Making the most of possibilities of digitisation: an #rbscg13 write-up

  by  Keith Marshall 

Rare Books and Special Collections Group Conference (programme (.docx)).  The theme this year was digitisation (last year was fundraising and advocacy).  The three recurring themes across all of the papers were audience, metadata, and the 'thinginess of things', with some very useful practical advice thrown in. I'm not going to give a blow-by-blow account of every paper, but rather to pick out the bits I've been chewing over since.

All three themes were addressed in Simon Tanner's keynote, which adeptly summed up the current situation as well as challenging us to think more imaginatively about the future and shaking us out of complacency about what we're doing now.

Tanner started by using the analogy of an ant mill to describe the fate of too many digitisation projects.  He emphasised that it's vital to plan properly and to seriously consider audience, opportunity costs (what aren't you doing if you are doing digitisation instead?), and to keep asking the 'so what' question to keep you focussed on why you're doing what you're doing. He also shared lots of useful resources:

• Inspiring research, inspiring scholarship: the value and benefits of digitised resources for learning, teaching, research and enjoyment. A report from a JISC-http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5829453287508418737#editor/target=post;postID=8554323225911761063funded project.
• Measuring the impact of digital resources: the balanced value impact model. A report which examines impact in its widest senses, and suggests means to measure it.
• Why your cultural website is rubbish*. Report in the Guardian revealing that the UK's 40 biggest cultural venues get 0.04% of web traffic.
  

Sian Prosser presented a case study on cataloguing and digitising a comparatively small collection of  manuscript fragments. She emphasised that even though there weren't many fragments, a very high level of specialist knowledge was required to describe them well, and that any project of this type is likely to take more time than envisaged.

• TEI by example. Sian's project used TEI to mark up the descriptions. TEI by example is a set of free online tutorials.
• Ransom Center Fragments. This is a very useful Flickr site displaying images from a large collection of manuscript fragments at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

My favourite paper from the conference was  Rowena Willard-Wright on 'Transforming our data for the internet on a tight budget'.  Willard-Wright works for English Heritage and described their work on digitising and improving their catalogue, including photographing objects, improving old records, cataloguing from scratch, and create varied means of access to the records.  Her talk really exposed infuriating and frustrating the problems faced by all cataloguers are.  As she spoke I wrote:

Willard-Wright's description of migrating and updating catalogue data is very familiar: data has been lost and garbled in transfers over years. Cataloguing has been and still is viewed as archane, and a thing not worth funding, because catalogues were and are seen as not for general consumption. I.e. they are perceived as been the exact opposite of their whole point. This problem that has been seen with the English Heritage catalogue is *exactly* what is being exposed as libraries moves from traditional OPACs to resource discovery/next-generation systems. And, most infuriatingly, the things that cataloguers have known and have been saying forever (e.g. consistency matters, access points matter) is suddenly being "discovered" as if it's new.

Willard-Wright was talking from the perspective of a museum catalogue, which is in some ways very different to a library catalogue.  Museums don't have such a tradition of the publicly accessible comprehensive catalogue, and write much more descriptive and less codified entries for their objects.

The English Heritage cataloguing project used teams of volunteers with very well-defined tasks.  They write clear, concise, engaging, small chunks of description - i.e. entries that confirm to the principles of good writing for the web. The volunteers aren't necessarily experts on the objects, and they're writing for audiences who aren't necessarily experts either. However, there's a recognition that the audience may have additional knowledge or stories to share, and for this reason a 'tell the curators something about this' button is being built into the public catalogue.  I absolutely love this - it's baffled me for years that so few library catalogues have a 'tell us if there's a mistake' button. Copac is a notable exception.  I fear that many libraries don't have one because, if it was ever mentioned in a meeting, someone piped up and said "but think of all the extra work" which likely trumped "think of how handy that will be for our readers, and how useful for us to make use of their knowledge".

That lack of connection to the audience was hammered home for me in another way throughout Willard-Wright's talk.  The museum descriptions are being written for general audiences.  Rare books records contain descriptions that are, frankly, written for librarians.  Not even, really, for most researchers. Yes, we include all sorts of useful information, but we code it up in impenetrable ways, and there's all sorts of information we don't include accessibly.  This has maybe been less of an issue in the past, when catalogue records were only seen by those initiated into our arcane world. But now catalogue records go along with beautiful/intriguing/important digitised books that all sorts of people might want to see, and our gibberish means *nothing*, and doesn't explain any of the basics. (How many records for the first folio show clearly that this is a first folio? Or the Nuremberg Chronicle?)

