2. Hey, What About Access? Roy Tennant The California Digital Library, University of California http://escholarship.cdlib.org/rtennant/presentations/2002sfs/ A Practical Guide to Decision-Making

3. Outline  What are your access goals?  What are your constraints?  What opportunities do you have?  Capturing  Describing  Providing Access

4. What are Your Access Goals?  On-screen viewing  Thumbnail preview  Screen-size  Detail study (and how much?)  Printing  Artifactual Fidelity or Intellectual Content

10. Printing  On-screen resolutions are typically inadequate for printing  For non-transparency material (prints, books, objects, etc.), 300dpi is a good resolution for printable versions

11. Artifactual Fidelity or Intellectual Content?  Artifactual fidelity  Must preserve the appearance of the actual object  Can provide an enhanced sense of experiencing the real object  But in some cases, preserving the look and feel of the artifact obstructs the content  Doug Greenberg’s “compulsive authenticity disorder” (http://www.nedcc.org/owol/dgabs.htm)  Intellectual content  Optimized to provide the best presentation of the content itself, not the artifact  The sense of interacting with the actual object may be diminished or destroyed  Both strategies may be required

13. What are Your Constraints?  Hardware  RAM  CPU speed  Disk space  Storage  Software  Staff  Time  Skill and experience  Money

14. What Opportunities Do You Have?  Grants may be available to finance your project  Grants often expect a certain level of quality; if so, what capture quality is specified?  Do you have access to student help? Interns? Volunteers?  Can you cut a deal with a vendor like Octavo?

15. Capturing  Monitor resolutions are improving  640 x 480 --> 800 x 600 --> 1280 x 768  What is a good resolution for onscreen viewing today, may not be tomorrow  How many times do you want to scan your material?  Scan at the best quality you can justify given your goals, constraints, and opportunities

16. Capture Recommendations for Access (not preservation)  Photos, illustrations, maps, etc.:  300dpi  24 bit color  B/W Text document:  300dpi  8 bit grayscale  Negatives and Slides:  2200 pixels in longest dimension  24 bit color or 8 bit grayscale

17. Describing  Good metadata is essential to your success  Three types:  Descriptive  Administrative  Structural

18. Describing: Appropriate Level  Collection-level access:  Discovery metadata describes the collection  Example: Archival finding aid; see http://www.oac.cdlib.org/  Item-level access:  Discovery metadata describes the item  Example: MARC or Dublin Core records for each item; see http://jarda.cdlib.org/search.html  Both types of access may be appropriate  Doing both often takes very little extra effort

19. Search Interface Collection Description Images Collection Level Access Collection Description

20. Search Interface Images Item Level Access Collection Descriptions

21. http://oac.cdlib.org/

25. http://jarda.cdlib.org/

26. jarda.cdlib.org/search.html

27. Describing: Metadata Granularity  William Randolph Hearst  Consider all uses for the metadata  Design for the most granular use  Store it in a machine-parseable format

28. Describing: Machine Parseability  The ability to pull apart and reconstruct information via software  For example, this: William Randolph Hearst  Can easily become this: Hearst, William Randolph

29. Describing: Metadata Qualification  William Randolph Hearst  Builder -- Castles -- Southern California

30. Describing: Formats & Syntax Dublin Core EAD MARC TEI XML Which ones?

31. Describing: Metadata Storage Formats  It doesn’t matter so long as:  You captured the quantity required for your purposes  You captured it at the granularity required for your purposes  You qualify the metadata where required  You store it in a machine-parseable format  You can output it in any format to which you wish to comply  Given that, you can do anything!

32. Describing: Standards  Decide to which industry standards you will comply  Use an internal metadata infrastructure that supports compliance with those standards, as well as your specific requirements  Consider the issues of item v. collection level, granularity, qualification, and machine parseability  Understand that your internal formats may be more complex than what is required for standards compliance

33. Describing: Making Your Metadata Searchable  Sample Indexing Systems/Databases:  Sprite (Perl module)  Microsoft Access, Filemaker Pro  SWISH-E, swish-e.org  MySQL, mysql.com  Oracle or Sybase Less More The power & complexity continuum SpriteSWISH-EMySQLAccess/Filemaker Oracle, Sybase

34. Providing Access  Exhibit  Browse  Search

35. Providing Access: Exhibit  Goals:  Inviting  Easy to navigate  Highlight selected parts of a collection  Teach  Requirements:  Great graphic design  Informative and succinct commentary  Interesting subject matter

39. http://www.kb.nl/kb/galerie/trivulzio/index-en.html

40. http://www.bl.uk/

41. Providing Access: Browse  Goals:  Provide intriguing and interesting paths into and throughout a collection  Give a broad sense of a collection, but not show everything necessarily  Requirements:  Logical browse paths  May have multiple paths to the same items (e.g., time, geography, subject)

42. http://www.kb.nl/kb/manuscripts/browser/

43. Providing Access: Search  Goals  To provide post-coordinate access to all items in a collection relevant to a particular query  To provide good methods to create a search as well as refine or alter the display as required  Requirements:  Good search software (database or indexing software)  Good metadata (minimum is probably a title or caption for each item)  Good interface (options for navigation, search refinement, etc.)

44. http://www.scran.ac.uk/

46. Recap  Determine what you want your users to be able to do (your access goals)  Consider your constraints, opportunities, and long-term goals  Capture images at the best quality you can stand  Collect metadata in an amount and form that supports your access goals as well as interoperability with relevant standards  Never underestimate the power of a committed individual and a cheap scanner!

47. Final Advice  Don’t scrimp on tools — staff time is the most expensive part of any project  For any given project, there are several ways it can succeed and countless ways it can fail  Do it right, or don’t do it at all?  NO! From the access perspective, it’s much better to do it as well as you can than to not do it at all.