Pocahontas County History Preservation, Digitization, Community

The security updates are in place, and the Archives are once again active. I've spruced up the place a bit with clip art, thanks to these websites:

• Clip Art Collection is provided by www.rrhistorical.com(gifs)
• Free Clip Art from download-free-pictures.com(jpgs)

The current edition of History News Network's "Website of the Month" feature highlights 20 history Websites, with topics ranging from a facsimile edition of the lurid publication "Wet with Blood: An Investigation of Mary Todd Lincoln's Cloak" to Digital Vaults, an on line tour of the National Archives.

If you're looking for some snowy day reading, you're bound to find something here that will interest you!

If you've tried to access our "Digital Archive," you'll know we were off-line for a while, due to a small but fatal error with software updates. It's fixed now, and I hope to add large bundles of digital images as soon as the infernal updating process is complete.

If you're interested in such things, I've been detailing the Drupal update process. Step One and Step 2 are completed. I sincerely hope there will not be more than five steps total, but software updates usually surprise me, and not in a good way.

Following the old computer user's adage "If it's not backed up in three locations, it's not backed up," I've been making sure all our digital materials are adequately backed up. It's easy to let data acquisition get far ahead of annotation and backup.

Three ladies with bicycles, and a man afoot. Written in corner, “Gay,” possibly refers to the Marlinton photographer’s studio. From the Susan A. Price collection, Pocahontas County Historical Society

Via Library Law Blog, I found out about Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for Digitization for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums. It's available as a free pdf, and also as a print book. Here's the abstract:

Digital communications technologies have led to fundamental changes in the ways that cultural institutions fulfil their public missions of access, preservation, research, and education. Institutions are developing publicly-accessible websites in which users can visit online exhibitions, search collection databases, access images of collection items, and in some cases create their own digital content. Digitization, however, also raises the possibility of copyright infringement. "Copyright and Digitization" aims to assist understanding and compliance with copyright law across libraries, archives, and museums. It discusses the exclusive rights of the copyright owner, the major exemptions used by cultural heritage institutions, and stresses the importance of “risk assessment” when conducting any digitization project. It also includes two cases studies, examining digitizing oral histories and student work. As well as free availability here, print copies are available for purchase via createspace.

Dr. Susan A. Price (1873-1956), daughter of William T. Price. This photograph was taken in Marlinton, some time after Dr. Price's graduation from the Women's Medical College of Baltimore, 1903.

As a supplement to the Pocahontas County Historic Preservation Project report, I've uploaded a sample image gallery of the sort that would be included with any digitization project DVD's that would be distributed to the county libraries and court house. These galleries should make browsing the digital collection DVD's easier and more enjoyable.

The gallery sample represents about 15% of the Susan A. Price Collection in the Pocahontas County Historical Society paper archives. Dr. Price, who graduated from medical school in 1903, left several dozen photographic images and many more letters and typewritten manuscripts. Some of her writings were on professional topics, while others incuded family stories and local history.

Abstract

18 months into the project, the Pocahontas County Historic Preservation project has moved out of the development phase and into "production." Necessary equipment and software have been acquired, the website, Pocahontas County History: Preservation, Digitization, Community. http://pocahontascohistory.org/community is up and running, the server-side database has been populated, and scanning of historic documents is underway. Accomplishments for 2009 include:

Goals of the Digitization Project

• To facilitate preservation of historic materials through digitization.
• To make freely available as much material as possible, over the web and through local libraries, museums, and historic sites.
• To behave in a scholarly, courteous, and responsible manner to those who create or donate historic materials and to those who wish to access such material for noncommercial purposes. This must include acting in accordance with copyright, property, and privacy laws.

Digitization has tremendous potential to enhance preservation of historic materials, and to make all types of information available to interested parties around the world at little cost. However, it also presents novel problems in intellectual property rights. Who owns the rights to reproduce materials, and what may be done with the digital copies? There have been many changes in intellectual property rights law in the last 20 years, and there are few simple, straightforward answers to these questions.

I believe there are some cases in which we can use materials without fear of infringing anyone's rights.

Concluding Comments

Let it be far from me to write anything captiously or peevishly about any policy deemed wisest and best by my brethren as earnest and conscientious as I can justly claim to be and possibly far more in practice than I have been, yet I must say that to me it has been something rather bitter that efforts made by an obscure member of our assembly to have a grievous evil palliated should be ignored as they have been. The censorship of the press, recommended by the Moderator of the Little Rock Assembly in 1873 was so effective that not even a hint appeared in the papers of that cities concerning the preamble and resolutions that had been presented. So far as I am advised there was not a syllable published in the religious papers, North or South, concerning the affair. With magnanimous courtesy, which I shall always appreciate, the Christian Observer, at Louisville, Ky,., one of whose Editors was present when the paper in question was presented, published a communication written soon after the adjournment of the Assembly, form which this extract is given: