Executive Summary
Currently underway at the University of Vermont is a major collaboration supported by the Office of the Provost, Fleming Museum, Bailey-Howe Library, Computing and Information Technology, and Center for Teaching and Learning to create the Vermont Cultural Heritage Digitization Center. This initiative would establish a center dedicated to the digitizing of a selected collection of Vermont's unique cultural materials and the creation of learning modules suitable for use in a variety of educational settings.
While Vermont has changed greatly in the last thirty years, it remains one of the most rural states in the union. The state's largest city, Burlington, contains only fifty thousand people, and most residents live in communities of less than 2,500. Most towns struggle to maintain their cultural and political history through historical societies and town libraries that are locally run by volunteers. Lacking staff or facilities to adequately protect and preserve their valuable and vulnerable holdings, and operating on limited hours, they have difficulty sharing their collections with the public.
To rectify this situation, the aim of this initiative is to create a
digital archive among Vermont's existing cultural organizations. Such a
program seeks to fulfill three pressing, significantly felt needs among
Vermont's schools, museums, libraries, and historical societies:
(1) to provide the resources to preserve the rich heritage of even the
smallest community by creating digital surrogates of their holdings; (2)
to make these surrogates instantly accessible not only to scholars but
as importantly to community residents and school children across the nation;
and (3) to train a cadre of volunteers in the technologies necessary to
ensure the continuing capture of the future as it becomes our past.
As we venture into this arena, the University of Vermont has already made significant strides in securing the collaboration of the critical constituencies necessary to make a large-scale project feasible. Further, since Cornell Institute for Digital Collections and Cornell University Libraries have already made significant strides in creating a prototype digital library, our emerging partnership with Cornell University adds a significant dimension to the strength of our efforts and ensures integration and compatibility with national efforts such as the Making of America and Projecting America Projects.
Digitization for Learning
The networked digital environment has rapidly transformed traditional means of communicating information. Digital media have provided faculty and students in all disciplines with the wonderful opportunity to create interactive learning environments by integrating images, sound, and text online. In a world of increasing information resources, students and educators need to learn to navigate through, collect, analyze, and evaluate information using both visual and text-based critical skills. Digitization is a mechanism to not only integrate images, sound, and text online, but also offer faculty in all disciplines a wonderful opportunity to create interactive learning environments.
Using imaging technologies such as digital cameras and (flatbed, film, and overhead) scanners, documents, photographs, paintings, slides, film and other images can be captured and incorporated into an online collection. Cataloguing the images, maintaining the collection, and creating online databases which can be easily searched demands not only the expertise of computer technicians, museum and library professionals and faculty in a broad range of disciplines but also capital expenditures on computer hardware, classroom renovations, and state-of-the-art projection equipment.
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, and the Cornell Institute for Digital Collections provides a spectacular example of the transformation that is in progress. Efforts by the Institute to foster collaboration among curatorial, instructional, research, technical, and managerial experts and in the creation of learning vehicles for a wide variety of audiences is one of the most exciting developments in higher education today.
UVM Digitization Efforts to Date
The University of Vermont continues to develop projects that explore the capture, access, navigation and use of digital facsimiles created from primary source materials. At the Bailey Howe Library, The George Perkins Marsh Online Research Center (http://sageunix.uvm.edu/~sc/gpmorc.html) includes over 650 fully-searchable documents in facsimiles and transcriptions with annotations and biographical information about the principals. As one of the first to recognize and describe in detail the significance of human action in transforming the natural world, Marsh's work is the subject of worldwide research, and scholars worldwide have accessed this collection.
Special Collections is creating a database of the Wilbur Collection of Electronic Vermontiana (http://sageunix.uvm.edu/~sc/scev.html), which include images of Vermont's cultural and natural history and 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 first phase of a data entry project that will enable it to make all 20,000 of its collection records available online. (See http://www.uvm.edu/~fleming) In the last year the Fleming Museum has unveiled three new cyber galleries. These include: Heritage of the Brush; Dragon, Silk, and Jade(cultural artifacts including clothing, ceramics, and ivory carvings); and the Vermont landscape paintings of Charles Louis Heyde. (http://www.charleslouisheyde.com).
