Shoeboxes and Scanners:Digitizing Our Historical Treasures
Cory Lampert
Head, Digital [email protected]
UNLV Preservation Week, April 28, 2012
Collections in a changing world
How UNLV Libraries helps to preserve history…
How YOU can preserve your own history!
Why digitize?
• Preserve Collection Content
• Provide Access
• Transform Use
Digitization ≠ preservation … yet …
Three Phases of Digitization
•Digital Conversion
•Metadata
•Online Delivery
Why visit our collections?…• Most relevant material selected
by content experts• Scanned at high resolution for
access and use in research• Search on subject, date, location,
full text• Interact with collections• Get ideas for teaching, including
classroom activities• Get research help and assistance
The value of digital collectionsThank you for all your hard work you put
into this website. I teach 4th grade here in Las Vegas, and this site will be used frequently this next school year. Thanks again.
Helen W.I am looking for some things about my great grandmother, who lived in Tonapah for a time, and this is interesting. Thanks for putting it together.
BillieGean G
Exploring digital history
• Historic Landscape of Nevada
• Menus: The Art of Dining
• Southern Nevada: The Boomtown Years
• The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project
• Showgirls
• Historic Maps
• Welcome Home, Howard!
Tell us what you think!!
Personal Archiving and Technology Obsolescence
We’ve got all that stuff in a shoebox in the attic!
Back in the days of floppy disks?
The only person that knows is probably Grandma!
As soon as I get a chance I’m going to organize all these family photos!
I don’t know, the computer just crashed!
Should you think about personal archiving?
• Do you have family photos lying around unorganized in a shoebox?
• Are items fading or damaged?
• Would you like to get family memories recorded?
• Have you put off downloading vacation pictures off your camera?
• Have you ever lost an important file because your computer crashed?
• Organize and prep materials for scanning
• Make technical decisions
• Scan once (high resolution)
• Save with meaningful name
• Capture annotations and descriptions, if possible
• Document what you did
• Make copies
Photos - Tips
Documents - Tips
• Locate and consolidate
• Versions of documents
• File formats and software
• Give meaningful file names
• Email? Websites?
• Make multiple copies
Other formatsVideo files
• Gather
• Name
• Transfer analog
• Consider format
• Consider copyright
• Software: MovieMaker (Microsoft) or iMovie (Apple)
• Tips: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/documents/video-transfer.pdf
Audio files
• Gather
• Name
• Transfer analog
• Consider format
• Consider copyright
• Audacity free software: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
• Tips: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/documents/PA_Audio.pdf
STORAGE SPACE!!!
A Word About Storage
• Devices and synching
• Multiple copies
• Multiple locations
• The Cloud vs. local
• Use a naming convention
• Develop a routine
Digital and Beyond: Sharing and Crowdsourcing
• Social sites (Flickr, Facebook)
• Education and sites like Wikipedia
• Local history organizations
• Libraries and archives
Citizen Archivists / National Archives: http://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/
Save Your Stuff!!: Library of Congress Personal Archiving Kit
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/padKit/handouts.html
Handouts available on table
Digital collections demo to follow presentation
Thank You!
Cory Lampert
Head, Digital Collections
UNLV [email protected]
http://www.digital.library.unlv.edu