How to Use this Site
Collections Online is designed to accommodate browsing, searching, and display of archival collections held by the Archives of American Art that have been digitized, for the most part, in their entirety, under a grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. A total of 105 collections will be made available as they become digitized during the next five years.
All of the information on each collection's website is compiled directly from the archival finding aid that was written by the archivist who processed the collection.
Each digitized collection is listed on the left side of the Home Page, arranged alphabetically by the name of the collection's creator. Clicking on the name will bring you to the home page for the specific collection.
View Collection
Click on View the Collection link to see a list of series and a gallery of images from those series. (Collections are divided into series during archival processing. Series are groups of similar or related materials that are most easily described and accessed as a group. For general information about the way the collection has been divided into series, click on the "About the Collection" link).
By clicking on the series that interests you, the individual series page is displayed. The series description and folder listing beneath it describe the documents in the series and the way they are arranged. Folders that have been scanned appear as links. Clicking on the folder heading will open the image viewer.
Folder listings will also list folders that have not been scanned. Items that are typically not scanned include published materials, duplicates or copies, and items with little research value, such as personal items of an artist's descendants. Duplicates and copies are often filed in separate folders under the same folder heading, and where they exist, multiple folders may be indicated, but only the folder containing the originals is scanned.
Oversized (OV) original documents, which have to be filed separately because of their size, are listed beneath the main folder listing. However, they are digitized to appear with the regular-sized items to which they are related. Cross-references in the folder list link the physical location of the original with the folder where the digital image is found. Use the Image Viewer for this folder heading to view oversized items.
Image Viewer
When a folder title link is selected, the Collections Online Image Viewer will appear. The image viewer displays the digitized documents from each folder in thumbnail-sized images on the left, with the first image displayed in a reference-sized image in a larger window. Thumbnails appear in the order in which the originals are arranged, with front and back of documents in separate, adjacent images.
Click on the thumbnails to view each item in the larger window. Use the magnifying tool to the right of the window to zoom in and out, and click and hold the cursor on the image to drag and view different portions of the image. To view an item in a larger window, click on "open in new window." This window will allow you to view the entire image at once, and to navigate to previous and next documents for that folder only.
Users can view images from subsequent folders by simply clicking "next folder" on the image viewer. The folder heading displayed at the top of the image viewer will indicate which folder is currently open, and the series in which the folder is found.
Archives staff have made every effort to ensure that items displayed in the image viewer are as legible as the original document, while balancing considerations of digital image size and system memory. On rare occasions, digital images of large, original documents with very small text are not large enough to be legible, even when zoomed in fully. On such occasions, researchers may request a larger image through the Archives reference form, "Ask Us".
Search
Type words or terms into the Search Collections Online box. Keywords are indexed directly from the archival finding aid that was written by the archivist who processed the collection.
Use the search box on the main page of Collections Online to search the text of all finding aids on the site. From an individual collection, the search is limited to that collection only.
The digitized documents are not individually indexed nor have they undergone Optical Character Recognition (OCR), therefore words and terms are indexed solely from the archival finding aid for the collection written by an AAA Archivist.
Archival Finding Aids
Archival finding aids combine narrative description, historical and administrative information about the collection, and lists of folder headings to describe the content and arrangement of materials in a collection and the historical context of the collection's creation.
Some of the traditional archival terms used in the finding aid have been omitted. Users familiar with finding aids should look on the page called "About This Collection" for the scope and content note, arrangement note, provenance, processing note, and biographical note. Individual series within each collection can be accessed from this page, or by clicking on "View the Collection." To view the traditional, text-only version of the finding aid, click on the "Finding Aid" tab. For help with archival terminology, consult the Society of American Archivist's Glossary.
About This Collection
Each collection's "About The Collection" page contains general information about the content and context of the collection, including
- The size of the collection (expressed in linear feet, which is the amount of shelf space occupied by the original documents);
- types of documents found in the collection;
- subjects, events, individuals, and organizations documented in the collection;
- the arrangement of the documents in the collection;
- the history or provenance of the collection; and
- information about the way the collection has been processed at the Archives of American Art.
