Magic lantern slides and 3D PDFs: working with diverse content providers

Editor's Notes

• #3: I’ll start by talking about the context for LoCloud in Ireland,. Then I’ll take you through the organisations and collections we worked with, before finally drawing some conclusions.
• #4: So, first of all, the Irish context in which LoCloud finds itself can be broadly outlined as follows: There are 478 museums listed with the Irish Museums Association. The Heritage Council lists 568 museums, collections or archives accessible to the public. There is some overlap between these figures, it’s hard to say how much because The Heritage Council’s list is not broken down into types of service at all. There are also 359 branch libraries in the public library system administered by local government. The Irish Archives Resource lists 36 archives services which contribute to its database. Many, if not almost all, of the organisation on these lists are small and medium sized.
• #5: If you compare the number of organisations mentioned there to Ireland’s contributors to Europeana you’ll find 20 Irish contributors to Europeana 9 are publicly funded by the DAHG and/or are National Cultural Institutions 4 are in the Higher Education Sector, universities. 3 are independent, supported through grants from statutory bodies: The Heritage Council and The Arts Council. 2 are State organisations, the national broadcaster and the parliamentary library The final two are comprised of a well established voluntary organisation of members and a media business. So while we have lots of memory institutions in Ireland, as you might expect, contributions to Europeana have come from larger institutions with comparatively more resources. I say comparatively because in the past seven years, resources available in the cultural heritage sector have reduced significantly, in some cases by 40%.
• #6: Looking at Ireland’s contributions to Europeana (using ‘Ireland’ in Providing country and no other parameters), these are the kinds of numbers you will get. Two hundred and forty thousand items with almost one hundred and seventeen thousand of them from one provider. Ask about ireland contributes the greatest proportion of items. The majority, if not all of these are digitised pages of Thom’s directory, which is am historic street directory for Dublin. Names of residents and businesses are listed and the directory is still updated annually. It’s a great resource for genealogy as names within the pages are searchable- for example, if you know that your great grandmother Mary Byrne lived in Dublin in the 1870s you can search her name in Europeana and have a chance of finding out which street she lived on. Still, the Directory’s proliferation among search results for anything related to Ireland can be very frustrating. That’s the wider context for LoCloud within Ireland
• #7: These are some of the collections and organisations we’ve worked with, and I’ll say a brief word about each one. The Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland was established in the 19th century and holds wonderful, largely unseen collections. Leo Swan Aerial Photography began as a grant-aided project to digitise, catalogue and publish a unique collection of 20th century aerial photography and Ogham in 3D is a project designed to record and share evidence of Ireland’s earliest written records. Two of the collections I’ll talk about are digitisation projects, and two had digital objects to publish. I’ll start with the digitisation projects.
• #8: The RSAI is well described as a small memory institution.     It’s goal is to ‘preserve, examine and illustrate all ancient monuments and memorials of the arts, manners and customs of the past, as connected with the antiquities, language, literature and history of Ireland’.     It employs two part time staff, relies on membership and events for much of its income and cares for unique library and archive collections in its historic building in Dublin.  
• #9: Through LoCloud, the RSAI has published content from two of its archival collections: its Lantern Slides and its collection of drawings and sketches by George Victor Du Noyer. The Lantern Slide collection contains thousands of images of 19th and 20th century antiquarian research. The RSAI have digitised a portion of this collection and you can see almost 700 images on their LoCloud hosting site.
• #10: Just a brief word about the Lantern Slide collection itself. This image is from a part of the collection referred to as Darkest Dublin. The Darkest Dublin images document the Dublin Housing Inquiry carried out in 1913 following the death of seven people in a tenement collapse. It’s an important record of the city in the same year as the pivotal industrial conflict that was the Dublin Lockout and just before the 1916 Rising. There were quite a few people involved in the digitisation of these slides; a team of volunteers was recruited, trained and supervised by the RSAI over about a year and two staff members were given guidance and training on the LoCloud tools and services, some of which was passed on to the volunteers also.
