2018 Upper Midwest Digital Collections Conference

In 2016, Iowa State University Library was awarded a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources to create the Avian Archives of Iowa Online, a web portal for digital Iowa ornithological primary sources dating from 1895-2012. The items selected for this project incorporate a range of genres which reveal both the human elements of birding as well as more scientific field observations. A major portion of our project is to test a method for the extraction of biodiversity data from archival collections. In addition to DublinCore records, we are creating a second layer of metadata for a subset of detailed bird sighting records from the Iowa Ornithologists’ Union to encode these records using field observation data standards (DarwinCore) for sharing via natural science data consortia.
 
This session will provide an introduction to how we have developed and managed this large project using a combination of existing tools, new metadata practices, and custom web development. We will demonstrate how we are managing this project in the midst of a migration to new digital collections software and how we have relied on, and contributed to, open metadata resources.