Abstract

Indiana University (IU) proposes to create a model for integrating multimedia materials and distributing them via the Internet by highlighting its widely popular collection of items pertaining to master songwriter Hoagy Carmichael. The project will accomplish two goals: first, it will preserve and digitize unique resources that appeal both to the general public and to scholars of twentieth-century American music; and second, the project will provide a model for presenting these various media through a web site that is meaningful to these distinct audiences. This "dual-target" model will contribute to the knowledge base of other museums and libraries who wish to increase access to their own diverse collections (which may include field recordings, manuscripts, images, and three-dimensional artifacts), and in so doing, help these institutions in using technology to meet their complementary goals of outreach and research. The diversity of items within Indiana University’s Hoagy Carmichael collection—from original musical scores and signed photographs to unreleased recordings of the composer’s music and films in which he appeared—provides the inspiration as well as the intellectual framework for this undertaking.

Specifically, the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music (ATM) and the Indiana University Libraries propose to digitize every item in IU’s collections pertaining to the life and career of master songwriter Hoagland "Hoagy" Carmichael (1899-1981). The collections include approximately 250 hours of sound recordings, 4,550 pages of printed and textual materials, and 1,070 photographs. These materials will be available at three access points: a public web site, which will offer selections of the collection; a digital library web site, which will offer a complete finding aid and access to digitized materials at all levels of resolution; and workstations in the Archives of Traditional Music connected to the University network where every digital item will be available to scholars and museum visitors. Digitization will also prolong the life of these materials by providing surrogates which can be examined or listened to in lieu of the originals and thus reduce deterioration.

IU has substantial experience in audio digitization, both in the Archives of Traditional Music and in the Music Library, where over 5,000 hours of audio have been digitized to date and stored for online access. This proposal builds upon the accomplishments of IU’s Variations Project, a national model in distributing CD-quality sound via computer networks. The on-campus listening copies of the Carmichael materials will be streamed from Variations for use on campus, and the low bit rate selections will be streamed to users over the Internet.

Showcasing Hoagy Carmichael’s career is an ideal subject for a new media project at Indiana University. Carmichael grew up in Bloomington, Indiana and graduated from the IU School of Law. He composed his enduring pop standard, "Star Dust," in Bloomington, and the story of its creation has become an integral part of local history. Carmichael valued his association with the community, and as a result, he and his heirs have contributed to Indiana University many materials pertaining to Carmichael’s career. In fact, the Hoagy Carmichael Collection at IU’s Archives of Traditional Music offers the largest grouping of materials pertaining to Carmichael’s life available anywhere. Complementing this collection are Carmichael’s manuscripts and sheet music at the Lilly Library, IU’s principal special collections repository, as well as materials at the IU Archives.

IU will provide access to the Carmichael collections through a home page devoted to the project, which will contain introductory materials and finding aids. The home page will be a launching point that leads users to two separate but complementary directions: one for scholars and one for the general public. The general interest site will follow the museum model by offering examples of audio, video, text, and photographs, simulating a visit to the Hoagy Carmichael Room at the Archives of Traditional Music. The scholarly site will follow a digital library model, offering a complete finding aid, plus selections of digital objects, including sound files of field recordings, home movies, original music manuscripts and photographs.

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Introduction

Hoagy Carmichael’s songs are among the most memorable and widely recognized of the early twentieth-century. Read the titles, and you’re likely to sing them instead. "In the Cool, Cool , Cool of the Evening." "Georgia on My Mind." "In the Still of The Night." It is no surprise that millions of Americans, even if they do not know Carmichael by name, know and love his music.

During his 50-year career, Bloomington-native Hoagy Carmichael became renowned as a singer, pianist, actor, TV and radio personality, and most significantly, as a composer. Indeed, he was one of the master songwriters of the twentieth century: "the most talented, inventive, sophisticated and jazz-oriented of all the great craftsmen" according to popular music scholar Alec Wilder (1972). His enduring pop standard, "Star Dust," has been recorded more than 1,600 times and is translated into thirty languages.

Hoagy Carmichael offered unique contributions within the context of twentieth-century popular American music history. His songs were experimental and innovative, reflecting his interest in jazz, folk, and other vernacular American musics. And yet, despite the broad range of his influences and the sophistication of his songs, Carmichael’s music remained accessible. A "musical democrat," Carmichael created songs that "communicated with Park Avenue society and Wall Street brokers as well as with small-town merchants and tenant farmers" (Hasse 1988).

