|
About NEA
Activities & Services |
Around and AboutMaine Memory Network: The Challenges of Digital CollaborationBy Ellen Dyer, Outreach Consultant, Maine Memory NetworkHave you checked out the Maine Memory Network yet? If not, direct your browser to <www.mainememory.net> and take a look at one of the first statewide digital museums on the Web. Launched in December of 2001, we are still very much in the building stage, and interesting images are still being added every day. There are many exciting things about the Maine Memory Network: it is set up so that any collecting agency may contribute items to the digital museum; it allows the user to view the images in many ways; and it is targeted specifically for school and research use. I am a member of the Maine Memory Network (MMN) team, working as an outreach consultant for central and eastern Maine. As such I have had a chance to work very closely with a wide variety of libraries, archives, and museums, helping them master the technology involved. I have had the opportunity to witness first hand the enthusiasm and energy generated when repositories realize the possibilities that Maine Memory Network affords them. I have also seen the outreach program find itself filling needs not originally imagined. I’d like to take you behind the scenes of working for and participating in such an innovative project. First, a little background about the history of the Maine Memory Network is in order. The seed money came through the efforts of the Maine Cultural Affairs Council, a unique public-private partnership of seven statewide cultural agencies. Five public agencies—the Maine Arts Commission, Maine Historic Preservation Commission, Maine State Archives, Maine State Library and the Maine State Museum—partnered with two private organizations—the Maine Humanities Council and the Maine Historical Society—and developed a cooperative appropriations request to the state legislature. In 1999 the legislature responded with an appropriation of $3.2 million to fund specific activities supported by each of the council partners, what became known as the New Century Community Program. One of those activities was a statewide digital museum and archives, the brainchild of Richard D’Abate, director of the Maine Historical Society. The next step was to hire Dan Kaplan as project director. Kaplan spent the first four months on the job gathering information from other cultural organizations about what they would like to see on Maine Memory Network. He was assisted by an advisory board including representatives from Fogler Library at the University of Maine, the Maine State Library, Northeast Historic Film, the Maine State Museum, the Maine Humanities Council, and, of course, the Maine Historical Society. He also consulted with other organizations working on similar projects, such as the Colorado Digitization Project, the California Heritage Collection, American Memory, and the Minnesota Historical Society. From all this information, he started to assemble a plan for the Web site. One of the top priorities for Maine Memory Network was to incorporate the ability for any repository with collections related to Maine history to contribute their own historical images to the database. The intent behind the New Century Program was for projects to have a statewide impact. While the Maine Historical Society has a rich and varied collection that covers much of the state, everyone realized that the content of the Maine Memory Network would be exponentially deeper if other historical societies and museums could contribute images from their own collections. Furthermore, it would allow smaller, volunteer-run organizations to have access to technology they would probably have not have been able to afford on their own. Knowing the Maine temperament (we can be pretty independent), another priority was to ensure that those contributing partners would be able to participate with a great deal of autonomy. Within certain standards, contributing partners should be able to choose, upload, and catalog their images with minimal dependence on MMN staff. This is one of the features that sets the Maine Memory Network apart from other similar digital projects. After reviewing many Web sites, and investigating software, Kaplan determined that stock photo Web sites were already doing a lot of the things Maine Memory Network wanted to do. He approached Aurora and Quanta to see if they could adapt a stock photo application to satisfy MMN requirements. Happily, they were able to make provisions for the distributed input and holding pen that Maine Memory Network required. The result was an agreement to license the software from A & Q for much less than it would cost to develop it from scratch. Then work began on building the initial Maine Memory Network site. The Maine Historical Society became the test case for working out the processes and identifying the bugs. When Maine Memory Network went live, all of its images were from the Maine Historical Society. Obviously the database needed more depth, which is where the outreach team comes in. A grant from the Technology Opportunities Program, administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce, provided the funding for an outreach program in the fall of 2001. The mission of the outreach program was to recruit and train contributing partners as well as raise general awareness about the Maine Memory Network. Kathy Amoroso was brought on board to act as outreach coordinator, helping to develop the standards for submissions to MMN, the manual that would become the contributing partners’ guidebook and making initial contact with potential contributors. She then turned her sights toward hiring two other outreach consultants to increase MMN’s presence throughout the state. Maine is, after all, a large state – to drive from Portland to Fort Kent can take nine hours. Fortunately, Rick Asam in Presque Isle, works with organizations in the northern part of the state. Based out of Warren, I work with organizations in eastern and central Maine. The easy part of the outreach job is getting people excited about using the Web site. One can search the database in a variety of ways – by keyword, by county, by time period, by theme, or by person. A “browse” tool is slated to go live in early fall 2003, a way for researchers to narrow down a group of images through hierarchical subject categories. Once a user identifies an image they would like to take a closer look at they proceed to a detail page that gives descriptive information about the item and contact information for the organization that contributed it to the Maine Memory Network. From there the user can “zoom” into the image. For select images the user can rotate the item, getting either a 360° view of three-dimensional items or the ability to see the writing on the back of a postcard (for an example of the rotate tool, type 6034 in the search field and view the Robinson pitcher). The album feature allows the user to group specific images together, add text, and view it as a slide show, with its own