Content & Toolkit Overview

Columbia University Libraries plans to develop an innovative framework within which to present historical and other humanities-oriented resources relating to New York City.   In doing this we will build on the experience gained from a variety of institutional digitization activities over the last decade as well as from a number of collaborative projects with other universities to build in depth research tools and databases in the humanities.

A.  Content

Phase I: Initially Digital NYC will consist of a set of Columbia resources that are either of broad interest in themselves or are able to serve an entry to other digital materials in the same subject area.  For instance, a digital version of the Stokes Inconography of Manhattan will provide a virtual geographic and architectural index to other such materials in the archive.

Phase 2:  Additional Columbia resources will be digitized and integrated into the site.  

Phase 3: One or more methods will be established to facilitate the virtual integration of material from other NYC research collections, e.g., OAI harvesting, central collection hosting.

Phase 4:  It may be possible to partner with one or more commercial publishers to provide more current content on the site.

Further description of possible / proposed collection content.

B. Integration, Discovery & Navigation

In order to knit together historical and cultural heritage materials from a variety of sources, the following techniques will be evaluated for use in addition to standard keyword and phrase indexing:

1. Chronological indexing: this might include the assignment of date/time metadata into material with chronological content or references
2. Geographic indexing: this might include the assignment of GIS and/or NYC street grid coordinates
3. Biographical indexing: this might include the incorporation of biographical information into the corpus and the linking of substantive content about individuals to that biographical material or to authoritative external biographical sources.
4. Reference linking:  this might include the creation of Open URL links for citations found in project content as well as making project content itself Open-URL compliant for others to link to.

Because of the large size of the text corpus that will evolve, full featured text indexing will need to include a variety of tools for browsing similar content, filtering result sets and viewing results contextually.

C.  Technologies

The core of the Portal will be a large and growing collection of texts, images, audio files, archival collections, and statistical information encoded using the most appropriate current markup standards, generally TEI or a related standard.   A version of MARC or MODS targeted toward cultural heritage materials will be used for item-level cataloging.   It may also be desirable to include a basic level of "learning object metadata" to facilitate the materials use in course-related presentations.

The Lucene text-indexing software tool will be used to index and retrieve materials that are primarily textual.  An OAI harvester will also be used as appropiate to gather descriptions and links to relevant material in institutions other that Columbia (primarily in Phase 3).

D. Presentation

Topic threads to include:

• People
• Places, Buildings & Landmarks
• Architecture & urban planning
• Law, Politics & Government
• History
• Social issues and movements
• Immigrants, ethnic groups and cultural diversity
• Theater and the Arts
• Business and commerce
• Religion

D.  Contexts

• Scholarly / popular essays on key topic areas for background, and with links into content
• Optional arrangement of selected material into "virtual modules" corresponding to NY City / State classroom instruction
• Bibliographies of modern works covering key topic areas with links to NYC library locations or booksellers
• Knowledge base of NYC-related historical facts and figures configured for FAQ or Ask Jeeves type