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Preservation Hesitation? Just Get Started!

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Do you have a historical collection that deserves digital preservation but keep coming back to the same problems? Maybe your project is so extensive you don’t know where to start, or you simply can’t afford an archival project right now. Even if you’ve owned a collection for decades, you’ve probably noticed more recent emphasis on the importance of digitization. To keep your collection pristine, secure, and free from dangerous overhandling, digitization is paramount.

If you have a historical collection that needs conversion, Anderson Archival’s advice is this: just get started!

Outsourcing Is an Option

Outsourcing the digitization takes a lot of pressure off you. While the archival company you choose needs to have your vision in mind, the day-to-day tasks are off your plate and entrusted to experts. Digitizing a project in-house is often an organization’s first thought, but there are many reasons this isn’t sustainable.

Daily tasks are resource intensive and include dedicated personnel standing at a scanner and turning the pages of a book in an expensive cradle scanner. Each page must be monitored for poor-quality images and followed up with a multitude of post-processing work. This is a full-time task for employees who normally have other responsibilities.  Often, the project gets delayed. Inevitably, immediate tasks need to be fulfilled, and scanning gets pushed lower on the priority list. Outsourcing gets the job done in a timely manner with little or no burden added to your employees’ responsibilities. Before you consider bringing someone new in to do this work, remember taking on a new hire comes with its own long-term overhead costs, and having an intern perform scanning often means inexperienced hands on fragile and irreplaceable materials.

By sending your documents to a trusted archival company, your organization is freed from laboring over a game plan.

Archivists guide you through each step of the project using their expertise and experience. They’re happy to answer any questions, ask you pertinent questions you may not have considered, and get you started on the right foot.

In all likelihood, outsourcing your archival project provides better quality results as well. Archival companies are equipped with enterprise-grade scanners, software, organizational techniques, and the experienced archivists needed to put those tools to good use. Adding features to your project such as searchability through optical character recognition (OCR) and metadata will move your search to the next level in terms of speed and accuracy.

How can you get started right now? Evaluate your needs—but keep it simple because the heavy lift is for your archival team. How are your documents stored or organized? What would you like to be able to do with them? Which items are the top priority? Talk with your archival company and just start! They’ll guide you through the process.

Budget Wise? You Bet.

When choosing an archival company to kick off your digitization project, look for one that doesn’t require a massive price tag up front. Experienced archival companies provide the option of a metered approach to balance timely completion of a project with a client’s budget.

In this process, you prioritize what you need archived and divide the project into phases with a focus on what your budget can handle or what a board will approve. For instance, a project can be planned out to take two years to complete with each phase delivering you a portion of the collection. You will pay smaller fees monthly while also enjoying measurable deliverables throughout the process. You’ll be able to start using your archives right away. Don’t let budgetary concerns halt your progress or steer you to a poor-quality solution.

Another option that can help pay for digitization is monetization, but this only works if the documents are of wide public interest. In this case, the documents are displayed in an online collection, and the public (or libraries or schools) pays for subscriptions or printing rights. This allows your organization or company to make money off the project as documents are made available to users online.

There are many ways to get started, so if you have a vision for your project, don’t be too worried about what you should do first. Give your archival company a call, and they’ll guide you and get your project started!

 

Anderson Archival is an archival company that listens to your needs, takes the lead, and offers assistance every step of the way. If you’d like to hear more about what makes Anderson Archival different, give us a call at 314.259.1900 or email us at info@andersonarchival.com today!

A Gift to the Future: 3 Goals of Digital Heritage and the Archives Showcasing Them

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Why are collectors, organizations, and institutions bringing their collections into the digital age? What makes the effort and cost of digital conservation worthwhile?

As users, we can’t know the primary driving force behind the digitization of some of the most impactful collections on the internet, but at Anderson Archival, we’ve seen countless motivations for digitization. One common element is that the stewards of these collections want to bestow a gift on the digital landscape: the gift of preservation, the gift of a better future through learning and inspiration, the gift of accessibility.

New to digital libraries? Read more about digital collections and the Anderson Archival difference.

Here is a sampling of successful digital archives that showcase these three goals for digitization.

