University of Vermont Digitization Center

(UVMDC)


Summary

We propose a pilot study to develop a sustainable model for a center to create digital resources,     [to create, teach others to create, work with faculty to integrate/transform education . . .]

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. 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 faculty in all disciplines a wonderful opportunity to create interactive learning environments.

Creating digital resources involves digitizing, or, turning into 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 by scholars 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. 

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. The initiative would also continue to develop our partnerships with other Universities and organizations to ensure integration and compatibility with national efforts. 

UVM Digitization Efforts to Date

The University of Vermont continues to develop projects that draw on our unique resources, producing digital collections that serve both the UVM learning community and a world-wide audience.

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 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 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.  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.

Infrastructure

Successful digitization projects are not created in isolation. Building the necessary infrastructure requires:

With its current projects UVM has begun to develop the expertise required to select, catalog, and build large online collections. Through the Center for Teaching and Learning, UVM has [a bridge, a conduit, some way to help faculty integrate create develop. . .]   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.

What UVM lacks is a [formal] mechanism to ensure that all the pieces work together so that the collections adhere to world-wide standards, are created in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible , and provide the best opportunites for students and faculty to learn not only how to create these collections, but how their creation and use can transform education.  [Make this more explicit, make this less explicit?--as in: so why can't we keep doing what we are doing--why do we need more $$ or a Center]

Project Proposal

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

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 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 by:

-------------- ditch these two paragraphs altogether??---------
In creating such a center, UVM 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 for evaluating 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.

By helping to establish common standards and procedures, the University of Vermont can 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. Geographically separated projects can be brought together at the UVMDC, which can act as a central clearinghouse for local collections. 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.
----------------------or work them into something else?--------------


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: