Working Group Reports
April 26, 2012
Spring Report
Production
We've really picked up speed with two more batches out the door and the next one
in the data verfication stage. Batch_wa_bump
ing and batch_wa_columbia were shipped at the end of March and mid-April respectively. They have been received at the LC receiv
ing center and are wait
ing to be approved and uploaded by LC. Newpspaer titles that will be uploaded from these batches
include
The Lynden Tribune (sn88085445) and
The Spokane Press (LCCN: 88085947). Batch_wa_duwamish is
in the hopper to be shipped with
in the week and will
include a reel of the aforementioned
Spokane Pressand
The Vancouver Independent (LCCN sn87093109)from the late 1800s. Neat stuff from 130 years ago!
We received an upgrade of our docWorks software
in February and met the CCS U.S. Systems Eng
ineer, Tip Ros, at that time for tra
ining. It was great to meet Tip and we learned a lot more about the application that does our OCR process
ing, metadata management and generation of derivative files allow
ing us to meet NDNP requirements.
Staff Changes
Carl Burnett has graciously volunteered to assist us
in process
ing and newspaper essay research despite his busy schedule work
ing at UW's Suzzallo Library and complet
ing his portfolio before he graduates this June.
Kate Ratcliff is a familiar face at the Wash
ington State Library and UW as a recent graduate from their MLIS program.
In between jobs at UW
in Seattle and
index
ing political comics for a local cartoonist, she is volunteer
ing
in our WSL office assist
ing with process
ing.
We have four volunteers
in total contribut
ing to about 15 hours per week of our process
ing and research time. Karen and Barb, retired school teachers from Olympia, appear every Tuesday at WSL and are great fun to work with. They have been steadily chipp
ing away at the stack of documents
in the OCR zon
ing stage despite all the staff
ing changes
in NDNP last summer. They've really helped keep us on track.
We're sad to announce that Shawn Moriarty, an early member of the NDNP team, has decided to resign from WSL. But the good news is she'll be able to spend more time with her daughter N
ina, future digital librarian extraord
inaire. They also make appearances
in the department from time to time to get that "early librarian learn
ing time
in. Judy Pitchford will be tak
ing on some additional hours to help with NDNP process
ing
in ShawnM's place.
Thanks everyone!!!!
January 5, 2012
A New and Exciting 2012!¶
Happy New Year from WA-NDNP!
We have ambitious goals ahead of us as we're gear
ing up for speedy production this year. We are wait
ing to hear back from LC on the approval of batch_wa_american and already prepar
ing the next for submission this month. Titles
included
in the first batch are Wenatchee Daily World, Labor Journal and a few issues of the Spokane Press.
We will have more people help
ing with the process
ing through the addition of two new volunteers
in Olympia, Col
in and Kate, and
in the spr
ing quarter we will add an
intern
in Seattle through UW's Directed Fieldwork program.
In the meantime, the staff at WSL and UW have been truly wonderful
in help
ing me "learn the ropes" of NDNP details very quickly. We have a new space for our film readers, PCs and students that allows the three of us to stretch our arms and meet together
in one room at the same time. :) This will allow us to br
ing
in the DFW student and collaborate more effectively. It's been great meet
ing people at both worksites and shar
ing the news of the Chronicl
ing America project.
Our NEH and LC contacts have also been warm and welcom
ing
in guid
ing me through the standards and our process
ing software vendor, CCS, has been patiently answer
ing my many questions about the tool and keep
ing everyth
ing runn
ing smoothly.
Feel free to send questions my way if you'd like to know more about the project. I'll post more as we add new batches and titles.
Cheers!
Shawn Schollmeyer
Project Manager
shawn.schollmeyer@sos.wa.gov
December 2, 2011
Changes and progress for 2011 from Washington’s National Digital Newspaper Program¶
Hello from the new program coord
inator!
I'd like to
introduce myself and give you a brief update on some of our big changes over the past year. My name is Shawn Schollmeyer and I am a 2006 graduate of the UW iSchool program. My background has
included many years of library and digital asset management experience that I hope will be a great asset to the NDNP for Wash
ington. My family has lived
in Wash
ington for more than four generations which is why I am look
ing forward to promot
ing this great opportunity to show our history and development s
ince pre-statehood.
