A Digital Imaging Scenario Group Project—My Family Tree Project
Compiled by
Blair Hinson: Group Leader, Organizer,  & Photographer
Mary Boehling: Organizer, Designer, & Photographer
Susan Bryant: Metadata Specialist, & Photographer
Terry Elsey: Hardware & Software Scout, & Photographer
Ashley Knox: Scribe & Photographer

My Family Tree Banner

Click on the logo to return to the Blair Museum and Historical Society homepage.

Background and Introduction


The Blair Museum and Historical Society is located in Lewistown, South Carolina.  Lewistown is a charming small town with a population of 15,000.  It is known for its historic homes and Main Street buildings, its proximity to a well-known university, and its Southern hospitality.  The Blair Museum and Historical Society (BMHS) is primarily publicly funded, but it supplements its operating budget with an annual fundraising drive to solicit private donations and with grant money.

The BMHS has a web site, which was established five years ago with funds from a private donor.  Initially, the web site consisted of a web page, created in-house, that served as a virtual bulletin board for the museum.  No attempt was made to count hits to the site, although the host server should be able to provide information regarding traffic and usage.

Four years ago, the BMHS received grant money to upgrade its website and create a “My Family Tree Museum” section to showcase local family histories as a means of documenting and promoting the history of Lewistown. Again, the BMHS turned to in-house sources for creating the family history section and maintaining it.  While intentions were good, the site is lacking in pizzazz and flash, two qualities necessary to attract a large number and variety of users.  In addition, the site is not reliable in that it has broken links.   Museum staff members have received complaints from patrons who were unable to navigate the website.  The organization providing the grant money has placed the BMHS on notice that the website must be redone and upgraded within a four-month period or face the withdrawal of the project endowment.

The BMHS has signed a contract with our firm, DigiRedo, to redesign the website.  To fulfill our mission, we have taken the following steps:

DigiRedo Investigation Results

Results of our investigation suggest that the staff currently lacks the technological knowledge to help us with the “redo.”  Therefore, we are prepared to:

Description of Current Website

The homepage of the BMHS website is very simple in design.  It has a black and white photograph of the BMHS in the upper right hand corner.  To the left of the photo are the words “The Blair Museum and Historical Society.”  Under the name are the hours, telephone number, and address.  In the center of the page is a black and white drawing of a tree.  There is a button with the words “Click here to see our family trees” under it.

When the button described above is clicked, the names of five local families appear. Clicking on the name of a family should take the user to a page that displays a family tree with links to photographs of each member listed on the tree.  However, only three of the five families’ links work.

Design Problems with Current Website (My Family Tree)

The current website is ugly, ineffective, and unreliable. There are broken links and images that will not display properly.

Design Recommendations for “DigiRedoing” the Website


To make the website attractive, effective, and reliable, we recommend:

Follow-up Recommendations (To be addressed by the BMHS staff after website has been "DigiRedone"

To promote use of the new website and to enable the BMHS staff to assume ownership of the site's upkeep, we recommend that the BMHS staff:

Group Budget

The DigiRedo group decided on the following items for the project budget:

Equipment/Hardware:   Dell PowerEdge 840 server, 2 units, $1339.00 each through Dell Small Business.  Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 R2 with SP2, Standard Edition operating system.   Server operating system: Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 R2 with SP2, Standard Edition operating system.

Networked computers: Dell desktop pc Core i7 processors, 6GB RAM, 640 GB hard drive.  $999.00

Scanner:  Epson Perfection V750-M Pro Scanner  $799.99


Digital camera:  Canon EOS 1D Mark III Price range: $3,838.00 - $3,844.95

Also needed: Routers, misc cables, etc.

Labor:  1 fulltime employee, salary $35,000 annually. Other labor would be handled by volunteers and student internships.

Digital Image Database Management Software


Past Perfect Software, Inc. is a company founded in 1996, and provides a turnkey solution for internal management and web presence also, if desired. This software is approved by American Association for State and Local History (www.aaslh.org).  It is an affordable museum software with enhanced multi-media options for music collections, oral histories, fundraising.  It handles image management, metadata, editing and image manipulation, and multiple views of object capability. www.museumsoftware.com

Pricing is: basic program $870, network upgrade 2-5 users $425, add-on multimedia $370, service/support 1st year for network users $495, training classes $123.75, users manual $20, and S&H $10.  Supports Dublin Core elements.  Can use peer-to-peer or client-server.

Total Budget Projection


The total cost associated with this project came in slightly below our target budget of $50,000. The final figure of the above expenses was:
Total costs--  $47,634.64

Digitization Standards

The following standards were discussed in our group and decided on to allow us to a) fall within the parameters requested by the assignment guidelines, and b) give us a manageable standard that people in different locations with various equipment could readily meet.
Scanning standards:  Access images 200 ppi resolution (400 pixels long side) and thumbnails 144 ppi resolution (150 pixels long side).  Scan black and white photos in grayscale and sepias and color photos in RGB
Quality Assurance:   Zoom beyond 100%.

