 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event. We are a webinar, a webcast, an online show, whatever you want to call us. The terminology is up for debate in some areas. Whatever it is, we are live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. However, if you are unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show every week and post that onto our website as well. And I'll show you where that is at the end of today's show. Both the live show and our recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So if there are any topics that you think of maybe of interest to your colleagues, friends, neighbors, family, anybody, go ahead and share our page with them and share the links out to them. There may be something they want to watch. We do a variety of things here on Encompass Live, book reviews, mini-training sessions, interviews, tours, demos of products and services. Basically, anything library related that is really our only criteria is something to do with libraries. Either something libraries are actually doing themselves, something that are new to libraries, something new you can use, but always something libraries. So our topics might seem a little out of the box, but trust us, it'll always come around to libraries in some way. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff who sometimes do presentations, but we also bring in guest speakers as we have this morning. As you can see from the slide here, on the line with us from Omaha Public Library is Mary Marcio. Hello, Mary. Good morning. I'm sure you're there. Yeah, I'm here. And Martha Grinseback, who's also from Omaha. Now, Mary is actually retired officially. Yes, that's correct, but somehow I have not really left libraries. I still volunteer and do all kinds of different things. That seems to happen a lot. And we're glad that you are still around in the library world here in Nebraska. And Martha and Mary have a presentation here about, said that Omaha Public Library is done with their digital collections. They had a lot of different, I actually attended this session at our state library conference, the Nebraska Library Association and School Librarians Association joint conference last fall. And it was very interesting, I thought. I am not a cataloger, I'll tell you that right now. But what they had to go through to get everything organized was very interesting. So I invited them to come on our show here and share it. So I'll just hand over to you guys to go ahead and take it away with your presentation. If anybody has any questions, take them in as we're going, and we will answer them. OK, I am Martha Grinseback. I'm a librarian at the downtown branch of Omaha Public Library. And I'm Mary Marcio, a formerly cataloged department manager at OPL. I retired in 2005, but I haven't managed to leave libraries yet. So we should start off by saying that nobody really appointed us to this project. We were self-selected, and we will explain how that happened. But just to give a little background, in 1998 Omaha Public Library created its first online digital library to showcase its extensive collection of original photographs and documents from the 1898 Trans Mississippi International Exposition, which was Omaha's own world's fair. Later projects were embarked upon, and the result was a huge hodgepodge of different interfaces and metadata standards. It was clear that an overhaul was needed. We had, at the point where we decided that there was no going back, we had very few staff and very little time, but we plunged in anyway. It's still very much a work in progress, and we will tell you some more things that have happened along the way since the NLA conference. It's been slow progress, but it's been a great learning process. Interesting, as Christa said, and we are going to share that with you now. OK, so first we're going to change the slide. And there we go. OK, technical difficulties. Anyway, first we're going to briefly show you our original digital collections and tell you how they got started, we hope, and why. And we'll talk about how decisions were made about metadata and the problems we faced when we decided to upgrade our digital site. And then in the second half of the presentation we'll look at how we've dealt with those problems and what we've learned, which is a lot. And we continue to learn. So on the slide you can see representations of our four major collections and the very approximate number of images we started with. There's the Trans-Mississippi, the early Omaha, which is not just images, but also some written material as well, the StereoView collection. And the early Nebraska collection, which is primarily maps. These are two collections. These are two cooperative collections which contain OPL materials. We've contributed both images and metadata to these over time. Most of the images came from our early Omaha collection, which you saw on the first slide. OK, next, now you've seen the four. Now we're going to just talk a little bit about each of them, what's in them, and how library patrons and researchers and other people have been able or not to access them over the years. So the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition is sort of our flagship collection. It's the most extensive and the most unique. Back in 1898, when the World's Fair, the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, was held here in Omaha, at the end of that Congress, at the end of the exposition, all the photographs taken by the official photographer, Frank Reinhart, and all the papers, correspondence, and other memorabilia related to that, and to the Indian Congress that was part of the exposition, were all donated to the library, which, following the usual idea that anything you don't know what to do with, give to the library. Anyway, it was donated to the library, and we have purchased a few things since then, and other people have donated a few things. So we have really a great collection. For many, many years, it was available in the library to researchers and not really in any other way. Let me see if I can read. And here's just a few examples of the types of things. We had menus, photographs, tickets, all