Vermont Cultural Heritage Digitization Center
(VCHDC)

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 stateís 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 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 suurogates instantly accessible not only to scholars but as importantly to 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. 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/%7esc/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, Marshís 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 Vermontís 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 competed the first phase of a data entry project that will enable it to make all 20,000 of its collection records available online. Three of its most popular are Musical Instruments, Non-Western (including artifacts from its collection of Native American, African, and Asian Art), and the American digital collections. (See http://www.uvm.edu/~fleming) In the last year, the Fleming unveiled three cyber galleries including 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 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 in Geology are currently involved in a digital image project that compares the Vermont environment, past and present, titled  Landscape Changes in Vermont, available at http://geology.uvm.edu/landscape/index.html.

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 filesystem 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 stateís 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 community of volunteers with the necessary training to scan their own holdings and participate in choosing images to be held in 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:
Establishing a digitization center is a heuristic process, and through the pilot projects that the Vermont Cultural Heritage Digitization Center sponsors, it will define Vermont's practices for encapsulating the administrative and structural metadata along with the digitized version of the primary resource to create an archival digital library of Vermont's objects. It will also test end-user acceptance of the methods, especially the interpretative, curricular materials, and scholarly materials especially developed by the Center. By limiting the scope of its initial pilot projects and through its links with the library, academic and administrative computing support groups, audiovisual and multimedia facilities, and academic offices as well as with other campus digitization initiatives in the medical and physical sciences, the VCHDC hopes to manage its development and growth.
 
Acquiring the technical expertise in digitizing Vermontís 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.Under its newest digital initiative, ìProjecting Americaî (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 ìProjecting Americaî project, UVM can accelerate its understanding of appropriate technical standards for archival capture, storage, maintenance, and transmission of data as well as. In return, Vermont will not only contribute to Cornellís database but more importantly, place itself in a position to help Vermontís 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.
 
Leaders in Collaborative LearningAn 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.

Leadership in Organization and Planning. A dynamic organizational structure will be put in place in order to collaborate efficiently, productively and positively with museums, libraries, state and community leaders in the arts and historic preservation, local curators of historical societies, representatives of members of Congress and faculty from Vermontís educational. A steering committee responsible for the general oversight of the grant and project implementation will consist of individuals from the university and state colleges, larger libraries, museums, and other public interest groups. Working groups with different areas of specialization, such as metadata standards, scanning procedures, and the selection of images and objects will be responsible for reviewing options and establishing guidelines to be used by project participants.

 
Leadership in Encouraging Community Involvement. By offering local organizations the opportunity to learn about and develop digital imaging projects, by crafting guidelines and procedures, and by supporting local projects, the VCHDC will be innovative because it will be a grass roots effort, involving local organizations and then enabling the sharing of their resources via the web. Vermont is an ideal venue for such a project because of the relatively small number of cultural institutions and the already established connections among many of them. The VCHDC will create a forum through its website, allowing individuals and organizations to explore Vermontís cultural heritage as materials are selected for presentation. The University of Vermont is willing to take a leadership role, as Vermontís land grant university, to help citizens throughout the state to not only articulate what is important to them about their communities and history but to project those images to the rest of the world
 
The Vermont Cultural Heritage Digitization Center will work with institutions throughout the state to develop locally based digitization projects, offering advice and assistance as needed. The Center will offer training on the many aspects of digital imaging and the use of standards and guidelines developed by the VCHDC in partnership with the Cornell Institute for Digital Collections. 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.
 
Setting Standards for Scholarly Work. The Vermont Cultural Heritage Digitization Center will bring scholars from a variety of disciplines together to create scholarly collections. A third important purpose of the Center is to foster dialogue among museum archivists, librarians, preservationists, cultural historians, and historians about the scholarship of cultural heritage projects and to contribute to national dialogue concerning peer review and scholarly assessment of interdisciplinary and jointly-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.
 
