GW Masonic Memorial Web Session on Digitized Proceedings

This from WBro. Mark Tabbert at the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia. This is a truly useful program. The goal is to eventually digitize all proceedings of all US Grand Lodges into a searchable database—a boon to researchers and future generations, as well as a space-saving way to be rid of reams of duplicated copies of proceedings that take up untold miles of shelf space in grand lodge libraries and basements where they reside, unindexed, unused, and virtually inaccessible. Yes, the initial digitalization may be costly, but it is a worthy goal, and the memorial is the one national location and body that all mainstream grand lodges participate in and support. The program is well worth looking into for your grand lodge.

Here is Mark's announcement:

EDIT: Broken links now fixed. My fault, not Mark's.
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The George Washington Masonic Memorial Association, in partnership with OCLC, is offering to all interested Freemasons two web sessions (15 & 29 January) to learn about ContentDM Database.

Currently contained in the database are over 100 years of Grand Lodge of Washington State's Proceedings, seven years from the Grand Lodge of Oklahoma and 93 years of the George Washington Masonic Memorial Association annual reports.


To browse these collection click here:
http://cdm2623-01.cdmhost.com/


To register for the Thursday 15 January (2:00 -3:00 pm Eastern) session click here:
https://www3.oclc.org/app/request/bin/r ... MDRP_Jan15


To register for the Thursday 29 January (2:00 -3:00 pm Eastern) session click here:
https://www3.oclc.org/app/request/bin/r ... MDRP_Jan29


The Masonic digitization project is open to all members of the Memorial Association and to all other Masonic organizations. Any participating Grand Lodge may first periodically determine the number of volumes it wishes to digitize. In response the Memorial and OCLC determines the cost of the volumes, and upon approval, ships the volumes to OCLC’s processing center. Within in a matter of weeks the digitized proceedings are available to the Grand Lodge through a private and secure website. Once the process is complete, the Grand Lodge will receive a master archive copy of their proceedings in TIFF format. The base cost for this process will be $0.69 per page, plus $6.95 to dis-bind each volume. For example a hard-bound proceeding of 1,000 pages would cost $696.50.

With ContentDM the Memorial Association is uniquely placed to coordinate the voluntary and systematic digitization of American Masonic history. Though this service Freemasons may better communicate among themselves, educate the brethren and articulate their history, aims and achievements to the digital world.

Thank you
- please forward to any interested Freemason.

Online Computer Library center, Inc.
Founded in 1967, OCLC is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization. More than 69,000 libraries and other cultural heritage organizations around the world use OCLC services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend and preserve library materials.
http://www.oclc.org/us/en/default.htm

OCLC’s CONTENTdm® Digital Collection Management Software provides a complete solution for Grand Lodges to store, manage and deliver their digital collections to the Internet.

Once items are digitized and loaded into CONTENTdm collections every Grand Lodge proceeding—along with other media types from photographs and maps to audio and video files —can appear on the Internet. Some highlights of CONTENTdm are:

Powerful end-user search/browse interface.
CONTENTdm’s text-based search engine is designed to retrieve results from millions of items no matter the format—books, newspapers, maps, audio/video and more.

Flexible for collection building. CONTENTdm gives Grand Lodges full control over digital resources, their descriptions, access and display. It stores any type of file and displays all items viewable in a Web browser.

Active user community. Through CONTENTdm, Freemasonry become part of an active user community that is advancing efforts to digitize primary resources by sharing best practices and putting millions of items on the Web. Libraries’ and other cultural organizations’ successful digital projects have received community recognition, provided leadership, support genealogy research, and access to historical information.