Enlightened Librarian: Digital Collections

Flickr is not my friend · Aug 24, 05:51 PM

Forgive the absence.

Several months ago I succumbed to the allure of emulsionless photography. Forget over a century of chemical refinements, arduous craft and halide-blackened fingers. Now I can take pictures and see them instantly! All colour and no weight. Not even a hair’s breadth between the thought and the act.

And I have become addicted to Flickr, which has become the flickering, convulsive mass at the agitated centre of the world. Heroin connects you to an intricate chemistry and infrastructure of supply. Flickr connects you to the most intimate blinking and yearning of millions of other minds. Nothing passing through you but shouting colour: a massless high.

Go there now. See everyone’s photos. Press reload. Again. This is a pipe through which the world flows. Inhale. Baby sunset drinking flower street wedding flower holiday lonelyselfportrait beach fruit alley dog. And repeat. Subway cherrytree building dance lonelyroom neonsign dog arminarm waterdrop doorway graffiti flower stiffportrait mountain.

Flicker and buzz.

Digital counterfeits the world and streams it through your senses. And it is easy to become addicted to the stream. Because the stream is so much like the world.

My camera is a beautiful thing. I want to take beautiful pictures. Maybe once or twice.

But let me not lose my bearings.

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The infinite library · Sep 18, 07:08 PM

The following appears in the Autumn 2005 issue of University of Toronto Magazine:

If he traded his khakis and open-collared shirt for a monk’s robe, the bearded Rev. William Craig would not look out of place in a dank medieval library. But this is 2005, and the Anglican priest doesn’t need to roam the dark, mouldy corridors of a medieval library to do research.

In the cafeteria of Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, Craig, a doctoral student in theology, pulls out his wireless laptop computer, launches an Internet browser and calls up a digital book from the library’s electronic collection. The print version of the 221-volume Patrologia Latina, a massive 19th-century collection of a thousand years of church doctrine, would fill dozens of shelves. Yet Craig can scour the full text of every volume simply by entering a few words into the search box on the screen.

Academic research has changed remarkably since Craig began his student career in the 1970s. “When I was an undergrad, we didn’t have personal computers,” he says. Now he can find primary sources central to his thesis – on the 1604 Hampton Court Conference of King James I of England – with a few clicks of his mouse. Digital resources such as Early English Books Online, which contains nearly 100,000 page-by-page reproductions of books published between 1475 and 1700, have made research “infinitely” easier, says Craig.

Thirty years ago, card catalogues and printed periodical indexes ruled the library system. Then the digital revolution arrived. Computers replaced card catalogues and microfiche in the mid-1980s. Encyclopedias that appeared on CD-ROMs in the early 1990s gave way to easy-to-search electronic indexes and other reference databases on the World Wide Web.

But those early milestones were only a prelude. Thanks to the development of more powerful computers and larger databases, the number of library resources available in digital form is expanding rapidly. U of T’s electronic collection now includes almost 40,000 journals, more than 50,000 e-books and 1,000 indexes and other online reference tools. However, U of T’s e-collection is still dwarfed by the 15 million books and periodicals held by the university’s 32 libraries.

Peter Clinton, the director of information technology services for U of T Libraries (UTL), says the last few years have seen a quantum leap in the availability of full-text electronic materials – whole articles and books rather than just brief citations or abstracts. As a result, students and faculty can do an increasing amount of research from their computer desktops. Not surprisingly, they check out materials from the library less often. Over the past decade, the circulation of print items at UTL has dropped 20 per cent, due mostly to falling demand for print journals. In the field of physics, the latest research is published only in electronic form. When it comes to searching for library resources, students “want it now, they want it fast and they want it to work like Google,” says Clinton.

Visit UTL’s Web site and you’ll discover just how influential the popular Internet search engine has become. Front and centre on the home page is Google’s colourful logo. Click the link and you land on a page with the message, “There are limits to searching Google Scholar and you may find better quality information through the University of Toronto Libraries’ databases.” The wording is mild, but it’s evidence of the growing competition between academic libraries and major technology companies, such as Google, Yahoo and Amazon.