  1. Documenting and Preserving a Lost History

For some collections without a digital presence, the cultures, histories, and movements they represent may be lost in the event of a disaster. Those interested in historical preservation know that history is relevant for both today and tomorrow. Digital collections that preserve a little-known or previously lost history fill in gaps left by traditional education, inviting readers and viewers to explore and learn.

  • Early Americas Digital Archive offers rare and out-of-print texts, written in and about the early Americas as full-text documents checked against originals. This text is easy to search, read, and reference.
  • RomArchive is populated with highly curated sub-collections and journeys of thought that explore how the Roma people are represented in European history and culture, where gaps in coverage lie and affect public perception, and offer strategies for combating this skewed absence.
  • Virtual First Ohioans, a sub-collection of Ohio History Connection, invites visitors to take a tour through this native history of Ohio, starting with the archeological process involved in modern re-discovery and preservation, and journeys through time with descriptive visuals. Clicking through the section acts as a virtual museum showcasing these ancient peoples.
  • The Library of Congress’ Mapping the National Parks collection tracks the history of lands that visitors may take for granted.
  • The Digital Library of the Middle East provides a vital resource to a region often divided by conflict, preserving documents digitally because the physical originals are often sold on the black market or destroyed.

These collections and archives could have remained behind closed doors, in drawers, in museums, or even destroyed, but curators identified a need to not only preserve but to share their contents with the world.

  1. Sharing History to Change the Future for the Better

Many collection owners believe that the material in their possession has the power to educate, enlighten, and change the world for the better. In some cases, documents present underheard worldviews or religious beliefs, while others highlight periods of historical upheaval, from which many lessons may be learned. For these curators and collectors, making the words, photos, or other historical materials available to the general public is deeply important.

  • The Pearl Digital Collections of the Presbyterian Historical Society comprise the oldest denominational archives in the United States. Primary source documentation of Japanese-American internment during World War II, tied to the denomination through mission work in the camps, is just one example of a piece of history that still resonates today.
  • Another highly-curated digital museum is the digital offerings of United States Holocaust Museum. The site covers brutal historical events with honesty, providing photographic and written record for a thoughtful tour or in-depth research.
  • The Peace Database collections of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum serve a similar purpose. Though the digital archive hasn’t been updated since 2016, the site stands as memorial and marker of a horrific event.

These collections have the potential to make a profound change in the thinking of modern readers, and digitization has made them available to anyone.

  1. Giving the Gift of Accessibility

Digitization offers incredible freedom: researchers and other users no longer must travel to a single location and request limited time in a temperature-controlled room with just a copier to aid their memory. Research (and search in general) is far easier when done digitally, where a single keyword puts the user just a click away from the title, page, and paragraph they want to find.

  • The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation brings historical artifacts to users who can’t make the trip to Michigan. Their digital collections mimic walking through a museum by browsing through Expert Sets or the back room of a research library through their advanced search.
  • The New York Public Library’s Digital Collections are stunning in scope and content. Containing material that users might not have even known existed, NYPL makes these collections easy to browse and search, like this collection of The Black Experience in Children’s Books. While not every item in these collections is fully text searchable, NYPL makes discovery easy.
  • The Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan continues to grow its collection, moving forward with the belief that the content it provides is valuable and that digitization offers unparalleled search for its users.
  • The Internet Archive is possibly the longest-running and most comprehensive archive currently online. Founded on the ideal of “Universal Access to All Knowledge,” the Internet Archive has been in the news recently for linking Wikipedia-cited passages to digitized materials, stressing the importance of using digitization as a tool for verification.

Being able to access materials like these from anywhere in the world is a gift to this century. This massive amount of data is now accessible and at the fingertips of anyone in the world.

 

When all is said and done, the deciding factor to digitize may come down to the simple fact that the world is going digital. Don’t let your collection be left behind or forgotten.

Contact Anderson Archival by phone (314.259.1900), email, or our contact form today for a free consultation regarding the digitization of your collection, regardless of your goal for going digital.

Quotables: Digital Archives (Grit Daily)

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Principal Farica Chang shared the importance of digitizing your “docs and pics” with Grit Daily.

While you might not have an original draft of the Declaration of Independence lying around, your collection—whether it contains historical newspapers or your grandparents’ letters from the war—has value to you and to the future.

