Digital Tools for Information and Democracy Conference
November 5-7, 2009 - Monticello
Introduction
Jefferson Institute – 6 years old – Has offices in DC and Belgrade, but works to reverse the standard business model. Rather than basing a lot of analysts in Washington and occasionally dropping in on the geographic area of interest, we host analysts in the region of interest with the occasional visit to Washington.
JI is also very active in creating digital tools to support its research and to help boost the capacity of its partners in the US and abroad. We work in each of the three areas covered today: archives, news, and education - and we find synergies between the three to be among the most exciting opportunities for democracy and community. This was the inspiration for our gathering today.
Some recent examples of our digital tools work:
1) Serbian Military Archive project – approx. 120,000 pages digitized per month
2) Community information portal – sochireporter.ru – Sochi, Russia
Capturing and preserving News 2.0 for archiving is an enormous new challenge – not just the reportage, but the comments people make in response
Long-tail possibilities afforded by archives for community news outlets
How do we look at the issues of digital tools in the context of democracy? Looking at changes in the region and elsewhere in the world, these are critical issues.
In Serbia – an exciting trend of the state exiting from its monopoly on the interpretation of history and returning that ownership to the people. It gives us inspiration and energy for redoubling our efforts at home in the US.
Digital tools for Archives
When we partner, we are not just looking for digitization. We want to know what tools you are building.
• Currently there is not a good count of archives in the USA – working on determining
• Goal to support and provide for better management of information
• IMLS first funded digitization projects in 1998 (approx. $5 million to 18 projects)
• Since the over 150 projects primarily involved with digitization, work more secondarily involved
• Build the content landscape, find the right economies of scale for digital information, enhance discovery, address copyright barriers
• Funded several state-wide preservation networks
• Ongoing – sustainable repositories
• http://steve.museum at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and a more recent project looking at social tagging and authoritative metadata
• http://omeka.org
• Univ. of Maryland is doing a new project studying Copyright Practices of Libraries, Archives and Museums
• Education for professionals to serve in new roles – curation, data management, etc. (Cultural Heritage Information Professional Workshop, Sarasota, FL, April 3-4, 2008 – http://chips.ci.fsu.edu/)
• JISC – released report on Cloud Computing and Repositories: Fedorazon
• Removing all Restrictions: Cornell’s New Policy on Use
• Promote greater consistency across LAMs digitizing materials – policies, services, presentation, interoperability
• www.imls.gov/about/21stCSkills.shtm
• Encourage closer ties with International Communities
• Webwise will be in Denver
The work of Digitization of archives is both:
an effort in identification and mitigation of risk (ie loss); and a drive to maximize access, which is why it is so important to maintain authenticity and integrity of the digital replicas
We need to develop comprehensive workflow tools, covering each phase of the effort
Wherever possible, to do the job better, seek out automation for economies of scale
Standards are numerous but important: cf GARP
It takes effort, but ultimately, standardization promotes the ease of use - and management
Don't be blinded by the lights. Technology also comes with important down sides.
Our holdings are vast and global. Most of our holdigns are not in English.
• Manage more than 20 million files, and growing every year
• Educational mandate as well
• Global gateway – LC holds more materials in other languages than in English
• World Digital Library
• Chronicling America – historic American newspapers
• NDIIPP – National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/
• Approaches to sharing information across organizations and communities
• Recollection – a platform for curators/librarians/archivists to explore and share their content – should go live early December
• Goal is to create communities – including communities for curating resources
• Visualeyes tool – available for free for other people to use – easy to use, easy to make the “Ken Burns” type of product
• Role in making the records accessible and allowing people to tell stories
• Developed HistoryBrowser at Viginia Center for Digital History under a grant from NEH
• Started a course – one project was Jefferson Travels – a visualization of a six-week trip Jefferson took in 1786 – three classes so far, with other projects and research with original source materials – added in aspects of money spent and sat for a painting (so an interactive link to other paintings done by the painter)
• www.primaryaccess.org - outstanding motion picture tool
• Using Flash – excellent capabilities and proven to be very backward compatible, it is a proprietary application – they may be considering opening the source code
Digital tools for Journalism
• News Challenge
• Engage local communities and use digital technology – 6,000 applications over the last 3 years and 50 projects funded
• Knight drupal Initiative – a contest within the drupal community – community identified the best projects
• Knight Community Information Challenge
• Future – more mobile, feeds, cloud computing, opening APIs, etc.
• Release open-source code
• New project – Test-kitchen – see what works best in your town and use it
• Apply, use the code, give feedback, etc.
