Minutes are in order starting with the most recent meeting first.

Website for collection : http://libraries.mit.edu/lynch

Archives finding aid: http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/research/collections/collections-mc/mc208.html

Flickr set:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/mit-libraries/sets/72157614966285159/

Archives final report on effort involved for their staff, decisions made, and evaluation. Archives Project Overview.

In production! Click here to go to the collection in DOME.

3.11.09 - Deleted Kepes Lynch from R:DSpaceImages

Update from Beverly 2.13.09

Mikki, Jolene, and Carl have been testing the ingest for the past several weeks.  Mikki will work on gathering her notes regarding the background of the decisions that were made for the full item record in Dome.  This would be a good reference for future projects.

Beverly and Mikki met on 2.09.09 to reconcile the images from R:Drive to the external hard drive that will be used for uploading.  There are two outstanding issues regarding maps. KL002172 & KL002173. They should be reshot by BPI.  BPI has agreed to do this at their shop and at the convenience of Archives' schedule.

The project will begin production into Dome the week of February 16th. Carl advised that we can make changes to the metadata after images are loaded into Dome since the collection is not too large.

The collection will be made publicly. Please test.

There is a subgroup working on uploading the images into flickr.  Notes from this meeting.

The next meeting is on Wednesday, March 4th.  We can review the Dome collection live, continue with the assessment, and discuss the announcement of the collection.

Update from Mikki on Tuesday 1.13.09

We have completed the transcription and review of the documents.  The PDFs are saved on the R drive: R:\DSpace Images\Kepes-Lynch\Letters+Papers\transcripts. The transcriptions can be matched to the "originals" by the KL number. The only difference in file name will be _tr following the number indicating a transcription.
 

Minutes Tuesday 1.06.09

Documents-
Mikki reported transcription is completed, one more week of review, she has half of the transcriptions converted to pdf.

Jolene's group will convert the images to derivatives and will also include the maps when converting derivatives.  RVC will use the external hard drive to save the derivatives and convert using Bridge. 

Document Services will correct the few pdfs that have pages out of order.

Dome Test View of the documents: http://dome-test.mit.edu/handle/1234567890/29563?show=full

Carl will ingest the images and documents from the external hard drive because it is too slow to ingest from the R Drive.

BPI will send another invoice for the additional 23 images.

Assessment:

Should we catalog before digitizing to limit the handling of items? What is the best process?  Prep for scanning, Scan, QC scans, catalog, or Catalog/prep for scanning, scan, QC scans.  This may depend on whether we are working with documents or images.

In the preparation for scanning KL the documents/images were named and had a label attached to them with the name, shipped, scanned, cataloged,  reviewed.

Should we use our naming convention again?  Carl has spent a lot of time matching the project number to the IRIS number in his crosswalk.  Is this necessary?

Update from Mikki on Monday 12.08.08

All 235 digital objects from the Archives are cataloged in IRIS. All that remains is to clean and add to some of the descriptions per a conversation I had with Liz last week. This will be done by the end of the week.
I've been working with Carl to map our data to dc fields in Dome. This is going well. I'll send you a copy once we've worked out the kinks.
The transcription review began last Monday.

Minutes Wednesday 11.19.08

Present: Liz Andrews, Jolene de Verges, Jennifer Friedman, Mikki Simon Macdonald, Tom Rosko, Beverly Turner, Ann Whiteside

Images update:

Jolene reported that there are 1375 images cataloged - this process is getting faster and expects the cataloging to finish by December 8th. Found roughly 20 images that need to be scanned.  Looking ahead RVC wants to export all of the data that the 5 catalogers have created and compare the data to try to be consistent.  They need to complete some quality control of the catalog records.

Text Documents update:

Mikki has catalogued 74 documents.  She reports that it takes about 20 minutes per record, some go faster.  She will have a better idea of completion date at the end of November.  Mikki assigned the last batch of transcription this week.  She anticipates that the transcription will be completed the 1st week of December.  The students will then need to review their work.  Not sure how long this process will take.

