Volunteer Voices: Tennessee’s Collaborative Digitization Program

This article provides an overview of Volunteer Voices, Tennessee’s statewide digitization program. The authors focus on the three-year Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant that provided the foundation for future growth of the digitization program. In addition to an overview of the content selection, metadata issues, software selection, digital preservation, and K-12 education emphasis of the grant project, the article includes a detailed description of the work done by the digitization and content specialists from across the state who selected and scanned items. The article concludes with a look at post-grant efforts to promote the sustainability of Volunteer Voices

Volunteer Voices: Tennessee\u27s Collaborative Digitization Program

This article provides an overview of Volunteer Voices, Tennessee’s statewide digitization program. The authors focus on the three-year Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant that provided the foundation for future growth of the digitization program. In addition to an overview of the content selection, metadata issues, software selection, digital preservation, and K-12 education emphasis of the grant project, the article includes a detailed description of the work done by the digitization and content specialists from across the state who selected and scanned items. The article concludes with a look at post-grant efforts to promote the sustainability of Volunteer Voices

On the edge of inclusion: A look at the shifting of representation in museum display and archival cataloging

This project, entitled On The Edge of Inclusion: A Look at the Shifting of Representation in Museum Display and Archival Cataloging by Natalie Ray delves into how the growing trend of social justice has raised new questions about how to better represent marginalized populations and how museum work has followed this pursuit. The digital age continues to impact the dynamism of exhibiting. Accurate representation becomes more imperative now that representative texts are able to reach more people than ever before. This increasing access coupled with the expanding interest in social justice and cultural reconciliation renders it necessary for curators and archivists to create accurate and culturally sustaining work. The exhibits and collections being viewed are in flux, and the texts that have been prepared for the public have been conceived by individuals and institutions with their own motivations and directives. Awareness of this fact allows for visitors to be critical of these possible inflections and misinterpretations. The first chapter provides an overview of the field and structuring of the project, the second chapter analyzes the current conversation among practitioners, the third chapter reviews the methodologies of this project, and the fourth is the project’s conclusion. This project aims to recognize practices that are creating new schemas by which archivists and curators will structure history. And more specifically, the literature review of this project is looking at those schemas that are working to promote previously regulated or oppressed histories. Following the literature review are suggestions for how the archival process might be changed through teaching integration and increased public outreach

Visual Resource Reference: Collaboration Between Digital Museums and Digital Libraries

The Information Institute of Syracuse at Syracuse University is engaged in a project designed to build collaborative digital museum and digital library reference services. To that end, the project team is currently developing, testing, and evaluating procedures and mechanisms that will enable museums and libraries to work together in providing reference assistance over the Web to support patrons\u27 image information needs. The user-centered project is based upon a successful model for digital reference that has been widely embraced in the digital library community. This approach is expected to yield new insight into users\u27 image seeking behavior that will help museums and libraries provide transparent access to visual resources across collections and institutions. This article presents an overview of the project and discusses the challenges involved in helping users find appropriate images on the web

Digitally Archiving Architectural Models and Exhibition Designs: The Case of an Art Museum

[Excerpt] In 2013, a medium-sized art museum located in the Northeast United States received a grant to plan for an electronic records repository. This museum will be referred to here as USAM for brevity. Working as the electronic records consultant on this project, the first major task was to research and inventory the electronic records being created and already existing at the museum, which necessitated scans of network storage, focus groups with departmental staff, and investigations of media included in the physical archives. In engaging in this research process, certain document types were expected, such as image files, word processed documents and spreadsheets. Although documents of these types were indeed plentiful, an extensive quantity of digitally produced two-dimensional drawings (2D) and three-dimensional models (3D) were found. Specifically, over 37,000 CAD drawings were unearthed during a network storage inventory project, as well as over 6,000 3D models. These files originate primarily in VectorWorks (and its predecessor MiniCAD), AutoCAD, and Rhinoceros. Given the quantity of digitally produced models and drawings existing at USAM, and the need to plan for an electronic records repository, this project is motivated by the following question: By what methods can two-dimensional CAD drawings (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) models be digitally archived for long term preservation and access? To answer this question, a review of the relevant literature is first presented, which explores the methods that have been developed for archiving architectural models and exhibition designs. Second, the study methods are presented, which include more detail on the context as well the archiving tests that were conducted. The paper concludes with results and conclusions regarding how architectural models and exhibitions designs are archived at USAM

Museum Experience Design: A Modern Storytelling Methodology

In this paper we propose a new direction for design, in the context of the theme “Next Digital Technologies in Arts and Culture”, by employing modern methods based on Interaction Design, Interactive Storytelling and Artificial Intelligence. Focusing on Cultural Heritage, we propose a new paradigm for Museum Experience Design, facilitating on the one hand traditional visual and multimedia communication and, on the other, a new type of interaction with artefacts, in the form of a Storytelling Experience. Museums are increasingly being transformed into hybrid spaces, where virtual (digital) information coexists with tangible artefacts. In this context, “Next Digital Technologies” play a new role, providing methods to increase cultural accessibility and enhance experience. Not only is the goal to convey stories hidden inside artefacts, as well as items or objects connected to them, but it is also to pave the way for the creation of new ones through an interactive museum experience that continues after the museum visit ends. Social sharing, in particular, can greatly increase the value of dissemination

The DiSCmap project : overview and first results

Traditionally, digitisation of cultural and scientific heritage material for use by the scholarly community has been led by supply rather than demand. The DiSCmap project commissioned by JISC in 2008, aimed to study what refocussing of digitisation efforts will suit best the users of digitised materials, especially in the context of the research and teaching in the higher education institutions in the UK. The paper presents some of its initial outcomes based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of 945 special collections nominated for digitisation by intermediary users (librarians, archivist and museum curators), as well as end users' study involving a combination of online survey, focus groups and in-depth interviews. The criteria for prioritising digitisation advanced by intermediaries and end users were analysed and cross-mapped to a range of existing digitisation frameworks. A user-driven prioritisation framework which synthesises the findings of the project is presented

Somewhere There’s a PLACE for Us: Linking Fedora Digital Collections and Open Geoportal

The University of New Hampshire Library and its partner, the UNH Earth Systems Research Center, have been awarded a grant in the amount of $474,156 from the Institute for Museum and Library Services, National Leadership Grants for Libraries Program, to build PLACE, the Position-based Location Archive Coordinate Explorer. Among project objectives is to provide a toolkit for other institutions to implement in their geospatial digital collections. The project will contribute to two open source communities: Open Geoportal (OGP) and Fedora Commons. In this poster session we will provide an overview of the PLACE project timeline and a visual representation of its expected functionality and preliminary design. We will also distribute a progress report on the first year of our three-year project and hope to gather feedback on the outline for our toolkit from potential future PLACE implementers. PLACE will be a geospatial search interface that will use embedded geospatial coordinates to enable discovery of information that can be difficult to locate through text based searching. Through PLACE, via a click or delineation of a search polygon on a web map, users will zoom to a region and will locate all objects from the UNH Library Digital Collections whose geographic extents intersect. Initially, PLACE will provide access to geographic collections focused on the New Hampshire region, but it will be flexible and expandable as collections grow. Poster presented at the ALA Annual Conference, June 28, 2014, Las Vegas, N

Introduction: migrating heritage - experiences of cultural networks and cultural dialogue in Europe

No abstract available

Scottish Archaeological Research Framework: Future Thinking on Carved Stones

No abstract available