Carmichael’s career began in Bloomington, Indiana where he formed a jazz band and made his first recording in 1925. In 1930, he began pursuing a career as a songwriter in New York, where he collaborated on popular songs with lyricists such as Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser, Paul Francis Webster, and Stanley Adams. Later Carmichael moved to Los Angeles and contributed songs to a number of motion pictures, including Thanks for the Memory (1938) and To Have and Have Not (1944). Carmichael also appeared in fourteen motion pictures, most notably To Have and Have Not, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and Young Man with a Horn (1950). During the 1940s he served as host for several musical variety programs on network radio. Beginning in the 1950s Carmichael moved on to television, where he acted in thirteen programs or series. In 1971 Carmichael was elected to the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

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The Hoagy Carmichael Collections

The collection at the Archives of Traditional Music is one of the institution’s most popular, and represents the largest grouping of materials pertaining to Hoagy Carmichael anywhere. The collection includes original music manuscripts, original lyric sheets, commercial and field recordings, recorded interviews, commercial and homemade films, photographs, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, early drafts of his biography, oil paintings (by Carmichael himself), a piano and many other artifacts totaling more than 3,000 items (Please see Appendix C). The Hoagy Carmichael Collection consists of items that were in his personal collection, items donated by his family, and items pertaining to Carmichael donated by others. The sound recordings of the collection contain many unique and valuable items, including the following 78 rpm master discs: the original unreleased recording of "Star Dust," featuring Carmichael's original lyrics; an early unreleased version of "One Night in Havanna," with Carmichael's handwriting on the label identifying this as the first recording of the rhumba in this country; an unreleased master of "When Baby Sleeps," with Carmichael's handwriting on the label identifying this as what later became his hit "Old Rocking Chair." Furthermore, this collection is growing. In March 1998, the Archives of Traditional Music received Earl T. Butler's collection of 1,600 recorded versions of "Star Dust." The Archives soon will receive researcher/documentary filmmaker Pat Kellar's donation of the results of her years of research on Carmichael, including unique and valuable video interviews and transcripts.

Materials pertaining to Hoagy Carmichael are found in three locations at Indiana University: the Archives of Traditional Music, the Lilly Library, and the Indiana University Archives. Relevant materials at the IU Archives include newspaper clippings, photographs, and correspondence; the Lilly Library features 56 items including musical manuscripts, newspaper clippings, and correspondence with individuals such as Dwight David Eisenhower, Bob Hope, William Ezra Jenner, and Richard Nixon.

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Reaching Scholars and the General Public

Museums and libraries successfully use technology to inspire and educate their users. Electronic, interactive exhibits blend sound, images, and text to heighten appreciation for and understanding of the museums’ collections. A science museum, for example, may offer a free-standing, CD-ROM-based exhibit that allows users to explore various wildlife habitats, hear the sounds of animals who live in these spaces, and form conclusions about the behaviors of those animals. Indiana University proposes to extend this application to one that reaches audiences at remote sites: to distribute audio, images and text via the Internet. In addition to advancing the outreach goals of museums and encouraging users to visit these institutions, the project will also reach audiences who would otherwise have no access to the collections.

Indiana University's Hoagy Carmichael collections are valuable national resources, both for the general public and for the scholarly community. In order to meet the needs of the target audiences, this digitization project will provide three entry points, two via the World Wide Web and one via the campus network:

The online exhibition will offer: a) a general description of the collection, including photos of the Hoagy Carmichael Room at the ATM; b) an online overview catalog of the kinds of materials available in the Hoagy Carmichael Collection; and c) examples of certain unique materials, such as sound files of non-commercially released field recording excerpts, clips from home movies, scans of original music manuscripts and/or lyric sheets and low resolution photographs. These materials will be organized by category and according to a theme or themes, such as "Hoagy Carmichael's Personal History," "Hoagy Carmichael's Career History" or "Hoagy Carmichael's Compositional Process." The target audience will be the general public and students through middle school.

The digital library entry point will conform to standard practices for digital library projects. It will include access to the complete finding aid and to a selection of the digital objects (at all levels of resolution) that would be more likely to interest the serious student or scholar. Access to these digital objects will enable the close scholarly examination of Carmichael's works. Scholars will be able to make more informed decisions regarding research trips to the Bloomington campus. By creating a virtual collection, with materials from three locations on campus, scholars who visit the Archives of Traditional Music will have access to the entire array of Carmichael materials, using the highest quality digital surrogates. In addition to university students and scholars, the digital library site will also be designed for use by secondary school students, and we plan to work with music educators in the state to ensure its usability.

