Secrets of Duke Digital Collections … Revealed! November 3, 2009
Posted by Rich in : Announcements , add a comment
How do we make Duke Digital Collections happen? Well, obviously, our secret is glamour, which comes as no surprise to those of you who know us. But as with Miss Denney in this advertisement from our Ad*Access collection, there’s a bit more to it than that, and it takes a lot of work to get there, especially since we try to avoid disturbing fatigue lines and “crepey throat” along the way. (We know this ad is tiny here, but trust us, it’s worth clicking on to experience its full glory.)
We were recently asked to write about the Duke Digital Collections program for the Duke University Libraries Magazine. The results appear in five articles in the Fall 2009 issue of the magazine, and you can read them online here. Among other things, you can read about the history of digitization at Duke, the global reach of our digital collections, the creative interfaces we use to open the doors to our collections, the behind-the-scenes steps in the creation of a new digital collection, and how our digital collections are being used in the classroom.
Thanks to our friends at the magazine for giving us the opportunity to talk about the Duke Digital Collections program!
AdViews: 3,000 New Commercials, Improved Access October 21, 2009
Posted by Jill Katte in : AdViews, Announcements , add a comment
I’m excited to announce that we’ve launched 3,000 new commercials in the AdViews digital collection on iTunes U.
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adviews/
This includes over 50 new products and brands, such as the American Association of Railroads, Burma Shave, Bounce, Eastern Airlines, Folgers, Glade, Pepto-Bismol, Prell, Sanka, and Zest. We’ve also added many new commercials for Crest, some fantastic Hasbro toy commercials from the 1970s, and much more.
The AdViews Highlights album now features over 40 commercials with closed captioning and audio descriptions created by the National Center for Accessible Media for users with hearing or vision impairments. Users can take advantage of these accessibility features using the Preferences and Controls menus in iTunes. We’ve also improved the indexing of the collection, making it easier to search for and discover AdViews content from the Libraries website.
Many thanks to Duke Libraries staff and interns, to Duke OIT, and to A/V Geeks for their excellent contributions to the project.
The digital collections team will promote some new AdViews commercials during the next few weeks on Twitter — follow us! http://twitter.com/dukedigitalcoll
The Classical String Quartet, 1770-1840 August 10, 2009
Posted by Jill Katte in : Announcements , 3comments
Note: This is a guest post by Tom Moore, Head of the Music Library and Music Media Center at Duke. Tom is also the editor of the Music Library blog, Biddle Beat.
The award-winning Historic American Sheet Music Project of the Duke Libraries Digital Collections provides access to images of more than three thousand pieces of early American sheet music. Almost all of this music is popular vocal music intended for voice with piano accompaniment, and virtually none belongs to the genres of classical or concert music, which are also richly represented in the collections of the Duke Libraries. The Classical String Quartet, 1770-1840, begins to explore this area, and makes available the contents of about forty collections from the period when the string quartet was at its peak, when the works of the Viennese masters for the genre were created, many of them unavailable previously in any form since their original publication. Of particular interest are the various arrangements of operas for string quartet, including Joseph and his Brothers by Méhul, and the famous Magic Flute of Mozart. This resource will be highly valuable to scholars of the period, providing primary sources for study, and to string quartets, with a wealth of new repertoire.
AdViews: Don’t Touch That Dial! July 21, 2009
Posted by Jill Katte in : AdViews, Announcements , 4comments
The Duke Digital Collections team is excited to announce our newest project: AdViews, a digital archive of vintage television commercials. Our first batch of commercials went live in iTunes U last night (July 20, 2009), and we’ll continue to add thousands of historic commercials to the collection through the rest of 2009. By year’s end, the collection will contain over 10,000 digitized TV commercials from the archives, all available for FREE from Duke’s iTunes U site.
AdViews will provide students, teachers, and researchers access to a wide range of vintage brand advertising from the first four decades of mainstream commercial television. The collection will support interdisciplinary research, not only in marketing and advertising history, but also in visual studies, communication, women’s studies, public health, cultural anthropology, nutrition, technology, and more.
AdViews currently features commercials from the ad agency D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B), a New York advertising firm founded in 1929. The DMB&B archives are held at Duke in the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, a research center in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.
Stay tuned! We’ll be right back with more AdViews updates and behind-the-scenes information…
You Know What We Did This Summer July 15, 2009
Posted by Rich in : Announcements, Broadsides, Trident , add a comment
I’ve been working in academic libraries for fourteen years now, and I still haven’t been able to convince my grandmother that working for a university doesn’t mean you get the summers off. We certainly haven’t been taking the summer off in the Digital Collections Program here at the Duke University Libraries, even though you haven’t seen most of the results of our summer work yet.
We premiered the Duke Digital Collections iPhone app back in June, which has been getting positive and enthusiastic feedback (thanks!), but otherwise most of our work has been behind-the-scenes stuff that will pay off in the future. Among our projects:
- The metadata phase of the Broadsides & Ephemera digital collection has begun in earnest, with a team of eight catalogers and archivists using our new metadata editor to describe these rare and valuable resources.
