Pictured: "Bathing
Beauties," 1890. Courtesy American Labor Museum/Botto
House National Landmark. Click image for a larger view.
Garden State communities looking to learn more about their
beginnings are quickly finding that history and high-tech
intersect on the New Jersey Digital Highway, a newly developed
Web portal that is linking historical institutions around
the state and helping to digitize their rich collections.
Funded in part by a National Leadership Grant, the Digital
Highway is a three-plus-year project run through Rutgers University
that has digitized more than 10,000 pictures, records, and
oral histories and is serving as a model for how to connect
community cultural organizations, from Clifton to Cape May,
through a central Web site.
“This is about local ownership and shared access,”
says Linda Langschied, Digital Projects Manager for the Rutgers
University Libraries. “It is a true statewide preservation
service. It’s books, reports, audio, and video. The
services developed for collections owners is a critical component.
We don’t do the work for the cultural heritage partners.
It’s their collection – they manage it, they run
it. But we assist with consultation and can lend equipment.”
What began as a desire by the New Jersey State Library, the
New Jersey Historical Society, the New Jersey State Archives,
and the American Labor Museum to digitally preserve many of
the state’s most important artifacts and records became
a broad-based grassroots effort that included community libraries,
museums, historical societies, and other cultural heritage
associations around the state.
The State Library, knowing of Rutgers’ national reputation
as a high-tech troubleshooter, quickly enlisted the university
as the technical engine for this project.
“Our original partners, under the leadership of the
State Library, wanted to be able to digitize their cultural
heritage materials and make them accessible to the public,
and we wanted to deliver that in a way that was going to be
sustainable,” Langschied says.
What that meant was finding a digital platform that could
be used by all statewide institutions to mount their objects
and descriptive information, known as metadata. They found
that platform in FEDORA (Flexible Extensible Digital Object
Repository Architecture), an award-winning model developed
by Cornell University that is customizable and allows local
institutions to have true control over what they digitize
and post.
Rutgers and its partners recruited more partners around the
state (17 in all) to share their collections, the State Library
offered grants to help institutions meet the program’s
high digitization standard of 600 dots per inch. Collaborators
included everyone from large state institutions like public
television station NJN to small and diverse collection holders
like Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center and the American
Hungarian Foundation.
With a promise to digitize some 10,000 objects, Rutgers and
its partners decided to launch the site showcasing a topic
near and dear to New Jersey residents: the state’s rich
immigrant heritage.
“We are the immigrant state,” Langschied says.
“For so many people, this was the doorstep to America…
New Jersey is among the most diverse states in the nation,
with so many wonderful stories to tell. This was a perfect
opportunity.”
Merging collections from around the state, The Changing
Face of New Jersey: the Immigration Experience from Earliest
Times to the Present covers four centuries of immigration
in the Garden State through eye-catching, fully searchable
maps, photos, sheepskin deeds, audio and video histories,
immigration records, letters, and diaries. Through the Web
site, teachers can find curriculum content standards, desk
references on history and ethnic education, and lessons on
how to use digitized and primary resources in history education.
Students can get help with homework or questions about New
Jersey culture and history or get advice and assistance with
research papers. And researchers can find links to genealogy
resources from the state and individual counties to help uncover
family histories.
An 1850 letter from Irish immigrant servant Mary Garvey to
her mother back in Ireland, testifies to the challenges of
starting over in a new country, but implores her mother, just
the same, to come to America for a chance at opportunity.
Photos and oral histories from the Seabrook Educational and
Cultural Center, meanwhile, chronicle the relocation in the
1940s of more than 2,500 Japanese evacuees from internment
camps to Seabrook, then one of the nation’s largest
frozen vegetable producers. The American Labor Museum/Botto
House makes available papers and photos from the turn of the
20th century that convey the flavor and vigor of working class
life and union activity during that era.
In Atlantic County, home to a rich immigrant tradition, the
Atlantic County Library and the Egg Harbor City Historical
Society secured a state grant to chronicle what in the late
19th and early 20th centuries was one of the east coast’s
most prominent German communities.
“I was driving through Egg Harbor City one day, and
began to notice that so many of the streets were named after
famous Germans or cities with a lot of German people,”
says John King, Senior Public Information Assistant for the
Atlantic County Library. “I knew this was a city with
a great deal of German heritage, and the more I thought about
it, I thought this would be a fascinating place to look at.”
Over 18 months, King, alongside staff at his library and
in Egg Harbor City, spent hundreds of hours selecting from
more than 30,000 immigration records and thousands of photos,
and then meticulously scanning, indexing, and entering metadata
into the FEDORA-based system.
“I just like being a part of something that is going
to last so long,” King says. “There’s certainly
a prestige being part of a statewide initiative like this.
It’s important to remember the things we are preserving.
These may represent days gone by, but that doesn’t have
to mean they are gone forever.”
The Jersey City Free Public Library, meanwhile, used a state grant
to digitize hundreds of photos, postcards, letters, diaries,
genealogical records, and even recipes from early Dutch settlers
to the area. In addition to a hand-drawn 1727 map of what
is now Hudson County and part of Staten Island, Jersey City’s
contribution also included a series of historical tableaux
presented by schoolchildren in 1910 – a series that
allows visitors to both appreciate the subjects they capture
and to learn from the way those students chose to present
them.
“It is getting to the point where it is hard to recall
a time before the World Wide Web, but it really wasn’t
all that long ago,” says John Beekman, assistant manager
of the New Jersey Room at the Jersey City Free Public Library. “Projects
such as the New Jersey Digital Highway are crucial to…providing
content with the level of quality that libraries and academics
spent centuries developing…[They] allow a sharing of
expertise across disciplines and institutions to develop best
practices in creating and delivering content in the format
where our patrons and students have come to expect it.”
By most accounts, those expectations have been met.
With 10,000-plus visitors a month, evaluations of the New
Jersey Digital Highway have been glowing thus far, according
to a final report, with visitors lauding the layout and the
integration of different communities.
The accolades don’t end at New Jersey’s borders.
When Virginia Tech suffered tragedy earlier this year with
a horrific student shooting, tributes, letters and messages
of condolence piled up quickly. By the end, the university
had amassed more than 75,000 pieces, but had no plan in place
to deal with them. Within the technology community, Rutgers
had earned so much renown for its adaptation of FEDORA that
Virginia Tech immediately contacted the university’s
library to help create an online digital memorial and repository.
That project continues, with plans to have a Web site up in
the near future.
In the meantime, Langschied admits the New Jersey Digital
Highway remains a work in progress. The site’s administrators
continue to field suggestions about content and to extend
opportunities to more communities to link their sites and
scan their images.
William Paterson University, which received a National Leadership
Grant to create a state digital video archive and portal called
NJVid, is introducing another eye-catching medium to the mix.
NJVid will use the Digital Highway’s FEDORA platform
and work with Rutgers to help deliver high-quality video through
the Web site.
“We want to become the best digital library project
that exists,” Langschied says. “We want to partner
with other organizations, form a close community of FEDORA
users and engage in collaborative development with them. At
the end of the day, our goal is to provide seamless access
to historical collections for every user in the state.
“This is a huge project, but we will continue to query
end users, to grow, to develop, and to make available a system
that never breaks trust with our partners.”
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