OUTLINE PROPOSALS - SECOND DRAFTS

Updated Nov 1, 2000

1. Federating Digital Image Repositories and Interpretive Information

Objectives

To create a model for collaborative work and resource sharing in the cultural heritage sector; to move beyond the current “delivery and reception” model to create partnerships in which universities and museums/archives are mutually invested in contributing and using content.

 

To produce, through this collaboration, an extensible, expandable, annotatable federated collection of visual and multimedia materials that would be widely accessible and free of charge.

 

To develop, in relation to this federated visual multi-media collection, related bodies of interpretive information and sets of tools for research and pedagogy.

Means to the End

This project is based on a federated model that involves not only inter-institutional and interdisciplinary collaboration but also the incorporation of at least three different kinds of existing repositories from different kinds of institutions (e.g. library, archive, museum). We mean by “federated database” to suggest that this federation will point back to original repositories rather than copying them. Continuous evaluation of users and uses of the resulting resources will be an integral aspect of our work.

Using state of the art information technology and internationally accepted data standards, this project will produce the following archival and pedagogical resources:

A dynamic “virtual database” of sourced, reliable, high quality visual materials and related data.

 

A set of interpretative or curated resources based on the materials in the database reflecting the viewpoints of several different disciplines (e.g. art history, social science, history).

The database will focus, in its initial iteration on American visual and material culture from the seventeenth century to the present. The intention, however, is to create a fully extensible, extendable model.

Suggested Partners and Personnel (Revised 4/13/01)

Repositories

1. SAH/AIC (Jeff Cohen; some materials already digitized) digital archive//architecture
2. MIT Kidder Smith American Architecture image collection (Katherine Poole; slide collection; some slides already digitized) digital archive/ published material//architecture
3. LC collection on American Memory (check with Carl Fleishhauer; many materials already digitized) library//mutli-media
4. Chicago Historical Society (Bernard Reilly) museum and archive//multi-media
5. American Antiquarian Society (Georgia Barnhill; colonial gravestone photos already digitized///prints still to be digitized) archive//prints; photos of colonial gravestones
6. Eastman House photos/films (Roger Bruce; materials already digitized) museum//photographs
7. UC Berkeley architecture slide library (Howard Besser; materials already digitized) university slide library//architecture
8. Northwestern University Library, WWII posters (Virginia Kerr) library; posters
9. Harvard University Art Museums, Sargent drawings and/or Shahn materials (Miriam Stewart) museum//fine art drawings; Shahn photographs

Needed People Expertise

Project Manager (would need to be hired at lead institution?)

Faculty: Sally Promey

Technical Staff

Curators

Cataloguers (metadata, standards)

Archivists

Computer Scientists

Information Architects

User Interface Expert

Image Processing Expert

Intellectual Property Experts

Evaluation Staffing

Disciplinary Societies

Technology Centers (e.g., MITH Maryland Institute for Technology in Humanities(?); ETC(?); IATH(?); Getty(?)

Investigators and consultants: entire Visual and Media Studies field group

Characteristics of contributing repositories

Collaboration

Provide initial content with a coherent context (here, in terms of place, the United States)

Permits interdisciplinary use as well as use by a variety of distinct disciplinary constituencies

Content includes various types of media

Pedagogical utility

Include sourced high quality content (working with originals)

Images in database searchable as raw materials; providing maximum flexibility in use

 

Envisioned related tools

virtual light table,

ability to “quote” db image and data into a user document

identify details (e.g Inote )

sophisticated, resource assisted searching; interoperable searching interface

comment on record

virtual reality

time line

Howard Besser's catalytic language:

While individual digital repositories have reached some level of maturity in terms of infrastructure and information retrieval, much work still remains before such repositories become really useful for research and teaching. This project proposes to address several of those issues:

-Federating repositories

While other projects have dealt with searching across multiple repositories, this project seeks to explore what is necessary to make the contents of multiple repositories truly useful for scholars. This ranges from building upon the work of the Making of America II in developing standards for interoperable non-proprietary viewers, to combining the methodology of DL2 user-centered design researchers with previous studies of how humanities scholars do their work in an analog world. These studies will be used to develop and test tools (such as image browsers and enlargers) to make digital resources useful for scholarly work, and to identify additional metadata needed to make these tools work.

-Methods for minimizing reproduction in referencing and quoting digital objects

"Original" objects from digital repositories (photographs, passages of text, maps, etc.) are incorporated into a wide variety of secondary resources (instructional lessons and courseware, research papers and articles, "added value" multimedia resources, ...).

The only method for doing this today is to re-copy the digital object and insert it into a new digital resource. A better method might be to point to the original/primary object from within the secondary resource and have that object display within that secondary resource at the point of viewing.

This would solve a number of issues including:

• maintaining references between secondary and primary resources,
• easing certain problems that occur when primary resources are updated by a repository, and
• easing intellectual property rights clearance problems faced by researchers creating secondary resources that incorporate numerous primary resources.

This project proposes to explore these issues on a variety of levels including:

technical (ie. how to address a particular segment of a primary photograph and how to scale it for proper display);

institutional cooperation (repositories responding to how their materials are used and re-incorporated into secondary resources);

institutional maintenance (how to keep secondary materials viable over time), etc.

We will also explore long-term strategies for maintenance of secondary resources (such as university libraries taking responsibility for maintaining their own faculty's secondary resources, keeping their links active over time, etc.), and the ability to find all the secondary resources that incorporate or reference a given primary resource.

This project will also lead to much greater access to secondary resources, commentary on primary resources, etc. The technical aspects of this project will build upon discoveries from the University of Virginia's I-Note project and UC Berkeley's Multivalent documents project.