160 · Representative Documents: Promoting Digital Collections
INDIANA UNIVERSITY BLOOMINGTON
IU Libraries digitization project creates rich repository of Hoosier authors
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/23876.html
IU Libraries digitization project creates rich repository of Hoosier authors: IU News Room: Indiana University
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/23876.html[8/19/14 4:43:35 PM]
and nearly 21,000 book citations. It links directly to about 400 digitized
copies of selected titles and allows users to search for remaining titles via
external services like Google Books, WorldCat, Hathi Trust Digital Library
and the Libraries' online catalog, IUCAT.
Entries range from well-known authors such as James Whitcomb Riley,
Booth Tarkington and Gene Stratton Porter to the lesser known, such as an
entry for Ethel Mathilda Green Adams, a public schoolteacher who wrote a
book about musical understanding in the 1960s. In addition to works of
literature, there are a number of nonfiction works including histories of
local towns, counties and churches. These sources, and a handful of
regimental histories dating to the Civil War, are a genealogical gold mine.
"Our hard work on this project has created a really rich resource that is
already receiving more than 28,000 unique visits per month from users,"
digital projects and usability librarian Michelle Dalmau said. "I see it as an
important K-12 tool, while it can also assist scholars who are researching
more obscure authors. Users are able to browse by author, book title or
publication date, creating possibilities for deep textual analysis."
Dalmau plans to share encoded texts and descriptive metadata with the
state library to include in the Indiana Digital Library portal, Indiana
Memory.
The original project had called for digitization of about 150 curated titles
from 1880 to 1920, an era known as Indiana's Golden Age of Literature. But
the explosion of Google Books and other resources such as the HathiTrust
Digital Library onto the digitization scene opened up new possibilities,
allowing for access to hundreds more titles than originally expected,
Dalmau said.
In addition to the original 150 books digitized for the grant, IU Libraries
staff digitized an additional 250 books available through the project
themselves, focusing on important books from Indiana's literary and
historical heritage. These books become available as staff complete them --
on average, four new books every month.
That crucial behind-the-scenes effort is also benefitting Indiana University
in another way: The Digital Library Program partnered with the Library
Technical Services Department to generate new workflows for digitization
for the project, opening new doors for future collaboration.
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