The group discussed ways to announce the project.  Some ideas include an IAP session and Brown bag seminar about the project and what we learned from it. Ann Whiteside will ask Larry Vale about how to announce the project. Updated to add response from Larry Vale:

Nov. 25th email from Larry Vale -

Hi Ann,

I am glad to hear about progress with the Lynch materials.   I suggest several possible ways to publicize their existence: 

1) an announcement on the DUSP website, with a link to some sample images; Ezra Glenn would handle that

2) a link to this from one of the DUSP monthly electronic updates we send to DUSP alums (or to all School alums--Scott Campbell could handle that);

3) a reference to this in the Kevin Lynch Award program that will be distributed at the Lynch Award event this spring (and we should also list new book acquisitions from the Lynch Fund in that program); John de Monchaux is chair of the Lynch jury this year and could be the contact for this; and

4) someone could be commissioned to write a brief "dispatch" about the collection for publication in the journal _Places_ (I am on the editorial board).

Ingest Meeting recap:

11/10/08 Liz Andrews, Jolene de Verges, Carl Jones, Mikki Simon Macdonald, Beverly Turner

Need to map from IRIS to Dublin Core initially using the item importer.  Explained to Carl that these items do not have an IRIS number but rather a KL number and that the digital file name is the KL number.  Carl will go ahead and export some of the images which are only tiff files.  The collection will be tested in Dome test:  test site under the collection title Perceptual Form of the City.  The group discussed saving the tiff files along with the pdfs of the text documents.  Concerned that the user will open the tiff and not the pdf so we discussed ways to hide the tiff images or save as an archival file zipped together available for download with click-thru button. It will be useful to get access to these tiff files because the pdfs of so low resolution and it will be easier to manage all of the files together.

Flickr idea:

Ann Whiteside presented an idea based on a session that she saw at the Digital Library Federation Forum.  This would be a good test case for open access, a way to test the idea of Flickr and social tagging. We do this as an experiment and model.  We would continue with ingesting into Dome.  Ann, Rob, Tom, Lisa Sweeney, and Beverly will meet on 11.19 & 12.2.08 to discuss how we could put this project into Flickr.

Began assessment of project:

Ideas/issues-

  • Difficult to do this scope of project completely with regular staff
  • Mikki has been completely covered with this project alone
  • Tremendous amount of work involved writing the Rockafeller Center
  • Ended up working with items several times - next project will only touch items once if possible - how do we plan that? 
  • How long does it take to prep the photos for digitization? we felt like we were rushed by the vendor's schedule but there were unusual circumstances with this project working simultaneously with the Vail Balloon Project scanning.
  • Maybe in the future we could do test work on each part of the work process to see how much time it takes in each step.
  • Need to test metadata


10.29.08 update

850 images have been cataloged.  Approximate rate of 175/week.  The catalogers have found 20 images that were not scanned.

Transcription continues.

Minutes Wednesday 10.1.08

Present: Liz Andrews, Jolene de Verges, Jennifer Friedman, Tom Rosko, Mikki Simon, Sean Thomas, Beverly Turner, Ann Whiteside

Mikki Update:

Transcription-

  • Three Simmons students  - about 6 weeks transcribing and 3 weeks reviewing the documents.
  • The students began their work on September 29th.
  • Three jump drives that students swap, a spreadsheet to track document changes. 
  • Mikki gives each student a week's worth of work every Monday.
  • Mikki will have the students make the changes and track the changes.   
  • Mikki will save the Word documents on the R Drive under DSpace Images. 
  • When Mikki does the final document review she will convert the documents to pdfs. 
  • The transcription documents will have the same file number with the extension: _tr.pdf

Cataloging-

  • Mikki is training on IRIS with Jolene
  • Mikki has worked with Carl Jones on the ingest of her Filemaker Pro database into IRIS
  • Mikki will begin cataloging the documents in IRIS on November 3rd after the script meeting with Carl and Jolene. 

Jolene:
Cataloging discussion-

One image document for each document and in IRIS they do not care if there is a transcription document.  They go back and add the URI to the IRIS records.

