Libraries, archives, and museums have traditionally preserved and provided
access to many different kinds of physical materials, including books, papers,
theses, faculty research notes, correspondence, and more. These items have been
critical for researchers to have a full understanding of their fields of study as well as
the history and context that surround the work.
Plain text files created by extracting OCR'ed text (no cleanup) from PDFs comprising the Lucy Schultz Archive of historic textbooks on English, composition, and rhetoric.
Presentation given at MathFest, August 8, 2015, Washington, D.C. From the submission abstract: Libraries, archives, and museums have traditionally preserved and provided access to many different kinds of physical materials, including books, papers, theses, faculty research notes, correspondence, and more. These items have been critical for researchers to have a full understanding of their fields of study as well as the history and context that surround the work.
However, in recent years many of these equivalent materials only exist electronically on websites, laptops, private servers, and social media. These digital materials are currently very difficult to track, preserve, and make accessible. Future researchers may very well find a black hole of content: discovering early physical materials and late electronic records, but little information for the late 20th though early 21st Centuries. In other words, a portion of history, including the field of Mathematics, may be lost unless this electronic content--perhaps some content you have right now--is cared for properly.
The presenters will cover the issues surrounding Digital Preservation, including steps needed to make sure data is reasonably safe. Additionally they will pose a small number of discrete challenges and unsolved problems in the field of Digital Preservation, where Mathematicians may be able to help with analysis and new algorithms.
Carolyn Hansen, Metadata Librarian, and her colleague Sean Crowe, Electronic Resources Librarian at University of Cincinnati Libraries, will describe their experiences of transitioning from cataloging to metadata, which is a common occurrence for catalogers these days. As materials and projects are brought online as well as born digital, traditional cataloging sometimes does not suffice the needs of these types of collections. Their presentation is titled "From Cataloging to Metadata: Difference in Scope, Skills, and Standards" and will focus on UC's conversion of over 9,000 Dublin Core records to the VRA standard, illustrating the differences between traditional cataloging and metadata projects with technical details at the forefront. Presentation at ALA Midwinter Conference, CaMMS Cataloging Norms Interest Group, Jan. 25, 2014
A presentation and paper delivered at Open Repositories 2012, the 7th International Conference on Open Repositories, held in Edinburgh, Scotland, July 9-13, 2012.
