IS 565 Final Project
Proposal
Group 3
Robert
Waltz
Patricia
Smith
Sharon
Routh
Brendon
Guilliams
Part 1: Project Introduction and History
The project consists
of working with the Center for Rural Affairs (CFRA) in a mutually
beneficial organization project. The CFRA is a non-profit organization
advocating for issues affecting rural communities in the United States such as
“health care, clean energy, sustainable agriculture, and community
development”. (“About the Center for Rural Affairs”) The project will focus on
creating a digital library that will house the organization’s archived print
materials to make them easily accessible to the CFRA’s community. As a
group, we will work to digitize the CFRA print collection, create an
organizational framework that will allow the materials to be easily located, to
use open source digital library software, to create the collection to allow
access for the CFRA community and to leave the CFRA with a framework allowing future
additions to the digital collection.
The CFRA is a
descendant of the Goldenrod Hills Community Action Agency. (Raulston and
Strange) The Goldenrod Hills Community Action Agency, now named
Northeast Nebraska Community Action Partnership, is a Nebraska non-profit
that was chartered in 1966. (“About Us”) The agency was originally
incorporated under laws passed supporting President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great
Society platform to fight the War on Poverty. (Miller)
In 1973, President
Richard Nixon attempted to eliminate the federal anti-poverty programs, and
thus Goldenrod Hills Community Action Agency being funded through such programs
looked for other avenues to continue its mission. (Raulston and Strange)
Individuals associated with the agency responded by establishing a non-profit
funded from a diversified set of non-governmental sources. The CFRA’s
original mission included advocacy for family farm, small business, sustainable
agriculture and the rural culture of Northern Nebraska. (ibid.) Currently,
the CFRA provides rural America a voice, by advocating for values that support
rural America. They have continued to their mission through direct service work
and advocacy to create policies that “reflect the needs of all rural citizens”.
(“About the Center for Rural Affairs”)
The broad goal for this project is to create a digital
library prototype that will fulfill the needs of CFRA’s community.
CFRA has important published materials that they are unable to distribute
widely due to its printed format. By digitizing the printed material, the
project will assist in the dissemination of information considered historically
and culturally significant by the organization. A subsequent goal is to
establish digital policies and procedures that CFRA will be able to follow in
the future to expand its digital collection.
A narrower goal for the project is for our project members to
work in a real world situation with a digital library. It is the goal of
the class, and therefore our classmates, to gain as much experience with, not
only digital library technology, but the organizational tasks and workflows
needed to successfully establish a digital library.
From a personal contact of Brendon, Inga Haugen, we learned of the needs for digital curation of the CFRA’s documents. The CFRA has been working to digitize their materials to make the collection available to a larger audience but needs assistance to continue the effort. Inga had worked as an intern at CFRA over the summer of 2013 and has agreed to be a personal liaison for the group. She contacted Brian Depew, the newly appointed Executive Director of the CFRA about his interest. After discussing the project with him, Brian Depew endorsed the effort and set us on our course.
The CFRA’s print
collection represents artifacts such as project reports, newsletters,
correspondences, grants, legislation, born digital material (such as emails),
annual reports, meeting minutes, workshop booklets, conference papers and
internal policy documents. The entire collection is housed in two
separate locations. A part of the
collection is housed at the Center in Lyons, Nebraska and contains, among other
items, un-digitized published materials to which they currently hold copyright.
The second collection is stored in deep archives at the University of Iowa and is
under active curation.
CFRA Beyond the
Walls digital library project will feature newsletters as the main focus
material type. The CFRA has begun to digitize their collection, but many
important historical newsletters have yet to be digitized. Our participation in
the digitization effort will establish a digital collection, organize the
newsletters for ease of accessibility and provide the CFRA with a collection that
they can expand after our class is over.
The CFRA will retain
copyright and full ownership of the materials. Pursuant to this requirement,
the group will sign a Memorandum of Understanding with the CFRA. After
the Memorandum is finalized, the CFRA will send materials to our group to be
digitized. The materials will be returned at the beginning of 2014.
The CFRA Beyond the
Walls project will not only stand up a digital library but will establish
collection guidelines, policies and procedures for the curation of the
library. The materials of the CFRA must be reviewed to determine the
candidate literature most likely to be useful to the target population of the
online library. The project will establish workflows for content preparation
and ingestion. The project will recommend minimal standards for data
encoding and metadata description. The project will provide documentation to
the CFRA so that the effort may continue in the future.
The digital library
must be accessible by the project group as a whole in order to build a
collection and by the CFRA for review and feedback. In order to keep
costs at a minimum, the digital library software will be hosted by a free
online service, such as Amazon EC2's Free Usage Tier (Amazon AWS Free) or Google Compute Engine (Compute Engine). A free tier, virtual machine should have enough
memory and disk space to run a low usage instance of any of the following
open-source software platforms: Greenstone, Omeka, ePrints, DSpace.
Determination of the particular platform to utilize will be made after careful
consideration of the advantages/disadvantages of each product.