sorts of ephemera. OK, the next collection, the early Omaha Gateway to the West, that represents a collection of some 770 images of photographs, lantern slides, postcards, stereo views, maps, pamphlets, all sorts of things that reflect Omaha's importance as the site of the Union Pacific headquarters and the point of Eastern origin for the first transcontinental railway. It was called Gateway to the West. We called it Gateway to the West just because that was really its importance. We have actually quite a few more items that we would like to digitize and plan to digitize. But the 770 is about what we have online. And the source, as I mentioned, people have been donating things to the library since 1877, so things accumulate. So for many years, those things were available just by coming to the library. Certain things you could actually check out, lantern slides, for example. It used to be you could check them out and take them home. Here's just a few examples, maps, postcards, stereo views. OK, speaking of stereo views, we also have an enormous collection of world stereo views depicting different scenes around the world. Those were date back to the late 1800s, early 1900s, and they were given to the library by Charles Dietz, who is a wealthy businessman. He was a president of the library board for a long time, and he loved to travel the world and scavenge or collect things, I mean, and bring them back, and then he would donate them to the library. So we have those as well. For many years, the way to see those was to come to the library, and you could either look at them in the library, or you could check them out and take them home. We no longer allow that. And here's just a few examples. They're mostly sort of black and white or sepia. OK, and then a further collection is we have a very large collection of Nebraska County and regional maps and atlases. Most of these are not catalogued. They, again, are donations, some library purchases, and the only way to use those was to look at them in the library. And people can still look at them in the library. And here's just a few of the many maps. Maps are also a little tricky, because they tend to be large and harder to scan. OK, I am handing this over to Mary because she was involved in OPL's first digitization project. Yes, OK. So in about 1995, as I can remember, or as the documents we've been able to find have indicated, it was decided that the Trans-Mississippi collection should be given better access rather than have people actually handling these rare and delicate materials, was decided that they should be scanned and some sort of metadata should be created so that they could be accessed online. We were trying to, at this time, there were a few projects of this kind going on. Standards were not really very well established. But because the centennial celebration of the exposition was coming up and there were a variety of committees in the community that wanted to celebrate it, we decided that we should be part of that as well. So at this time, there weren't, there's not much in the way of guidelines, but we were very careful and planned carefully to use the highest standards of scanning material, scanning standards that were available at the time. And those have served us well across all of the other collections we've done. So a staff committee was formed. We generally had no idea what we were doing. But we learned a lot. We hired a consultant who evaluated the physical condition of the actual collection to make sure that scanning was not going to be disruptive or destructive. We got a grant from the murals project, which at that time was in Nebraska. I'm not sure if those are still available or not. We solicited bids for scanning. And a group of high school girls from Marion High School became our web team. They solicited the lowest bid and they performed beautifully. They had great equipment, too. Yeah, and they had great equipment. Faculty advisor was related to one of the people on our staff at the time. So we had a good result, even though it might have seemed strange at the time. So this is the website that they created, a picture of the website that they created, and which sadly is not available at this time. But we'll get into that later. Anyway, there is no metadata on the website, except very minimal descriptions. Well, no description, but just very minimal information. Next slide. There we go. So at that time, this was 1995, there were not digital management programs that we knew about. And so it was decided that we would catalog, we would create individual records for the images in our OPEC, which at the time was a dynec system. Dynec systems at that time were very flat. There was no graphical information, no pictures, no photos. There was simply a record with an 856 field with the link to the URL, which took you out to the web to bring up the image. There was discussion about cataloging these images in OCLC. At that time, there was a minute charge for use of OCLC. There was a cost to export individual records and a charge for being on OCLC while creating records. So it was decided that that was going to be prohibitively inexpensive. And just one record was created in OCLC for the whole collection. Yes, thank you. And people seem to be finding that. There is a lot of use of the Trans-Mississippi collection. And Martha says that a lot of it comes from that record on OCLC's site. So time passed, and things kept going on. Discussions went on regarding the digitization of other collections, and scanning went on, and local internal databases were created from resources, staff resources. People did research and made very good, detailed descriptions of the content of images. And then we came to about 2002 when we joined the Western Trails Project. Now, I must tell you that. I was the one who cataloged the initial images in our collection for Western Trails. And so the project people came to me and said, Mary, guess what? We're going to do this news thing. So the Western Trails Project was originally part of the Colorado Digitization Project. And these other states, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, joined that project