HBCU-GSU Digital Project Team Dr. Rosemary Mokia –Director of the library. Leading the digital project, delegating tasks, and directing the project activities Cecilia Iwala -Systems Librarian / HBCU-GSU Project Coordinator. Ms. Maraine Hall - Library Specialist for collection analysis. Mr. Derek Addison - Scanning Technician Student Assistant helps in scanning as well.

Grambling State University (GSU): Overview: Founded in 1901 as a private industrial school to educate African American citizens of north central Louisiana and GSU is now a comprehensive university offering undergraduate, graduate, professional and continuing education programs The 375-acre campus is nestled in the heart of Grambling, Louisiana, a small but growing community located in Lincoln Parish.

GSU overview continue … More than 800 courses and 68 degree programs are offered at Grambling. There are five colleges, including an honors college, two professional schools, a graduate school, and a Division of Continuing Education.

Mission: Grambling State University strives: to render service to the community and to the citizenry of Louisiana to provide equal access to higher education for all applicants regardless of race, color, sex, national origin, age, religion, disability, and veteran status to serve as a repository for preserving the heritage of people of African American descent.

HBCU-GSU Digital Project : Introduction: Grambling State University is one of the ten Historically Black Colleges and Universities to partner with Cornell University in an effort to digitize the historical hidden treasures on HBCU campuses. The project was made possible through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Definition: The Collaborative Digitization Program defines digital imaging as “An electronic photograph scanned from an original document, made up of pixels.

Reasons and benefits for HBCU-GSU Digital Project: Access : Providing access to materials. Preservation : Method of reducing wear and tear on items. Education: As a tool for creating awareness Research: Method for data investigation. Knowledge sharing : As a tool for disseminating ideas

Planning for Project: Digital Project Planning at the Grambling State University A.C. Lewis Memorial library covers the methodology, the digitization goal, and objectives defining and identification of the project. Project implementation is facilitated by all staff members who identify materials and provide a forum for discussion of policy issues.

Mission: Our mission is to help HBCU-GSU faculty and students in various departments across the campus and the community to make the most effective use of the digital historical treasures at any time and any where without restriction.

Goal: The main goal is to help foster effective access and methods to the historical preserved documents and hidden treasures of the HBCUs. Making the retrieval of the documents easier and motivating stakeholders to use the historical digital collections.

GSU Black-Gold Digital Collection: We are currently digitizing Grambling State University founder’s documents, Presidents’ Reports, Inaugurations, games, and professional appointments. Extraction of all the metadata information such as the image pixel dimensions, compression format, the Dots Per Inch, file type and size, date scan, physical dimensions of the source file, and indexed color, are stored on a local PC and other backup drives.

GSU Black-Gold Digital Collection continue … We plan to start digitizing yearbooks next. We will select pertinent images from the yearbooks. Selection will be based on relevancy and the relationship to the University’s goal and objectives. We plan to archive some special collections from The Eddie Robinson artifacts. The HBCU-GSU Digital Collections are located at:

Metadata: This is a data about data and it plays a critical role in document description, authenticity, structural, and retrieval systems with the entity relationships.

Metadata continue … This is how I can best emphasize the importance of metadata. A beautiful database system with the most beautiful graphical interface design system without good reference structure for satisfactory search is as good as a database without external interface to view the contents of the database tables. At GSU, we want to be sure that our method is constant and the data has valid associations or relationships with the original documents.

The challenging questions and the steps taken in creating our metadata: One of our major challenges is making decisions about material selection. Deciding which aspects of metadata are essential for content description and retrieval of the documents. Lack of archivist to help with collection identification and copy right issues.

Metadata challenging questions continue … We are currently using the metadata standards provided by the CONTENTdm application. We are considering adding additional metadata or enhancing the metadata as needed and necessary in the future to suit our collection description. Currently our metadata extraction comes from the document contents such as document title, subject, key words, abstracts and descriptions.

Checklists: At GSU, we verify our digital collection against the digital standards provided by the HBCU-CUL Project Coordinator. It is very important to perform checklist and verification so that intelligent decision can be made early in the project phase as to what procedure is better suited for the collections.

Validating the Products and Deliverable Readiness Review Validation is the process of confirming that the collections conform to the requirements established for the project. This process involves peer and/or team reviews to ensure that the solution meets acceptance criteria of the HBCU digital standards. I am testing for bugs

Lesson : What should a Digital Liaison know? Understand and define the project objectives and goals. Understand the organization’s policies, objectives and goals. Understand the organization collection management as related to project.

Conclusion This collaborative effort will help to foster the development of an infrastructure that consists of high quality production standards, better and long lasting storage, and distribution methods for development of digital image technology and knowledge base systems to preserve the HBCU-GSU collections.

At your convenience, please visit our Online collections at and come to see us at Grambling State University where everybody is somebody.

–Thank you.