Search Disabled |
|
|
|
Search Options | Help | Site Map | Cultivate Web Site | ||||
|
|
|||||
| Home | Current Issue | Index of Back Issues |
| Issue 6 Home | Editorial | Features | Regular Columns | News & Events | Misc. | ||
By Esther Gregory and Michael Ryan - February 2002
The CHILDE (Children's Historical Literature Disseminated Throughout Europe) [1] project was developed by Buckinghamshire County Library Service and European team, and six partners from Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Ireland and the UK. In November 2000 a grant of £60,000/ €100,000 was awarded to the project.
The CHILDE partners worked together during the next 12 months to:
The following article describes this process and draws some conclusions from its success.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
In the early part of 2000, a chance conversation between two local government officers in Buckinghamshire sparked off an idea that led to the development of a unique cultural and educational project, CHILDE. The idea itself, to create a Web site based on Europe's rich but disparate heritage of historic children's book collections, would have remained merely a distant vision had a partner search, carried out through the European Cultural Contact Points, not proved so successful. An impressive range of organisations responded to the initial project brief and, after further discussion and exchange of ideas, committed themselves to a bid for funding from the European Commission's Culture 2000 programme. A detailed project plan and budget were devised and these formed the basis for the eventual bid to the Commission.
The project, which by the submission date of May 2000 had acquired the name CHILDE (Children's Historical Literature Disseminated throughout Europe) was developed by Buckinghamshire County Council's Library Service and European team, along with:
Technical advice and assistance was provided by the Higher Education Digitisation Service (HEDS) at the University of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire County Council's IT Unit.
The bid was successful and in October 2000 a grant of €100,000 was awarded to the scheme. The inaugural project meeting was organised for the first week in December and on a windswept and rainy day in Brussels, CHILDE was born.
The key objectives of the CHILDE project were to digitise 1,000 illustrations from six European historical children's book collections and to display these on a specially created Web site. Consideration was given to the digitisation of text as well as images but the constraints of time and budget, along with the idea that this project would have scope for such further development in the future, led us to decide to concentrate the digitisation on visual illustration. The site was would also feature an Education Programme built around four main themes:
In addition, a Best Practice Report, drawing on the project partners' experiences of collection management, preservation, cataloguing and utilisation would be included on the site. All of this was to be achieved with the assistance of Email, fax, phone and through four trans-national meetings to be held in four partner countries over one year, although in the event this was to prove to be an eleven-month year. The culmination of the project would be an international conference, provisionally entitled 'Opening the Portal,' to be held in the lead partner's home locality of Buckinghamshire. At the time of writing, all of these objectives have been met, with some aspects, for example the Web site's underlying database, having developed a far greater, and necessary, sophistication than was at first envisaged.
Aside from the Education Programme and the Best Practice Report, which were written and edited by all of the project partners, based on their professional knowledge and expertise and using the simple expedient of Word, the main technological and organisational challenges lay in the digitisation and Web site creation elements of the project. But before any of this could begin it was first necessary to select 1,000 images from a joint 'project collection' of almost one million books. The partners at the inaugural meeting in Brussels laid down a number of strict selection criteria. It was agreed that the four Education Programme themes, outlined above, were to guide this selection and that, partly with an eye on copyright considerations, we would only include images published before 1890.
The Project Plan, devised with the technical assistance of HEDS, called for the chosen images to be photographed and produced as 35mm slides. The digitisation process itself would be based on these slides. In this way the handling and transportation of many rare and fragile books would be reduced to an absolute minimum. Having agreed in Brussels on the selection criteria, each partner then commissioned professional photographers to produce two sets of 35mm slides. Again taking the advice of HEDS, considerable emphasis was placed on the importance of the quality both of the photography itself and of the physical characteristics of the resulting slides. All partners were agreed that the final images on the Web site would need to be of the highest possible standard if they were to be of real value to their end users. Early in 2000 a 'benchmark selection' of slides was taken to HEDS and subjected to a series of trial scans to highlight any potential problems. It is with no sense of embarrassment that we can state that a very small number of slides, for a variety of reasons, did not initially pass this self imposed quality test and that as a result, some illustrations were re-photographed as a guarantee of quality. The CHILDE site itself now bears witness to the success of this important aspect of the project.
Another important consideration was that of copyright. Although the original illustrations were now free of the European copyright legislation's 70-year statute of limitation on visual images, it was necessary for the photographers to formally assign copyright of the photographs to the CHILDE partnership.
Once the slides had been produced by each partner, using their
own choice of photographer, they were posted to the Project
Co-ordinator at her office in Chesham Library in Buckinghamshire.
From here they were taken to HEDS at the University of
Hertfordshire. HEDS organised the scanning and the production of
2700 dpi resolution master tif images, whose high definition
would compensate for the slight loss of detail intrinsic in the
photography process. From these master images CD ROMs with jpeg
thumbnail and screen sized images, along with their unique file
names, were produced for use on the Web.