The on-site version of the digital library will make all items available to scholars and to the general public. The Archives of Traditional Music, while primarily a depository for its collections, also has a museum component. Its Hoagy Carmichael Room displays many of the photographs, works, and artifacts of the songwriter. Through workstations in the ATM Library and the Carmichael Room, visitors and scholars will have access to the complete, digitized works of the songwriter, available at all levels of resolution and fidelity. Providing the works in digital form will reduce the deterioration of the originals.

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National Impact

The Hoagy Carmichael Collection has the potential to be used by scholars with many research interests. In fact, the collection already receives a great deal of scholarly attention; in the past three years alone materials in the collection have been used in the making of two documentary films and a program for Japanese television. Most recently, scholar Richard Sudhalter’s book, Lost Chords (1998), deals with the development of jazz in Indiana and Hoagy Carmichael’s role in its growth. Potential future research projects abound. Original lyric sheets and manuscripts are among the materials that permit a window into the compositional process of this famed songwriter. More than 1,600 audio versions of "Star Dust" are available at the IU Archives of Traditional Music for study by researchers interested in arrangement and variation.

Moreover, the collection has great popular appeal. Nineteen ninety-nine marks the centennial of Carmichael’s birth, and the IU web site will honor that event and benefit from the nationwide celebration organized by Carmichael fans. Among the planned activities: a Carnegie Hall concert in October 1999 featuring headline entertainers and the Carnegie Hall Jazz Orchestra; a television broadcast from Ryman Auditorium (the original site of the Grand Ole Opry); a concert in Bloomington, Indiana, featuring Erich Kunzel, conductor of the Cincinnati Pops; and a star-studded concert in London. Releases of CDs and books will likely accompany these events. Fans of Carmichael and scholars of twentieth-century popular music will gain broad access to the extensive collection of photographs, films, artifacts, memorabilia, well-known and rare recordings, and other materials at Indiana University.

One of the goals of this project is to work through copyright issues and provide useful information to others who face similar challenges in distributing copyright-protected material via the World Wide Web. Audio projects usually distribute materials that exist in the public domain; the Hoagy Carmichael Project, however, includes copyright-protected materials. As part of our management plan, we will investigate legal issues and find solutions. We will consult the IU Office of University Counsel and the Center for Copyright Management at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, an institution that monitors copyright law and advises groups about its application. The rights for much of Carmichael’s work are held by Hoagy Bix Carmichael, the songwriter’s son, who with a copyright lawyer has ascertained the copyright status of every Carmichael song. Carmichael supports fully the creation of this web site honoring his father and has agreed to give the University permission to present much of the copyright-protected material to the public.

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Preparation and Preservation of the Collection

A key aspect of this project is the need for preservation of materials in the ATM Hoagy Carmichael Collection. Preservation copies must be made for all print materials and photographs. Lyric sheets and original typescripts are currently being image scanned thanks to the support of an Indiana Heritage grant. The Archives of Traditional Music is planning both digital preservation of musical scores, title sheets, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, correspondence, typescripts, moviescripts and selected record labels, all of which will be scanned. Photographs will be scanned at high resolution. Color digital images will be shot of Carmichael's original paintings and all other three-dimensional objects.

Presently, preservation copies of sound recordings and films exist for only a small portion of the collection. Sound recordings will be copied in digital and analog formats. Following the ATM’s standard practice, ECs ("earliest copies") will be made on 1/4" analog reel-to-reel tapes. Simultaneously, digital copies will be made which will be stored on a limited access server for preservation purposes. Select digital audio will then be available as options for the web site. Film clips, video, and trailers will be handled in a later phase of this digitization project.

Another important aspect of preservation is storage of the original materials. Music scores, title sheets, typescripts, movie scripts and encapsulated lyric sheets are stored archival boxes. Some correspondence, and all newspaper clippings must still be transferred into archival boxes. While most photographs have been placed in archival sleeves in boxes, some remain in frames or glued to pages of scrapbooks and will need to be stored properly.

