Who's your father? IslandLives: Creating a community digital history project

Donald Moses from UPEI spoke about their project to digitize Prince Edward Island local histories and create a website where people can browse by surname, the name of the place, a subject or an organization. This is similar to what we are doing in our digitization lab. Just as we've concentrated on the Coady and StFX Extension Department material for the last year because of a grant, UPEI obtained a grant to do local histories and have scanned more than 170. It was very interesting to see how they set up their digitization compared to us.

The UPEI project differs from how we do digitization in several ways. We use ContentDM (from Memorial) to store our documents and provide searching and access. UPEI uses open source software called Fedora (to store the documents); Drupal (to create webpages to access the documents and djatoka (to edit their images). They have developed their own software called Islandora to help Fedora and Druple work together.

UPEI is doing optical character recognition (OCR) on every document and text based files TEI(text encoding initiative) files which means that they can mark every personal or place names in thebooks and use this information to create an index of names. We let ContentDM do most of the OCR on our documents and only do OCR here if we think there will be problems, such as when the text is very faint or there are many pictures.

Brad developed a program for us to track our processes so we know which items need to be scanned, which are ready for OCR and which are ready to be uploaded and to track the quality control of the documents. UPEI developed a spreadsheet in Google Docs to do this tracking.

We both plan to use Google Maps to visually show communities mentioned in the books or documents.

All in all, we took very different routes for our digitization units but we have very similar challenges and goals. I think UPEI will be launching their Island Lives project this fall. You can see a copy of Donald's presentation here http://www.apla2009.ca/images/presentations/moses.pdf