Each member of the
project has access to a basic scanner and will be responsible for imaging part
of the overall material. The scanned images will then be processed with
an Optical Character Recognition program fed to convert the images into digital
text. The textual output will be further encoded for preservation
needs. Each set of images and text that represent a newsletter will be
preserved as a digital object with appropriate metadata in the digital library.
The digital library should allow public access to the digital objects through a
variety of dissemination methods and viewable formats.
The goals, as stated
in Part 1 for our Beyond the Walls Archive for the Center for Rural Affairs,
for this project will be accomplished by dividing the work equally among team
members with each member spearheading a specific task. Additionally, all
members will collaborate, via weekly meetings, concerning all tasks and
responsibilities to facilitate skill development in the areas of community
analysis, collection development, open source digital library software,
metadata encoding, and technological infrastructure development.
Reference materials will be mailed to Brendon Guilliams by the CFRA Executive
Director Brian Depew. Timelines will be initiated upon the arrival of the
reference materials and will be set as either weekly or biweekly deadlines
determined by topic which will determine key milestones needed for completion.
The team is working
remotely, distributed across East and Middle Tennessee. We will
collaborate via Google Apps for the deliverables of the project. Each
member will have access to shared Google Drive documents, including meeting
minutes, draft papers and spreadsheets. Our publications and records will
be hosted on Google’s Blogger at Center for Rural Affairs IS 565 Project. Each member of the team will post their own
work as well as edit the work of others. Online meetings will be held using
Google +’s hangout technology. A shared Google calendar will be created
by Brendon for all members specifying milestones and deadlines.
The first specific
task needed for this project involves identifying the target community and
designing a community analysis. Sharon Routh will be undertaking this
effort with collaboration from all members. Next, collection guideline
development will need to be initiated and adapted as the project evolves.
Tricia Smith will spearhead this monumental task with assistance from all
members. Robert Waltz will assume responsibility for creating
recommendations for metadata and will educate team members as to the pros and
cons of the different options. Robert will then create a matrix of
possible standards to use and write up a rationalization for the use of the
chosen standards. Brendon Guilliams will be the interface with Brian for
attaining reference materials and will also make decisions about the
technological infrastructure. Brendon will create a matrix of
technologies to use, evaluate their capabilities, and write up reasons for
choosing the technology with member collaboration. All members will work
together to develop the prototype for the Beyond the Walls Digital Library.
Reference materials
have been collected by the CFRA and are currently awaiting digitization and
development. Our digital library will be a subset of the larger CFRA
Library and will mostly include newsletters but may also incorporate other related
items in the CFRA Archive collection including published materials, project
reports, annual reports, correspondence, grants, legislation, workshop reports,
and business reports. CFRA Executive Director Brian Depew has agreed to
be our interface for the project and will mail the materials to Brendon who
will divide them evenly among group members.
Part 4: Personal Goals
Sharon Routh
My main goal for
this project includes developing the skills needed to attain employment in an
archives, academic library or museum related position following the achievement
of my MSIS degree next year. As we have studied in our Digital Libraries
class so far this semester, working in a digital environment involves the
application of a multitude of interrelated skills and my secondary goals are to
achieve as many of these as the project will present. These skills include but
are not limited to how to write a community analysis, develop collection
guidelines, digitize reference sources, apply open source software to digitized
materials, establish metadata encoding, and develop an understanding of the
technological infrastructure of a digital library.
As I have not worked
with the technology needed for digitized materials, or in any digital
environment, before I will be learning everything as a beginner. While I have
significant expertise in history with a minor in Social Sciences, an additional
30 hour history teaching endorsement in the state of Tennessee, and five years’
experience with teaching World and US History, I am especially deficient in the
technical skills required for an archivist or digital librarian. Already
with this project, I have begun work on a community analysis for our project
which is opening up a new interest for me and helping to develop this new
skill. As the weeks progress, I will gain valuable hands-on experience
with digitizing reference sources for our collection. My Archives and
Records class so far this semester has shown me the importance of Collection
Guidelines in order to create a cohesive collection. Again, I hope to
soon gain valuable hands-on experience in establishing copyright policies, deed
familiarity, and standards for acceptance of materials all involved in the
process of collection development.
While I am of the
generation not as familiar with computer technology, I have taken
continued professional development courses in the last fifteen years including
Microsoft Office certifications in order to maintain employability in education
or an interrelated field. I continue to learn and hope to gain
valuable knowledge regarding open source software digital programs. In addition
I hope to gain hands-on experience with at least a few open source or
professional resources. I also hope to learn how to apply metadata
standards to documents and gain more in depth knowledge as to the technical
infrastructure of digital collections.
As a result,
everything I learn through the development of this digital library project will
be a goal achieved and a new skill developed to add to my repertoire.
These skills will include but will not be limited to writing a community
analysis, developing collection guidelines, digitizing reference sources,
applying open source software to digitized materials, establishing metadata
encoding, and developing an understanding of the technological infrastructure
of a digital library. I anticipate many more goals achieved along this
path and look forward to the challenges ahead. Hopefully, I will not
annoy my teammates too badly with the many questions I am sure to ask!