Lorraine Olley, Head of Preservation, and a member of the Digital Library Program Team, will oversee preparation of the collections for digitization and the preservation treatment of the original materials. Jo Burgess, Assistant Head of Preservation and Head of Conservation Services, will specifically oversee the preparation of the 5,500 items that will be image scanned, including the photographs and the textual materials. Ms. Burgess will also supervise the rehousing and reformatting of other original items. Ms. Olley's department has been responsible for scanning approximately 1,550 pages, including lyric sheets and annotated drafts of Carmichael's autobiography.

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An Indiana University Collaboration

The Hoagy Carmichael Project is a collaboration of several units within Indiana University, with overall management provided by the University’s Digital Library Program. This program is dedicated to the selection, production, and maintenance of a wide range of high-quality networked resources for scholars and students at Indiana University and elsewhere. The project will be jointly directed and managed by staff from the Archives of Traditional Music and the Digital Library Program.

Gloria Gibson, Director of the Archives of Traditional Music, and Kristine Brancolini, Chief Planner for the Digital Library Program, will serve as project co-directors. Working closely with the directors will be Suzanne Mudge, Librarian of the Archives of Traditional Music, as well as members from the Indiana University’s Digital Library Program Team. Jon Dunn, Manager, Digital Library Operations and Development, will co-manage the project with Ms. Mudge. Additional individuals responsible for specific activities are identified throughout this proposal. For a complete list of personnel, both permanent staff and temporary staff, please see budget Attachments A and B.

• The IU Digital Library Program is a collaboration of the IU Libraries, the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology, and the IU School of Library and Information Science. In establishing this program, IU has joined the Digital Library Federation, a national group of research libraries under the auspices of the Council on Library and Information Resources that coordinates what materials will be digitized, sets polices, and adopts standards. IU’s Digital Library Program is currently digitizing the photographs of Frank M. Hohenberger, a noted Indiana photographer whose entire collection of 10,000 images resides in IU’s Lilly Library.

• The Archives of Traditional Music fosters the educational and cultural role of Indiana University through the preservation and dissemination of the world’s music and oral traditions. The Archives collections and library contribute to the research and teaching activities of Indiana University. Home to the largest collection of material pertaining to Hoagy Carmichael available anywhere, the Archives also offers a Hoagy Carmichael room. This room, designed as a lively memorial to the songwriter, provides a performance venue for local musicians and a showcase for many items in the Hoagy Carmichael Collection.

• Indiana University Libraries includes the University Archives, the Music Library, and the Lilly Library for rare books and manuscripts. Indiana University has substantial experience in audio digitization, both in the Archives of Traditional Music and in the Music Library, where over 5,000 hours of audio have been digitized to date and stored in Variations for online access. This proposal builds upon the technical accomplishments of Variations by extending its use to other audio collections and extending its reach via the use of low bit rate audio for Internet users.

• University Information Technology Services (UITS) provides support networked information resources. The UITS data center operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week to provide students, faculty, staff, and the international scholarly community with continuous access to university information resources. Through a regular program of upgrade and replacement, UITS maintains currency in hardware, software, and storage media. Information resources of long-term or permanent value are kept current as part of this upgrade and replacement cycle. UITS and the Indiana University Archives have participated in the research program of the National Historic Publications and Records Commission, studying means and methods of preserving digital content. To date, and in practice, our most reliable means of preservation has been a combination of routine content copying (to preserve against media decay), and periodic content conversion, as part of the equipment or application upgrade cycle (to preserve against hardware or software obsolescence). These practices, and the institution's commitment to maintaining the scholarly record, help ensure preservation and continued access to networked information resources.

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 Designing the Work Plan

Intellectual Access

Intellectual access to the collection on the digital library side will be provided through MARC records and an online finding aid. The ATM is first and foremost a sound recording archive. Thus, of the various categories of materials in the Hoagy Carmichael Collection, the sound recordings are the ATM's cataloging priority. Approximately 100 of the 750 recorded items in the collection are now catalogued. Under the direction of ATM Librarian Suzanne Mudge, a specialist in sound recording cataloging, the ATM will catalog at the item level the remaining recorded items. The ATM anticipates that at least half of the recorded items that remain will require original cataloging. MARC records will be created on OCLC and exported to the Indiana University Libraries on-line catalog, IUCAT. Films, videos and books will also be cataloged in the same manner described above. The individual materials in the collection other than the sound recordings, films, videos and books will not be catalogued on OCLC, but will be made accessible through an online finding aid as described below. A collection-level MARC record will be created that points to the top-level page for the entire collection web site.

