About This Project
Welcome to the prototype for Lansing Historical Society's online presence!
This digital library prototype was undertaken as an individual final project in Rutgers University's 553: Digital Libraries class in Fall 2007.
The site was created in Notepad++ by Kelli Staley.
Purpose:
Fitting with the historical society's mission to record and preserve the history that is our great heritage, this prototype digitizes selected portions of the museum's collection, and presents them online.
Presenting selected artifacts in this way allows for the creation of a deeper user experience as it is possible to link to other historical
information of the time period, provide additional details and provide a more interactive educational context that may be used as a
supplement to classroom instruction, and allow access to selected artifacts when the museum is not open to visitors.
The museum's collection of First Lady dolls in replica inaugural gowns are unique, and the museum's annual Festival of Lights Christmas Tree display is extremely popular with visitors in suburban Chicago and Northwest Indiana.
This project is also crucial, since the Lansing Historical Society's only existing online presence is a page on the Lansing Public Library's website listing the museum's hours.
What will be included:
Initially, this project will focus on two of the museum's popular special collections: the First Ladies Dolls and the Christmas Trees and provide a limited selection of artifacts from the general collection.
The Plan & Procedure:
- Take original photographs of the display(s)
- Digital photographs were taken for prototype purposes. Photographs are not of an archival quality.
- All photographs of museum artifacts were taken by Kelli Staley.
- Determine site layout & consistent navigation
- A static navigation bar is used throughout the site for consistency.
- Varying Cascading Style Sheets are used for the 3 major sections of the website,
allowing the background to indicate the section of the website.
- Create dynamic pages for each, linking to other relevant sites, such as the official White House biographies of the First Ladies, informational sites about Christmas traditions in various countries
- Individual pages were created for items in the collection.
- Smaller dimension images are linked to the full-sized image to reduce download times.
- Relevant links were selected and hyperlinked for the two featured collections,
preference was given to reputable, nationally recognized, sites when available.
- Create a search box for the site.
- Search hints provided to guide users toward types of search terms indexed.
- Create metadata for pages allowing retrieval by searching mechanism.
- Usability testing.
- Classmates, coworkers, and cohort members provided feedback during the design process.
Objectives Reached:
- The Lansing Historical Society now has an opportunity to showcase portions of the museum's collection online.
- Additional interest in local history, the Historical Society and the museum may be generated.
- A popular seasonal exhibit is now available year-round, instead of only 5 weeks out of the year.
- Additional resources relating to museum exhibits have been collected, making the digital library an opportunity to learn more about the items, people and cultures represented in the exhibits. Local schoolteachers could use the digital library as a teaching tool in conjunction with a field trip to the museum.
Challenges & Proposed Solutions
- Difficulties in photographing some items due to lighting challenges and equipment available.
This could be addressed if the museum wished to pursue this prototype and develop into an official project, as then delicate items would be removed from display cases and photographed archivally.
A photographer (preferably professional) should be a part of the project to deal with the lighting challenges.
- Exposure needed to capture ambient glow of Christmas tree lights was not sufficient to capture detail in decorations. A second photograph with increased lighting was also taken to show decoration details.
- Initial search box was attempted with Google Custom Search Engine, although with little control of when the website would be crawled for index, this proved ineffective. Lack of websites linking to the prototype also adversely affected the crawl rate.
An alternate search box and indexing website was located, FusioNBot which proved an effective solution.
- Limited information was available about some of the items in the archive, resulting in limited metadata. Additional information may be available from individual members of the Historical Society and should be recorded.
- Javascript included at the bottom of webpages intended to list the last update date of the page malfunctioned, or is incompatible with the web host and was removed. The same javascript code functions correctly on another server.
- Feedback from classmates and the professor indicated the digital library should link back to the "main site" which is non-existent, so this "about" page has been expanded to indicate that.
- Some items in the museum's collection were excluded from this project due to potential copyrights. Due to time constraints, permission to use the additional images was not secured in time.
Future Opportunities
- Promote online presence with the official Village of Lansing website.
- Include additional seasonal exhibits, such as the June display of antique wedding dresses.
- Include written interviews, or audio interview files, documenting a 'virtual' tour of the museum.
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