Digital Asset Management in the Liberal Arts Curriculum
Teaching with Digital Images in Classics & Humanities
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Evaluation Criteria
Innovation: Many digital collections are based in college and university libraries, primarily for the purpose of providing access to special collections and archives. The Classics & Humanities collection extends well beyond mere access to images by providing tools and web resources explicitly to support undergraduate instruction. The success of this project results from a multi-faceted approach that integrates systems, content, metadata and web interfaces to build a comprehensive, full-featured teaching resource that can be utilized in various ways to support both specialized study and cross-disciplinary work with visual resources. By combining all these elements, we were able to create a system that effectively that provides the benefits of a flexible research database combined with a user-friendly browsing interface, study guides, and classroom presentation tools.
The development of this instructional collection has benefited from an ongoing and collaboration between Computing, the Library, the Visual Resources Collections, and our faculty partners. Librarians, visual resource professionals and computing staff all have a shared mission to support the academic needs of our community, but we often approach this mission in very different ways. Rather than creating disconnected systems and content "silos" we have worked together to create a unified system that capitalizes on the strengths that each department can contribute. In the course of this project, our team has visited several other academic institutions and hosted a number of site visits for schools engaged in building digital image collections. Throughout these meetings, our collaborative efforts have consistently been remarked upon and complemented.
Benefits: The Classics & Humanities site has broad and fabulous benefits for faculty & students.
Replicability: CONTENTdm is a very widely-adopted digital asset management system in colleges and universities. Within NWACC, more than 10 institutions have adopted CONTENTdm. Many of the features created for the Classics & Humanities site are based on customization mechanisms that could be deployed by any CONTENTdm site. Required skills include The concepts of creating web-based collection browsing tools and study guides could be implemented more broadly with other web-based digital asset management systems
Costs: The direct costs for Classics & Humanities site were approximately $20,000. This included a faculty stipend, a contractor with additional subject area expertise, student wages for cataloging assistance, and licensing of approximately 4,200 images. (The images, which cost approximately $11,000, were purchased as part of a bulk acquisition from the Scholar's Resource. If they had been purchased separately, the cost would be more than $30,000).
Additional staff support was provided by the Digital Assets Librarian and Digital Collections Assistant as well as the Academic Web Developer and Webmaster, both members of Computing & Information Services. The combined contribution of these staff members over the last year has been approximately .6 FTE, with most intensive activity occurring over the summer.
This project is part of a larger grant-funded initiative "Integrating Digital Collections into the Small College Curriculum," focusing on images for Art and Humanities. The larger project covered the initial CONTENTdm system costs, salaries for the Digital Assets Librarian and Digital Collections Assistant, project support, and image acquisition. The total cost for the CONTENTdm license and server was approximately $______