This page also includes a biographical or historical note, which provides a brief history of the individual or organization which created the collection. This history often contains specific information about the origins of documents in the collection.
Copyright Restrictions & Usage
If you have a question about copyright restrictions and usage, especially for publication purposes, please contact our reference department.
Read the Archives of American Art's full copyright policy.
About this Project : Collections Online
Background
In February 2005, the Archives received an award of $3.6 million to dramatically increase the accessibility of its resources on the web. This support is funding a comprehensive, five-year program to digitize and make available on the Archives' website a substantial cross-section of the Archives' most important collections, including the papers of a highly diverse range of artists and arts-related figures from the eighteenth century to today. At the end of the program, an estimated 1.6 million digital files will be available to the public.
The Archives has been scanning selected items from collections for several years. Each item is cataloged and entered into our Digital Collections Database. A primary goal of the Terra project, however, is to digitize entire collections with new equipment designed specifically for increased levels of production and to develop an innovative web interface to access the digital collections. The new Collections Online interface uses the XML (Extensible Mark-Up Language) EAD (Encoded Archival Description) tagged data in the collectionís finding aid as the metadata structure from which the digital image files are linked and presented online.
Scanning Collections
Using a planetary scanner, the Zeutschel Omni Scan K100A1, AAA began scanning collections in August, 2005. The new equipment is capable of scanning in black & white, grayscale, and color in ranges from 25 - 800 dpi. AAA's default setting is grayscale mode at 300 dpi. Grayscale mode was selected because it captures and displays the wide variety of tones found in older manuscripts and the nuances of handwritten documents. This format often suppresses the typical bleed-through of handwritten documents on older and thinner papers. AAA uses the color mode to scan sketches, vintage photographs, rare publications, and illustrated letters.
Because these are historical documents, many of the original items are discolored, faded, stained, or fragile because of age and past handling. Their corresponding digital images will depict the same conditions as the original documents; no attempt to digitally enhance documents has been made. When documents are scanned from the collection with the new Zuetschel equipment, the scanning technician saves the digital files according to a file structure that matches the collection's naming code, and box and folder numbers - essentially the finding aid container listing. Master uncompressed TIFF format files are archived in an offline Digital Asset Preservation System, with derivative JPEG format images for web presentation.
EAD (Encoded Archival Description) Finding Aids
Each collection selected to scan is first processed according to current archival standards and an EAD finding aid to the collection is created by the Project Archivist. All of AAA's EAD finding aids are encoded in XML using the text editor Note Tab Pro. The finding aids contain the typical EAD tags for descriptive biographical or historical notes, scope and content notes, and narrative series descriptions. Detailed container listings with numbered box and folder headings are also included. It is this box and folder listing that forms the file structure for the scanning technician to save the digital files, as well as the primary descriptive metadata for discovery of the digital files.
The Digital Collections Database and the Collections Online Interface
Using Coldfusion programming, each EAD XML file is passed through a parser that transforms the XML EAD data into an EAD Document Object, which is then transformed into a Finding Aid Record in a SQL Server Digital Collections Database. The Finding Aid Record in the database contains all of the EAD descriptive and component information, such as series, subseries, folder headings, box numbers, and folder numbers. In addition, the same database holds the digital files as Digital Resource Records. Storing all of the EAD XML data and the digital files in one relational database allows the potential for the output of the stored data for many different resources and allows the data to be linked with the other records/resources in the database.
Again, using Coldfusion programming, the Finding Aid Record and the Digital Resource Record stored in the database is then dumped into the Collections Online template and interface. The resulting web presentation allows users to understand, view, and navigate the digital files within their proper archival context and hierarchy.
For further information about this project, contact:
Karen Weiss, Project Director
weissk@si.edu
Loren Scherbak, IT Specialist
Toby Reiter, Computer Programmer
reitert@si.edu
Barbara Aikens, Chief of Collections Processing
aikensb@si.edu