Nancy Gallagher, author of Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State, has been funded by a grant from The Web Project of the Vermont Institute for Science, Math and Technology to produce The Eugenics Collection. Selected from UVM's Special Collections, and a variety of state repositories, the 200+ documents detail the growth of the eugenics movement in Vermont and its impact on Vermont's social policies. The collection will be available through UVM's Electronic Text server (http://etext.uvm.edu) or directly at http://www.uvm.edu/~eugenics.
Other collections at the Etext server include digital images backed by searchable texts of Godey's Lady's Book, the popular 19th century women's magazine, an upcoming electronic scholarly edition of the works of Alice B. Neal Haven, and The History Review. Winner of this year's Phi Alpha Theta award for student produced history journals, The History Review is a model for how students can learn the process of collaboratively editing and publishing simultaneous print and electronic versions of their peer-reviewed work that adheres to the latest developing standards for electronic scholarly publications. (see http://etext.uvm.edu)
Students have also been active in creating online collections. Geology undergraduates are currently involved in a digital image project that compares the Vermont environment, past and present, available at http://geology.uvm.edu/landscape/index.html. The Digital Musical Instrument collection on the Fleming Museum's website was likewise created as a class project by a UVM student who researched the objects, captured the images, and designed the website.
UVM Technology Infrastructure
The hardware infrastructure required to create and serve a large digital archive is not trivial. UVM is uniquely positioned within the state to undertake this kind of project. Its server system, affectionately known as Zoo, is a large cluster of UNIX servers, primarily IBM RS/6000 and Sun Enterprise multiprocessor systems. Zoo uses the Distributed File System (DFS) technology to distribute our central file system to all the machines in the cluster. Data is archived nightly to a 10TB (terabyte) automated tape library.
The image-intensive materials envisioned as the VCHDC collection, along with the processing power needed to serve them to the online world, can be supported by the current UVM infrastructure with some provision. In order to ensure that the materials created by the VCHDC are available at any time, are reasonably quick and easy to access, and are archived both for expected ocasional hardware failure and for long-term archival purposes, the VCHDC will contribute to increasing the capacity of the UVM system. Additional processing power will be added to current servers and tape storage will be increased. Redundancy or mirroring, that is keeping dual copies of the archive available transparently in case one drive fails, will also be provided.
A software grant from the Enigma Corporation, formerly Inso, allowed UVM to establish its first two SGML-based text encoding projects. The VCHDC will continue to use this electronic text and indexing software. It will encourage the use of educationally priced or open source software for image capture, manipulation, metadata creation, serving, indexing, and searching. It is committed to using and supporting standards that are non-proprietary and provide the best promise for ensuring longevity and portability to the next generation of computing and network devices.
In addition to the expected benefits derived from planning an archive of this type at an institution that is already well equipped to handle it, 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 computing-intensive educational research projects with the image-rich collections of the VCHDC at the core.
Challenges
All digital projects are innovative by their very nature. Thus, we respect the fact that consensus does not exist on standards and requisite metadata elements nor on intellectual property rights, licensing arrangements, and requirements for authentication. In addition, we recognize that large-scale digitization efforts that convert cultural, scientific, and legal documents and artifacts and produce large-scale databases and digital archives are costly to initiate and maintain. But like other public goods, once the expert staff, necessary hardware, and technical infrastructure are in place, expertise, protocol, and equipment can be shared by many agencies or projects at negligible additional cost and with no reduction in quality or quantity.
In the spirit of collaborative learning and as the state's land grant university, we propose to design and test a model to demonstrate innovative uses of digital network technologies in underserved communities around the state of Vermont and to provide a community of volunteers with the necessary training to scan their own holdings and participate in choosing images to be held in local digital collections.
In this way we seek to pool and share the resources, technical expertise and experience both within the University of Vermont and among the emerging leaders in digitization technology, such as Cornell, the Smithsonian, Library of Congress and others involved in the Making of America and Projecting America Project.
