Digitization Services

Digitization at the Library

Digitization Services began working with the Rare Book & Manuscript Library in 2007 on a collection called Project Unica, digitizing books for which there is only one known copy of in the world.  The strong relationship between the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Digitization Services and Conservation makes it possible to preserve, digitize and provide access to materials like the Gwendolyn Brooks collection.

Digital Surrogates and Representation

At first glance photographs seem less challenging to digitize given their condition.  The photos require little conservation and in the case of the Red Album, all of the photographs were in good condition and easy to remove from their sleeves.  It is however difficult to digitally translate the organic nature of a personal photo album. A photo album is an evolving object within one’s personal archive and often brims with more pictures than it is pages allow. The Red Album’s pages are full of images from Gwendolyn Brooks’ life. Photos are stacked on each other back to front, within sleeves, some with text written identifying the people in the photo or the date it was captured.  The pages are not linear though and images are not visible all at once.  The physical properties challenge the static, 2-dimension representation required for a digital surrogate.  We wanted the digital album to mimic the experience one has while sitting with the Red Album in person.

Accessibility in the Digitial Library 

Parts of the Gwendolyn Brooks Papers will be available to search in our Digital Collections.  It’s through the hard work of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library and the Metadata Librarians that searchability is possible. The Red Album and its photographs were researched and described by the RBML.  The metadata fields include descriptions, names, dates, geographical locations, and dimensions. 

As the collection is unique in its structure and contents, the Metadata Team (MJ and Stephanie) created a new metadata profile to support both the album level and item level metadata. The new metadata profile has 24 elements for descriptive and administrative information of the collection. Structure of the album and the display of items included in the album are also important for this collection. In order to preserve the order of items in the album, we worked with the file structure and gave the page number to all items in the backend system. For this work, all items are displayed as included in the album.  Lessons learned from this project will be used for other similar collections that require different levels of metadata and have unique structure.

Digital Collections of the University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign

The digital collections platform is powered by a Digital Library System built on top of our preservation repository, which also links to collections in other external repositories like HathiTrust Digital Library. It is through these platforms we deliver unencumbered discovery, access, and navigation; bringing our collections beyond the vault to anyone who wants to interact with them. You can visit our Digital Collections here at https://digital.library.illinois.edu/

Digitizing selected materials from the Gwendolyn Brooks Papers is a tremendous opportunity. It will allow digital long-term preservation of the materials and provide online access to portions of the collection. The physical nature of personal scrapbooks, photographs, notebooks, and papers which comprise her archive make this project especially exciting and challenging.  The project is ongoing, and we are still discovering new ways to innovate.  Each new phase gives more lessons learned and informs the next step.