Observed in the United States on the last Monday of May, Memorial Day honors those who died in the armed forces. Many cities in the United States have claimed to be the originators of Memorial Day, including Boalsburg, Pennsylvania. Boalsburg declared itself the birthplace of Memorial Day in 1864, according to this pamphlet (oddly enough, a part of the Digital Library of Georgia’s collections!). Unfortunately for Boalsburg, President Lyndon Johnson declared in 1966 that Waterloo, New York was the official birthplace of this tradition. Regardless of its birthplace, we celebrate this day every year by organizing parades, decorating gravesites, wearing remembrance poppies, and thanking those who served.
Here are some items from PA Digital collections highlighting celebrations in our state’s past:
Memorial Day also typically signals the official beginning of summer! After the prolonged winter this year, we could sure use it. The long weekend is a popular time for backyard barbecuing, spending time in the garden, or heading down the shore (and, of course, getting stuck in traffic on the way home). Take a look at how Pennsylvanians have celebrated:
This post is by Brandy Karl, Copyright Officer @ the Pennsylvania State University and member of PA Digital Metadata Team Rights Subgroup and Rachel Appel, co-project manager of PA Digital.
Our panel! Top row from left: Doreva Belfiore, Linda Tompkins-Baldwin, Gabe Galson, Jen Palmentiero. Bottom row from left: Paul Kelly, Rachel Appel, Brandy Karl. Photo taken by Jessica Lydon.
This month, we had the pleasure of presenting at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives (MARAC) Spring 2018 Conference in Hershey, PA along with PA Digital colleagues, Doreva Belfiore (HSLC), Gabe Galson (Temple University), and members of other hubs, Paul Kelly (DC Public Library and District Digital), Linda Tompkins-Baldwin (Enoch Enoch Pratt Free Library/State Library Resource and Digital Maryland), and Jen Palmentiero (Southeastern New York Library Resources Council and Empire State Digital Network).
A highlight of the conference was the keynote by Trevor Owens, Head of Digital Content Management at the Library of Congress. Trevor’s keynote was framed around his book Theory & Craft of Digital Preservation (full preprint available via link). He discussed how we’ve been working on digital preservation for over half a century and made points about the holistic nature of digital preservation. For example, software cannot preserve anything and a repository is the work that people do with tools, workflows and processes. Hoarding is also not digital preservation and therefore appraisal is key. It was a great way to start the conference!
Our own panel was a birds-of-a-feather on rights statements, “True Rights Statement Confessions” [slides can be found at this link]. The completely Q&A focused session aimed to bring together various experts from mid-Atlantic DPLA Hubs who have implemented standardized rights statements for digital collections, worked on education and training for its constituent institutions’ digital collections, or have done rights statements analyses across their home institution or constituent collections. Attendees were encouraged to ask any questions about normalized rights statements. We had some great questions and discussions, such as when to use the Public Domain license versus the No Copyright – US statement and how rights statements are user-centric and focus on potential uses of the item than the repository’s risk profile.
Interestingly, we did get a number of questions that focused on copyright concerns. One great question asked about the difference between the rights of the original work and the digitized facsimile, or surrogate. Other questions included where to put in permissions information (if at all) and the notion of what is someone’s intellectual property in handwritten modern letters.
We had a total of 68 attendees and did not need to use any of our backup questions in case folks didn’t have any. We hope the attendees enjoyed the session and MARAC Spring 2018 as much as we did.
Rachel Appel, Doreva Belfiore, Gabe Galson, and I attended the first DPLA Members Network Meeting held in Atlanta, GA. Including PA Digital, 23 of 27 member hubs were represented at the meeting, which provided us the opportunity to chat with other attendees about our ideas, goals, projects, questions, challenges, and successes.
The first day consisted of updates from the DPLA team, including a welcome from new DPLA Director John Bracken, who set the tone for the meeting by asking questions for us to consider around our audiences and our impact. Other members of the DPLA team provided updates on ongoing work around curatorial projects, rights statements applications, QA practices, and analytics. We learned that the DPLA has 141 Primary Source Sets available on their website, which comprise 30-35% of traffic to the DPLA during the school year. DPLA also has 33 exhibits currently, which represents 15-20% of traffic to DPLA. I was interested in these because we are in the midst of creating our own Primary Source Sets at PA Digital, and I was interested in not only how the DPLA went about creating these, but how they measured their impact.
