Shirley Gedeon, Lauck Parke, Sharon Haas, Tom Visser, Ted X. Lyman,
Darcy Coates, Margaret Tamulonis, Connie B. Gallagher, Diane Felicio

Creating an infrastructure for how a Vermont cultural heritage project
could work, including exemplars from history, architecture, art and
other cultural resources.

Action Summary:
The project: Vermont focus, historic/landscape/architecture/art,
including contemporary art/life to be documented
- examples of standards based projects
- a model for future collaborative projects
- a method for incorporating these kinds of projects into the pedagogy
- an evaluation piece (Diane)

What do we need:
space, equipment (hardware/storage/software), programmers, training,
organizational overhead, worker bees, Doctor is In-type support setup,
community-based mini-grants, teachers/scholars/local library/summer
student opportunities, workshops

We need to put together a proposal quickly for Lauck to take to donor.
We need to commit our time/resources.
We need letters of support from our collaborators.
Establish what the big goal is: Why now? Why UVM? UVM, the land grant
institution, will establish its role as a Vt leader for how a state
digital cultural archive can be created and used.
 

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Today we will define parameters, (look at materials Shirley has
brought), talk about what is happening on campus.

1) Connie:

a) Marsh Project - Special Collections has unique collection from George
Perkins Marsh (congressman, US Ambassador to Constantinople, to Kingdom
of Itale in mid 1800s) originally requested $$ from LOC but eventually
got $$ from Woodstock Foundation. Focus was to be on Vermont qualities
but it expanded from there. Purpose: provide access to Marsh documents
so now Woodstock and others can use the collection. Also, make available
for K-12 use.
Entire groups of letters around particular subjects were selected for
publication. Letters were then annotated for use by non-scholars.
(Elizabeth Dow-organizer, Harry Orth-editing/anotations, grad students
doing research work, tagger for tech work) Borrowed letters from other
collections like Smithsonian, etc.

b) Leahy collection - very large volume. He is very interested in
technology and would be interested in a tech answer to preserving and
providing access to his papers.  Use the Marsh as a prototype: focus on
several topics, annotate them, use them to leverage additional funding
Given our lack of resources UVM is interested in doing focused quality
projects rather than large collection projects.

2) Margaret:

a) Fleming database - make it available to UVM and world. There is a
basic inventory for the 20,000 objects. 3 work study students are
currently entering records in the database. They are up to 4,000 objects
(11 months). Lotus Approach, data dictionary: Getty Art and Architecture thesaurus.
Questions: what archival quality images are appropriate for this
project? Developing policies to deal with copyright of images for use by others.

3) Hope:

a) whatever projects we come up with, we should be sure, if we want
funding, that we follow the guidelines, best practices and standards
that are currently developed.
See:
http://www-ninch.cni.org, particularly their survey on best practices
which can act as a guide for any new projects

4) Tom:

a) groups around the country are interested in creating digital
inventories of historic buildings. We might develop some projects here
in collaboration with the State Historic preservation office
(particularly asking for some of their many photographs) to do
then-and-now projects

b) Burlington 1830s map of buildings mapped to present day to see what
buildings may be historic, for example, the Chicken Bone - 1815!

5) Ted:

a) many university art departments currently put their information on
the web. There are many legal complexities relating to
creating/publishing images online. Perhaps we could limit ourselves to
Vermont artists, or New England artists, working with the Fleming using
things were copyright is not such a sticky issue. (Current collection is
125,000 slides.)

Lauck:
What do we need in terms of funding? Our patron may be willing to fund a
$250,000-$500,000 prototype grant.

Lauck: The Cornell Connection - applied research on human/computer
interaction, digital archive

purpose of project, collaboration here/VT/Cornell, demo of standards
based model, if we have this it makes us attractive to that, one page budget

Checklist for Hope:
- ask CIT about additional storage
- investigate scanning hardware/software options
- put together standards explanation
- training plan (see Hati)

See also:
U of Colorado digitization project: http://coloradodigital.coalliance.org/intro.html

Picturing the Past for Students of the Future: Connecticut Heritage
online:
http://www.lib.uconn.edu/cho/