Success stories: case studies
Naval War College, Bates Papers

The Naval War College recently approached Preservation Resources with a type of project that is becoming increasingly common for libraries and archives. They wanted to preserve the papers of Rear Admiral Richard W. Bates, a manuscript collection, and provide access to the papers on the Web. The collection consists of typewritten correspondence with some photographs, newspaper clippings, commissioning certificates, handwritten material, and miscellaneous printed materials.

Background

The Naval War College acquired the papers of Rear Admiral Richard W. Bates (1892-1974) in 1974. Bates was a participant in and scholar of World War II and a major figure at the Naval War College. The papers span six decades and contain correspondence, subject files, writings and speeches. They were deposited in the Naval Historical Collection of the Naval War College Library where they were subsequently organized and arranged. The material consisted of various paper types including carbon copies on an assortment of onionskin. Prior to filming and digitizing, the papers could only be accessed at the Naval War College by referring to a finding aid and perusing the many boxes and folders.

Goals

The Naval War College had two goals—to preserve the historical collection and to provide increased access to a broad audience. The register of the Bates papers and their arrangement by the College’s archivists into series, boxes and folders would provide the structural backbone of the preservation and access project.

The College required complete services from start to finish including material preparation, metadata collection, microfilming and digitization. For the digital project, they required an indexed and hyperlinked stand-alone end product that could be mounted on the Web for easy access. Navigation through the digitized collection had to be intuitive to novice users.

Solution

After issuing a request for proposal and evaluating responses, the Naval War College chose Preservation Resources to microfilm and digitize the collection. Preservation Resources has the unique ability to combine filming and digitizing projects into an integrated process. Decisions about what data to be collected during preparation for filming were made based on what was needed for creation of the digital product. For example, in preparation, folder targets were created to introduce new topics in the film, which also served to introduce each PDF document. During filming, frame numbers were used both to simplify digitization and provide additional points of access for researchers. The result was a process that was designed for maximum efficiency.

• Preparation: Preservation Resources has been providing preparation services to clients since 1985. For this project, Preservation Resources fully collated the papers, which included arranging them in chronological order within the folders and locating duplicates not to be filmed. Preservation Resources also programmed the reels and created targets that were used in both filming and digitizing. Since the finding aid did not exist in electronic format, it was rekeyed for use in the digital product.
• Filming: Preservation Resources has wide experience in filming manuscript collections and dealing with the challenges of poor print quality and a variety of paper types and colors. Camera operators are well trained to compensate for variances in the material in order to create the highest-quality images possible on microfilm. Preservation Resources also has a complete in-house darkroom and film lab, as well as a secure and environmentally-controlled storage vault for storing the print master negatives.
• Scanning: Preservation Resources has four years of experience in scanning microfilm of research collections. After evaluating several different options, Preservation Resources chose Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) for the Web product. Preservation Resources created a hyperlinked PDF index that is similar in structure to the finding aid supplied by the Naval War College. The organizational structure of the PDF index is related to that of the material-each box is a separate index entry that contains folder entries. Each folder entry is a hyperlink to a separate PDF document containing the images of the contents of the folder beginning with the target. The PDF product is optimized for printing and for display in Web browsers; and is accessible on most computer platforms.

Benefits

Outsourcing the entire preservation and access project to Preservation Resources resulted in several benefits for the Naval War College:

• Preservation of the original: The personal papers of Rear Admiral Bates are now preserved on the highest-quality preservation microfilm with a life expectancy of 500 years.
• Web access: In addition to receiving the original TIFF images, the College received a digital end-product that could be easily mounted on their Web site.
• Efficiency: By contracting with Preservation Resources to provide all services, the College was able to realize a rapid turnaround, seamless transition from filming to digitizing, and the ease of dealing with a single provider with years of expertise in both areas.

Learn more

The Admiral Bates papers can be accessed from the Naval War College Library at: http://merln.ndu.edu/diglib.html#bates

The Bates papers can also be accessed from MERLN (Military and Education Research and Library Network) at: http://merln.ndu.edu/resources.html