3 ms·

Kudos for having their hearts in the right place. No kudos for presentation. I've tried to look at two works, typewritten MSS by Vachel Lindsay and Sara Teasda

by fernly 11y ago

Kudos for having their hearts in the right place. No kudos for presentation. I've tried to look at two works, typewritten MSS by Vachel Lindsay and Sara Teasdale, and the text display is awkward. The initial presentation is too small to read. Looked long for a zoom control. Finally tried "full browser" link which does display the current page with a zoom control and the ability to drag that page around in a small frame to read it. While it is nice that UT is doing this, it is sad that each uni has to do its own thing. Can there be no one virtual repository where all such collections -- or at least their catalogs -- could be amalgamated? It's like the bad old days of physical libraries: the scholar has first to find out which collection has the thing she needs, and may never learn that it exists. If they don't want to deal with google books, how about using TIA as a front end? Edit: ...and then I looked at the URL, hrc.contentdm.oclc.org and thought, huh, that doesn't look like UT or EDU... turns out oclc.org is something like I was just asking for, a front end content distribution platform for multiple libraries. OK then. TIL and all that.

userbinator 11y ago
It always irritates me when these sorts of sites decide to implement their own often quirky document-viewing web app and hide everything behind it instead of just providing a direct link to a PDF or similar. I mean, if you're going to have this material freely available anyway why not make it easy to access? IMHO archive.org is a good example to follow; I know their recent redesign is somewhat controversial, but they have not changed the fact that it is easy to get to the content directly, and their URLs are also mostly descriptive.
mmcfly85 11y ago
I've been working in this space for the last 6 years. One of the challenges of these efforts is the funding model -- a lot of the work is funded through grants. If a grant funds a project for 5-10 years, maybe 80-90% goes towards conservation and digitization of the material, leaving a relatively small amount of funding for sharing the material online. As a result the websites (and related tech) tends to be fragmented even within the same organization. Usually the folks building the website are brought in as short-term contractors who tend to use the tech of the day. In the last couple years there has been a renewed interest among culture heritage organizations to create and formalize technology standards. International Image Interoperability Framework (http://iiif.io/ http://iiif.io/) is one of those efforts and has resulted in a couple of good open projects. Of course there are many more budding standards and open/closed SaaS and COTS products, but the industry is improving. As more folks use these systems, they become more appealing to the folks offering grant money, more grants/visibility results in better offerings and more unification/exchange between organizations. It's always exciting to see these cultural heritage project pop up on HN.

by fernly 11y ago

userbinator 11y ago

It always irritates me when these sorts of sites decide to implement their own often quirky document-viewing web app and hide everything behind it instead of just providing a direct link to a PDF or similar. I mean, if you're going to have this material freely available anyway why not make it easy to access? IMHO archive.org is a good example to follow; I know their recent redesign is somewhat controversial, but they have not changed the fact that it is easy to get to the content directly, and their URLs are also mostly descriptive.

mmcfly85 11y ago

I've been working in this space for the last 6 years. One of the challenges of these efforts is the funding model -- a lot of the work is funded through grants. If a grant funds a project for 5-10 years, maybe 80-90% goes towards conservation and digitization of the material, leaving a relatively small amount of funding for sharing the material online. As a result the websites (and related tech) tends to be fragmented even within the same organization. Usually the folks building the website are brought in as short-term contractors who tend to use the tech of the day. In the last couple years there has been a renewed interest among culture heritage organizations to create and formalize technology standards. International Image Interoperability Framework (http://iiif.io/ http://iiif.io/) is one of those efforts and has resulted in a couple of good open projects. Of course there are many more budding standards and open/closed SaaS and COTS products, but the industry is improving. As more folks use these systems, they become more appealing to the folks offering grant money, more grants/visibility results in better offerings and more unification/exchange between organizations. It's always exciting to see these cultural heritage project pop up on HN.