in the 2000s. And we went along as well. I think there are other Nebraska organizations that are part of it as well, including the Library Commission. So there were standards for scanning and for metadata that were established by this project. And you can get to the site through this URL here at the bottom of the page. It's now managed at the Nebraska information. It's managed by the Library Commission. It's not easy to find the entire Western Trails Project on the web. We're not sure what happened to that. Yes, we're not sure. But here's a look at the Western Trails site on. Oh, it's hosted at UNL. Thank you, Martha. I haven't kept up with all this. Anyway, these are some of our images that are on the Western Trails site. And for the most part, they come from our early Omaha collection. So the metadata was modified Dublin Core. We were asked to use Library of Congress subject headings for proper names and corporate names. And the Library of Congress, the source for graphic materials for topical headings. There was a web interface of form on the web that we were to use to input this information. Later it was transferred to Content DM. But when we were trying to harvest our data for this project, it was not easy to find. And we found that we had not kept copies of it here. So we had to go round about to harvest that data for our own Content DM project. We'll talk about that later. Oh, and then we had our own internal access database, which I spoke about a little earlier. And that was where we got a lot of the basic metadata, the descriptions, and a really lovely subject heading scheme that was developed by Peggy Maher as one of our former employees that we had to modify. But it was still very helpful. It was still very helpful. It was creative. Nothing to do with any other system. No, it was unique. It still is, in fact. I think it's still being used for some applications here. So then early Omaha, this was a project. The digitization portion of this was given impetus by the 150th anniversary of Omaha's founding, which is in 2005. Part of Western Trails, the scanning standards were still those of Western Trails. And the Trans-Mississippi standards meet those as well. The website, oh, yes. And our website was created by an OPL staff member named Julie Casper, who'd just taken a class in web design. So these pieces have come together in a lot of different ways. I'm sure you find that happens at your libraries, too. And again, we used the access database to record and to gather minimal metadata information. But there was a lot of description that had been built by our history experts. And this is an example of the website which, sadly, is not available. Well, Martha says it's not that sad that it's not available. Because, as you can see, it's pretty sketchy. In today's world, it's pretty sketchy. But the descriptions are quite wonderful. And then we embarked, yes. And then the library embarked on the Nebraska Memories Project. And again, this is a cooperative project from many Nebraska organizations, not just libraries, but a lot of historical societies and nonprofits. It's really wonderful. Anyway, again, these were high standards for scanning. And the metadata used the same standards, modified Dublin Core with LC, SH, and the TGM headings. And there is the URL, which does work because it's on the commission's website. We're still contributing to this. And Nebraska Memories is still going strong. We're always adding to it still. Yes, I think you're getting more and more contributors. And then the existing contributors are contributing more and more materials. So and I was not working, but I was hired to do the subject headings and enhancements for some of the descriptions. But most of it had been done beautifully by other staff. And this is representation of the Nebraska Memories site on the commission's website. Some of our images are there. Oh, yay, it's Martha Stern. OK, moving on to our World StereoView. So we already had these projects. We, I wasn't here yet, but we already had these projects sort of going. And we were getting the idea, this is great to provide more access so that the wider public can see what we have, can use it for research. So for the World StereoViews, there were 1,259 images and didn't really have a budget or any sort of special way to do anything with those. But what they decided to do was put them on Flickr, which by the way, the Library of Congress does that with their images too. It's quick. It's easy. Anybody can upload their images. We had been scanning all of these in-house using the same scanning standards as for the other projects. Metadata is always the sticking point, the thing that takes up the most time and labor in any digital project. So in Flickr, you don't need much metadata. All they require are captions and tags. So that's what we decided to do. And they are still up there on Flickr. I hope eventually to get them incorporated into the rest of our digital interface with richer metadata. But for now, people can at least access them. And in fact, they get quite a wide public there because a lot of people visit Flickr who aren't necessarily interested in libraries, per se. Then our other project, Early Nebraska. That was Maps and Atlases of Nebraska. Those, as I mentioned before, maps can be difficult. They're large, you need special equipment frequently, certainly more than our small scanner. So those we had to contract out with grant money. I discovered these, except for the maps that were the Omaha maps and atlases that were included in Nebraska Memories. We had no metadata for these at all. So I have been doing those from scratch, actually, to get them onto our new website. And yet, all this time, our map gallery has been one of our most heavily used collections. Do I have it up there? Yes. As you can see, it's just sort of a bunch of maps in chronological order. And if you double click on it, which you can't anymore because this page is also gone. But if you double click on the image, it comes up. It's a nice, big, clear image. So people were using that a lot, even without metadata. So it does look a little utilitarian. That was part of our same early Omaha