The creation of the database, which would hold all the required bibliographic and image data, was in many ways the most important topic that the project team discussed at its second meeting, held in January 2001 in Dublin. Colleagues from Dublin City Public Libraries undertook the initial work of creating the database, using Microsoft Access. There then followed a period of time during which the draft database was bounced back and forth by email between the partners until a consensus was reached on the range and naming of fields. For Buckinghamshire County Council's I.T. Unit, who were providing essential technical support to the project, the reconciling of these different versions of the database was a major issue. By the time of the third project meeting in Bologna in May the design of the database was beginning to feel like a project in itself. However, all of the partners agreed on the final shape of the database and the construction of the CHILDE site moved on
The major design consideration was to understand how users would want to search the site and also, crucially, who we intended or expected those users to be. It had been agreed at the outset of the project that researchers, librarians, teachers and private individuals with an interest in historic children's bibliography would constitute the main audience for the site, but a plea was also made for children. In other words, the site designer would need to combine visual elegance with an ease of operation that would enable a wide range of users to find and make use of the site's various components.
The designer used Microsoft FrontPage to create the site pages. These were then enhanced e.g. through the addition of special language tags so that non-visual browsers could understand the text. Further manual additions were made to the site, including meta-data, such as keywords in various languages, to help promote the site with search engines. The designer also made a simple but very effective use of the European Union's signature colours of blue and yellow.
The database was interrogated via an Active Serve Page (ASP). This was essential in order to coordinate changes being made to the database by the project partners e.g. the names of searchable fields. A few JavaScript 'tweaks' were then added to the ASP to allow the search to focus on the field selected.
Once the various elements were in a sufficiently developed state (please note, we have not used the word 'complete' here) the trial site was placed in the development area of Buckinghamshire County Council's own site, where it was hosted on an Internet Information Server 5 (IIS5) - a Microsoft product that specifically supports FrontPage extensions.
Initially this trial site used only images from the Buckinghamshire Early Children's Book Collection and it was with a considerable sense of excitement that the CHILDE partners were soon able to make use of the Search page to seek out pictures and bibliographic data. As soon as the first few trial searches were undertaken it was clear that in addition to producing detailed book and image data, the user's computer screen would be filled with images of startling clarity. The site worked!
Having got this far and having demonstrated that all the
development work on the site was producing the results we wanted,
it was now necessary for the project partners to complete their
bibliographic entries on their parts of the database. It also
remained for us all to complete work on writing and editing the
Best Practice Reports and the Education Programme. And organise
publicity and promotional events in all partner countries and
organisations to tie in with the official Web site launch week in
September. Oh, and also plan, prepare for and promote the
transnational 'Opening the Portal' conference scheduled for the
19th October 2001. This was nothing if not a busy project!
Eventually however all of this work was achieved and the final
writing up, budget balancing, invoice chasing, and general
managerial tidying up could be done. Less than a year after the
project's first transnational meeting in Brussels, the product
all of the partners' ideas, efforts and continued commitment had
been realised and CHILDE was ready to face the world. Efforts
were made to register the site with the major Internet search
engines and by the end of October 2001, after a few short weeks
of existence, the CHILDE Web site had received 17,761 visits!
Before embarking on CHILDE, the authors spoke to people who had already been involved with other European Commission funded projects. Through this we gained a valuable insight into what should go right and what could go wrong with such a project. To go into detail about this would effectively require a whole new article, but we would like to just highlight some aspects of the way that this project developed that could offer pointers to other projects' futures.
We hope that tomorrow's CHILDE has far to go. It was part of the original vision of the project that one of its outcomes would be the establishment of the foundations of a European network of historical children's book collections. At the time of writing, these foundations are in place. The opportunity has been created for all interested individuals and organisations to meet and build on these foundations in order to establish a European network and seek the resources necessary to give it life. All of the CHILDE project partners are aware of, and indeed are participants in, the considerable international work that is going on in the field of historical children's literature. We are also aware that the CHILDE Web site has the potential to become the principal European site for this type of digitisation and Internet activity. Now that would be a great future for this particular offspring of Culture 2000.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Esther Gregory
CHILDE Project Co-ordinator
Buckinghamshire County Library Service
County Library Headquarters
Gallery Suite
County Hall
Walton Street
Aylesbury
Bucks
HP20 1UU
esther_childe@hotmail.com
<http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/>
Esther Gregory worked for Buckinghamshire Library Service for 6 years. In 1999 she completed a two year postgraduate in Information Management and became Children's Librarian at Aylesbury Lending Library. Finally in the year 2000 she took on the role of Project Co-ordinator for the CHILDE project. Since writing this article, Esther has taken up the post of Virtual Library Development Manager with Bedfordshire Library Service.
Michael Ryan
CHILDE Project Manager/Principal Learning Support Officer:
Buckinghamshire County Library Service
County Library Headquarters
Gallery Suite
County Hall
Walton Street
Aylesbury
Bucks
HP20 1UU
mryan@buckscc.gov.uk
<http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/>
Michael Ryan has worked as a teacher and librarian for 30 years. He currently manages a number of projects, including the CHILDE project. He has written articles for professional journals on various aspects of children's and educational librarianship. Other publications include 'Computers for young people: a select booklist' (YLG) and the 'Buckinghamshire Early Children's Book Collection' (BCC), with Lesley Kumiega. He was until recently a member of the Library Association's Youth Libraries Committee and Chair of the School Libraries Group.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
For citation purposes:
Gregory, E. and Ryan, M. "Bringing CHILDE into the World", Cultivate Interactive, issue
6, 11 February 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue6/childe/>
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Related articles:
If you would like to view similar articles to this one click on a key word below:
< - digitisation - books - children - >
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
|
|