Hello from La Crosse! I’m Scott Brouwer, Archivist at the La Crosse Public Library Archives. In my position, I enjoy the many things in which I am involved, including collection processing, website management, digital content management, research assistance, media consulting, local history reference, photo scanning, metadata creation, and extensive local history programming.
I would encourage any reader of this to also check out the blog post from our student intern, Jessica Behrman. The specific project she worked on with us was creating new ingestion procedures and workflows for preserving and providing access to digital-only and born-digital photographs. “Digital-only” photographs refer to the situations we increasingly face when patrons want to provide historic photos to our collection but would like to keep the originals. Up to now, we have scanned these photographs and stored them on our server, but we have not provided the same level of access to these images as we do for our traditional photo collection. “Born-digital” photographs refer to photos taken on digital cameras and transferred directly to our servers without the process of printing them first. At this time, this mostly means images that members of our staff have taken with the express intent of “donating” them to the Archives to be used as reference material for local history questions. However, we anticipate more and more digital photography donations from the public and city departments in the future, so new ingestion and preservation workflows and procedures will be critical for providing access to and preserving these digital images for the future.
While we have very good intellectual control of our digitized content – that is, a scan of a paper document or original analog photograph – because the digital structure on our server basically mirrors our physical collection, we do not have the same level of intellectual control of our “born-digital” and “digital-only” content. In this case, intellectual control includes:
- Gathering administrative metadata such as the donor, acquisition date, and rights management information
- Gathering content metadata such as information about the people or places in the pictures, the photographer, or important context for the pictures
- Providing a description of the collection using our content management system to create finding aids that conveniently live on our full-text searchable website
- Providing a final disposition for the files that both meets our digital preservation needs but also allows for easy access by staff
- Being able to provide access to the materials to the public upon request
Improving intellectual control of this content included creation of a new collection umbrella called Community Photographs. This new formal collection will be incorporated into our holdings seamlessly, but will also stand alone as a browse-able collection of potentially broader community interest than say, city department staff meeting minutes or a local business’ financial records. Ultimately, some of these new Community Photographs collections will be priority content made available online on a digital content platform in the near-to-mid future.
— Posted by Scott Brouwer, Archivist, La Crosse Public Library Archives
Curating Community Digital Collections is supported by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, #RE-85-17-0127-17.
