My name is Bethany Huse, Librarian and Head of Special Collections at the College of Menominee Nation (CMN) S. Verna Fowler Academic Library/Menominee Public Library. I had the honor of participating in Curating Community Digital Collections (CCDC) for a second time in 2019. Our Library is unique in that it is a tribal, academic, and public Library. We focus on meeting the needs of the tribal members, college students, staff, and faculty, as well as the community of the Menominee County.
Our Special Collections hosts materials from the community and the Menominee history. Recently, we’ve received requests for digital copies of Native American children’s stories and legends. With this in mind, Special Collections began to digitize various books of legends and stories. This digitization was motivated by patron request and, unfortunately, occurred without a solid workflow in place for digitizing materials. These files were saved and shared without considering metadata or preservation standards. Thankfully, CCDC 2019 came along just in time to tackle this issue! The CMN Library was happy to join the program and welcome Dani Fulwiler, a graduate student from UW-Madison’s iSchool, as this summer’s intern.
Dani worked on a variety of tasks throughout the summer. Notably, she continued working on the digital preservation policies and workflow that was started during last year’s CCDC project. This included creating a new document using last year’s research as well as new research and processes specifically for current and future Library staff. Dani also worked on metadata for digitized materials and researched various topics on preservation and how it would work implemented at CMN. The metadata project included digitized Native American children’s books, the College’s Sustainable Development Institute historical documents and additional content from our “regular” digital item inventory.
Thanks to the CCDC program, CMN received a Color Target which will help us to better scan items and ensure color preservation in scans from documents and photographs in our Special Collections. Dani worked with our CCDC mentor, Jesse Henderson, the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center’s Digital Library Services Planning & Production Manager, to choose and research a color target that would best meet the needs of the College of Menominee Nation’s Special Collections.
I truly enjoyed working with the CCDC program and look forward to implementing the digital preservation strategies, processes, and standards into our regular workflow at the College of Menominee Nation S. Verna Fowler Academic Library/Menominee Public Library.
The S. Verna Fowler Academic Library/Menominee Public Library is a joint venture between the College of Menominee Nation, the Menominee Tribe, and Menominee County. Through this partnership, the Library is able to provide a variety of programs and services to meet the needs of the various populations represented by each. The library also serves people from neighboring communities.
Visit Curating Community Digital Collections for more information about this project. This project is made possible by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, #RE-85-17-0127-17