Script ingest from IRIS into DOME. Meeting scheduled for Carl Jones, Mikki Simon, and Jolene de Verges on Monday, November 3rd. Considerations for cataloging the documents in IRIS should work for DOME and Archivist Toolkit.

Two Simmons students, Jessie Howell and Betsy Baldwin, have been temporarily hired for this project for 12hrs/week each = 24hrs/week along with Gordon Thomas from CAMS.  Gordon will work 1 day a week on this project = 8hrs/week. Michael Schaeffer a casual staff member in RVC is also working on the project.  In total there is 41 hrs/week dedicated to cataloging the images. The estimated completion date is December 1st or 8-10 weeks.  Also related to the project are Andrea Shuler who is helping manage the project and answer questions from the catalogers, Claire Conway who is checking the quality control of the images returned from BPI and assisting Jolene with the project management of the cataloging process.  Stephanie Tuerk has agreed to continue to consult on the project as needed.  The catalogers will meet once a week on Wednesdays at 3pm briefly to discuss the project and any issues they have with cataloging the images and make sure that they are consistent. The first meeting took place on 10/1/08.  The catalogers started the week of September 22nd.

Jolene noted that it took a lot longer than anticipated to prep the project for digitization and cataloging.  This was the most difficult part of the process and took most of the summer.

The catalogers are subject indexing everything in the photo and they have created local subject headings, for example "people in touch with their environment."

Interesting news: RVC discovered that the project photographer, Nishan Bijachain,  may be living in MA.  Should we contact him? This does mean that we should document his biographical information in the catalog records. He will get the copyright credit.  He was definitely for hire on the project. The group decided that we would call him and ask him about his involvement in the project, any interesting notes, and maybe he will have more photos to add to the collection.  Jolene will contact. Jolene did go to the department and asked if they had any personnel records on him.

Upcoming:

Monday, November 3rd - Scripting meeting with Carl Jones, Jolene, Mikki, and Beverly

Wednesday, November 19th at noon - Update meeting for entire group.  At this time most of the cataloging should be complete, and test scripts should have been tested.

Wednesday, December 17th at noon - Final Meeting!!  Review items in DOME and review the project.  Decide how to share the project with the Libraries and how to evaluate the project. 

Minutes Thursday 8.14.08 

Present: Jennifer Friedman, Mikki Simon, Tom Rosko, Ann Whiteside, Beverly Turner 

QC of the text files from BPI

Mikki is taking the information she already has minus subject terms and working on mapping her Filemaker database into IRIS.  Mikki has reviewed ¼ of the pdf documents.  She has identified two pdfs that have been a problem this far.  The problem (for example): the first page is the last page. Some of the overlays didn't come out great but they are okay.  Need to speak to Dave at BPI about this.

The maps have been transformed into pdf but we should put the tiff files into DOME because the pdfs are a little fuzzy. 

Mikki has been marking which documents may be difficult for transcription.

Transcription

Stephanie may be able to do some transcription considering her illness however she will be starting the school semester, and working on a book project. Starting August 25th the student workers may no longer be available because of school.  We need to find new hires. The group decided to hire two Simmons students to do the transcription.  Stephanie has already created a thesaurus so we do not necessarily need a student with an architecture background. Ann will email Martha from Simmons asking for student suggestions and Mikki will write a job description and post to Simmons lists. The students can work from home and must be able to access/visit Archives. Once hired Beverly can manage the timesheets.

Communication with BPI

We have paid BPI for the work and we have overpaid by $1700.  BPI will send a refund.  Mikki would like to wait until she has reviewed all of the documents before we communicate with them regarding any issues on the scanned items.

Appearance of Kepes Lynch in DOME

The community and the collection in DOME will have the same name. The item's physical location will be held in the metadata.  Until we have faceted browsing this organization will work.

The name of the collection in DOME will be: Perceptual Form of the City

The names do not need to be in the collection title because it will be covered in the metadata.

Cataloguing of the documents

Make sure that Kevin Lynch is a keyword in a metadata but not necessarily in the creator field.  If you do not know the creator then you should leave that field blank. Both Kepes & Lynch will be subject headings in all records.