Project Proposal
The Vermont Cultural Heritage Digitization Center (VCHDC) will be committed to creating models for acquisition, conversion, storage, and maintenance of digital materials and shall teach the use and nature of such models to interested and appropriate parties not only in Vermont but throughout the world. Specifically, the goals and purposes are to:
Acquiring the technical expertise in digitizing Vermont's unique collections and developing the expertise necessary to create and evaluate the best methods of delivering this digital information to a diverse audience can best be accomplished in consultation and collaboration with more experienced universities and museums. We propose to establish a consulting relationship with the Cornell Institute for Digital Collections and the Cornell Digital library Research Group. Under its newest digital initiative, Projecting America (http://www.aapvrf.cornell.edu/projecting_america), Cornell plans to collect and catalog digital images representing American visual and material culture. Through close collaboration with archivists from Cornell who are working on the Projecting America project, UVM can accelerate its understanding of appropriate technical standards for archival capture, storage, maintenance, and transmission of data as well. In return, Vermont will not only contribute to Cornell's database but more importantly, place itself in a position to help Vermont's local cultural institutions to learn about and develop digital imaging projects. In this sense, the liason with Cornell will enable the University of Vermont to create a public good which models the infrastructure required by digital imaging in a university setting shaped by pedagogical imperatives.
Leadership in Collaborative Learning and Management. An important component of this project is the development of a number of models of collaboration and management that will link the activities and direction of the VCHDC with initiatives campus-wide, state-wide, and nationally. This implies the development of a flexible management team that represents faculty, museum, library, preservationist, public interest, and computing technology interests and that can collaborate in the acquisition and evaluation of emerging technologies and application of them for educational purposes. Promoting collaborative decision-making include:
Leadership in Organization and Planning. The process of creating digital libraries is interactive and demands dialogue among technical experts, administrators, faculty, curators, librarians, other academic and public institutions, and commercial developers. To encourage cooperation and collaboration, the VCHDC will apply and extend models of collaborative learning and management and draw from the experience of two successful UVM faculty development programs, the Doctor Is In Program and the Faculty Laptop Program, operating through the Center for Teaching and Learning.
Leadership in Community Involvement. By offering local organizations the opportunity to learn about and develop digital imaging projects through the VCHDC and by helping to establish common standards and procedures, the University of Vermont can serve as one 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. Geographically separated projects will be brought together at the VCHDC website, and as the project unfolds, UVM will act as a central clearinghouse for local websites and collections information. Additionally, participants will be asked to work within their communities, thereby building awareness of the rich resources available through Vermont institutions as well as the Internet. As Vermont's land grant university with a well-respected Extension Program, the VCHDC will be poised to help citizens throughout the state to not only articulate what is important to them about their communities but to project those images to the rest of the world.
Setting Scholarly Standards. The Vermont Cultural Heritage Digitization Center will bring scholars from a variety of disciplines together to create scholarly collections. A third important leadership role of the Center is to foster dialogue among museum archivists, librarians, preservationists, cultural historians, and historians about the scholarship of cultural heritage projects. The VCHDC will help to develop guidelines that can evaluate the intellectual content of collections in terms of their usefulness to researchers and their applicability to electronic applications. In addition, the Center will encourage scholarly participation in national dialogue concerning peer review and scholarly assessment of interdisciplinary and joint-authored digital projects. Once established, it will be expected that the VCHDC will sponsor research and hold symposia on issues pertaining to the standards of scholarly work in the field.
Planning the Pilot Digital Projects
Images from the proposed pilot projects will comprise the initial Vermont Cultural History Digital Collection. They will be retrievable as a cohesive collection and catalogued so as to capture their shared themes and to serve inter-disciplinary purposes. The goal of the Digital Collection is to organize cultural information in systematic and hierarchical ways with an eye toward inter-related, cross-purpose, and end-user applications.
In the following section, we articulate the criteria for pilot selection, describe some possible pilot projects, and discuss ways in which the pooled database from these pilot projects can be used in the classroom and by the community.