The growth and
development of both technology and the Internet have had a large impact on
Information Sciences and will continue to do so in future. Adapting to the new
technologies will be important for libraries to thrive amid this changing
environment. This is why I chose to take the digital libraries class and to
work on building a digital library as my project. I want to increase my
knowledge and experience in working with the available technology and learn the
skills that will help me as I go forward in my career.
There are a variety
of goals that I hope to accomplish by the end of this project. One is to
develop an understanding of the tools available for creating a digital
collection and to be able to determine the strengths and weaknesses of each. I
look forward to the opportunity for hands-on experience with digitization
software and content management systems. Two, I would like to have a better
understanding of developing a digital collection and what materials should be
included and why. Three, I would like to increase my understanding of metadata
standards. If a digital collection is to be properly utilized, the materials
must be organized, categorized and findable for users. Studying and becoming
more familiar with metadata standards will lead to success not only in this
project but in my future as an information professional. Finally, I
welcome the opportunity to work with my fellow classmates as well as the
representatives from the CFRA and learning from the knowledge and skills that
each person will bring to the project.
The knowledge gained
from working on this project will better prepare me for the challenges that
come from working as an information professional and provide me with real world
experience that will benefit me in my future career. The decision to take this
class was based on the growing importance of digital technology in information
sciences and by participating in this project I hope to increase my understanding
of this aspect of the information science field.
The project with the CFRA will provide an opportunity to gain insight into the process of taking services to the community beyond the physical limitations of the building. The project parameters work into my professional goals of becoming a public library director. Working with the CFRA provides me the opportunity to work with another professional community type outside the library environment and see the manner of service that the CFRA provides to the community it serves. A public library director has traditionally been bound to the community in which the physical library building is located. I know I am interested in maintaining and serving that type of community. This project gives me the opportunity to explore new directions, in a way that can support my known objectives even if I don’t chose to work with this type of non-physically centered community in the future.
The process of creating a digital library framework for a community service provider like CFRA, will closely resemble the process a public library would use. A public library can use the digital library to preserve the local history of the community it serves. The issues a public library would have are similar to that which we will face in working with the CFRA. Funding is tight and one has to watch closely not only creation cost, but also maintenance. By working with the CFRA on this project, I hope to create a framework that can be used in not only my e-portfolio, but also as an experimental phase to produce a local history and materials digital library within a public library system. My goal is to provide a library setting that not only serves the community through traditional understandings, but serves to preserve the local community flavor. The CFRA preserves the flavor of the community is served via the materials it produces and by placing those materials online. The history featured in the materials will be accessible to the modern members of the community in a conveniently accessible space.
Robert Patrick Waltz
My stated career
objective on my Student Planning Form that I must fill out every semester
asserts that I wish to specialize in open source digital archive and repository
design. Before my work with DataONE, as a contractor for Cadre5, LLC, I
assisted in the development of crossroadstofreedom.org, a digital collection of
materials documenting the civil rights struggle in Memphis Tennessee and the
Midsouth area. After my Master’s program is complete, I intend to
continue in the domain of digital repositories and digital libraries.
Becoming acquainted
with a different digital library open source software stack is one of my goals
for this class. I wish not only to use a new digital library product, but
also to evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. One task that I wish to
familiarize myself further with is the details of setting up a cloud based
instance hosted by one of the larger infrastructure providers, as I have never attempted
a cloud based deployment before. Many of the products require a stack of
software to exploit all of its features, and the configuration of the stack
requires details of planning that are not always apparent. Of course, all the
procedures must be documented such that the resulting architecture can be
recreated by others with ease.
Another goal will be
to investigate how best to build digital objects; as well arrive at a
definition of digital object. Is a digital object simply a single
bytestream of content, or should it be considered a unique combination of
bytestreams and structural, descriptive and administrative metadata
records? Luckily, the scope of the CFRA Beyond the Walls will be limited
to primarily textual material, however, other types of objects will need to be
addressed. Evaluating metadata standards and proposing the best one for
the project is also of interest to me. Interoperability of the software
is important, but also the correct use of open standards such that the content
of the objects will be adoptable to future technologies.
Lastly, but by no
means least, I look forward to working with an ad hoc group. One of my
professional goals is to develop communication skills in group settings.
Having the opportunity to listen to differing viewpoints and work with new
personalities will reinforce past skills of adapting to new situations and
people. I look forward to learning from my peers and collaborating with
them on this project.
References
“About the Center for
Rural Affairs.” Center for Rural Affairs. Accessed October 03, 2013.
http://www.cfra.org/about.
“About Us.” Accessed October 03, 2013.
http://www.goldenrodhillscommunityaction.org/aboutus.cfm.
Miller, Robert. “Economic Opportunity Act of 1964
(PL88-452).” History of Career and Technical Education. Accessed October 03,
2013. http://jschell.myweb.uga.edu/history/legis/econ.htm.
Ralston, Don, and Marty Strange. “Our Early History.”
Center for Rural Affairs. Accessed October 03, 2013.
http://www.cfra.org/about/history/early.
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