Read the full article on their website:

https://gritdaily.com/this-supernerd-might-be-on-to-something-with-digital-archives-for-your-stuff/

Do you have a historical document collection that you’d like to make more accessible, relevant, and impactful? Anderson Archival uses proprietary methods to digitize collections so they are easily searchable, ultimately accessible, and even more meaningful to a wide audience. Let us help you preserve your legacy today! Give us a call at 314.259.1900 or email us at info@andersonarchival.com.

What are Quotables? This is a category in our posts to highlight any professional publications that benefit from our expert archivist experience and quote us in articles for their readers. 

generate revenue with monetization

Generate Revenue from Your Online Collection

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Is the perceived cost of digitally archiving your collection making you hesitant to move forward with an important project? Monetizing archival collections may be the answer!

Monetizing an archival collection involves electronically transforming the collection in a way that allows people to access it online for a fee. You use the digital collection to provide revenue to your organization, so the project helps pay for itself while allowing users to access what they need from the archives. TIME, Harper’s Weekly, Vanity Fair, and other magazines are transforming their historical collections in this way.

To monetize, your digitized collection needs to be available online. This has many benefits, including a variety of options for display and customization. With an online interface, the documents are beautifully preserved, interactive, and searchable.

Optical character recognition (OCR) creates document searchability, which is a prime benefit of digitization. Being able to search the full text—especially when there are thousands of documents in a database—can be life-changing for researchers. OCR takes digitizing to a new level, but it does require more time and resources for the digitization process. However, doing the project right the first time with quality and precision means your collection will be preserved long term and it could fund itself.

Anyone thinking about archiving their collection usually has a vision of what they want it to look like on-screen, but a limited budget could cripple the effort to make a well-preserved collection shareable with the world.

What Does Monetizing Look Like?

Say your organization has a website with a newsletter that averages one million subscribers. If 1% of those subscribers were willing to pay for enhanced archival access at $1/month, your collection would generate $120,000 annually. Engaging 4% of your subscribers would result in almost half a million dollars in revenue. If just a fraction of your current constituency engages with your digitized collection, the results could be substantial.

The key is strategically marketing subscriptions to users and organizations that will directly benefit from your collection. Think of the potential users. Do you have subscribers already, users accessing or already paying for access to a printed or digital newsletter? Current print and email subscribers might be attracted to the ability to access a digital collection for more robust study of their interest. Libraries, schools, archives, research centers, museums, and organizations specializing in the field of your collection would also be promising candidates.

It is important to consider where the paywall is placed. What materials, if any, are accessible for free, and what materials or functions are available only for a fee? Do you want all users to have to pay for the services (hard paywall), or do you want to grant users limited access to the documents and pay a subscription for full access or for specific functions (metered paywall)? Maybe you’d prefer to make the collection only available to members. The paywall’s location and function are dynamic, as customizable as the way your collection will be displayed, and can be adjusted based on specific users or specific materials.

Read more about custom software development – built for your collection!

Working Within Your Budget

Archival companies work with organizations that have a broad range of budgetary needs and considerations, including nonprofits, so the one you choose should understand the monetary considerations of archiving a large collection. Strong communication throughout the bid process is essential to make sure your exact budget needs are met. For example, the collection could be divided into sections so completed sections of the collection can be made available to users while another section is being digitized. In this example, project managers would work with you to determine an annual budget, prioritize your documents, and begin the digitization process for the first set. Once those are online and users are subscribing, you’ll have more resources for the next set of documents.

When digitizing your collection, remember that the cost is an investment in doing the project right the first time. Your archival company should balance budget requirements with providing a quality end product and thoroughly explore revenue-generating potential. Don’t sacrifice quality or your dream of a digital collection because of your budget.

Is monetizing your collection something you’d like learn more about? Contact us today at 314.259.1900 or info@andersonarchival.com.

Quotables: Q&A: Mark Anderson on how organizations can preserve their historical documents

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Co-founder of Anderson Archival Mark Anderson recently interviewed with Karen Dybis of Corp! Magazine.

All organizations, whether they are families, nonprofit groups, or businesses, have documents that are important in telling their story. These historically valuable papers should be preserved—but what are the best ways to do it?…

“Every business has a story to tell,” Anderson says.

Corp! Magazine provides “excellence in reporting important economic, growth, trend information, and resources” to businesses. Dybis’ interview with Anderson delves into the reasons why an organization or business should preserve their history by preserving their documents.

