Hey, What About Access?

1. A Practical Guide to Decision-Making Hey, What About Access? Roy Tennant The California Digital Library, University of California http://escholarship.cdlib.org/rtennant/presentations/2002sfs/

2. Outline • What are your access goals? • What are your constraints? • What opportunities do you have? • Capturing • Describing • Providing Access

3. What are Your Access Goals? • On-screen viewing • Thumbnail preview • Screen-size • Detail study (and how much?) • Printing • Artifactual Fidelity or Intellectual Content

9. Printing • On-screen resolutions are typically inadequate for printing • For non-transparency material (prints, books, objects, etc.), 300dpi is a good resolution for printable versions

10. Artifactual Fidelity or Intellectual Content? • Artifactual fidelity • Must preserve the appearance of the actual object • Can provide an enhanced sense of experiencing the real object • But in some cases, preserving the look and feel of the artifact obstructs the content • Doug Greenberg’s “compulsive authenticity disorder” (http://www.nedcc.org/owol/dgabs.htm) • Intellectual content • Optimized to provide the best presentation of the content itself, not the artifact • The sense of interacting with the actual object may be diminished or destroyed • Both strategies may be required

12. What are Your Constraints? • Hardware • RAM • CPU speed • Disk space • Storage • Software • Staff • Time • Skill and experience • Money

13. What Opportunities Do You Have? • Grants may be available to finance your project • Grants often expect a certain level of quality; if so, what capture quality is specified? • Do you have access to student help? Interns? Volunteers? • Can you cut a deal with a vendor like Octavo?

14. Capturing • Monitor resolutions are improving • 640 x 480 --> 800 x 600 --> 1280 x 768 • What is a good resolution for onscreen viewing today, may not be tomorrow • How many times do you want to scan your material? • Scan at the best quality you can justify given your goals, constraints, and opportunities

15. Capture Recommendations for Access (not preservation) • Photos, illustrations, maps, etc.: • 300dpi • 24 bit color • B/W Text document: • 300dpi • 8 bit grayscale • Negatives and Slides: • 2200 pixels in longest dimension • 24 bit color or 8 bit grayscale

16. Describing • Good metadata is essential to your success • Three types: • Descriptive • Administrative • Structural

17. Describing: Appropriate Level • Collection-level access: • Discovery metadata describes the collection • Example: Archival finding aid; see http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ • Item-level access: • Discovery metadata describes the item • Example: MARC or Dublin Core records for each item; see http://jarda.cdlib.org/search.html • Both types of access may be appropriate • Doing both often takes very little extra effort

18. Collection Level Access Images Collection Description SearchInterface Collection Description

19. Item Level Access Images Collection Descriptions SearchInterface

20. http://oac.cdlib.org/

24. http://jarda.cdlib.org/

25. jarda.cdlib.org/search.html

26. Describing: Metadata Granularity • <name>William Randolph Hearst</name> • <name> <first>William</first> <middle>Randolph</middle> <last>Hearst</last></name> • Consider all uses for the metadata • Design for the most granular use • Store it in a machine-parseable format

27. Describing: Machine Parseability • The ability to pull apart and reconstruct information via software • For example, this:<name> <first>William</first> <middle>Randolph</middle> <last>Hearst</last></name> • Can easily become this:<DC.creator>Hearst, William Randolph</DC.creator>

28. Describing: Metadata Qualification • <name role=“creator”>William Randolph Hearst</name> • <subject scheme=“LCSH”>Builder -- Castles -- Southern California</subject>

29. Describing: Formats & Syntax Which ones? Dublin Core MARC XML EAD TEI

30. Describing: Metadata Storage Formats • It doesn’t matter so long as: • You captured the quantity required for your purposes • You captured it at the granularity required for your purposes • You qualify the metadata where required • You store it in a machine-parseable format • You can output it in any format to which you wish to comply • Given that, you can do anything!

31. Describing: Standards • Decide to which industry standards you will comply • Use an internal metadata infrastructure that supports compliance with those standards, as well as your specific requirements • Consider the issues of item v. collection level, granularity, qualification, and machine parseability • Understand that your internal formats may be more complex than what is required for standards compliance

32. Describing:Making Your Metadata Searchable • Sample Indexing Systems/Databases: • Sprite (Perl module) • Microsoft Access, Filemaker Pro • SWISH-E, swish-e.org • MySQL, mysql.com • Oracle or Sybase Oracle, Sybase Sprite Access/Filemaker SWISH-E MySQL The power & complexity continuum More Less

33. Providing Access • Exhibit • Browse • Search

34. Providing Access: Exhibit • Goals: • Inviting • Easy to navigate • Highlight selected parts of a collection • Teach • Requirements: • Great graphic design • Informative and succinct commentary • Interesting subject matter

38. http://www.kb.nl/kb/galerie/trivulzio/index-en.html

39. http://www.bl.uk/

40. Providing Access: Browse • Goals: • Provide intriguing and interesting paths into and throughout a collection • Give a broad sense of a collection, but not show everything necessarily • Requirements: • Logical browse paths • May have multiple paths to the same items (e.g., time, geography, subject)

41. http://www.kb.nl/kb/manuscripts/browser/

42. Providing Access: Search • Goals • To provide post-coordinate access to all items in a collection relevant to a particular query • To provide good methods to create a search as well as refine or alter the display as required • Requirements: • Good search software (database or indexing software) • Good metadata (minimum is probably a title or caption for each item) • Good interface (options for navigation, search refinement, etc.)

43. http://www.scran.ac.uk/

45. Recap • Determine what you want your users to be able to do (your access goals) • Consider your constraints, opportunities, and long-term goals • Capture images at the best quality you can stand • Collect metadata in an amount and form that supports your access goals as well as interoperability with relevant standards • Never underestimate the power of a committed individual and a cheap scanner!

46. Final Advice • Don’t scrimp on tools — staff time is the most expensive part of any project • For any given project, there are several ways it can succeed and countless ways it can fail • Do it right, or don’t do it at all? • NO! From the access perspective, it’s much better to do it as well as you can than to not do it at all.