web page. So you've seen all our various projects. We have all these projects. They're all with different parameters, different projects, and not really standards, but certainly as far as the metadata, it's all over the place. The scanning is all in the same great, high standard, which is still good today, even though they started it 15, 20 years, close to 20 years ago. They fortunately scanned it to really a good, high standard so we haven't had to re-scan. Metadata, however, is all over the place. So we have our mark records. We have our Dublin core. We have Flickr metadata. We have Peggy Maher's postcard cataloging scheme. And we have nothing. So it made things a little difficult. One of the big problems was searching. Most of those collections couldn't actually be searched. Early Omaha and early Nebraska couldn't be searched on our website. The transmits couldn't be searched, except for those 600 or so images that were in our O-PAC. People didn't know that we had these things online. Staff didn't know that we had them. And if they did know that we had them, they had no idea how to tell people where to find them. People often would want to purchase an image. We license a high resolution TIF of these images for people who want them for publication or whatever. So they'd call up, and they wouldn't really be able to identify the image very well. They would describe it. They wouldn't be able to see the image number or anything like that. So it made our lives very difficult and made access very difficult. In the West, even the items that were on the Western Trail site, which does have pretty good metadata, when they uploaded it to the UNL site, they changed all the local accession numbers. So there is no way to see what the original image file number is. So there again, it can be very difficult to identify things. So in short, we were having some trouble. There we go. So what to do? It's not like we are the first people to see that there is a problem. These problems had been discussed multiple times by different staff groups at OPL. In earlier times, as Mary mentioned, the focus was more on cataloging these things, because that was the way things used to be done. There weren't really digital programs in the way there are now. So they were thinking of cataloging everything in Horizon, which was our ILS at the time. We have those 600 images from the Trans-Mississippi as a result. But as digitization became a more common thing, that gradually became the goal. So what did we need to do? We needed to find, clean up, enhance, and reinvent our data. We had some 8,241. Give or take a few. Images online. And as I mentioned, it was quite the mess. So there were a few things that brought all of this to a head. First of all, the site was looking more and more out of date. You noticed our examples of the previous web pages and that picture of the web team for the Trans-Mississippi. It just is not keeping up with the modern look. It was getting more and more frustrating. More and more people were coming looking for the Reinhardt photographs, for example. And so getting more image requests and it was difficult to fill them. So it was becoming more and more of a hassle. And then everywhere we look, everybody's doing a digital collection. Libraries, archives, museums, Nebraska memories was there as a constant inspiration. So it began to seem more of a, this is what we've got to do. And then a final spur was they started talking about a new Omaha Public Library website, which they have now done a little bit sooner than scheduled. And that has created its own problems because all our old websites suddenly disappeared even though we were told that would not happen. So progress moves on. That just was within the last month or so, right? Yes, in fact, Gary and I were looking over and checking our links like two weeks ago, and everything worked. And then one week ago, all of a sudden, the links don't work. It was that soon, yeah. So you can touch it on the way back machine. Anyway, that's definitely an impetus to be moving things over a little faster than what we've been doing. So let's look at our challenges, which were many. First of all, almost everyone who was involved in those first projects, except for Mary, are gone, distracted. Some of them retired. Some of them have died. Patrick Essar, one of our leading lights in the Trans-Mississippi, he is so knowledgeable and so helpful. And he passed away while we were in the process of doing this transition. Other people have moved to other positions. Nobody remembers what they were doing 20 years ago. The paper trail was kind of spotty. I mean, there was no real organized archive of everything that people had done. Backups did not always exist. We mentioned that problem of uploading directly via zebra rather than keeping some kind of record in the home base. And then there were all these different projects. Each one had different parameters. Different people were involved in them. So there was a lot of fragmentation. And then our project manager for this project, which would be me, had really no experience. I mean, I didn't take one digital library class when I was getting my MLS. But I definitely was not paying enough attention if I had realized how crucial it was going to be. So I've been sort of teaching myself. And then nobody was really assigned to this. We were just doing this kind of in our spare time. And then so it wasn't our main job. And yet everyone seemed to be expecting we would be able to do it. May I mention that new website pressure again? So, but we weren't totally up the creek. I mean, we had some great advantages. Images, as I mentioned, were up to current standards. We have not. There is very little that we've had to actually re-scan. We had our original cataloger on our team, Mary Markio, which has been invaluable. Although she is sorry that she threw away all her notes. Never throw anything away. We got a lot of assistance from employees, you know, the ones who had moved on to other positions. They did their best for us. Everybody was trying to help. And we also had employees who had unique skills. Patrick Esser, for example, with his great knowledge of