Digital Collections

This 21 minute podcast features an inteview with Mark Kornbluh, Director of MATRIX and Professor of History at Michigan State University. Our conversation was recorded at the CNI 2008 Spring Task Force Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota where Mark co-presented the session, "Digital Humanities Centers: Models, Missions, and Challenges".

The Section 108 Copyright Study Group (www.section108.gov), which was assembled to study and look for potential changes to copyright law, released its report on March 31. Established under the watch of the Library of Congress, this group of independent experts was charged with finding areas in copyright law that might need changes in order to better balance the positions of rights holders and "cultural memory organizations such as libraries and archives in the digital world."

The group has worked on this issue for nearly three years. Among their recommendations, they conclude:

Many academic digital collection projects are focused on special collections and college archives. Such projects seek to bring collections "out of the basement" and enable greater access to valuable and specialized research materials. However, undergraduate students and faculty often have very different needs and expectations of these digital materials than experienced researchers or the general public.

• Stephen R. Ruth, Martha Sammons, and Lindsey Poulin on distance learning challenges
  
• Benoît Burdet, Cédric Bontron, and Pierre-Yves Burgi on digital lecture-capture at the University of Geneva
  
• Joseph Rene Corbeil and Maria Elena Valdes-Corbeilon on using mobile devices for teaching and learning
  
• Complete findings from the 2007 EDUCAUSE Current IT Issues Survey

In this 24-minute recording from the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, we'll hear from Nate McQueen in a session entitled DigitalWell: Solutions for Digital Content Collections.  McQueen explains how the University of Washington, in collaboration with ResearchChannel, uses the DigitalWell Digital Asset Management System to encode, manage, and distribute large content collections through streaming and podcast technologies.

In this 32-minute presentation from the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, we'll hear from Michael Fegan and Dean Rehberger in a session entitled Project Builder: Building Rich, Contextualized Web Presentations from a Digital Archive. They explain how the Project Builder CMS helps faculty members and cultural institutions create rich, multimedia digital archives and Web sites that are easily maintained and augmented.