This week consisted of even more scanning! I was primarily working with the Kurt Vonnegut collection, so I am unable to share the images from the collection due to copyright restrictions and/or the terms of the donation. I also processed a few patron orders (one of which was for scans from a newspaper from the 1950s) and scanned more of the Welles collection. The big difference this week came in that I learned some of the basics of how we are currently migrating media from the old Archives Online site to the new Digital Collections Online (DCO) site! All aboard the bus to acronym city!
While we produce a good chunk of the images for the DCO site, any media (specifically audio or visual mediums list cassette tapes, CDs, and VHS) that requires additional technology to digitize has to be sent to the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative (MDPI) team to process. Once the data have been processed by the MDPI team, they upload the files to a secondary site that functions almost like a cloud-hosted storage option. Once the files are on the site, we go into the DCO site and create a new collection page (which essentially functions as a folder to house the collection information). After the collection page is created we can use a link generated in the Dark Avalon site to connect the collection page to the media/data for that collection. For example, for the Latin American mss that I’ve been working on, the No. 12 manuscript in the collection can be found on this page. The images on that page are linked via permalink (also called a purl) to the item files in Dark Avalon. The way we keep track of which items belong to which collection is by using a VAD number (example highlighted in the image below). This number helps to ensure that the data created in each site is able to be tied back to the same, original physical item in the collection.
Leave a Reply