Cornell Institute for Digital Collections Digital Technologies and Access At Cornell University Peter B. Hirtle Cornell Institute for Digital Collections

Cornell Institute for Digital Collections Overview  Describe some of the activities of CIDC  Lessons learned –Projects are more than just scanning –Collaborative projects work well

Cornell Institute for Digital Collections What does CIDC do?  Explores the use of digital technologies in teaching and research  Cornell focus, but with a broader perspective  Educates, through workshops and publications –Digital imaging workshops; DigiNews; D-Lib Magazine

Cornell Institute for Digital Collections Representative projects  Image collections –Slide libraries; Japanese theater; Contemporary African Art; Birds  Textual materials – printed and MSS  Textiles and costumes

Cornell Institute for Digital Collections Museum Online project  collaborative project with H. F. Johnson Art Museum  digitize 25,000+ objects in the museum –purchase of high-end digital cameras –staffing and systems support –two year time frame  add subject terms to public access catalog

Cornell Institute for Digital Collections SagaNet  Collaborative project with the National Library of Iceland  Scan 400,000+ manuscript pages, 100,000+ printed pages  Create a comprehensive resource for Saga studies

Cornell Institute for Digital Collections Making of America  Previous Cornell project to scan 750,000 pages of 19 th -century journals  New project to OCR and index the text, provide word access to the contents Available at

Cornell Institute for Digital Collections Lessons learned  Projects are still difficult – no “off the shelf” solutions  Projects involve more than just scanning –Only a small portion of the tasks

Cornell Institute for Digital Collections Importance of the full digitization chain  Benchmark capture requirements –Purpose Preservation? Access? For how long? –Nature of documents  Capture and conversion –QC is hardest part

Cornell Institute for Digital Collections More digitization chain  Metadata creation  File management and storage –Backups, migration  Network infrastructure  Display derivatives  Output options – print, etc.

Cornell Institute for Digital Collections 2 nd Lesson Learned: Importance of Collaboration  Almost all our projects involve collaboration –Museum, slide libraries, faculty, Computer Science, other schools  Not a natural act… –Differ over access, fear of loss of control

Cornell Institute for Digital Collections Value of collaboration  For maintenance and support –Museum Project is one example  Library provides technical support –Bits are bits…  For technical exertise and advice – no one has all the answer –SagaNet good example

Cornell Institute for Digital Collections More benefits to collaboration  To create an integrated resource –Can’t think in terms of collections –Can’t think in terms of repositories –Researchers use everything  As a service to users

Cornell Institute for Digital Collections Summary  Digitization is more than scanning –Need a commitment to the full digitization chain –Recognize that your level of indexing will probably be higher than before  Collaboration can be an effective way to decrease cost and increase value