Caroline Catchpole is a mobile digitization specialist for the Metropolitan New York Library Council, a winner of the Knight News Challenge on Libraries for the Culture in Transit project. Photo above: Community scanning project at Woodhaven. 

Culture in Transit is working to uncover and document New York histories not yet told, by taking scanners, cameras and librarians’ expertise into communities and small cultural heritage institutions. A partnership between the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO), the Brooklyn Public Library and Queens Library, our work falls into two main areas: community events and institutional scanning.

Community events, which are organized at Brooklyn Public Library by Sarah Quick and at Queens Library by Maggie Schreiner, are held at branch libraries throughout the two boroughs. We bring mobile scanning equipment to library branches and invite residents to bring in family photos, documents and other memorabilia. We digitize the materials, which are returned to the donors along with a flash drive of digital files. The digital files are included in our libraries’ respective catalogs (Queens Memory and Brooklyn Public Library’s catalog), and shared with the Digital Public Library of America. Through these community events, we aim to democratize the archival record and empower residents to help shape the histories of their communities.

Institutional scanning is organized through METRO, a nonprofit organization with a membership of 250 local libraries, museums and archives. We take our mobile scanning equipment to member institutions with the aim to help libraries and archives that do not have the staff time to devote to digitization, the budget to spend on equipment, or the ability to display digitized content online. Caroline spends up to two weeks on site at different institutions, scanning items from their collections. The materials are then displayed on METRO’s Digital Culture site and shared with the Digital Public Library of America. METRO recently published the first Culture In Transit digitized collection, a collection of ephemera from the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Before going out to community events or small local institutions, we had to select and purchase the equipment that would make up our mobile scanning kits. Trying to put together a digitization kit can be overwhelming regardless of how tech-savvy you might be. It took hours of researching products and reviews before we made our final decisions. Our kit includes two components: a scanner for small two-dimensional items and a copy stand for three-dimensional or oversized items. To see a list of the items we purchased please visit the project documentation section of our blog. It’s our hope that this list will serve as a starting point for anyone interested in building their own low-cost or mobile digitization project.

After months of planning, purchasing and outreach we finally began scanning at our respective locations in June. Caroline’s first institution was the Wildlife Conservation Society, digitizing an interesting mix of pamphlets, brochures and small books. Sarah hosted her first event at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Leonard branch, collecting photographs from longtime Williamsburg resident Vera Toscano. Maggie hosted her first event at the Sunnyside branch of the Queens Library, where neighbors came to have photographs scanned and to chat about local history.

Mobile digitization kit.

Our blog has been a significant milestone for the project. We developed it as a space to record our project activities and to post project documentation. We have a steady and growing readership, which is encouraging for us and reaffirms our belief that the ideas we are exploring as this project develops are meaningful and interesting to our readership.

Moving forward, although Culture in Transit’s community events were originally designed to occur in branch libraries, we’re interested in exploring additional community spaces to host events. What would it be like to bring our equipment to a senior center or arts organization? Would the number of donations or participants increase? In the upcoming months we plan to test some alternate locations in the hope of answering some of these questions.

As the project progresses we’re also looking for opportunities to share our experiences with colleagues. In addition to our blog we’re applying to present at a number of conferences and will be participating in New York Archives Week. On Oct. 15 we’ll be hosting “Six Months in Transit: An Open House With the Culture in Transit Team,” which is a free event open to anyone who wants to test our equipment and ask questions.

Mobile digitization specialists Sarah Quick of the Brooklyn Public Library and Maggie Schreiner of Queens Library contributed to this post.