digital yearbooks have also increased, generating a modest source of revenue for the library. The Hilltop project resulted in the kind of high-visibility project Vol.35 NO.4 that librarians had sought for the university's 125th anniversa-ry. The digital project was com-pleted prior the release of the campus anniversary web page. When launched, the informa-tion-rich yearbooks formed a cornerstone of this high-profile website. In addition, the cam-pus webmaster contracted to have hyper-text links prepared to the yearbooks for more than 25,000 registered alumni within the online alumni directory. Us-age statistics revealed that the digital yearbooks were browsed or searched more than 44,000 times during the initial six-month reporting period. The Marquette University Hilltop can be selected from the master list of collections at: http://www.marquette.edu/ library/MUDC. Notes 1 Ericson, Timothy L., "Anniver-sary: A Framework Planning Public Programs," Advocating Archives: An Introduction to Public Relations for Archivists (Chicago: Society of American Archivists), pp. 65-81. 2 The largest private university in Wisconsin, Marquette Uni-versity consists of eight colleges, 35 graduate programs, and two professional schools. The Raynor Memorial Libraries has a staff of 32 librarians and 40 sup-port staff. The Raynor Memo-rial Libraries house 1.4 printed volumes, while the Department An Anniversary Opportunity of Special Collections and Uni-versity Archives provides access to nearly 20,000 cubic feet of manuscripts, photographs, and the university archives. 3 Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner, "More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing," American Archvist 68: 2 (FailIWinter 2005). p.248. 4 Ibid. p. 240. 5 Marquette University Hilltop Yearbooks, 1915-1996. Avail-able at: http://digitalmarquette. cdmhost.com/HT/. 6 The Raynor Memorial Librar-ies solicited bids from various vendors and selected the firm of iArchives (http://www. iarchives.com) for scanning and OCR. 133 

An Anniversary Opportunity: Digitization of Student Yearbooks

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An Anniversary Opportunity: Digitization of Student Yearbooks

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