New Jersey
is a state known for its roadways, and now an electronic highway is about
to be added to the state's resources. The
New Jersey State Library
has joined with
Rutgers University Libraries
"to create a web site that will contain digitized historical and cultural
heritage materials," the university said. Funded by a $460,000
Institute of Museum and
Library Services
grant, the New
Jersey Digital Highway
(NJDH) (www.njdigitalhighway.org)
will feature state and local history collections from libraries, museums,
other cultural institutions, and individual owners. Materials will include
books, diaries, letters, and legal documents, plus moving and still
images.
Additional
grant partners include the American Labor Museum/Botto House National
Landmark, New Jersey State Archives, and New Jersey Historical Society.
Linda
Langschied,
head of Rutgers's
Scholarly Communications
Center,
told LJ that the university will "work very closely with history
teachers to test the site's usability." To that end, the project is
developing specialized portals for teachers and their students. "We'll be
closely matching the curricular needs that they have," she said.
The
educators' portal will link and display metadata for lesson plans and
activities with the metadata for the digitized content. The students'
portal will function as a search facility for middle- and high school
students looking for information and provide simple bulleted guides to
finding and using information in term papers and assignments. Special
templates for student activities will be developed.
The
cultural heritage information portal will provide resources on metadata
and digitization best practices, including workflow design and a business
model for a digitization project.
Langschied
said the university's project teams are developing the site's
infrastructure, while the state library is doing a lot of the publicity.
"That's the development that largely will be going on this year, although
we'll also be working with our collection partners." In addition to the
five lead partners, many smaller organizations are joining in. "Part of
the concept is that this system will be usable by anyone who has cultural
heritage/historical materials."
Among the
smaller participants is a church that has records and deeds from the
1700s. An oral history collection of Portuguese Americans in Newark, NJ,
from Rutgers professor Kimberley Holton, will be included. The project is
also getting materials from the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center
and local PBS affiliate WNET-TV. Although the site is live, the historical
content is not yet online. "We'll be putting up the real site in the next
month or two," Langschied said. "It will be at least a year out before we
have any digital collections."
The
inaugural theme of the site will be "The Changing Face of New Jersey: The
Immigration Experience from Earliest Times to the Present," with topics
such as environmental history and transportation history, among others.
Participating collections have been chosen based on ownership of
high-interest materials, as well as on organization size and diversity.
Approximately 10,000 items will be digitized in the first three years.
Core
infrastructure is based on FEDORA (Flexible Extensible Digital Object and
Repository Architecture). FEDORA adds intelligence to digital objects by
incorporating METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) to link
metadata to the object and to provide uniform structure maps for multipart
objects, such as text and video.
Open
Archives Initiative (OAI) strategy allows participants to designate
records and collections for OAI data mining. The NJDH will serve as an OAI
data provider for the integrated repository collection but also on behalf
of individual participating organizations.
Since much
of the content will come from local paper archives, the materials need
digitizing. Langschied revealed that in many cases, rather than bringing
the materials to a digitization facility, the facility will be going to
the materials. Contributors can elect to bring their items to Rutgers if
necessary, but part of the grant money is for the purchase of laptops and
portable scanners that will be loaned. Major partners will receive
permanent digitizing stations.
Rutgers will offer training
in how to digitize materials according to archival standards.
OCLC
also provides training, and the
University of Illinois
offers a two-week online training course, "so there are many ways that
we're going to offer digitization training," Langschied said. Project
organizers are offering additional training in metadata creation and
rights management.
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