publications fall into four categories: plays, musicals, songbooks, and
advertisements. Among the items of special historical significance in this
collection are songs by noted musicologist, Charles Seeger, and a short
previously unpublished one-act play by Tennessee Williams. The collection also
contains the books for three musicals published by what is now known as the
Government Printing Office. These hitherto unheard of musicals were written by
Guys ‘N’ Dolls librettist, Frank Loesser, and 2001: Space Odyssey composer,
Alex North, and were choreographed by folklorist, José Limon, all before they
became celebrities. Within many of these publications are valuable photos,
reproductions of newspaper articles, and letters. Although these documents are
not rare or in need of restoration and preservation, we believe the organization of
the documents into a single collection that we will make available and searchable
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on the World Wide Web would be unique and would be valuable to great
numbers of users.
Mission
One of the main purposes of digitizing the the World War II War Bond
Promotions materials is to create awareness of the existence of this special
collection of documents, not just in the academic community, but also among the
general public. The collection is currently almost completely unknown, even
among scholars in the field.
By digitizing the collection, we will make it searchable, which will allow
users to interact with it more richly than if they were simply looking through the
printed materials. Also, the digital version of the collection will permit users to
actually listen to the musical pieces contained within the collection. We believe
that this feature will increase its educational value significantly.
Given the recent increased interest in the World War II era, as illustrated
by the release of the movie “Pearl Harbor” and Tom Brokaw’s book, The
Greatest Generation, we believe that this is an opportune time to digitize this
collection and help raise awareness about this important period in history. We
hope that it will prove to be a valuable addition to other pre-existing digital
libraries with World War II themes (a list of these other World War II related
digital library sites can be found at
http://www.academicinfo.net/histww2library.html).
Goals
Our main goal is to create a digital library that is user-friendly and yet
supports the kind of advanced searching capabilities that scholars and perhaps
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lay people will find useful when conducting research on the collection. We hope
to create a solid information architecture for the site. By separating the content
from presentation, we expect to ease the process of changing the site’s interface,
which will most likely be necessary in the future as browser technologies change
and new web markup language standards are endorsed by the Word Wide Web
Consortium (http://www.w3.org). The separation of content from presentation will
also make it possible to more easily port the collection to other media, such as
CD-ROM or DVD-ROM, should this be desired at some point in the future.
Who is our audience?
We anticipate that this project will be useful to a variety of communities.
Those interested in wartime songs—scholars (folklorists, ethnomusicologists,
theater historians, and WWII historians) and WWII aficionados—will find these
songs exciting because many of them were (a) composed by amateurs, and/or
(b) written or adapted by children, and because the publication of songs of this
type is rare. In addition, the three complete musicals—perhaps the most
professional items in the collection--will pique an interest in theater historians,
historical musicologists, and possibly professional and amateur theater
producers looking for a new hit show in today’s revival market.
We also believe this collection will prove valuable to those interested in
wartime images. Documentary filmmakers and photojournalists, as well as
academic researchers, often complain about the canonization of a particular core
of images that happens to reside in the Smithsonian Archives. This collection
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would make available visual perspectives of the World War II era to which
photojournalists have not yet given a voice.
Those interested in genealogy might be interested in using this collection
to find special information about their relatives and friends. This collection is
interesting in that many of its materials link together specific names and places.
There is, for example, a newspaper clipping of a woman winning a war song
contest in Akron, OH. Family members may have only seen that clipping in the
original newspaper, but may never have known that the U.S. government
nationally recognized the incident.
High school and college teachers could make use of this material to
present multiple perspectives on WWII. On one hand, professors could highlight
the propagandistic, jingoistic nature of these materials—one gets a fresh insight
into how the U.S. government was promoting the war on every level. On the
other hand, professors could highlight this period as a time when the government
was encouraging great quantities of artistic expression from amateurs and semiprofessionals,
a time when there were numerous prizes and awards being given
to encourage creativity.
Copyright:
The War Department of the U.S. Government created all of the materials
in this collection, and as such, they all exist in the public domain; therefore, there
are no known copyright issues. Pre-existing materials that the War Department
used for propaganda were already in the public domain, and the government
automatically gave public domain status to materials created by civilians and
soldiers for the bond promotion campaign. Sound recordings made for
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presentation on the Web will belong to the Digital Library Project, and we will
make these freely available to the public. Although these materials are legally
free from copyright restrictions, certain parties may not wish, for whatever
reason, to see these works displayed on the Internet. We are concerned,
namely, about the estates of the more famous composers and authors who have
their works in this collection. Therefore, we will contact their estates to get a
sense of how they would like us to handle this material.
