MESDA: Letter of Intent or Agreement Letter [draft] (2009)

Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library

Letter of Intent or Agreement Letter [draft]

Introduction

Old Salem Museums and Gardens (OSMG) and UNC Library formed a strategic partnership for collaborative investigation and use of innovative digital technologies to expose rich research collections on material culture and decorative arts of the American South to global audiences over the Internet. [need a brief piece on the current status and role of material culture in the larger context of the history studies, does its role increase? Why?]

This partnership is mutually beneficial for OSMG and UNC Library, and their constituencies. Modern researchers increasingly rely on Internet in their studies and provision of free online access to MESDA’s unique paper-based research collections will greatly increase their usability and visibility. Improved access to MESDA’s paper-based research collections on Southern artisans and their works should also stimulate interest in OSMG’s collections of physical artifacts. This program will also stimulate material culture studies in the United States and internationally by provision of free online access to MESDA’s unique research collections which are currently available on paper only. UNC’s participation in this program will contribute to achievement of its strategic goal to increase support to local communities and cultural institutions in North Carolina which were set up by the UNC Tomorrow initiative. The program will also help promote UNC’s own material culture and history programs, and further advance its status of a regional center for digitization and innovative digital library technologies. OSMG and UNC Library partnership forms a new collaborative environment for exploration of opportunities to create, integrate and develop new services for digitized collections and other resources which will serve as the core of the future Southern Material Culture Portal.

MESDA’s paper research collections

MESDA’s two “paper databases”—Craftsman index cards and Object data sheets—lay in the heart of its collections. Scholars rely on these collections as an irreplaceable source of information for research and publishing projects, and in general to “connect the dots” between cultural artifacts and their creators, interpretation of social and other contexts of early American South. Paper format of these resources complicates this discovery process.

Craftsmen index cards contains information on over 76,000 artisans working in the early

South in 126 different trades (300,000 paper index cards). Organized by artisan name, these cards contain bibliographic and other information which was hand selected by several generations of MESDA researchers from pre-1821 newspapers, city directories, court, estate and private papers, and other primary materials.

Object data sheets contains descriptions, data and photographs of over 18,000 objects in private and public collections which were made in the early American South (?? pages and photographs).

The program will also include digitization and online publishing of MESDA’s main publication, Journal of.., which is currently available on subscription only. Many scholars indicated that digitization of its full run of 65 issues and provision of free online access to complete set of the journal will greatly support teaching and scholarship in the field.

Development of the Southern Material Culture Portal

Given the sheer amount of material for digitization, and the extent of data conversion and programming work required for project of this scale, we suggest to organize it as a multi-year program with several stages. These stages will be structured in the way that allows progressive “brick by brick” digitization of material and database functionality development from basic to advanced levels as funding and resources permit. In this scenario, each individual stage should result in a new collection available for online public access, on one side, and it will also form a basis for consequent work with more complex material and database functionality on more advanced levels, on the other. This approach should help plan the program and development activities in the way that leaves doors open for implementation of value added functionality and services for these collections which will be expected from us by the future users.

There are two main aspects of the Portal idea as a final goal of the program. With respect to the content, its digitization and aggregation, the Portal will provide a physical place where the digitized and future born digital materials will be living. With respect to the use of these materials, the Portal will serve as a common technological infrastructure or a platform which will provide researchers will navigation, browsing, searching and value added functionality and services (Web 2.0, for example) which will be consistent for all types of material and collections residing on the Platform. This approach will support knowledge discovery across growing multiple online collections and their intuitive use.

Description of stages

Stage I.

Digitization of the Craftsman database index cards, creation of an online database

a. Document Type Definition development

b. digitization/OCR of paper index cards;

c. linking of index card images with available metadata from the online database (name, id, trade, dates, location, summary, what else?) and with OCRed texts;

d. creation of an online database

-browse function: the cards can be browsed by available metadata fields

-search function:

-basic search: keyword searching across all fields (MD and OCRed text) with boolean logic;

-advanced search: search in individual MD/OCRed text fields and in their combinations.

-search results: search results show basic metadata fields for a records and keyword in context for OCRed text. Found keywords are shown in bold. Click on the search result opens up an “individual card page.”

-individual card page: basic unit of the database—one page dedicated to an individual card or a group of related cards with relevant metadata and images of the cards.

e. index cards upload.

Stage II. Digitization of MESDA’ Journal, integration of the online journal with the Craftsman database

Document Type Definition development;
retroconversion/OCR of the journal (formats: GIF, PDF, dirty text);
production of metadata and XML structures for articles/issues as per DTD;
optimization of the Craftsman database for the online journal presentation/functionality;

-optimization of interfaces for journal presentation

-optimization of browsing and searching functionality to allow work with the

Craftsman database and the Journal individually and in combination (ability to choose one or two database for searching, search results show hits from both databases in one list, sorting of search results by database and MD fields)

journals upload.

Stage III. Digitization of the Object Database

Stage IV. Value added modules and functionality to support online collaborative work and knowledge discovery

-commenting module

-tagging module (user term extraction and tagging of index/object cards, journal articles?)

-GIS component: linking of locations to a map

-allowing browsing/searching collections individually and all together,

-to provide students and researchers with innovative ways to work with these resources.

Main idea of the project is to improve access to MESDA resources, to support knowledge discovery in the material culture field, early American South, to provide support to studies in the material culture program nationally and at UNC. Through digization, online database development, and creation of value added features and functionality which support knowledge discovery. Creation of new tools to support collaborative online work material culture students and scholars.

-resource integration ideas and Southern Material Culture Portal development

-connection with the State library and the Fujitsu scanner.