Sandra G. Yee
Dean
Wayne State University
Jonathan McGlone
Digital Collections Librarian
Wayne State University
Joshua Neds-Fox
Web Librarian
Wayne State University
Nardina Mein
Director, New Media & Info Technology, Library Computing & Media Services
Wayne State University
In partnership with Michigan cultural institutions, and state and national funding agencies including the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Library of Michigan, the Wayne State University Library System’s New Media & Information Technology unit has been a pioneer developer of digital library collections, including the Virtual Motor City, Digital Dress, and Herman Miller Collections. These collections are accessed thousands of times per month. However, technological barriers and an ad-hoc knowledge base result in hit-and-miss use in online instruction by both faculty and students. This problem is not unique to Wayne State: nationally, it has resulted in widespread under-use of digital archives and inadequate mapping of the knowledge base for using collections. To foster the instructional use of new media, the research team designed the Digital Learning and Development Environment, an active Web environment where faculty and students can use accessible tools to easily create digital learning objects (DLOs) from digital collections. The unique design of the environment places images from the Library’s digital collections in context with a tool that downloads the images into a learning object and provides expert advice in the design of effective digital media for instruction. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the tool takes advantage of the digital collections’ Open Archives Initiative (OAI) broker, and the OpenOfficeXML (OOXML) standard, to harvest images and metadata and create an open source, widely usable learning object. It is targeted for a broad audience of students and teachers in universities, colleges, high schools, and educational departments of museums, libraries, and archives.
http://dlxs.lib.wayne.edu/sandbox/
http://www.lib.wayne.edu/resources/digital/collections.php
http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=292
http://www.academiccommons.org/imagereport
Handout (PDF)