Summary Purpose and Goals:
a.) The program shall be dedicated to digitizing a selected collection of Vermontís 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.
 
 
 

Pilot Projects for the VCHDC

 
Each of the projects sponsored by the VCHDC will be designed so as to interest an interdisciplinary user base. Although our primary audience will most likely be composed of faculty members in Colleges across the University who regularly incorporate images into the classroom experience, we anticipate that through support and training programs, educators at the elementary and secondary levels as well as scholars of Vermont, the tourist industry, and citizens involved in historic preservation will utilize the databases.
Projects will have a clear scholarly focus and advance means of using the Internet as an educational and communication medium. It is expected that the VCHDC will participate in the development of protocols for scholarly review of the pilot projects and participate in national conversations pertaining to scholar assessment and peer review of digital collections.
 
[Insert brief pilot project descriptions here. Refer to appendixes for more details]

 

Technical Standards and Procedures:

In order to accomplish the goals outlined above in a timely, practical and efficient manner, the Vermont Cultural Heritage Digitization Project will need to prepare carefully thought out plans, standards and procedures for the project. Because few projects share the scope and goals of the one proposed for Vermont, these plans will draw from as many appropriate sources as possible, but will necessitate the development of new procedures and standards. Other projects such as Cornellís provide good examples and opportunities to learn from other organizations.The VCHDC will also be able to contribute to the development of digitization guidelines at a national level, as we follow, develop and implement guidelines and procedures for everything from image selection to scanning to metadata.

One of the first parts of the process will be a review of the current best practices and standards for scanning, metadata, copyright, and collection policies. Recommendations for minimum standards will then be developed, along with guidelines for applying those standards.

To enhance inter-operability with other digitization efforts, the project will use established practices and standards where they exist. The National Digital Library Federation, a program of the Council on Library and Information Resources, has suggested three types of metadata for digital surrogate collections: intellectual, structural, and administrative. Intellectual metadata describes the content of each digital object for purposes of cataloguing. Existing standards for intellectual metadata are the library-based USMARC record and the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) DTD for finding aids. Structural metadata is the information that describes the internal organization of the digital object for purposes of navigation. For example, in a digital facsimile of a book one might wish to go to the next page, to the next chapter, or to the table of contents. Administrative metadata records information about the digital object. This includes technical specifications related to image capture, enhancements to the digital object, information related to copyright and intellectual property rights, and information that should remain with the object to ensure its long term retention and use. Standards for structure and administrative metadata being developed by the Making of America project will be consulted and adapted as appropriate for this project.

Although there is no one standard for capture and storage of digital surrogates, a number of best practices are being developed that balance long-term preservation needs with current technical limitations. At a minimum, this project will follow the Technical Recommendations for Digital Imaging Projects from the Image Quality Working Group- of ArchivesCom, a joint Libraries/AcIS committee (http://www.columbia.edu/acis/dl/imagespec.html). These recommendations call for capturing bitonal images (printed text, line drawings) at 1-bit, 600 effective dpi to be stored as uncompressed TIFF files, 8-bit greyscale for black and white photos, and 24-bit color, 300 effective dpi, for color images. The capture process will depend on the location and nature of the original. A combination of digital SLR cameras, digital video cameras, and flat-bed scanners will be used.

The Burlington Agenda:Research Issues in Intellectual Access to Electronically Published Historical Documents, a report on a meeting funded by the University of Vermont and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) points out the limitations of todayís search engines in providing intellectual access to the contents of electronically published historical documents. In an effort to address these limitations, this project will also rely on the standards developed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and Model Editions Partnership (MEP) to encode documents.

Within the context of the project itself, procedural standards will be developed for digital capture, encoding, and cataloguing to ensure that participants within UVM and partners from other institutions can create inter-operable collections.
 

Contributors to this Draft:

Darcy Coates
Shirley Gedeon
Hope Greenberg
Ted Lyman
Ann Porter
Margaret Tamulonis