Image Selection Criteria

Criteria:   Image of individual or individual(s) in family group who belong to one of the five local town founding families.  Older photographs may be mixed with more recent family portraits, but the general idea was to promote and exhibit a partial or complete family line. Image must be of sufficient quality to be viewed by general public without significant deterioration, damage or flaws.

Producing the Images
Software:  Adobe Master Collection, Adobe Creative Suite 4--$2499.00
Suite to include inDesign CS4, Photoshop CS4 Extended, Abobe Acrobat 9 Pro, Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, Adobe Fireworks CS4, Adobe Contribute CS4, Adobe After Effects CS4, Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, Adobe Soundbooth CS4, Adobe OnLocation, Adobe Encore CS4, Adobe Bridge CS4, Adobe Device Central CS4, Adobe Version Cue CS4, Adobe Dynamic Link and upgrade Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 to manages more images and photos $99.00. 
Retrieved from www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/suiteselector/ accessed 4/14/09.

Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 to include Access 2007, Accounting Express 2008, Excel 2007, Infopath 2007, Groove 2007, OneNote 2007, Outlook with contact business manager 2007, Powerpower 2007, Publisher 2007 and Word 2007.  $679.95
Retrieved from http://store.microsoft.com/microsoftoffice-ultimate-2007-Full/product/16E681F4 accessed 4/12/09.

File format:  TIFF format for archival image.  TIFF for digital surrogate.  JPEG for website and thumbnail. 
File naming system: Use scheme as follows:  first 2 letters will be dr for DigiRedo; next 2 letters will be initials of photographer and follow 2 digits will be numbered photos.

Example: Pictures from Mary Boehling would be labeled as follows:
drmb01a.jpg -OR- drmb01t.jpg

(“a” stands for access, and “t” stands for thumbnails)

Storing the images


Media:  All JPEG images available to public to be stored on server online. 
Archival storage of master images:  Store TIFF images on removeable media (tape, microfilm, DVDs) in climate controlled location separate from electronic equipment used for regular access.

Accessing the images


Who can access:  Library or Collection staff assigned to maintain collection should have access to surrogate images.  Original image access should be limited to archivist who converts the original image by scanning or photography.  Website JPEG image access open to all public visitors to website.  These JPEG images should be watermarked with collection owner name or logo.
Legal restrictions:  All copyright owned by BMHS, or revert to the original individual families.  As such, all images submitted to collection should have legal waiver signed by owner releasing rights to image for the collection purposes with understanding they will be viewable by general public.  Requests for image reproduction can be submitted to collection administrator by commercial or non-profit organizations.

Preservation


Long-term physical storage:  Store in separate location from original photos and born digital images.
Migration to new technology:  Set up quality control checks semi-annually to randomly access 3-5% of digital image collection to review image durability, comparison to original image or photo.

Metadata


Standards:  Follow Dublin Core standards.
Required fields included: Title, Subject, Place, Photographer, File format, Date, Physical Description
Optional field chosen by the group: Resource Identifier (the number discussed above as our file naming system.)
This provides a Multi-level description with hierarchy of whole-to-part relationships.
Thesaurus:  The DigiRedo Group chose to use an existing thesaurus for terms and subject headings. The one we chose was the Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials, http://www.loc.gov/lexico/servlet/lexico/?usr=pub-48844:0&op=frames&db=TGM_II.

In processing the images, Mary was able to capture and use information about the creators of the files, file size(s) and color to help standardize the images for posting to the website.

Access to information


Record maintenance: Records about the images and the processing of the images will be kept on the servers discussed above, and the image originals will either remain with the individual families or, if donated outright, will kept in the appropriate humidity and temperature controlled storage boxes or sleeves, depending on the format of the original images. There is a limited amount of information about the family histories on the website, but other information could be requested by email (linked to the site) and accessed by researchers, subject to the needs and privacy concerns of the individual families.
Record display:  For web-based records, one can click on each family name to see thumbnails of each family image, and then one can click on any image for larger viewing and metadata information.
Record searches:  Keyword: subject, place, photographer and collection.  Boolean operators would be considered and implemented (if we actually had a database in place.)

Any other known issues: Reflections from our group leader

Reflecting back over the entire project, a couple of things come to mind. One of them is that I was really glad we had somebody with Dreamweaver and Illustrator experience.  Another was that I was worried about out interactives, but I think the Google Group and the word find came out well, and I think having multiple ways to engage the intended audience (email, Google Group, word find, links with additional genealogy information) is a plus. The only thing we would have liked to do differently, but really didn't have the capacity to do in this scenario, was to make the site searchable. In a real-world scenario, that would be a given.

We all supported each other very well, and everybody fulfilled their roles well and did what was asked of them, and a whole lot more. It was a pleasure to be associated with this group. I hope our product is well received.

DigiRedo logo

“DigiRedoing” the BMHS Website