Newsletter of North Carolina ECHO

              NC ECHO welcomes our new
Project Assistant, Matt Vernon.
Matt is starting the Public His-tory
Master’s Program at NC
State University. We are really
looking forward to working with
him.
NC ECHO is committed to helping
the state’s school children ac-cess
the treasures housed in
North Carolina’s museums, li-braries,
archives and historic
sites. We have recently com-pleted
a seminar focusing on
online collections and the K-12
audience. May 1-5, 2006, we
held a seminar called “Back of
Beyond: Portals to Our Mountain
Past” at the North Carolina Cen-ter
for the Advancement of
Teaching
(NCCAT) in Cul-lowhee,
NC. This
weeklong semi-nar
brought to-gether
10 cul-tural
heritage
professionals
and 8 teachers
from the public
schools. To-gether
we looked
at how resources
from museums,
archives and
libraries can be
brought into the
classroom and
discussed the
unique needs of
teachers and
ways in which
cultural institu-tions
can meet
those needs in the online envi-ronment.
This seminar revolved
around Horace Kephart: Reveal-ing
an Enigma, a digital collec-tion
of archives and artifacts put
online by Western Carolina Uni-versity
in collaboration with the
Mountain Heritage Center. Semi-nar
participants, both teachers
and cultural heritage profession-als,
used this fabulous web re-source
to examine the potential
for the use of online collections
in the classroom.
In 1904, Horace Kephart, a natu-ralist
and student of wood lore,
moved to western North Carolina
in search of a more simple life.
He noted that the remoteness of
the region and the difficulty of
passing through the terrain made
many of the sites he visited seem
like “the back of beyond”. In his
newly adopted home, Kephart
studied the lives and culture of
the mountain people and the
natural history of the mountain
region. From this study came
Kephart’s book Our Southern
Highlanders first published in
1913. You can learn more about
the Horace Kephart digital collec-tion
in the Spotlight section of
this newsletter (p. 3).
Participants at the Back of Be-yond
Seminar learned that mak-ing
your online collections usable
to the K-12 audience needs to
be deliberate. As computers
become more important in the
classroom, teachers are looking
for ways to expose their students
to quality online content. Some-thing
to keep in mind, seminar
participants discovered, is that
teachers must be able to con-nect
the online collection they
use in the classroom to the Stan-dard
Course of Study for their
grade and subject. Teachers
also rarely have
time to develop
their own lesson
plan for how to use
online collections
with their stu-dents.
A website
will be of far
greater use if les-son
plans that
align with the Stan-dard
Course of
Study are pro-vided.
NC ECHO partners
with LEARN NC, a
program of the
University of North
Carolina at Chapel
Hill School of Edu-cation.
This state-wide
network of
educators is using
the power of the Internet to im-prove
K-12 education in North
Carolina. LEARN NC can consult
with NC ECHO partner institu-tions
to help tailor online collec-tions
to be most useful to the K-
12 audience. LEARN NC’s web-site
www.learnnc.org also has
the most current version of the
Standard Course of Study as well
as numerous lesson plans which
SEE K-12 SEMINAR, 2
From the Project Archivist
Newsletter
July 2006
Volume 3, Issue 3
Inside this issue:
Staff Notes 1
From the Project Archivist 1, 2
Mark Your Calendars 2
Metadata Matters 2, 3
Spotlight 3
NC ECHO Advisory Committee 4
NC ECHO
www.ncecho.org
State Library of North Carolina
4640 Mail Service Center
Raleigh, NC 27699-4640
Phone: (919) 807-7418
Editor: Hilary Perez
Staff Notes
Online Collections and the K-12 Audience
The Back Of Beyond: Portals to Our Mountain Past (May 1-5, 2006 at NCCAT)
Back Row: Kathy Bundy, Leslie Richardson, Tami Shaw, Jeff Futch, Karen Shaver,
Jonathan Wade, Bob Boswell. Middle Row: Rachel Dickens, Nanci Petrucelli,
Sharon Wiley, Richard Knapp, Ramona Renfroe, Jann Brown. Front Row: Nancy
Harris, Jan Wyatt, Debbi Blake, JoAnn Williford, Christy Earp.
The Back Of Beyond: Portals to Our Mountain Past (May 1-5, 2006 at NCCAT)
Back Row: Kathy Bundy, Leslie Richardson, Tami Shaw, Jeff Futch, Karen Shaver,
Jonathan Wade, Bob Boswell. Middle Row: Rachel Dickens, Nanci Petrucelli,
Sharon Wiley, Richard Knapp, Ramona Renfroe, Jann Brown. Front Row: Nancy
Harris, Jan Wyatt, Debbi Blake, JoAnn Williford, Christy Earp.
