Baton Rouge Digital Obituaries

Dominic Bordelon and Adam St.Pierre

Introduction Based upon The Advocate Obituary

Index

Obtained obituaries from microfilm to make full-text searchable records

Could be expounded upon for genealogical researchers

Organization Content is structured around the

image of the obituary itself with relevant metadataoMetadata with Dublin Core Elements• Title (Matching the title of the obituary)• Subject (subject of the obituary including birth

and death dates)• Date (of printing)• Description (full-text of obituary)• Format (image file format)

Digitization A Scanpro 2000 was utilized for PDF

creation from microfilm reels• OCR was not available with the Scanpro

software

Scanpro allowed for some contrast, brightness, and grayscale adjustment

Digitization PDF files were

imported to Photoshop for careful adjustment

Access images were created at 72 ppi as JPEGs

CONTENTdm JPEGs were put into the Project Client

and DC metadata was added

Our planned refinements of the date and relation properties were not allowed despite the possibility of adding fields

Finished Product

Copyright Issues For the purpose of this project

sources contacted stated this was fair use

Many of the obituaries are now defunct

If EBRPL decides to continue this project however a lawyer must be contacted

Conclusion We gained a practical understanding

of the a digitization project

Coped with technical and copyright issues

And provided a path for the continuation of this digitization effort