A River Runs Through It: The Arizona v. California

Digitization ProjectSWALL Annual Meeting

March 22, 2014

Erik Beck, Karen Selden & Jane Thompson

The Arizona v. California Litigation (1952-1963)

Graphic by Caleb Trantow

Project: The Inspiration

• The serendipitous conversation at law school commencement (May 2012)

CLYDE MARTZ SUMMER CONFERENCE, August 15-16, 2013Arizona v. California at 50: The Legacy and Future of Governance, Reserved Rights, and Water Transfers

Project: Revisiting the Stacks

• The Arizona v. California volumes (33 v.)

Project: Our Questions

• When and from whom did we acquire these documents?

• What organizational scheme was employed to group and bind them, and does it make sense?

• Do we have a complete collection?• Do our print holdings overlap significantly

with other libraries?• Has another library digitized them and, if

not, who would be interested in them?• How much time would it take to create a

digital archive?

Project: An Exciting Discovery

Project: The Team

Project: The Process

Due Diligence

ElectronicBookplate

Metadata

Scanning/Ingestion

Landing Page & Interviews

Demo & Publicity

Project: Cover Sheets

Project: The Role of Researchers (June/July 2013)

Professors Jason Robison & Larry MacDonnellJason A. Robison & Lawrence J. MacDonnell, Arizona v. California & the Colorado River Compact: Fifty Years Ago, Fifty Years Ahead, 4 ARIZ. J. ENVTL. L. & POL’Y (forthcoming 2014).

Project: Identify Needed Content and Place ILL Requests

Appendix 1Special Master’s

Draft ReportMay 5, 1960

Project: Identify Needed Content and Place ILL Requests (cont’d)

• Libraries who lent us materials or made scans:

• Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library, James E. Rogers College of Law, University of Arizona

• Special Collections at the University of Arizona Libraries• John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, California State

University, Los Angeles• Hugh & Hazel Darling Law Library, UCLA School of Law• Special Collections & Archives, Water Resources

Collections, UCR Libraries, University of California, Riverside

• William M. Rains Library, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles• Wyoming State Library• The Arthur W. Diamond Law Library, Columbia Law

School• United States Department of the Interior Library

Project: What Did We Learn?

• Court documents: difficult to manage, but available for digitizing

• Team projects: rewarding and surprising• Project management: old and new

methods work• Involvement of researchers improves the

final product• Conference tie-in boosted awareness by

expert group, but more publicity is even better

Project: Publicity Plan (Asana.com)

Featured in The Water ReportCOLORADO ARCHIVE WESTARIZONA V. CALIFORNIA COLLECTION - The William A. Wise Law Library

Project: Hopes for the Future

• Improve workflow and processes for future projects

• Include our holdings in the Western Water Digital Library -http://www.westernwater.org/

• Identify and scan/collaborate re: additional content held by other libraries

• Create a hyperlinked finding aid

Metadata

Cataloging Decisions & Processes

Managing the Workflow

Metadata

Research & Retrieval Needs

Hey girl.You know I’mnot usually thejealous type…but, who is MARC?

MARC Fields• 520: Case summary

MARC Fields• 524s: Citations to brief &

to landmark case

MARC Fields• 730s: Uniform titles for:

the case; the entire collection;

sub-collections

MARC Fields• 856: Link to Digitool bib

record• 970: Electronic Bookplate

The Template

Party Copy Cataloging

Original Cataloging

Total

California 46 27 73

Arizona 25 6 31

Nevada 17 5 22

United States 11 3 14

New Mexico 8 2 10

Utah 7 7

Colorado 1 1 2

Total 121 47 168

Original Image by Julieta Felix

Digital Collections Workflow

• Step 1: Image Capture

• Step 2: Editing

• Step 3: Add to Repository

• Step 4: Incorporate Into Landing Page

Image Capture

Bookdrive Pro from Atiz

• Metal frame• LED lights and hood• Angled cradle on track• Glass guard• Cameras not included

Produced archival images between 4 and 5 megabytes in size.

Product details at http://pro.atiz.com

Irregular Artifacts

Editing

Blk&wht, text only Blk&wht, text and image Color, image or textOriginal type- text Original type- text Original type- Photo/Printed Photo

or Text-PhotoSimplex/Duplex- 2 sided Simplex/Duplex- 2 sided Simplex/Duplex- 2 sidedResolution– 200dpi Resolution – 300dpi Resolution – 300dpiFile type- PDF File type- PDF File type- PDF: multi-page,

JPEG: Single page

Density- middle setting Density- middle setting Density- middle settingColor- Black Color- Grey scale Color- Full ColorScan size - auto Scan size – auto Scan size – auto

Editing Standards

Metadata Conversion

MARC MARCxml

The Repository

Digital Collections of Colorado: http://digitool.library.colostate.edu

The Repository

Digital Collections of Colorado: http://digitool.library.colostate.edu

• Branding

• Unique Access Point

• Specialized Searching

Collection “Landing Page”

• Designed imagery for the collection (Branding)

• Hosted a page on library website with unique content about the collection.

• Special search functionalities to augment full-text searching offered through the repository.

Using Drupal

Used Drupal CMS to create additional search functionality.

Essentially had to create a second database for metadata to target specific fields for searching.

Connecting Resources

LawLibrary.Colorado.edu Digital Collections of Colorado

Connected via Hyperlink

Specialized searching of targetedfields: Year, Author, Title

Searches full text of document and more detailed metadata record.

Quality Assurance Testing

After staff review, we added the following design elements:

• Instructional text.

• Emphasis of unique text in title.

• List nodes in chronological order.

• Results Counter

• Inclusion of clear button.

Collection Usage

Regular traffic to page after initial launch with intermittent spikes.

High average time on page.

Lessons Learned

• Adobe optical character recognition insufficient for indexing documents for digital collections. Alternative options: Abbyy FineReader, Tesseract

• Creating dual interfaces produces extra work, duplicates effort.

• Faster computers are worth the investment.

Project: Searching the Collection

Project: Searching the Collection

Project: Refining Search in Repository

Project: Refining Search in Repository (cont’d)