New Jersey Libraries Team Up for Statewide Digital Highway

New Jersey is a state known for its roadways, and now an electronic highway is about to be added to the state's resources. The New Jersey State Library has joined with Rutgers University Libraries "to create a web site that will contain digitized historical and cultural heritage materials," the university said. Funded by a $460,000 Institute of Museum and Library Services grant, the New Jersey Digital Highway (NJDH) (www.njdigitalhighway.org) will feature state and local history collections from libraries, museums, other cultural institutions, and individual owners. Materials will include books, diaries, letters, and legal documents, plus moving and still images.

Additional grant partners include the American Labor Museum/Botto House National Landmark, New Jersey State Archives, and New Jersey Historical Society.

Linda Langschied, head of Rutgers's Scholarly Communications Center, told LJ that the university will "work very closely with history teachers to test the site's usability." To that end, the project is developing specialized portals for teachers and their students. "We'll be closely matching the curricular needs that they have," she said.

The educators' portal will link and display metadata for lesson plans and activities with the metadata for the digitized content. The students' portal will function as a search facility for middle- and high school students looking for information and provide simple bulleted guides to finding and using information in term papers and assignments. Special templates for student activities will be developed.

The cultural heritage information portal will provide resources on metadata and digitization best practices, including workflow design and a business model for a digitization project.

Langschied said the university's project teams are developing the site's infrastructure, while the state library is doing a lot of the publicity. "That's the development that largely will be going on this year, although we'll also be working with our collection partners." In addition to the five lead partners, many smaller organizations are joining in. "Part of the concept is that this system will be usable by anyone who has cultural heritage/historical materials."

Among the smaller participants is a church that has records and deeds from the 1700s. An oral history collection of Portuguese Americans in Newark, NJ, from Rutgers professor Kimberley Holton, will be included. The project is also getting materials from the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center and local PBS affiliate WNET-TV. Although the site is live, the historical content is not yet online. "We'll be putting up the real site in the next month or two," Langschied said. "It will be at least a year out before we have any digital collections."

The inaugural theme of the site will be "The Changing Face of New Jersey: The Immigration Experience from Earliest Times to the Present," with topics such as environmental history and transportation history, among others. Participating collections have been chosen based on ownership of high-interest materials, as well as on organization size and diversity. Approximately 10,000 items will be digitized in the first three years.

Core infrastructure is based on FEDORA (Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture). FEDORA adds intelligence to digital objects by incorporating METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) to link metadata to the object and to provide uniform structure maps for multipart objects, such as text and video.

Open Archives Initiative (OAI) strategy allows participants to designate records and collections for OAI data mining. The NJDH will serve as an OAI data provider for the integrated repository collection but also on behalf of individual participating organizations.

Since much of the content will come from local paper archives, the materials need digitizing. Langschied revealed that in many cases, rather than bringing the materials to a digitization facility, the facility will be going to the materials. Contributors can elect to bring their items to Rutgers if necessary, but part of the grant money is for the purchase of laptops and portable scanners that will be loaned. Major partners will receive permanent digitizing stations.

Rutgers will offer training in how to digitize materials according to archival standards. OCLC also provides training, and the University of Illinois offers a two-week online training course, "so there are many ways that we're going to offer digitization training," Langschied said. Project organizers are offering additional training in metadata creation and rights management