Alrighty, thanks Paul for that gracious introduction. Um I want to tell
you about a collaboration of three institutions and the work of 17 people
over a period of about a year uh in the construction of the 100 years of
grand digital archive. And it's been my pleasure to work with such
talented people and to work with Some amazing materials. The 100 years of
grand collaboration is the work of the Arizona State University Library,
the Cline Library at Northern Arizona University and the Grand Canyon
National Park Museum. And ultimately, this project goes back to The spring
of 2016 when um history librarian Ed ending. And I got together in my
office one day and he um he and I have had over 50 years of experience
working in our greater Arizona collection. And we were ed asked me, you
know, is there some way that we can honor the career of the great Senator
Carl Hayden from Arizona and his role in the founding of the Grand Canyon
National Park In 1919. And and we realized at that time that, Wow, you
know, three years away, we've got a centennial coming up. What a great
opportunity to do that work of honoring the Senator and his role in the
founding of the national Park. And so uh we thought about who appropriate
partners would be in uh immediately identified Pete Runge who spoke
yesterday from the special collections at the Northern Arizona University
client library. And uh so we we called up Peter, we had a nice meeting
with him and we we talked to him and we realized, you know, the stars of
the show here are the staff and the facilities of the Grand Canyon
National Park. And so we asked Peter, have you got any working
relationships with staff from the National Park? And Peter uh, identified
kimba is um from the Grand Canyon National Park Museum Uh as an
appropriate collaborator. And so we're often running uh and writing the
grant in the spring of 2017
In the early spring of 2017. And so just to tell you a little bit about
what's involved in a project like this, we new ed and I knew that there
are wonderful pockets of historical materials that were available in the
uh Senator Hayden's papers and a number of other collections at the
greater Arizona collection here at the issue library. And Peter, having
long experience with his materials also could identify important things.
Um and so we began to do some searching in our systems to identify the
pockets of stuff that we thought might be appropriate. Um and so we
started by looking at Arizona archives online. How many of you have looked
at Arizona archives online? We have a few hands, this is the collaborative
database where the archivists of Arizona post Finding AIDS to the archival
collections across the state. And if you've worked with finding AIDS and
archival collections, you know that these are typically bulk level
descriptions. Uh You're fortunate if you can get down to the folder level
in archival description given the thousands of linear feet of material
that we have. Um And so we're trying to find the right corner of the
haystack to look in these collections and identify specific items that
were that were exciting like that one. Um So ultimately, uh we put
together this collaboration put together a grant proposal um to our state
library for Library Library Services and Technology Act funds. And so this
project is ultimately funded by the U. S. Department of Education uh and
through the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And those monies are
distributed to worthy proposals across Arizona by your Arizona State
Library. Um What we envision it really was a project where there were
several uh loki of activity. We we had the advantage here at A. S. U. Of
having a robust and useful digital repository. The A. S. U. Digital
repository. Uh And in fact N. Au for many years they have been working to
build the Colorado Plateau digital repository. So we had technical
expertise and we had a platform or places to put these materials so they
could be made accessible.
Um We uh we also envision including the Grand Canyon National Park and N.
A. You step forward to work with kim be some to select and digitized
materials from the Grand Canyon National Park. So in that part of the
model, in fact materials were literally picked up at the Grand Canyon and
driven to Flagstaff for digitization and the museum staff provided us with
a contextual information or the metadata that helped us understand and
make sense of the materials that they contributed.
Um In our model at A. S. U. We uh we chose to outsource the digitization
which had its very some very interesting implications for workflow. And
ultimately history librarian at Eddings spent much of the first four or
five months in the work of selecting the material from these collections.
And then I would go in and package those things up and keep track of
where they came from. So we could put them back um and then shipping them
up to our vendor in Salt Lake City for actual digitization
You'll find when you enter the 100 years of grand project. And I want to
point out that all you need to do Is Google 100 years of grand and linked
to this project comes right up at the top of that, you can do that on your
phone. Although the repository isn't necessarily optimized for mobile
display, you can actually see some pretty cool things right through your
phone.
Um So ultimately we have this distributed model for digital library work
and I want to get to
Yeah, here we go. This is what the homepage for the digital library looks
like. So what you have ultimately is a website that points to two
different digital repositories. The N. Au repository and the A. S. U.