The item-level finding aid will be encoded according to the Document Type Definition (DTD) created for Encoded Archival Description (EAD) following Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) guidelines, and supported and maintained by the Library of Congress and the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The unpublished materials in the collection have been brief-listed in an in-house finding aid. These brief-listings will be enhanced to create the EAD item-level finding aid for the collection. This finding aid will be stored and made searchable using an existing OpenText server, maintained by IU’s Library Electronic Text Resource Service.

From the digital library section of the web site, users will be able to access the finding aid or search the subset of IUCAT containing MARC records for the Hoagy Carmichael Collection.

Users will either be able to browse the entire finding aid or to search it using keywords. The search will retrieve a list of entries from the finding aid. These entries will include titles, or descriptions if untitled, and links to the digital objects. Since not all digital objects will be available over the Internet, users will also be able to restrict their search to digital objects only.

The digital collection will be addressable at the item level. Each digital resource will be accessible via a Persistent Uniform Resource Locator (PURL), which masks the actual URL used to access the item on the IBM Digital Library or OpenText server. These PURLs will be supported by a PURL resolver at Indiana University.

For sound recordings and films, the PURL for each item will be added to the 856 field of the MARC record for the original object. An indicator or note field will be used to indicate that this PURL points to an electronic version of the physical item described in the bibliographic record. For other items, the PURL for each digital item will be added to the EAD-encoded finding aid using the <dao> tag and SGML’s entity mechanism.

Item presentation will vary according to item type:

• For sound recordings, the PURL will point to a web page which contains links to the sound files which make up the recording along with links to images of liner notes, record labels, or other items associated with the recording. While all sound recordings will be digitized, not all digital files will be accessible via the Internet, due to copyright restrictions.
• For photographs or other single page items, the PURL will point to a web page which contains a thumbnail image of the photograph. From this page, the user will click to access the reference version of the same image.
• For multi-page items such as sheet music, lyric sheets, correspondence, and newspaper clippings which are being presented as images, the PURL will point to a web page containing a reference version of the first page of the item. The user will be able to move forward and backward through the document page by page or by jumping to a specific page number.
• For textual material, both published and unpublished the PURL will point to a web page containing the encoded text of the item, translated from SGML into HTML. Other formats (native TEI/SGML or possibly XML) may also be displayed from this page. The text of each document will be keyword searchable via OpenText software and scripts.

For on-campus research at the Archives of Traditional Music, access will be made available as described above, but with links to all digitized items rather than only selected items and excerpts.

Suzanne Mudge, Archives of Traditional Music Librarian, will be supervising the cataloging of approximately 250 items with cataloging copy and performing the original cataloging of approximately 400 items, for a total of 650 sound recordings. Ms. Mudge will be supervising the work of one three-quarter time Cataloging Assistant.

Perry Willett, Director of Library Electronic Text Resource Services (LETRS) and a member of the Digital Library Program Team, will be responsible for creation of the EAD-encoded finding aid and transcription and mark-up of the texts.

Jackie Byrd, Cataloger, and a member of the Digital Library Program Team, will be responsible for defining additional administrative and structural metadata for the entire collection.

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Technical Knowledge

Digital Conversion Methodology: Sound Recordings

Approximately 750 sound recordings totaling 250 hours will be digitized from the collection. This digitization will be performed at the Archives of Traditional Music by the Audio Technician, using equipment requested in this proposal. Each recording will be converted to one or more computer files in WAV format using a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz and sample size of 16 bits in mono or stereo as appropriate. This will be the first digital archival copy. A second digital archival copy will be generated on CD-R (Compact Disc - Recordable) from the computer file for each recording, to be stored at the Archives of Traditional Music. In addition, a traditional 1/4" reel-to-reel analog archival copy will be created for each recording. The Archives of Traditional Music, in the process of moving to digital, must protect its unique holdings and ensure that these unique materials will be available for posterity. Staff members and visitors to the Archives of Traditional Music must handle unique and fragile original materials as little as possible; it is therefore essential to make multiple copies of materials that may be used for research. Analog copies are time-proven and will ensure that the original materials, which are old and degrading, will not further deteriorate.

All digitized recordings will be transferred into Indiana University's Variations system. Variations is a digital audio library system originally developed by the Indiana University Music Library, in cooperation with IBM, for online delivery of its sound recording collection. Variations provides for digitization, storage, and on-demand retrieval and streaming of audio via a World Wide Web interface. Each audio item stored in Variations is addressable via a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and thus can be linked to from a variety of finding aids and other user interfaces. More information on the Variations Project may be found at <http://www.music.indiana.edu/variations/>.

