Center for Railroad Photography & Art | Ask an Archivist: Q&A for Odyssey Content Management System
After enjoying an online program on train model expert and photographer Linn Westcott hosted by the Center for Railroad Photography & Art (CRP&A) back in July, I discovered that the organization had just launched a new collections management system using Odyssey Preservation Software created by History IT. As someone who maintains a database for my “real job” and met Odyssey representatives during NEMA Conference 2022 [Day 1, Day 2, Day 3], not to mention that I really like trains, the webinar held on Tuesday, August 15, 2023 at 8:00 p.m. EDT was an ideal opportunity to learn more about several of my interests. CRP&A Executive Director Scott Lothes gave an introduction to the organization and its upcoming events, while Director of Archives & Collections Adrienne Evans and Reference & Digital Projects Archivist Erin Rose led the two-part demonstration and answered questions.
Before the demo, Evans and Rose described the “long road” to selecting this database. The process began in 2019 after receiving a five year grant from Elizabeth Morse Genius Charitable Trust. The search for an appropriate platform lasted for two years and was significantly slowed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Once the staff chose Odyssey, they spent an additional year implementing the system. The staff prefers Odyssey over other systems, such as PastPerfect Museum Software, because it is an affordable, off-the-shelf product with a robust administrative backend and a public facing online collections portal.
Odyssey servers offer plenty of storage space to post its digital surrogates, when physical slides are digitized as high resolution TIFF or NUF and resized as JPEGs at 4000px on the longest side. The program allows batch uploads with captions and metadata. Currently, a batch upload with a thousand images and metadata takes a few hours, while a single upload takes mere minutes. The staff had previously used Flickr for photo storage and migrated about 8,500 images with captions onto Odyssey. The public site launched in June 2023, with new images regularly added into the system. At the time of the conference, about 10,500 of their 200,000 digitized images are on Odyssey. Besides slides, CRP&A has an extensive art and film collection. Staff are investigate copyright and reproduction rights to host these works on Odyssey. In the future, interns and volunteers might be involved in the uploading process.
During the Q&A, Lothes explained that Odyssey is not intended as a secure storage system but a public presentation system. CRP&A already uses a triplicate backup system of digital surrogates in additional to the archived original slide. Hard drives on internal servers holding these surrogates are changed every three years, using both solid state and hard-disk drives from multiple manufacturers to create redundancy.
Starting off the demo, Evans gave a basic site tour and demonstrated how to best browse the database. A simple link on the Collections Overview page of the main website brings users directly to the digital collections site. Users can choose to “Explore” or browse by theme; “Browse Images” in a scroll format similar to Pinterest or Instagram; view selections from CRP&A’s social media in the “Featured Gallery”; give “Feedback” in a Google form to give additional information, provide corrections, link supporting documents, and share more images; and learn more “About the CRP&A” by going back to the main website. The layout of the site is clean and easy to navigate, while the basic search bar works the same as a browser search like Google or DuckDuckGo, including the ability to put quotes around words to search for an exact phrase.
Next, Rose took a deep dive into the database and used the “Advanced Search” feature to search by multiple criteria. Each criteria has a “Require all terms” checkbox that works the same as quotes in basic search. Users can search by “Identifier” or name of the file, Date/Range to specify period of interest, “Person” such as the name of the photographer, “Description” to search the image captions, “Keyword/Subject” to search by tag, or “Railroad” to find trains and tracks from a specific company. Once the correct image is discovered, users can read the metadata to learn about the creator, geographic location, railroad, copyright status, and other information. Because the images have such a high resolution, users can zoom in to see minute details.
As I know from my own experience in creating databases, files are only discoverable when correctly labeled and tagged within the system. The Cataloging Working Group within the staff designed descriptive standards and controlled vocabulary for their system and made informed choices based on existing systems. For example, they chose to use full legal names of railroads unless those were greatly superseded by popular names. They call their metadata standards CRPA Core, which is based on widely used Dublin Core. To generate list of names, they consulted the Getty Thesaurus for Geographic Names, Library of Congress’ Thesaurus for Graphic Materials, and Getty’s Art & Architecture Thesaurus, along with compiling their own list of railroad vocabulary and photographers.
While the Q&A portion of the talk occasionally became sidetracked in technical details, the overall presentation was a fantastic introduction to the new CRP&A digitized archives. I look forward to many hours of looking at pictures of trains. A recorded version of this presentation will be available on the Rail Photo Art YouTube channel in about two weeks.