Click to read the article at Corp!

Do you have a historical document collection that you’d like to make more accessible, relevant, and impactful? Anderson Archival uses proprietary methods to digitize collections so they are easily searchable, ultimately accessible, and even more meaningful to a wide audience. Let us help you today! Give us a call at 314.259.1900 or email us at info@andersonarchival.com.

What are Quotables? This is a category in our posts to highlight any professional publications that benefit from our expert archivist experience and quote us in articles for their readers. 

Transcription from the Crowd: Three Success Stories

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The cost of paying for expert text recognition, proofreading, and quality assurance do not need to be prohibitory barriers to the completion of a digital library, recent stories show.

Projects ranging from preserving digital records of the stars to documenting the civil rights and suffrage movements have employed volunteers to transcribe historical documents. Whether dedicated researchers with a vested interest in the final product or a stranger offering a moment of time and effort, volunteer transcribers provide an essential service that ensures collections are accessible and searchable without a huge price tag.

Crowdsourcing volunteers is not new, not even for transcription work. Since 2012, the National Archives’ Citizen Archivist program has utilized a nearly unlimited workforce of internet users to transcribe historical documents, add metadata tags, and review changes made by other volunteers.

Part of what Anderson Archival offers is the integrity of treating your collection as our own – and for some collections, crowdsourcing the text recognition process can be an incredible solution to a lack of funding, or desire to involve the public.

Three such crowdsourced digitization and transcription projects already prove the capabilities of a large group of volunteers.

Involving specially-trained volunteers in some cases or strangers around the world also directly ties the public to the welfare of the collection.

Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard (DASCH)

Not long ago, Anderson Archival wrote about the digitization of this spectacular collection. Since 2014, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has asked digital volunteers for help transcribing material related to Harvard observatory’s glass plates. This collection, known as Project PHaEDRA, includes logbooks and findings related to the DASCH glass plates analyzed by notable women in science history, such as Williamina Fleming, Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, and Antonia Maura.

Transcription will allow the collection to be fully text-searchable and provides crucial contextual data about the 500,000 glass plate photographs of the night sky taken from 1885 to 1992. Without transcription of these data sets, accurate digital modeling of the scanned plates is not possible.

The collection of glass plates along with notebooks of findings will provide an incredible look at the history of our sky and of astronomy.

#TranscribeBond with University of Virginia

In August of 2018, and again in 2019, residents of Charlottesville, the University of Virginia, and digital volunteers met for a “transcribe-a-thon” of civil rights activist Julian Bond’s writings. Previously, the papers were available only to students in person at the university library, but digitization efforts aim to make this collection available online.

Transcription efforts for this collection are ongoing. Digital volunteers can join the work at From the Page. At the time of this posting, more than three thousand of the 7,797 pages of Bond’s writings are transcribed.

The Library of Congress: By the People

The Library of Congress’ By the People project proves that a few minutes of your time can impact future historical research and reference. By the People was launched in 2018, and collections relating to Abraham Lincoln, women’s suffrage, and the Civil War continue to be featured.

The digitization and transcription of these collections mean that countless pages will be available digitally and fully searchable for the first time, ensuring that the history they contain is accessible to all.

For volunteers fascinated with history, By the People has enough variety to keep anyone entertained and learning while they transcribe.

Crowdsourcing Saves Costs and Enriches the World

A solution like one of these might be possible for your collection. The cost of expert handwriting transcription, proofreading, and quality assurance may feel too high for some collection owners. A volunteer workforce can save money when this is the case!

Involving specially-trained volunteers in some cases or strangers around the world also directly ties the public to the welfare of the collection.

Crowdsourcing does have its downsides. As illustrated by the three examples above, even with millions of potential volunteers, the time taken to process documents greatly increases. In addition, a digital transcription framework may need to be purchased or developed. If a digitization project has limits on timeframe, or if leaving the accuracy of your collection to the public is a concern, crowdsourcing may not be right for you.

As with any project involving the public, your success may vary, and this is something to consider in the planning process, but crowdsourcing transcription provides an interesting alternative to the traditional model.

 

Anderson Archival provides all aspects of historical document digitization, including expert transcription, proofreading, and quality assurance. Are you looking for a digitization company that will treat your collection as their own? Contact Anderson Archival today.

use cases venn diagram

Who Will Use This Collection and How? All About Use Cases

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Use cases. It’s simply a term for capturing the functional requirements of a digital library. Each use case is written from the user’s perspective, defining who they are and how they want and expect to use the digital collection.

