Digital Collections and Presentations/Speeches

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. Wittenberg will discuss the project’s findings and cover both the breakthroughs and obstacles encountered during the course of the project’s development.

Led by Lake Forest College, Chicago-area academic, cultural, and civic institutions are developing VBI, the Virtual Burnham Initiative, with 3D models re-creating the 1909 Plan of Chicago housed on a project website. VBI is a project about the Chicagoland community that builds community between academic institutions, area organizations, and the greater public through technology.

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.

How can we bring authentic learning, with real-world outcomes and assessments, into the history/social science classroom? This session will discuss the presenter's efforts to design and teach digital history seminars in partnership with museum professionals at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Monticello.

PrimaryAccess (www.primaryaccess.org) www.primaryaccess.org is a Web 2.0 digital tool developed at the University of Virginia's Center for Technology and Teacher Education that allows teachers to integrate primary source documents into the curriculum through student-created digital documentaries. This session will demonstrate the tool and discuss its use in the K–12 classroom to stimulate participant ideas for transferability to higher education.

This presentation focuses on a collaborative local history project between Duke University undergraduates and Durham eighth graders. Through their research seminar, Duke students conduct original research in local archives and then mentor eighth graders in how to use technology, particularly the Digital Durham website http://digitaldurham.duke.edu

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.

In creating a digital library collection on World War II, Texas A&M University-Commerce discovered an opportunity to work in partnership with local museums, public libraries, and historical societies. This diverse community greatly expands our ability to preserve historical resources and make them available to scholars worldwide.

A challenge arises in making digital information and communication technologies accessible to indigenous communities. From digital preservation of cultural and historic artifacts to embedding culturally sensitive materials in academic courses, technology can become a double-edged sword: it can be deployed to obfuscate a critical analysis of how "communication" is understood as meaningful by First Nations themselves.