 Welcome, and thank you for joining us for today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar, Getting Started with Digitization. My name is Crystal, and I'll be your host. We have three guests today who have been involved with the development of a curriculum for helping libraries create and share digital collections. And in just a few minutes they will share that curriculum and their experiences with you. But before we begin, I have just a few announcements to share. Today we will be using the ReadyTalk platform, and please use the chat in the lower left corner to send questions and comments to the presenters. We will be tracking your questions throughout the webinar and will answer them at a designated Q&A section at the end. All of your chat comments will only come to the presenters. But if you have comments or ideas to share, we will forward them back out to the entire group. You don't need to raise your hand to ask a question, simply type it into the chat box. Should you get disconnected during the webinar, you can reconnect using the same link in your confirmation email. You should be hearing the conference audio through your computer speakers, but if your audio connection is unclear, you can dial in using the phone number in your confirmation email that we've also shared in the chat. If you're having technical issues, please send us a chat message and we'll try to assist you. This webinar is being recorded and it will be archived on the TechSoup website. If you're called away from the webinar or if you have connection issues, you can watch a full recording of the webinar later. You will receive an archive email within about two days that will include a link to the recording, the PowerPoint slides, and any additional links or resources shared during the session. If you're tweeting this webinar, please use the hashtag PS4LIBS. We have someone from TechSoup live tweeting this event, so please join the conversation there. TechSoup Global is dedicated to serving the world's nonprofit organizations and libraries. TechSoup was founded in 1987 with a global network of partners. We connect libraries and nonprofits to technology, resources, and support so that you can operate at your full potential, more effectively deliver programs and services, and better achieve your missions. TechSoup has helped to distribute over 14 million software and hardware donations to date through the product donation program. We offer a wide range of software, hardware, and services including software like Microsoft Office and refurbished computers. For more information about TechSoup product donations or services, please visit TechSoup.org and click on Get Products and Services. Today we have three guests joining us. Frankie Abbott joins us from Boston where she is a project manager for the Digital Public Library of America, or DPLA for short. Frankie runs education, training, and curation projects at DPLA, including the Public Library Partnership Program. Jennifer Brunel is the director of the Montana Memory Project and helped to develop the DPLA digitization curriculum. And Sarah Hawkins is the resource librarian at the East Central Regional Library in Minnesota and is a DPLA community rep. My name is Crystal Schimpf and I'll be your host for today's webinar. Assisting us with chat and Twitter, we have Ginny Mies and Susan Bard from the TechSoup team. We will be on Twitter using the at TechSoup for Libs Handle and the hashtag T-S-4-L-I-B-S. We will have time for questions throughout or at the end of the webinar and so please send in questions as they arise and we'll keep track of them. I'll answer them at the end. Now we'll start off by hearing from Frankie and learning a little bit about the Digital Public Library of America DPLA and the Public Library Partnerships Project, the curriculum that was developed through that project which is entirely free for you to use. And then we'll get a preview from Jennifer of the curriculum and learn a little bit about planning for digitization projects. Sarah will share her perspective having participated in the DPLA training and having applied it to several digitization projects. As I said, we'll take questions at the end of all of this so send in questions as they arise. Now we'd like to know a little bit about you and your experience coming in today so let's just do a quick poll. You can select your response by clicking the radio button and then clicking Submit and then you'll see the responses appear on your screen. And tell us, has your library worked on any digitization projects to date? You may have a strong yes there. Maybe you've just gotten started, so this is still a new venture. Maybe you haven't done anything so far and maybe you're in a position where you're not sure and that's okay as well. So I'll give you a few moments to respond here. Think about your responses and I'll say that whatever level you're at I think you'll benefit from what we have to share with you today. Even if you've done some digitization projects it looks like close to a third have already done some digitization so you'll be able to apply some new best practices and get some new ideas for moving forward. If you're just getting started this is the perfect time. We're going to talk about getting started with digitization today. And then if you haven't started yet perhaps then the resources we share with you will help you get on your path towards starting a digitization project in the future or finding out what might be a benefit for you there. All right it looks like most people have had a chance to respond so we'll go ahead and close this poll now and it looks like the majority are just getting started although we definitely have some in the yes and the no camps as well. So thanks for joining us and hope that you get some excellent tips to help you in whatever phase of digitization you're at in your library. Well at this point I'm going to hand things over to Frankie so she can tell us about the DPLA and this curriculum for digitization. Frankie? Thanks so much Crystal and thanks so much to TechSoup for Libraries for having us on the webinar today. I'm really excited to see the mix of people represented in the poll. It looks a lot like the mix of people who participated in the original kind of pilot project that we're going to talk about where we tested out this curriculum and made revisions and so I hope that you'll find something useful in the resources that we're going to share today. As Crystal mentioned I am an employee of the Digital Public Library of America which is a cultural heritage nonprofit organization and I want to start by just explaining to those who do not know what the DPLA is, what it is, and there may be many of you who do not know what the DPLA is because the DPLA is only two and a half years old. So for those who don't know, the DPLA is a free national digital library that provides access to materials from libraries, archives, and museums across the country. The DPLA is also a network of partners who have their own digitized content and agree to make that content available