Understanding use cases is essential for determining how a collection will be best delivered, and what functionality needs to be built in.

Let’s imagine a collector owns a Sears, Roebuck, and Co. personal library of catalogues* that spans nearly 75 years, and they want to digitize it. Right now, they’re the only person using it in their study of American history to provide the cultural context of what people were buying, using, and interested in at particular points in time.

Currently, the magazines in the collection are physically arranged by date—this is how the collector imagines they will organize the collection digitally. They have already done a lot of physical work to categorize the collection, including making notes of what is in which volume.

The collector wants to make their collection of catalogues available to other historians, schools, and individuals, so they decide to employ a technical archival company to help develop the digitized collection and figure out the best way to showcase it.

When the collector talks to an archival company, one of the questions a digital archivist asks is, “What are your use cases?”

In other words, who will use this collection? In this imagined case of a digitized Sears catalogue collection, the collector works with the archival company to make estimations of these categories of users:

  • Historians and collectors
  • Students
  • Librarians and researchers
  • Historical Fiction Writers

Next, a sample of potential users should be interviewed about how they would like to use this collection. It’s important to talk to users directly because the quality of requirements will be better if they come directly from the users. Assuming how a group would utilize the collection could mean missing something crucial.

Read more about how Anderson Archival builds digital collections!

Discovering the use cases for these specific groups will help determine how the collection will operate, how it will appear, and how it will be accessed.

The first interview is with a researcher of Western Expansion. She wants to do specific research on the homes available for purchase in the catalogue. She plans to compare the results found in this collection to others she has found in scholarly work. She mentions that she would like to use search to narrow results by date, model number or name of the house, and price range. She wants to be able to search for exact phrases found in scholarly work, to verify that it appears in the collection.

The second interview is with a university student. He informs the interviewer that he does much of his electronic research on his phone. He mentions that he usually sends interesting articles or pictures to himself to later reference.

And the interview process continues.

The collection will need to accommodate the needs of all of these interviewees. Some key points of the interview findings might look something like this:

Historians and collectorsNeed a way to save pertinent documents or quotes easily. Want the ability to print historically accurate pages.
StudentsWant a fast, accurate search of keywords, mobile access, and the ability to share pages electronically.
Librarians and researchersKnow what they are looking for and expect to be able to search dates, volumes, and issues. Want to search exact phrases and verify what they know is in the collection.
Historical fiction writersWant to page through issues to get a sense of the era and need to search by date, category, or item type.

Once interviews have concluded and use case scenarios have been compiled, a technical archival company can then recommend the best tools, and in some cases, a custom software solution for the collection.

For Anderson Archival, this step is utilized in the development process. Knowing the current and potential users of a collection helps to determine how best the digital library should be delivered. Options can be as simple as using a PDF viewer to access a private library for only a few users, to as complex as custom online software with logins.

Technology is constantly evolving. If the collector wants to invest in digitizing right the first time, the collection should be optimized for cutting-edge technology so it will easily adapt to the new and better software and hardware developed every year.

Of course, each collection will be different and have specific needs for digitization, tagging, and its interface, but the goal for anyone digitizing their collection and defining use cases is to make their collection accessible and functional for as many types of users as possible.

Here are a few more tips for building your use cases:

  • Consider how your collection is different from others. What features could this collection offer that others do not?
  • As you think about use cases, focus on users’ functional needs and not software design.
  • Often, collectors think they know how users will use the collection, but actually interviewing potential users will uncover needs for critical functionality that otherwise is likely to be lost.
  • Developing detailed use cases, taking the time to learn from users, will make the final product of your digital collection much better!

Whether you’re developing use cases for a private collection or because you want to share your collection with the world, once your collection is digitized, you’ll have peace of mind. Your digital library will be preserved for generations to come and now others will be able to interact with it easily and share it.

If you want help developing a use case for your collection, contact Anderson Archival at 314.259.1900 or email us today!

*This theoretical collection is used purely for example purposes. Sears has a portion of their catalogue available online here.

magnifying glass over stack of papers

How Do You Build Effective Search? (Hint: Metadata and Tagging!)

