American Subculture Digital Library

American Subculture Digital Library✦ Members/Roles

✦ Micah Vandegrift - Project Manager

✦ Carolyn Renko - Cataloging/Metadata

✦ Brooke Fry - Collection Development/Software Engineer

✦ Tasks✦ M - keep on target with goals, general leadership with content

✦ C - Developed metadata scheme, processed digital objects

✦ B - collection research, Greenstone installation

American Subculture Digital Library✦ Mission Statement

✦ The American Subculture Digital Library seeks to document the subcultural music scenes that existed between 1998 and 2001 in Central Florida, and create a searchable digital archive of photos, and ephemera related to the history and growth of this subculture.

✦ Goals

✦ To preserve the materials that were substantial in the development of this subculture.

✦ To document and archive an integral part of American musical history that is heretofore not well-represented in research and collection.

✦ To promote a contextual and historical understanding of music subcultures in American pop culture studies.

✦ To institute a standard and practice for archiving pop culture objects that are related to socio-cultural movements.

American Subculture Digital Library✦ “Behind the DL”

✦ Research in subcultures is difficult without content archived and indexed

✦ Bridges the gap between library, archive and museum

✦ Influential in contemporary cultural trends✦ Personal interest and career goal

American Subculture Digital Library✦ Target Audience

✦ All ages✦ Young and old individuals interested in music and music ephemera

✦ Individuals who were involved in American Subcultural music scenes from 1990-2005

✦ Individuals compiling information and researching the American Subculture music scene

✦ Computer proficiency- Average to advanced✦ Proficient with Internet searching and locating online information

✦ Content✦ Small collection of photographs and ephemera that document the

Central Florida subcultural music scene between 1998 – 2001.✦ Photographs are owned by group member, Micah Vandegrift, who

grew up in this subculture.✦ Other

✦ Flickr - Creative Commons & Audio/Video owned by Micah Vandegrift✦ We considered the inclusion of photos from Flickr as well as

audio/video but ultimately felt it would lead to less cohesion in our DL. These other materials would be fantastic additions in the future but did not fit in with our focus of Central Florida subculture (for purposes of this class).

American Subculture Digital Library - The Collection

✦ Process✦ 27 Photographs/objects were scanned by Micah Vandegrift and loaded to Dropbox as Master Files.

✦ Photographs were then named FLsubcult and further identified by the following conventions: show, venue, event, band, object. ✦ (Ex. FLsubcult_show1)

✦ Each group member was responsible for the transition to working files of nine images.

American Subculture Digital Library - The Collection

✦ Methods✦ Working File Transition included changes to resolution and naming, as well as any post processing (image sharpening, color correction, repair).

✦ Images were converted from 600 dpi to 200 dpi using Photoshop and GIMP, and renamed to denote working file. (Ex. FLsubcult_show 1 – Copy W)

✦ Tracked all changes and data using Google Docs

American Subculture Digital Library - The Collection

✦ Issues✦ Our file naming convention is not the best. When using numbers, its best to use leading zeros to act as placeholders (001, 002). This will allow better sorting and file management.

✦ Its often recommended to use 8 or fewer characters in file names. Our use of multiple characters, upper and lower case, and spaces may increase potential for error when typing file name.

American Subculture Digital Library - The Collection

✦ Future Development✦ We will continue collection development by accepting crowdsourced submissions from parties interested in preserving their analog materials in our archive. This decision will help in alleviating issues surrounding copyright, as the submission process will involve a copyright clause.

✦ Flickr Creative Commons.✦ Other alternative libraries/archives.

American Subculture Digital Library - The Collection

American Subculture Digital Library - Metadata ✦ Began with an NISO (National Information Standards Organization) document - NISO Framework Advisory Group (2007). “A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections.”

✦ CDP Metadata Working Group, Dublin Core Metadata Best Practices Version 2.1.1 September 2006 ©

✦ 10 Required elements, 8 optional. ✦ We used: Title, Creator, Subject, Description, Publisher, Date Original, Date Digital, Type, Format, Digitization Specs, Resource ID, Source, Rights Management.

American Subculture Digital Library - Metadata✦ Transfer to Greenstone - different metadata standards.✦ Some elements did not have an exact match or existed but had different meanings in Greenstone. Ex. No digitization specification element.

✦ Create a Crosswalk:✦ Title-Title, Creator-Creator, Subject-Subject an Keywords, Description-Description, Publisher-Publisher, Date Original-Date Created, Date Digital-Date Modified, Format-Format, Format Extent- Size of working file in bytes, Resource Identifier-Resource Identifier, Source-Source, Rights Management-Rights Management License

American Subculture Digital Library ✦ Our goal is to have a visually pleasing, easily manageable site that will

engage the user with the content.

Navigation

✦ Does each page have a home button?

Consistency and Standards✦ Do the textual descriptions use consistent wording, phrasing and

structure?

Visibility of System Status

✦ Are there progress bars or loading meters when a page is slow to load?

Flexibility and Efficiency of Use

✦ ! Are the pages of the site free of extraneous graphics and text?

Usability

American Subculture Digital Library - Demo

American Subculture Digital LibraryRights

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported

License.

All images are property of Micah Vandegrift. Commercial reproduction or distribution requires written

permission.