May 26, 2009
Reed College Symposium on Teaching with Digital Collections in the Liberal Arts Curriculum
Last week, I attended a Symposium on Teaching with Digital Collections in the Liberal Arts Curriculum at Reed College. The program consisted of a day and a half filled with presentations by librarians and faculty who are building and teaching with digital assets, primarily images, at various liberal arts colleges in the U.S. Key takeaways:- Building effective digital collections requires investment of considerable time, planning, and other resources. Most of the institutions represented at the symposium have staff who focus primarily on digital asset management, and many have used grant funding to get started and/or expand their infrastructure and build collections.
- Partnering with "early adopter" teaching faculty is a good way to get started with building digital collections. This can give the project a clear focus and help keep it manageable. It can also help with selection of content that will be used and creation of high quality metadata.
- Most of the presenters at the symposium use ContentDM to manage their digital collections. ContentDM hasn't completely met their needs, however. Reed, for example, has built a number of extensions to improve the faculty/end-user interface and functionality. Lewis and Clark College has built an interesting site using Flickr for storage, but they also utilized some custom programming for their accessCeramics collection.
- Claremont Libraries Digital Collections (CCDL)
- Reed College Digital Collections
- Lafayette College Digital Collections
- Art Images for College Teaching (AICT)
- accessCeramics
Posted by lincics at 10:43 AM | Comments (0)
June 6, 2008
Catalog as collection
Thinking about the future of the catalog, the following has been bugging me for a long time. Today, I was finally able to write something about it that is at least semi-articulate, I hope ...
Selection of resources relevant to a particular user community has long been a function of libraries, especially academic libraries. In this day of information overload, the selection function is more valuable and more challenging than ever before. In the past, factors such as acquisitions budgets and limited availability of physical items greatly restricted the amount of content that a single library could collect. Today, with the proliferation of electronic content, these restrictions have been greatly reduced. Libraries can choose to "collect" materials relevant to their user community even if they can't actually acquire physical copies. They accomplish this by placing resource surrogates where users can find them. In a sense, the catalog itself becomes the collection.
This has great potential value, but it requires librarians to approach selection somewhat differently than they have in the past, and it places significant new demands on library systems. The current generation of library cataloging and collection management systems place emphasis upon acquiring and providing inventory control for physical materials. To build a coherent collection that contains both locally and remotely owned resources, librarians need systems that provide more robust support for the selection and organization of diverse content.
For example, we need:
- Applications that allow selectors to quickly obtain metadata describing individual resources and/or targeted collections of resources and add this metadata to a local resource discovery database, adding minor customizations useful to the local community as needed. Having the option of downloading a copy of the full resource would also be desirable. This is similar to what iTunes and similar music file management applications currently support.
- Applications that enable people to recognize and articulate relationships between resources that are relevant to their needs or the needs of their users. Ideally these would include functions that collect and/or analyze data related to resource usage, statistical analysis of full-text, etc.
- Applications that support development of frameworks or schemas for organizing resources and controlled vocabularies for describing or categorizing resources.
- Applications that are designed to interoperate and/or exchange data.
Posted by lincics at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)