Web Seminars Contributed by EDUCAUSE, Digital Collections, and EDUCAUSE Live!

Ithaka's research group studies how new technologies are affecting higher education and how colleges and universities can best manage these changes in four discrete program areas: providing academia with the policy basis needed to transition effectively and responsibly away from print collections and toward increasingly electronic-only collections; helping information-services organizations meet the needs of scholars by understanding their changing attitudes and practices; improving the community's understanding of how new information resources drive teaching and learning practices; and analyzing strategies for the most effective possible dissemination of knowledge from colleges and universities to researchers, students, and other learners. This presentation will review these areas of work and highlight some key findings, encouraging discussion about these and other key strategic issues facing higher education.

The Gutenberg-e project was created as a bold experiment to explore whether peer-reviewed, born-digital monographs would alter the way historical scholarship is presented, whether scholars would receive the same professional credit for these publications as they would from work published in print, and whether the project would enable the publication of monographs that would otherwise be turned down for financial reasons by university presses. The project has a history that includes both exciting breakthroughs and significant challenges. A number of the authors have created completely new models of collaboration in the scholarly communication process as well as new models of historical scholarship and narrative. We have come to understand that e-books require a significant level of investment in both editorial and technical staff time in order to create publications that reach their full potential as works of digital scholarship. We have also learned that integrating and sustaining this work within a collaborative publishing, library, and technology organization presents significant challenges and great opportunities.

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.

What does it take to implement a digital asset management system that not only improves access to collections but also allows faculty to integrate digital materials into their teaching? Teaching with digital collections means collection development that is driven by faculty needs, flexible presentation tools, and web interfaces that help students understand visual resources in context. Reed College’s IT and library will share their experiences in implementing a CONTENTdm-based digital image collection for the classics and humanities.

The collective expertise of digital libraries in making available the diverse literatures of science and artistic expression, in concert with the increasing sophistication of commercial partners and the development of distributed, interactive forms of publishing, require libraries to chart the engineering of new architectures for teaching, learning, and research. Digital libraries must work to forge the new collaborations required to enable and build these services.

Libraries and archives have long collected information to serve scholars in understanding history, culture, and society. Today, Web pages have replaced newsletters; blogs have supplanted diaries; and many government forms and documents are more readily accessible on the Web than in paper form. As part of an effort to appropriately document and capture today's information for tomorrow's use, institutions must adopt a Web archiving strategy. Fortunately, Archive-It takes much of the burden out of the task. Archive-It is a Web application uniquely designed for the needs of university and government institutions interested in preserving Web content. The application allows organizations with limited infrastructure and technical staff to collect, catalog, search, and manage archived Web content through a Web interface. Built on open source components by the Internet Archive and the International Internet Preservation Consortium, Archive-It creates and stores the ARC files that are the standard format for Web archiving. In this presentation, two representatives from the Internet Archive discuss the Archive-It project.