Funds from the Murdock Grant allowed me to attend the Digitization for Cultural
Heritage Information Professionals Workshop held at the University of North
Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill. This intensive workshop is a part of the University
of Glasgow, Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII)
and the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS).
Developing high-quality digital content is central to improving public access to cultural heritage information, as well as to promoting teaching and research. It is essential to have excellent images, great presentation software and good metadata. Reed College has approximately 115,000 slides in the Visual Resources Collection and access to those images has become an important issue since Kodak announced the demise of slide projectors in September 2003 and carousel trays in May 2004.
I was most interested in learning the skills to select and apply appropriate standards and good practices for a library of digital images. This information was covered in classroom lectures and lab-based workshops. We were continually referred to the NINCH Guide to Good Practices, the Colorado Digitization Project, the Library of Congress, the Research Libraries Group (RLG), and the Open Archives Initiative as examples.
This course examined the advantages of developing digital collections of heritage materials, as well as investigated issues involved in creating, curating, and managing access to such collections. We also spent time covering the selection of materials, evaluating different costing models for digitization projects, and planning appropriate storage and access facilities. All are issues Reed is grappling with at present for the archive and the gallery.
Some of the most useful information covered workflow planning and management, grant getting and multimedia delivery and interfaces, as these are issues not previously addressed in the Visual Resources Collection. The VRC has been concerned with getting our slides into a digital format that is easy to access and manipulate.
Murdock grant funds were also used to purchase Adobe Creative Suite for print and web publishing, FileMaker Pro 7 to shift our database of 70,000 analog image to a relational database in order to share information with other people and Programs, and FlipAlbum 3D page-flipping digital photo software to provide a means to view the Medieval French prayer book purchased by the college this past spring.
Managing the transition from analog to digital image delivery systems challenges every level of Reed's community: faculty, students, and staff must all be involved in and committed to the process for it to be productive and successful. Administratively, the transition must be carefully planned and deliberately executed, in increments designed to encourage utilization of the new tools without detriment to those making use of the old. Funding levels for staff and patron training, for hardware and software upgrades, for technical support, must be regularized, that is, made part of the standard budget process, just as funding for slide mounts and film processing are part of the current process. Pedagogically, the transition from analog to digital means nothing less than a complete change in teaching methods, as the images representing works of art in the classroom cease to be always paired or static.