Practicum Report

Project Summary

In late August 2009, the Columbus Landmarks Foundation donated 85 illustration boards to the Knowlton Digital Library at the Ohio State University. The images were taken by Robert Samuelson and used for the book Architecture: Columbus, published in 1976. The illustration boards contained black and white photographs of structures in the Columbus, Ohio area adhered to them for exhibition purposes at the Columbus Museum of Art around the time of publication. Although the images were donated to the Knowlton Digital Library, the copyright would remain with the Columbus Landmarks Foundation. Lorrie McAllister decided to have them digitized and added to the digital library and assigned the task to me as my Culminating Experience Practicum for Fall 2009.

The project tasks involved cleaning the images gently, scanning the images, saving them in TIFF format on the local D drive, minor image editing, resizing copies and saving to JPEG format, uploading the images to an publicly accessible server, cataloging, and web page design. Out of the approximately 85 illustration boards to be digitized, 70 were successfully completed. 15 of the images contained publication mock-ups or were damaged images so were not selected for digitization. Identification of the images would be by cross checking them with the images in the book and by researching other publications and contacting the original researchers.

The scanning portion of the project seemed to be the fastest part of the whole project. It only took 3-4 days at the most to scan all 70 images. Once they were all scanned, they were batch resized using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom from 4000 pixels (longest side) to 2600 pixels. Of all the images scanned, only three were unidentified. Once this process was complete, the images were uploaded to the publicly accessible server. The images could now be cataloged using the KSA administrative interface.

By far, the bulk of the time spent on the project was for cataloging the images. I used the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus and Getty Union List of Artist Names, Library of Congress Name Authorities, and selected publications like the American Architects Directory and the AIA Guide to Columbus to confirm the architect names and terms to be used. Other sources found on the internet were used, subject to approval by the Practicum supervisor.

I searched the local controlled vocabulary available through the administrative interface for appropriate terms, and if the term was not in the local controlled vocabulary, I could add it only after referencing the Getty AAT or similar thesaurus or external controlled vocabulary and asking my supervisor for approval. I had to be careful to add it only to the appropriate place because any slip up could potentially change every entry in the whole digital library catalog. I had to constantly check my work for errors, omissions, and details I had overlooked or words I had misspelled. Once I had cataloged all 70 images I began the quality check and released them. Lorrie periodically came behind to double check my work.

After completing the cataloging Lorrie let me create a collection level overview. The Knowlton Digital Library website utilized Cold Fusion Markup Language (.cfm) files that support applications and scripts, reference database information and generates Flash forms. I had no previous experience with this format but I am confident with my HTML skills. I found that it is similar to HTML however, so I mainly added and positioned text and images. Lorrie told me that the CSS files are stored in an external server so I would not be able to edit or work with those files.

After the collection overview was finished I began adding the Columbus Landmarks Foundation Collection to the Online Exhibitions page. I added the project I had completed to the page and positioned the collection headers according to Lorrie's direction. Once this was complete my onsite hours were finished. Lorrie informed me that during the fourth week of November the digital library would undergo a data freeze in preparation for migration to the new Drupal platform. The new website is tentatively scheduled to be completely up and running by the end of December 2009. I want to extend a special thanks to Lorrie McAllister and Jane McMaster for allowing me to help on this project.

2009 Jeffrey Zarate. Page last updated November 24, 2009