Google Scholar, a service started late last year that’s still in its testing phase, is the company’s first foray into academic research. It allows users to search collections of proprietary electronic journals and a variety of online repositories of scholarly papers. A Google Scholar search on “exosolar planets,” for example, returns 54 academic essays on the subject, ranked roughly in order of the number of times they’ve been cited. Within just a few months, Google Scholar has established itself as a rival to powerful multinational companies such as Thomson and Elsevier that offer huge (and, for libraries, hugely expensive) databases of scholarly material. Some librarians say that Google underperforms its rivals in the currency and quantity of its search results, while others declare that its simplicity is a huge advantage. “Google Scholar works. And it works in a way that presents very few of the hoops that we make students jump through to use our library databases,” writes T.J. Sondermann, an academic librarian and prominent blogger on library issues in the U.S.

UTL is not so conciliatory. The library is attempting to teach researchers that its resources are more specialized, in-depth and targeted to particular fields. Carole Moore, UTL’s chief librarian, says the problem is not that students use Google’s main search engine but that they use it primarily because they are unaware of alternatives. “Many students have a limited idea of how to search and of what they’re finding,” she says. UTL is conducting seminars on the use of library materials and Moore notes that once researchers are aware of what the library has to offer, they tend to lose their dependency on the search engine. “If researchers know how to use the databases, then that actually does bring them in for materials because it’s not all online,” she says.

However, Google isn’t standing idly by. The company is developing another service called Google Print that may encroach even more on the traditional turf of libraries. Last December, it announced a partnership with the New York Public Library and four major university libraries – Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and Michigan – to digitize millions of their books. Publishers are expressing concerns about copyright protection, but even if Google limits itself to works in the public domain, the implications for academic libraries are profound. A Google search of the text of millions of instantly available digital books would be a more compelling first choice than even the largest library catalogue of physical volumes.

As Google expands into the academic realm, some argue that libraries should simply bow to its strengths. John Wilkin, a librarian at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, believes that the company’s dominance in online searching is inevitable. He says that libraries should “cede the generalist role to Google” and allow it to become a universal search engine for library materials. “We all love Google for its quick and dirty approach,” says Patricia Bellamy, a reference librarian at the Robarts Library. But Moore doesn’t share Wilkin’s view that libraries should relinquish their core business to Google. “I really don’t think we would want a world that was totally controlled by one search engine,” she says, noting that Google’s for-profit status puts it in a compromised position as an academic research tool compared to the non-profit neutrality of UTL. She adds that Google’s mandate is not to support academic research but to make a profit. If a service such as Google Scholar became unprofitable, the company might decide to stop supporting it.

To compete with Google, UTL, like other academic libraries across Canada, is facing short- and long-term challenges. In the short term, UTL must match Google’s ease of use. This means replicating the company’s one-stop search box. For libraries plagued with many different ways of gaining access to their diverse collections, as UTL is, creating a single search box to retrieve a broad range of materials is an obvious step toward making research more convenient for students. Currently, researchers must deal with separate entry points for the print catalogue, electronic index and abstract databases, e-books and e-journals, and UTL’s own scanned digital collections. Since 2002, however, UTL has been working with the libraries at all of Ontario’s universities to create the Ontario Scholars Portal, a single-box search engine that covers 7,300 electronic journals and 65 electronic indexes. Clinton says that the library is about six months away from its ultimate goal of tying its print catalogue, databases and catalogued Web resources to a single search. He admits that Google is innovating quickly, but says that libraries – and the electronic database vendors whose products they buy – are beginning to catch up. “Google, and in particular Google Scholar, has been a wake-up call for many of the information vendors,” he says.

Over the long term, the library is thinking about new ways that digital materials can be stored, packaged and delivered, says Moore. Like Google, UTL is digitizing books, but its focus is on its unique collections used by the U of T community and other Canadian researchers. So far, UTL has scanned thousands of rare illustrations of human anatomy, explorers’ documents and early Canadiana from the university’s rare-book collection. Progress has been slow, but last September UTL began a pilot project with a non-profit organization called Internet Archive to digitize books using a robotic scanning machine provided by the archive. Under the arrangement, U of T pays Internet Archive 10 cents US for every page scanned. Internet Archive, which is based in San Francisco, keeps one copy to add to its digital collection and U of T keeps one copy.