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Does your digitization partner know your collection?

Search results, whether too broad or broken, often reveal how well archivists know your material. Proper use of metadata and tagging, from general information to specific facets only relevant to your collection, make all the difference.

For a company like Anderson Archival, the digitization process is only the first part of your digital collection’s story. Before beginning each project, we sit down with the owners and have a series of discussions to determine why this collection needs to be preserved digitally and how researchers, readers, teachers, learners, and the casually curious will interact with the digital library.

What is a digital library?

We dig deep into use cases. Who wants to access this collection and who do you want to provide access to? How and when will the collection be accessed? Do the majority of potential users use browsers, or are they on the cutting edge of technology, wanting something to work seamlessly on desktop, tablet, and phone? Will you require a subscription for access, keeping some of the collection behind a paywall? And, most important to this step, what information should be included in metadata and tagging?

What is Tagging?

Metadata is data about the collection, such as author, date, title, section, topic, era, etc. Tagging is a technical means to mark up the collection with this metadata.

Advanced or faceted search is built upon tagging. Metadata tagging breaks documents into pieces of information that the search engine utilizes to allow the user to refine their results. For example, in a collection of periodicals, most of the metadata is already present in the text of the first pages.

page of the New York Times from 1918

If this New York Times page was part of a digital library, it would include at least three data layers:

  1. The visible image.
  2. Searchable text.
  3. Helpful metadata tags.

Where HTML tags instruct a system how to display a certain document, XML metadata tagging tells a search engine what it is looking at, and where on the page search terms, topics, authors, and any other information can be found.

What is Faceted Search?

Generic, bulk search does a decent job finding exact text matches within documents and providing those documents as results. Advanced faceted search takes these results to another level.

advanced search options

If you’ve ever worked with a search page that looks something like the example above, you know the power of faceted search! Building the information and commands into the documents makes a search like this function.

Take the New York Times example above. This page, along with every article on it, would be tagged with the date, volume, and number of the particular issue. That way, if a user were to search for the word “armistice,” but limited the results to 1918, the main story on this page would appear in the results. If use cases indicated that users would benefit from being able to search by subject (WWI, Kaiser Wilhelm, etc.) even if the referenced term did not appear in the original text, tagging that information in the metadata would make sure that it appeared as a result of those searches.

The author is important to many collections. But what happens when that author is published under a married name, or a pseudonym? Most users would want complete results, regardless of how a name is printed on a page. This takes research, time, and care.

The terms and searches themselves vary depending on the collection and the users accessing it. Identifying these categories takes ongoing discussion and collaboration between the collection owners and digitization team. Because of the flexibility of tagging, almost any value can be marked. For example, a collection of Shakespeare’s plays may benefit from tagging each line, and encoding it with the line number. A user could search Act 3, Scene 1, line 61 in Romeo and Juliet and get the same result, “Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch,” regardless of printed version referenced. Tags can identify where a sentence starts and stops, or, for something like Romeo and Juliet, the start and stop of lines of text, or when characters start and stop speech.

Your digitization company needs to know your collection inside and out in order to create metadata that powers an effective and comprehensive search.

What Does This Process Look Like?

When working with a digitization company, the process of building metadata and tagging the collection is ongoing. Once the process has started, you and your archival team may need to go back to the beginning to review your goals and refocus based on new findings.

Common steps in the process are:

  1. Define Use Cases. How is the digital collection going to be used, and by whom? Who is going to use the digital collection? How can search cater to the broadest number of potential users? What tags and information would benefit searchers and users?
  2. Build Data Dictionary. Also known as a metadata repository, this living document will hold all of the potential tags that will be employed in the collection.
  3. Accurate and Comprehensive Tagging. With the full knowledge of your collection, archivists spend time tagging and checking one another’s work for quality assurance.
  4. Implementation of Search. Once tagging is complete, archivists conduct thorough testing on whatever platform you choose to house your collection, confirming the quality of the user experience.

At each stage, your digitization company should grow to know your collection better. In the end, the accurate search and clear display of your collection will be a testament to how dedicated your team has been, providing an incredible return on your investment in digitization.

Are you looking for an innovative search solution for your collection? Contact Anderson Archival by phone at 314.259.1900 or email (info@andersonarchival.com) today.