A. Project Criteria:
Digital projects must make direct association to user needs, research
goals, educational applications, preservation plans, and organizational
priorities. Projects based on the collection of digital images should meet
the following criteria:
I. Vermont Community Heritage Project
This project will produce an annotated web-based digital archive that documents the history of several important urban and rural Vermont communities. Extensive archival research will be conducted to gather pictorial documentation that illustrates how the Vermont landscape has evolved over the past two centuries. The urban heritage projects will focus on the cities of Burlington and Winooski and will draw on such archival sources as the Louis L. McAllister street photograph collection, postcards, stereo views, city directories and neighborhood maps that are available at the University of Vermont's Special Collections. The rural community heritage projects will be developed in collaboration with the Vermont Historical Society, the Vermont State Historic Preservation Office and local historical societies. They will incorporate such underutilized archival sources as 19th century agricultural census records, rare town and county maps and farm photos. Along with the historic images, recent aerial views and street level photographs will also be included to provide contemporary points of reference for both the urban and rural projects. (See Burlington 1830 http://www.uvm.edu/histpres/HPJ/Burl1830 and the UVM Campus Treasures Project http://www.uvm.edu/campus for examples.)
II. Daniel Higgins Project
Daniel Higgins is an artist photographer who has lived and worked in Winooski, Vermont since 1976. His photography serves to engage the viewer in the social life of Vermont communities, and virtually his entire opus is Vermont in nature. Higgins' photographs capture working class and farm laborers in Vermont and constitute a striking commentary on the social and cultural life of the mid-twentieth century mill towns. He has done several projects in Winooski itself and completed other efforts in which Burlington's sister cities, Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, and Yaroslavl, Russia, are seen relative to their Vermont counterpart. (see http://www.uvm.edu/~dhiggins/) The work has been the subject of scholarly review and contributes to the study of cultural history through sociology, history, politics, cultural relations and art by raising the questions of dialogue within community and means of establishing social and political memory.
III. Heyde's Vermont Landscapes: Paintings, Cultural Artifacts, Historical Resources
Through his painting, 19th century Vermont artist Charles Louis Heyde documented the changing Vermont countryside at the onset of the industrial revolution and through his work embodied the role of artist as naturalist, ecologist, and scholar.
Much research on Heyde and his work has already been completed for the exhibition, Old Summits, Far Surrounding Vales: The Vermont Landscape Paintings of Charles Louis Heyde.
Over 150 Heyde works from Vermont museums and private collections throughout the country, including 74 newly discovered by the curators, were researched and documented for the exhibition. Since not every painting could be exhibited, and the exhibition itself closes on June 10, 2001, producing digital images for study and comparison is an ideal means to go beyond the limits of the exhibition. Heyde's paintings will be documented not only as works of art, but also as cultural artifacts, as items bought and sold and presented in local homes.
Topics such as Heyde's marketing of his work, the public and private use of artwork, changing conservation methods, and provenance research will be explored. For example, the frames of many of the paintings are original and have inscriptions by the artist himself. We will extend the initial research on the manufacture of the frames using detailed images of frame backs and inscriptions. Notations include canvas makers' stencils, past exhibition labels, framers' notations, and Heyde's commentary. Detailed images of the paintings and their frames will be presented together.
Heyde's works are based on many familiar Vermont scenes, and "then and now" comparisons can be made using contemporary photographs and images from his paintings, as well as other documentation and representation of the landscape over time, such as postcards; Heyde's own "calling cards"; poetry; and newspapers and photographs from UVM Special Collections, the Vermont Historical Society, and other institutions. Letters from Heyde and members of his family, including his brother-in-law Walt Whitman, will be made available through digital images. All of these themes can be explored through an evolving, interactive website that will be a valuable resource not just for the works of Charles Louis Heyde but for an exploration of the landscape and history of Vermont.