Project Deadline

The group wants a strong deadline for the completion of the project.  October 1st will be the date of the next meeting.  In light of Mikki's wedding in October we are asking her to complete the cataloguing of the text documents by October 1st.  Not sure when the cataloguing of the images can be completed.

The project completion is set for Wednesday, November 19th and a group meeting has been set for this date.

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Minutes Monday 7.14.08

Present: Jolene De Verges, Mikki Simon, Jennifer Friedman, Liz Andrews, Ann Whiteside , Beverly Turner

Photo QC-

Recapped on the QC meeting with Jolene De Verges and Liz Phipps regarding the QC of the photos. RVC will do a quick QC of the photos by opening the photos in Photoshop and making sure the name is correct and no photos are missing.

Text QC-

Mikki will send the originals off site as soon as BPI returns them.  She has photocopies of the originals and will use the photocopies if she needs to reference them in the QC process.  Mikki is going to request Photoshop.

Cataloguing of photos (1,963 photos)-

Prepping the photos for the scanning process was a part of their cataloguing process.  They all have an IRIS number. Stephanie has been working 20 hours a week gathering terminology in IRIS in the subject file when she identifies types of buildings/accents/structures in the photographs.  The titles that are on them will be used as titles in the item even though they are not unique, ex. Street name, date, time of day etc.  The photos also have a category like signs or Boston at night (about 20 categories) these will be subject heading.  Jolene doesn't have an estimation of how long this will take but will check in with Liz P. and Stephanie on their progress to date.

Beverly - Sean, Beverly, and Carl Jones met about the ingest process into DOME. Relayed that Carl could ingest the collection based on their types: photos, text documents, oversized maps.

Jolene - will the Kepes Lynch photos also be included with the RVC collection? Beverly said they will be a separate collection.  Ann noted that searches would want them to be cross searchable.

We would want two references to the same collection so that the text items would be linked to the photo items. The related collection would be included in the descriptive metadata.

Group is waiting for faceted browsing. (updated 7/15 to note that this is not available at this time) So we will include all items in one collection instead of sub collections to prepare for faceted browsing in the near future.

Group thought that the name of the project should be the name of the collection in DOME.

Perceptual Form of the City will be the name of the collection in DOME. Or Kevin Lynch's Perceptual Form of the City.(updated to note that Mikki checked and noticed that the project was named Perceptual Form of the City project documents Boston during the 1960s.  This isn't accurate as the text portion of the project is from 1954 to 1959.  Mikki also noted that the book Image of the City was published in 1960.)

Scope note about the collection. Kevin Lynch would be one of the creators, subject heading to include Kepes Lynch

Cataloguing text documents (250 documents, 1200 pages)-

Mikki's first step is to clean up the data she already has then see what is missing. Ann suggested that less data would be easier to import into IRIS so that it will be easier to map.

Title, Creator, Date, Location: RVC, Subject - content is in subject (which could be the location in the photograph), Description (not for the text documents), Work type: letter, interview, report - a searchable field

Mikki says the folder title could be the subject terms.

The KL number will have to be added to the IRIS record manually and will be part of the metadata.

Mikki needs to look at IRIS - set things up with Jolene for training. Specific version of IRIS that RVC is using is version 8. Jolene will give Mikki the IP address and login access.

Mikki, Kate, Stephanie, and Liz Phipps will work as a team on cataloguing.

Should we include a reference document in DOME: for more information on these notations click here - key information document

Each record will have 2 derivatives: one pdf of the image and one pdf of the transcription.

Transcription -

The order of documents to be transcribed:

  • Start with the documents that are handwritten - 60 documents
  • Next the documents with annotation (mostly the ones with the Lynch key)
  • Then type the items that are already typed

Jordan Koffman and Stephanie will be the students that will work on transcription.

Transcribe from the original and remotely.  Put the copies of pdfs on thumb keys to give the transcriber.

Have students for 6-7 more weeks, approximately until September 1st.  We just need the KL number and the digital scanned pdfs for them to start on the transcription.