through a single website. And that website you can see at the bottom of this slide is DP.LA which is not the most conventional URL. There's an interesting story there if you want to ask questions about it later I'm happy to explain. But again a network of partners represented in fact well I think by the group of people presenting on this webinar. And the DPLA as a website is really one place therefore for users to find digitized content and some born digital content from 1800 plus institutions across the country again libraries, archives, and museums. The nature of this partnership probably makes it clear why the DPLA is so interested in being a good community of practice around digitization. The DPLA's big network of 1800 plus institutions includes organizations at many different stages of digitization experience. So some very large federal institutions example on this slide is the Smithsonian Institution who of course has been in the business of digitizing the content in their museums for decades now. Also including some state-based organizations the example on this slide is Digital Commonwealth in My State. They are a state digital library and they in turn support organizations in the state of Massachusetts such as the Brockton Public Library in getting their content digitized and up online and accessible both through their website and then shared additionally with the Digital Public Library of America. We also of course partner with the Montana Memory Project which Jennifer is here representing and the Minnesota Digital Library who works with Sarah and East Central Regional Library in Minnesota. So we have a vested interest in digitization and in sharing best practices for it and also in training digitization beginners in best practices. And with those ideas in mind the DPLA in 2013 applied for funding from the Bill and the Gates Foundation to do a two-year project called the Public Library Partnerships Project. And that project was a collaboration between the DPLA and a group of its partners from the state of Georgia, the Digital Library of Georgia in Massachusetts, Digital Commonwealth and then Minnesota Digital Library in Montana and Utah through the Mountain West Digital Library. And the goals of the Public Library Partnerships Project were many but for the purposes of our conversation today they were really to give some considered thought to best practices for digitization beginners. So they were to develop a curriculum that we would use through the project to train public librarians in digitization skills. And then secondarily after having created this curriculum and tested it out in trainings and gotten feedback from participants about how well it worked over the course of a digitization project that the Gates funding supported, it was also a goal of the project to revise the curriculum and present a version of it for really a broader variety of cultural heritage institutions for free online. Ultimately we had a lot of success with the trainings and the project went really well. This is a map of the places that we gave an in-person version of the curriculum training. So I wish I had some zooming capacity. I could show you some interesting richness in the Montana participants and the Minnesota participants where I got to be in the same room and spend time with both Sarah and Jennifer. But you can see an exciting range of folks from different parts of the states that we worked in. 151 participants total from 134 institutions participated in a day-long training with the same modules that the free online version has and gave us feedback about that as they moved ahead to digitize material from their own collections. So the curriculum itself that we designed was created really to follow the flow of the digitization process itself. And so we organized this curriculum into six sections or modules as we call them. And I'm going to spend just a few minutes talking through each of those modules to give you a sense of what they cover. Hopefully to give you a sense also of how you might personally be interested in experiencing the curriculum if you're looking to answer a specific question or if you're just interested in some general tips for getting started. So the flow of the digitization process starts of course with planning like all good projects. And then the curriculum moves to selecting content. So give some idea of the actual materials that you would select particularly for an early digitization project. Thinking about scope and kind of materials. Also the curriculum includes a healthy portion about copyright, something that a lot of the digitization beginners feel quite nervous about. The sort of legal implications of what they might choose and what they have the right to make digital copies of and put up online and what kind of risk they might or might not be running in doing those kinds of activities. Then also really important the curriculum moves to a discussion of describing materials. So we'll talk about this at greater length in a minute. But once you are moving ahead to create a digital version, you are also creating a descriptive record or metadata record that goes with an item. Finally the actual process of reformatting, taking something that is physical or analog and making a digital copy of it. What are the best ways to do that and to get support for doing that? And finally a stage that I think people often leave out of the digitization process, but it's really important. Thinking through how you can promote the digital content that you've created through your digitization project. So thinking about who the users of that might be, what the value is of putting it up online, where you might want to put it, who you might want to share it with, and what you could potentially use it to do. We as I mentioned spent a lot of time revising the version of the curriculum that you see up online through the feedback we got from participants. We actually did one group of trainings in, let's see, it would have been April and May of 2014. And then took a pause, revised the curriculum, gave a second and third set of trainings that August and September, and then ultimately put the free online version up actually in October of 2015. So we had a good long time to sort of percolate and to learn from some of the decisions that we made in giving the trainings. And also to think about how the curriculum should work differently for those people who would be using it in a self-guided manner. So I see that the TechSoup staff has helpfully posted the URL to the curriculum itself, which I hope that you will go see. And if you don't remember this tiny URL that I've made, it's actually pretty easy to find the curriculum if you just Google DPLA and curriculum. It's the only such curriculum that we've produced. So it should be pretty easy to find. And in thinking about the best way to present the curriculum in a self-guided version, we have made pages for each of the modules that I am going to describe. And each module includes a video of the presentation, so an actual person from our team giving the talk as well