Another highlight of the first day was nine lightning talks covering a variety of projects spearheaded by hubs, ranging from metadata aggregation in Michigan to geospatial mapping in Minnesota to connecting LIS students into cultural heritage institutions in Wisconsin. Rachel and I were able to present on the Primary Source Sets project too!
Using sorcery to impress everyone at the DPLA Members Meeting! (Photo courtesy of Doreva Belfiore.)
Our talk, Primary Source Set Sorcery, gave an overview of our approach to creating primary source sets (disclaimer: no sorcery was actually performed). We received positive feedback from hubs who have already created Primary Source Sets or were working towards it. We’re looking forward to updating you on this project more soon! (You can also find our slides here.)
The second day of the meeting included sessions and workshops in areas such as rights statements, outreach, networking, repository challenges, partner recruitment, and building hubs. I attended a workshop on rightsstatements.org with Greg Cram from the NYPL and Emily Gore from the DPLA who walked us through the three major categories of rightsstatements.org: In Copyright, No Copyright, and Other, with really helpful examples of what a good rights statement looks like, as well as some confusing ones. This is something we have been actively working on at PA Digital and it was great for me to see how Greg and Emily taught us so we can continue educating ourselves and our contributing institutions on how to properly apply rights information to their collections.
Some of the sessions around outreach and partner recruitment allowed hubs to share approaches that have worked for them as well as some challenges that we all face. One of the challenges that resonated with me was how to reach out to unique types of institutions and/or users and how do we measure the impact we have. For example, one challenge that many hubs related to was connecting with institutions across large states. An obstacle we are working on is making connections with institutions in Central and Western Pennsylvania, while I am based at Temple University, all the way out east in Philadelphia. I heard from many other hubs who have staff centralized in one part of the state who don’t know where to start in reaching out to others further away. Many others hubs do a lot of work to keep up with local conferences, listservs, and following up with their connections from all over their state. This is something we will continue to improve on, and if you’re reading this and interested in working with us, email us!
Having a community of peers to connect with around these issues and questions was really helpful and PA Digital is excited to continue participating in these events. Thanks for hosting us, DPLA!
At Temple University Libraries several staff members work on the PA Digital project. PA Digital is the Pennsylvania service hub of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The DPLA aggregates digital collections (images, photographs, text, maps, audio and video) shared by libraries and archives’ special collections all across the United States, allowing researchers to efficiently search, browse, and utilize these resources through a single interface. PA Digital is a statewide partnership that collects materials from Pennsylvania cultural heritage organizations, then transmits them to the DPLA, making them available to the widest possible audience. All of these activities are enabled, to a great degree, by Fair Use.
Fair Use is a US legal doctrine that allows limited reuse of copyrighted materials. It is an invitation to the sort of intellectual/artistic exchange that keeps our culture vibrant, and a counterbalance against the the US’s increasingly strict copyright laws. Sampling, artistic appropriation, creative or educational quotation, parody, and text mining/textual analysis are all activities that flourish under Fair Use’s protection, shielded –to a degree at least– from the threat of litigation. Likewise libraries, archives and museums around the country have been able to digitize their archival objects and make them freely accessible online because of the fair use doctrine. Many digital collections that are available through PA Digital and the Digital Public Library of America, for example, are in copyright; digitizing and making them publicly discoverable through a database platform is considered fair use. However, it is important to communicate clearly to users, such as scholars and researchers, that such works remain in copyright and have use restrictions and limitations. Fair Use is a key concept that enables both digitization and reuse of digital facsimiles and is the rationale for making cultural heritage collections available online, in local repositories as well as the DPLA.
That’s where RightsStatements.org comes in. The site provides 12 normalized, standardized statements that cultural heritage institutions can use to describe the copyright status of online cultural heritage materials. A joint global project of Digital Public Library of America, Europeana, New York Public Library, University of Michigan, and other institutions, Rightsstatements.org went live in 2016. It creates three categories of statements (with four statements in each) to be used with cultural heritage materials, including some terms for use in the EU. The goal is to provide cultural heritage institutions with simple and standardized terms to summarize the copyright status of Works in their collection and how those Works may be used.
Rights Statements and Licenses are critical for digitization and data reuse. A normalized rights statement or Creative Commons license makes it so much easier for a member of the public to understand how that item can be used. The Digital Public Library of America has incorporated RightsStatements.org statements into their portal to function as a facet for searching because they are all machine readable and normalized. A similar metaphor is shopping through an online retailer – when we buy from online retailers what do we look for? Ideally, items with Free Shipping. This makes it easy for scholars to look for Works that can be used in their publications and research.
