An app to look at for working with photos

From ResearchBuzz 3/28/2018:

American Historical Association: Research Clutter: A New App Helps Create Order out of Disorder. "Tropy is a free, open-source desktop application designed to help researchers organize and describe the photos they take in archives in intuitive and useful ways. It allows users to group photos of research materials, annotate images, add metadata, export to other applications, and easily search their collections."

What I like about it - it allows you to create metadata for images, organize groups of photos, and export the metadata to other applications. It also makes the collection searchable. 

Where it's better than creating the metadata in Digital Commons - it allows you to pick any number of photos to add the same data.

What I don't like about it - it only works with .jpg files. 

How it could be useful here - perhaps it is something a student working in the archives could learn and try out. If it worked well, could it be a possible workshop idea for the DSC?

For more information: https://tropy.org/ 

College & departmental annual reports

Just got off the phone with Cindy Krautwurst who was inquiring about the stacks of annual report binders that are in the Provost's office (as they prepare for a new Provost). Is this something that is appropriate for Digital Commons? Absolutely!

Cindy will work to box these up, and make arrangements with the moving crew to have them brought over here sometime this summer. It can be a big scanning project for Elizabeth, Rebecca or Kristen, depending on when they arrive. Follow up on this next month, if I don't hear more before then.

I will also talk to Charlie about whether the Archives would like the hard copies, and have him contact Cindy about it.

Archival Audio files

I met with Charlie today to ask about digitizing some books from the Archives, and he showed me the audio files he had dating over the last 20 years - oral history of the college. What a great find. There are 55 files, 16 G of data, mostly in .wav format. I would really love to see this collection get put up!

Suggested two different formats to CC -http://repository.uwyo.edu/njat_oralhistories/ from Wyoming Scholars Repository (Not Just a Teacher collection), where they stream the interview. They also have a photo of the teacher, and a transcript of the interview as part of the metadata. The second was the Dory collection from Linfield College: http://digitalcommons.linfield.edu/dory/ where they have the audio file as a download in both MVA and the larger WAV archival formats. This is a slightly more robust collection, with extensive photos, interviews, transcripts, and even some videos. Charlie liked a hybrid approach, as did I, of having a streaming option, combined with being able to download the file, too. I contacted bepress, and they set up a collection on the demo site: http://demo.brockport.bepress.com/archival_test_series/.

Met with Bob today (6/26) to discuss possible format, etc. to put the audio files up in. He suggested conversion to MPG, with the option to play directly from the browser. He also mentioned not putting up the .wav files to be downloaded, unless we wanted others to be able to edit them - we don't right?

I asked whether this would be something we could get a student with a specific skill set to convert, and he suggested the Communications department might teach that skill set, so to check with them. Or apply for grant money to outsource it.