as a copy of the slides with notes both in PDF and PowerPoint form. So we really wanted to be able to put the curriculum materials out there and encourage people to reuse them in training situations or to sort of experience them as adjacent participants to the trainings that we had given. We're always eager for feedback when and if you've had a chance to take a look and questions. I won't want to get too far into this because we actually hope to give you a little flavor of the curriculum today in Jennifer's portion of the presentation. She's going to share with you the planning module. And in that module, she will cover some answers to these questions. Why would you digitize content? Sort of what would the benefits be of doing that? What are some of the resources that are required to do a good job with a digital project or digitization effort? And what are some of the issues and concerns that you should consider before you get started? How can you be best prepared to embark on a digitization project? So Jennifer will actually be showing you that part of the curriculum in just a few minutes. Module 2 is about selecting content and really goes through a series of considerations for the content selection process. And it's actually given by Carla Urban of the Minnesota Digital Library in the online version. Then Carla talks in that module a little bit about some of the things that you might consider when looking through what I think we all think of as the storage closet full of potential physical material for digitization. So looking for items that are unique and that have subject matter that you think would be interesting and useful to the patrons that you are concerned about. Also to think through the format of items, there is some information in the curriculum about some of the different challenges posed by say bound materials like books versus items like photographs and then the sometimes greater cost of the digitization of audio-visual materials which of course are great and really important but offer a different sort of set of concerns. Carla also spends some time discussing the quality of the materials in terms of how easy they might be or how damaged they might be by the digitization process. And then also encourages participants to start with things that are already somewhat processed catalog or described particularly probably important for beginners to think about starting with something that they already have some information about because you know we don't want to be selecting the largest boulder to roll up the hill when we begin our very first digitization project ever. Module 3 is actually given by me about copyright. And focus is really a lot on explaining the sort of general concept behind copyright law. It goes in a lot of depth about how to identify material in the public domain which is free and clear for you to digitize and free and clear for other people to use. Walks participants through a useful permissions process for material that is under copyright and that you might be interested in pursuing permission to digitize. It includes some discussion of orphan works, explains what they are as well as fair use. And then spends time talking about risk management, how to make a decision as an institution about how risky the behaviors that you're thinking about pursuing in terms of digitization really are. And when the legal implications of digitization are different than privacy concerns that might come up depending on the kinds of things that you're interested in digitizing. Module 4 is all about description or metadata given by Ann and each hour formally of the Mountain West Digital Library and Greer Martin from the Digital Library of Georgia. I don't know, I assume many of the people on this webinar are familiar with the idea of metadata, but if you're not, metadata is again the descriptive record that accompanies a digitized item. So you could think really of a digitized item as both a file, an image file, a text file, or an audio-visual file, accompanied by some information about that file. So metadata is the place where we record titles and descriptions and locations and dates and all that kind of information that gives an item a lot of value to the people who might use it for research purposes. So this is a great module that helps you think through not only how to practice writing good metadata, how to think about some of the most commonly required or most important metadata fields that you'd fill out for the things you digitize, and how to try to fill in the blanks with information about items that you may or may not know. In addition, the module spends some time thinking through the implications of writing descriptions in a way that make your items useful not just to very local users, but also to people, for example, not familiar with the names of the counties where you live or the names of the towns where you live. Module 5, given by Sandra McIntyre of Mountain West Digital Library and Sheila McAllister of Digital Library of Georgia, is about the actual reformatting process itself. Interesting that many times people think of digitization as scanning, but really in our curriculum important to emphasize that we think of it not just as scanning which is again traditionally what you would do with two-dimensional items, but to think of it as reformatting, again taking a physical or analog item and making a digital copy. The emphasis of module 5 is particularly for institutions with fewer resources, ways to get some support. So when does it make sense, for example, to purchase your own equipment for doing scanning or converting audio and video? And when does it make sense to enlist the help of another institution in your state instead of spending money on equipment? When to work with vendors? And the module also covers best practices for how to name your files as you make them and how to make some selections for setting for file formatting and the like. And finally, the last module given by Anna Fahieflin who works for Digital Common Mall considers what to do with digitized content once you've created it, and how can you promote its use? Where might you try to connect it with users? And then how can you productively assess the way in which the content that you put up online is being used? How can you track that? How can you assess it? And how can you hopefully use some of the assessment of use to potentially fund future digitization projects? How can we sort of learn about what users are engaging with and where we might put any resources that we come across in the future? The curriculum itself, which again, I hope that you will take time to explore, was, as I said, released in October 2015. And to be honest, we've all been pretty floored by the amount of attention and circulation that has gotten in the library, archives, and museums world. People have spent time really looking at the modules on YouTube. They have visited the curriculum pages. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback. But we are always looking to think about this. It is something I know Jennifer, for example, works for an institution where she is working with digitization beginners all the time. And so we had hoped to create a tool that was really useful primarily for two audiences. One is digitization beginners themselves, a place where if you wanted to learn a little bit more about the process or a specific aspect of the process, you could come on and you could watch a video or you could look through some notes to learn. But we had also hoped to create a resource for some of the other cultural heritage trainers in the DPLA's network, people like Jennifer, who are working in their own training settings and working with people who are getting started with digitization to try to think about what the best way to approach that sort of workshop training would be. So without further ado, I'm going to turn the presentation over to Jennifer Bernal who is going to give you a flavor of the curriculum by talking you through our very first module called Planning for Digitization. Can everybody hear me okay? First of all, thank you for having me today. My name is Jennifer and today I want to talk to you a little bit about the planning module. Actually I'm going to share the planning module with you and so you'll be able to jump right into, plant the second module on selecting items after this webinar today. To start with, I want to talk a little bit about why you would consider digitization. And we often think of it as something that those of us that have thought about digitizing is a thing that everybody should do and still not everyone understands the value or the importance of having digital content. So that's one of the places to start as to why digitize. And the presentations as a whole are part of the curriculum developed at the DPLA through these partners that are listed on the slide. And we really encourage you to share, reuse, and adapt any of this content for your institutions or for your communities. So you might have been considering a digitization project or already had started one but you have a problem getting buy-in. And one of the big things that we want to share with you today is how do you get other people to understand the value and let you have the resources you need. It's daunting to start and we need some support from administrators as well as the resources that are necessary. So we need to start with first what is digitization. Digitization is a process. It's more than just scanning stuff. The steps are very important and the key is the final step which is sharing with a larger audience. For many of us our cultural content gets locked in a special cupboard or a vault and it might be hidden behind a desk or sitting in a box. It's only accessible as someone knows it exists and requests it and even then we may hesitate to share. Digitization leads to access and discovery of materials. Digitized content contributes to the pool of cultural heritage materials and other research content available online. Contributing to the public good. Digitizing the content helps share the stories we tell about our history. Preservation, we often hide our special items so that they deter use because we're worried about the items being damaged or stolen and those are valid concerns. Digitization allows the ability to share rare fragile items with a broader audience and then white gloves are not necessary. Digital formats are more long term than physical ones and that's important to keep in mind but they are a backup. For example, we had a public library in Montana that has series of books on architecture of the community. The series was created by a local author and they were no longer in print. The books were used annually in a middle school project and were beginning to show their wear and tear. In an effort to protect the books from further damage while still making the books available and accessible to a large number of students, they were digitized and made available on the Internet. Creating an online presence takes a lot of time and adding digital content can create pathways to your institution that did not previously exist. So it can really increase the visibility of your institution and its collection. Another thing that is important when considering to digitize is developing partnerships. Partnerships with clubs, community organizations, and government agencies can lead to better resources. For example, a public library can partner with a local museum, the historical society, churches, or local clubs to share resources. In this photo on the slide here you see train tracks and they are most effective when they intersect with other train tracks and can get you somewhere. But you don't want to have to do all that work on your own of building a system to communicate. You might imagine too that if you look at this you will see that it is a particular transition in a particular location. We can all discern that. But if we are a train enthusiast or if we know somebody who is a train enthusiast they might be able to tell us a lot more about this picture and that really gets to the heart of why we develop partnerships. And a train enthusiast might tell us what type of train this is, when it was likely used, maybe able to identify the particular depot in this picture. And then all of a sudden we have a lot more context and a lot more information and partners can really help us develop information and get us the resources that we need to get the job done. Partners also really improve your reach. They can lead to bigger outreach through their broader networks and they can help you connect your resources with new communities. And if possible we encourage you to work with regional and national hubs like DPLA or DPLA Service Hub to share your content and get technical support. The technical support piece has been big for us in Montana. Partners share knowledge and learn. You can connect with institutions doing similar projects for collaborations and you can learn from each other in the process. And it's important to remember that your collection is just one piece of a whole. The stories that your content tells multiply when it appears with content from multiple institutions which helps researchers of all kinds. So I'd like to talk about five tips for getting started with a digitization project. First of all, tip one is where. You want to decide where the content will live. Can a partner host it for you? Can you host it locally? Or do you need to purchase a service space to make it accessible? You not only need storage space but you will want to share that content with an audience. So you want to explore if there's a DPLA Service Hub in your area and if you can work with that hub. Or can you work with other local state and regional partners to make your digital content accessible? Tip two is when. You want to know your timeline. We want to usually work backwards from a deadline date to determine if you can finish the project on time. We need to be aware that you may encounter problems along the way and having extra time is optional. Timelines always get a little skewed and this is a really important part of the