the Trans-Mississippi and Deirdre Root, who was at the time when we started, she was manager of cataloging. And she had a lot of experience in cataloging historical things. We had great support from Deborah Dragos and Alana Navotny of the Nebraska Library Commission. They're in charge of Nebraska Memories. And they are still a lifeline for us. They are always so helpful and willing to answer every stupid question that we have. And then another plus was the fact that although there wasn't a great paper trail, the fact that nobody ever seems to throw anything away around here, except Mary, of course. There was a lot to be found. We just had to kind of go ransacking computers and old boxes of things and so on. There was a certain amount of paper and old computer files and things that gave us quite a few clues and assistance to sort of retrace what had been done. And then we were very lucky that our administration was very supportive. They didn't really give us a lot of special time to do this or anything like that. But they were favorably inclined to the project. They thought it was a good idea. Gary Wasden, who was our director at the time, thought it was a great idea. And he agreed to move us up to the paid level of content DM. So they were willing to put money into this. Just not really staff, but it's very helpful when your administration thinks that this is a good project. So we got started. Things sort of came to a head. All the things I mentioned, sort of the inadequacies of our website and so on, it all came to a head at the end of 2011 when UNL contacted us. They wanted to use our digital images for their new Trans-Mississippian International Exposition portal site. Their idea is to have a sort of portal for everybody's images. So our images, and then they're hoping to mostly, right now, all they have is our images. But they're hoping to get sort of loans of other images from other institutions. So it will be a one-stop spot for researchers interested in the Trans-Mississippian. So they were sort of inspired by Timothy Shaffert, an English professor. He wrote a book called Swan Gondola, which you may have read or heard of, which takes place in its fiction. It takes place in the Trans-Mississippian International Exposition. Timothy and Gary Wasden were friends. So that also sort of oiled the wheels and made getting the Trans-Mississippian into a more user-friendly format online, just sort of a more pressing kind of priority. So that was back in 2012. We sort of formally came to an agreement that we would have a new digital site. And we started with Content DM in March 2013. So you can see things move kind of slowly. We started with the free version of Content DM that you get if you have an OCLC subscription. We did discuss, you might wonder why we're using Content DM and not something else. We did briefly discuss using Omega, which some libraries and other institutions use. It's open source, it's free. Or Content Pro, which was an add-on for our ILS, like you could get that paying extra for it. It would supposedly work well with our innovative ILS. In the end, we decided Omega open source requires quite a bit of upkeep and technological expertise. We do have an IT department, but they have other things to do. So we went with Content DM, and we have not regretted it. The plus is it's hosted. It's user-friendly. The collections reside on the Content DM server, so that's sort of extra backup. And we now pay for the basic level one subscription, which lets us digitize up to 10,000 items. We are nowhere near there yet. It has excellent support. Every problem I've had, somebody helped me resolve it. They have a good user forum. As I said, you can get started free and sort of try it out. If you have an OCLC subscription, you can use it straight out of the box. You can customize things a bit, but you don't really have to do a lot of. It's good for the beginner. Let's put it that way. And we haven't done this yet, but the records can be synced to WorldCat, which really aids in discovery. A lot more people will be able to find your collection. So the minus is it looks like every other digital collection website, because so many other libraries are using Content DM. I can recognize them all. As I said, you can customize them somewhat, but it always kind of looks like Content DM. And the other thing is it gets more expensive as your collection grows. There's different levels of subscription. So far, we're not worrying about that one too much, because our problem is getting the stuff up there to begin with. So we devised a plan of action. We put together a working group, which was basically self-selected. Patrick Esser, the librarian I mentioned, who is very keen on the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition. Mary Marcio, Lindsay Bray, who is our webmaster. Deirdre Root, who was at the time head of cataloging at OPL, and she's now a branch manager and me. And basically, we were self-selected based on our special superpowers. It was just all people who really thought we should have a better digital library. Sounds very familiar. Anybody who wants to join in and help? So we just did a lot of reading, many webinars later. We know a little bit more than we did. In 2013, Deirdre did a really useful thing and created our guidelines for Content DM entry. And she pretty much based it on the Nebraska memories metadata guidelines, which in turn, well, I think she also used the Huntington Digital Library guidelines. Those URLs do still work. I mean, Content DM uses Dublin Core. So the Nebraska memories guidelines are based on the CDP Dublin Core metadata best practices. May I just say it is crucial to have that kind of stuff written down, because we have gone back to it again and again, especially if you're doing things at long intervals and have to retrain yourself every time you come back to the project. It is very good to have something written down so you know what you're doing. Here's just one of our working papers where we were mapping the different terms to the Dublin Core fields. Still me. So it was kind of overwhelming, but the first thing you want to do and that we did was we created a timeline. Now, the