Sean Dolan is a student in the MLIS and IAKM programs at Kent State University. He possess a BA in History from Cleveland State and a great deal of respect for the events of the past and what they can teach us. He is completing this Cain Park Theatre digital web exhibit on the Cleveland Memory Project as a Practicum under the instruction of Preserve Posterity.
The final phase of my Practicum, in which I have endeavored to tell the story of Cain Park's early history through a web exhibit on the Cleveland Memory Project, has proven to be far more difficult and time-consuming than I ever could have imagined. Each and every step of the process- selecting materials, digitizing the materials, digitally cleaning up photographs using Photoshop, creating PDFs of playbills using Adobe Acrobat, uploading all the items, and adding their metadata to Content DM- involves numerous steps of its own. For a variety of reasons, it was not possible to begin actually using the ContentDM software to upload items and metadata to the Cleveland Memory Project website until July 17th. This was the day when I was given my training session at the Cleveland State University (CSU) Special Collections Department. Joanne Cornelius, Digital Productions specialist, and Marsha Miles, Digital Initiatives Librarian (both at CSU's Michael Schwartz Library) provided much-needed information about CSU's standards for digitization and metadata, respectively. Up to this point I had been working off of guidelines provided by my Practicum advisor, Calvin Rydbom of Pursue Posterity. While these instructions provided a good starting point for my digitization efforts, it was not until my ContentDM training session at CSU that I finally felt that I really had a firm grip on what exactly would be required to complete my Practicum.
I had already spent all of June scanning playbills, documents, and some of the hundreds of photographs in the Cain Park collection housed in the basement of the City of Cleveland Heights Department of Planning and Development. Fortunately, because I followed the guidelines that Calvin had provided, roughly ninety-percent of what I had scanned was usable for the Cleveland Memory Project website. However, because of instructions that were unclear, absent, or which I had misinterpreted, I had to go through the tedious process of reformatting, resizing, and renaming a large number of files. Although annoying at first, this gave me a valuable opportunity to use aspects of programs I had never had need for before, such as batch processing. A lot of these skills I picked up will undoubtedly save me a significant amount of time on future projects. Once this was done, I was able to begin using Photoshop to digitally "clean-up" the images on these files. Having never used Photoshop before, I had to learn how to crop, rotate, adjust brightness and contrast, and perform several other operations as I went along. This was actually a rewarding experience, with the added bonus of having yet another skill to add to my resume, but the process took a lot of time. Finally, I was ready to actually begin uploading the items and adding metadata using the ContentDM program. This was the part of the Cain Park project that had interested me in the Practicum in the first place, because two of the focuses of my studies at Kent State University (KSU), in both the Library and Information Science (LIS) and Information Architecture and Knowledge Management (IAKM) programs, have been content management and working with metadata.
The learning curve for ContentDM was not very steep, because the program is very straightforward and intuitive. Plus, my courses at KSU had thoroughly covered subjects like metadata and Library of Congress Authority Headings for names and subjects. Of course, I made mistakes, but I found that it was most often the result of carelessness as I rushed to enter data, knowing how many items have yet to be entered with only a short window of time remaining. Marsha reviewed some of my early entries and pointed out the instances where I had deviated from CSU's "best practices" in my entries. However, it was Calvin who, as my Practicum adviser, has been tasked with reviewing my entries and approving them before they go up on the Memory Project website, who caught and corrected the majority of my aforementioned errors. As with the Digitization and Photoshop stages of my project, there were technical bumps along the road with ContentDM as well. I discovered that about twenty-five percent of the playbills I had digitized had resulted in PDF files too large for the normal ContentDM admin page to handle. This meant that I needed to download and learn to use the Project Client, which allows you prepare a large batch of items ahead of time and upload them all at once (in addition to handling large files). I wish I had tackled learning the Project Client sooner, but I am also glad I did not save it for the very end. The reason for this is my discovery, just this morning, that the Project Client also allows you to create "metadata templates" for different types of files, such as PDFs or JPEGs. Once you have created a template, the Project Client automatically fills in all the metadata fields for which you have provided a default value- for every item you have added to your project queue. This wonderful feature eliminates a whole lot of repetitive typing in a project where a good number of fields have the exact same value for every item that needs to be added to the collection. With the number of photographs and documents I have left to enter in the next two weeks, I am profoundly grateful for this discovery.