2011 has seen a lot of changes by br
ing
ing the docWorks application
in house and with the addition of a new Digital Newspaper Project Assistant and recent library grad student, April Mart
in.
We are already work
ing on the draft for our next grant cycle which will be due
in January. We are plann
ing on add
ing the rema
ining Seattle P-I and Seattle Star issues for the 2012-14 time period to have a well rounded representation of the state and population areas.
While I'm gett
ing up to speed on the NDNP processes I will be add
ing our updates to the WIKI. Take a look at the Milestones table so see what we've accomplished to date.
Do check back for more updates over the next few months.
Shawn Schollmeyer
Project Manager
Wash
ington National Digital Newspaper Program
Wash
ington State Library
360.570.5568 | 360.480.9538 cell
shawn.schollmeyer@sos.wa.gov
Oct. 08, 2010
Hello to our esteemed Wash
ington NDNP Advisory Committee members and staff,
Here’s a quick update from Wash
ington’s National Digital Newspaper Program.
What we’ve accomplished:
1.
In late September we released news that 23 titles with over 115,000 newspaper pages went live
in Chronicl
ing America (
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers/). We sent releases by title to media, libraries, and archives based on regional
interest (I’ve attached a copy of the Seattle Star release so you can see an example). See a list of titles and more
here.
2. For the most part, our 2008-2010 grant has been completed. For a more detailed report please see the 2008-2010 f
inal report to NEH:
Final ReportsWhat’s next:
3. You may have heard that WSL received word
in June that Wash
ington’s NDNP grant has been renewed for another two years. Yay!
4. For the next grant round we decided to license docWorks from CCS (our text conversion vendor
in Germany)
in order to br
ing more of the work
in house and allow us to digitize other WSL collections
in a similar fashion. We’re gett
ing ready to tra
in on the use of docWorks
in the next few weeks.
5. We’re
in the process of look
ing for grant fund
ing that would allow us to create a Digital Library Repository,
ingest
ing our NDNP titles with other digital collections here at the State Library. The idea is that this would allow better management, preservation, and access to historic newspapers, books, maps, etc. that have been digitized by or
in conjunction with the Wash
ington State Library. Grant money is gett
ing much more competitive
in these tough f
inancial times so keep your f
ingers crossed for us.
Welcome and Thanks
6. Please jo
in me
in welcom
ing Claire Imamura, our new Digital Newspaper Project Assistant. Claire started yesterday, she worked for a time at the Alaska State Library and is now a full time graduate student at the UW iSchool. She will be work
ing with me at the University of Wash
ington on the next phase of the grant.
7. And f
inally, a big thanks to Glenda Pearson and staff at the University of Wash
ington for hous
ing me (part time) and the students work
ing on this project, provid
ing access to the negatives they’ve filmed over the years, head
ing the titles selection committee, and help
ing to research newspaper titles. UW has been a great partner
in this project and WSL is grateful for its collaborative spirit.
And as always, thank you for your support and feel free to contact me with questions.
Laura Rob
inson
Project Manager
Wash
ington National Digital Newspaper Program
Wash
ington State Library
360.570.5568 | 360.915.4156 cell
laura.rob
inson@sos.wa.gov
Feb. 04, 2010
Hello to Wash
ington’s NDNP Advisory Committee members,
I trust everyone is enjoy
ing their w
inter (or at least are hopeful that it’s already February).
This is just a quick update to
inform folks of the progress with Wash
ington’s National Digital Newspaper Program here at the State Library.
- We recently released news regarding the 8 Washington titles we have live in Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers/). We sent releases based on title to media, libraries, and archives based on regional interest. I’ve attached a general one here for the group.
- We’re also planning a strategy to incorporate these pages and our existing Pioneer Newspapers database into one digital repository and search interface. This may take some time but we’ve begun the initial research.