process. Tip three is consider the staff and resources required. And these actually appear in order of preference on the slide. Partnerships are highly recommended and encouraged because they share in the workload of a digital project. Partners can assist with financial resources, staffing, and equipment. Vendors can be hired for re-reformanting and often can help with other tasks related to the project. Of course, vendors charge for their services but the expense may be worth it. Re-formatting is time-consuming and can be expensive to do in-house as well. The other option is to purchase the proper equipment to do the re-formatting task. This equipment is expensive and is only advised if your volume of re-formatting warrants it. Keep in mind that equipment like technology becomes outdated quickly. It is often less expensive to do the work with a vendor than to purchase your own equipment. Tip four is why? You want to be ready to explain the importance of creating digital collections to your partners and to your administrators again and those are the importance of access, discovery, and use. And tip five is what? You have to select the items that you will digitize. Collections are made up of a wide array of content. Some of this content includes photographs, documents, newspapers, yearbooks, maps, books, ephemeral, the list can go on and on. To make the content easier to manage, you can work on selecting that with a committee but you will learn more about that in selecting the content module in this curriculum which is the next step in the process. So you finished module one and after today you can jump right into module two which is selecting the content and Carla Urban will walk you through that process. So now I'm going to turn it over to Sarah Hawkins from the East Central Regional Library in Minnesota to talk about her role as a participant in this training. Thank you, Jennifer. All right, I am going to get started telling you a little bit about who we are as an organization. East Central Regional Library is a consolidated regional public library system in East Central Minnesota. Our claim to fame is that we are the oldest existing regional public library system in the state. We were formed in 1959 by a joint powers agreement between six counties. We have 14 branches and outreach in those six counties. Geographically, one end of our region is more than 100 miles away from the other so we do have a lot of distance to cover when talking about working with each other in person. And then the size of our communities also range greatly. We are on the outskirts of the suburbs of the Twin Cities and we go all the way up north to very small rural towns with populations of less than 400. So it's just a sneak peek at who we are and why this project was a good thing for us. This is one of my favorite visuals that the Digital Public Library of America uses to explain the Service Hub relationship. Your public library or other local group is a pond with our local unique materials and you can see East Central Regional Library and the outskirts of that. We send our content upstream to the lakes to the Service Hubs. In our case, it's the Minnesota Digital Library which pulls data from cultural institutions across their state or region. And then those Service Hubs feed the content through the rivers to the ocean which is the Digital Public Library of America. So it's just a great visual there on how the process works. As I mentioned, our lake is Minnesota Digital Library or our Service Hub is Minnesota Digital Library. The Minnesota Digital Library is 12 years old. Their largest online project is called Minnesota Reflections which has more than 215,000 items, photographs, postcards, maps, documents, letters, and oral histories that tell the history of Minnesota. And in Minnesota Reflections is content from more than 157 participating organizations. So the digital skills training, there were four separate day-long digital skills training sessions held across Minnesota in summer of 2014 that Frankie talked about earlier. They were really designed to reach public libraries such as ours with unique local content that want to share that content with a broader audience but really don't have the resources or skills to do so. And if any of this sounds intimidating, I have to say that I mean that it was the most basic. We went in with absolutely no knowledge and came out feeling like we could tackle a digitization process and you will see that we did successfully. So in this training in Minnesota, there were 31 participants from 22 organizations that attended and our organization had four staff members that attended and they were from within all levels of our organization. The training we received came from both Minnesota Digital Library staff and Digital Public Library of America staff and our staff member that trained us with Frankie. And really the training turned the theoretical into practical. We had all of this vague knowledge of metadata and copyright and preservation and promoting, but how did it work? And this really turned this into a viable plan for us. And in the photo here you can see Carla Urban from Minnesota Digital Library leading one of the trainings with participants. So we came away successfully with two projects, one of which was the photographs used in East Central Regional Library's 50th anniversary book which was written in 2009. And those photographs included library buildings and staff members both past and present. Services over the years such as the bookmobile, the card catalog, records, cassettes, and as you can see in these images here, our mail-a-book program and then the 16 millimeter films and projectors. And our second project that was digitized was the Kids Design Glass project. This project originally was funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. In 2008 Minnesota voters passed the Legacy Amendment which increased sales tax and that sales tax is distributed partially into the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund to support arts and to preserve our Minnesota's history and cultural heritage. And we took the funds that were distributed to East Central Regional Library and created a summer reading program art contest. The contest was open to kids age 5 to 10 and we chose one drawing from each of East Central Regional Library's 14 branches. The winning drawings were then transformed into 3D blown glass sculptures that were created by a local artist. And so then as a result of the Public Library Partnership project and the digitization, in Minnesota Reflections are now scans of the original 14 drawings, the artist's statements, and you can see those on the left there. And then the Minnesota Digital Library came out and took professional photographs of the sculpture and a short video of each sculpture rotating on a turntable. So those are what you can see on the right hand side. And I know it's kind of small and blurry here but what you are looking at is Arg Mady and this sculpture's name is Arg Mady. And it says because he belongs to a pirate he sees land and says Arg