Example DPLA record from Penn State University with NoC-US statement Beyond traditional scholarship, normalized rights statements can also encourage creative reuse of Works if people know what they can and can’t do. For example, DPLA’s annual GIF IT UP campaign, where users make images into gifs, and the #ColorOurCollections nationwide promotion by galleries, libraries, archives and museums, where end users are encouraged to reuse digital objects as coloring pages.
Rightsstatements.org is still getting off the ground, but it promises to make the process of identifying usable Works far simpler and less time-consuming for researchers, scholars, and students. Take a look at the Europeana aggregator’s eight million plus ‘free reuse’ results for an example of what’s possible via machine-readable statements. Go forth and reuse!
More resources: Ballinger, Linda, et al. “Providing Quality Rights Metadata for Digital Collections Through RightsStatements.org.” Pennsylvania Libraries: Research & Practice, vol. 5, no. 2, 2017, pp. 144–158. http://palrap.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/palrap/article/view/157
We at PA Digital are wrapping up our work with our generous Knight Grant subaward from the DPLA for 2017.
The funding from the Knight Grant allowed us to expand our outreach to potential contributors in the Knight Communities of Philadelphia and State College, PA. We have seen a sizable increase in the number of records, collections, and institutions represented in DPLA as a result of these outreach efforts.
Our numbers: Since March, we have ingested 59,575 new records from 93 new collections, and 12 new institutions within the Knight communities. This exceeded our goals for the sub-award!
Our events:
PA Digital Orientation webinar targeted towards Knight institutions on July 20th [slides]
“Connect and Communicate” webinarPennsylvania Library Association “Connect and Communicate” webinar on May 17
Greater Philadelphia Law Library Association Institute in-person session on June 23
“Metadata Anonymous” webinar in an effort to expand the conversation about metadata quality and explain our various review processes on August 23 [slides]
“Metadata Anonymous” in-person workshop based on the webinar at the Free Library of Philadelphia on December 7 [slides]
Our Rights Statements Training:
We created three Rights Webinar “modules” with the aim of providing context and guidance toward implementing the RightsStatements.org recommendations.
Thank you to everyone who became a contributor, attended one of our workshops or webinars, and supported our increased outreach efforts to Knight communities. Please contact us if you have any questions, concerns, or would like to contribute additional collections: info@padigital.org.
The PA Digital Metadata Rights Subgroup Team is excited to present the third of three video modules on copyright and rights statements. The third module, “Implementing RightsStatements.org” provides an overview of rights statements and how to implement them as shown through examples done at Penn State University. This is a condensed version of Linda Ballinger, Brandy Karl, and Anastasia Chiu’s article, “Providing Quality Rights Metadata for Digital Collections Through RightsStatements.org” in Pennsylvania Libraries: Research and Practice.
This guest blog post is written by Tara Murphy, Assistant Director of Digitization and Instructional Services @ Free Library of Philadelphia, and PA Digital Metadata Team Rights Subgroup member
This was my second time attending the DPLAfest representing the Free Library of Philadelphia. Last year DPLAfest was held in DC and most of the time I was just geeking out over being in the staff areas of the Library of Congress for all of the sessions and viewing the Capitol Building from my lunch terrace in the Library of Congress (We ate meals inside the Library of Congress!).
This year DPLAfest was hosted at Chicago Public Library’s Harold Washington Library Center. Upon arrival in Chicago’s “Loop,” it seemed like a Clean NYC and very tall DC got together and had a baby: Chicago. This time, I met with fellow PA Digital Rights group members, Brandy Karl and Rachel Appel, as well as Delphine Khanna From Temple University.
Chicago with tulips
me and Brandy Karl
me and Rachel Appel
The opening session really focused on DPLA values: collaboration, inclusion, serving the public and really being stewards of our resources. I found these values repeated throughout the conference in sessions on how we are using digital communication with civic engagement, where we provide the infrastructure and how we really need to blend the digital and the analog in our programming. Outreach and transparency are more important than ever; making our staff more accessible and visible is the key to success in the 21st century world. For example – should we be concerned with disappearance or lowered visibility of archives and open data online?