Mikki has completed a transcription guideline (referenced Library of Congress and considerations for ADA) - will put on the wiki by end of the week.

Other news-

BPI will deliver the hard drive in approximately 2 weeks (BPI delivered the harddrive with the scanned images on July 31st) .  The images are located on the SAN: R:\DSpace Images\Kepes-Lynch. Contact Beverly to get access to the folder if needed.

Minutes Friday 5.30.08

Boston Photo Imaging (BPI) has been selected to scan the text documents, photos, and oversized maps. Now the group must decide which items should be scanned first and when they will be ready for BPI to scan. Factors known prior to start of meeting:  the photos are ready to go out of the door today, BPI will be in house

How long will this prep take?Liz - Text prep would take several weeks

Jolene - Student workers hired to work part-time on the transcription.  Can they work on the prep?

Liz - the students can not work on prep process.  The training process would take too long. Also, where would the student's work? No one can be in the collections' pit unless a staff member is present.

Mikki will put each content into it's own folder (because there is no information on the item), generate numbers and spreadsheet.

Sean - Is there anything for the vendor to reference if they are confused as to which box the item belongs to?

Liz - The finding aids are not item level. Photocopy the front page of the document/object and keep it in the box that Archives will hold and in the Mylar folder.

Beverly - Could we send the photos first to gain a few more days to prep the text?

The photos will only take a couple of days and would use different cameras than the text documents so sending them ahead of time would not help with our time schedule.

Text prep process:Jennifer can help Mikki prep the text because she has an open week the first week of June; Jennifer and Mikki need to get together and discuss prep and Stephanie (newly hired student) can sit in on that meeting to orient herself on the project. 

The accession numbers will come from the folders

I should organize the transcription guidelines

Work with Jennifer/Mikki on getting text ready for BPI

I will handle the coordination of getting items to BPI

Collection - KL MC208

                Item - Archives Box 1/Fldr 6

Minutes from Friday, 5.23.08 

Revisited the naming convention discussion to make sure that we were confident in our decision.

Record item # - automatically generated

File name = digital file

These are the same #

Keep the same naming convention that was created in last week's meeting on 5/12/08

Naming convention for files:

Use: KL_000001_001_sv.TIFF

KL_000001_001_tr.pdf

KL_000001_001_org.pdf

<Project Prefix><six digit item unique ID number><item image #><version/derivative type>.<file extension>_

METADATA

Walked through:

Photos-administrative

  • Rights mgt. (copyright)
    • Who owns copyright
    • What are the usage right
    • Provenance
    • Location (Rotch, Archives)
  • Photos-descriptive
    • Title
    • Creator
    • Dates
    • Location of the physical location - site
      • Location - content
      • Location - item
      • Geospatial coordinates? (level 2)
    • Physical size of photo
    • Subjects
    • Description
    • Work type
    • Physical description
    • Collection Name
    • Relation
  • Text-descriptive
    • Work type: Street interviews, directional, project documentation
  • Text-administrative
    • Folder/box names
  • "maps"-descriptive*
  • "maps"-administrative
    • Folder/box names

*The map (hand drawing) with the overlay is a new object. The overlay is what is important and it becomes a new map.

Summary of the group's metadata choices:

Administrative:

  • Rights mgt/ usage/copyright
  • Provenance
  • Collection Location (Rotch, Archives)
  • Folder/Box Names

Descriptive:

  • Title
  • Creator
  • Dates
  • Location (content, item, geospatial coordinates)
  • Subject/keywords
  • Descriptions
  • Type (worktype)
  • Physical Description
  • Collection Name
  • Relation

Discussed cost estimates for capturing metadata.

A rule of thumb for estimating cost is the  average time it takes to capture image information: average 6 minutes/image = 10 images an hour/ times  the salary

Sean says: What should we spend on cataloguing?

RVC thought that their staff was suppose to do the cataloguing as part of their workflow already.  Jolene and Ann should not have cost recovery since the photographs out of the Kepes-Lynch are from RVC and therefore  there should not be any cost recovery for capturing metadata. 

Upcoming.... 

