Reinforcing Data Bridges

You may already know about Americana, the JCB’s online collection and collaborative research platform. But did you know that it just got better? New England has three seasons: Winter, Mud, and Road Construction – and just like New England roads, technical infrastructure needs some periods of maintenance too.

At the beginning of June, we gave Americana an overhaul. We are working to better capture the detailed information that our cataloging team produces every day, and to dynamically pair it with new digital images as we aim to photograph our entire collection.

Some of the additions in this edit appear in nearly every record: you’ll now find all the citations for each entry under “References,” and browsable versions of publication information like the place of publication, publisher’s statement (transcribed verbatim), and date. We’ve broken the “creator” of an object out from its “contributors.” As a result, you can now discover all the items we have tagged with Joseph Sabin’s Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America, from its Discovery to the Present Time (1336 items), you can browse all the items we have that were published in Mexico (3,879), and former owners won’t be mistaken for authors of an anonymous work. We’ve also added commonly-known-as titles, so now if you search for the Declaration of Independence, you’ll see our copies of the Declaration, not just related materials.

Other bits of information are more specialized: maps, like this one of the St. Laurence River and Quebec, now include their scale when available. We’ve tweaked how some information is displayed – we’re spelling out languages now, like Nahuatl (284), and trying to reduce abbreviations where possible, exchanging “S.N.” for the clearer “unknown” when a publisher’s name is missing. We’re showing more of the information about the objects’ dimensions, including page counts and formats for printed books, and the image and sheet size where available for maps and prints.

We’ve also done some important work under the hood. While it’s less glitzy than adding new files or new data, our revisions should ensure that copies and volumes are associated with the right files and your downloads work smoothly. The system isn’t perfect yet, and we continue working to improve the data connections. If you see something wrong, we’d love to hear from you – you can report it at Americana (at) brown.edu.