The Back Of Beyond: Portals to Our Mountain Past (May 1-5, 2006 at NCCAT)
Back Row: Kathy Bundy, Leslie Richardson, Tami Shaw, Jeff Futch, Karen Shaver,
Jonathan Wade, Bob Boswell. Middle Row: Rachel Dickens, Nanci Petrucelli,
Sharon Wiley, Richard Knapp, Romona Renfroe, Jann Brown. Front Row: Nancy
Harris, Jan Wyatt, Debbi Blake, JoAnn Williford, Christy Earp. Not Pictured:
Monika Rhue, Ray Rose.
This spring has been quiet in the
metadata world. The Library of
Congress made a startling an-nouncement
about the suspen-sion
of controlled series titles
early in April, but other metadata
schemes have not experienced
any revolutionary events quite
like that. That said, I thought I’d
take the opportunity to talk about
a few ideas that I’ve had about
metadata recently: metadata pie
and standards types. These con-cepts
are intertwined and can
help cultural heritage profession-als
make metadata decisions
when they’re getting ready to
implement something new.
Metadata Pie
Sounds like a great dish, but
really it’s a new conceptual ap-proach
to thinking about the vari-ety
of different metadata types
that you can keep about any ob-ject
(digital or physical). So what
do I mean by metadata pie?
Metadata pie refers to the full
amount of metadata that you can
compile about any object. This
includes four over-all categories:
descriptive, structural, adminis-trative,
and analytical metadata.
Within each category there are
subcategories. For instance,
administrative metadata includes
information about Rights man-agement,
Technical specifica-tions,
preservation and condition
data, as well as mundane aspects
like physical location information.
Descriptive metadata includes
physical description, title, creator,
and so on.
While this appears to be a neat
way to divide-up metadata types,
it’s not as clear cut as that. For
instance, language is both de-scriptive
and administrative. The
question is: do we repeat the
language information in those two
different pie slices or can we con-ceptualize
a more multidimen-sional
approach to metadata?
The best way to approach these
issues is to delineate the purpose
of the metadata you are creating
and to consider the
aspects of that
purpose. Most
metadata stan-dards
include a
variety of elements
that address more
than one of these
types. Understand-ing
these differen-tiations
in metadata purposes
helps you decipher the kind of
information that needs to be in-cluded
and the relationship that
that information will have with
other elements in the standard.
For instance, Dublin Core in-cludes
both descriptive fields
(title, creator, extent, etc.) and
structural fields (relation).
Data standards types
The other aspect of metadata
that should be considered is the
different kinds of standards that
are part of metadata. There are
three kinds generally discussed.
These kinds compliment each
other and help construct a full
metadata picture.
Data content standards:
Data content standards instruct
you on the way to express infor-mation
about a particular ele-ment.
For instance, Anglo-
American Cataloging Rules 2
(AACR2) or Describing Archives: a
Content Standard (DACS) are
both data content standards. If
we look at the title section of
these two as a comparison, it
helps to demonstrate the way
that content standards work. In
bibliographic cataloging (AACR2),
title formation is based upon tran-scription
of the title as it appears
on the title page. There are sub-sequent
rules for
what constitutes
a title, what hap-pens
if there is
no title page,
and so on. In
DACS, title is
composed of
four separate
pieces of infor-mation:
the name of creator in
director order, the nature of the
materials (papers, records), a
genre type if appropriate, and an
optional topical unit. This results
in titles such as “Louis Round
Wilson papers.”
Data structure standards:
Data structure standards provide
the syntax or structure in which
you place your content. Examples
of this include Machine Readable
Cataloging (MARC) and Encoded
Archival Description (EAD). These
standards focus on the structure
or encoding of metadata rather
than what belongs in particular
fields.
Data value standards:
Data value standards regularize
the values for the content. This
includes controlled vocabularies
and standards such as ISO 8601
(date-time format) or ISO 639-2b
SEE METADATA CONCEPTS, 3
Metadata Matters
Page 2
Digitization Institute IX
June 5-9, 2006
Back Row: Amy Rudersdorf, Sara
McGough, Emily Gore, Hillary Dawkins,
Mandy Foss. Front Row: Kim Garmon,
John Mercer, Julie Thomas, Joe Bar-ricella,
Linda Sparks, Jennifer Burns,
Ran Shaffner, Frank Thomson. Not
Pictured: Deb Schillo.
Mark Your
Calendars!
- September, 2006
Digitization Institute X
NCCAT, Cullowhee, NC
(Check http://www.ncecho.org
for more information as it becomes
available.)
- July 30—August 6, 2006
Society of American Archivists 2006
Washington, DC
Stay Informed! Join the NC ECHO-Announce
listserve to receive e-mail
announcements about upcoming events
by NC ECHO and NC ECHO partner
institutions. To subscribe, e-mail Matt
Vernon
(mvernon@library.dcr.state.nc.us).
use online collections such the Horace Kephart: Revealing an Enigma digital collection.
Lesson plans for the Kephart collection are for grade 8, 11 and 12, language arts, social studies and US
history. Using the collection, students read selections from Our Southern Highlanders to achieve social
studies and English language arts objectives while developing an appreciation of the uniqueness of re-gional
speech patterns, the complexities of ethnographic encounters, and the need to interrogate pri-mary
sources carefully to identify potential biases and misinformation in them. (http://www.learnnc.org/
bestweb/kephart-wcu).
Visit the NC ECHO website or join our listserve to receive announcements about upcoming seminars for
online collections and the K-12 audience. Hilary Perez
K-12 Seminar, Continued
Ramona Renfroe, Rachel Dickens, Hilary
Perez and Monika Rhue work together on
a lesson plan exercise.
“[Metadata pie and
data standards types]
provide new ways to
classify metadata con-cepts
in order to make
better choices...”
Volume 3, Issue 3 Page 3
About Horace Kephart
Born in East Salem, Pennsylvania
in 1862, Horace Kephart went on
to become a
leading liter-ary
figure in
early 20th
century North
Carolina.
Prior to mov-ing
to western
North Carolina
and becoming
a full-time
writer,
Kephart es-tablished
a
career as a
librarian. His
cataloging
experience
gave him a
unique char-acteristic
of
attention to
detail that he incorporated into
his later writing and research. He
published his first book, Camping
and Woodcraft, in 1906.
Move to North Carolina
In 1904, at the age of 42,
Kephart arrived in western North
Carolina to begin his life anew.
He chose a simple lifestyle and
“nature-as-healer” approach. At
the same time, he took an imme-diate
interest in the history and
culture of the people. He soon
emerged as a recognized author-ity
on the cultural and natural
history of the region. Kephart
wrote hundreds of articles, but
became especially renowned for
his work Our Southern Highland-ers,
first published in 1913.
Later he turned his writing skills
towards the successful promotion
of the Great Smoky Mountains
National Park.
About the Project
In 2004, western North Carolina
celebrated the 100-year anniver-sary
of Horace
Kephart’s arrival
in the region. As
an extension of
these events,
Hunter Library’s
Special Collec-tions
and the
Mountain Heri-tage
Center
joined together to
create an online
exhibit of
Kephart’s life and
works. Funding
for the project
came through a
Library Services
and Technology
Act (LSTA) grant
managed by
North Carolina
Exploring Cultural
Heritage Online (NC ECHO).
As the project developed, it be-came
clear that Horace Kephart’s
personal album would become a
feature of
the exhibit,
providing a
unique
opportunity
to recon-struct
virtu-ally
the
scrapbook
album.
Alongside the album, another
important component of the pro-ject
is a series of exhibit pages
featuring Kephart’s artifacts and
personal notes. Much like a mu-seum
gallery, these provide a
logical path through related items
to create a unique learning ex-perience.
Here visitors can dis-cover
Kephart, his writings, his
belongings, and the people and
places of early 20th century west-ern
North Carolina. Researchers
will find the searchable database
helpful for locating specific docu-ments
and artifacts related to a
given topic.
Special
Collections
at Hunter
Library and
the Moun-tain
Heri-tage
Cen-ter
invite you to enjoy this exhibit.
George Frizzell
http://www.wcu.edu/library/
digitalcoll/kephart/
Update!
Kathy Wisser’s e-mail address
has changed.
Contact her at: kwisser@unc.edu.
Spotlight
Hunter Library Special Collections and the Mountain Heritage Center Collaborate on Horace Kephart Website
“The virtual album presents the
essence of Kephart’s vision, and is
a tribute to the people and places
he photographed.”
language codes. These and others are recommendations for NC ECHO community standards such as
NCEAD and NCDC guidelines. They provide the way to say the 4th of July in a consistent way for com-puters
to use that information in retrieval and manipulation.