IV. Lewis Hine in Vermont
An important but little-known component of the Robert Hull Fleming Museum's collection are the 100+ photographs by Lewis Hine (1874-1940), who worked as an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee between 1908 and 1921. Many of the photographs at the Fleming are of local Vermont industries, including mills and factories in Burlington, Winooski, and Manchester, as well as images of children working on farms in Vermont. Some of the mills documented by Hine, such as the American Woolen Mill in Winooski, are still standing and are examples of successful adaptive reuse. These images are a valuable local resource, and as documents of child labor, social history, industrial history, and political activism, they are unique because of their Vermont focus. A small selection of these local photographs have been exhibited online through institutions such as Heritage Winooski; making more of them available in digital format would easily increase their accessibility for scholars, educators, and others, without subjecting them to the risk of damage. There has been an increased interest in this collection, from elementary school teachers wishing to use the images in their classrooms to museum curators wanting reproductions in a local history exhibition to a Montreal newspaper wishing to use Hine's works for a story on Franco-American culture. Scanning all of these images, as well as the captions and annotations Lewis Hine added to his work, and making them available through an on-line database will allow researchers to search the collections and find photos of specific interest to them. Selections of the images based on specific themes, such as factory life, immigrant workers, and the labor movement can be made accessible through a curated website. The Fleming Museum's Hine Collection is the largest of any Vermont institution and could now be made available for study online.
V. The Long Trail Project
James Taylor, Assistant Headmaster at Vermont Academy, wondered: "What was the point of living in one of the most beautiful states in the Union and never getting to know its beauties at close range." He decided to create the Green Mountain Club in 1911 to provide and promote access to our mountain wilderness by building the Long Trail, the road through the heart of Vermont.
The University of Vermont and the Vermont Historical Society have both built marvelous collections of photographs, maps and other papers relating to the 1911 founding of the Green Mountain Club and the building of the Long Trail. Access to this exciting history and to the pioneers who created it is difficult. Though some of this material is processed and prepared for use by those who visit the institutions, many potential users do not have the time or the wherewithal to come. Many of the photographs remain in forms difficult to use as well, hand-colored glass slides and negatives, for instance.
An online interactive map of the Long Trail will be linked with hundreds of trail images and portraits of historical figures, journals, letters, and other related collections, retrievable by location and time. In addition, we will mount maps, including Taylor's first map of the proposed trail owned by VHS, an early , middle and late Long Trail Guide, the Vermonter magazine issue from 1911 dedicated to the Green Mountain Club and the Long Trail, and important correspondents of the principles, James Taylor (papers at VHS), Theron Dean (UVM), Herbert Wheaton Congdon (UVM), Judge Elihu B. Taft (UVM), and Judge Clarence Cowles (UVM). We would also collaborate with the Green Mountain Club and consult their archives for artifacts.
C. Applications from the Vermont Cultural History Collection
The VCHDC along with the Center for Teaching and Learning will assist educators in the design and implementation of assignments that utilize the Vermont Cultural History Collection. Below are just three samples.
A Sample University-Level Assignment:
The exercise above is designed with several pedagogical intentions. The first is push the student to use the technical skills they will have acquired during the course relative to the use of databases and the making of digital presentations. The second is to encourage them to consider the different properties of each form of presentation relative to the intention of the author. A digital movie, for example, is a linear, unchangeable experience for the viewer, and allows the maker to fully meter and control the content. A website, on the other hand, is interactive, and the designer must take this factor into account while trying to assemble a persuasive message. The third purpose is to press the pupil to penetrate the Vermont Cultural History Collection database and become exposed to the fact that history and culture are local, as well as remote, phenomena, and surround us in the present while also existing in other places and times. The final educational goal is conceptual. The camera image has had an aura of objectivity since the invention of the photograph but history is full of instances where this presumed factuality has been used to persuasively advance false content. This phenomenon can only increase with the additional manipulation allowed by the digital tool. By putting the student in the position of creating a "true" and "false" version of an entity's history, this assignment will teach an invaluable lesson about the mutable nature of media and communication.
The assignment assumes access to the cluster of digitized text and images proposed elsewhere in this document and would be given to the students after they had learned about the contents of this database and about techniques in its use. The task is designed as a final project and assumes familiarity with the technical and conceptual properties of media and with methods of digital presentation.
"Select a subject from the Vermont Cultural Heritage Digitization Project that interests you. This topic may be an era, a location, an individual, a structure, an event, a social or cultural movement, the work of an artist, or any entity for which you feel you can create a history. Using images and information from the database, generate two such histories for your chosen subject, one of which you consider truthful and one of which you consider patently false. Present these versions in what you consider the most appropriate digital form: Powerpoint, website, or movie. Each history should be as persuasive as possible, to the point where members of the audience not familiar with the subject may not know which is closer to actual fact. You may wish to research examples of how others have used media to manipulate history, such as Michael Lesy's book, Wisconsin Death Trip, Nazi propaganda films, or political television commercials."
