Finding and Using Moving Images In Context

Meeting yesterday in Portland with Steve Bromage, Assistant Director, and Candace Kanes, Maine Memory Network Curator and Historian. Teeter Bibber and I were there to talk about Northeast Historic Film digital video in online exhibits and to see a demonstration of their soon-to-be-launched Sitebuilder utility. The Maine Community Heritage Project (MCHP), with IMLS funding, is intended to help groups create sites within the Maine Memory Network.

Using Sitebuilder, local teams will be able to add text, historic items, contemporary images, links, audio, and video to their website, and customize menu items, layout, etc. Each team will receive full training and support in the use of these tools. Creating a website through the MCHP will enable your team to take advantage of Maine Memory’s robust infrastructure, expand your community’s presence on the web, and to present its history within the context of a nationally recognized website that thousands of people throughout Maine and across the country use to learn about Maine history.

The example, on Maine’s Swedish Colony, shows flexibility; it looks easy to learn and pleasing to read. The underlying content management system will permit upload and import of digitized still images, documents, audio, and video (.mov files).

Northeast Historic Film could provide footage for use in these community sites, and also for Maine History Online, another initiative consisting of 100 topical web exhibits.

Kathy Amoroso, Director of Digital Projects, created an example of footage from NHF’s Hackett Collection in a Maine Memory Network result–tuberculosis sanatoria being a topic under construction. Kathy Amoroso says, “The user has to scroll down to see the video. We plan on making the interface more friendly in the future.” Their plans include backing off the watermarking shown here.

We talked about formal and informal ways large collections, like those at Maine Historical Society and Northeast Historic Film, are prioritized for digitization and interpretation:

• curators’ choice
• frequently requested by researchers
• already digitized for reuse (by paying customers)
• new & important arrivals to the institution
• pressing themes and topics
• other ongoing initiatives

Another issue in our shared selection and contextualization realm is how the institution and the user understand the relation of items (Maine Memory Network records are items) to collections. In particular, Northeast Historic Film intends to work through the relations of short clips (learning objects) with their original arrangement (often a reel) and that reel’s place within a described collection–its fonds.