Mady but it's really Land Ho. And so that was created by Sydney in one of our communities. So the impact for us of these successful projects is the tangible impact is it allowed us to showcase our history and services in a format that we wouldn't otherwise have been able to on a state and national level. Again, especially highlighting the history of being the oldest regional public library system, the role we've played in our communities, and more generally rural library services and how they have played out in Minnesota and throughout the country. The second thing is that the kids design glass sculptures are not currently on display due to concerns about the safety of the artwork and just various factors. So right now the easiest way for kids to see the artwork that they created is to see it online daily. And we hear feedback all the time from the kids and their families and friends that it's just important for them. And then also that we've just preserved our materials to provide a lasting record. More intangibly, the impact for us is that we've strengthened our relationship with our service hub of Minnesota Digital Library, improved the digitization knowledge of our staff again from all levels of the institution, and then we've strengthened relationships with community organizations and introduced new partnerships. So again, going back to what Jennifer said, we've not only have strengthened the partnerships that we had, but we are also creating new ones as an impact of a direct relation to this project. The impact beyond our organization is that Minnesota Digital Library is incorporating its training that we received into its ongoing recruitment and preparation for potential participants in the Minnesota Digital Library, both in-person training within the state and in the self-guided curriculum that Jennifer and Frankie introduced you to earlier. We like to think that we challenge the Minnesota Digital Library and new avenues of content creation by experimenting with photographing 3D objects and adding the spinning videos, both of which were new formats to Minnesota Reflections. We have increased community awareness of the resources of Minnesota Digital Library and the Digital Public Library of America. We have East Central Digital Library staff teaching classes to patrons and organizations within our communities, introducing them to the resources, as well as just being more aware and having those conversations on an informal basis. And then we've also increased our community groups' digitization knowledge through outreach. Our staff has met with local history groups and historical societies, and I'll just give you a quick example that we were at a meeting where a local group was announcing their intention to purchase digitization equipment. We introduced them to even the resources of Minnesota Digital Library and the Digital Public Library of America. We shared our beliefs and the importance of open access and then explained the simple process of applying for digitization with Minnesota Digital Library and explained that that might be a better avenue for them to explore, and they are now successfully walking through that process. And then finally, I can't stress enough the importance of this as an advocacy piece for us. I think all digitization projects can be used as advocacy pieces to some extent as promotion. But for us specifically, the Kids Design Glass Project, every two years we have to go to the Minnesota State Legislature who appropriates the funds from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund across institutions, and libraries are part of that appropriation. So to be able to share with them this really wow project that came out of this fund, the original project itself, and then the digitization, and just being able to share its impact has been a huge advocacy piece for us, and we expect that it will continue to be. And then finally, I will just introduce you to some of the other Minnesota success stories. Out of those 22 organizations that attended the skills training in Minnesota, 12 different organizations successfully completed projects through this process. Just some of the noteworthy content, and there is plenty out there, but there is a series of Mayor's portraits that were digitized. And this right here that you are seeing is the first Mayor of Duluth who was the Mayor in 1877 when it became an independent city. And they digitized all of those portraits. So that was a cool thing. And then the thing below it is another 3D photograph that Minnesota Digital Library created. And it's called Goose Grease, which is for congestion. And it is from Mark's Drug Store in Foster, Minnesota in the early 1900s. So there's plenty of other cool medicine bottles that they created the 3D, but the 3D images were created into photographs and the videos as well. And then finally, the content from Minnesota has gone into three different Digital Public Library of America exhibitions, including the history of U.S. public libraries, the urban parks in the United States, and then the things like this Goose Grease went into Cures and Self Remedies, an exhibition on patent medicine in the United States. So just to wrap things up for us and for I think all of Minnesota, we consider this project a huge success, and I know it will carry us into the future of digitization and where we plan to go next. Well, Sarah, thank you for sharing your experience, both learning from and contributing to DPLA. And thanks to Frankie and Jennifer, both of you for sharing an overview of what's available I think in terms of the curriculum. And I know we've started to get a few questions. We'll get to those in just a minute if you have questions. Now is a great time to enter them into the chat. One thing I did just want to reiterate is that what we shared today is part of the curriculum that's been created that's freely available for anyone to use on the DPLA website. We'll share that link again before we sign off and it will also be included in the archive. And it really is just the beginning. We're looking at getting started today. What is it that you need to think about in order to get started and what resources might you tap into once you do start a digitization project? Of course there's a lot of additional information out there and quite a bit of that is going to be included in this curriculum that you can access later on. So we just showed the planning stages really to get started there. So hopefully that helps you think through how you might get started on a project or how you might approach your next project differently than you have in the past. So thanks for all the questions that are coming in. I think we'll work our way backwards. And actually in thinking about Sarah's project and this project in particular, I want to address a question that has come in about the storage of the digital materials. Where exactly are you going to store and share that? And in Sarah's example we've got the Minnesota Digital Library MDL that was a vehicle for storing that. Frankie, I might take this question to you first and