• #11: At Discovery Programme we have been involved in an advisory capacity in that project since 2013. What our Technology Manager Anthony Corns and myself have done is provide advice on hardware and software for the digitisation project, on metadata standards and the implementation of Dublin Core and provided some guidance and training for using LoCloud Collections, particularly metadata mapping and using CSV import.  
• #12: The second digitisation project to use LoCloud services was the Leo Swan collection. The project has been ongoing since 2011. The collection was a bequest to the National Museum of Ireland and digitisation and cataloguing was initially grant-aided by the Heritage Council. The project has continued on a voluntary basis, with support from the National Museum and the Discovery Programme. Anthony Corns and myself both advised on the digitisation process, including metadata. There are over six thousand images in the collection, which was received with minimal metadata at the item level. Care has been taken to capture good quality metadata throughout the project, which we hope will open the way for Linked Data with this dataset in future. As a partner/ aggregator, having some influence in the metadata design phase has been useful for streamlining workflows for the later steps, but as with the RSAI’s Lantern slides, the challenge for this project lies in finding the human and time resources required to digitise the film and research and capture metadata.
• #13: Just a quick look at the collection itself- here’s Leo Swan in a mid-flight, camera film selfie. The collection is comprised of mostly black and white aerial photography, but including a good proportion of colour images. Leo’s research interest was primarily in ecclesiastical enclosures, the remains of settlements around churches, but the collection also documents cropmarks, earthworks, henges and excavations. He focused his attention on a number of geographical areas in Ireland, such as North County Dublin, county Meath and the midlands.  
• #14: Most of the images in the collection date between the 1970s and 1990s. That means that it provides an important record of not only the sites themselves but of the landscape, which was subject to significant change from the later 1990s through the economic ‘boom’ years up to 2008. Some of the landscape photographed at what had been the fringe of urban landscape in the 1970s or 80s has become commuter suburbs of Dublin over the last 20 years.
• #15: Leo returned to the same sites many times: his photographs of the Hill of Tara gave us the first look at the wider landscape of the archaeological complex there. He returned again and again to photograph sites like these in different light at different times of year. Snow and snow melt were particularly useful for highlighting features that are difficult to discern in other conditions.
• #16: This slide shows the at the time controversial Wood Quay site in Dublin city centre, one which Leo photographed through its excavation phase, public protests, construction of the civic offices and on its completion. These two collections- the RSAI’s Lantern slides and Leo Swan’s photography show some of the important issues for small and medium institutions creating digital content. They are issues around digitisation projects which will effect whether small institutions ever get to the point where LoCloud is a powerful tool for them. That said, for the curators involved in these two digitisation projects, online publication and contribution to Europeana would have been projects in themselves but for the presence and accessibility of the LoCloud tools. Simply put, the material would not have been published online, either at all or for an undetermined amount of time. It almost certainly would not get to Europeana. In that sense, the availability of LoCloud provided a sort of reassurance that there would be an achievable route to publication for the content they had invested in creating. That is why the long term sustainability of the services is so crucial.
• #17: To provide a contrast to the experience with digitisation projects, I’ll talk about the RSAI’s Du Noyer collection and the Ogham in 3D project. The DuNoyer collection had previously been digitised and it’s with collections like this that LoCloud shows its strengths. The Department of Environment had provided a grant which allowed the majority albums of drawings and sketches to be scanned in 2009 and luckily Michael O’ Neill, who carried out the work, also completed an index of the images. This meant that we had some decent quality metadata already in a spreadsheet to work with.
• #18: To say a brief few words about the collection and DuNoyer himself, Coffey gives a wonderful account in the Society’s Journal (JRSAI Vol.123 (1993): 102-119) of a man considered first as “a topographical draughtsman” (103) but who could also have been remembered as a botanical artist (104). Trained by George Petrie, his “natural interest in antiquities and archaeology” (107) is reflected in these volumes of drawings and sketches, but they also reflect his “very soft heart” (115)- With this collection, the index fields were mapped to the Dublin Core fields of LoCloud Collections, a batch of web sized images were created from the original scans and the majority of the metadata records were uploaded in one bulk ingest. The image files were then added one by one to the items in LoCloud Collections, which was a somewhat daunting prospect given that there were over two thousand of them. The process and return on effort with this collection compared very favourably to working with digitisation projects.
