The Digital Library Triumvirate: Content, Collaboration, and Technology

• By John Ober
• 04/30/01

A single point of access to digital materials for historical and cultural scholarship, the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive (JARDA) is a model of a collaboratively constructed gateway to the documentation of an era.

Few events of World War II had as dramatic an effect within the United States or upon a population as did Executive Order #9066, which resulted in the evacuation and internment of thousands of Japanese Americans. The War Relocation Authority (WRA), the agency created to assume jurisdiction over the evacuees, controlled the relocation centers, alternatively labeled "relocation camps," "concentration camps," or "evacuation centers." These WRA camps housed more than 120,000 Japanese Americans for over four years.

The experiences of the adults, young adults, and children—the majority of whom were U.S. citizens—in internment camps during the war is richly documented in the holdings of several California repositories. Among the 10,000 images and 20,000 pages of electronic transcriptions of documents and oral histories are diaries, letters, drawings, and photographs from internees at the 11 camps. Also included are camp newsletters, final reports, photographs, and other documents relating to the day-to-day administration of the camps by the WRA.

In September 1998, the members of the California Digital Library's Online Archive of California (OAC) identified the need to develop digital archives for "thematic collections," and thus was born the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive (JARDA). As with several CDL projects, JARDA is supported by both university and grant funds. JARDA development was supported by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian.

Focus on Collaboration

Academic digital library initiatives range from the digitization of specific collections of materials to elaborate state, national, or international organizations devoted to developing innovative technologies for providing information services. Both modest and large-scale projects have high-quality digital content—and its selection, design, management, preservation, and tools to ensure its discovery and availability—at their core. A scan of the activities of the 20+ members of the Digital Library Federation provides an informative overview of the scope of digital library activities (see www.diglib.org/).

To that focus on high-quality content, the California Digital Library has added a particularly strong focus on collaboration. From its inception in 1997 as a "co-library" of the ten campuses of the University of California, the CDL has embraced collaboration both within and well beyond the university as essential to the pursuit of its goals. Collaboratively designed and built, JARDA serves as a gateway to the personal and institutional documentation of an era and also to scholarship mined from newly available digital cultural heritage materials.

JARDA collaborators currently include the California Historical Society; the California State Archives, California State University at Fullerton; the Japanese American National Museum, UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library, UCLA's Young Research Library Department of Special Collections, the University of the Pacific (UOP); and the University of Southern California (USC). These institutions, along with nearly forty others, are all members of the CDL's Online Archive of California (www.oac.cdlib.org/), of which JARDA is but one component.

Content: Primary Source

Materials To build JARDA, the CDL began with a survey of primary source materials in California-based libraries and archives. The survey identified the heavily used Japanese American internment collections throughout the state as a high priority for digitization. Curators at all Online Archive of California (OAC) repositories reported that Japanese American internment collections are among the most-requested materials, but the fact that they are so widely scattered has presented a serious discovery-and-access problem.

The JARDA gateway provides a single point of access for college and university students and faculty, students and teachers in kindergarten through high school, and the general public. Both the UCLA and UC Berkeley Libraries are actively engaged in projects that have demonstrated the importance of incorporating primary sources into the curriculum. These projects have confirmed the need to make Japanese American Relocation collections more accessible to the community. The OAC's statewide union database of finding aids provides the means to integrate collections in a Web-accessible "virtual archive," forming the premier source of digital documentation on the subject.

JARDA is the first thematic collection added to the larger Online Archive of California. The strategy of building thematic "virtual collections" (other California cultural communities are also under consideration) is a deliberate strategy not only to make high-demand materials available in digital form, but also to encourage new analysis and scholarship drawn from those materials to flourish. The ideal digital library leverages collaboration to provide access to high-quality content and also encourages, indeed enables, the creation of new scholarship. The CDL's eScholarship (http://escholarship.cdlib.org/) program of supporting innovation in scholarly communication is based upon that belief. eScholarship is working with UC Press and JARDA participants to identify new scholarly publications associated with Japanese American Relocation materials.

The CDL and its partners are enthusiastic about the scholarship that can be supported by this single access point for geographically dispersed source materials. For example, a history student sitting in her dorm room can now compare personal memoirs, observations by WRA officials, and oral histories with the many photos and sketches of camp life from different collections.

Oral history—memories, thoughts and motivations behind people's actions, the details of day-to-day life—may elude other primary sources. It has been particularly valuable in documenting perspectives often marginalized from the mainstream historical record.

The Japanese American National Museum's Life History Program has joined several other excellent programs in the quest to recover Japanese American history through oral history. No longer is history told about them; it is told by them. Moreover, the anti-Japanese hysteria of World War II forced many families to destroy irreplaceable photographs, letters, and other documentation. These historical records would have been very valuable to researchers today. Oral history offers one way in which some of this lost history can be recovered.

Technology Infrastructure

In addition to the JARDA Web site, access to the digital content will be available through catalog records in UC's Melvyl union library catalog and by collection inventories in the OAC. These inventories, or finding aids, are created with an SGML document type definition called the Encoded Archival Description (EAD). The JARDA electronic texts have been marked up according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard. The use of cataloging and structured text markup standards reflects the CDL's strong belief in the use and promulgation of standards to assist both technological innovation and long-term access and preservation.

By virtue of its reliance on markup standards, technology to store and present structured text and images, and distributed production of materials, JARDA is also a proving ground for building and managing the technological infrastructure to support digital libraries. For example, the CDL has established image and metadata standards that partners must meet. Creating a flexible architecture for the JARDA collection, one that can manage different types of digital objects and allow the possibility of federating the material with still other distributed collections, including those outside California, is also a goal.

Envisioning an Online Future

Of course the CDL vision of technologically federated collections of high-quality research and source materials is shared well beyond California. The U.S.-based Digital Library Federation (www.diglib.org), of which the CDL is a member, is largely motivated by this vision. A similar dream is arguably driving the National Science Foundation's multi-million dollar, internationally connected Digital Library Initiative (www.dli2.nsf.gov/) and the many research projects it supports.

In fact, the synergies that emerge from the interactions among these programs and projects, even those of modest proportion such as JARDA, are grander than what may be first inferred from the notion of federated library collections. When their attempts—to coordinate interoperability between entire collections, to investigate such possibilities as self-describing collections and visually based search results and navigation, to provide access to the "dark matter" buried in online multimedia collections not reached by the surface of the Web and its search engines—are combined with fundamental network developments such as Internet2, then the "digital library" domain actually emerges as a defining force in the future of an online world.