It is a great example of how automation, putting machines to work to eliminate the need for human beings to do unpleasant "drudge work", is not just a 20th Century, "Industrial Age" concept. As we advance further into the 21st Century and its "Knowledge Economy", the informational professionals and knowledge workers of the future may find that the way they work is changed not just by software that allows for automation and batch processing, but also semantic analysis tools that "outsource" lower cognitive functions to machine agents. It is expensive to pay human beings to locate, compile, and synthesize information- once we have the ability to do so, why not allow the computers to do this work and free human beings to the critical thinking, analysis, and decision-making tasks of which only we (so far) are capable? These are the sort of topics that interest me professionally, and they are the reason I chose a dual major in both Library and Information Science (LIS) and Information Architecture and Knowledge Management (IAKM). The former still focuses mainly on the traditional work of information professionals such as archivists, librarians, and museum curators. The latter focuses on bringing new management philosophies and technological innovation to an economy that will require the vast majority of professionals, no matter what their field, to work with and manage vast quantities of data, information, and knowledge. I believe there is a great deal of potential for overlap between the MLIS and IAKM disciplines, and I am glad that Kent State has had the foresight to recognize this as well.
I am also grateful to Pursue Posterity, for giving me this opportunity to combine my first academic love, history, with my current pursuits. I might have looked for a Practicum opportunity in a more "corporate" setting and spent the summer working with data that was a lot less interesting- inventories, cost and sales figures, SKU numbers, who knows . . . . Instead I was able to delve into the fascinating history of a historic theater venue that, despite living within thirty miles of it my whole life, I knew absolutely nothing about. It is my hope that when the Cain Park Collection is viewable on the Cleveland Memory Project website, others will find the story of how a high school drama teacher from Cleveland Heights High School helped build the first outdoor community theater in the country as interesting as I did. Rising out of the Great Depression, Cain Park Theatre not only survived, but thrived throughout the 1940's, outlasting a World War and drawing huge audiences even with competition from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Dr. Dina Rees "Doc" Evans and a whole cast of players, both on the stage and behind the scenes, built something that endures to this day. It has been a pleasure working to preserve memories from those "Halcyon Days" in a digital format, so that they will endure even after the last of those captured in so many black and white photographs has passed on.
I had already spent all of June scanning playbills, documents, and some of the hundreds of photographs in the Cain Park collection housed in the basement of the City of Cleveland Heights Department of Planning and Development. Fortunately, because I followed the guidelines that Calvin had provided, roughly ninety-percent of what I had scanned was usable for the Cleveland Memory Project website. However, because of instructions that were unclear, absent, or which I had misinterpreted, I had to go through the tedious process of reformatting, resizing, and renaming a large number of files. Although annoying at first, this gave me a valuable opportunity to use aspects of programs I had never had need for before, such as batch processing. A lot of these skills I picked up will undoubtedly save me a significant amount of time on future projects. Once this was done, I was able to begin using Photoshop to digitally "clean-up" the images on these files. Having never used Photoshop before, I had to learn how to crop, rotate, adjust brightness and contrast, and perform several other operations as I went along. This was actually a rewarding experience, with the added bonus of having yet another skill to add to my resume, but the process took a lot of time. Finally, I was ready to actually begin uploading the items and adding metadata using the ContentDM program. This was the part of the Cain Park project that had interested me in the Practicum in the first place, because two of the focuses of my studies at Kent State University (KSU), in both the Library and Information Science (LIS) and Information Architecture and Knowledge Management (IAKM) programs, have been content management and working with metadata.
