Business meeting followed by presentations on arranging and describing large image collections:
“I Think I Saw the Picture in the Durham Paper:” A Case Study in Iterative Processing Patrick C. Cullom, Visual Materials Processing Archivist, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
In 2015, after several years of negotiations, the Durham Morning Herald newspaper located in Durham, NC, transferred its photographic holdings to the North Carolina Collection in Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The agreement reached allowed UNC to physically take hold of the materials and transferred copyright to the University and the State of North Carolina. Will include a recount of the important work done by archivists coordinating with the former owners and North Carolina Collection Curators that allowed for the creation of a working box-level finding aid, before the material arrived at UNC. The talk will discuss some of the problems and solutions that have arisen in the almost 4 years the collection has been actively processed and constantly used by researchers. There will also be some examples given of how some steps in this iterative processing model have been incorporated into intake & processing activities on all new materials acquired by Special Collections.
Reimagining Metadata Practices for a Large Digitized Image Collection Elliot Williams, Digital Initiatives Metadata Librarian, University of Miami Libraries
The Hilgard O’Reilly Sternberg Photography collection is a large collection of approximately 18,000 photographic slides, held at the University of Miami Libraries Special Collections. As the library began digitizing this collection, we realized that our standard metadata practices for digital collections, which focus on intensive item-level description, would not be practical for this collection. To efficiently describe this collection, which currently contains over 8,600 digitized images, we structured the digital collection into “sets” of approximately 20-40 images, based on the original order and arrangement of the collection, with each set described as an intellectual unit. This presentation will describe how we re-thought description and access for this collection, challenges we have faced in adapting our metadata practices for a different level of description, and the effect on access for users.