During Willard-Wright's paper Jill Dye commented that "The only difference between an online catalogue and a digitisation project is adding a photo?", and I think that in one way she's right: it's completely wrong to think that a digitisation project stands apart from cataloguing. However, making materials accessible in any way, but especially if they're freely available online demands a new attitude to description. We really need to step up our game.

Melissa Terras is director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, and she presented a wide-ranging paper highlighting some of the possibilities of high-end digital imaging. She works on these projects in collaboration with computer scientists and engineers, and they're often adapting techniques already used elsewhere (such as in medical imaging). As well as drawing our attention to current projects, Terras made some important points about the theory and practice. Digitisation means lots more sorts of metadata needed so that we can properly interpret the images. As Hannah Thomas put it, Terras' work is "not just about creating a surrogate but about using the image to discover new things, inspire new research". Terras made the point that digital images are *not* exact reproductions of originals. Terras asked us to talk to her if we know of collections or items that would benefit from advanced digitisation and imaging work; part of her role is to connect the various people involved.

• The one resource I'll share is this breathtaking (there were audible gasps in the room) video of the digital flattening of the great parchment book. Watch it. It's amazing.

Alixe Bovey spoke from the academic's perspective, and addressed some of the threats posed by digitisation. She was heavily involved in the campaign to try to prevent the sale of some of the Mendham Collection books last year. Bovey passionately explained that the digital is not the same as the physical, and we all need to communicate this better.  With the Mendham sale, the existence of digitised copies of the titles on databases such as EEBO and ECCO was used as justification for the sale, ignoring the copy specific details of the Mendham copies, as well as the failings of the scans themselves. Earlier digitisations have been particularly lacking. Never mind the poor black and white reproductions of scanned microfilm, they tended, for example, not to include any blank or apparently blank pages.in the source copy (see this post), and also ignored bindings, and made it difficult to determine the original size of the book. But we're not past such difficulties even with the best modern digitisations; they tend not to include scale rules, (see this post for difficulties of determining size), and give little indication of other factors such as weight, quality of materials used, or even smell.

Anne Welsh spoke very pragmatically from the point of view of libraries and library staff themselves.  She pointed out that we are continually needing to update and improve what we've done before: both content format and types of description.  She faced the fact that we can't do everything, and used the example of the University of Manchester Library Digitisation Strategy Group's 'Criteria for ensuring value to the Library for partnerships' (pdf link), which considers the value to the library of any potential projects.

Nicolas Pickwoad spoke about one element of early books which is too often overlooked in digitisations: book bindings. Most bookbinding digitisations (Pickwoad mentioned the Uppsala Probok project as an exception) show only beautiful, expensive, fancy and/or fine bindings, turning bookbinding digitisation has into "a decorative arts ghetto". This doesn't represent most early book bindings, which are less extravagant, but can tell us a very great deal about the book's history, and may often be the most interesting.

There's also a vicious circle at work: bindings aren't so often described in catalogue records, soscholars can't ask for them, so there's not so much research, so it's not seen as a priority... At least when books are viewed in person, the binding will be seen 'by accident' as it were.  If they're not included in digital surrogates they disappear altogether. Like many specialist aspects of digitisation, imaging bindings takes special requirements, including lighting, including to show structures accurately.

• I'm keen to keep an eye on Pickwoad's Ligatus project, which is working on guidelines and terms for describing bindings better. It's hoping to develop vocabulary and multilevel descriptions for bookbinding including the ability to record negatives (e.g. 'no clasps'). This is key, because otherwise you just can't tell whether a feature is absent or it's just a bad record.

  by  Xavier de Jauréguiberry

So all in all, my summary would be that we need to be using better, subtler and more flexible descriptive frameworks and presentational tools to make digitised materials accessible and available to the audiences who want to see them.  Digitisation can help with some, but not all, problems, and we need to advocate loudly for the intrinsic physical value of the things we want to digitise, to try to stem the tide of feeling that a copy is as good as, and entirely replaces, the original.

There was lots of tweeting throughout the conference:

• The rare books group storify of all of the conference tweets is here. 
• My archive of my #rbscg13 tweets is here.

