The following was written by Ethan Cline, who recently completed his Capstone project with ZSR’s Special Collections and Archives. Ethan is currently pursuing his Master’s in Library and Information Science (MLIS) at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His project here at ZSR covered the process of creating a digital collection–digitization, metadata creation, ingest to our online digital collections platform, and finally documenting his work via this blog post.

Introduction

Hello, I’m Ethan Cline, a graduate student in my final semester of the Master’s of Library and Information Studies program (MLIS) at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Since August 26, I have been completing my capstone practicum project at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library Special Collections and Archives department.

When I first learned that I was going to complete a practicum field experience for my MLIS degree, my mind immediately went to Wake Forest University. This was because most of my coursework in the MLIS program had revolved around archives and special collections, and as a Winston-Salem native that’s fascinated by our local history, I knew that the Z. Smith Reynolds Special Collections and Archives department held a large assortment of interesting and important local historical documents. Additionally, Wake Forest is widely regarded as a premier university, so I was confident that this opportunity would be a worthwhile experience. Now that my practicum is over, I can confidently say that my time here has been invaluable and has significantly furthered my knowledge of library systems.

Melde Rutledge, the Digital Collections Librarian at ZSR, was the supervisor for my practicum. He has been an excellent mentor in the field of archives and special collections. We first sat down together to develop a general project outline based on my interests. We then came up with a list of project goals, which included learning about the functions of archives and special collections from various members of the department, becoming familiar with the digitization process, and finally applying all of this knowledge to digitize part of a collection for ZSR.

Learning About the Archives and Special Collections

Prior to my practicum with ZSR, I had some experience digitizing materials for UNCG’s Archives and Special Collections department. I worked on the Loewenstein Collection for UNCG, which is a set of architectural drawings and correspondence documents related to the famed architect Edward Loewenstein. This was a useful experience that taught me how to scan and organize documents in accordance with professional archival standards.

I learned a great deal during my time with UNCG’s Archives and Special Collections department, but it was primarily related to the digitization side of archives. For my practicum with ZSR, it was important to learn about each of the different components of the archives and special collections department, discovering how they work with and are dependent upon one another.

The first of my one-on-one meetings was with Alayna Veasey, the Collections Specialist at ZSR. She showed me around the fascinating offsite collections storage building where I was immediately struck by the size of their bookcases, these immense towers that require the use of a forklift to reach the upper shelves. Alayna stressed the importance of having a well thought out system of organization when working with such a large and vast array of materials.

Next I met with Megan Mulder, the Special Collections Librarian. She demonstrated how displaying and presenting the materials held within the archives directly benefits the education of students at Wake Forest University. Then I met with Stephanie Bennett, the Collections Archivist, who taught me the importance of performing background research on the key individuals and important topics of an archival collection. I took this advice into account when working on the Samuel and Sarah Wait Papers; it helped me understand the context of the collection, which was useful for writing the metadata.

After my meeting with Stephanie, I met with Rebecca Petersen May, the Public Services Archivist. Rebecca talked about managing student workers, and she explained the immense benefit of promoting the archives and its events to the public. Finally, I met with Craig Fansler, the Preservation Librarian. He showed me the different techniques used to preserve physical items, including the assembly method used for putting together the archival quality boxes that hold fragile books and materials. I learned a great deal from all of these meetings, and I would like to thank every individual for taking the time to meet with me.

In addition to the one-on-one meetings, I also spent time attending the biweekly departmental meetings. From these meetings, I learned about the ongoing projects that the ZSR Archives and Special Collections department was undertaking, and how they planned out different events for the library. I also spoke at these meetings and provided regular updates on the progress I was making with my practicum project. My key takeaway from these meetings was the importance of prioritization. A library department is restricted by a limited amount of time and resources, but a surplus of user needs, so it is crucial to conduct meetings on a regular basis to ensure everyone is on the same page, working together to best meet the needs of their user base.

