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Creating the Collected Letters of Nano Nagle Digital Collection
The document outlines the roles and responsibilities of UCD library staff involved in digital asset curation, including collection profiling, cataloguing, and copyright management. It emphasizes collaboration with depositors to address the unique challenges of each collection while ensuring quality review and publicity evaluation. Additionally, it includes reflective thoughts on personal experiences related to school and secrecy.
Creating the Collected Letters of Nano Nagle Digital Collection
- 1. Órna Roche Metadata Librarian,UCD Digital Library https://digital.ucd.ie
- 2. Dani Montes Library Assistant PeterClarke Programmer Audrey Drohan Senior Library Assistant Órna Roche Metadata Librarian Dr John B. Howard UCD Librarian Julia Barrett Head of Research Services
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- 6. Meetings with thedepositor Complete a profile of the collection Team compile a collection plan Every collection is different Every collection has unique challenges Work closely with depositor and source archives
- 7. Add Nanoimage
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- 21. Created by JørgenStamp Data Seal of Approval
- 26. Wax cylinder recordingdevice Cnuasach Bhéaloideas Éireann / National Folklore Collection UCD
- 36. Dublin – Cork- New York - San Francisco round trip = 17,482km
- 37. I have madea pretty garden, and inclos’d all the ground back of their house, which has cost a great dale making the walls, we could not do well without it, some place to walk in… I often think my schools will never bring me to Heaven, I only take pleasure and delight in them I kept my design a profound secret, as I knew if it were spoken of, I should meet with opposition...When this little school was settled I used to steal there in the morning, my brother thought I was at the chapel
Editor's Notes
- #3 I would like to introduce you to the Digital Library team, particularly Dani, Peter, and Audrey who could not be here today.
- #4 To get a collection into the Digital Library, we have a workflow in place where we take a physical object and convert it to a digital version through digitisation. Many people think that digitising the original object is the entire process…
- #5 …but the actual digitisation or scanning is just part of one of eight processes in our workflow. Today I am going to broadly explain each of the 8 main processes – but there are thousand of individual steps that make up the whole workflow.
- #6 For every new collection, we begin by profiling the collection to get a sense of what type of objects are in the collection, how big it is, and what might be involved in putting it online.
- #7 Like all processes in our workflow, this is a really collaborative process often involving lots of meetings. Profiling is really important – the team need to fully understand the collection, particularly when there are a lot of outside collaborators and when we don’t see all the physical objects as was the case for the Nano Nagle letters.
- #8 The next process is Digital Asset Curation…this is when the actual scanning or digitisation takes place. For this collection the letters were digitised by different collaborators. Some were photographed by Deirdre or by CultureArk. As can be seen here, the rest of the letters were scanned in our digital lab by Dani. Because there were a number of collaborators digitising the collection it was important to liaise with everyone to ensure the final images met our standards…
- #9 When we scan in the Digital Library we follow a number of international best practices and standards to ensure we capture the best possible images.
- #10 Once the object is digitised we process the images - basically we tidy up the images, so we might rotate the image to ensure it is straight and crop it a bit. Our aim is to reflect as closely as possible the original object – for example we always allow a margin around the edge of the page, to reassure the user that the whole object has been captured.
- #11 Cataloguing is the process that I am mainly responsible for. The information, or catalogue record, that describes the collection and each of the letters is called metadata. The aim of metadata is to ensure the letters can be found, understood, and used both now and into the future.
- #12 As the letters are held in several different repositories we provided a template to gather all the existing descriptions about the collection together. David Gunning from the Nano Nagle project team completed this template giving me a really rich source of information for the Digital Library records.
- #13 I take the information from this template and add additional information to ensure it matches the international description standards we use. I also add subject headings from recognised thesauri and ensure people are correctly identified - for example to identify that we mean the Francis Moylan who was Bishop of Cork and not the Francis Moylan who is an Australian author.
- #14 This rich metadata ensures that the collection is findable in many ways, for example in a Google search. The metadata can be exchanged and used not only by people and but also other systems such as Europeana, a Europe wide cultural heritage platform.
- #15 The copyright process involves investigating whether there are any issues with copyright, data protection, or if there any ethical concerns. Again we work closely with the depositors when assessing a collection for copyright. In a nutshell Audrey has to ask three main questions about every object in a collection …
- #16 Who the creator of each object is…
- #17 …and if they’re dead, when they died… This tells us if the object is still in copyright or not…
- #18 …and whether we need to seek permission to put the object into the Digital Library.
- #19 As Nano died in 1784 her letters are out of copyright. We record all the rights information in the metadata so users can clearly see that her letters are in the public domain. The Creative Commons License informs users how they can reuse the actual digital images.
- #20 Ingest simply means the collection is added to our repository software, Fedora, for long term storage and uploaded to the digital library website where users can access it. This is a very technical process involving a lot of programming and automation. Which all sounds a bit robotic…
- #21 …but the process also relies on the human skills of Peter, our programmer. This is the part of the workflow where most of the digital preservation activities take place.
- #22 We want our collections to be available for future generations so long term digital preservation is very important. UCD Digital Library has been certified as a trustworthy digital repository. This provides peace of mind that our processes follow international best practice.
- #23 Once the collection is available on our website our work is not quite finished. We need to check that everything displays and functions correctly on a variety of devices as well as different browsers. Our website is a responsive website which means it works well on mobile devices – mobile devices are now a very important access points, particularly in less developed countries.
- #24 It is at this point in the workflow that the transcripts created by the research team were added to our transcription platform, From the Page. The Digital Library team then identified people and places in the transcripts as subjects – which are highlighted in red as links.
- #25 Once we are happy that the collection is displaying properly, we can begin to publicise the collection. Not all collections will get an official launch like this one, but we do publicise all the collections through various channels, including social media, our websites and email lists.
- #26 In addition some collections get a Google Arts & Culture exhibition like the one created by Deirdre and the project team.
- #27 The final stage in our workflow is evaluation. When a collection has been online for at least a month, we sit down as a team to talk over the entire process to see what we learned and make adjustments to our processes. The Nano Nagle collection has helped us develop and improve our procedures around transcription.
- #28 So now that the collection is online, here are some of the benefits of the digital version of the letters.
- #29 You can zoom in…
- #30 Change the image settings such as colour, contrast, and brightness, or even turn it into a negative.
- #31 Using the crop/edit/save tool…
- #32 …you can select a section or the whole image to save.
- #33 And of course you can view the transcriptions by clicking here…
- #34 …which will open our transcription platform. Having the transcriptions in the Digital Library means you can also search for a word or phrase contained within any of the letters in the Digital Library.
- #35 You can also compare objects within the same viewer.
- #36 For example you can compare these two letters written 13 years apart to see any changes in Nano’s handwriting.
- #37 Of course the main benefit of the collection being online is that it now accessible anywhere in the world (internet access allowing!). A researcher would have to travel over 17 thousand kilometres to consult all the letters physically. Now they can view them from the comfort of their own sofa. So now anyone across the globe has the opportunity to connect with Nano’s letters.
- #38 And it is making a personal connection the collections that is one of the joys for me about my work, so I would like to finish with some quotes that particularly struck me from Nano’s letters.