Hope's Centre-Table: 2005: Plans

January 20, 2005

Plans for 2005 include:

1. "Support for UVM Digital Collection Projects"

Planning

UVMDC will continue to explore digital collection applications. This year the focus will also be on how to grow and support initiatives.
UVM has received an earmark funds commitment for digital collections. While this will focus on digitizing the Leahy papers, the UVMDC committee will be involved. The extent of that involvement will be discussed at a February meeting. This could be a major time commitment.
Planning new collections: Example: Center for Research on Vermont is interested in putting several hundred abstracts of their Vermont-related theses and dissertations online. Their timeframe is to start this later in the semester, so we are still in the organizational stages.

Development/Deployment

HST 11-12: The original project involved two activities, a) developing a web site for the multiple sections of the course, and b) developing an image database for use by the faculty. The first activity is being done by the TechCats. The second was begun under the auspices of a Instructional Incentive Grant which covered the scanning of several hundred images. Mounting those images and adding to them will continue as a joint project between AC (me), and the History faculty involved and will take the form, this semester, of an internship program. Two students have been identified and we are working out their schedules and assignments. I will be responsible for teaching them the technical aspects, as well as developing ideas and working with the faculty on how to integrate the image collection with their teaching.
Other digital collection projects include Geology (Wes is primary contact), and a revival/completion of the Eugenics Project.
Dynaweb! We (CIT and Special Collections, both) need a replacement. This involves both finding an appropriate application, installing and testing it (where?) and refitting the existing collections. The replacement will obviously be XML-based. Our documents are SGML. While XML is SGML, the reverse is not completely true, so the documents will need some work. A little programming help or some student help would work wonders here.

2. Support for Humanities Computing

UT&D/CTL small workshops. First up this semester is one on creating documents with Adobe Acrobat.
ICT literacy course for history students - Have begun discussions with History Dept. faculty for a 1-2 credit methods course with primary focus on related IT literacy. If it works it could be used as a model for other humanities disciplines. Proposed time would be Spr '06.
Humanities Computing Literacy Course - CS005: Introduction to Applied Humanities Computing, first taught Spr '04. Next session is scheduled for Fall '05. Based on experience gained last year, I will be rewriting a substantial portion of this 3 credit course this summer.

3. Infrastructure Support and Development

Digital Library Collections applications: dSpace, ContentDM, Fedora, dlxs, possibly Luminis and Documentum.
Text Encoding Intitative (TEI) upgrade: v. P5 has been extensively re-worked as an XML-based DTD and schema. The TEI is the primary mark-up used by our current (and probably future) digital text collections.
Developing "best practices" for humanities computing and digital library projects.

Posted by hag at January 20, 2005 9:05 AM