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THE LAWTON DIGITAL ARCHIVE: PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTATIONRACHEL R. RESNICK, MS; KAREN C. KOHN, MS; AMANDA J. LEHNING, MSS; NICOLE SNYDER, MS; ARTHUR SHUM, MS

POLISHER RESEARCH INSTITUTE, ARCADIA UNIVERSITY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-BERKELEY, POLISHER RESEARCH INSTITUTE

This poster describes two projects: the first, a digitization planning project to identify unpublished documents of M. Powell Lawton, Ph.D. that may contain relevant gerontological research material; and to learn how to create a digital archive to make the documents accessible. The second, a digitization project to create the archive, publicize and evaluate it.

Individuals familiar with Dr. Lawton's work (co-investigators, co-authors, co-editors, colleagues, etc.) were surveyed regarding whether they would be interested in obtaining access to Dr. Lawton's unpublished documents; to learn what types of documents would be of interest, how respondents would like to access them, what they would do with them, and how they would like to learn about the archive when it became available.

Project staff investigated aspects of digitization, including metadata creation, technical details of scanning, information about scanners and relevant software, etc.; and compared outsourcing versus in-house production costs.

Project staff examined the documents to determine which types lent themselves most easily to digitization.

Five survey respondents served as document reviewers; they read the set of documents identified by the investigators and recommended those that they thought should be digitized.

With the second LSTA grant, we purchased the hardware and software needed and scanned the documents.

This poster is part of the publicity plan for the archive.

We are indebted to our document reviewers: Maggie Calkins, Laura Gitlin, Patricia Parmelee, Philip Sloane, and Jeanne Teresi. We are also grateful for the support of Polisher Research Institute senior researchers and staff, and the Abramson Center for Jewish Life. Lastly, we are grateful for our funding: these projects were partially funded with two sets of federal Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) funds administered by the Pennsylvania Office of Commonwealth Libraries.

LOGO

At the time of his death in 2001, Dr. Lawton was director emeritus of Polisher Research Institute. Its first director, he grew the Institute’s reputation for pioneering research into the psychological, social, and medical aspects of aging over 40 years. He created assessment tools to measure morale, instrumental activities of daily living, affect, emotion and other facets of aging. His body of work includes more than 100 books that he wrote, edited or contributed to, and more than 100 professional journal articles. He received many awards from professional societies and universities, and often presented at conferences. He served as President of the Gerontological Society of America. He served as editor-in-chief, on editorial boards and as a reviewer for several gerontology journals. He also served the national government as a peer reviewer for research studies. He was principal investigator of nearly 30 studies dealing with housing, mental health and quality of life for the elderly, and the principles he developed in his studies in environmental psychology influenced design innovations in nursing homes, special dementia units, and community-based programs all over the world.

The Library of Polisher Research Institute (established in 1959) holds one of the largest gerontological collections in the country, supporting research about the aged and the aging process, long-term care administration, aging healthcare policy, Medicare and Medicaid, death and dying, and aging populations outside of the United States. The collection also includes materials dealing with the anthropological issues of aging, environmental design and housing for the elderly, marketing to the senior population, depiction of the aged in the mass media, social work and the aged, Alzheimer’s disease, and caregiver issues.

A cursory inventory of materials left in Dr. Lawton’s filing cabinets after his death revealed information about articles, chapters, scales and surveys, manuals and reports; correspondence to colleagues, professional societies, and editors; and presentations he made at professional conferences. These documents--unpublished, uncataloged, unorganized--remain inaccessible to researchers. Other documents in the cabinets include programs, brochures, minutes and agendas from professional meetings, which may also have historical value to researchers in psychology, gerontology and the history of medicine.

With digitization, we can not only preserve the content of these documents, but make them available to researchers.

OBJECTIVES

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT

METHODOLOGY

RESULTS

CONCLUSIONS

DISCUSSION: TECHNICAL ASPECTS

Scanner: MICROTEK LAB ScanMaker i700 Scanner with a document feeder. Includes Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Computer: Dell Dimension 4700 desktop computer with 19” UltraSharp 1905FP Digital Flat Panel monitor.

Software: Microtek ScanWizard (software included with the scanner), Adobe Acrobat Professional, CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management Software with OCR Extension, TiffSplitter (shareware).

Metadata: Dublin Core--a universal standard, easily learned and can accommodate modification.

Storage: Iomega 80GB external hard drive; Delkin Devices Archival Gold 700MB CD-Rs; Kingston 4GB portable flash drives.

Scanning issues: Most documents were scanned using the paper feeder as black-and-white text documents. Fragile documents were scanned using the flatbed. Documents yellowed with age or that had handwriting on them were scanned as grayscale so that the text and markings would show up more clearly. Contrast and/or brightness of these scans were adjusted to maximize clarity. The documents were scanned at 600 dpi (dots per inch) into TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) files for archival preservation. CONTENTdm’s OCR Extension was used on the TIFF files to recognize text and generate searchable PDFs. Some metadata was embedded in the PDFs; a copyright statement was added and the PDFs were secured. The PDFs were uploaded to the AccessPA Digital Repository for display, and a more complete set of metadata was attached to the records.

Unexpected scanning problems: Uneven quality, such as black edges, faint black lines, uneven brightness, incorrect page size, distorted images.

• Causes: dust in the feeder, uneven paper intake, paper curling causing uneven light exposure during scanning.

• Fixes: cleaning the scanner, scanning multiple times, adjusting scanned image sizes.

Unexpected losses: staff turnover

Unexpected gifts: free hosting on the AccessPA Digital Repository; free use of CONTENTdm document and metadata management software.

Thirty-four of 132 surveys were returned. Respondents were interested in scales and related documents, unpublished articles and chapters, texts of presentations presented at professional meetings. They preferred to read them online or print them from a website.

These types of documents were then reviewed by our staff as to context regarding date created, earlier or later versions, relationship to other documents, certainty of provenance, etc. We determined that the 33 texts of conference presentations should be evaluated for digitization.

After consideration by the document reviewers, 15 presentations were selected. The reviewers determined that these documents sufficiently add to the knowledge base that they merit formal publication. The investigators were able to put these documents into the context of Dr. Lawton’s body of work and identify when and where the information was originally presented.

The archive is available at http://www.accesspadr.org; a survey about the archive will be available through October 2007 on http://www.surveymonkey.com.

The survey will examine various aspects of the website, from the users’ perspective: Usability, Functionality, Reliability, Efficiency, Portability, and Maintainability (Olsina [1999] and Olsina and Rossi [1999]).