One year into the project, UTL has paid for about 2,000 scanned titles, ranging from a copy of a 1475 edition of St. Augustine’s City of God to war memoirs and literary texts. Over the next two years, the project will digitize all of the known editions of books and print material – about three million pages in total – by John Henry Cardinal Newman, a 19th century Christian theologian. The effort, a joint project of three American partners and St. Michael’s College at U of T, should enable researchers to detect subtle changes in Newman’s language that would otherwise take years to discover, says Jonathan Bengtson, the chief librarian of John M. Kelly Library at St. Mike’s. “Such analyses will lead to a deeper understanding of the development of Newman’s thought,” he says.

Google’s somewhat grandiose mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” With a market valuation in July of more than $80 billion US and quarterly earnings of $343 million US, the company is in a far better financial position than UTL. The library system is stretching its resources to the limit to compete with the ease and scope of Google as well as preserve its traditional collections and services. Unlike Google, which publicly announced that it plans to spend up to 30 per cent of its earnings on new product development, UTL has no capital for innovative projects. While UTL has managed to maintain its acquisition spending in real terms, it has had to contend with university-wide funding cuts that in the past decade have led to a 30 per cent reduction in library staff.

In the 2003-04 academic year, UTL’s total acquisition budget was $25 million, of which about half was spent on scholarly journals. Because some members of the university community prefer the print format, while others request electronic, UTL often acquires both – frequently at a higher cost, and with the associated headache of storing all those volumes. The university recently spent $6 million on an off-site, climate-controlled preservation space, to keep two million books. “I spent 10 years seeking this facility, because we’re out of space,” says Moore. Located near U of T’s aerospace building in Downsview, the warehouse is expected to be enlarged to hold five million volumes by 2020.

As UTL attempts to secure a role for itself in the Google Age, it’s reconsidering its traditional reliance on publishers and vendors and beginning to act a little like a publisher itself. Last year, for example, the library developed T-Space, a university-wide digital repository that holds thousands of documents, including course mate-rials and unpublished scholarship that would previously have fallen outside the library’s mandate to collect. Modelled on a similar repository developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, T-Space lets students download specialized course materials and allows faculty to post papers and research findings in a public venue without first having to find a publisher.

As UTL boosts its technological capabilities, Moore likens the direction that the library is heading to a much earlier forebear – a medieval library. These institutions of the Middle Ages were not only book storehouses but places where manuscripts were rewritten and information was combined and republished in new ways, she says.

As for Rev. Craig, who has watched the world of print expand into the broader possibilities of digital texts, the library has become an even more stimulating place to be. Writing a dissertation is still not easy, but he says that research “is a lot more fun” when the wealth of the world’s knowledge is at your fingertips.

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Dreaming in Kodachrome · Jan 7, 12:47 PM

Given the rapid rate of digital camera adoption,¹ photographic film will this year edge closer to the abyss that swallowed rotary telephones and Edison Wax Cylinders. I already feel a sort of anticipatory nostalgia for the happy colours of film packaging, those little plastic canisters that serve no useful purpose and the folded sheets of exposure advice that no one ever read.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not so much of a crank that I think digital photography is a bad idea. Eventually I’ll succumb to the enticements of instantaneous results and developing without tears. It’s just that, for me, the pleasure of photography comes only partly in the exposing of decent frames; the other part is the stuff—flash cords, screw-on filters, a good supply of film in the fridge—that are part of the largesse of one’s hobby. Film photography is about materiel, and the satisfyingly physical act of admitting light through a shutter to expose an emulsion that is immersed in a chemical bath. Film is also about using a physical medium to cheat time and decay, a gentlemanly contest of chemistry and good care versus the time-wearing effects of light and heat.

Such a contest is rendered moot by digitization—in theory at least. Yet compact disc manufacturers typically peg the lifespan of a CD—the most typical storage medium for digital photos—at about 100 years. That, give or take, is about the same longevity ascribed to one of the best photographic films ever produced: Kodachrome slides.

When Charles W. Cushman started taking slide photographs in the late 1930s, he settled for nothing less. As a result, the Charles W. Cushman Photography Collection captures an astonishing record of one American’s life over 30 years. Here are street scenes from 60 years ago preserved in such vivid colours that the intervening period falls away: the past is now.

An Indianan whose varied career included work as an editor, statistician, businessman and civil servant, Cushman was an obsessive documentarian, and the collection—some 14,500 slides taken between 1938 and 1969—is wonderfully catalogued. It’s easy to spend hours browsing by a myriad of subjects—clothing, locations, activities—or choosing a year and following Cushman’s photographic decisions frame by frame, and roll by roll.