Mobile technology and special collections: a perspective on the #mlibs conference

Last Tuesday saw the Mobile Technologies in Libraries Information Sharing Event, held in Birmingham and organised by the m-libraries project. As someone who's a late-adopter of technological gadgets (I got my first laptop last Autumn), I didn't take detailed notes throughout the day, and chose to consider the broader aspects of the topic and not the details.  There is lots of information about the individual sessions on the event Lanyrd page.

  by  melingo wagamama 

Throughout the day there were interesting discussions about what we mean by 'mobile' technology, and whether it is possible or useful to make a distinction between mobile technology and other technology.  My own view is that very soon the distinction will no longer be of any use, as what we now call 'mobile' technology will be the predominant kind of technology being bought and used.  At the moment the designation can be useful - it brought together people for this information-sharing event, at least, but it's very important always to focus on what service we're trying to offer, and not merely on the medium through which we're providing it.

Of course (as James Clay pointed out in his keynote) not all of our users are using this technology, and not all of them ever will.  We should make sure that all of our content is available in other ways too.  But people are using it now, and we have to make sure our services are available to them via their preferred device.

Design is key to providing any web-based service, but particularly in making it accessible from the multitude of devices now available.  Matt Machell gave a presentation about Responsive Web Design, which is a must-watch for anyone with an interest in web design and the *how* of making content accessible to mobile devices. (He linked to this super piece on User Interface Design, recently too, which is definitely worth looking at if you're interested in this sort of thing. As is Your Library Website Stinks and it's your fault.) The key is to create a flexible site that can adapt to whatever device is viewing it.  This requires planning from the start -- it's hard to retrofit -- but it saves you time and effort in the long run as you only have one site to keep up-to-date, your content is your own rather than being subject to app-store control, and your users get a much better experience as the service will look and feel the same across all the devices from which they're using it.

 The mobility of mobile technology is, of course, particularly relevant to apps that use geo-spatial data to provide information about your current location.  The Phone Booth Project at LSE (presented by Ed Fay) displays Charles Booth's late-nineteenth-century annotated maps of life, labour and poverty London for the user's current location.  They're laid over a Google Maps base, so you can closely compare the modern city with the historic city.  As the overlaying of data works just based on geographic location co-ordinates, it's possible to add further layers, such as modern deprivation information, or information from Booth's notebooks, very simply.  Georgina Parsons had a great idea for extending one of Surrey Libraries' current outreach projects: how about constructing a walking-tour map of a local area, with audio (talks, readings, music?) relating to literary (or other) history available around the route?

I was really interested in the session about the SCARLET (Special Collections using Augmented Reality to Enhance Learning and Teaching) Project at the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester.  The project has been investigating how to use augmented reality (AR) in teaching and learning with special collections.  I have to say that I'm not sure that I completely agree with its brief:

SCARLET addresses one of the principal obstacles to the use of Special Collections in teaching and learning – the fact that students must consult rare books, manuscripts and archives within the controlled conditions of library study rooms. The material is isolated from the secondary, supporting materials and the growing mass of related digital assets. This is an alien experience for students familiar with an information-rich, connected wireless world, and is a barrier to their use of Special Collections.

Yes, locating the useful secondary material relating to rare books and manuscripts can be quite a specialised skill, and one I fear isn't uniformly well-taught to undergraduates at the point at which they start accessing the special collections for their study and research.  However, most special collections reading rooms have reference books, allow the transfer of modern books from elsewhere in the library, and allow laptops to be used.  Granted, they might not all have wifi yet, but I was genuinely surprised to hear that this was considered one of the 'principal obstacles' to the use of Special Collections for teaching and learning.  From the student's point of view I would have thought that just not knowing where to start and what to order up, and then how to interpret what has been requested (e.g. how to find particular sections in a manuscript or early book, how to read the handwriting or typography, how best to handle the material, etc.) would be the biggest issue. From a teaching perspective, practical concerns such as arranging a time and location for a teaching visit, negotiating the level of supervision from library staff, and just thinking of it as an option in the first place, would seem to be big concerns. But I'm willing to believe I could be wrong, and would really like to hear what other people think.

