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:
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