• Need to create a group to catalog projects and efforts out there now, so we do not duplicate efforts – need to address lessons-learned from earlier digitization efforts to make sure we do a better job and not lose things
• Aaron – Knight foundation has an emphasis on building the community of awardees and fostering interaction
• A global resource, also a standard museum library to support staff and research fellows
• Imagined a comprehensive approach to Jefferson
• Thomas Jefferson portal – online library catalog was intended to be a research database
• Catalog individual op-ed, newpaper and journal articles – adding connections
• Considering linking to GoogleBooks, plan to link through OCLC WorldCat
• Have the benefit of focusing on one man – still a tremendous amount to do – have benefit of a small and dedicated staff, also the disadvantages
• Making the effort to follow existing standards and guidelines
• Library Thing – a web-based open-source cataloging tool intended for people to catalog their personal books – loading records for Jefferson’s books
• Created the Thomas Jefferson Wiki – now the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia - using the open-source Media Wiki
• Bringing together 14 distinct databases within the organization, also have about 25 commercial databases, working with Deep Web Technologies to build the connectors across the databases – has a very good relevancy algorithm - in pilot phase with six external sources to build a federated approach – will be developing a new interactive web interface with built-in community creation tools
• Active on Facebook and have a couple blogs – a community exists, currently relative small in comparison to the broader Jefferson scholarly community
• Many topical-based interest groups – Jefferson and wine, Jefferson and travel, Jefferson and Paris, etc.
• Knight Commission on Information and Democracy recommendations – what is missing here is a mention of the importance of archives
• Book and exhibit – American Scenes
• Not just the broader community, but the underlying international research community as well
• Context
• 1 – need an authoritative and reliable conduit to sources
• 2 – a comprehensive understanding of the nature and extent of the sources – an audit trail
• 3 – need ease of and inexpensive access to information – barriers like private ownership of information
• 4 – ability to gather easily and add to the sources
• 5 – has to be sustainable – can not rely on grants forever to support this information dissemination – need a sustainable framework
A short note on Metadata:
Metadata standards are often so complex that they are not used at all. The real question for metadata standards should be: what is the least amount of useful information we should assemble for this object. The rising semantic web and full text search will give a huge boost to discovery. Europe is doing very interesting things in this area.
• Publisher of local newspapers in three cities
• Newspapers as a technology, in both new and original form, remain very useful
• How to raise value, content-awareness and engagement for your information? - Goal – how to do it online when you are competing with many, many other organizations and websites?
• Increased the ways in which news is managed and delivered online
• Newspapers ought to be repositories of community stories and information – currently publishers and reporters think about and focus on “product” with a short time horizon – need to move from a product-focus to a service-focus – deliver context for any given story or issue
• Newspapers should be using wiki oriented sites as repositories of information for communities to provide access to and delivery of information – still a challenge from a business model perspective
• Net neutrality and broad-band access (the digital divide) remain outstanding challenges
Digital tools for Education
We see ourselves as educators - teaching through the museum. Our central question is: how to promote democracy?
• A number of projects at this time
• http://research.history.org/DigitalLibrary.cfm
• http://research.history.org/eWilliamsburg (map based view, adding new research tools – temporal GIS mapping available in Jan. 2010)
• Virtual Williamsburg, spring 2010
• American Revolution, fall 2010
• Working with the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH)
• Will generate 3D models – starting with a smaller, specific section, rather than waiting a long time to get everything done
• Start with creating very basic model and then adding features and textures – creating photo-realistic models, animations, and immersive environments
• Williamsburg has four full-time architectural historians on staff
Collections came from the various Rockefeller related foundations/organizations and other non-related organizations
• Unifying theme is philanthropy – history of philanthropy has become the research theme
• Large archive of photography – approx. 750,000 images
• Over 50% of users are from outside the US
• Using ReDiscovery, but not happy with it
• Agree we are stuck in a particular funding model, which centers on supporting elements, rather than a complex whole
• A lot of education sites do not have the original documents illustrated, only transcriptions
• NARA Lesson Plans is one model
• Another option is the Salem Witch Trials – primarily an archival survey, pointing to a lot of thematically related resources/sites, but not intended for any specific purpose
• Today, there are about 76,000 foundations and the rate of growth is increasing (4,000 to 5,000 new per year)
We have a responsibility as educators to pass on our living memory to the next generation, yet how we do that faces enormous challenges.
• Who are the students? – 80 ethnic groups from around the world – English is a second language, with range of understanding and facility – only 20% of jobs in the future will require a 4-year education – not all people learn by reading, a lot of experiential learning
• A younger generation communicates almost exclusively through cell phones and smaller mobile devices – not large screens
• Language matters - as much of our American experience is not in English
• Not as educated
• A large number of educators currently are only holding on for retirement – not a lot of inventiveness and not much engagement with the students (drop out rate is 50% in the cities) – need new ways to engage with students
• Need to think about producing information in a different way – new and different – visualizations, animations, interactive environments, etc.
• Probably will not be able to engage school districts directly – will have to work with like-minded and excited people – work from the bottom up
If you need to contact the event organizers for any reason, at any time, please feel free:
+202 213 8559
Charlottesville weather
Mon, 02/06/2012 - 4:53pm
50 °F
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