A Sample K-12 Application
A sixth-grader being introduced to the impact of the Industrial Revolution on Vermont life could take a multi-sensory, interactive journey back in time to learn about working conditions of children in the early 20th-century and about how Louis Hine used photography to promote social change.
She might virtually accompany Hine first into the mills where he photographed girls, boys, and women at work, then venture out into Vermont's public arena with him where he lobbied for the enactment of better child labor laws. By clicking on details of a Hine photograph, say, of boys in a woolen mill, the student could examine a larger image of the machinery, while hearing it hum in the background and learning about its function.
Alternatively, she could explore the raw materials depicted, perhaps taking a virtual field trip tracking the wool's journey from sheep farm to market to mill to general store to the home of a typical turn-of-the-century Vermonter. Guided questions on a pop-up menu would capture the student's observations about the scene: How old do the laborers appear to be? What kind of work are they doing? What do you notice about the factory environment?
The student could also be recruited to embark on a real-life quest for descendents of the mill workers in her 21st-century town. Her own written responses and research findings--e.g., scanned photographs and digitally recorded oral histories--could be posted to a dynamically-created archive and thus shared with classmates for further discussion. On each screen she would also find inviting interdisciplinary links to related topics that she could peruse at her own pace. These subjects for further exploration might include the economic impact of textile mills, child labor, and the urban centers that lured farmers away from their rural enterprises; the Winooski River as power source, ecosystem, and recreational destination; the evolution of child labor laws and textile production technology; adaptive reuse of historic mill buildings; and so on. Another hands-on activity might allow her to collect images and people along her journey for later creation of historical scrapbooks or timelines. Again, these could be shared via the students' own online archive.
Community Involvement Exercise
As geographer Pierce Lewis pointed out in his Axioms for Reading the Landscape: "The man-made landscape -- the ordinary run-of-the-mill things that humans have created and put upon the earth -- provides strong evidence of the kind of people we are, and were, and are in the process of becoming." (1)
Recognizing that many in Vermont and elsewhere in the world hold a special love and fascination with the history of this small state's communities and its rural landscape and share a commitment to the preservation of the character of this place, an important goal of the Vermont Cultural Heritage Digitization Project is to provide the public with an opportunity to gain a richer understanding of how the Vermont of today is the product of its evolving cultural history. To help develop this understanding, citizens, public servants and scholars will be offered fresh perspectives as they may ask:
1. Why do Vermont places look the way they do?2. What specific features contribute to the character these places?
3. What can we learn about the history of these places from the record of inhabitation left on the land?
4. What can we learn about ourselves and our present culture from how we treat the land today?
5. How can these discoveries help us plan for the future?
Grant Summary: Purposes and Goals
a) The program shall be dedicated to digitizing a selected collection of Vermont's unique cultural materials including written materials and imagery of significant structures, objects, and pictures. These materials will be drawn from Vermontís entire available history, from pre-colonial times to the present day.
b) The program shall be designed to make these stored resources available to the general public in an open, accessible digital media system.
c) The program shall create models for acquisition, conversion, storage, dissemination and maintenance of digital materials and shall teach the use and nature of such models to interested and appropriate parties throughout the State of Vermont. These models shall include a protocol for collaboration between the various facilities, individuals and organizations relevant to the issue, including other Vermont colleges, museums, libraries, state and community leaders in the arts and in historic preservation, local curators of historical societies, representatives of members of Congress and faculty from Vermont educational institutions.
d) The above protocol shall address such questions as the storage, dissemination, and maintenance of digital images according to standards agreed upon by various relevant institutions such as the University of Vermont, the State Historic Preservation Office, criteria for the selection of objects and images significant to the state, and copyright issues
e) The program shall have a teaching component directed toward aiding
educators, K-20, in the use of these protocols and materials in their teaching.
1. 1 Pierce Lewis, "Axioms for Reading the Landscape," The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, D. W. Meining, ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 1979), 15.