Managing Research Collections 

Folders and subfolders full of jpeg and analog sources

Text

  • Survey of historians.  90-95% take digital photographs (2000+) in the archives. 
  • This has led to a significant shift in research practices.
  • Quick trips to take photos are common with follow-up visits
  • Historians are doing this work without training or professional dialogue with one another. 

 

Tropy

 

Research Photograph Management

  • A tool to organize and add metadata to image collections
  • All files remain on your computer in their original folders
  • Add tags, transcriptions
  • Fields for common archival terms such as collection, folder. Templates for common types such as correspondence, memos, and so forth 

Tropy Limitations

  • All data is entered manually (with exception of exif image data)
  • Limited to image files and pdf, no spreadsheet or audio files 
  • Only on one machine, not able to collaborate across machines. For such cases, Omeka is  a better option

Google Pinpoint

Pinpoint

  • Upload materials (pdf, docx, jpg, mp3...)
  • Text is extracted from images and audio
  • Text is indexed for search
  • Entites are identified for people, places and organizations
  • Semantic search allows for variations of names, spellings, fuzzy search terms
  • Multi-lingual

Request access to Pinpoint here:

https://journaliststudio.google.com/pinpoint/about

Demonstration

Pinpoint

  • Limit of 200,000 items in a collection
  • File size limitation (1GB)
  • Pinpoint converts images and other file types (Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, email files and others) into new PDFs
  • Able to search but not view data in spreadsheets
  • Currently an experiment without fees. How long will that last? Does the project need to become profitable to be sustainable?
  • Data is private, but on the cloud. What is retention schedule, use of derivatives, exposure to hacking?
  • All the capabilities can be replicated by open-source libraries
  • Entities have variation, but are normalized to Latin variant

Research Image Collections

By Andrew Janco

Research Image Collections

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