Dan X. O’Neil, Harper Reed, Angel Ysaguirre, presenting on the Impact of Digital Communication on Civic Engagement
This guest blog post is written by Brandy Karl, Copyright Officer and Affiliate Law Library Faculty @ the Pennsylvania State University, and PA Digital Metadata Team Rights Subgroup Member
I attended DPLAfest in April on behalf of the PA Digital DPLA Hub & PSU Libraries and spoke on a panel sharing the experiences of metadata teams: Managing Relationships, Managing Metadata: Digital Library Collaborations Between Institutions and Across Sectors.
I worked with the PA Digital Metadata Rights Subgroup team to present Anastasia Chiu’s analysis of rights statements in metadata associated with PA Digital objects. A few other hubs had the same idea – we all believe that this data is incredibly important to demonstrate our progress, the work that needs to be done to implement normalized rights statements, and to provide a deeper understanding of the overall DPLA metadata analysis, which is tilted heavily towards a few institutions with many DPLA contributions.
I also presented insights from our work on the Metadata Rights Subgroup – how we share cross-institutional workload and collaborate effectively with different systems and technologies.
Finally, I called upon the attendees to brainstorm technical ideas to combat static rights statements. That is to say that a rights statement is only good so long as the copyright term status hasn’t changed or the copyright law hasn’t changed. DPLA leadership was excited and I continue to receive questions and interest in resolving this big issue.
Takeaways:
I was really struck by the multiple structural forms of the Hubs – I hadn’t realized that some hubs had their own staff.
DPLA is interested in forming a national working group to create Rights Statement & Metadata training, but doesn’t seem to be moving fast. It is my opinion that it should be a separately funded position (to create training); currently, it’s still falling on hubs to build their own, separate wheels (rather than sharing creation of the wheel together). But we are moving forward with that at PA Digital, and I think the Metadata Team’s work is showing true leadership in this area.
It’s clear that the DPLA is valuable – there were many sessions on the projects that started with access to the materials that DPLA has enabled, with an extremely strong emphasis on social engagement.
Everyone was very excited about the idea of creating a risk management toolkit. Understanding copyright and convincing administrations that it’s actually not very risky to engage in the sort of digitization most small institutions want to do should be top priority.
Today marks PA Digital’s first anniversary as a live service hub to the Digital Public Library of America! In the last year, we have worked with institutions all over the state of Pennsylvania to expose more than 168,000 digital objects to the general public through the DPLA. We are grateful for the collaborative efforts of our many excellent partners and contributors, and eagerly look forward to our second year. Happy birthday, PA Digital!
Welcome to this special Women’s History Month edition of the “Meet Our Contributors” feature! “Meet Our Contributors” spotlights the individuals who work with us to contribute digital collections from their institutions to PA Digital and the Digital Public Library of America. We want all of our readers to know about the amazing work that they do in their institutions, and what they believe partnership with PA Digital brings to their work. This month, we are pleased to hear from Mary Sieminski and Janet Hurlbert of the Lycoming County Women’s History Collection. Check out some of the Lycoming County Women’s History Collection, contributed through Lycoming College, in PA Digital and the DPLA!
Anastasia Chiu (AC): Can you tell our readers a little about yourself and your role/association with Lycoming College and the Lycoming County Women’s History Collection?
Janet Hurlbert (Janet): I was the administrator for the project as Associate Dean and director of library services for Snowden Library/Lycoming College until my retirement. I am now an advisor for the collection.
Mary Sieminski (Mary): I am the project manager — a position I’ve had for ten years now, from the beginning of the project. I do much of the actual work on the database, prepare items for digitization, create metadata, etc. We have had wonderful technical assistants and student assistants who have helped through the years.
AC: Can you tell me about the Lycoming County Women’s History Collection? Overall, what do you feel makes the collection significant or unique? What role or mission does the collection address?
Janet: The overall mission of the project is to provide source material relating to the history of women in Lycoming County with documents that highlight women in volunteer and reform organizations, education, the arts, the workplace and in their private lives. The time period covered is mainly 1870-1970.
What makes the collection special is its collaborative nature; it brings together four cultural heritage institutions in Williamsport: Snowden Library/Lycoming College, the Lycoming County Historical Society, the James V. Brown Library, and the Madigan Library/Pennsylvania College of Technology. Materials from several significant organizations such as the Williamsport YWCA are included as well, so it truly does represent women’s history for our rather small and rural community.
AC: How did the collection get started? How was it built?