URL. This allows a school child to put together a project and e-mail it to his or her teacher, or for a small historical society to put together a virtual exhibit and link to it from their own Web site. A significant part of MMN is dedicated to educators, and the schools section provides access to primary documents that support teachers and students using the new Maine Studies textbook, Finding Katahdin: An Exploration of Maine’s Past (University of Maine Press, 2001). There is also a section of on-line features that explore different historical themes in detail. Because contributing partners run the gamut of professionalism, resources, and comfort with technology, MMN has simple standards in place to ensure a consistent level of quality across the database. To keep the collection focused we require that submissions be somehow related to Maine and of historic interest. Since items are displayed at a standard 600-pixel width, whether the original is a slide or an 8 x 10 print, we require that the final scan be a certain file size instead of a certain resolution. This ensures that they both will display at roughly the same resolution at a 600-pixel width. We encourage contributing partners to scan at a very high quality, resulting in a 40 MB jpg file when opened. This captures a lot of detail, enables the zoom tool to function well, and allows the contributing partner to make that image available for sale if they choose. If file sizes are a real concern for them, they may choose to submit 2.5-3.5 MB files instead (for more details about our scanning standards, please see our Contributing Partners Manual, available on the Web site). The cataloging for each image is standardized as much as possible through the use of an on-line, password-protected form whose fields roughly correspond to MARC record fields. MMN staff double check every submission to ensure everything is in order and our intrepid cataloger, Fran Pollitt, adds Library of Congress subject headings before a finished submission goes on-line. One of the hardest challenges of the outreach mission is getting contributing partners through the initial training and making sure they have the tools they need to participate. MMN has made a real effort to make the process of scanning, uploading and cataloging as simple as possible. A number of contributing partners have the equipment readily available and are comfortable enough with technology that all they have to do is skim the Contributing Partners Manual and they are ready to go. But not everyone is that fortunate. Many of Maine’s historical societies are small, volunteer-run organizations with a high percentage of volunteers who are not comfortable with technology. If they have a computer and scanner, it may be an ancient one someone donated when they upgraded their home system (have you ever tried opening a 40 MB file on a seven-year-old computer?) They may not even have a phone line in their building for Internet access. Or they may not have the time to do the work, especially for manuscripts, which require a full transcription. The outreach consultants doing the training must be able to decipher a variety of scanning and imaging software to ensure that we can help the contributing partner meet MMN standards. Maine Memory Network has faced this challenge in a variety of ways, from the simple to the innovative. We have helped connect organizations to grant resources to get equipment, and have even located an intern or two to help with their scanning and cataloging. In Skowhegan, director of education, Steve Bromage, managed to facilitate a collaboration between two middle school teachers and the Skowhegan History House. The curator provided access and insight into the students’ local history, and in return the students provided the manpower to scan, and the school provided access to equipment and a high-speed Internet connection. Their efforts have resulted in over eighty images on-line. Last fall the Maine Memory Network partnered with the Lewiston Public Library in a New Century grant to create a scanning center for local contributing partners. A computer, scanner and trained staff person were funded by this grant, and all are available at the Lewiston Public Library for any contributing partner without equipment or a good internet connection to use. Another challenge has been educating contributing partners about the issues involved in making images available on the Web. Attitudes range from the desire to scan everything without regard to privacy or copyright issues to the fear that putting an image on the Web will mean it will show up mass-marketed on t-shirts next week. MMN provides each contributing partner with a primer on copyright law, and talks them through the grey areas so that they can make an informed decision about what their risks are in putting certain images on the web. We have helped them develop better gift agreements that assign copyright as part of the gift, and provided sample photo releases to get permission to post images of people still living. To help allay fears about widespread dissemination of an image, each submission is watermarked, and users do not have direct access to high quality images except through the zoom tool, which does not allow easy copying. Beyond all the information directly related to Maine Memory Network the outreach team disseminates, we have discovered there is a real thirst for information about proper archival and museum methods, especially in the rural areas. In addition to advising on gift agreements, we have frequently found ourselves advising contributing partners on where to find grant money for archival supplies, connecting them with experts on exhibit mounts for museum objects, telling them where to find information on creating disaster plans, pointing them in the direction of places they can purchase collection managment software or informing them about archival classes available to them. This is a service not originally envisioned by MMN, but it is one that our contributing partners have appreciated, and one that makes them stronger organizations. The stronger they are as a repository, the stronger they are as contributing partners. The Maine Memory Network has covered a lot of ground and faced a lot
of challenges in the course of recruiting and training contributing
partners, but we have many more ahead of us. We are currently working
on expanding the number of museum objects and over-sized documents available
on the Web site, which requires the use of digital cameras instead of
scanners. We are in the process of making audio clips available to researchers
as well. Video clips are also part of our future plans. A newly-hired
historian, Candace Kanes, is helping to identify gaps in the database,
and locating possible material to fill them. A lot of new things will
be happening. By the time this newsletter reaches your mailbox, the
Maine Memory Network should have over seventy contributing partners.
For an outreach consultant, that’s the most exciting thing of
all. Have an idea for an article?Contact any of the editors. |