Members of the 2024 Cohort of the Digital Curation for Information Professionals (DCIP) Certificate Program finalized their capstone projects. The DCIP Certificate Program consists of three classes – Introduction to Digital Curation (6 weeks – Instructor: Mark Conrad), Tools and Software for Digital Curation (12 weeks – Instructor: Mark Conrad) and Implementing Digital Curation in the Workplace (12 weeks – Instructor: Richard Marciano). Members of the cohort who successfully complete all three courses are awarded a certificate.Congratulations to this year’s graduating cohort with an array of outstanding projects:
- Sarah Cogley: Mapping the Love Canal Superfund Site
- Taylor Johnson: A Digital Model for 17th-Century Secretary Hand
- Sarah Barksdale: Generating a Heritage Pamphlet for the Joint Base Andrews Naval Air Facility, Maryland
- Kristina Wagner: Implementing a Scalable Handwriting Text Recognition (HTR) Program at Loyola Notre Dame Library (LNDL)
For the third course, cohort members must complete a capstone project in which they use some of the skills and knowledge that they have acquired in the first two courses to implement a digital curation project. The capstone project can take place at either their workplace or as part of another organization or project that interests them.
1. Sarah COGLEY: Mapping the Love Canal Superfund Site
VIDEO: https://youtu.be/5D1kkq9bvdc (24′ 39″)
Sarah Cogley is the Digital Collections and Repositories Librarian (as of July 2024) at the University of Buffalo.
The University at Buffalo (UB) University Archives has several manuscript collections focused on the environmental and public health crisis of the late 1970s in the Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls. The 45th anniversary of the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program is in 2025. To mark this, the University Archives is partnering with other regional institutions to create programming, exhibitions, and events. Sarah produced an online ArcGIS StoryMap resource that features maps and digital images from the Love Canal collections. The map was created using ArcGIS layers of Love Canal neighborhood parcels, the Love Canal Emergency Declaration Area, and the Love Canal Containment Area outline. Sarah overlayed the historical images onto the map according to the location at which the images were taken (street addresses or geographical location). Researchers can select the images or map locations and explore information (descriptive metadata) about the photographs including the address, names of subjects (people), date of photography, photographer name, identifier, copyright information, and a link to the broader digital collection of Love Canal images hosted by the UB Libraries Digital Collections. Researchers may zoom onto the map to see the Love Canal neighborhood in its broader geographic location.
2. Taylor JOHNSON: A Digital Model for the 17-Century Secretary Hand
StoryMap: https://arcg.is/1bv1G2
Taylor Johnson is the Rare Book Collection Coordinator at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
Taylor developed a digital transcription model for 17th-century English handwriting. Using Transkribus–an AI-powered platform for the text recognition, image analysis and structure recognition of historical documents–her project explores methodologies for improving the transcription and analysis of large-scale manuscript collections. She selected Elizabeth Bulkeley’s 1627 recipe book, A boke of hearbes and receipts (Wellcome Collection MS.169) as a case study for training a customized Text Recognition model to recognize the unique letterforms and abbreviations of 17th-century English secretary hand. English secretary hand, a form of handwriting common in the 16th and 17th centuries, is uniquely difficult to transcribe, bearing little resemblance to more familiar print and cursive scripts. In addition to the strange letterforms, abbreviations were quite common, and spelling had yet to be standardized.
3. Sarah BARKSDALE: Generating a Heritage Pamphlet for the Joint Base Andrews Naval Air Facility, Maryland
PRODUCTS: Movie: https://youtu.be/L8eXN3O8E7I (18′ 18″) & StoryMap: LINK
Sarah Barksdale is the Historian for the United States Department of the Air Force, Andrews AFB, Maryland.
The Department of the Air Force Heritage Program requires its field historians to generate a unit heritage pamphlet detailing the pertinent history, lineage, and honors of that organization. This product is intended to be a public-facing document that the Air Force Historical Research Agency recommends placing on the unit’s website. Sarah used ABBYFineReader and OpenRefine to clean and transform data. Using computational tools historians can more efficiently start extracting data sets such as aircraft types, units, dates, or personnel numbers from the history office’s reference library. An initial StoryMap was prototyped.
4. Kristina WAGNER: Implementing a Scalable Handwriting Text Recognition (HTR) Program at Loyola Notre Dame Library (LNDL)
PRODUCTS: Movie: https://youtu.be/tDe504wzL0s (“14′ 20”) & StoryMap: LINK
Kristina Wagner is the Scholarly Communications Librarian at Loyola Notre Dame Library (LNDL).
LNDL has a great deal of correspondence and diaries in the archives including a prefect diary from 1856 documenting the comings and goings of Jesuits at Loyola. Currently, all transcription is done by hand. Utilizing this diary as a test case, Kristina used Transkribus to transcribe the handwritten text. This transcription is then utilized in Neo4j to build a network of these Jesuits. This work can be further expanded upon to tie into work being done at Loyola investing ties to the GU272 descendant community.
-Written by Richard Marciano
