Wulfman on the Modernist Journals Project
Cliff Wulfman is working at Brown – lucky us! (Major shout-out to Cliff.) The full title of his paper is “The Modernist Journals Project: A new architecture.”
Here’s the MJP site. It’s evolved from a quite small-scale faculty project. Cliff talks about how to take one of those and move it toward technologies that will allow it to grow and expand and move at a healthy pace. Their primary-source set is pretty large: modernism grew up largely in periodicals, and they’re digitizing them and putting them online.
Complete runs of magazines are scarce, CW says. Even when they exist, oftentimes the advertising has been stripped.
The MJP started out with a desktop scanner and an OCR (optical-character-recognition) package. One office, one faculty member, several students. That’s all. They tried to digitize all 30 volumes – nearly 18,000 pages! – of The New Age (“a weekly review of politics, literature, and art”) that way.
The limits of the original implementation: it was labor-intensive, hand-scanned and hand-coded; and it was served through eclectic, hand-made HTML pages. The MJP was outgrowing the prot in which it was seeded, CW says. It needed:
- engagement with the concept of “cyberinfrastructure”
- embrace of new technologies, standards, best practices that weren’t in place when the project was first conceived.
So they stepped back and devised a new architecture:
- complex digital objects based on digital library standards (METS, MODS, MADS)
- XML substrate
- data- [?] and database- driven service
- polymorphous delivery: can deliver in formats other than PDF
We then had a demo. Go look at the site for more. :)
Future directions:
- access to new scanner technolgoies will enable vast collection growth
- developing an interlinked encyclopedia of modernism
- build on Fedora‘s digital library infrastructure