This project was the final project for my Digital Libraries course as part of my MLIS program at Florida State University. View the DL here - http://tinyurl.com/FLsubcultDL.

1. American Subculture Digital Library

2. American Subculture Digital Library
✦ Members/Roles ✦ Tasks
✦ Micah Vandegrift ✦ M - keep on
- Project target with goals,
Manager general leadership
with content
✦ Carolyn Renko -
Cataloging/ ✦ C - Developed
Metadata metadata scheme,
processed digital
✦ Brooke Fry -
objects
Collection
Development/ ✦ B - collection
Software research,
Greenstone
Engineer
installation

3. American Subculture Digital Library
✦ Mission Statement
✦ The American Subculture Digital Library seeks to document the
subcultural music scenes that existed between 1998 and 2001 in
Central Florida, and create a searchable digital archive of photos,
and ephemera related to the history and growth of this subculture.
✦ Goals
✦ To preserve the materials that were substantial in the development
of this subculture.
✦ To document and archive an integral part of American musical
history that is heretofore not well-represented in research and
collection.
✦ To promote a contextual and historical understanding of music
subcultures in American pop culture studies.
✦ To institute a standard and practice for archiving pop culture
objects that are related to socio-cultural movements.

4. American Subculture Digital Library
✦ “Behind the DL”
✦ Research in subcultures is difficult without content
archived and indexed
✦ Bridges the gap between library, archive and
museum
✦ Influential in contemporary cultural trends
✦ Personal interest and career goal

5. American Subculture Digital Library
✦ Target Audience
✦ All ages
✦ Young and old individuals interested in music and
music ephemera
✦ Individuals who were involved in American
Subcultural music scenes from 1990-2005
✦ Individuals compiling information and researching
the American Subculture music scene
✦ Computer proficiency- Average to advanced
✦ Proficient with Internet searching and locating
online information

6. American Subculture Digital Library - The Collection
✦ Content
✦ Small collection of photographs and ephemera that document the
Central Florida subcultural music scene between 1998 – 2001.
✦ Photographs are owned by group member, Micah Vandegrift, who
grew up in this subculture.
✦ Other
✦ Flickr - Creative Commons & Audio/Video owned by Micah
Vandegrift
✦ We considered the inclusion of photos from Flickr as well as
audio/video but ultimately felt it would lead to less cohesion
in our DL. These other materials would be fantastic additions
in the future but did not fit in with our focus of Central
Florida subculture (for purposes of this class).

7. American Subculture Digital Library - The Collection
✦ Process
✦ 27 Photographs/objects were scanned by Micah
Vandegrift and loaded to Dropbox as Master
Files.
✦ Photographs were then named FLsubcult and
further identified by the following conventions:
show, venue, event, band, object.
✦ (Ex. FLsubcult_show1)
✦ Each group member was responsible for the
transition to working files of nine images.

8. American Subculture Digital Library - The Collection
✦ Methods
✦ Working File Transition included changes to
resolution and naming, as well as any post
processing (image sharpening, color correction,
repair).
✦ Images were converted from 600 dpi to 200 dpi
using Photoshop and GIMP, and renamed to
denote working file. (Ex. FLsubcult_show 1 –
Copy W)
✦ Tracked all changes and data using Google Docs

9. American Subculture Digital Library - The Collection
✦ Issues
✦ Our file naming convention is not the best.
When using numbers, its best to use leading
zeros to act as placeholders (001, 002). This will
allow better sorting and file management.
✦ Its often recommended to use 8 or fewer
characters in file names. Our use of multiple
characters, upper and lower case, and spaces may
increase potential for error when typing file name.

10. American Subculture Digital Library - The Collection
✦ Future Development
✦ We will continue collection development by
accepting crowdsourced submissions from parties
interested in preserving their analog materials in
our archive. This decision will help in alleviating
issues surrounding copyright, as the submission
process will involve a copyright clause.
✦ Flickr Creative Commons.
✦ Other alternative libraries/archives.

11. American Subculture Digital Library - Metadata
✦ Began with an NISO (National Information Standards
Organization) document - NISO Framework Advisory
Group (2007). “A Framework of Guidance for
Building Good Digital Collections.”
✦ CDP Metadata Working Group, Dublin Core Metadata
Best Practices Version 2.1.1 September 2006 ©
✦ 10 Required elements, 8 optional.
✦ We used: Title, Creator, Subject, Description,
Publisher, Date Original, Date Digital, Type, Format,
Digitization Specs, Resource ID, Source, Rights
Management.

12. American Subculture Digital Library - Metadata
✦ Transfer to Greenstone - different metadata standards.
✦ Some elements did not have an exact match or existed but
had different meanings in Greenstone. Ex. No digitization
specification element.
✦ Create a Crosswalk:
✦ Title-Title, Creator-Creator, Subject-Subject an Keywords,
Description-Description, Publisher-Publisher, Date Original-
Date Created, Date Digital-Date Modified, Format-Format,
Format Extent- Size of working file in bytes, Resource
Identifier-Resource Identifier, Source-Source, Rights
Management-Rights Management License

13. American Subculture Digital Library
Usability
✦ Our goal is to have a visually pleasing, easily manageable site that will
engage the user with the content.
Navigation
✦ Does each page have a home button?
Consistency and Standards
✦ Do the textual descriptions use consistent wording, phrasing and
structure?
Visibility of System Status
✦ Are there progress bars or loading meters when a page is slow to
load?
Flexibility and Efficiency of Use
✦ ! Are the pages of the site free of extraneous graphics and text?

14. American Subculture Digital Library -
Demo

15. American Subculture Digital Library
Rights
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
License.
All images are property of Micah Vandegrift.
Commercial reproduction or distribution requires written
permission.