So why do these concepts matter in the everyday use of metadata and standards? The first allows you to
pinpoint the goals and objectives of your metadata in order to match your needs with your data. The sec-ond
allows you to assess the purpose of particular standards in order to understand how they work to-gether
rather than in conflict. Both provide new ways to classify metadata concepts in order to make
better choices about standards and systems for today’s project and tomorrow’s program.
Questions, comments, problems, or solutions regarding metadata? Contact me at: kwisser@unc.edu.
Metadata Concepts, Continued
The “Turpin house” - one of Kephart’s
photographs featured in the website’s
virtual album.
Horace Kephart’s personal mica-windowed
lantern and framed
shaving mirror with case are
among the artifacts digitized for
display on the website.
Horace Kephart is seen in this photo captioned “Bunk in Hall Cabin.” It appears in his scrap-book
album under the heading “Great Smoky Mts.”
NC ECHO
www.ncecho.org
State Library of North Carolina
4640 Mail Service Center
Phone: (919) 807-7422
E-mail: ncecho@library.dcr.state.nc.us
www.ncecho.org
North Carolina ECHO, Exploring Cultural Heritage Online, is the World
Wide Web's doorway to the special collections of North Carolina's librar-ies,
archives, museums, and historic sites. Supported with federal Li-brary
Services and Technology Act (LSTA) funds made possible through
a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) admin-istered
by the State Library of North Carolina, a division of the Depart-ment
of Cultural Resources, this innovative project seeks to build a state-wide
framework for digitization in order to facilitate comprehensive ac-cess
to the holdings of North Carolina’s cultural institutions.
NC ECHO Project Vision – All of North Carolina's cultural institutions
work together to make the state's unique cultural and historical resources
accessible for the education and enjoyment of people of all ages in the
state, the nation, and the world.
NC ECHO Project Purpose – The NC ECHO portal provides a single
point of entry for the citizens of North Carolina to the unique resources of
North Carolina's cultural institutions in order to enhance education and
learning.
Criteria for Inclusion in the NC ECHO project – Any cultural institution
(library, archive, museum, historic site, or organization), which maintains
a permanent, non-living collection of unique materials held for research
and/or exhibit purposes and open for the use of the public will be sur-veyed.
Denominational/associational collections will be surveyed, but
individual church collections will not. Art museums will be surveyed but
galleries will not. Zoos, arboreta, and parks will not be surveyed unless
as a part of their mission they hold collections as described above.
Through a comprehensive needs assessment and opinion survey, site
visits, consultations, workshops, and grant programs, NC ECHO encour-ages
cooperation and collaboration among differing types of cultural
institutions and among institutions of varying levels of technological and
professional expertise. It is NC ECHO’s belief that by working together
North Carolina’s cultural institutions can achieve greater successes and
can do more good than they can by working alone.
Newsletter
Nooma Monika Rhue, Archivist / Archival
Services Librarian, Inez Moore Parker Ar-chives
and Research Center, Johnson C.
Smith University
Druscie Simpson, Head of Information Tech-nology,
Division of Archives and History,
North Carolina Department of Cultural Re-sources
Gerry Solomon, Assistant Section Chief,
Evaluation Services, North Carolina Depart-ment
of Public Instruction
Melissa Thibault, Director, Media Services,
Learn North Carolina
Ann Tippett, Executive Director, Schiele
Museum of Natural History
Jonathan Wade, Fellow, North Carolina
Center for the Advancement of Teaching
Helen Wykle, Special Collections Librarian,
D. H. Ramsey Library, University of North
Carolina – Asheville
Chair
Kevin Cherry, Visiting Lecturer, College of
Education, Joyner Library, East Carolina
University
Members
Robert Busko, Director, Scotland County
Memorial Library
Steve Hensen, Director, Planning and Project
Development, Rare Book, Manuscript, and
Special Collections Library, Duke University
Lynn Holdzkom, Assistant Curator, Head of
Technical Services, Wilson Library, UNC-CH
Martha Battle Jackson, Curator, North Caro-lina
State Historic Sites, North Carolina
Department of Cultural Resources
Hal Keiner, University Archivist, Appala-chian
State University
Dick Lankford, State Archivist, Division of
Archives and History, North Carolina Depart-ment
of Cultural Resources
State Library Staff Members
Grant Pair, Assistant State Librarian
for Information Technologies, State
Library of North Carolina
NC ECHO Advisory Committee
NC ECHO Staff
Hilary Perez, Project Archivist
Matt Vernon, Project Assistant
Katherine M. Wisser, Metadata Coordinator
Organization
Kevin Cherry
Chair,
NC ECHO Advisory Committee;
Visiting Lecturer,
College of Education,
Joyner Library, ECU