Hayley Brooks

Digital Libraries 17:610:553

Term Project – Final Report

04/27/2015

DIGITAL LIBRARIES [17:610:553] - Final Term Project

Group A Digital Library Design Proposal

Digital Library for Journey Museum - Minnilusa Pioneer Collection

Members: Hayley Brooks, Kaitlan Estes, Taran Gallagher, Christina Woodall

Purpose:

We plan to create a digital library that will compliment the Minnilusa Pioneer Museum, which is located at The Journey Museum in Rapid City, South Dakota. The purpose of our digital library is to provide children, parents, and educators of children child-friendly, digital access where they can explore the historical and cultural information the museum provides. This is an important museum collection because it plays a vital role in helping the people of the area better understand their cultural history. The museum provides so many artifacts and materials to teach children about this cultural history and by offering a digital space online, we aim to showcase the museums information and provide opportunities for children to build an appreciation for the past and discover how it relates to their personal environment today.

The design of this digital library will focus on a highly interactive interface where children will be able to discover what it was like for pioneer children to settle in the untamed plains. The metadata and public access materials will provide information specific to the local history of Rapid City, SD, focusing specifically on the pioneer days, and will follow the museum’s scope of late 1880s to mid-1920s time frame.

Objectives:

In order for museums to keep up and continue to meet the needs of their patrons, it is important for them to have a digital presence such as providing access to their collections online. Digital access will allow children from other parts of the country to “visit” and “explore” the collections and resources of the Minnilusa Pioneer Museum.

In efforts to enhance the Museum’s appeal to children and offer local schools and families a place to ignite and nurture the interest in local history, our digital library has focused on children in both its design and content. We believe the online presence will also help draw visitors in during tourist season and create a growing interest from the local community. This will hopefully enhance the museum’s relationship with families and schools in the area and extend relations nationally/globally.

Metadata Selection:

We know that the Minnilusa Pioneer Museum utilizes the software program PastPerfect for organizing metadata of their collections (screenshot example shown below):

In order to better integrate our proposed collection with Minnilusa’s already established collection and library, we will select the metadata information for fields that PastPerfect includes in its database to allow the proposed Children’s Digital Library to be an extension of this information. This will make our proposition a simple and easy addition, as opposed to causing the library to adapt their entire collection to fit ours.

Below is one example of our proposed addition. Using information collected from the physical objects, as well as working with staff to complete or update missing fields, the record would be recorded as such:

Selection & Search Strategy:

After viewing some of the resources the Minnilusa Pioneer Museum concurrently has in their collection, we selected a few books whose scope specifically address the lives of children growing up during the Pioneer era. The books we selected include a variety of both children and young adult books so as to appeal to a wider audience, cementing the worth and necessity of our proposition.

The digital library will be designed with children as the target audience, mainly from the ages of 4-15 years. For this reason, we hope to make the searching process simple yet effective. Through a web search of our own, we particularly liked the design of http://www.childrenslibrary.org’s Simple Search section. The bright colors and visual elements used within this library can be applied to our own, as they draw the attention of younger patrons. It is simple and user-friendly, so users will be able to easily search for items that they are interested in while also being presented with similar options. There will be images of the cover art of the books that children can view before selecting an item, thereby allowing them to rely on the visual aspect and not just a black and white text description. In addition to this, key words will be attributed to each resource in order to populate results if a keyword search is conducted. Wild Bill Hickock, for example, is an infamous character from the Pioneer days. If a child wanted to look up “Wild Bill”, they could navigate visually through representative icons, or conduct a keyword search. Based on the keyword search of “Wild Bill”, two of our currently selected resources would be populated in the search results.

Example:

This design will serve as a start to creating a larger online presence for the Minnilusa Pioneer Museum. Children are fascinated with stories about the “wild west” and our digital library can help the museum connect with younger patrons. Not only this, but it can also reach out to families visiting the area, enticing them to come discover more about the lives of children on the frontier.

Services:

The Minnilusa Pioneer Museum has several children’s events that this digital library will tie in to, almost symbiotically. Examples of this include their Discovery Expedition Series, geared towards children ages 9-13, or Family Fun Day, where families and children of all ages come and enjoy a film and participate in activities related to the topic of the month. By providing access to this digital library, the Minnilusa Pioneer Museum will now have a way to interact with their youngest patrons outside of these special events, even from the comfort of their own home. In the future, they could add YouTube videos or other unique materials to help bring the museum and its rich experience into the homes of children all across the area and beyond.

By providing these services to be accessed at home and on the go, we enable The Journey Museum Learning Center to reach more children and better achieve the goals on their mission statement: “The Journey Museum and Learning Center is the education venue that serves as a forum to preserve and explore the heritage of the cultures of the Black Hills region and the knowledge of its natural environment to understand and value our past, enrich our present, and meet the challenges of the future.”

Management and Preservation:

From our understanding, there is not currently an information specialist at the Minnilusa Pioneer Museum with the technical skills in operating a digital library. If this design is something they wish to pursue, they would need to either hire or train an information specialist who has the training and ability to maintain such a database. The Digital Library for the Minnilusa Pioneer Museum would need to be monitored and updated by an information specialist with both the technical skills required and familiarity with the museum’s operations. This would mean an initial course for them to obtain the necessary skills to begin this process, as well as potential updates along the way to keep up with relevant updates and adaptations that are inevitable with any digital technology. Not only this, but it would be worth having at least one other librarian versed in the upkeep of this library as a backup (perhaps more if the digital aspect were to grow in size and content). It would also be beneficial to train the current staff on the basic essentials for the Digital Library operations.

