h. What was your greatest challenge in training staff or volunteers?
We had planned on training volunteers to work on indexing of issues of the Morning Leader. However, since the scanning consumed the bulk of the project time, with the remainder devoted to nailing down metadata and indexing structure. Training of staff and volunteers is a major component of the "Washington at Work" project (with Ellensburg Public Library and UW).

i. What was your greatest challenge in indexing content or creating the metadata?
During the course of this project, I came to realize that great care is needed in assigning metadata to each page image. This process assures that the pages will be accessible on the World Wide Web, but more importantly, adds value to the original newspaper in the creation of the first comprehensive index of its content. Because this was a pilot project, I was able to try out different combinations of index terms mapped to various Dublin Core elements, and tailor how the descriptive display appears to the user. For example, several searchable fields are keyed to the DC title field, including issue & page, article titles, vessel name (shipping was key to the local economy of the time), personal names, and advertisements.

One of the challenges of indexing a newspaper is determining where to stop; it is tempting to retype the text of each article! I spent a morning discussing newspaper indexing with an expert in the newspaper/microfilm department of the University of Washington Libraries. The indexer needs to rely on various print and electronic reference resources to verify names and assign appropriate controlled-vocabulary subject headings (i.e.; LCSH). Resources I found particularly useful, other than local history texts, were the OCLC/WLN Lasercat bibliographic database, the 2000 edition of the Encyclopedia of Washington, and policalgraveyard.com, "the web site that tells where the dead politicians are buried." Another indexing challenge involves handling sensitive text, for example, racist phrases that would never appear in a modern newspaper.

The indexing of the newspaper, while time consuming, is probably the most rewarding part of this type of imaging project, because it is what brings history alive.

j. What was your greatest challenge in scanning the objects?
The plan for this project was to outsource the scanning of microfilm. The objective was to create images in TIFF4 format, which would be converted by the vendor to the GIF or JPEG images required by the CONTENT program. Because the interior pages of each issue of the Morning Leader were undated and unpaginated, we specified that each image would be tagged to identify date and page.

This was the most time-consuming and problematic aspect of the project. In the end, we opted for sample scans from the "gold standard" vendor and a local vendor in order to compare image quality and ease of uploading.

Local vendor experience: A list of possible vendors was obtained from the ReferenceUSA business directory (available online at the library through the Statewide Database Licensing program). Based on company descriptors and number of employees, Northwest Center Document Management of Seattle was contacted for a price quote. A copy of the museum microfilm was sent for sample scans, which could be transmitted back to the library via attachment to electronic mail. Unfortunately, the JPEG file conversion format could no be opened with software available on Port Townsend Library computers. After several conversations with NW Center and UW CONTENT administration staff, we decided to purchase the Adobe PhotoShop 5.5 software for resizing images and changing the file format. Unfortunately, the JPEG images were still incompatible with the software. Finally, we determined that the best course of action was to create TIFF images, which could be converted to JPEG with a "batch action" process in PhotoShop. In the meantime, I contacted other local vendors, who either answered with a machine or neglected to follow up on my inquiry.

The staff at Northwest Center tried very hard to make the scanning work; the problem was that their image software was less commonly used. This whole process took a lot of time because of shipping of microfilm back and forth, vacations, voice mail phone tag, and so forth. Complicating matters, the director of the museum was unwilling to loan the microfilm from the Jefferson County Historical Society library for the extended time needed to make the test scans. We ended up borrowing film from the Washington State library on interlibrary loan.

Out of state vendor: At the suggestion of Geri Bunker Ingram, Digital Projects Coordinator for UW Libraries, I contacted Preservation Resources in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a division of OCLC (commonly known as PresRes). This is an organization with much experience in digitization of library materials, and they began the process with a lengthy questionnaire regarding the specifications of the microfilm source and the digital product. Not surprisingly, the price quote was considerably higher than the one from NW Center. In conversations with the representative from PresRes, we decided to purchase a clean microfilm negative from Bell & Howell and have it shipped to PresRes, who the provided a scan of a sample of the issues of the newspaper on the roll.

As I suspected, the images from the negative film that were scanned by PresRes are of much higher quality than those from the local microfilm positives.