1 April 18, 2023

Shall We Dance? Issues & Opportunities in collaboratively-developed networked information

Michael Roy, Director of Academic Computing Services & Digital Library ProjectsWesleyan Universitymichael.roy@wesleyan.edu

2 April 18, 2023

"It took only twenty five years for the overhead projector to make it from the bowling alley to the classroom. I'm optimistic about academic computing; I've begun to see computers in bowling alleys."

--George LandowHypertext: The convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology, 1991

3 April 18, 2023

4 April 18, 2023

Overview

› Framework for thinking about collaboration

› 4 collaborative projects (3 of them from NITLE schools)

• ArtSTOR• REALIA• IDEAS• LoLa Exchange

› Issues, opportunities, and challenging alternative models for strategizing about networked information

5 April 18, 2023

Who are we in this room?

supporters of supporters

supporters

casual users

power users

contributors

organizers

6 April 18, 2023

Framework for thinking about collaborative ventures

• Is it relevant to my campus? • Where did the idea come from?• Who is using it?• How are they using it?• How are they assessing it?• How big is it?• How big will it be?• What is the (business) model for sustainability?• Is it of high quality?• How does one get rewarded for contributing?• How much does it cost? (Money, Support time, Development

Time, Faculty time)• Do the tools for manipulating the content work in a variety of

educational settings?• How does it integrate into the general computing environment?

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8 April 18, 2023

ArtSTOR

› Who: Mellon/Ithaka

› What: Hundreds of thousands of high-quality digital images, and software to work with those images (pan, zoom, compare, work-offline)

› Where: www.artstor.org

› Why: To provide a means for colleges and universities to deliver high-quality images to their students in a cost-effective manner

9 April 18, 2023

ArtSTOR & NITLE

› Seminars

› Use-cases

› Visual literacy

› Digital Asset Management Strategies

› Faculty reception of tools and content

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11 April 18, 2023

Introduction to Realia

› Who: ACS, ACM, GLCA

› What: REALIA: Rich Electronic Archive for Language Instruction Anywhere, Database developed through a collaboration of faculty, librarians and technologists from Global Partners institutions. (+/- 1,000 images)

› Where: http://www.realiaproject.org

12 April 18, 2023

Rationale for Realia

Why:•Strong mandate from language faculty

•Generation of visually-oriented students

•Authentic materials best promote cultural literacy

•Serves a multiplicity of student learners: images can serve at all levels of language instruction, in culture courses, in preparation for study abroad programs

13 April 18, 2023

Realia Philosophy

› Archive significant images with cultural

information and pedagogical suggestions

› Ensure quality through

peer-review and editorial

assistance

› Capture the present while

preserving the past

› Free for educational use

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15 April 18, 2023

IDEAS

Who: Colorado College, Earlham College, Lake Forest College, St. Olaf College

What: IDEAS Project: Image Database to Enhance Asian Studies (1,300 images)

Where: http://ideas.midwest-itc.org/

How: ContentDM, MITC-support

16 April 18, 2023

What can I do with IDEAS?

› Search by keyword: e.g., buddha, rice, "Great Wall"

› Use a clickable map to find all the images for a particular country

› Limit your search to a particular IDEAS collection (i.e., CC's Japanese Religions collection, Lake Forest's Indian Religions collection, etc.)

› Do an advanced search to find words in particular metadata fields, or to do more complex combined searches

› Eventually the IDEAS Topic search will help people find images around a small "controlled vocabulary" of subject headings.

› In the classroom: choose a group of images ahead of time and save to "My Favorites"; use these images to illustrate a lecture.

› As an assignment: have students choose images around a topic and write or present on those images.

17 April 18, 2023

How does IDEAS work?

› ContentDM: IDEAS uses the digital collection management software CONTENTdm to store all the images and data, and to create the web interface for the database.

› Metadata document: It is impossible to find images in a database unless they have good "metadata," or descriptive information. The more uniform and accurate that metadata, the easier it should be for people to find things in the database.

› MITC support: MITC, the Midwest Instructional Technology Center, has supported the project all along, funding the meetings, licensing CONTENTdm, hosting the web site, paying for student assistants, etc. They have also supplied expertise through their personnel, particularly Manuel Rendon and Alex Wirth-Cauchon.

18 April 18, 2023

What are the future plans for IDEAS?

› Refine the search and display of the website.

› Refine the metadata standard to ensure accurate, consistent descriptions of images.

› Add more images.

› Work with faculty to understand how to make this a better tool for classroom use.

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20 April 18, 2023

LoLa Exchange

› Who: Wesleyan, Connecticut College, Trinity College, and other NE schools

› What: learning object referatory (40 items)

› Where: http://www.lolaexchange.org

› Why: Make Learning Objects and their uses more widely known

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LoLa Editorial Process

PaidCataloger

InterestedUnpaidUser

General editor

Music Editors

InfoLitEditors

Music.lolaexchange.org

Infolit.lolaexchange.org

GeneralEditors

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lola dspace oai

merlot

worldcat

metalibblackboard

Google scholar

LoLa Architecture

25 April 18, 2023

cmsFed search (metalib)

merlot

worldcat

lola

Google scholar

artstorrealia ideas

Federated Search Architecture

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Challenge: Discovery

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Challenge: Metadata

› Semantic search

› Folksonomies (e.g flickr)

› Google

› Google images

› Trove.net (RLG)

› Lionshare (p2p)

Is metadata worth all the trouble? What value does it really add? Who has time to create it?

28 April 18, 2023

Get current design

29 April 18, 2023

Over the last decade, American higher education has created a doughnut IT infrastructure: all periphery and no center. We have invested in the machinery but not in the teachers and the scholars to make that machinery worthwhile in the classroom and in scholarship. The massive investment in networks and computers will not pay off until we fill in the hole, until we work together to create content.

From “Why IT Has Not Paid Off As We Hoped (Yet)”

By Edward L. Ayers and Charles M. Grisham

EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 38, no. 6 (November/December 2003): 40–51.

30 April 18, 2023

Thanks!

› Slides (including references) at http://mroy.web.wesleyan.edu/talks/nitle-oregon05/

› Reach me:

› Michael Roymichael.roy@wesleyan.edu