have you just talk about first of all what do libraries need to think about when they think about storing their digital content and is that addressed in the curriculum? Can you point us to where they might learn more detail about that? Sure. So I'm looking at the question. So I think I know which question you're addressing here. We have essentially the reforming module is entirely devoted to the issue of storage, devoted to the issue of backups. It's also devoted to the issue of some of the perilous things involved in working with an outside vendor to try to help people overcome the possibility of doing things like overspending on working with vendors. So I would encourage people who have questions about file management in general including storage, including decisions about whether you want to close things yourself on your own website, or you do want to turn them over to an organization like Minnesota Digital Library. That module in particular really helps to think through those questions in a much deeper way. And tell us which module was that again just in case we missed it. Reformatting, the reformatting. Reformatting, which is module 4, right? 5. So module 5, reformatting, that's where you'll get that information then about the vendors and the storage and all of that. I would say that we as a group have for, well I mean I suppose there is probably a large range of institutions I would imagine participating in the webinar, but if you are an institution without a huge number of resources, the curriculum really encourages people as a first step almost to try to partner up, as Jennifer mentioned, with an organization with more experience and more resources and to consider getting their assistance with things like storage and hosting. So that is I guess a sort of a bias you'll see when you look at the reformatting module. Great. And Sarah, do you have anything to add to that with your experience? I would just add that for us we trusted the experts. You know, Minnesota Digital Library had been doing it for 11 years by the time we were working with them. And it's something that they do all day, every day. It's only a portion of what we do in the public library. And so it was important to us that we let them host. And they're always working on best practices for preservation. We did get a copy back, so we do have a copy on a CD of everything that was digitized for us. And we will be working on deciding how we want to preserve it best as an institution. But just for us the best plan was for consistency and for security's sake we decided to trust Minnesota Digital Library. And also just for impact. More people visit their website than visit ours every day. And we will post things individually on our site as well. But we do like that they've been around and they have their reputation and people already are going to them. Jennifer, I'll see if you have anything to add coming from a statewide perspective. No, I think that these two covered that portion very well. I think we should move on to some other questions. Okay, all right. Well, another question that has come up, and Frankie, I think this one will be for you, is how do you get in touch with, or find out if there's a DPLA hub or some other DPLA, I don't know if it's a community rep, how do you get connected with that network in your area? And this comes from somebody who asked the question coming from New York State specifically, but I'm sure it would apply to any area. Sure, that's an excellent question. And I actually also want to say as much advocacy as we are doing for the DPLA and its partner network there are actually state-based organizations that do this kind of work that are not partners yet with the DPLA. So there are in some states memory projects like the one that Jennifer works for that provides support to other institutions that in terms of being connected to the DPLA family, if you go onto our website again at dp.la, there is a menu called Hubs at the top, and there's a list of all the hubs we work with. And in about, I would say now we're coming close to about 50% of states. So closing in on about 25 states where we work with a state-based organization that provides support to other institutions or a service hub that Sarah talked about. And in New York State we work with a group called the Empire State Digital Network. So that would be the group that the asker of that question would want to look for. Excellent. All right. And then so now to take kind of a different direction, we've gotten several questions about the metadata that is included. And one maybe just a good place to start here is the real question is, does metadata need to be created for each piece that's added to a collection? And this comes from somebody who heard that they only needed to add it for some of their digitized materials. And so I don't know, Frankie, maybe you want to take that one first and see if Jennifer and Sarah have anything to add later? Good or bad news. You should plan on creating metadata for all of the items that you digitize. Again, I think you could think of a digitized item really as two components, one being the actual digital file that is the item itself and the other being that descriptive record or metadata record that travels with it. But I think, again, to refer back to the curriculum, Module 4, which is all about metadata does include I think some useful tips for how you can kind of do bulk metadata. So people tend to do digital projects around a collection idea. So for example, they may be writing metadata for 50 photographs by the same photographer or about the same place. And so by using simple spreadsheet programs like Excel or using Excel, which is not simple in a simple way, you can often save yourself some time in creating metadata for a number of items kind of all at once. Again, the module gives some I think useful tips about how to do that. But yes, we do item level metadata, the DPLA partner projects do, and the curriculum promotes that as an idea. Great. And I know I see some very specific questions coming in about metadata aligning with specific programs. And I just want to assure the people who have asked those questions, we'll follow up with you via email on those just because I think it might be a bit too technical for this moment. We want to make sure to get you the right information. So if we don't answer your question today, regardless of the nature, we will follow up with you later via email. I think we're going to run out of time. We've got a lot of great questions coming in. So we'll get to as many as we can and we'll follow up with you later on if we didn't get to your question live during the webinar. Jennifer, Sarah, anything to add to this conversation about metadata from your experience? I'm seeing a lot of people talk about using a specific software for organizing their content and their metadata like past perfect. And we've been very successful in Montana in reconstructing those so that they fit to match the requirements for DPLA. And I'd be happy to address those after this session if people want to ask me more