timeline in the long run is, I mean, it's delusional. We have not kept to our timeline in any way. However, it did help in that it sort of helped us see what was going to be involved. What were the tasks that we needed to do and who was probably going to do them? So this is a very sketchy version of one of our first timelines. We began trying to track down any data that we already had on OPL's digital images. We didn't want to reinvent the wheel. I kept thinking there may be some perfect Dublin Core metadata hanging around this building somewhere, and so I don't want to have to do it all over from scratch. I created a trial collection, which is the Millard Town Memories, just to sort of feel how the program worked and get the hang of it. Ultimately, though, we decided to start with the Trans-Mississippi collection. Since, as I mentioned, that project, the UNL project, was kind of an impetus for us to start there. Gary Wasden and also Timothy Shaffard were quite eager for us to work on that collection. I'm going to pass over to Mary some more discussion about that, because that was a big part of her. It still is a big part of her job here. Yes, don't just walk into a library and say, oh, maybe I could volunteer, because things then happen to you that, well, I don't regret it. But anyway, so we did start with the Trans-Mississippi. Excuse me, I need to clear my throat. There we go. We had the metadata in mark format. We also had an Excel spreadsheet with some cataloging data and descriptive data of many of the images. Patrick, dearly missed, created a crosswalk so that the mark records could be moved into an Excel spreadsheet. And then I was able to use that, enhance that, in order to make the records workable in Dublin Corp. And that was a big help. Those first 600 records were part of that crosswalk process. There was also minimal information in some other records that were in the Excel spreadsheet. And those are the ones I've been using as the basis for the content DM records. I've been enhancing them with subject headings from the LCSH and the TGM, and adapting things to Dublin Corp standards, enriching descriptions. And then Martha comes along and she fixes my spelling mistakes, luckily. We found that, well, I found that it was useful for me to create an authority file, just a spreadsheet, listing in separate columns the subjects from the Library of Congress subject headings and the topical headings from, yeah, and the topical headings from the TGM. And that also comes in, that's very useful later when the records are being uploaded into content DM. And I think Martha's going to talk more about that. But this is very helpful. And as a cataloger of long term, I just have to have something like this. Satisfy something in my soul. And you can, as you go along, creating records in content DM, you do create an authority file within your collection. But Martha finds that she refers back to this also. So OK. So we got started with the Trans-Mississippi, and Martha's going to talk some more. But I just wanted to make one point here. Each of these projects we seem to have dealt with as though it was discreet. So we have all these discreet projects that we're now trying to bring together in an umbrella kind of management program of content DM. So if you're doing this, if you're starting this off and you're doing this, try and think of long term, which we were not able to see long term when we started this in 95. We thought, oh, we're going to do this, and then we're going to be done. But it didn't work, did it? I just want to say that that local authority file is fantastic and has made life so much easier, because Mary started that for the Trans-Mississippi collection. But we have just kept adding to it for all the other collections. And it is a lot easier to verify the subject headings and names and so on before we upload them to content DM. The other thing is even though originally partway through the process, I thought, well, if we hadn't been pushed into doing Trans-Mississippi first, it might have been easier to start with the items that we already had in Nebraska Memories, because we already had metadata. But it has turned out that starting with a less organized project has taught us more, made us think things through a little bit more, because we had to create our master plan, we had to create this local authority file, which we might not have done if we already just had the metadata. Let's move on from that. So when we turned our attention to the early Omaha Western Trails project, this one was kind of difficult. In fact, I was pulling my hair out for a while, because as mentioned, the metadata had been directly uploaded to the Western Trails database. And OPL didn't have any real record of it. Like, no, we had that access database, but it didn't have proper subject. I mean, it had Peggy Maher's type headings. And it didn't have a lot of the other information you really need in metadata. However, I discovered after trying to contact UNL and other people to find out if anybody had a spreadsheet or some other form of the original metadata for Western Trails. Nobody remembered. Everybody referred me to somebody else who they thought worked on the project, but didn't anymore and had moved to Bermuda or someplace. So it was kind of frustrating. However, it turned out that most of the Western Trails images were duplicated in Nebraska Memories. And I'm not totally sure how that happened. That's up to Nebraska Memories. But Alana Novotny really nicely, generously went through the holdings of both to get a list of the OPL items that weren't in Nebraska Memories. And there were quite very few of them. And Mary Marchio cataloged those. So we have just solved the Western Trails problem, because we've got the metadata from Nebraska Memories. This is another reason why cooperative projects are good, because sometimes you find your metadata is duplicated elsewhere. So as I said, they had all the metadata. And not only did they have it, but they gave it back to us in an Excel spreadsheet. And so that has been fairly simple. We have a few different fields. I mean, Nebraska Memories is a large cooperative