May 30thAgenda:

1. Recap of last week's discussion

2. Sending content out to BPI - prep. work to be done, timeline

3. Look at how IRIS handles content other than images

4. Agreement on system to use for cataloging Kepes-Lynch content

Minutes from Wednesday, 4.9.08

Present: Ann Whiteside, Jolene de Verges, Jennifer Friedman, Sean Thomas, Tom Rosko, Mikki Simon

Walked through our last meeting using the notes from that meeting to give Sean a sense of where we are.

Maps - sizes. Mikki is measuring now. about 18", some 8.5x11"

Scope: this is Boston related only, so this piece is discrete. Can add other related material later.

Answer to question about printed documents becoming obsolete; TR says "not at risk".

Vendors and digitization

photos are for publication - reprint and what formats
maps - for preservation
documents - for access
PDFs - multiple page documents.

Want to be aware of file sizes that will be created. There are a couple of hundred that are way over five pages. Longer ones tend not to have annotations. Generally, the annotated documents are fewer than 5 pages. Some of those are also

Ask Doc. Svcs. to do a test on compressing the files. 600 dpi, compress the files.
Liz will talk with Doc.Svcs.

Annotations would be transcribed. Writing is over the text and is marginalia. Sean suggests we also test doing OCR scanning.
Ask vendors - OCR the documents rather than straight scanning?
Delivery all text documents as images, possibly with OCR underneath go into a single pdf; transcriptions go into pfs

Sean says - two things - one, would we expect to want to have more functionality so that pages and transcriptions sit side by side? it would be easier for users to have page to page between PDF and transcription.
Will have item records for:
each photograph
each map
each document
photos and maps delivered as jpgs.
maps - some are really overlays to go over a map, so they're not really maps. You could scan each map and then scan the map with the appropriate overlays individually.

Catalog as individual items for DOME. Collection level records?

Community - can have many

Subcommunities - can have many of these within a Community

Collections - can be within subcommunities and within communities

only collections can contain items

Need to think about services:

lowest common denominator

tying all the types of content together - a necessity or a phase 2 thing? Do we want content in sooner?

We want it browseable - can do that through metadata

Could we have a subcommunity of Kevin Lynch Image of the City, with collections: images, documents, maps? the book?

Can add a description to the subcommunity that explains the collections.

Jennifer will draw a visual flow chart for our next meeting?

Can develop the facets that we would want people to be able to use to find content. i.e., photographs, scollay square

Simile allows you to multi-select things to search by.

cataloging:

facets - for dome.mit.edu and for this project
 

Minutes from Thursday, 4.3.08

AGENDA

Present: Friedman, de Verges, Simon, Andrews, Whiteside, Rosko

  1. Notes from last meeting
    1. Tom and MIT Press - update
      1. No. new deadline: April 7th
    1. going through the boxes of documents - update
      1.  done
    1. maps - update from discussion with Nancy S.
      1. Nancy has been too busy. Should go ahead and get price estimates. But Nancy still needs to review before actually sending out
      2. the maps are really drawings and of various sizes. Larger ones are on fragile paper.

Mikki and Liz to provide size information and fragility info. deadline: April 11th

    1. information about digitizing text 
  1. Template
    1. text digitization and resolution - 600 dpi?
      1. text at 600 dpi; transcription
      2. delivery: OR original w/a link to transcription
        1. if you have a multiple page document, it should be one file with multiple pages. One pdf of multiple pages and one transcription file.
        2.  hand written notes on text pages. How to handle?

Jennifer and Mikki will go through the written docs. and make recommendations for how to transcribe annotations. They will also look to see how many names appear in the actual field notes. Deadline: April 18th.

    1. images
      1. images at 600 dpi. with thumbnails and derviatives
    1. maps digitization - BPI recommends 300 dpi - any other thoughts?
      1. line drawings, with color, and some nodes; some are brittle
      2. could be done at 600 dpi?
      3. we are trying to preserve the original for this particular content.
      4. Ask vendors their suggestions for dpi
    2. Will this "collection" grow" in DOME?
      1. We would like to add discrete pieces over time.
    1. content at risk? need to define for project plan
      1. maps are fragile and the intellectual content is not preserved in the book "Image of the City".
      2. text pages are somewhat fragile, but the content is summarized elsewhere ("Image of  the City")
      3. Photographs are in good condition
    1. rights - text and images
      1. what we know now:

1.      photographs: files in RVC has a boiler plate form for the making of the slides.