The Minnilusa Digital Library is based on their current collections. The information regarding items and content available on the Digital Library will be edited and monitored via the PastPerfect cataloging system they currently have in place. In other words, as they update their own system, we would like it to become common practice for the digital library(ies) to become an automatic part of this continuous update as new materials come in. This could be done manually, or could be integrated into an automatically updated program (using possibly SQL or PHP). If the latter were used, this would still require a regular monitor to check that this system was still working smoothly and effectively.

The information available through the digital library will be backed up in the PastPerfect museum software cataloging system. For this reason, we feel it is important to store the information in the Digital Library on a separate secured server, in order to maintain accessibility and not directly rely solely on the institutions equipment. This is something that is important with all digital collections and libraries, since where possible, all digitization should be backed up in at least one (if not more than one) format.

As with any new aspect, it would be worth it for the Minnilusa Pioneer Museum to keep up-to-date on innovations in the field (with particular note to those that would be best suited to the expenditure of their particular budget), as well as making their resources known in as many avenues as possible. This can range from advertising or promoting their own collections in local advertisements, to reaching out to more wide-ranging publications or websites. For example, they could work together with multiple other libraries and institutions to create a geographically diverse map that covered historical sites across the United States. For example, they could work with other state libraries that were involved in any kind of migration or settlement to form a more comprehensive map of the United States during its early years of settlement. This could be used as an addition to, or example aside from, more commonly known migration trails such as the Oregon Trail.

Resources:

The information that will be fully accessible / available from home for users will only be the items that are owned solely by the Museum. This can include, but is not limited to, physical artifacts and descriptions. This will include photographical, provincial, historical, and other available information relating to the item. For text resources, the library will have general metadata on the text resource documents, including books, magazines, reports, and other in house collection materials. The users will be able to learn a little bit about each of these items; however, because of copyright issues, the full text will NOT be made available online in the beginning. Once the Digital Library is up and running, the Journey Museum may wish to consider collaborating with other databases as an institution in order to provide more content to their users (such as ProQuest).

Evaluation and Future Repercussions:

Initially, evaluation of The Digital Library for the Minnilusa Pioneer Museum can be measured with simple web analytics that look at how many visitors the site has, how long they are on the website, and what documents draw the most attention. After time, they may want to consider looking into more substantial data, such as usability, user satisfaction, reliability, etc.

A legal action that Minnilusa needs to take into consideration is making intellectual property rights of the materials clear to users (if the aforementioned is not owned by Minnilusa). This might have to be done in conjunction with a legal team, depending on the status of the materials.

Future Development

With regards to the future development of this library, we would put forth the following suggestions:

1. The Minnilusa Pioneer Museum should add a contact/suggestions page to allow users to easily and quickly suggest changes that can then be monitored and taken into account by the authorities in charge. Additionally, creating a Facebook, Twitter, and/or Instagram account would allow Minnilusa to interact with the public on platforms that they frequently utilize, at no cost to the Museum. These pages can advertise events, new materials, and provide a quick link to the main library page.

2. The library, and site in particular, should make themselves known to the American Library Association in order to add verifiable credentials to their recommendations. This will give this digital library a more wide-spread range, as well as affording it more credence within the library community. This can also lead to being maintained by library volunteers, students, etc. (perhaps as a way to further their own development as well as that of the library’s).

3. Those involved with the development of the library should keep abreast of the developments and evolutions occurring within the digital library community as a whole in order to effectively utilize these developments with regards to the Minnilusa library’s specific needs.

4. Finally, outside input should be welcomed and used to the library’s advantage - where appropriate, and possible, this library should allow for outside articles, “contributor of the week” input, and perhaps even advertise other library’s websites/collections. This could lead to a reciprocal relationship which would be beneficial for all sides, and would allow for easier access between library’s for the users themselves.

Appendix A

Interview/Discussion with Minnilusa Pioneer Museum curator Reid Reiner

(Date 4/22/2015 Session: 4:15-4:45 / Hayley Brooks and Reid Reiner, Reid’s Office at the Journey, Minnilusa Pioneer Museum to discuss digital library interest and opportunity.)

Q1: Has the Minnilusa Pioneer museum discussed plans for a Digital Library?

A: Yes – there is a high interest in creating a digital library.

Q2: Why would it be beneficial?

A: Further education and awareness of collection. It would be really good for regional heritage and tourism of the Black Hills as well. Not many people think of the Black Hills region when they think of history, so it would help educate and spread word of our rich history. We would also use it for self-promotion, becoming more known, and also would like to have an online presence to help promote memberships, an area where I know we are currently lacking.

Q3(a): What would you think the positive / negative impact be of implementing a Digital Library?

A: Positive is that it would spread awareness and open up access for lots of content. We receive lots of requests from people asking if we have any photographs of family members, or any information on specific people. Having a searchable online Digital library with open access we could connect people with this content.

This was important because it helps us with the content description for our DL Proposal.

Q3(b): What kind of content would you like to see available in the DL?