The Samuel and Sarah Wait Papers

My first hands-on learning experience at ZSR was courtesy of the NC Baptist Church and Association Files Collection. It was, in total, an eight-year project, so I was there at the very end to scan some of the remaining documents. This collection was very important to my practicum because it was my first introduction to Omniscan, which is the software ZSR uses to scan text based documents on the Zeutschel overhead scanner. During my time at ZSR, I became very familiar with Omniscan and the Zeutschel.

Once I finished with the NC Baptist Church and Association Files Collection, I began working on my primary project: The Sarah and Samuel Wait Papers. Samuel Wait was the founding president of Wake Forest University in 1834. In 1818, he married Sarah Merriam who then became Sarah Wait. I digitized boxes 1-4 of this collection, which spanned from 1815-1840. It mostly consisted of correspondence between the Waits and church officials, government officials, and assorted family members. Since these are old and very fragile items, I always used gloves when handling the materials. It was exciting to physically hold fragments of history, a set of original letters and documents that were over two hundred years old. I occasionally ran into materials that were difficult to scan because the writing inside of them crossed the margins and ran into the next page, but in those instances, I chose to scan both pages of the letter at once instead of scanning page by page. In total, I scanned approximately 2,000 documents.

Metadata

After scanning boxes 1-4 of the Samuel and Sarah Wait Papers, I combined the TIFF files from each folder into a single PDF. The original TIFF files are retained in a “master” folder, as TIFFs are the highest quality versions of those scanned images. The next step was to assign metadata to each digitized folder in the collection. Metadata provides contextual data to a resource, adding a greater level of detail to a resource improving, among other things, access and searchability.

ZSR uses the Dublin Core schema for assigning metadata to their digital collections. It is a set of standardized vocabulary terms used for describing digital artifacts. This vocabulary information consists of different elements including: identifier (file name), title (name of the resource), description, temporal coverage/date created, format, repository, copyright statement, type (nature of the resource, i.e. “text”), language, format (file type), source (URL of the finding aid), subject, extent (length of the resource, i.e. “5 pages”), creator, and spatial coverage (area described by the resource). The library’s finding aids were crucial for locating some of this metadata information. Once I had all of the pertinent information in place, I entered the metadata into a Google Sheets document.

Uploading Files to ZSR Digital Collections

After adding in the metadata, it was time to upload the files to ZSR’s Digital Collections website. All of this was done through Wake Forest University’s DSpace platform: WakeSpace. Uploading files to WakeSpace was the most challenging part of the digitization process for me, because there were several steps to this process and they must be completed in a very specific order.

First, each PDF file was uploaded to a temporary collection in the back end of WakeSpace, which serves as a holding space. Once all the files were uploaded to WakeSpace, I added in the metadata. WakeSpace provides the ability to export a formatted .csv spreadsheet for adding metadata, so I copied all of the information from the original Google Sheets metadata document and pasted it onto the .csv spreadsheet. This process was not as simple as it seems, however, because the rows between the two spreadsheets were frequently misaligned. The rows in the Google Sheets document was often not in the same order as the rows in the exported spreadsheet from DSpace, so the rows for both spreadsheets had to be reorganized in alphabetical order. This ensured that the information matched across the spreadsheets before pasting in the information.

Next, the collection number for each item in the spreadsheet was changed from the temporary holding digital collection (where the items were first uploaded) to the collection number associated with the Samuel and Sarah Wait Papers. The .csv metadata spreadsheet was then uploaded back into WakeSpace. Ultimately, all the metadata was assigned to the correct resource, and both the files and metadata was transferred to the Samuel and Sarah Wait Papers collection.

Finally, all that was left was to verify that the items were added to the collection correctly. I repeated this process for each box in the collection. Once that was done, I had officially finished digitizing boxes 1-4 of the Samuel and Sarah Wait Papers.

Thanks!

I had a great experience at ZSR, and I would like to once again thank everyone at the Z. Smith Reynolds Special Collections and Archives department for their help and support while I was working here.