• #19: The DuNoyer collection was harvested directly from LoCloud Collections to MORe, an operation which I think works really well for curators, and enriched using the Geonames Geocoding microservice. While this is a really great service, it might have been helpful to be able to exclude the very localised placenames within this package- some of the local placenames returned points in other hemispheres, such as Dingle Lake in Antartica. For larger areas, counties, administrative areas and so on, the results were perfect. It would also be useful to curators to be able to export that enriched metadata set- in this case the RSAI would then add the map points generated to the items in LoCloud collections, but this would need to be a bulk operation for a collection of this size.
• #20: Finally, Ogham in 3D at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (DIAS) had metadata and online digital objects to publish to Europeana. DIAS is a publicly funded independent centre for research in a number of disciplines include Celtic Studies, Theoretical Physics and Cosmic Studies. Their metadata for this project presented some challenges. It is marked up in the Epidoc specification of TEI, one xml document for each ogham stone. That standard is used for text editing rather than aggregation and in this case it wasn’t particularly helpful for moving towards EDM.
• #21: But before I go into too much detail, what are Ogham stones?     The Ogham in 3D project describes Ogham stones as “perpendicular cut stones [which] bear inscriptions in the uniquely Irish Ogham alphabet, using a system of notches and horizontal or diagonal lines/scores to represent the sounds of an early form of the Irish language. The stones are inscribed with the names of prominent people and sometimes tribal affiliation or geographical areas. These inscriptions constitute the earliest recorded form of Irish and, as our earliest written records dating back at least as far as the 5th century AD, are a significant resource for historians, as well as linguists and archaeologists.”  
• #22: So the logical thing to do with the metadata records nicely marked up to conform to a standard was bring them into MINT and create a mapping to EDM. Unfortunately things didn’t really work out like that. I discovered that not all of the elements in the TEI XML were used in the same way by each person who had encoded a stone. For example, the ownership or responsibility information was encoded differently in some of the Epidocs, which meant that one mapping would not apply across the board.
• #23: There are also a number of content types for each ogham stone- images, 3D PDFs, obj files, x3D files and movies in a couple of cases. So the metadata records had to be duplicated for each content type. In addition, there were no URLs or hyperlinks to the individual objects in the metadata.
• #24: I tackled this by stripping out only the elements I needed from the Epidoc TEI and creating one XML document for each type of resource- so one document with the metadata for all the images, one for all of the 3D PDFs and so on, which worked ok, though with all the doubling up there was lack of unique links for some of the resources, such as the movies (some movies showed multiple stones, so there wasn’t a 1:1 relationship between a stone and a movie file). Because we don’t have access to DIAS systems, we couldn’t create urls with unique identifiers for each resource for each stone. So this has been a somewhat less than perfect implementation so far but they are issues that we can resolve.
• #25: Just to conclude with a couple of points For small and medium institutions without any or very much digital content, I think the tools and services LoCloud provides are absolutely crucial- while that might sound strange, it means at the planning stage for digitisation that there is a route and services they can afford, which reduces the barriers to beginning in the first place. It will take time. While curators will see the benefits of LoCloud Collections very easily, we also have to find ways to be persuasive about the returns for publishing within Europeana.   When it comes to metadata standards and the skills and knowledge for mapping between them, this can be a challenging area for curators. Moving from LoCloud Collections to directly to MORe, this is not really an issue and I think that workflow will work really well for people, but for those who need to use MINT, it’s a different challenge and one which will require different support from the national partners, so maybe as we move toward the project end we could consider methods and sustainability around that particular issue.
• #26: Thank you