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Library and Archives Canada has announced the launch of the 2017–2018 funding cycle for the third year of the Documentary Heritage Communities Program (DHCP).

The deadline for applications is January 27th, 2017.  Check out the lists of previous recipientsfor a guide to the type of projects that qualified.  Andornot clients were successful in getting funded in both previous rounds.

This program is a great opportunity for archives, museums, historical societies and other cultural institutions to digitize their collections, develop search engines and virtual exhibits, and other activities that preserve and promote their valuable resources.

The objectives of the program are to:

  • Increase access to, and awareness of Canada's local documentary institutions and their holdings; and
  • Increase the capacity of local documentary heritage institutions to better sustain and preserve Canada's documentary heritage.

The program is aimed at non-governmental organizations specifically, including:

  • Archives;
  • Privately funded libraries;
  • Historical societies;             
  • Genealogical organizations/societies; 
  • Professional Associations; and
  • Museums with an archival component.

As before,businesses, government and government institution (including municipal governments and Crown Corporations), museums without archives, and universities and colleges are not eligible.

Types of projects which would be considered for funding include:

  • Conversion and digitization for access purposes;
  • Conservation and preservation treatment;
  • The development (research, design and production) of virtual and physical exhibitions, including travelling exhibits;
  • Conversion and digitization for preservation purposes;
  • Increased digital preservation capacity (excluding digital infrastructure related to day-to-day activities);
  • Training and workshops that improve competencies and build capacity; and
  • Development of standards, performance and other measurement activities.
  • Collection, cataloguing and access based management; and
  • Commemorative projects.

Two categories of funding available:

  • small projects under $15,000; and
  • large projects up to $100,000.

Further program details, requirements  and application procedures are available at http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/services/documentary-heritage-communities-program/Pages/dhcp-portal.aspx

How can Andornot help?

Andornot has worked with many clients on the types of projects which would qualify for this grant. Some examples are detailed in these blog posts:

We have extensive experience with digitizing documents, books and audio and video materials, and developing systems to manage those collections and make them searchable or presented in virtual exhibits.

Contact us to discuss collections you have and ideas for proposals. We'll do our best to help you obtain funding from the DHCP program!

So often when searching a database, records in the search results include links to PDFs and other electronic documents. Somewhere in the linked documents are pages with information related to the search, but where? And which pages are the most relevant? A user can use their PDF reader’s Find function to search again for keywords in the document, but that’s repetitive and not especially sophisticated. What if there was a better way of reviewing content within linked documents?

The Andornot Embedded Document Viewer breaks every PDF or similar document down into individual pages, with OCRd, indexed, searchable full text content available to searchers. When a user searches a database, the search results can include individual pages of linked documents, with their search terms highlighted, and with the most relevant pages shown, not just the record that links to the resource.

The screenshot below shows search terms highlighted on page. Additional images and examples are available here.

By viewing individual pages, rather than having to open and review each linked document in its entirety, a user can more quickly assess resources.

Other features include the ability to navigation through the document, zoom in and out of a page, and view thumbnails of all pages.

The Andornot Embedded Document Viewer is often added to the Andornot Discovery Interface search engine. Search results can represent the individual pages of a document that best match the user's search, ranked by relevancy, rather than just the catalogue or parent metadata record for the entire document.

Examples

The Andornot Embedded Document viewer is incorporated into the following projects, which are also based on the Andornot Discovery Interface:

Contact us for more information about enhancing search and discovery of linked, digitized resources.

The College of Registered Nurses of BC (CRNBC) celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2012. To commemorate this milestone, a project was undertaken to digitize and make available online many decades of CRNBC publications, such as newsletters and annual reports. This collection documents the history of the college and the many nurses who contributed to its first 100 years, and perhaps most importantly, easily enables tracking of important decisions over the decades.

Printed copies of the publications were digitized by a service bureau, with Andornot then developing the online search and presentation system.

The new site is available at https://archives.crnbc.ca

As shown in the flowchart below, the workflow from print to online involved several stages and processes.

  • The service bureau scanned the documents to specifications developed by Andornot, producing thousands of high-resolution TIFF images – one image for each page of each publication – as well as associated XML in ALTO format containing the full text extracted from the scanned images through an OCR process. 
  • Andornot developed scripts to extract metadata from these many separate files, such as the name and date of the publication, and to generate images in different sizes as needed for the interface. We used PowerShell, ImageMagick and djvulibre for this.
  • Andornot developed a search engine using the Andornot Discovery Interface (AnDI) to provide the best possible keyword searching. 

