HBCU-GSU Digital Project Team

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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.

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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.

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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.
• http//www.gram.edu/prospective/degrees.asp

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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.

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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.

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Definition

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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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GSU Black-Gold Digital Collection

• We are currently digitizing Grambling State
  University founders 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 .

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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 Universitys goal and
  objectives.
• We plan to archive some special collections from
  The Eddie Robinson artifacts.
• The HBCU-GSU Digital Collections are located at
  http//contentdm.auctr.edu/cdm4/browse.php

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Validating the Products and Deliverable Readiness
Review
I am testing for bugs

• 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.

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Lesson What should a Digital Liaison know?

• Understand and define the project objectives and
  goals.
• Understand the organizations policies,
  objectives and goals.
• Understand the organization collection management
  as related to project.

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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.

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• At your convenience, please visit our Online
  collections at http//contentdm.auctr.edu/cdm4/bro
  wse.php
• and come to see us at Grambling State
  University where everybody is somebody.

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• Thank you.