FROM PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE TO DIGITAL ASSET
Transcript
Ayla Toussaint (00:07):
I’m Ayla Toussaint. I’m the museum archivist for Vizcaya Museum and Gardens.
Ayla Toussaint (00:11):
Right now, we are in our secure offsite storage, where we house the majority of our archival collections.
Ayla Toussaint (00:17):
Today, we are going to be talking about the scanning process for our historic correspondence, and that ties directly into the Yours Truly project, where we make this correspondence available for the public to view.
Ayla Toussaint (00:29):
So our correspondence collection, which we’re currently digitizing, is approximately 25,000 letters. These letters range from 1907 through all the way up to about the 1930s, although we have some as late as the 1950s. The majority of the collection though is between 1914 and 1922, which are the construction years for the house and the gardens.
Ayla Toussaint (00:53):
So this process can be tedious and time-consuming, and it takes a lot of attention to detail. When we begin the process, we select the correspondence that we’re going to be digitizing. Our digitization process, we’re going in order by year. And so, we started in 1907, and now we are all the way through 1915. And so, we’ll select the box. We’ll take out a folder of correspondence. We’ll set the folder on the table. We will then take each piece of correspondence individually and scan it on our flatbed scanner. We use specific DPI and file types to ensure long-term preservation. After we capture the scan, we check to make sure that it was captured accurately, and then we code what we call metadata.
Ayla Toussaint (01:40):
So metadata is data about the thing that we just captured. Data about data, essentially. So it’s things like who is the letter to, who is the letter from, what is the date of the letter, and then what’s the letter about. We use controlled vocabularies, also known as keywords, to help us accurately and quickly describe what the letter is about, so that you, as the user, can find those things more quickly. After that, we upload all of the files into our CMS, or collections management system, and then that talks to the website and allows these things to be searchable by you all.
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