2.      the project hired an assistant, as a work for hire. He is credited, but does not own copyright.  No gift form found for the photograph collection. Look at grant application.

Liz will contact the Rockefeller Foundation Archives to see what information we can find re: rights around the project. Deadline: April 18th
Need to discuss language for usage rights. Jolene and Liz.  Deadline: April 18th

  1. End user delivery for whole

A collection within DOME that has its own identity;  searchable as its own collection, and across collections. Could create a link from the Archives website.  We want the collection to be open. Talk with Sean about this at meeting on April 9th.

4, Digitizing and RFPs

    1. Boston Photo
    2. NEDCC
    3. Backstage
    4. Two Cat Digital

Update on discussion with Doc. Svcs. - Jolene and Jennifer talked with Jenn Morris. Doc. Services does not have the equipment to do the work needed on the photographs. Not an option for the photographs. Discussed handling of objects, security. They have more space and a place to secure content that they are working on. Jolene and Jennifer are going to do another walk through of the handling processes with Jenn to analyze how well they will handle rare content. Weakness is their equipment. They are building expertise.

They have been digitizing Archives content, but the handling of the materials has been unacceptable. Archives has talked with them repeatedly about the handling.

We are treating them as a vendor.

Do we want to have the whole digitized as one project of a variety of content? Or as separate?  We do not think that any one vendor will do transcription.  If we do this as one project are we missing out on expertise from particular vendors?

We'll ask each vendor what they can or will do. Send them information about the content for the project, and begin the RFP process.

Talking with vendors will get us the cost information we need for SC.

AW talk to vendors by April 18th.

Process from here

6.Cataloging - discuss on April 18th.

Minutes from Thursday, 2.7.08

Present: Tom, Liz, Mikki, AW, Jolene, Jennifer

Re-cap of review of documents:

Maps - very valuable; ca. 30 maps; some have numbers that are codes. They are the maps that the assistants used to survey the city.
Box 1 - some good content; some not so valuable for the project; primarily docs. related to proposal for the book; interviews, Rockefeller Foundation; people from whom Lynch received input.
Liz noticed about the papers that the folder titles are those that Lynch used. Also saw proposal to foundation; also a summary report; Kepes' comments on the draft summary report.
Liz says do enough from the documents that talk about the photographs which ties the project together.
Tom says we should digitize the book "Image of the City". It's an MIT Press book. Talk with the Press?  Tom will contact Ellen Ferrin at MIT Press. DEADLINE: February 15th
How to do document selection?
All the RVC photographs

Create a spreadsheet with box #, file folder, an id for the document, keep track of number of pages; which ones need to be copied for discussion with others (metadata, digitizing, etc.)?
Need to take the time to go through the boxes - 3. DEADLINE: March 10th

Do: proposal, summary, Kepes' comments on the summary.
Make photo copies? Liz wants to digitize from originals. Some have different color backgrounds; notes in margins.
Some of the legibility of the docs is not good. Copying might give you more legibility?
Scanning might be able to do this, too.

Pull sample documents for vendors to look at as part of RFP process.
Maps - do only Boston related maps.
Talk with Conservation about the maps.  Tom will talk with Nancy about the maps. DEADLINE: February 14th. Will figure out the time frame. She'll look within the month (February).

Vendors: quotes for scanning

BPI

NEDCC

Document Services
AW will look up information about digitizing text.  DEADLINE: February 14th
Contact vendors: Jennifer/Jolene; set up meeting with Liz and Mikki

DEADLINE: February 21st

Next topics for discussion

Output:
Ask Sean Thomas about pdfs or what is best?
Exhibit page for the content as a collection
Cataloging: Jolene and Rebecca + Rob

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