Digital Imaging

Storing digital data is becoming more essential to the work of librarians, who are trying to think in terms of the next 100 years — a virtual eternity in computer time.

Panelists from academic computing and the library in three different types of institution will discuss the approaches their organizations have taken as they foster digital humanities research projects. Discussion will focus on the particularities of digital research projects in the humanities, the collaborative relationship of the contributors, and sustainability and scale.

As information literacy and active learning principles are being incorporated into accreditation standards, the teaching of these skills is becoming a broader campus concern. This session will feature two collaborative digitization projects that exemplify best practices in visual and information literacy and technology fluency.

Stephen G. Nichols tells of creating a digital library of manuscripts of the <i>Romance of the Rose</i>, the most popular vernacular French romance of the Middle Ages. The scholarly rationale for the digital library project proved the easy part. Nichols also shares the complex, technical steps of digitizing the manuscripts.

Increasingly, moving images are part of students' daily lives. Students record scenes they witness on their pocket digital movie cameras, download clips from free movie sites, and create remixes and mashups. Students recognize something that many libraries don't—that moving images are one of the richest ways of capturing events and that they tell us an immense amount about the history of their time, as well as current culture and styles.

These are guidelines in the acquisition and use of images in non-profit educational visual resources collections, written by the Visual Resources Association.

Educational institutions should be actively rethinking how they are accessing and using copyrighted visual arts images, and they should be exploring an approach that seeks to address copyright owners’ interests, as well as users’ needs, in an environment that encourages increased, shared access to these images for teaching and study.