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

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…

Permission- Before posting anything online, the first step is often getting permission from the creator. The authors of zines usually no longer live at the address included in their zine, if they give a name or address at all. Even email isn’t a reliable way to contact people since many zines were created in the pre-internet era, or include old addresses no longer in use.

Copyright- Some zine archives claim that publishing PDF scans of zines online falls under “fair use” for nonprofit educational purposes, and because they usually aren’t hindering anyone’s ability to profit from the publication. To further complicate this question, most zines cut, paste, reprint, borrow, steal, and repurpose images and text from other publications, with or without attribution. According to the Copyright Office: “The distinction between ‘fair use’ and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission. Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission.”

Privacy- Even though zines are “published” rather than private, like a letter or diary, we have no idea whether 10 copies were made for close friends or 1,000 copies were made and sent far and wide through a zine distributor. They are most often written by young women who never imagined that their deepest secrets and angsty rants would be archived in a research library. One could argue that other digital projects that post diaries and letters of historical significance also violate this right to privacy, but the now-adult women who created these zines are likely to be living, active Internet users whose personal and professional lives could be negatively (or positively) affected by someone else finding their zine online. For example, we have been contacted to remove a last name from our database that was associated with a zine title that the author felt damaged her reputation in her current career—at age 16, she had no idea that the flippant title would ever be available online.

Print culture- This argument for maintaining the print and material nature of zines as opposed to creating digital surrogates is perhaps the weakest of these 4 factors, but it is still a point to consider. Zines are created by hand, crafted with paper, scissors, tape, glue, staples. They were meant to be handed from person to person, physically shared. The experience of handling zines in person, turning each page to reveal intimate secrets, funny comics, and poetry, can’t be duplicated on-line. You would get the content, but miss out on the physical experience, an aspect that is even more important as the medium of communication has shifted to the electronic.

I could write a few more reasons why we are not digitizing our zine collection, just as I could write as many more about why we perhaps should digitize them. Instead I’d rather hear what others have to say on the subject.

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…

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….

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.

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.

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!

• 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

Notes:

• An iTunes Preview is when someone double-clicks a video to watch it without downloading it.
• An iTunes Download is when someone clicks the “GET MOVIE” button to download the video to their computer.
• YouTube does not allow downloads
• We can’t tell how many times iTunes U videos have been watched after they have been downloaded.

Where Are All These Views Coming From?

The iTunes views & downloads all happen in the same place: the collection interface in iTunes U. We don’t know how many originated with an external link (URL’s are available for individual iTunes tracks). With the YouTube videos, people are finding them in a multitude of ways. Here are example stats for our most-viewed video (as of today, Feb 25):

But no single discovery method for YouTube videos stands out as ‘primary’ across the collections. Of our five most-viewed videos (see Top 10 below), Winogrand has been viewed mostly through an embedded player (32.0%, primarily from a street photography blog), Meyerowitz was discovered most frequently as a ‘related video’ to other YouTube videos (26.0%), Maloof was viewed most frequently via external links (35.0%, mostly from a woodworker community site), and Dine was found mostly via keyword searching in YouTube (34.0%).

Top 10 Videos

YouTube:

1. Visions and Images: Garry Winogrand, 1981 (2,576 views)
2. Visions and Images: Joel Meyerowitz, 1981 (918)
3. Visions and Images: Elliot Erwitt, 1981 (607)
4. Handmade in America: Sam Maloof (546)
5. Inside New York’s Art World: Jim Dine (470)
6. Inside New York’s Art World: Lee Krasner, 1978 (454)
7. Visions and Images: Harry Callahan, 1981 (377)
8. Inside New York’s Art World: Motherwell (358)
9. Visions and Images: Arnold Newman, 1981 (331)
10. Visions and Images: Duane Michaels (291)

iTunes:

1. American Architecture Now: Frank Gehry, 1980 (60 downloads)
2. American Architecture Now: Peter Eisenman, Jaquelin Robertson, 1984 (35)
3. Visions and Images: Garry Winogrand, 1981 (28)
4. American Architecture Now: Stanley Tigerman, 1984 (28)
5. Visions and Images: Elliot Erwitt, 1981 (27)
6. American Architecture Now: Philip Johnson (27)
7. Visions and Images: Joel Meyerowitz, 1981 (26)
8. American Architecture Now: Richard Meier (24)
9. Visions and Images: Arnold Newman, 1981 (22)
10. American Architecture Now: Michael Graves, 1980 (21)

Comparison:

Only four videos appear in both Top Tens, so there is disparity in which videos are most popular in both systems. 6 of the top 10 videos in iTunes are from the American Architecture Now series yet not a single one of these even cracks the top 10 in YouTube. Does this mean architecture enthusiasts are more apt to be iTunes users? Probably not. A more likely explanation for this phenomenon is the arrangement of tabs for the various series in the iTunes interface:

American Architecture Now is the first and default tab, thus videos in the other series are initially hidden from view. We may reconsider the tab arrangement for future collections.

Comments & Ratings

YouTube’s comment and rating functions have both been used considerably in the collection. As of today (Feb 25) we have received 35 total comments on 24 videos (High: 3). 84 ratings have been cast on 41 videos (High: 9). 36 of the 41 rated videos have a 5/5 star average rating, 1 has a 3/5 average, and 4 have a 1/5 average. The high ratings indicate that people are finding the videos to be valuable, and that is reinforced by the grateful messages that comprise the majority of the comments received.

Other Observations

It’s unclear to what extent the services complement each other, although we have already had a patron contact us through YouTube inquiring about how s/he could download the videos (iTunes makes this possible). It’s also conceivable that someone might download a video from iTunes, watch it, and then use the YouTube version to discuss or share it.

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. Currently there is no item-level access to the collection; researchers have to review individual folders on-site. Some of the international materials have no metadata. Since we have little to no metadata, the collection will provide a body of material for developing a prototype metadata tool and for training staff in our Cataloging and Metadata Services dept. in contributing metadata for digital collections.

Before work could begin on the project, the Broadsides collection passed through the proposal and planning stage. During this phase we evaluated the project proposal based on research value, resource requirements, intellectual property issues, and overall feasibility. The Libraries’ Collections Council gives final approval for all digitization projects to move into production.

The next stage of the process is conservation — coming soon!