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
Why We’re Not Digitizing Zines September 21, 2009
Posted by Jill Katte in : Collections, metadata , 6comments
Note: This is a guest post by Kelly Wooten, Research Services and Collection Development Librarian of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture in the Duke University Libraries. Kelly is curator of the Bingham Center Zine Collections.
The Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture has a collection of over 4,000 zines written by women and girls from the early 1990s to the present. So far we have about 2,600 of these issues cataloged in a metadata-only database. At first glance, the zines look like perfect candidates for full-scale digitization. They are frequently used by researchers from around the United States and beyond, have great visual appeal, and often are the only copies to be held in an archives. Digitizing would help preserve zines from heavy use and promote broader access to unique material in a popular collection.
When you take a closer look, digitizing zines becomes a lot more complicated… (more…)
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
Posted by Jill Katte in : Announcements, Trumpet of Conscience , add a comment
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.
Images of the Protestant Family April 2, 2009
Posted by Jill Katte in : Announcements, Protestant Family , add a comment
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: Conservation March 16, 2009
Posted by maa13 in : Broadsides, Trident , add a commentWhat happens when an entire collection goes through the Conservation Department to be processed so that it can be digitized? What do these collections look like through the eyes of a conservator? What level of conservation work should a collection get? How long does it take to process a collection? These are some of the common questions asked of the Conservation Staff. In our second installment of Digital Collections “Behind the Scenes” we will explore these questions and more. Below is an overview of the process which is explained in detail in the embedded video.
Overview:
1. Sort
2. Remove Mylar
3. Assess collection for repair
4. Repair
5. Flag problem items for the Digital Production Center
6. Re-house
7. Repeat
The next stage of the process is digitization — coming soon!
LAUNC-CH presentation on Metadata Librarianship March 12, 2009
Posted by Rich in : Gamble, Presentations, metadata , add a commentNoah Huffman and I (that would be Rich Murray), the two Metadata Librarians working on the Digital Collections team at Duke, spoke about our jobs at the LAUNC-CH conference in Chapel Hill on March 9 as part of a panel called “New Titles, Changing Workforce.” Thanks to everyone who attended, and to the conference organizers who invited us! As promised, here are the slides from our presentation.
Video Discovery Stats for DSVA: A First Look February 25, 2009
Posted by Sean Aery in : Assessment, Diamonstein-Spielvogel , add a comment
Our Diamonstein-Spielvogel video archive collection, comprised of about 130 videos, was introduced this past fall and represents our first digital video collection. Our Digital Collections system (Tripod) does not yet support discovery within a video collection, so in the interim, we are using two external video services in tandem to host the collection and are relying on their native interfaces for search and retrieval.
- videos uploaded to iTunes U the week of September 21, 2008
- videos uploaded to YouTube the week of December 14, 2008
Each service provides some distinct advantages over the other. A basic matrix of differences can be found here:
http://www.oit.duke.edu/web-multimedia/multimedia/YouTube/index.html#faq
Usage
To gauge use, we looked at about 8 weeks of data in both systems following the publication of the videos in YouTube. There were 16,412 YouTube views, 993 iTunes downloads, and 392 iTunes previews.
Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive Usage Stats
Dec 14, 2008 – Feb 8, 2009
Building the Broadsides Collection: A Large-Scale Digitization Approach February 17, 2009
Posted by Jill Katte in : Broadsides, Trident , 3comments
I’m happy to report that work on the Broadsides and Ephemera Collection has begun! The source content for this project is an artificial collection in Duke’s Special Collections Library, dated 1790-1940. Truly an interdisciplinary collection, it includes materials related to political campaigns, politics, theater, dance, museum exhibitions, advertising, travel, expositions, and military campaigns, and it presents historical perspectives on race relations, gender, and religion. On many items, you can still see holes in the upper corners from the original posting of the signs and flyers.
Aside from past processing decisions that brought this artificial collection together in the first place, we will do no selection before digitization. Our goal is to digitize ALL of the content (roughly 5,000 items) and to use it as an example of an “open-ended” digital collection. If we aquire additional broadsides and posters, they can be digitized and added to this collection on an ongoing basis.
We also consider this project as digitization of a hidden collection: the early broadsides and posters are a significant, but underutilized resource. (more…)
