From the Director: Bancroft Goes Digital
It started slowly. About ten years ago the Bancroft staff realized that we could make a real contribution to scholarship if we could convert our existing card file of books and manuscripts into machine- readable form and make it available online. The main library had begun just such a retrospective conversion project for its collections in the late '70s; but Bancroft was the first rare book and special collections library in the country to put its card file on line, a project that was completed in 1992. Almost overnight usage of Bancroft's collections doubled as scholars and students not only at Berkeley but around the country were able to gain access to the bibliographical records of Bancroft's treasures via the internet.
Charles Faulhaber and Tim Hoyer discuss digitizing a photograph of Joan Baez for the Free Speech Movement project. Photo by Peg Skorpinski. |
Emboldened by that success, Bancroft, in collaboration with the Electronic Text Unit of the main library, embarked on the next step, the conversion of the typed inventories and finding aids of the manuscript collections to a digital format that would also make them available world wide. As in the case of the retrospective conversion of the card file, one of the crucial constraints was the necessity of making use of existing materials rather than starting from scratch—especially in view of the fact that a preliminary study estimated that a complete re-inventory of the manuscript collections would take about 400 years to carry out.
We therefore decided to convert them using the Standardized General Markup Language (SGML) as the basis for the National Endowment for the Humanities funded Berkeley Finding Aids Project. The choice has been validated by the fact that the pilot project carried out at Berkeley has been adopted as a national standard, now known as the Encoded Archival Description (EAD), by the Library of Congress. It is being used increasingly in other countries and it has made possible the union catalog of archival collections in major California institutions known as the Online Archive of California (http:// www.oac.cdlib.org).
One step led to another. Because of the ease with which they deal with images, the World Wide Web and EAD made it possible for us to think about gaining control of our massive pictorial collections (some three million photographs, engravings, oil paintings, watercolors, lithographs, drawings, and posters), first by cataloguing them at the individual collection level, a project carried out with the aid of a grant from the National Historical Publications & Records Commission, then by digitizing significant portions of the collections, again with the aid of external grants. These collections, like the Robert B. Honeyman Collection of Western Art, are now available via the Online Archive of California to scholars and students all over the world.
Our goal, however, is not simply to put as many images on the web as we can. Scanning a photograph and making a web site is easy. The art—and the difficulty— lies in organizing the materials so that researchers can find what they are looking for and only what they are looking for. It is disheartening, to say the least, to search for "San Francisco Earthquake," find 5,273 web sites, and then have to examine each one in turn in order to locate useful information on those sites.
All of Bancroft's projects in these first stages of the Digital Revolution have been designed to help us and collaborating institutions solve specific technical problems or propose international standards that can serve as a framework for individual efforts. Thus in the Digital Scriptorium project we are currently working with other institutions here and abroad to develop standards for describing medieval manuscripts. This in turn will make it possible to create a visual union catalog so that scholars will no longer have to travel to a dozen different libraries to examine manuscripts of potential interest ("You mean that I'll no longer be able to justify a research trip to Paris?" was one shocked question when I presented this project to the campus' Medieval Studies Committee. There's a down side to everything....).
Through all of this development work there has been one constant figure: Tim Hoyer, the current Head of Bancroft Technical Services. Tim came to Bancroft as a graduate student in English in 1972. His first assignment was typing the master copy for Bancroft catalog cards—undoubtedly a stimulus to finding a better way to provide access to the collections. Tim has been the chief strategist for Bancroft's digital library projects. In addition, Tim has also written most of the grant proposals that have persuaded external funding agencies like NEH to fund these projects. Thanks to Tim and his dedicated technical services staff, Bancroft has acquired a national and even international reputation as a leader in the difficult process of providing digital access to special collections. With that as background, I'm very sorry to report that Tim has decided to take early retirement, despite our best efforts to persuade him to remain at Bancroft. We shall miss his intensity, intelligence, and intellectual integrity.
Volume 116
Spring 2000
Table of Contents
The Silent Multitude of Voices in the Reading Room
From the Director: Bancroft Goes Digital
Highlights from Bancroft's Web Resources
Paramount Theatre Archives at The Bancroft Library
Three Monuments in the History of Science Arrive at Bancroft
Ancient Lives: The Tebtunis Papyri in Context
From Mine to Natural Reserve: ROHO records the transition
Chemistry Symposium in Honor of Kenneth S. Pitzer Held January 9 to 13, 2000: Oral History Presented
Welcome, Iris Donovan, Circulation Supervisor in Bancroft