- With 42,000 pages available online (Chronicling America) and 28,000 more pages delivered and waiting for upload, we are approximately 70% the way through our 100,000 pages. Visit our progress chart for more details: Latest Updates.
- We’ve applied for the 2010-2012 grant cycle and hope to find out by June if we’ve received another two-year grant.
For a more detailed progress report please see our Jan 31, 2010
interim report to NEH:
Interim ReportsAnd as always, thanks for your support and contact me with questions.
Cheers.
Laura Rob
inson
WA - National Digital Newspaper Program
Wash
ington State Library
360.570.5568 | 360.915.4156
laura.rob
inson@sos.wa.gov
TopSept. 30, 2008
Our NDNP coord
inator, Laura Rob
inson, is now
in place. She will be out of the office from Oct. 1-10 to get married and have a short honeymoon. When she returns, you can contact her at 360.570.5568
in Olympia, or at 360.915.4156 on her cell phone. You may want to try her cell phone first as she will be at UW for part of each week. Her email is lrob
inson@secstate.wa.gov.
The RFP for scann
ing was issued on Sept. 15 and responses are due Oct. 15. We plan to announce our selection by Oct. 24.
Laura and Marlys were able to attend the third meta|morphosis conference
in Lex
ington, Ky., Sept. 24-25. It was a valuable experience and
included some hands-on time with film scanners, densitometers and XML files. It was also a good chance to talk to some of the vendors and other NDNP participants.
We will be work
ing closely with University of Kentucky and plan to use their web form for collect
ing title and collation metadata for the film we’ll be exam
ining.
Title selection is mov
ing along, and at a meet
ing between UW and WSL on Sept. 12, both organizations decided on the first titles to be purchased. M
inutes of that meet
ing can be found on the NDNP wiki at
Meetings.
The contract between WSL and UW to allow us to reimburse them for film and student workers is still
in our contracts office, but should be emerg
ing soon.
Laura has established a wiki for the project to use for ma
inta
ining files and communicat
ing. The NDNP wiki is located at
MainPage In the
interests of keep
ing a coherent record of the project, we will cont
inue to send
information and updates out via listserv, but will also add the updates, discussions, etc. to the wiki. At present I believe anyone can read the wiki. If you want to be able to add to the wiki, please contact Laura.
TopAug. 20, 2008
Greet
ings from overcast Olympia!
I just want to take a m
inute to update everyone on where we are
in the NDNP project.
We have hired an NDNP Project Coord
inator, Laura Rob
inson, who will start work officially on Sept. 1. Laura has been work
ing on the Wash
ington Rural Heritage project, travel
ing around the state do
ing scann
ing and tra
ining at rural libraries and heritage organizations to help them convert some of their unique hold
ings. Before that she worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory
in New Mexico develop
ing a quality assurance program for cross-walk
ing and normalization of huge databases. Needless to say we are delighted to have her with us.
Laura will be spend
ing part of her time
in Olympia and part of it
in Seattle at UW. Once we nail down phone numbers and such, I’ll send out her contact
information.
In the next 2 months Laura will also be gett
ing married, buy
ing a house and mov
ing – so she’ll be very busy!
We have a draft of an RFP for a vendor that is currently be
ing reviewed by our contracts office. We hope to release it soon and have a vendor nailed down by Nov. I’ve started work
ing on a contract with UW that will allow us to reimburse them for film and for student workers.
Glenda is work
ing on our prelim
inary list of titles so we can place our first orders of film and get started on the film evaluation and test
ing, as well as the gather
ing of metadata.
Laura and I attended the participants meet
ing for NDNP
in Wash
ington, DC Aug. 6-8, and had a chance to meet the participants from all the other libraries and the LC staff we will be work
ing with. The agenda covered a lot of the nuts and bolts of the project as well as presentations from several of the cont
inu
ing awardees on project design and troubleshoot
ing. It was a very positive experience.
We had hoped to also attend the metamorphosis08 conference at the University of Kentucky which focuses on conversion of film to digital, but with the ban on out-of-state travel that looks doubtful.
That’s about it for now – hope you are all hav
ing a great summer!
TopOther Reports and News¶