Digital Content in a Museum Library: Projects and a Survey
Paul O'Pecko, Mystic Seaport Museum, USA
http://www.mysticseaport.org/library/home.cfm

Demonstration: Demonstrations - Session 2

The G.W. Blunt White Library at Mystic Seaport has been involved in creating digital content for web display over the last 4 years. We would like to demonstrate the results of two major projects, one an American Memory project and the other an Andrew W. Mellon Project, totaling nearly 200,000 pages of images, mostly archival material and published books. We have attempted to incorporate our digital work into our daily routines and finding aids in addition to using the content as stand-alone .exhibits.. Since the completion of the two major projects we have received another Mellon grant to host a conference and open up a dialogue with scholars in the field of maritime history in an attempt to make a worthwhile impact on new scholarship in the humanities and other areas of study. We were challenged by Mellon to survey historians to determine their actual wants and needs in terms of researching primary sources online and we would like to share parts of the study as well as the URL for the online survey we are developing as a result.