Currently, digital archival copies stored in Variations are transferred via an RS/6000 server to IBM 3590 Magstar 1/2" tape cartridges which are then stored in a controlled environment. From each archival copy, a compressed digital listening copy is automatically generated in ISO standard MPEG-1 format at a compression ratio of approximately 4:1. This MPEG listening copy offers quality comparable to the digital archival copy but with greatly reduced storage requirements. These listening copies are also stored on 3590 Magstar tape in an automated tape library for on-demand retrieval for on-campus listening access. The media used to store both copies will be refreshed as needed to preserve against media decay and adapt to a changing technology environment. The Libraries are also exploring the use of a new mass storage facility being planned for the data center at University Information Technology Services for storage and preservation of these and other digital objects.

In addition to the archive and listening copies stored in Variations for on-campus access, selections from a portion of the recordings (determination to be made based on copyright status) will also be made available for Internet access from the Hoagy Carmichael web site. These excerpts will be encoded in a low bit rate format, suitable for users connecting to the web site via the Internet, and stored on a low bit rate capable streaming media server (such as RealAudio or IBM VideoCharger) to be purchased as part of this proposal.

The Audio Technician will supervise the digitization and duplication, which will be performed by graduate students. The Audio Technician will perform quality control of the digitization, the creation of digital surrogates, and analog surrogates.

Digital Conversion Methodology: Photographs

The collection includes approximately 1,070 photographs and all will be digitized. This digitization will be performed at the Main Library by the Image Technician, using equipment requested in this proposal. Each photograph will be scanned at archival quality, with a GIF thumbnail and a JPEG reference image. High-resolution 8-bit grayscale TIFF files will be scanned from each photograph, and GIF and JPEG derivatives created for use as thumbnail and reference images. (Please see Appendix B for a table of image file formats.)

Rachael Stoeltje, Image Collections Care Coordinator, will supervise the digitization of the photographs. The Imaging Technician will actually be scanning the materials. Ms. Stoeltje has extensive experience scanning photographs from the Lilly Library Frank M. Hohenberger Collection and from the Kinsey Institute.

Digital Conversion Methodology: Printed and Textual Materials

The printed and textual material in the collection totals 4,550 pages and all will be digitized as TIFF image files. This digitization will be performed at the Main Library by the Image Technician, using equipment requested in this proposal. Textual materials include sheet music, lyric sheets, correspondence, and newspaper clippings. These documents will also be transcribed, SGML-encoded and proofread by graduate student consultants, trained in SGML and the TEI Guidelines. This work will be performed in the Library Electronic Text Resource Service (LETRS) in the Main Library.

All scanned images (photographs, printed and textual materials) will be stored using IBM Digital Library 2.0 as an object repository, running on existing IBM RS/6000 servers. These servers were granted in December 1997 to Indiana University by IBM via IBM’s Shared University Research (SUR) program. Images that make up a particular item (such as a piece of sheet music) will be grouped together as parts of a single DL object. Web access to these items will be provided by CGI scripts interacting with IBM Digital Library Internet Connection. Additional storage space for these servers is being purchased as part of this proposal.

Encoded text files will be stored and made accessible on an existing server using OpenText software. As described above, results will be displayed in HTML, translated using a series of SGML-to-HTML Perl scripts already in use at Indiana University.

Rachael Stoeltje, Image Collections Care Coordinator, will supervise the digitization of the printed and textual materials. The Imaging Technician will actually be scanning the materials. Approximately 1,550 pages of archival material have already been digitized as TIFF images for the Indiana Humanities Council Grant. Perry Willett, Director of LETRS and General Editor of the Victorian Women Writers Project (VWWP), will supervise the SGML encoding and the conversion to HTML for both the finding aid and the full texts. Over the past two years, this project has SGML encoded more than 14,000 pages of text.

Access to Networked Information

The Carmichael Project offer numerous technical challenges centered upon delivering a variety of selected digital objects to users via the World Wide Web and delivering the entire digital collection to users within the Archive of Traditional Music. This important aspect of the project will be managed by Jon Dunn, Manager of Digital Library Operations and Development. Mr. Dunn will be supervising Allen Hutchison, System Administrator for the Digital Library Program, and the Analyst/Programmer who will be hired for the project.