Janet: The collection began because of good fortune — you could say that the stars were aligned just right! Mary, a “semi-retired” retired librarian, accepted a temporary appointment at Snowden Library during a maternity leave — in fact we had several maternity leaves all within a year. One of her special assignments was to investigate the possibility of outside funding so that we could digitize our college archives. We quickly saw that this was considered an institutional responsibility. I had been interested in more grant projects in general for the library as a contributing member of our college community. Mary and I shared an interest in women’s history and there was a need right in our own hometown to tell women’s stories.
Williamsport excelled at men’s history because of its lumbering and manufacturing heritage, but huge local history books seldom mentioned women. Lycoming College had been coeducational since the 19th century, and the Historical Society and public library had many books, papers, and images tucked away waiting to be discovered by a broader audience.
Utilizing Access Pennsylvania meant that we did not have to own our own server, and we received a PEW grant, which meant that we could digitize more book-type documents for significantly less. At that time, LSTA Grants were given for planning. Mary and I knew little about digitization and outsourcing and didn’t know where to start with material selection and prioritization. The opportunity to receive funds to hire consultants to help plan and organize the project was perfect. A subject specialist identified priorities and we determined outsourcing capabilities.
The second LSTA grant paid to actually do the work. We were set! A third LSTA Grant (after one unsuccessful attempt) allowed us to include documents from three essential community organizations — the Williamsport YWCA, the Williamsport Hospital School of Nursing Alumni Association, and the Home for the Friendless. Private donations enabled us to add other smaller collections such as the scrapbooks from the Williamsport Music Club.
Mary: As Janet said, she and I shared a passion for this history. It did not take long to realize what a rich resource we had uncovered. Some of the archives were in danger of being lost — the YWCA archives were in shambles, stored in closets and shelves all over the building, the Nursing School archives were in a building that was in danger of being razed, and the Home for the Friendless archives were stored in their basement. Each organization ultimately donated its archives to the Lycoming County Historical Society. Our most recent addition, being digitized right now, is a scrapbook form the 1920s and 1930s from a women’s prison in Lycoming County — the Industrial Home for Women at Muncy. One of our greatest achievements is preserving these archives and making them accessible.
AC: What role, if any, did your local community play in the development and growth of the Collection?
Janet: As we mentioned earlier, the steering committee is community based. We also have an advisory council composed of key individuals including representation from local school systems that meets about once a year to discuss directions for managing the collection and what should be included.
Mary: Our community has a great interest in its history and in preservation of historic homes, so it has been easy to find allies in our search for materials. Tour guides for Williamsport’s Millionaires’ Row tell us that they use our material to enrich their tours with stories of real people who lived in the large Victorian homes.
AC: Do you offer any programs or workshops for researchers and community members?
Janet: The collection has a curriculum guide designed for middle and high school levels. A faculty member from the education department at Lycoming College who designed it has conducted workshops for teachers. We have given numerous presentations and “how to” sessions about the collection for local historians and genealogists.
Mary: I have taken on the role as being a “voice” for the collection and have presented to many local women’s groups and historical societies. I love to talk about what one reporter called “my nineteenth century friends.” One spin off from the collection has been a monthly newspaper column titled “Williamsport Women.” Through the online collection, Janet and I discovered so many individual women and groups of women that have had an impact on our community, we wanted to spread their stories even further than the digital collection. The series has received very enthusiastic support from its followers. Even after three years, Janet and I can seldom go anyplace, including the grocery store, without someone telling us how much he or she enjoys the column.
AC: What goals or purpose do you hope contributing to PA Digital and the DPLA can achieve for the Lycoming County Women’s History Collection?
Janet: We have always wanted to present the story of Williamsport Women to as many researchers, students, amateur historians, and genealogists as possible. A digital audience is perfect for that purpose.
Mary: What PA Digital and DPLA can do is help us spread the word and make access easier to potential users all over the globe. Having our local collection a part of a state and national database with such a wide audience is “a dream come true” for us.
AC: Thank you very much, Janet and Mary! Readers, don’t forget to check out the Lycoming County Women’s History Collection through their website, PA Digital, and the DPLA!
Memorial Day Parade, 1927. Courtesy of James V. Brown Public Library.
Thomas Sovereign Gates (Penn President, 1930-1944) places a wreath at War Memorial plaque in Furness Library, 1945. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania.
Boys swim at Vare Recreation Center, 1964. Courtesy of Temple University. 
Memorial Day traffic, 1972. Courtesy of Temple University.
