Contributing Content to Historic Pittsburgh
We’re glad that you want to contribute content to the Historic Pittsburgh site (http://historicpittsburgh.org/). What follows are directions for existing partners to get started. If you're not a partner and would like to become one, please contact us. We'd love to hear from you!
Step 1. Introduction to Content and Setup
Please use the following form to alert us of your interest in contributing new content to Historic Pittsburgh. Following the completion of this form, our Digital Collections Coordinator will contact you to schedule a virtual meeting to discuss your new project in detail and determine the best project workflow for your materials.
Step 2. New Contributor
If you are a brand new contributor, then Pitt will need your institutional logo (220 pixels x 220 pixels) and a brief 2-4 sentences about your organization to appear on the HP Partner page (http://historicpittsburgh.org/partners). We also need to know your official name (i.e., how you want to be referred to on the site).
Step 3. Preparation of Content
Each content type (e.g. manuscript, image, oral histories, other a/v, etc.) should have its own spreadsheet. Each content type has slightly different metadata requirements and slightly different templates. The Digital Collections Coordinator and Metadata and Discovery Unit will work with you to provide the best template for your materials. If you are contributing manuscript items and they are already described in an ArchivesSpace generated EAD finding aid, you can choose to submit that finding aid as the metadata. However, if you would like to provide enhanced metadata to manuscript content (e.g. assigning creators or subject headings) you can opt to fill out the spreadsheet template for such content, as well.
Keep in mind that you can still associate the finding aid with the manuscript content even if you elect to describe the content more fully using the spreadsheet. To do so, you must make sure that whatever is supplied as the identifier in the spreadsheet is recorded in as the DAO for the item in the finding aid.
A detailed description of the metadata fields to be collected can be found here. Before populating the spreadsheet, please make sure you have reviewed this documentation. We suggest starting out with five items and then sending the metadata to us for review. This will ensure that we catch any issues early in the project.
File Naming
When naming files for scanned images, the file names must match the identifier given to the image in the spreadsheet. At the end of scanning, you should have a directory with a one-to-one match for each image scanned and an entry in the spreadsheet.
Example:
| title | identifier | description |
|---|---|---|
Water Street, river front, bulldozer stuck |
20211026-hpicasc-0001 | This item is a test item. |
Liberty Avenue and Grant Street |
20211026-hpicasc-0002 | This is another test item. |
And from this, you would derive file names for the corresponding images. So, line item one would have a tiff file with the following filename: 20211026-hpicasc-0001.tif.
Manuscript content is a little different. If you are describing content in a spreadsheet, you will describe it in much the same way as you do for an image. You will provide only one spreadsheet entry per manuscript object, and the entire manuscript object will have one identifier. You will not provide a line entry or identifier for each page of the manuscript object.
Example:
| title | identifier | description |
|---|---|---|
Letter from Charles Nisbet to Alexander Addison |
20211026-dar192506-0001 | This line-item represents one entire manuscript object. Meaning, the manuscript may have multiple pages associated with it. |
| Letter from Alexander Addison to John Smith | 20211026-dar192506-0002 | Again, this line-item represents one entire manuscript object. Meaning, the manuscript may have multiple pages associated with it. |
You will have one directory (or folder) for each line item in the spreadsheet that is named for the identifier of the item. Within this directory, you will have the individual scans that make up the pages of the manuscript object.
In our example, directory 20211026-dar192506-0001 will contain 4 files, and those files will be named using a sequential four-digit, zero-padded numbering schema: 0001.tif, 0002.tif, 0003.tif, 0004.tif.
Step 4. Batch Delivery
When your content is ready (items are scanned and metadata is complete), then you will deliver that content to Pitt via SharePoint. We will create a folder in SharePoint and invite you to join. Your top-level folder will be your institution name, so for example HeinzHistoryCenter (no spaces).
Then you will create a folder titled by the date of delivery and the name of the collection/project. Using the History Center as an example, you will create 20210208-AlcoaRecords. If you deliver more than one batch, just assign a different date, or if it’s on the same day, then add “a” or “b” to the end of the date. If you have manuscript content and image content to submit, please create separate folders for each. Going back to the initial example, the folders would be titled in the same manner, but with "images" or "manuscript" appended:
- 20210208-AlcoaRecords-images
- 20210208-AlcoaRecords-manuscript
Step 5. Copying Files
Within that new folder, you should copy the following items:
- Content files, which should be compressed and delivered as a .zip file.
- Spreadsheet with metadata or EAD finding aid.
If these images are being ADDED to an existing image collection that is already online, then please check the Description about the online collection and send any updates to the email list (digital-collections@pitt.edu).
If this is a NEW image collection, then please follow these additional steps:
- Select a suitable image to use to represent the collection homepage. It’s best to select a landscape image. Pitt will size it accordingly (250 pixels x 860 pixels roughly), but be sure to tell us what in the image you want to capture. Copy that image into the folder, and include “banner” in the filename.
- We will also use a portion of this image to create the collection thumbnail which is used for collection search results and browsing collections (see http://historicpittsburgh.org/collections for example).
- Write the Description that accompanies each image collection which includes What’s online, What’s in the entire collection, and About the collection (see this collection page as an example: http://historicpittsburgh.org/collection/george-westinghouse-museum-collection). Save it as either a Word or text file.
Step 6. Content Ingest and Review
Once you copied all of this to SharePoint, then please send an email to the email list (digital-collections@pitt.edu) letting us know that the batch is ready to process. Your metadata will undergo an internal review by our Metadata and Discovery Unit. After this review, they may provide recommendations for changes and edits to be made. Once you have addressed any concerns raised, the updated metadata will be resubmitted for ingest.
Then Pitt will ingest the images/metadata and we will then send you a link to your collection. You can then review and hopefully, everything looks right, but we know this is not always the case, so please follow up with us on things you need to change or correct. We may ask you to resubmit your entire spreadsheet, or we may be able to correct it directly on our end, or some combination of the two.
Step 7. Announce Release
Once the images appear online, Pitt will add an announcement about them on the site’s homepage. Please send a very brief announcement that we can include here: http://historicpittsburgh.org/news.
Step 8. Start Again!
Select more objects and repeat!