The interface and features were tailored to the specific needs of this project:

  • Brief search results show details of the publication and a snippet of text showing the user’s search words highlighted, as well as a thumbnail image of the page containing the text, and facets to limit by date and publication. 
  • Clicking through to the full record shows the page in greater detail, but still with the search words highlighted. As well, the surrounding pages of the publication are also available allowing quick navigation through the entire publication. This was achieved through the use of the New York Times Document Viewer and custom programming to highlight text in an overlay layer.
  • A PDF of the full document is also available for download. Andornot created these by stitching together the separate images files for each page back together into a single file.
  • Permalinks allow users to easily bookmark and share specific pages and documents.

Often in a digitization project, the result might be a single PDF per publication. With this project, by having each page available as a separate image, we were more easily able to direct the user to the page and text they are most interested in, though they can still access a PDF of the entire document – the best of both worlds.

All of this complexity comes together to provide an elegant and intuitive interface for users.

A CRNBC staffer using the archive says, “This archive is awesome! We were able to search several decades of a policy issue in a short time, so we could draft an historical timeline showing policy changes right up to 2013! Searching this database saved us so much time.”

Contact Andornot for help with your own digitization project.

Andornot has recently completed several exciting upgrades to the Heritage Burnaby website. The Archives received funding to digitize and create a web search interface to audio interviews on cassettes or reel to reel tapes from the last fifty years.  These interviews give an intimate glimpse into the lives of the Burnaby pioneers, and cover a wide range of subjects.  One of the common themes is the struggles that the Municipality and Burnaby families faced during the 1930s when the City went into receivership and unemployment was widespread.

As an interview could be more than an hour long, each was split into 5-10 minute tracks.  Behind the scenes Inmagic TextWorks databases HeritageBurnabyOralHistoryScreenshotwere established to capture information on the Master recording with metadata including the interviewee, date interviewed, interviewer and detailed biographical notes.  An image file showing either the interviewee or a relevant image such as the location or house discussed in the interview was also added.  Each track was then described individually and associated with the master record. Information includes the scope and content of each track, the date range, the subjects discussed and the historical neighbourhood. 

The new web interface allows users to search for any word or phrase across the descriptive fields, or by interviewee, subject or neighbourhood.  There is also an option to browse a listing of all the interviews.

Just adding a link for a user to click and then download an audio file was not an option.  Most users do not want to wait for a track to download, and they may not have an installed media player that supports the audio format.   Playback therefore relies on jPlayer, an open source HTML5 audio/video library which intelligently falls back to Adobe Flash when necessary to provide a consistent interface in all browsers.

“We are thrilled with the flexible and user-friendly interface that has allowed us to make these records publicly accessible for the first time.  By also adding the oral history database to the OneSearch feature on our site, researchers have the ability to find all related records, regardless of medium or format.  This will be an extremely useful tool for our users.”   [Arilea Sill, City Archivist]

Check out last week’s article in the Burnaby NewsLeader - Oral histories online provide fascinating look at Burnaby history or contact us for further information.

I recently read a post on the Vancouver Law Librarian blog from Steve Matthews wondering if any libraries were using Aperture 3 for a Mac or any other software for assisting them recognizes faces in their digital image collections.  This seemed to have interesting possibilities so we decided to do some further research.  I have used Picasa for years for my personal photo collection and have created albums for each of my family and friends using the facial recognition feature.  It works amazingly well, identifying people correctly from their baby pictures through adulthood. Most of the errors were when it confused siblings, which is as you would expect.

I know that many of our clients use Photoshop Elements for editing their digital images.  I found a review comparing the Elements interface to the Picasa interface and it appears that if you are not using Elements right now, Picasa would be a better starting point – and of course it  is free.

So, once you have let Picasa import your selection of photos, you would seed it by identifying some names and then let it churn away.  As you confirm its choices,  it will add more photos to the album for each person, without physically changing the original location of your image files.  Our challenge then would be how to enable users to get this information out of Picasa and into their databases.   Not so easy unfortunately, as Picasa does not embed the names into the image itself.  However we tested exporting the albums as XML which does include the name, so from there we could write an XSLT to parse the data for import into Inmagic DB/TextWorks.  Maybe just editing records by searching for the matching image numbers would be adequate for small batches. At least Picasa would give you a head’s start by identifying and grouping people.

We have done projects where we embedded the latest metadata for copyright etc. from a database record into an image each time it is downloaded from the web, and we can reverse the process and extract data from an image for importing into the database.  We can also add the ability for users of a website to comment on photos and identify specific individuals in a photo by selecting their face with their mouse.

We have so many clients interested in digitizing archival photos, or in keeping track of born digital images for marketing purposes, that we are definitely going to be keeping an eye on possibilities in this area. As always, any comments or suggestions are welcome.

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