Dirk Alvermann Director of the University Archives Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University of Greifswald	Alexander Weidauer Scientific Assistant, Project “Unimatrix” Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University of Greifswald

Over the past 5 years German archives have undertaken numerous digital archive projects to provide access to their holdings. Web presentations such as HADIS, Ariadne or BAM, to name some of the larger projects, and several single archival institutions vary in their goals and technical specifications by making their metadata accessible through the Internet. On the one hand these projects use a wide variety of system designs and metadata formats to organize, describe and provide electronic access to their holdings. However, on the other hand, it is a great advantage for German archives that they traditionally maintain a high degree of standardization concerning the description of archival material and a well structured composition of archival finding aids.

The quantity of information and the number of archival information providers are increasing. This expansion makes it increasingly difficult for both researcher and user to keep track of the disparate information lanscape. At the present technical stage of information services for German archives on the World Wide Web, it is obvious to think of a federally coordinated and integrated Internet information service, based on a united and standardized platform. The realization of such an idea, from the presenters’ point of view, is closely connected to the development of a software solution. This will provide the possibility to integrate metadata from a wide range of existing archival database applications and to normalize this information in a formal, structured and semantical way. Finally, this will enable the delivery of a standardized and easily accessible outcoming datastream to be used in subsequent applications. The two projects – ARIADNE and UNIMATRIX – will be presented as steps toward a solution of these problems.

http://ariadne.uni-greifswald.de
http://unimatrix.uni-greifswald.de

Handout (MS Word)

 

Joan Giesecke Dean of Libraries University of Nebraska at Lincoln	David Bagby Technology Coordinator, Hixon-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts University of Nebraska at Lincoln

Despite the development of commercial systems for providing art historians with digital images for classroom use, the practical issue of how to project dual images for teaching art history survey courses in large classrooms remained unsolved. The split screen system found in most commercial products for comparing images does not provide large enough images to be seen in the back rows of classes of 100 or more students. A technology solution was needed to provide full-size dual image projection from one computer that was easy for faculty to use. While the technology was relatively easy to adapt so that two different “slide shows” could be projected to mimic two traditional slide projectors, the real challenge was to address the culture of an art history field that is wedded to slides, and to address the administrative challenges of developing support systems for helping faculty use technology that is different from what is found in most of the large classrooms. At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the Libraries and the Art and Art History Department received a joint teaching grant from the University to create digital image collections that would meet the needs of the art historians teaching large survey classes, and to assess the impact on student learning when students have access to the images used in class on a 24×7 basis. A project team of library staff, art historians and the art slide curator, and technologists was created to manage the grant. CONTENTdm was used to create the image collections, and then programs were written to allow dual image projection using PowerPoint, rather that split screens, for the MAC platform. Software from CONTENTdm that supported the PC platform was also tested and used.

In this briefing session, we will describe the challenges of moving from developing digital content to solving the “last mile problem” of how to put the technology in large, general classrooms and then persuade faculty to change their teaching methods to use the new system. Technological, administrative, financial, and instructional challenges will be addressed. The views of an art historian who was reluctant to give up slides and is now using digital images in the classroom will be described. The librarian and technologist will discuss the programming and equipment issues, training issues, and the challenge of helping art historians understand how a key word searchable digital collection can be more powerful in teaching than the traditional slide collection. Lessons learned, including both successes and failures, will be included.

Handout (MS Word)

 

Aaron Coburn Lead Developer, Semantic Indexing Project Middlebury College	Clara Yu President Monterey Institute of International Studies
John L. Cuadrado Consulting Chief Scientist, NITLE Semantic Engine (NSE) National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE)

The quantity of digital text continues to expand at unprecedented rates, and attempts to categorize the information with metadata have not kept pace with this growth. As a result, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has supported the development of the NITLE Semantic Engine (NSE), a tool to address the issue of bringing order to large quantities of otherwise unstructured text. In a completely automated process, using word distribution and co-occurrence statistics, this tool exceeds simple keyword search capabilities by making inferences about the semantic relationship among documents. As an “expanded recall” search engine, the NSE will display relevant documents that may not contain the original query term. In addition, search results are automatically grouped into semantically coherent clusters, and interactive visualizations help a user explore the underlying associations among documents. This presentation will describe both the network-based tool and the desktop application as tools for exploring and navigating large collections of textual information.

http://www.knowledgesearch.org

Handout (MS Word)

 

Nena Couch Curator and Professor, Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute Ohio State University	Elizabeth Aldrich Dance Curator Library of Congress
Gilad Rosner Systems Integrator Media Matters LLC

The Dance Heritage Coalition, a consortium of eight leading dance archives in the United States dedicated to preservation, access and documentation of dance, is working with Media Matters LLC to develop a pilot project for searching and distributing dance-related audiovisual records among DHC institutions. Students and scholars of dance wishing to view materials currently available only by traveling to a particular DHC institution (among them New York Public Library and The Ohio State University), will be able to upload selected moving image files at special viewing stations established at four DHC member sites located in four distinct areas of the country. Presenters will discuss the significance of this file-sharing network to the field of dance scholarship, as well as the methodology and digital rights management technology to be employed.

http://www.danceheritage.org/

Powerpoint Presentation