Indiana University's Digital Library Program has experience in mounting large digital collections on the WWW and providing sustained support for network access to these collections. Perry Willett is General Editor of the Victorian Women Writers Project, a collection of SGML-encoded texts created and mounted on the WWW at Indiana University <http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/vwwp/index.html>. (In October 1997 the National Endowment for the Humanities named IU’s Victorian Women Writers Project one of the top 20 humanities sites on the World Wide Web.) Jon Dunn is responsible for development and operation of Variations, a collection of CD-quality digital audio recordings accessible on the network in the Indiana University School of Music Library <http://www.music.indiana.edu/variations>. Kristine Brancolini is managing the Hohenberger photo digitization project.

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Web Design and Evaluation

Creation of the Hoagy Carmichael web sites will be coordinated by the Digital Library Program, working with the IU’s Usability Consulting Services. A usability consultant will work with the Carmichael Project team to apply a user-centered approach to the design, development and evaluation of the two web sites. The consultant advises teams on selecting appropriate user-centered activities—those most likely to provide useful data—to help guide design and evaluation. The consultant will guide the web developer in planning, conducting and interpreting the results of user-centered activities. This work will involve four phases: pre-design; conceptual design and prototyping; implementation; and evaluation. The evaluation will work with all target user groups, the general adult public, students grade 8 and above, and scholars.

A feedback form on the IU Carmichael web site will provide the opportunity to make suggestions and will help to ensure ongoing improvement. We will measure the number of hits the web site receives and explore opportunities to link it to other sites relating to early twentieth-century American music.

Yolanda Cooper-Birdine, Assistant to the Dean of University Libraries, will develop the web sites and conduct the evaluation. She will be working with IU’s Usability Consulting Services staff. Ms. Cooper-Birdine has developed web sites for the IU Libraries and conducted HTML training.

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Adding to the Base of Knowledge and Reaching New Audiences

The Indiana University model of providing a twin-targeted digitization project suitable for scholars and the general public will be publicized in ways specific to each group. Principals will prepare papers on the results of the project and make the findings available on the Web and through professional groups such as the American Library Association and the American Association of Museums. Topics may include matters relating to creating and evaluating the web site, employing technology, and addressing copyright issues when distributing audio materials via the Internet. Additionally, Indiana University will share the results of its research with the Digital Library Federation, an organization with a mission to build federated digitized collections. As a musical slice of Americana, the Hoagy Carmichael web site will supplement such collections as the Library of Congress’s American Memory Project and the Making of America Project, a multi-institutional initiative that provides internet access to important materials on the history of the United States. The Hoagy Carmichael web site will attract scholarly interest through links to numerous associated sites, such as those of the Indiana Historical Society or the Red Hot Jazz Archive.

The national celebrations surrounding the centennial of Hoagy Carmichael’s birth provide an excellent opportunity to publicize the increased access of IU’s collection to the general public. High-profile concerts will themselves renew interest among Carmichael’s many fans, as well as create new admirers. By tapping into the popular interest these celebrations engender, we will reach far greater audiences and realize the full potential of this undertaking.

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Summary

Embedded within this project are several goals which will directly impact residents of Indiana, as well as those worldwide. "Digitizing and Preserving the Hoagy Carmichael Collections at Indiana University" will: 1) provide visibility and access to an influential American composer; 2) propose a model for other museums and libraries that will contribute to the conversation of using the World Wide Web for outreach; 3) provide a historical context for the appreciation and understanding of the music of Hoagy Carmichael; 4) contribute to curricular development of courses (high school through college) dealing with American music; and 5) preserve unique collections of general and scholarly interest. The marriage of the Hoagy Carmichael Collections and new technology can potentially ignite an enduring desire to appreciate and a continuous appetite to learn about the meaningful and colorful tapestry of music by Indiana native Hoagland "Hoagy" Carmichael.

 ______________________________________________

Hasse, John Edward. The Classic Hoagy Carmichael. Indianapolis: The Indiana Historical Society, 1988.

Wilder, Alec. American Popular Song. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.

 

 

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BUDGET NARRATIVE

The Hoagy Carmichael Project budget may be divided into four sections:

• Creation of the sound recording digitizing lab
• Creation of the image digitizing lab
• Archival storage of the digital objects, the analog duplicates (sound recordings only), and the original objects
• Creation of the two complementary Carmichael web sites

Overall, we are requesting funds for equipment, supplies, services, and some temporary staff to complete the project. The University will provide matching funds for the majority of the personnel costs for the project.