- Work continues on Trident, our digital collections system. With a new repository, a new metadata editor, and all sorts of other new developments, we’ll be able to create and manage digital collections better, faster, and more seamlessly than ever before, and deliver content in new and exciting ways.
- Our Digital Production Center continues digitizing materials for future collections at a furious rate. As usual, they’re very speedy and the rest of us sometimes feel like we’re trying to play catch-up with them….
- We’ve introduced new ways to keep up with the Digital Collections Program, including a Facebook page (come be our friend!) and more frequent Twitter updates, where we’ve been tweeting highlights from the Duke Digital Collections since the spring. We’ve also been posting with our digital collections colleagues from across the state to the North Carolina Digital Collections Collaboratory blog.
- Last but certainly not least, we’re about to launch a huge, fantastic, exciting, FUN new digital collection — hopefully next week — that we’re going to have to keep secret a bit longer. We hate to tease you … well, maybe we want to tease you a little bit. It’s completely different from anything we’ve done before in several ways that will become clear when it’s published. We’ve been working like fiends on this one, but we think it’s totally going to be worth it, and hope you will, too, when you see it. Stay tuned.
As always, thanks for reading, and for your support and interest. We hope you’re having as good a summer as we are. Don’t forget the sunscreen and the frosty beverage of your choice….
Sam Reed and the Trumpet of Conscience April 2, 2009
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In late-March 2009, we proudly published a digital collection entitled: Sam Reed and the Trumpet of Conscience. This collection documents the life and work of activist and organizer, Sam Reed, and the organization and publication, the Trumpet of Conscience, he founded in Durham, N.C., 1987-2000. The Trumpet of Conscience worked for social justice and to improve race relations, and the group’s mission was “To come together, to listen to one another, to strive toward reducing and eliminating the root causes of crime and divisiveness in our midst.”
TOC was open to all and attracted active involvement from numerous Duke University and North Carolina Central University faculty, as well as local Durham residents. According to William Willimon, former Dean of Duke Chapel, Duke and Durham’s Martin Luther King Day celebrations were established, in large part, because of Reed’s efforts. The Sam Reed and the Trumpet of Conscience digital collection includes newsletters, planning documents, photographs, awards, speeches, and interviews created and collected by Sam Reed. The collection also includes articles by and about Dr. John Hope Franklin.
Deena Stryker Photographs of Cuba April 2, 2009
Posted by Jill Katte in : Announcements, Uncategorized , add a comment
We’re very excited to announce the Deena Stryker Photographs digital collection. It includes approximately 1,850 photographs shot in Cuba between 1963 and 1964, processed by Alberto Korda on the island. The collection features photographs of Fidel Castro and Raúl Castro, as well as other major figures in the Cuban Revolution, including Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Celia Sánchez, and René Vallejo. In addition to images of key members of the Castro government at work and relaxing, the collection documents everyday life in Havana and in rural Cuba, focusing on farms, development projects, and schools.
Images of the Protestant Family April 2, 2009
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In our March build, we collaborated with Duke’s Divinity School Library to republish a collection entitled Images of mainline Images of mainline Protestant children and families in the U.S., which features articles and advertising images of children and families in the U.S. from Protestant-supported or targeted magazines.
The collection includes images depicting family size and health, articles and advertisements on scientific nutrition, and other images directly related to scientific progress and domesticity. Also included are images depicting families in Protestant mission settings. Content for the collection was selected by Dr. Amy Laura Hall and Andrew Keck in the Duke Divinity School.
We acknowledge the generous support of the ATLA/ATS Cooperative Digital Resources Initiative (CDRI), funded by the Luce Foundation, and the Valparaiso Child in Religion and Ethics Program, funded by the Lilly Foundation.
The collection is also part of the American Theological Library Association and the Association of Theological Schools Cooperative Digital Resources Initiative.
Building the Broadsides collection-Part 1 January 12, 2009
Posted by nh48 in : Announcements, Broadsides, Trident , add a comment
Over the the next few months, we’ll be writing a series of posts that offer a behind-the-scenes look at all of the work and decision-making that goes into building one digital collection, from selection, conservation, and physical processing to scanning, metadata, and publication. We’ve chosen to blog about our work on the Broadsides collection in particular for several reasons:
- It’s a relatively large-scale project that will test our ability to ramp up our digitization efforts (5,500 items from the U.S. and abroad, dated 1790-1940)
- It will serve as a test-case for the development and use of our new metadata tool–codename “Trident.”
- It will be a pilot project to get more library staff involved in generating metadata for digital collections.
So check in periodically to see how the project is moving along!
Visions and Designs from Bloomsbury December 19, 2008
Posted by Jill Katte in : Announcements , 3comments
This month, we published a small collection of Bloomsbury Group-related materials in Manuscripts and Woodcuts: Visions and Designs from Bloomsbury. It features a handwritten, manuscript draft of Elizabeth and Essex by Lytton Strachey and a collection of woodcut illustrations by Roger Fry, as well as letters and book covers. This collection accompanies a Duke University Libraries exhibit on the Bloomsbury Group entitled “‘How Full of Life Those Days Seemed’: New Approaches to Art, Literature, Sexuality, and Society in Bloomsbury” that is part of a year-long celebration at Duke, Vision and Design: A Year of Bloomsbury,