Collection Maintenance and Development
This digitized collection will be hosted free of charge on IU’s web server,
and therefore, any ‘server upkeep’ responsibilities will be theirs. Because of the
finite quantity of data that we are digitizing, we do not anticipate significant
development on this project after its completion; we foresee just two minor
upkeep tasks. (1) We will keep copies of the project stored on backup media and
will house this media in our facilities. It is possible that years to come, this media
might become defective—the life-span of CD-Rs is still unknown. Therefore, we
will be ready to transfer the files to other media when the time arises. Being a
Digital Library Program, we have a member of staff that is responsible for the
maintenance of all of our web projects. We will add the task of maintaining this
project (i.e. making back-up copies of this project, updating media storage, etc.)
to this staff member’s workload, and s/he will periodically upkeep the project in
conjunction with other maintenance tasks. (2) The bibliographies provided by our
researchers will eventually grow out-of-date. We will periodically contact
graduate students on our campus and ask them to update these bibliographies.
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Acquisition Process and Handling Issues
All of these materials are stored in IU’s Government Publications
department in its function as a U.S. Government Document Depository. This
department has already given us permission to work with and electronically
publish these materials, with the minor requirement that we give Web space to
highlight their other collections. While we are working with these materials, they
will not be available for use by library patrons. However, if patrons request these
materials, they can acquire them through IU’s interlibrary loan service from other
U.S. Government Document Depositories. These documents will not require
extraordinary care for two reasons: (a) they are not ancient or even old, and the
government published numerous copies of each item, and (b) because both the
Government Publications Department and the Digital Library Project reside in the
same building, there should not be any shipping or handling problems to arise
when transporting them to our work area.
Access
This collection will be accessible through the WWW. Our aim is to
disseminate these materials to as many users as possible, and thus, no fee or
registration will be required to view our site. In order to make full use of this site,
users will need Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher, and
RealPlayer. Because all documents included are in the public domain, anyone
with access to the World Wide Web will have access to the collection.
For us, access also implies knowledge; users must know about the project
before they can access it. Therefore, we plan to heavily promote the project in a
variety of communities, so that anyone who might have an interest in the web site
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will have heard of it. One idea that we have so far is to have the unveiling of the
project coincide with a historic WWII date like Pearl Harbor or D-Day, just as IU’s
Hoagy Carmichael collection was unveiled on his birthday.
Features & Functionality:
We will digitally scan each page of an object in the TIFF format for archival
purposes. We will then create smaller GIF files for use on the World Wide Web.
Users will be able to flip through web pages as if they were flipping through the
objects themselves, taking note of the formatting of the text, the organization of
pictures, etc. We will create a digital table of contents for each page to facilitate
easy navigation, and each page will contain hyperlinks to other pages within a
given item. We consider this method of presentation more accessible than a
PDF conversion, because of the limited dispersion of the plug-in that displays
PDFs.
We will also convert pictures into GIFs, and will descriptively index similar
to what we will do with the song lyrics. Index names like “boy with rifle pointed at
mock Nazi,” or “middle age woman happily buying war bonds in Ithaca, New
York” will help users find the images they will be looking for. This part of the
project will require a double phase of indexing. First, the appropriate historian
will determine the most crucial information that s/he would convey about the
content of each picture. Second, the metadata specialist would format the
historian’s captions into a mode suitable for further indexing.
We will also scan each object through an OCR application. The OCRproduced
pages will allow us to construct a search engine that enables users to
look for keywords of their choice within each object, or within the entire collection.
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We will then format the OCR text and display on a text only version of the site;
users will be able to download pages quickly for easy reading, and will have a
second way to browse the material. We feel OCR is a preferable method of input
to manual key entry because of many the unique text formatting issues. With
manual key entry, a typist would need to use extra time to determine a new
margin layout for each given song or poem, while with OCR, the computer will be
able to quickly accomplish this task.
The OCR processing will also allow us to extract materials from the
objects and organize them in ways that are more meaningful; users probably will
not be searching by object, but instead by the genre of material within the object.
On the home page, for example, the user will be able to access an index and
jump to a sub-index of all the song lyrics by title, song lyrics by first line (common
in many song indexes), materials by year, materials by genre, or perhaps of
composers and authors. Users who come to the site looking specifically for
materials related to Frank Loesser will have the option of moving directly to our
index rather than using the search engine.