Fires Rage, History Fades

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Physical structures may feel like safe, permanent homes for humanity’s history, but they are also fragile, vulnerable to human error and malice alike.” – Andrew Lapin, NPR

If you saw our recent article about the Karpeles Museum fire in St. Louis, you’re well aware of the dangers that threaten physical historical manuscripts. Flood, flame, and fallout can surprise archivists with a severity that has the potential to wipe out entire collections. The local incident we reported about did minimal damage to the Karpeles Manuscript Library’s collection, but this is not the case for all fires.

It can be easy to dismiss natural disasters as a threat of days past. You might think the infamous burning of the Library of Alexandria or other world-altering events can’t happen in this age of technological advancements. However, in the past year alone, two major institutions of cultural history experienced significant fire damage.

Brazil’s Museu Nacional

Museu Nacional (or the National Museum of Brazil), located in the country’s capital Rio de Janiero, housed artifacts of Brazil’s natural and cultural history since the founding of the Royal Museum by King João VI in 1818. Since its establishment as the crown jewel of Brazil’s cultural and economic progress, it was adopted by the Federal University of Rio de Janiero as a research center and hosted a variety of natural history exhibits from around the globe.

On September 2, 2018, a fire began in the Museu Nacional main facility, which held most of the museum’s exhibits. Onlookers spent the night watching as flames consumed the core of the building and threatened its approximately 20 million artifacts—including the first fossil found in the region, the oldest human skull found in the Americas, and a one-of-a-kind collection of historical indigenous works that “included audio recordings of indigenous leaders who died several years ago, and writings about languages that have long become extinct.”

Because of the construction of the building and lack of public awareness and funding, the fire spread quickly. The New York Times reports:

Chronic underfunding left its halls with jury-rigged wiring, infiltrated ceilings and bat droppings along walls and shelves. A termite attack forced the closing of a dinosaur exhibit in late 2017. At one point there was not enough money to pay the cleaning crew — much less to install a fire suppression system.”

Investigation into the fire and recovery efforts are ongoing. Some 2,000 artifacts have been saved, but an estimated 92.5% of the museum’s total collection was lost to the blaze. Thankfully, a small part of the museum’s experience has been preserved through the Google Arts & Culture app, which creates photo galleries and virtual walkthroughs of museum exhibits around the world.

Notre-Dame de Paris

In very recent world news, on April 15th fire destroyed much of the roof and interior of the 850-year-old Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, France.

Notre Dame was home to many relics of French and Catholic history, such as treasured stained glass windows, a Medieval-era organ, and the iconic gothic spire. The cathedral has stood in the center of Paris since 1345, and its construction took an astounding 182 years to complete. The cathedral has been a character in the backdrop of France’s history for most of the country’s cultural history.

Read more about preserving collections through cloud backup and storage through Anderson Archival!

Thankfully, many of the artifacts housed inside the building had been removed the previous week for the building’s renovation, a project that sought to restore some of the building’s wooden structure and spire that were a known fire hazard. Nearly $700 million of privatized funding has been pledged to future rebuilding efforts, though the total damage and cause of the fire is still being investigated.

More Than Ashes

Unfortunately, comparing these two tragedies highlights how important communities, funding, and other proactive measures are to protecting preservable culture. Notre Dame is a global household name, as the landmark’s fame has been highlighted in many pop culture and artistic works for centuries—Victor Hugo’s classic novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and the 1996 Disney adaptation being some of the most noteworthy.

Museu Nacional, on the other hand, isn’t a location many people around the world have heard of. Even Brazil’s government struggled at times to assert the significance of the cultural institution. Before the fire, Museu Nacional curators had just received a grant of a meager $5 million from the government, part of which was dedicated to fire prevention efforts and training:

“The staff had just gone through fire training and arranged for flammable items, such as animals kept in bottles with alcohol and formaldehyde, to be removed from the building. ‘The most terrible irony,’ [Vice director Luiz] Duarte reportedly said.

He also told the newspaper that the fire destroyed frescoes of Pompeii, language collections and the entire collection of the Empress Tereza Cristina, who was nicknamed ‘the Mother of the Brazilians.’”

Funding will soon be granted in small chunks by various government and nonprofit organizations for the repair of the museum.

