University of Vermont Digitization Center

(UVMDC)


The networked digital environment has rapidly transformed traditional means of communicating information. The availability of scholarly materials in digital format has made possible the integration of visual art and archival collections in a manner not possible before. This integration offers scholars a wonderful opportunity to create resources and interactive learning environments that go beyond the traditional classroom and reach out to K-12, state, and world-wide communities.

Creating digital resources involves digitizing, or, capturing in digital format, a non-digital original object such as a document or an image. It can also include the creation of new digital objects. But the creation or capture of the objects is just the beginning. To build useful collections of digital resources, the objects must be catalogued so they can be found both within and beyond UVM, the data must be maintained so that it is available now and in the long term, and multipurpose online databases must be created that fulfill the needs of scholars today and tomorrow. Creation of these digital repositories demands the expertise and collaboration of computer, museum, and library professionals. Integrating these materials into the classroom, and reshaping teaching, learning, and scholarship to take advantage of their use demands the expertise of faculty in a broad range of disciplines.

UVM Digitization Efforts to Date

The Perkins Geology Museum Archive ( http://perkinscatalog.uvm.edu ) was created to enhance research and educational access to the collection. When completed, the database will contain over 40,000 images from the museum’s collection, including fossil, rock, and mineral specimens, maps, photographs and soil cores.

At the Bailey Howe Library, The George Perkins Marsh Online Research Center ( http://bailey.uvm.edu/ specialcollections/gpmorc.html ) includes over 650 fully-searchable documents in facsimiles and transcriptions with annotations and biographical information about the principals.  Special Collections has begun to digitize its finding aids, or inventories of its manuscript holdings. The Library has additional plans. It recently proposed the establishment of the Vermont Congressional Online Research Center as a model interactive web resource for Senator Leahy's papers and other artifacts that are placed with the University, including pertinent photographs, video/audio materials, and oral history transcripts.

The Robert Hull Fleming Museum has recently completed the second phase of a data entry project that will enable it to make its 20,000 collections records available online (see www.flemingmuseum.org ). A digital imaging project is just underway and student research is being added to digital collections information.

Among the electronic text collections (see http://etext.uvm.edu), Nancy Gallagher, author of Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State, has been funded by a grant to produce The Eugenics Collection. The 200+ documents detail the growth of the eugenics movement in Vermont and its impact on Vermont's social policies. Other collections include digital images backed by searchable texts of the popular nineteenth century women's magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, and the Phi Alpha Theta award winning student produced UVM history journal, The History Review .

Project Proposal

The aim of this pilot study is to develop the model for a sustainable collaborative Digitization Center that will provide a central resource for campus- and state-wide digitization projects.

Our goal is to ensure the creation of digital resources that will be useful to scholars and the community for the long term by:

Large-scale digitization efforts are costly to initiate and maintain. Consensus does not yet exist on technical standards, intellectual property rights, licensing arrangements, and requirements for authentication. Attempting to build these projects in isolation leads to costly duplication of effort and results in resources that may be useful in the short term but usually do not survive the inevitable evolution of the technology used to create them.

Building the necessary infrastructure requires scholarly expertise in the selection of materials to be digitized; pedagogical expertise in their use in teaching and learning; expertise in cataloguing to make the collections transparently available to other library systems; technical expertise in how to capture, create, organize, and electronically store the digital objects;  archival expertise in how to maintain the digital collections and sufficient hardware capability to ensure that the collections can grow.

With its current projects UVM has begun to develop this expertise. Through the Center for Teaching and Learning, UVM has established a model for assiting faculty to integrate use of these resources into teaching and scholarship. The current UVM computer infrastructure has the processing power needed to serve the collections to the online world, and, with some provision, has the necessary storage capability. UVM offers another benefit as an Internet II University. This high speed, broadband network ties together top research universities for the purpose of collaborating on high-end research projects. The potential exists, therefore, to develop international computing-intensive educational research projects with the image-rich collections of the UVMDC at the core.

By providing a centralised service for learning about and creating digital collections, UVMDC hopes to create extensible, standards-based projects. Like other public goods, once the expert staff, necessary hardware, and technical infrastructure are in place, expertise, protocols, and equipment can be shared by many projects at negligible additional cost and with no reduction in quality or quantity.

By helping to establish common standards and procedures, the University of Vermont can also serve as an important resource in preserving the state's cultural history. Vermont is an ideal size to create models for such collaboration because of the relatively small number of cultural institutions and established connections among many of them. As Vermont's land grant university with a well-respected Extension Program, the UVMDC will be poised to help citizens throughout the state build projects that articulate and share what is important to them about their communities.

The pilot project will create a campus-wide steering committee led by two full-time staff to design, implement, and oversee the Digitization Center, guiding decisions on:


Budget

The cost of the pilot proposal is $600,000 in direct funds to support five areas: