Kawe Mahara Home
Collections
Resources
Visit the Archives
Links
Board of Trustees
The Friends
Make a Bequest
Volunteer
Events
Digital Archive Project
Conferences
Oral History

Poster Index Cards Digitisation - Volunteer Activity

Volunteers recently helped LAGANZ to digitise 700 typewritten index cards describing our poster collection by correcting the optimal character recognition (OCR) text.

• What's Next for the Posters Series Index Cards?

We have completed the transcription of 700 posters index cards using an online tool (website) called From the Page.

Thanks to all the volunteers who helped!

We received a grant from the Rainbow Welbeing Legacy Fund in August 2020 that enables us to continue digitising and correcting the transcription of all 5000 remaining index cards in our card catalogue.

What's Next for the Posters Index Cards?

Our next phase of digitisation of the posters index cards involves transposing the transcribed text rom From the Page into metadata fields that will eventually enable us to develop and online catalogue.

We started with a scanned image of a poster index cards in From the Page ...

The optical character recognition (OCR) of the image is not perfect.

There are corrections and formatting changes required to the text that the OCR process has extracted ...

SHELf: J_l§.1;
LAGANZ
Poster
I
No. 012
IN: mit gummi/ Out: Ohne gumrni. STOP AIDS.
[Zttrich: AIDS Hilfe Schweiz, n.d.]
Col. poster 42 x 59.5cm
1. Condoms. I. AIDS Hilfe Schweiz • I

.. so that we end up with corrected text looking like this:

LAGANZ Poster 0012

IN: mit gummi/ Out: Ohne gummi. STOP AIDS.
[Zürich: AIDS Hilfe Schweiz, n.d.]
Col. poster 42 x 59.5cm

1. Condoms.
I. AIDS Hilfe Schweiz.

Now we transpose the text from the cards into machine-readable data formats ...

We work out what each line or snippet of text represents as part of the description of the collection item and then transpose the text into structured data XML or CSV formats for import into online systems.

We use the using Qualified Dublin Core (or DC Terms) encoding schema. This is a snippet of XML.

<dcterms:identifier:laganz-call-number>LAGANZ-Poster-0012</dcterms:identifier:laganz-call-number>
<dcterms:title>IN: mit gummi/ Out: Ohne gummi. STOP AIDS.</dcterms:title>
<dcterms:publisher:place-of-publication>Zürich<dcterms:publisher:place-of-publication>
<dcterms:publisher>AIDS Hilfe Schweiz<dcterms:publisher>
<dcterms:issued>Not dated</dcterms:issued>
<dcterms:format>Col. poster</dcterms:format>
<dcterms:format:dimensions>42 x 59.5cm</dcterms:format:dimensions>
<dcterms:subject:laganz-subject-thesaurus-terms>Condoms</dcterms:subject:laganz-subject-thesaurus-terms>
<dcterms:subject:entity>AIDS Hilfe Schweiz</dcterms:subject:entity>

.. so that eventually this index card data will be searchable in our online catalogue and will support researchers to find a future digitised image of the poster itself.

Future volunteers will be able to enrich our description of this item, for example with a translation of the text and recording the languages used.

Contact

Feel free to make personal contact with Gavin Hamilton - gavin.laganz@gmail.com, +64 21 0200 7913 - to find out more about the index card transcription activity.

If you are not already signed up, we encourage you to sign up to both of these mailing lists:.

• Friends of LAGANZ - For LAGANZ news and events.
• LAGANZ Volunteers

Last updated: 21 Oct 2020

Lesbian and Gay Archives of New Zealand (LAGANZ) | Te Pūranga Takatāpui o Aotearoa
Alexander Turnbull Library, 70 Molesworth St, Wellington 6011
NEW ZEALAND

Curator Tel: +64 4 462 3972 | Trust Secretary Mob: +64 27 444 3961

curators@laganz.org.nz | facebook.com/kawemahara | instagram.com/kawemahara