Digital Preservation and Presentations/Speeches

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.

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.

Scientific progress and discovery increasingly hinge upon analysis of a wide variety of data sources. With these datasets growing ever larger and more complex, we are increasingly challenged in the areas of management, preservation, integration, and access to high-level services that facilitate inquiry and hypothesis testing. We are also seeing an increase in geographically distributed resources. For science to advance, we must develop new knowledge-based environments that allow researchers to easily query and analyze vast holdings of diverse, distributed data. NCAR has joined a number of collaborations aimed at addressing critical science and societal challenges, ranging from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the International Polar Year, regional climate modeling, solar-terrestrial science, digital preservation, and more. We will survey these areas, discuss some of the challenges we face in developing effective cyberinfrastructure, and briefly touch on the important migration towards "science gateways" and knowledge-based environments.

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.

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.

This session will share the vision of pioneers of evolving technologies on how to use them to reach their full potential. Topics will include 3D rapid prototyping, Google applications for higher education, digital preservation, storage and information life-cycle management, advances in virtualization, Web 2.0, m-learning, and location awareness.

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.