questions about using past perfect software, that kind of thing. Excellent. All right. You'll be our person for those questions. And thanks, Jennifer. We've got a few questions that have come in about the curriculum itself. And Trixie asks, are the YouTube curriculum videos captioned? Meaning, are they accessible through screen readers or are they accessible in that way? That's a really excellent question, Trixie. And I'm ashamed to say that they are not, although it is on a list of things for us to do and provide with the curriculum. So they should be, but they are not currently. All right. So it might be coming on the horizon. Good news perhaps for the future. I have a question. Good, good, good. So another question though is, I know you said that the slides are available and that the idea is for this resource to be shared out. Can people use this as part of a presentation for their staff, whether it's a staff day or a staff meeting of some sort? Are people able to repurpose this material? Yeah. So they actually, all of the presentations have a Creative Commons license. For those who aren't familiar with what that means, we actually cover it in the copyright portion of the curriculum if you don't know about Creative Commons, but it's a license that basically just asks people to give us a very small amount of credit, but people are free to take this, share it, adapt it, so only use part of it, reuse it, take a few of the slides, take all the slides. Any of that is fine. We really want people to do that with the curriculum. Excellent. All right, well we have just a few minutes left in our call today, so I'm going to take one last question, which I think is an excellent one for us to leave on. Of course, there's a lot of information here for those who are getting started who have not done this before. If you are getting started for the first time, what tips can you offer to get started? And what we'll do is, Sarah, we'll start with you, then Jennifer, and then Frankie will end with you before we sign off. So, Sarah? Yeah, the first thing I would say to think about getting started is to really walk through the modules and understand how the process works from beginning to end before you go back and look at what content you have and then really sit down and think about how the content that you have fits into all of these steps or all of the different components of the digitization process. So, for us, after we attended the training, we took some time and just kind of sat and thought about it and processed it, and then we honestly just went digging through our archives and thought about, okay, these are potential projects. Where do we find things that connect? Okay, what do we have copyright for? What would we have to get permission to digitize? What is the intention? Who are we going to share these with? And then the projects just kind of emerged from there, and I have to say that they did take a couple iterations and they did change throughout the process. But it was just – that's my best advice, is have a complete understanding of where you're going to go by getting the training from beginning to end before you go back and think about what you might want to digitize. I think if you go into this process of this is what I want to digitize and this is what I want to do, then you – before having a knowledge of the process, then you run into some pitfalls that it seems – from what I've seen, it seems harder to overcome. All right, and Jennifer, any quick tips from your perspective? Definitely reach out to those who have already done some digitization projects don't feel like you have to recreate the wheel because there's a lot of great helpful content out there on the Internet for how to get up in the data fields, how to specify to a vendor what type of digitization specifications you need to meet, that kind of thing. And much of the member project shares that freely, so do several of the other state organizations that digitize content. So please make contacts with people who might be able to help you with this process, so just trying to start from scratch on your own. All right, thank you Jennifer. And then Frankie, I'll leave the last word for you here. I will just say before I do this we have a few announcements after Frankie shares her last tip, so stay on the line for those and also to take a brief survey. But Frankie, I know you had some tips and next steps to share with everybody. Sure, I actually have a very short answer to the question you just asked also, which is just to also encourage people to do something which may be totally obvious, but when you do a first digitization project, don't take on digitizing every single thing, sitting in the file cabinet, start small, start with 25 items, start with 50 items. Make a manageable group of things to begin with so that you can after looking through curriculum materials and getting a sense, as Sarah said, of what you're going to do so that you can have a reasonable kind of scope of work for your very first project. So in terms of next steps, we really appreciate all of you coming to the webinar and I think from our point of view we really hope that this will have motivated you to take a peek at the curriculum where really lots of the good, rich material is about getting started for digitization. We hope we will have inspired you to take a peek at that and see if there is a module or all the modules. That might be interesting to you to learn more. And we're really eager for your feedback on the curriculum. So things that you think we missed, questions that occur to you when the webinar is over that you'd like to ask, you can email us at info.dp.la or my personal work email address is Frankie with a Y, F-R-A-N-K-Y at dp.la if you'd like to have follow-up. And of course I'm happy to share those questions with Jennifer and Sarah as well. Excellent. Well thank you to all three of you now for sharing all of this information. We have quite a few questions we'll be following up on later so just want to assure those of you who did not have time for your question we will follow up with you. And of course the archive email will be coming out in the next couple of days and that will include all of these resources and a recording of this presentation. We hope you'll join us at a future webinar. Our next TechSoup for Libraries webinar is actually on March 23rd and we'll talk about digital literacy training resources so we hope you will join us at that and you can register on our events page at TechSoup.org. And we also hope you'll visit us at TechSoupForLibraries.org where we have specific resources for libraries and blog posts. And you can even share your story there with us if you have one to share. So we hope to see you at TechSoupForLibraries.org. Thank you to ReadyTalk for being our sponsor today. And thank you for joining us. Thanks again to all of our guests. And please stay on the line. So just a brief survey we'd like you to fill out telling us what you thought of today's webinar. But that's all we have for today. Thank you and have a great afternoon. Bye-bye.