Repository. And the N. Au repository also includes the materials that
were digitized from the Grand Canyon National Park collections. So
scrolling down a little bit on this website, uh you can see that in the
case of a s you were able to make some prepackaged customized search
results by format. So you can actually select photographs or
correspondence or ephemera to look through these materials. In the case of
N. A. U. They were able to segregate their materials by the N AU materials
and the Grand Canyon National Park materials. Mhm. When you search in the
repository, this is a search results display and ultimately this isn't a
sus collection, add some slides for from a sus work here. So you see
titles for individual items and usually an abstract or description the
contributors or authors and the date of creation Um copyright played a big
role uh in the selection of materials here. We chose to focus historically
on the period 1892,
partly because we knew we had a large amount of material that we could
digitize from that period. And also because we knew that we had 1924 and
earlier, much of these materials had fallen into the public domain. And so
we had the ability to digitize and make things accessible. When you look
at the item level description, this is a single description of particular
item. You can see the richness of the metadata that was produced by our
metadata, librarian Carolyn thomas um because we had Collections that had
been professionally curated for 30 or 40 years. We've been building legacy
data and descriptions all of that time working with these collections. So
there were certain descriptions that we're able to existing descriptions
that we're able to leverage from finding AIDS or earlier efforts at item
level description in the archives. There are other descriptions we had to
build from scratch. And so what you find in the overall project is over
700 items that have been selected, described and digitized and loaded and
made accessible to many people. This work is very detail oriented and um
you'll you'll see that we've applied standardized subject headings within
that description that enable us to pull together like materials. Um you'll
also see uh series references to um topical groupings that had devised to
organize these materials in some different ways. So we had these series
like free enterprise That were set up to represent different chronological
periods within the 1890s and 1940 period. The other thing to notice on
this is that on the right underneath the call number for the file, the
actual file name. Um you'll see a link called download and downloads. Very
exciting. Um This means we get to give away stuff. So one of the
challenges with a project like this is trying to manage the risks of
copyright and looking at these collections. We had some materials that
were in the public domain by virtue of age. We had some materials that
were in the public domain by virtue of being government documents. We had
other materials that have been donated to the repositories with deeds of
gift that actually represented a legal transfer of copyright to a S. U. Or
to N A U. And then we have these wonderful things known as orphan works
and some chocolate. How many people have experienced or encountered orphan
works in their travels. In just a few. So, orphan works are lovely things
that are pieces of information where copyright is still active, but we
either don't know who owns it or we can't find contact information who
owns that piece of information. This creates some real challenges for us
when we're when we're really trying to put things online and give them
away. And so what you'll find is that there are many things in the, in
these collections where we have the download link lit up and we've done
copyright research on this. We believe it's either in the public domain or
we own sufficient rights to give the material away. And you can actually
download and reuse publication or high quality photography or ephemera uh
, from these collections. And we wouldn't even not even know that you were
there. Um, and so you can directly download really great stuff from this
site. You'll see some other places where the download link is blocked. And
this is an interesting challenge for us because here's a place where
copyright was still active and in some circumstances uh that we can employ
a fair use harbor to make such materials available to the S. U. Community.
Um So if you are an A. S. U. Person and you log in to the repository,
additional materials become available for download. Um but this is about
managing risk ultimately. So you will also find things, especially things
published after 1920, for where we've presented the description, we
presented a pdf of the material, for example, um and download is not
permitted and uh one of the sort of fun things about this is um over time
as things get older, more things fall into the public domain. So one of
the challenges is actually figuring out how to track when things fall into
the public domain and to open those things up for download and reuse over
time.
Now, now we get to the mapping part um and I'm greatly indebted to matt
toro uh and to Caroline thomas the metadata librarian for their efforts in
this part. Uh This is the first page of a really wonderful es ri story map
that matt and his crew put together for us the very latest stages of the
project. We were the last month of this. It was crazy Uh in July of 2018.
And you know, before I get in there, I want to make the point that we
wanted this project To be completed by July 2018. Um one of the selling
points for this project as far as being a grant proposal was, we wanted to
demonstrate that we could make the material available well before the
centennial
which was last week. Um so that tourism businesses, the park uh interested
tourists could actually download and use these things in time for the
centennial. And we received the support of the Arizona Office of Tourism,
the Tourism Office and Flagstaff and other places because we intentionally
wanted to give away materials so they could be used in a timely manner. So
going back to the story map um we've got some really great representations
of material through database in these repositories. But what's missing is
really a visual navigation of the material. And so in the story map um we
spent quite a bit of time Plotting coordinates for individual pieces that
are in the digital archive. And there are over 200 items that we were able
to plot where we were able to identify a place name and convert and
identify the coordinates associated with it. So that item could be located
in this lovely story map. So looking at this, it's presented here as a
heat map. And so the areas that you see with a very large red areas are
places where there are multiple items and as you would expect, you see
quite a few of those things are located at the south rim visitor center
and along the south rim you can expand the map and actually get some space
between the various points on the heat map. If you click on a point in the
heat map, it brings up a lovely box uh that gives you summary information
about the item you have selected, but more importantly it gives you a link
to the repository version of that item where you can download the high
quality version of it.