project. They have some fields that we don't need. And then we have a couple of fields that we just want to do a little differently. They have the dimensions of the item. In the description, we have a different field for it. But otherwise, it's a pretty easy process. And then early Nebraska, as I believe I mentioned, most of the maps in this project were not cataloged at all. We just had titles and the year of publication. Only the Omaha maps were in Nebraska Memories. Everything else was just on our website. And the images were good, but no metadata. So those I actually have been cataloging from scratch using Excel. It's not as hard as it might be, because maps don't usually need a huge number of subject headings. And most of it is description. And I do have the original maps, which I go and look at for further information about them. So our process now. So first of all, writing down the process was one of the smartest things I have done in this project. I haven't done a lot of smart things. But this was a good one, because you'd be surprised how easily you can forget what you were doing last week. So you want some uniformity. You want guidelines. So those metadata guidelines that Deirdre created have also been invaluable, because I can always go back to that and see what each field is supposed to contain. In addition to remembering how to do the stuff ourselves over time, we want to be able to train other staff and volunteers in the future. And for that, we really need to have things written down. The other thing we do is we use an Excel template with the fields that match the fields in the content DM template for a particular collection. And that is how we catalog everything, including things that we don't currently plan to upload or even digitize. But this way, when we do want to upload it, it's basically ready. So we do everything using Dublin Core. We use the thesaurus of graphic materials in the Library of Congress subject headings, just as we've done for all the other projects. We have stopped putting things in access, partly because neither of us really knows how to use access. And we don't want to get into a situation of cataloging in two different places. The other nice thing about the Excel, can you tell I love Excel? I mean, I proofread everything in Excel. I checked that the names and subjects appear in our local authority file created by Mary. I also proofread the descriptions there, and then we batch upload everything to content DM. And the big advantage of doing things in Excel, you can correct things in content DM, but it's a lot more trouble. It's much easier to make sure everything is correct in Excel before uploading. And then I also have that Excel spreadsheet as a backup to our metadata, should anything go wrong with our collection. So that means we have our Excel, our metadata in Excel spreadsheets. We also have it on the content DM server, and we have content DM setup, so it also saves a file locally on one of our own servers, the one of the library servers. So backup, very important. So here is a glimpse of our new site, which is live. It doesn't have everything on it that the old site had, not by a long shot. We're still adding collections. The Trans-Mississippi one is the largest at this point. There's some maps in there and a few other things, but there is a huge amount of work to be done. And since you cannot any longer access our old primitive looking sites, the best way to find some of that early Omaha stuff is through Nebraska Memories. And there is a link, you can't see it on here, but there's a link on our website that goes to Nebraska Memories. And one to Western Trails. So, let's get to the lessons learned part. I just want to interrupt for a second. Yeah. Yeah, I just want to note it is a little after 11 o'clock, which is our official end time for Encompass Live, but that's not a problem. We will be running this as long as necessary for Mary and Martha to get through their session. And if you guys do have any questions, type them into your go-to webinar interface in the questions section so that we can get them answered. If you do need to leave, that's fine. We are recording the show and you can watch anything you missed later. And the good news is this is our last slide. So, all right, we should be done in about five minutes. So, what did we learn from all this? And we are still learning. First of all, decide on collection content very carefully. In content DM, you can't switch items between collections or pull a smaller collection out of a larger one. So, you want to figure out your collections from the outset. For example, we decided after we'd gotten started that we really wanted to have the Indian Congress, which was sort of conjunctive to the Transmissippian International Exposition. We wanted to have that as a separate collections and so many people search it as a separate collection. And we discovered that that was a little, that was pretty awkward to divide it out after we'd already put it up as part of the other collection. So, by the same token, you want to decide your fields very carefully. More is better because you can leave fields empty but you can't add them in afterwards without re-uploading everything. For example, I'm now wondering if maybe I should have included a separate field for the scale and map collection. Might have been a good idea, but I believe at this point I will let that go. And then another thing that user forums and content DM support have been great. Always ask questions. Don't be afraid of looking dumb. People have been very helpful with content DM. And Mary will talk about some of her lessons learned. Oh, what? Like not throwing away my documentation? Yes. Well, I also took a former colleague out to lunch to pick her brain. So, you know, she sadly didn't remember very much either. But we had a nice time. We were, yes, grill everyone. Everyone you can think of and everyone that they refer you to because, especially when your projects are as old as our Trans-Mississippi projects where people are, as we said, gone for various reasons. We did find a box labeled Transmiss in the back of a back store that we sorted out. And we did find a lot