New Jersey Digital Highway

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The New Jersey Digital Highway is a collaborative initiative led by Rutgers University Libraries, the New Jersey State Library, the New Jersey Department of Archives and Records Management, the Botto House/American Labor Museum and the New Jersey Historical Society, with many other institutions around the state providing collections.

NJDH is designed to provide long-term preservation and access to cultural and historical artifacts in digital form. The technology infrastructure is the Fedora repository architecture, coupled with a data model and metadata implementation that provides access and management for digital resources and their analog source artifacts. NJDH provides guidance on digital encoding standards for images, text, and audiovisual files. NJDH includes a manual on creating and sharing digital resources and offers a web-based Workflow Management System tool for submitting resources and metadata.

The New Jersey Digital Highway collection features a selection of resources from a broad range of libraries, museums and archives, including:

*  Seabrook Farms Educational and Cultural Center
*  American Labor Museum/Botto House National Landmark
*  New Jersey State Library
*  Newark Museum
* Atlantic County Library System

The initial collection focused on the immigrant experience in New Jersey, since New Jersey has historically been the "gateway state" for new immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. The immigrant experience in New Jersey is rich and varied, particularly as exemplified by the Seabrook Farms experience. Seabrook Farms, a family-owned frozen vegetable packing plant, recruited Japanese Americans from internment camps, beginning in January 1944. As World War II ended, they were joined by displaced persons from Eastern Europe, resulting in a rich multicultural community in hear of the New Jersey "garden state" agricultural area. the New Jersey Digital Highway documents this vanishing way of life in photographs, oral histories and written remembrances. The immigrant experience is also deeply intertwined with the New Jersey labor movement, with many leaders who were first or second generation immigrants. The American Labor Museum/Botto House National Landmark Collection includes papers and photographs from prominent Textile Workers' Union leader Sol Stetin as well as images and documents that convey the flavor and vigor of working class life at the turn of the last century.

The New Jersey Digital Highway offers portals of information for specific audiences: the general public, educators, students, and the librarians, archivists and curators in New Jersey's cultural heritage institutions. Genealogy resources, working with digital primary sources, for educators and students, as well as lesson plans and educational activities are offered. The Digital Highway Collection Roadmap[1]gives guidance on creating standards-based digital collections in every format, addressing copyright issues, selecting collections to digitize and marketing to users. The general user portal has a broad range of information on New Jersey, from primary sources, to fun activities "off the beaten path" to explore New Jersey history and culture. Of course, there is a section on the Jersey Devil![2]

The New Jersey Digital Highway has a mission of "shared access, local control." It is designed to support collaboration and to provide participating organizations the opportunity to showcase their own collections, even as those collections are maintained and managed by the New Jersey Digital Highway repository architecture. The Atlantic County Library System utilized the dynamic collection service to create a browsable collection of artifacts from the Egg Harbor City German Project[3], which is organized and accessed at the library system's website but draws dynamically from the New Jersey Digital Highway repository.

[edit] Footnotes

(1) "Digital Highway Collection Roadmap" New Jersey Digital Highway. Last updated January 18, 2007. Last accessed July 31, 2007. http://www.njdigitalhighway.org/librarians.php

(2) Agnew, Grace. "What is the Jersey Devil" New Jersey Digital HighwayLast updated September 18, 2006. Last accessed July 31, 2007. http://www.njdigitalhighway.org/jersey_devil_ever.php

(3) "Egg Harbor City German Project" Atlantic County Library System http://www.atlanticlibrary.org/collections/digitized/EHC/highlights.asp

[edit] Bibliography for Further Reading

Giarlo, Michael J. "Highway Building 101: Paving the Way to a State-wide Digital Repository" Presentation for the New York Technical Services Librarians Last accessed August 1, 2007. http://www.lackoftalent.org/michael/presentations/HighwayBuilding101/

Hurst-Wahl, Jill. "the New Jersey Digital Highway" Digitization 101 October 7, 2004. Last accessed July 31, 2007. http://hurstassociates.blogspot.com/2004/10/new-jersey-digital-highway.html

Institute of Museum and Library Services. "New Jersey Digital Highway" Digital Collections and Content Last updated June 12, 2007. Last accessed July 31, 2007. http://imlsdcc.grainger.uiuc.edu/collections/FullDisplay.asp?cid=2576

Jantz, Ronald and Giarlo, Michael J. "Digital Preservation: Architecture and Technology for Trusted Digital Repositories" D-Lib Magazine vol. 11, no. 6 (June 2005) Lasted accessed July 31, 2007. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june05/jantz/06jantz.html

Weber, Mary Beth and Favaro, Sharon. "Beyond Dublin Core: Development of the Workflow Management System and Metadata Implementations at Rutgers University" DigCCurr 2007: an International Symposium in Digital Curation" April 18-20, 2007. Last accessed July 31, 2007. http://www.ils.unc.edu/digccurr2007/program.html

[edit] External links

Official website

Framework of Guidance to Building Good Digital Collections http://www.niso.org/framework/Framework2.html references The New Jersey Digital Highway in several areas.