Customer Reviews

Building Digital Archives, Descriptions, and Displays: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Archivists and Librarians (How-to-Do-It Manuals for Libraries)

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This is a classic digital library creation guide. It assumes you know Web database vocabulary. If you do you'll find it useful even if it is almost a decade old. Some standards persist.

I was gravely disappointed by this book. It sounded like just the thing
for a project I'm working on, but in both content and style it was sorely lacking.

The book attempts to whip through a massive amount of information--the
nature and history of archives and the jobs of archivists vs. those of
librarians; finding aids, MARC, EAD, Dublin Core, and some metadata
standards I've never even heard of; HTML, XHTML, and XML; the
organization of information both as a grand overwhelming topic and as
directly applied to digital files--well, you get the idea. A whole
section of the book is devoted to how to arrange folders and files on
a computer to make them usable by other people, which I guess would be
important if you were interested in setting up a shared filing system
on a local area network but which seemed not germane to my topic.
Also, Steilow says that it's not really necessary to learn HTML
because you can just write documents in Word and then save them as
HTML and they'll work just fine. Everything I have ever heard or
experiences suggests to the that doing so is a terrible idea--you end
up with ugly markup that's not standards-compliant.

Finally, on the subject of style, the book is, to my mind, written in
a hard-to-follow style. It's all arranged in bullet points and
sidebars and other little weird boxes of text and diagrams. I guess
for some people it's easier to learn that way, but I find it very hard
to follow--I never know what order I'm supposed to read things in, and
because the material is not presented as a narrative, I'm not sure how
one element is supposed to relate to another. I think that clauses
and verb tenses and prepositional phrases and conjunctions and
transitions exist for a reason--they make it possible for us to relay
ideas and how they relate to one another. I'm aware that not everyone
processes information in the way I do, though, and so there are
perhaps some people who would find this book helpful.