Um along the way, starting in January of 2018, we started doing weekly
Facebook posts regarding the 100 years of grand project. Um and we had
some sort of surprising things that came out of that. One of the um we
were trading posts, s you would would post one week and you would post the
next every third or fourth or fifth week and then you would post an image
from the Grand Canyon National Park Museum collections. And so there were
some surprising things. The photo of the Navajo bridge on the left was one
of the earliest posts in the project and um Hard to tell from the
screenshot but you can uh that photo generated over 60,000 likes. Um and
uh we had some other materials that there's another photograph of a mule
uh coming out of the cave and about to enter the Kaibab suspension bridge
that uh generated 46,000 likes and some some incredible number. Um and in
fact the mule handlers facebook page came in and shared that and we got
quite a bit of boost out of that. So, you know, watching, watching this
happen and then trying to chase down the shares and see who was reaching
this stuff was an interesting part of the project. Um We had an enormous
numbers of hits for certain photographs. Another factor was when the Grand
Canyon National Park shared our facebook posts, our results increased
astronomically. Uh there was a huge difference when when the library's
would post, you might get a couple 1000 hits when the Grand Canyon
National Park came along, we would get national exposure and just enormous
numbers of hits. There were, there was also tweeting going on on a regular
basis throughout the project. Um I don't have really good stats for the
impact of the tweeting but ultimately we we spent a fair amount of time
working on getting this information out where people could use it.
Um Just a few more fun things from the collections. Um you'll see some
very cool ephemera items um from this one, from the fred harvey collection
and ultimately from the greater Arizona collection here at ASU
um lovely photograph and in the diary page, Illustrated diary page from
the Carnegie caltech expedition. Uh this material from the client library
at N. A. U.
Uh and here's some photography from the National Park service in the Grand
Canyon National Park Museum Uh for sort of before and after or re
photography of the Phantom Ranch Swimming Pool in 1930 for in 1961.
Alright, so that's a quick walkthrough of this collaborative project um
and hardly want to keep you from getting to lunch, but I'm more than happy
to answer any questions you might have about the work that we've done.
The gentleman asked if this is a work in progress or are we all done? And
you know, this is one of these things where the uh project can take a life
on of its own. We spoke last week at the Grand Canyon symposium hosted by
the Grand Canyon Historical Society. And sure enough park ranger, the
librarian from the Grand Canyon National Park approached us and said we
have many more things in the library at the Grand Canyon National Park and
we'd like to participate in this. Um So there's certainly there were other
partners, many other partners that we could have chosen in this project.
Um The Arizona State Archives has material. The Arizona Historical Society
, University University of Arizona has materials. So there are a lot of
potentials for uh continuing the project. Another thing that I thought was
very interesting in this work was one of the spin offs of this project was
the Institute for Humanities Research, the A. S. U. Institute for
Humanities Research seed grant that were we received and that partly
supported this conference and the review committee for the Sea Grant asked
us this very interesting question that actually came up yesterday, I
believe in Teresa's presentation. And that was how do native american
communities uh do way finding, transmit information about places and
routes and ways to go around the Grand Canyon. And I don't know the answer
to that. And so the hr people asked us to look into that and to see if
there were some opportunities to partner with the native american
communities here in Arizona. Which is actually a big ask because there are
in fact at least eight or 9 of them. And I'd also like to say in relation
to that, we chose not to include those communities in this first go round
of the project. And part of that was it really is not our place to tell
their story.
And the other thing I want to talk about in relation to that is the
protocols for the handling of native american archival materials which is
an ethical standard Uh that really came out of actually began with some
discussions in the mid 1990s at Flagstaff at Northern Arizona University.
And those protocols call for in depth discussions with representatives of
the native american communities regarding uh the use the reuse the
presentation of materials relating to their history and their culture. Um
having some experience in working in these areas. We n au has had a long
experience with collaborative work with the Hopi tribe and with Stuart who
is the Cultural resources Cultural preservation office Director at Hopi.
Um And we talked about this and came to the conclusion that in this first
go round, it would be very difficult to have a respectful and in depth
conversation with the various tribal governments regarding a project of
this nature. So that may be something that we turn to. Um in the course of
the HR Grant, uh we want to begin to have a conversation um and see if
there's a way that these things might be shared with the recognition that
the very important recognition that every tribe and every tribal
government and even subdivisions within those groups are going to come at
those questions very differently. Um It's really not right to say what
would native americans do? Um every tribe has a different perspective
about those things. And so we anticipate a variety of answers to that
question as we get down into some of the details. I'm sorry, that was a
really lengthy response to your question.
Uh
thanks, thanks goodness. I thought that I noticed you had your list of
columns of different types of materials you had and you didn't have a
grouping for maps and I was wondering if that was one where you were going
to add in some of the maps that have been scanned for the project. Yeah, I
feel badly about that too. Um you know, matt matt identified some maps?
Yeah, some maps for us and um we kind of ran out of time. We we also had
some issues regarding access to large scale scanning facilities that might
have been worked out given more time. But really the I H. R. C Grant
project is about surveying and uh it's focused on mapping the Grand Canyon.
It's about surveying to find out what materials might be available for a
future expansion of the project.
Other questions.
Alright, great. Thank you very much.
Thank you.