The program is funded by the PALINET membership and supported in part through a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The development of a mass digitization service is the first component of PALINET’s collaborative digital collection strategy. The initial focus is on mass digitization of text.

The University of Maryland Libraries will be submitting eleven reels of microfilm containing the university’s course catalogs from 1859 through 1945 as part of the pilot project. These course catalogs document the early history of the Maryland Agricultural College through the end of World War II and online access to them will be a valuable asset to both researchers and to staff. For more information about this project, please see the PALINET Mass Digitization Collaborative F.A.Q.

The presentation explored the technical and organizational issues faced in mounting a relatively complex architecture with limited resources, as well as the various metadata schemes used in the system and the development of an API, object and content classifications, and web services. Issues of migration, authentication and archival storage featured prominently in the discussion. The presentation concluded by addressing future enhancements and plans for development, as well as stumbling blocks and lessons learned from the process of building a digital collections repository.

The PowerPoint slides of the presentation are available for viewing here.

Kate Murray presents “Sticky-shed, Dropouts and Warping: Issues in Preserving Your Audiovisual Collections.” This talk, sponsored by the MLA’s Academic Research Libraries division, addresses the broad issues in preserving audiovisual media, including the exploring the unique challenges inherent in audiovisual collections, examining survey and assessment tools, and discussing a variety of migration strategies to continue access to content. The presentation focuses on digital reformatting policies at UM Libraries.

The Maryland History and Culture Bibliography consists of citations to articles, books, and doctoral dissertations about various aspects of Maryland’s history and culture, divided into a set of standard subject categories. The citations are gathered from scholarly journals, local and state history-related newsletters and magazines, subject indexes to monographs and journals, publishers’ catalogs, and electronic databases, among other sources.

Genealogy-related works are not included unless they are of a more general nature, for example, indexes to various types of vital records or Civil War muster rolls.

The Maryland History and Culture Bibliography is primarily based on the annual bibliography of Maryland history sources that appears in the Maryland Historical Magazine. Citations in the bibliography date from the mid-1970s through 2002. Past compilers: Dorothy M. Brown and Richard R. Duncan (1973), Richard J. Cox (1974-1982), William LeFurgy and Peter H. Curtis (1983-1986), Anne S. K. Turkos and Peter H. Curtis (1987-1991), and Anne S. K. Turkos and Jeff Korman (1992-present). Annotations were added as part of the original Maryland Humanities Council project. Updates will be added in 2008 and in regular intervals thereafter.

The Maryland History and Culture Bibliography database was originally created by the Maryland Humanities Council in 2000. The University of Maryland Libraries assumed responsibility for the continued access and updating of the database in 2008.

Please explore the site and send us any feedback, questions and comments at http://www.lib.umd.edu/dcr/collections/mdhc/contact.php.

From a “colorized” view of Luna Park, a great Coney Island amusement park that burned in 1944, to the long-ago streets of Baltimore, the National Trust Library Historic Postcard Collection preserves unique and engaging images of people and places in early twentieth-century America. These postcards also provide unique evidence of the evolution in American architecture, with rare glimpses of buildings or places that may no longer exist or have dramatically altered over time.

The online collection represents a small sampling of the approximately 20,000 postcards available in the National Trust for Historic Preservation Library Collection. The Libraries will continue to add images to this collection.

For more information about the entire collection please visit http://www.lib.umd.edu/NTL/postcards.html.

Please explore the site and send us any feedback, questions and comments at http://www.lib.umd.edu/digital/contact.jsp.

Taking her place as managers of DCR are David Kennedy (Information Technology Division) and Jennie Levine (Archives and Manuscripts). Both bring their solid credentials and past experience with the University of Maryland Library system to their new roles. We would like to take a moment to welcome them to DCR.

The online collection provides access to children’s books published in Japan during the early post-World War II years, 1945-49. Currently, 200 children’s books are available.

The University of Maryland Libraries and the National Diet Library of Japan (NDL) are working collaboratively to preserve and provide access to the Prange Children’s Book Collection in digital format and on color microfilm. Eventually, 8,000 titles from the Gordon W. Prange Children’s Book Collection will be available. Digitization of those volumes is ongoing and new titles will be mounted on a rolling basis.

Due to copyright restrictions, access to the full contents of the books are limited to the University of Maryland College Park campus. However, access to book records and thumbnails of book covers are available to all.

The 600 EAD records can be broken down as follows:

Historical Manuscripts: 322
Literary Manuscripts: 61
University Archives: 89
Library of American Broadcasting: 10
National Public Broadcasting Archive: 68
Special Collections in Performing Arts: 49
World’s Fair: 1

Of those 600, there are 318 full finding aids and 272 are abstracts of either unprocessed collections, or collections for which we just have not mounted a full finding aid in ArchivesUM yet. That’s pretty good news for exposing our “hidden collections.”

I want to thank everyone who helps contribute to ArchivesUM, whether it is content, technical skills, design, or data entry.

Jennie Levine