A special component of our project will be the recordings that we will make
of each piece of sheet music in the collection. Users will be able to hear what the
music may have sounded like. This is particularly valuable in the many cases of
song lyrics in the collection that bear the inscription, “Sung to the tune of….”
Users today and in the future may not recognize those song references, and thus
might feel alienated without the aid of the MP3s. All of the composers in this
collection have arranged their music for voice and piano, and therefore their
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songs will be relatively easy to record. We will convert these recordings to MP3
files, and users will be able to download them from our site. Users will find links
to recordings next to song lyrics or items of sheet music, and there will be a
separate index of each recording.
The collection will also include many research components that link it to a
variety of academic communities, and to the public. Each researcher—an
ethnomusicologist, a theatre and dance historian, and a WWII historian—will
prepare an overview essay that situates the collection in a different historical
context. The researchers will then annotate the songs, pictures, authors, and
composers that they feel are noteworthy. These annotations will exist in an
optional frame below each GIF and OCR page; users will decide if they would
like to visit the site with or without a tour guide. Researchers will also provide a
selected bibliography, discography, and/or filmography that direct(s) the users to
relevant readings, recordings, and films.
Finally, there will be a page with links to other Digital Library projects, and
to outside pages that have related materials. There will also be an ‘about’ page
that encapsulates the mission and methods of the project, and that explains who
and what is the nature of the Digital Library Project.
How It Will Be Done
The Digital Library Project already owns or has free access to much of the
technical equipment needed to create this project. We have high-end digital
scanners, software for scanning, for OCR, for web development, and for
converting WAVs to MP3s, our own development server, a web server (IUB), and
a recording studio (IU School of Music). Upgrades to this equipment are
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automatically included in our annual budget, so if we need to upgrade this
collection in the future, we will certainly have the technology to allow this to
happen.
We will begin our project by scanning each page of our collection as
images into TIFF format. We will then rescan all photos and drawings as GIFs.
This phase will take 2 weeks of full time work by an imaging technician. Our
project supervisor will check to make sure that the scans are high quality enough
for web presentation. After this phase, we will immediately send copies of the
materials to the researchers, musicians, and front-end web developer. In this
second phase, the musicians and engineer will record the music, the engineer
will convert the audio files to MP3s, the researchers will compile essays,
annotation, and the bibliographies, and the web developer will prepare the web
design (i.e. graphics, layout, search engines, and overall thematic appearance).
Simultaneously, a technician will be running OCR scans of the materials, and a
part time graduate student will be proofreading the copies.
In the third phase of the project, we will send the annotations, audio files,
images, and all other materials, back to the web designer for a period of final web
development, and to the metadata specialist for indexing and cataloging. Toward
the end of this phase, the Digital Library Project will design advertisements, and
will get in touch with other libraries that have similar collections and let them
know of the project.
Financial Plans
Below, is a table that outlines our budget for the project:
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Activity Duration Cost
Scanning 2 weeks $11.50 x 80 hrs = $920 plus 25% benefits = $1150
OCR, extracting images and
XML markup
6 weeks $20.00 x 120 hrs = $2400 plus 25% benefits = $3000
Recording music 5 weeks $12.00 x 100 hrs = $1200 x 3 = $3600
Front-end web 4 weeks $20.00 x 160 hrs = $3200 plus 25% benefits = $4000
Back-end web 10 weeks $25.00 x 400 hrs = $10000 plus 25% benefits =
$12500
Metadata 8 weeks $21.00 x 40 hrs = $840 plus 25% benefits = $1050
Project Supervisor 10 weeks $50,000 per year 10% = $5000
Researchers 8 weeks $50,000 per year 10% = $4000 x 3 = $12000
A word on the music fees: Indiana University—Bloomington has one of the more
acclaimed music schools in the country. Any graduate student would be able to
provide a professional level interpretation of the music of our collection. Being
graduate students, however, we can ask them to record this music at a relatively
low fee.
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Project Phases/Timeline
Task Duration Start Finish Predecessors
Scanning 2w Wed 8/1/01 Tue 8/14/01
OCR, extract images, XML
markup
6w Wed 8/15/01 Tue 9/25/01 1
Record music 5w Wed 8/1/01 Tue 9/4/01
Front-end web development 4w Wed 8/1/01 Tue 8/28/01
Back-end web development 10w Wed 8/1/01 Tue 10/9/01
Metadata 8w Wed 8/15/01 Tue 10/9/01 1
Project Supervisor 10w Wed 8/1/01 Tue 10/9/01
Researchers 8w Wed 8/1/01 Tue 9/25/01
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Conceptual Model
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