New image viewer in place for Omeka content

In anticipation for the addition of a large number of textual documents to be added to our online digital archive in the next year, we've added a new image viewer that allows for much more interaction with the digital items. Now a user can zoom in and navigate through an image or document. Here is an example:

http://omeka.library.kent.edu/special-collections/items/show/1458

One feature that we are excited to have in place with this new viewer is to provide a slideshow/scroll view of items with multiple pages or images. Thanks to Project Mirador!

Check back for more additions in the coming months.

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Privacy and digital collections

This past October, I put in a book proposal on the topic of ethical decision-making around privacy issues in digital collections. It has been accepted by Morgan and Claypool, and I am cranking to meet a May 1st deadline to get this into print by November.

It's exciting, but also nerve-wracking and perhaps a little terrifying for a few reasons. Ethics is head space that I very much enjoy- This work will include a nod to an essay from Martin Heidegger, which oddly enough I used a different Heidegger essay in my museum studies MA thesis on the ethics of art conservation. The philosophy aspect in ethics is probably the most enjoyable part for me, but it's also unbelievably murky waters. I spent many years rejecting absolutes in my early twenties, though at some point I have to put the pen to the paper and just write. (Funny sidenote- This digital girl still prefers the analog. I write primarily on my laptop and then print out draft and edit by hand. I also hate, hate, hate e-book…

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Or for other digital librarians, a colleague at another university said "OCR'd PDFs just aren't going to cut it anymore". This statement I think reflects how many of us have practiced a simple approach to textual documents in the past. Batch run OCR before ingestion, and TADA! Done, or at least we had hoped.

But, as I have come to learn, this approach is does not fair well for screen readers or adapt for those with vision impairments. At Kent State, I've been fortunate to have some great folks in the Accessibility Office to offer advice and hands-on training (Thank you, Jason Piatt! My …

Digital Library Projects headspace

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