A more detailed discussion of each section follows.

Sound Recording Digitizing Lab

The digitizing lab for this project will be a self-contained unit. The ATM is currently set up with sound labs equipped with similar equipment that will be required for this project, but it is in near constant use. The workload of the Hoagy Carmichael project requires the purchasing of this self-contained system that will be used to transfer the audio materials from their present analog formats into digital and analog copies. The equipment for this digitizing lab has been selected with this need in mind. We must ensure that we obtain the highest quality possible from a single handling of the materials. The original Hoagy Carmichael materials are in various formats, from wire recording to 33 1/3 LPs to reel-to-reel tape. The Archives of Traditional Music will provide a wire recorder, but requests one analog reel-to-reel tape deck and one turntable to playback the originals. A second reel-to-reel tape deck and all the computer hardware and software is required to make the analog and digital copies.

Image Digitizing Lab

The Image Digitizing Lab will be housed in the Main Library at Indiana University. Digitizing and preserving the sound recordings will be one major aspect of the project, but an equally important aspect will be digitizing and preserving all of the other material in the collections, and those materials are diverse. The Image Digitizing Lab staff will be digitizing all other materials, including photographs, sheet music, printed text, and handwritten items. The Preservation Department within the Libraries is currently image scanning photographs, lyric sheets, and brittle books. However, the Libraries do not have enough equipment or the necessary equipment to handle the Carmichael Project without additional equipment, including a high-speed black-and-white scanner and a digital camera for color materials.

Preservation Storage – Digital, Analog, Original Objects

One of the primary goals of the project is to preserve the objects in the Hoagy Carmichael Collections. A major cost of the project will be providing the storage media, both digital and analog, to ensure continued access to the materials for many years to come. Thus, we must purchase equipment and supplies that will store the three archival copies of each item and the physical objects themselves. Because the digital technology is in its infancy compared to the other storage media, we are taking a cautious approach. However, Indiana University has a commitment to migrating digital archival objects, such as we propose creating as part of this project. We hope that our careful planning will ensure the viability of the original objects and their digital and analog surrogates.

Hoagy Carmichael Web Sites

Another primary goal of the project is to provide access to complete information about the collections and selected digital objects in the collections through the public and scholarly web sites. Another major cost of the project is to purchase the servers, software, and technical support that will be needed to bring up the web sites and maintain them for the duration of the grant. Following completion of the grant, Indiana University will assume replacement costs and the cost of ongoing maintenance. In addition to equipment costs, this aspect of the project will require collaborative work on the part of many people, including librarians, technologists, and scholars. It will require extensive testing and evaluation to insure that the important element of presentation meets the needs of our intended audiences for both web sites.

SCHEDULE OF COMPLETION

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List of Activities

NOTE: Costs for overall direction and management of the project have been placed in Activity 1. This includes all personnel who are budgeted to work for the duration of the project, October 1, 1998 through March 31, 2000. Some activities have costs of zero and some are lower than might be expected; this is because all or part of the costs of those activities are associated with personnel already accounted for under Activity 1.

Activity 1

Overall direction and management of the Hoagy Carmichael Project.

Activity 2

Cataloging sound recordings, books, and films.

Activity 3

Investigate copyright status of materials.

Activity 4

Establish specific selection criteria and select materials to be included in digital form on the public web site.

Activity 5

Order equipment and create audio and imaging labs.

Activity 6

Digitize sound recordings and perform quality control.

Activity 7

Prepare photographs and other materials for digitization. Shoot photographs of objects in the collection and the Hoagy Carmichael Room at the ATM.

Activity 8

Design and program image, audio, and metadata loading tools.

Activity 9

Order and install server hardware.

Activity 10

Digitize photographs and perform quality control.

Activity 11

Digitize printed and textual materials and perform quality control.

Activity 12

Program web access scripts.

Activity 13

Transcribe texts and perform SGML mark-up.

Activity 14

Create the EAD-encoded finding aid.

Activity 15

Order and install public access workstations in the ATM. Upgrade staff computers.

Activity 16

Develop public and digital library web sites.

Activity 17

Evaluate web sites.

Activity 18

Write the contextual and administrative information for the web sites.

Activity 19

Prepare the original materials for preservation storage.