Like many cultural heritage institutions, the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Louisville faces the dichotomy of material abundance and budgetary scarcity. Driven by the desire to make historical primary sources accessible online, this organization harnessed the power of the public to transcribe the Louisville Leader, an historic African American newspaper. The first sections of this article define crowdsourcing and describe how it was implemented at the University of Louisville, including the tools adopted and the process used. The latter sections outline the marketing strategy, the public response, and lessons learned from this ongoing project.
In the 1960s, a Louisville photography studio began donating its negatives, prints, and invoices to the University of Louisville Photographic Archives. The Caufield & Shook Collection remains a significant primary source for local history and a prime candidate for digitization. Unfortunately, on its receipt non-archivists processed the collection with little documentation of original order or organizational decision making. Additionally, workflow choices were determined largely by the desire to maximize student labor. In 2017, the Digital Initiatives Librarian worked with in-house application developers and archives staff to create a workflow that has significantly sped up the process of making this valuable photographic collection
This chapter describes the implementation of the WorldCat®1 Local discovery tool in a multiple-library system at a mid-sized university. The catalog data preparation required for implementation is a key focus, including discussion of the use of the OCLC holdings reclamation process. Special circumstances and limitations regarding government documents records are described. The challenge that WorldCat® Local’s architecture presents for a library system with multiple processing units is explained. Additional concepts discussed are the decisions regarding configuration and presentation on the Library’s Web interface, the challenges faced by librarians and staff, and the impact on instruction and reference. Comparisons between the number of searches in the traditional library catalog and WorldCat® Local are presented as well as interlibrary loan requests statistics pre and post implementation. Various difficulties encountered and the applied solutions are explained and discussed as well as ongoing challenges and issues.
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