Some of the AR content that SCARLET have produced really blew me away.  In particular, using AR to overlay a reconstruction and translation of this second-century papyrus fragment of St John's gospel.  This seems like just the sort of thing that technology should be doing.  The project say that feedback from first-year undergraduates has been very positive - they appreciate having a way to get to see and use the special collections materials that they've never previously used.  Third-year students enjoyed the videos of their course lecturers, but felt that on the whole the content was somewhat prescriptive and didn't allow for their own independent research.  These findings concur with what I might have expected: I'm not sure why I would want to produce a video-ed introduction to the material unless it really wasn't possible for students to receive such an introduction in person from their lecturers.  Not least because, when using special collections for the first time, it's good to have introductions to how to handle them properly.  I suppose that for students who've had some experience, but who still aren't at the advanced research stage, this content could be valuable.  Maybe I'm a curmudgeon, but it does still seem like a lot of effort for an unclear goal.  As I've already said, I'd love to hear other people's thoughts.

I'm not down on all AR, though.  I can see enormous potential for exhibitions (if issues of wifi/network connections and managing lighting to meet conservation requirements but also allow for the visual-recognition tech underpinning the AR to work in exhibition spaces can be overcome).  Having a reconstruction, or a translation, or annotations and explanations laid directly over the exhibit itself seems like a so much better way to interpret materials than with just a printed caption.  Audio, video, other images, complete digitisations, and more could all be accessible in the exhibition space in connection with the items on display.

All in all it was an interesting day - my thanks to Jo and the rest of the organising team.

Why do big dominant companies fail? A seminar on Kodak

Today's Arcadia Seminar was give by Dr Kamal Munir on the topic "Kodak and the Creation of Popular Photography: Explaining the Life and Death of an Icon".

The famous photography firm Kodak recently filed for bankruptcy.  This talk looked at the reasons why a market-leading, world-famous company could be so thoroughly upset by technological change (the move from film to digital).

The history and mindset of Kodak
To understand Kodak's recent history Munir argued that we have to understand the origins of Kodak's success.

'Photographic memories' by Matthew Wilkinson on Flickr

When Kodak first started, it sold film cameras in a world where photography was practised by professionals using glass plates.  Kodak's film cameras were easy to use, and cheaper than the standard, but the market that then existed didn't want them: the quality wasn't nearly good enough for professionals.

Kodak had to create a market in order to be able to sell its product.  First of all it marketed the cameras to children, but soon moved to marketing them to women. In addition to marketing to woman, Kodak created the suggestion that it was important to record the significant events in life, and to take photographs on tourist holidays.  Munir argued that Kodak set up women as the 'archivists of family life', implying that they would be letting their duties slide if they weren't photographing birthdays, marriages, Christmas, christenings, etc.

By the 1970s or so, 60% to 70% of photographs were being taken by women.  This marketing strategy success was supported by a sound financial model: there was a huge (70%) mark-up on camera film. Kodak never sold expensive cameras - in fact, it could almost give the cameras away, as everyone had to go on buying film.

Digital photography - what changed
Digital photography--which really started to take off when PC and internet access (especially broadband access) picked up in the mid 1990s--changed a number of things about the culture of photography.

It meant that, at least in the earlier years of take up, more photographs were being taken by men than women (80% by men), that photos were now more casual and less sentimental, and that photographs were taken more to be shared than to be preserved.

Kodak's response
Munir mapped out three tiers of response from Kodak, similar to the actions of many organisations and companies when faced with technological change:

1. Ignore it and hopes it goes away
2. Deride it. Kodak made statements about how people would always value having physical copies of photos and that they wouldn't accept the lower quality of digital images.
3. Try to co-opt the technology. Kodak made some small changes to try and cope with the change.  The APS film system (making things smaller) and producing photo CDs when processing film.

All the while, Kodak remained wedded to the razor blade sales model: sell the camera (razor) cheap, and make profits on the film (the blades). It was tied into a distribution model for this lucrative old technology, and resisted finding innovative ways to meet the challenge.


This was a very engaging and enjoyable talk.  I've never studied any aspect of business, and I'd never really thought it much interested me.  But the talk really got me thinking about how and why business works, about what Kodak could have done differently, about what other companies but be in a similar position (could it be Tesco?), and about what false assumptions we in libraries might be making and basing our efforts on as we face major technological change.

ETA: John Naughton introduced the talk by wondering whether we, as librarians are making false assumptions about how can survive current technological shifts.  Is the belief that service is the answer well-founded or not?  Could we be the next Kodak?  Obviously, if we don't make any changes then the answer is likely yes, but are the changes we're trying to make really the right ones?

A recording of this talk will be available in due course on the Arcadia Project podcasts page.