Digital Collection Development

Instructor: John Sarnowski, ResCarta Foundation

This is an introductory course on the use of open/free software to create, validate, index, search, display, and maintain a digital archive of various materials including photographs, oral histories, newspapers, and books.

Learn how to take simple digital files and create a knowledge base of standardized archival digital objects, complete with Library of Congress metadata. Learn how to build a collection and host it. Make your full text searchable oral histories to FADGI guidelines. Capture audio files with Audacity^tm, use digital cameras and scanners to create full-text searchable, harvestable archives with Tomcat^tm, ResCarta^tm, and jOAI.

Take the free and open source tools and knowledge with you to create a growing and sustainable archive.

Benefits
This course enables the attendee to:

• Understand the types of equipment, software and time required to convert analog objects to digital.
• Identify the various types of metadata and how they can be created.
• Understand the difference between a digital file and a digital object.
• Understand the use of OCR/AAT software and its limitations
• List best practice formats for long term storage and reuse.

 

Intended Audience: This workshop is intended to be relevant to a wide audience, but will be particularly relevant to those cultural heritage professionals tasked with converting analog materials to digital.

John Sarnowski has more than 25 years experience in building digital collections. He was responsible for creating millions of digital objects for learned societies, libraries, and major corporations as the  director of Imaging Products at Northern Micrographics. Projects included "The Making of America", JSTOR, and Historic Pittsburgh. He currently is a director of Imaging Products at Northern Micrographics. Projects included "The Making of America", JSTOR, and Historic Pittsburgh. He currently is a director of the ResCarta Foundation.

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