The learning curve for ContentDM was not very steep, because the program is very straightforward and intuitive. Plus, my courses at KSU had thoroughly covered subjects like metadata and Library of Congress Authority Headings for names and subjects. Of course, I made mistakes, but I found that it was most often the result of carelessness as I rushed to enter data, knowing how many items have yet to be entered with only a short window of time remaining. Marsha reviewed some of my early entries and pointed out the instances where I had deviated from CSU's "best practices" in my entries. However, it was Calvin who, as my Practicum adviser, has been tasked with reviewing my entries and approving them before they go up on the Memory Project website, who caught and corrected the majority of my aforementioned errors. As with the Digitization and Photoshop stages of my project, there were technical bumps along the road with ContentDM as well. I discovered that about twenty-five percent of the playbills I had digitized had resulted in PDF files too large for the normal ContentDM admin page to handle. This meant that I needed to download and learn to use the Project Client, which allows you prepare a large batch of items ahead of time and upload them all at once (in addition to handling large files). I wish I had tackled learning the Project Client sooner, but I am also glad I did not save it for the very end. The reason for this is my discovery, just this morning, that the Project Client also allows you to create "metadata templates" for different types of files, such as PDFs or JPEGs. Once you have created a template, the Project Client automatically fills in all the metadata fields for which you have provided a default value- for every item you have added to your project queue. This wonderful feature eliminates a whole lot of repetitive typing in a project where a good number of fields have the exact same value for every item that needs to be added to the collection. With the number of photographs and documents I have left to enter in the next two weeks, I am profoundly grateful for this discovery.
It is a great example of how automation, putting machines to work to eliminate the need for human beings to do unpleasant "drudge work", is not just a 20th Century, "Industrial Age" concept. As we advance further into the 21st Century and its "Knowledge Economy", the informational professionals and knowledge workers of the future may find that the way they work is changed not just by software that allows for automation and batch processing, but also semantic analysis tools that "outsource" lower cognitive functions to machine agents. It is expensive to pay human beings to locate, compile, and synthesize information- once we have the ability to do so, why not allow the computers to do this work and free human beings to the critical thinking, analysis, and decision-making tasks of which only we (so far) are capable? These are the sort of topics that interest me professionally, and they are the reason I chose a dual major in both Library and Information Science (LIS) and Information Architecture and Knowledge Management (IAKM). The former still focuses mainly on the traditional work of information professionals such as archivists, librarians, and museum curators. The latter focuses on bringing new management philosophies and technological innovation to an economy that will require the vast majority of professionals, no matter what their field, to work with and manage vast quantities of data, information, and knowledge. I believe there is a great deal of potential for overlap between the MLIS and IAKM disciplines, and I am glad that Kent State has had the foresight to recognize this as well.
I am also grateful to Pursue Posterity, for giving me this opportunity to combine my first academic love, history, with my current pursuits. I might have looked for a Practicum opportunity in a more "corporate" setting and spent the summer working with data that was a lot less interesting- inventories, cost and sales figures, SKU numbers, who knows . . . . Instead I was able to delve into the fascinating history of a historic theater venue that, despite living within thirty miles of it my whole life, I knew absolutely nothing about. It is my hope that when the Cain Park Collection is viewable on the Cleveland Memory Project website, others will find the story of how a high school drama teacher from Cleveland Heights High School helped build the first outdoor community theater in the country as interesting as I did. Rising out of the Great Depression, Cain Park Theatre not only survived, but thrived throughout the 1940's, outlasting a World War and drawing huge audiences even with competition from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Dr. Dina Rees "Doc" Evans and a whole cast of players, both on the stage and behind the scenes, built something that endures to this day. It has been a pleasure working to preserve memories from those "Halcyon Days" in a digital format, so that they will endure even after the last of those captured in so many black and white photographs has passed on.
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