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Collection Building & Technology

Building a digital collection involves selection of materials, clearance of copyright issues, scanning, cataloging, data storage, and delivery of the images to the user. Through collaboration with other partners in the Western Trails Project, the UW Digital Initiative has created best practices guidelines for digital imaging, metadata, and interoperability.

Scanning was completed on an Epson Expression 1640 XL flatbed scanner using the Silverfast 5 scanner driver, and the master images captured to the Western Trails Imaging Best Practices Guidelines, appropriate to the type of material. The access and thumbnail copies have been generated using Photoshop 5.5, also according to the Trails Guidelines. The files are stored on a 480 GB Quantum Snap Server.

Technical metadata has been captured during the scanning process, containing information on the date the item was scanned, scanning resolution, file format, bit depth, and file number. Descriptive metadata contains information concerning the intellectual content of the materials, such as title, creator, subject, language and others that facilitate in the discovery and retrieval of information. Both the technical and descriptive metadata followed the Western States Dublin Core Metadata Best Practices Guidelines and entered into the Colorado Digitization Program’s Dublin Core Builder. Once in the Dublin Core Builder, the records can be exported for searching into the Western Trails catalog.