Executive Summary

We propose a pilot     [feasability     model     sustainable . . .]

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 University of Vermont Digitization Center. This initiative would establish a center dedicated to the digitizing of collections of UVM's unique materials. 

Creating digital materials, cataloguing the collections, maintaining the data, and creating multipurpose online databases demands the expertise and collaboration of computer technicians, 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. 

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. In addition, our emerging partnerships with other Universities adds a significant dimension to the strength of our efforts and ensures integration and compatibility with national efforts. Our central role as Vermont's state university as well as our role as a New England Land Grant university [. . . positions us? . . .]

Digitization for Learning

The networked digital environment has rapidly transformed traditional means of communicating information. 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.

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. Efforts 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 [ . . .]

[expand Perkins, shorten some others]. . .

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. This collection is available through the UVM Libraries Voyager online catalog.

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. 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 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 ) 

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 19^th century women's magazine,  and The History Review. Winner of last 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 Infrastructure

[Expertise: archival, librarian, technical]

[Pedagogical: ? willingness to experiment? Center for Teaching and Learning?]

Technology: The hardware infrastructure required to create and serve a large digital archive is not trivial. The image-intensive materials envisioned, 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 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 international computing-intensive educational research projects with the image-rich collections of the UVMDC at the core.

Project Proposal

All digital projects are innovative by their very nature. Consensus does not yet exist on technical standards, intellectual property rights, licensing arrangements, and requirements for authentication. Large-scale digitization efforts that produce databases and digital archives of cultural, scientific, and legal documents and artifacts are costly to initiate and maintain. Integrating these resources into teaching and learning, shaping scholarship in new ways, is a developing field.

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. By providing a centralised service for learning about and creating digital collections, UVMDC hopes to both ease the process and encourage the creation of 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. Our goal is to ensure the creation of digital resources that will be useful to scholars and the community for the long term.

The aim of this initiative is to develop the model for a collaborative Digitization Center to provide a central resource for campus- and state-wide digitization projects.  [develop the model--study the feasability of--create the pilot for--i.e. we don't want to just know how--we want to actually do it

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Still thinking about this part which as you can see contains bits and pieces from the reports and things from Chris (thanks Chris!). I want to show the needs and maybe categorize them as teaching, scholarship, community, and something to do with archiving/preservation

Such a center seeks to fulfill four pressing, significantly felt needs: 

1. to provide the resources to preserve the collections of the University by creating digital surrogates of our holdings;
2. to develop a framework for and assist in the creation of new collections and educational materials;
3. to provide a venue for faculty and students to learn both the process of digitization and the ways in which digitization effects their discipline and scholarly development.

or...

Specifically, the goals and purposes are to:

• Explore and demonstrate ways in which technology can extend the traditional boundaries of the traditional classroom and the university
 
• Develop and model instituion-wide coordination of the process of evaluating and acquiring emerging technologies and applying them for educational purposes
 
• Foster dialogue among faculty, museum archivists, librarians, preservationists, cultural historians, and social scientists about the scholarship of digitization projects while providing a venue for faculty and students to learn both the process of digitization and the ways in which digitization effects their discipline and scholarly development.   [should this be two things?]

Scholarship: The University of Vermont Digitization Center will bring scholars from a variety of disciplines together to create scholarly collections. It will foster dialogue among museum archivists, librarians, preservationists, and historians about the scholarship of digitization projects. The UVMDC 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 UVMDC will sponsor research and hold symposia on issues pertaining to the standards of scholarly work in the field.

A campus-wide steering committee will design, implement, and oversee the Digitization Center, guiding decisions on:
·       Location of the Digitization Center
·       Staffing (digitization, systems, cataloging, educational modules)
·       Hardware (computers, digital cameras, scanners)
·       Software (imaging, cataloging, delivery, searching)
·       Scanning and metadata standards
·       Preservation of digital objects
·       What to digitize


The Digitization Center will undertake both new and ongoing digitization projects.  Potential digitization projects include:
·       Adding digital images to Fleming Museum collection records database
·       Charles Louis Heyde paintings
·       Lewis Hine Photographs
·       Vermont Congressional Online Research Center

    The University of Vermont Libraries has built one of the finest archives of political manuscripts with a focus on Vermont and its role in the region, the nation and internationally.  Holdings include the papers of the Allen Family, Samuel Chandler Crafts, Steven Rowe Bradley, Jacob Collamer, George P. Marsh, William P. Dillingham, David J. Foster, Warren R. Austin, George D. Aiken, Robert T. Stafford, James Jeffords, Alfred P. Heininger, Philip H. Hoff, William P. Meyer, Thomas P. Salmon, Madeline B. Kunin, and Bernie Sanders.

·       Louis L. McAllister and Joseph Detore Photographs
·       Maps (John Johnson Papers, Sanborn Fire Insurance, Beer’s and Walling’s County Atlases, Rural Electrification Act)
·       Electronic Thesis and Dissertations
·       Art History Slide Collection
·       Continuation of Perkins Museum catalog

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Budget

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

• salary for two full-time staff to investigate current best practices; develop, test, and recommend tools for the multifaceted task of creating of digital projects; conduct a university- and state-wide needs assessment for . . . ; . . . standards . . . 
• initiate and fund pilot digitization projects [with faculty?] to test the developing models for creation and instructional use of digital collections
• travel to consult with state organizations that could contribute to and benefit from a UVM digitization center; travel to conferences and universities that have established or are establishing similar models
• host conferences and meetings for university and state organizations that wish to contribute to and adopt the models proposed by the UVM digitization center
• [augment existing storage systems, purchase hardware, purchase software]