There are many beautiful pictures—try this or this—not the least because they look as though they were taken yesterday. There are also many that are kind of pedestrian, poorly exposed or both. But his less-than-stellar work just makes the collection all the more charming—and valuable as a complete archive. Cushman knew he had talent, but also wasn’t afraid to show his warts when he donated all of his photos and his camera equipment to the University of Indiana at Bloomington upon his death in 1972. (The university’s library digitized the collection and launched a web site in 2003.)

Cushman’s photos say: don’t discount the old stuff. There were miracles of permanency preserved on film, just as (with luck) today’s digital photos should promote fascination and curiosity a century—or more—from now.

¹The research firm IDC predicts that there will be more prints made from digital images than from film in 2006, and digital prints will account for over 70 percent of all prints by 2008.

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Very local history · Dec 23, 11:10 PM

In the early 1980s, my wife’s parents bought some land—200 acres in Osprey township, Grey County, in the Province of Ontario. On a current road map the place is indistinguishable, situated on an unmarked concession road somewhere southeast of the tiny village of Singhampton. But in the Grey County supplement in the Illustrated Atlas of the Dominion of Canada (Toronto: H. Belden & Co., 1880), the farm stands with its neighbours in the emphatic network of surveyed lots, and Singhampton to the northeast is a budding metropolis.

In its day, a county atlas worked much the same way as the white pages and yellow pages do now. Post offices, churches and taverns were duly noted in their places, and if a lot was farmed, its owner’s name was engraved right on his land. Even more informative, however, was the ever-handy county gazeteer, which advertised local businesses, listed the names and occupations of prominent folk and included a travel guide noting the quality of the roads, the soil and the local watering holes:

From the village of Flesherton it is three or four miles to the next tavern (T. Munshaw’s), then another mile and a half to Miller’s tavern; and about 3m. farther to the village of Maxwell in Osprey. We are now going East through the centre of Osprey, in a beautiful and level country, 3 or 4 mi. North of the real “Durham Road.” There is one Hotel at Maxwell, new and commodious. Frem thence we go about 7 m. East on a straight and beautiful road, to the County Line of Simcoe. We are now in sight of Singhampton, and only 1/2 m. S. of it. We turn North on the County line, put up comfortably at Singhampton, and when we go on again toward Bowmore and Collingwood Harbour (the latter 13 m. from Singhampton), we find we are out of the County of Grey, and have lost our Gravel Road.
—William Wye Smith, Gazetteer and Directory of the County of Grey for 1865-6, p. 73.

Two digital collections have done the exceedingly valuable service of digitizing rare and out-of-print county atlases and local histories, helping to re-vivify the era of homesteads and pioneers. A cooperative venture between the universities of Calgary and Laval, Our roots has digitized several thousand accounts of the birth of towns, villages and regions across Canada. Many of these rare books were prepared lovingly by amateur historians, printed locally and most are now impossible to find. And a McGill University project, In Search of Your Canadian Past: The Canadian County Atlas Digital Project has digitized 43 county atlases prepared between 1874 and 1881, covering counties in the Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes. Names mentioned on the maps are included in a searchable database, a boon for genealogists. The maps themselves have been scanned at high resolution, and although they take a while to load, the details are sharp.

Oh, and my wife’s parents’ farm is here.

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When the government had its hands in the art of the nation · Dec 23, 02:15 PM

If you’ve seen Cradle Will Rock you will have encountered the Work Projects Administration, a key component of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Like the Federal Theatre Program depicted in the movie, the Federal Art Program put creative types to work on projects to encourage civic renewal. In 2000, the Library of Congress’s American Memory project launched a digital collection of 908 colour posters from that program. The collection is featured in this month’s D-Lib Magazine.

Many of the posters are stunningly beautiful, and well worth taking some time to browse. The collection represents a lost era of civic engagement, and a unique period in American graphic design.

Starting today, I’ll be gradually compiling an annotated list of some of my favourite digital library collections, many of them showcased in D-Lib Magazine. At the same time, I’ll make an index so they can be located easily. There are many fantastic resources out there, but they’re maddeningly difficult to find amongst all the chaff.

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