An entire language died in the Museu Nacional fire. While your collection probably doesn’t contain the last recorded utterings of a dead language, there’s no telling how its contents can have a profound effect on the world. If disaster struck before you could safely digitize or otherwise preserve your historical materials, it is unlikely that restoration could bring them back to public use and knowledge.

Anderson Archival is dedicated to digitally preserving historical documents and manuscripts. Call 314.259.1900 today or sign up for a free consultation to protect your collection before it’s too late. More information on how to help the Museu recover is located at this blog.

The Path to Funding Your Archival Project

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You have big dreams and your organization has a big impact on communities, but sometimes you run into big roadblocks when funding your projects. Some of your projects include protecting and preserving documented history, which is our mission as well, so we know how important it is to be able to fund those projects. Asking for money can be hard, and can be a daunting task, especially when you need to raise a substantial amount.

However, you aren’t alone in this process! When you partner with a trusted archival company, they will be with you every step of the way. Here’s the three-step path we recommend for funding your archival projects.

  1. Tell Your Story

This is the single-most important foundational factor when funding your project. Telling your story establishes who you are and why you exist. What problems are you solving in your community, and why can’t it thrive without you? What resources do you make available? What collections are you preserving for historical research and future generations?

Don’t just tell your story. Share it in such a compelling way that your readers will want to jump on your band wagon, hail their friends, and enthusiastically dive into the work you’re doing. For this, social media can be incredibly productive. Creating videos, online events, groups, and pages will help capture interest and followers. Many archival companies can also assist in creating a web presence that matches the upcoming project or archive!

Part of telling your story is listing your goals for the future. When you ask for funding, make sure you explain why you need money and how it will be used, which is something your archival company can help you with. Be specific. Why do you need it to impact the community? And don’t forget to tell why your partnership is important.

  1. Ask for Donations from Private Donors

Whether it’s time or money, people are more likely to give when asked directly. Review your donor list and identify a handful of friends or donors who align best with the goals of the project. These are the donors who are moved by your mission and purpose. Use the old-fashioned method of mailing personal letters. Call potential donors on the phone and set up a meeting. Tell your story, explain your need and tell them why you thought of them, how their values align with yours, how they can help, and that they will directly impact a need.

People want to be needed. If you can outline exactly how a prospective donor can help, they will be more likely to invest, and personally asking people and being prepared to answer their questions will establish a foundation of trust.

Historic works are always at risk of damage due to accidents or simply handling the documents, which makes digital library preservation imperative. Explaining that preserving these documents is of utmost importance, and laying out exactly what will be lost if these documents aren’t preserved digitally will paint an honest picture of why you need the help of donors.

Partner with a trusted archival company who will help you communicate with those outside of your organization. They will help educate and energize your key donors on the possibilities and benefits of your digital archiving project.

You are not alone in this process. Your archival partner can provide demonstrations, presentations, and education. They will explain the importance of archival quality and doing your project right the first time.

  1. Apply for Grants

Did you know that both the private sector and the government have grants available for library preservation?

Applying for grants might be a little intimidating. A grant proposal is involved, and there are so many, many grants to apply for. Where should you start? How does receiving funds from foundations work?

Applying for grants takes more specialized expertise than marketing. In fact, it might be helpful to hire a grant writer. Again, you may have to spend money to make money. Charitable requests, whether government or not, aren’t just for giving away free money. Your mission must be aligned with their mission, and a grant writer will help you apply in a way that appeals to this connection. If you still want to go through the process yourself, you can find many guides, including this simple step-by-step guide.

Grants can be worth incredibly large sums, and there are a surprising number of grants available for nonprofits and libraries.

Don’t stop there!

You can use any or all of these strategies. Some build on each other, and each compliments the rest. Now all you have to do is continue to build your relationships. Make sure you thank your donors and invest in working relationships with them. This will remain important for future projects. You want your donor to take ownership of projects and be just as dedicated as you are. Don’t just use their money. Show them how they’re directly helping, which can be as simple as sending out regular newsletters or taking time to have personal conversations.

At Anderson Archival, we know how important preserving historical collections is for future generations, and we want to help you create the best digital collection possible. On occasion, our customers ask us to meet with significant donors to explain the benefits of creating a digital library and we have found this to be effective. Call us today at 314.259.1900 or email us at info@andersonarchival.com for more information on ways to fund your archival project and how to build a digital library!