Using open source tools in a newspaper digitization workflow
At the GLBT Historical Society we’re diligently digitizing more than 1,500 issues of the Bay Area Reporter, the San Francisco-based weekly newspaper that’s been serving the LGBT community since 1971. Thanks to a generous grant from the Bob Ross Foundation, we purchased a shiny new scanner that could accommodate newspaper spreads, and we set about…
Digital collections workflows at CHS
The California Historical Society recently added four collections of historical photographs to its digital library, including images of Los Angeles at the turn of the 20th century, and photos taken by a 15-year-old Alice Burr of volunteer infantrymen mustering in San Francisco during the Spanish-American War. These collections and more are available at digitallibrary.californiahistoricalsociety.org. Perhaps…
If you love these blues: A Mike Bloomfield discography
I had the great privilege of compiling the discography at the back of the newly-published Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American Guitar Hero, a totally revised and expanded edition of Ed Ward’s 1983 biography of the Chicago-born blues guitarist, from Chicago Review Press. There have been a few nice write-ups of the book,…
Visualizing jazz discography
As jazz music evolved alongside sound recording technology and the record industry, so too did the study and cataloging of sound recordings, or discography. From the early discographies of Charles Delaunay through the work of Brian Rust, Tom Lord, and many others, jazz discographers have published thousands upon thousands of pages of highly structured data…
Evaluating archival content management systems for the AMNH
From June through December 2014, I served as the metadata intern at the American Museum of Natural History Research Library, working on their CLIR Hidden Collections project. My primary responsibility was evaluating archival content management systems to determine the best way to manage both EAD and EAC-CPF records. I mostly looked at ArchivesSpace, Access to…
Connecting musicians through the photo archive
The Linked Jazz project has derived most of the social relationships in its dataset from the transcripts of oral histories given by jazz musicians. One question we began to ask some time ago is: what other jazz historical material in digital form would be a good source of additional relationship data? One answer to that…
