 There we go. Okay. Our last session is titled last lightning round session titled scan day with John Sarnowski the director of the Rescartes Foundation and Laura KSA and the adult services librarian at the door County Library in Wisconsin. Take it away. Good afternoon and welcome to Wisconsin. For next 10 minutes, we're going to be talking about getting local history into an archive and onto the worldwide web using open source software. We at the Rescartes Foundation have been holding what we call scan days around the state and you can find more about us and what we do at our website at www.rescartes.org. So what's a scan day? Well, the foundation provides flatbed scanners, rotary scanners, slide scanners and digital cameras to the library. We also provide training for volunteers to man the scanners. The library provides the promotion and invites the patrons to the site to bring in their photographs and postcards and memorabilia. And the items are then scanned or photographed, metadata is added from the worksheets filled out by the patron and a collection is made and a website is created on the same day. So what really is it? It's really kind of an exciting event. Patrons are really connecting to the library. You know, items come out of hiding. We've had things where, you know, the Historical Society locally said, well, there's nothing here. We've got everything. We know what's out there. And then suddenly in walks, you know, a thousand postcards of a very small town in Wisconsin. We have families sharing. People are out there looking at parts of an item and say, hey, that's my uncles and that's my grandfathers. And then finally, we find out that they're related. The fact that the technology works gets people excited seeing, you know, scanners doing their thing and people taking photographs. It's really just a fun and busy day. And what can be digitized? Well, of course, you know, on flatbeds we can do photographs and pamphlets. We can do audio cassette tapes. We bring a converter for that. But then we can take photographs of butter churns and plates and buttons and those kinds of things. We do 35 millimeter slides and film, but we can't bring microfilm scanners because first they're expensive and they're very large and hard to move. But Laurel will talk about that later. What does it take to make a digital archive? Well, you have to add metadata to your images. You have to tag your photographs. You can use optical character recognition on your text materials so they can be full text searchable. You can use automatic audio transcription to make your audio materials text searchable. You build a collection of my gathering things and making directories and then you create a website by typing a lot of stuff. Well, that sounds like a lot of work, but with our software, free software is available to anyone worldwide to use. We use simple forms. So here you see a photograph of baseball players in a car. We put a title in, we put an abstract and then you fill out a simple form and save that. The conversion, we take the JPEGs and PDFs and waves and whatever format the scanner or the camera produces and we write out a Library of Congress standard format. We embed the Library of Congress metadata into it so you're selling out simple forms and using software in fairly simple formats in order to create Library of Congress standard output. The collections here, you'll see that there's city directories and local history and photographs. And again, the collection manager allows you to create those collections or sub-collections. So going to www.riscarta.org, you can actually get the software. And what I'm going to do is take a quick pop over here and show you some of the sites. This is our website and down here on the front page, on our homepage, you'll find a little scan days link. You can find out more about scan days and what you can do. This is Galesville Population 1500. These are those postcards that came in. We scanned probably 250 postcards that day, but a lot of other things came in as well. Some of the tools that we had there were photographs, of course, of fire hydrants and all kinds of interest. We had, there used to be a medical college there and they brought in medical college bleeding kits and things like that. Hudson area, the city of Hudson used to actually create money and this was almost in mint condition. It was great seeing that kind of stuff. Independence, lots of old photographs of the town and disasters that happened in the town. Westby population, about 2200 here in Wisconsin. They brought in a lot of photographs and a lot of logical material, which again, because we used OSAR on the item, we could go in here and look for things like Smith and find it and we'll pop it up. If you're looking for your Smith family Robinson, you could find it. Also, because the website is a no brainer, you just pointed at your data so there's no work to be done. It gives you all these features of being able to search and to be able to clip and cut without the library doing a lot of work. So that's what the Riscarta Foundation does for you and I'm going to turn time over to Laura so she can talk about Dwork County and what they did using Riscarta Web. Thank you. I have great interest in history and I have a little background in technology and I decided to use my library position where I'm in charge of the history room and genealogy room to look into it. I'm not going to digitizing newspapers but it seems like most of the libraries doing it were big state libraries or large public libraries. It seemed a little daunting but things sort of started falling into my lap. I went to a technology conference and learned about Minnesota's digitization of newspapers. They're part of the Chronicling America project and I did a lot of research but I kept hearing good things about a company in Wisconsin called Northern Micrographics that scanning they did for Minnesota newspapers. So I did a lot of research but finally it came down to realizing that we needed some money so our library director talked to the library foundation and came up with one grant. And a man who just happened to be in the history room said he was in charge of a small family grant called the Myhogan Foundation and told me I should apply for a second grant there. And with that money falling into my lap I decided to go ahead and give this project a try. The fortunate thing is that, well, I realized that a lot of the projects are very expensive because they use the Content DM software which costs a lot of money to purchase in the thousands of dollars to start with and then you have to pay a licensing fee every year. And I knew that we couldn't afford that sort of thing because we're really very small and don't have a lot of budget for this. So I took the grant money and used that to pay for good quality scans because we needed to have a good quality OCR where you can do optical character recognition so you can do searches on the database. I got permission from the local newspaper to use their microphones which were in nearly pristine condition. Our library microphones were in really bad shape because they're so heavily used but these were really good condition. Then we talked to the county. We had one member of the county board who was really big on local history and the county was very helpful in agreeing to put our newspaper database on their servers. So once I got the scans, I realized I found the Riscarta Foundation was doing software that would allow me to do pretty much what I wanted to do with at no cost and John Sarnowski was a great help in helping me to understand the technology behind it. So I processed the newspapers myself. I had the scans done by Northern MicroGraphics and then with John Sarnowski's help we put them on the county server with the help of one of the IT staff over at the county. And as a result we have a really wonderful project that people are using very heavily and you can't imagine how appreciative they are that these things are online and available to them. They first tried just doing up to 1923-24 because of the copyright cutoff date and that was 40 microphones. Then we had a little money left over so we went and did 16 more microphones and our collection is now out from 1862 to 1941 and includes all the newspapers that were published in Dore County at that time. As you can see on the slide, it cost about $31,000. All that money really went to the scanning quality, high quality TIFF files that we received. And we don't pay any maintenance which to me is a godsend because we don't have a lot of budget for that sort of thing. So I'm trying to talk fast because I realize we're out of time but that's basically what we did and you can have a look at it online. It's just marvelous. The database went down for a short time last week and I immediately had three emails from people who were worried that it wasn't working and they had been using it heavily. So we know that it's being used. Also I do have Google Analytics tracking who logs into the website. You're welcome to try it out. It's very easy to work with and if you have any questions, contact me at the library. All right. Thank you, John and Laura. We have time for one question from the audience. Okay. I'm going to choose a question. We have a lot of questions here, but I'm going to choose. Does Riscarda cover other states as well or are you just confined yourself to Wisconsin? Well, the software is available worldwide. We actually have Russian and Slovenian and North African Chinese sites, but the Riscarda Foundation and dragging scanners around. I get my putt putt and I drive. So we're located here in Wisconsin. So we do Wisconsin and Eastern Minnesota, Northern Iowa, Northern Illinois. So as far as I can drive in a car in a day, I'll take it. Fair enough. Well, maybe we need to just come up and watch how you do it and you could be a model for us. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you everyone for our lightning round. This is the second year in a row we've done this and I would say success yet again.