Political Campaigns in Lincoln's Time

The history department arranged for the Kentucky Historical Society's History-Mobile to be on campus this week. Local elementary and middle schools were invited to bring their students to visit the History-Mobile and the archives was asked to create an exhibit that would be on display for the same days.

In conjunction with this we decided to create an electronic display that would add information to what was available in the display case. Even though I've drooled over some great online exhibits (my favorite being Not For Ourselves Alone), I hadn't tried to do one myself.

I've been out of the web site creation field for several years now (maintaining a created page doesn't count), so I had a big learning curve to make this page do what I wanted it to do. Fortunately Dreamweaver made it fairly easy to do a cascading style sheet even though I had very limited experience with them. It took several uninterrupted hours of trial and error trying different properties to see what each one would do and how it worked, but overall Dreamweaver made it easy.

The image below shows the physical exhibit and clicking on it will link to the online version which includes more information about each document, including biographical sketches on key individuals of the era, information about the political climate and events and external links to other information. We also scanned some speeches in our collections to OCR to add as links.

Historical Census Browser

The University of Virginia Library has developed a historical census browser that lets the user pull out statistical information found on the US Census from 1790 to 1960 down to the county level.

It will pull up multiple statistics, for example the total population in a location and the number of individuals attending school to allow users to compare statistics. It will pull the statistics over a period of years for comparison. Then it will map the results for you.

The statistics cover topics such as ethnicity, literacy in different ethnic groups and ages, farm and home ownership among different ethnic groups, employment, housing and more depending on the census year.

What you won't find are the names of individuals on the census, this browser is strictly for demographic information and it is outstanding for that type of information.

We Can Do OCR!

Yesterday afternoon I installed the new Abbyy FineReader software that just came in.

Installation was a breeze and the software is very intuitive to start using. Scanning the first document was simple. I didn't even have to look at the manual to scan or edit the text. It did get a bit more complicated when the document was saved, because there are so many options available.

The end result that I wanted was a .pdf document that looked like the original that, but that had a text layer underneath which allowed the user to search the document. After several tries and reading the manual (imagine that) here is the end result.

To get a document that looks like the original scan select 'keep original image size,' 'text under page image' and 'enable tagged pdf'.'

Some things to note. FineReader automatically rotated the landscape photograph on page 8, but it couldn't read the text that was sideways in the table on page 16. To get that section of text readable I think it would take a lot of extra effort.

I was impressed with the accuracy of the OCR and the ease of use. So now we enter another phase of digitization.

Book Terminology

The Independent Online Booksellers Association has a great list of book terms on their website.

Preservation 101 Online Course

Linda Clark Benedict, Alone in the Archives Blog recently had a link to an online Preservation 101 workshop that looks really good. It was funded by an IMLS grant to the Northeast Document Conservation Center and has two study options. The self study is unfacilitated and free of charge; there is also an instructor facilitated study for a fee which earns continuing education credits.

In my spare time I think I'll work my way through the self study.

Maude Gibson Paintings

Several months ago I borrowed an idea from another archives and started a Find of the Month. The August find was Maude Gibson's paintings. Maude was an art professor at Eastern from 1910 to about 1941 and painted almost her entire life. She died in 1964 at the age of 93 and the painting to the left is dated 1962.

The small paintings were scanned and uploaded to Flickr, but in the process of resizing them I got screen shots of small closeups of the paintings showing the layers of color and brush strokes. These small clips were so cool that I copied several of them from her paintings and uploaded them as well.

Here are some of my favorites. To see the entire collection click on the Flickr link above. If you want to have fun, try to match up the abstract clips with the original painting.

Eastern's Historical Resources

Eastern celebrated it's centennial anniversary in 2006. The provost provided funds to hire Joyce Miller, who compiled an inventory of the art, sculpture and other historical artifacts that were on campus at the time.

For 2 years that information has been sitting in an Access database not being used by anyone. Now it has been added to the University Archives Photo and Image Database. So anyone can find photos and information on the art and sculpture on campus.

The inventory may not be complete, because Joyce may not have been able to get into every office with university owned art work. For example, I know that she was unable to get into the Blanton House, so nothing in there was inventoried.

If you know of any art that was missed in the Historical Resources Inventory, leave a comment here and we'll photograph and add it. One other shortcoming is that very few of the art works in the University Archives were inventoried.