of information there. But, you know, some of it we just had to devise on our own. And people we should acknowledge are Joanne Ferguson-Cavanaugh, who did a lot of the historical research on many of these images. Lindsay, our website manager. Patrick, of course, Deirdre. Lynn Sullivan, Peggy Marr, sadly gone. And we cannot begin to thank Debra and Alana at the commission. And also Janet Davenport and Julie Casper, who was one of the first to develop part of our websites. So yes, you also need to, once you find your documentation or don't, document as you go. Talk about what you did and how you did it and why you did it and why is good because, you know, you ask yourself, why the heck did I do that? But no detail is too small. No comma should be left uncomment. Anyway. Yeah, right. So are we done? I think we're done. So if there are questions, we would entertain them. Oh, and here is how you can get in touch with us. But get in touch with Marlon. You're supposed to be retired, Mary. It's really hard, I know. Well, they say. But it sounds like this was a project that you really loved anyways, coming back for it. The labor of love was really not that good. Keeping one's mind going is really important, so at any age. All right, well, thank you very much, Mary and Martha. As I said, I attended this session at conference and thought it was just very interesting, seeing how you had had so many different collections all over the place. And I'm sure, and it sounded like this was going to be something very familiar to lots of people, who in the past, as you said, you didn't think about the fact that there could be a single place to do this, because those kind of things like Content DM and Omicode, they just didn't exist at the time. So I'm sure people were just doing the best they could, as you were, with getting the stuff out there, getting it available to people in whatever way necessary. And now that we have the places, yeah, having to make it a special project to get them on one easily searchable key and digitized location for preservation is very important, yes. That's a good summary. There you go. Anybody have any questions? Nobody typed in anything while you were talking, so I would just have to assume that you were very, very clear and detailed about everything. But if anybody has any last minute questions you want to ask before I wrap it up for today, type into your question section, and we can pass it on. Otherwise, obviously Martha and Mary are available later on if you do start having to get into the same thing at your library. I hope it just looks like we're getting some thank yous, good info, just what I needed type comments coming through at the moment. So I think since it is almost about 10 after, about when we started up, a little after 10, I think we could wrap it up this morning. OK, thank you. Yeah, thank you very much, Martha and Mary. Thank you. Anyone have any further questions for them? Definitely reach out to them here. I'm going to pull back presenter control to my screen now and show you. I've got up here. This is the new, the Content DM site that everything is in or going to be in, is that they had mentioned I've got it here. Any of the links that are mentioned in the presentation I will be collecting, so I'll be available to you guys afterwards as part of the recording. I believe, Martha, you're going to email me or send me your PowerPoint presentation. Yes, I will. And then that will be available as well for anyone who wants that as a reference. And they mentioned here at the bottom, the links there's linked to Nebraska Memories that they were talking about for other stuff, items that are still not into this, Content DM. So basically, we're talking this is still a work in progress, not completely done with everything down here, not even close to completely. OK, and it will always be ongoing. But it's great now that there's one place where everything can be. Yeah, all right, so that does wrap it up for today's show. This is our Encompass Live website, where the recording will be available here. These are upcoming shows. And right underneath here is where our archives are. So once this gets processed and everything, most likely by this afternoon, it'll be listed here. You'll have a link to the recording on YouTube. The presentation will put up on our Slideshare account. And any of the links and websites that are mentioned will be collected as well for you. So look for that message. I'll send that out to everyone who attended and who registered for today's show. You'll get an email letting you know that it is available. I hope you join us next week when our topic is Project Outcome, Measuring the True Impact of Public Libraries. Project Outcome is a new initiative by the Public Library Association. It's a free online toolkit that you can use to evaluate what's going on in your public library. And Samantha Lopez, who is actually from the Public Library, from PLA, will be with us online from Chicago. And Beth Anderson, who's at Library in West Virginia, Burnsville Public Library, will be with us. They've actually used Project Outcome with their library. They're probably a small library, so they will tell you about how they have used it. So definitely sign in, register for that. And any of our other upcoming shows here that are on our schedule, I've got Mark Traul booked up, and I'm working on April 8th too, so keep an eye on the schedule. And Compass Live is also on Facebook. We've got links all over our page to that. So if you are a big Facebook user, please do go over to Facebook and give us a like. You'll get notifications of when things are coming up. Like here this morning, I posted a reminder to log in on the fly to today's show. When our recordings are available, I post them on here. When your show is ready to this, to the schedule, I post them on here. So if you are big on Facebook, please do head over there and give us a like. Other than that, that wraps it up for this morning's Compass Live. Thank you very much, Mary and Martha. And thank you everyone for attending, and we will see you next time on Compass Live. There we go. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye.