Teaching about digital assets

Yesterday I agreed to teach a course entitled "Creating, Managing and Preserving Digital Assets" for Syracuse University during the Spring 2005 semester. The class, which I've taught before, will be done solely online.

Teaching about digitization in an online environment, without ever seeing your students, is an interesting adventure. One must decide how to talk about the various aspects of creating, managing and preserving digital objects/images in a way that makes students realize that there is more to know -- that digitization isn't as easy as one thinks.

One challenge that I encountered last spring was having student find digitization vendors to talk to and write about for an assignment. Here in New York State, there are many vendors. Yes, you might have to drive to get to the perfect vendor, but we have vendors nonetheless. But not so in other parts of the country. In the central part of the country and near the Rocky Mountains, vendors are hard to find. In fact, they don't exist in some areas at all. Rather than being able to visit a vendor, students had to rely on information gathered electronically about the vendors or through telephone conversations.

And some vendors would not talk to students. Did they fear giving away some secret? Did they suspect that the students were actually competitors? Sadly, vendors gave up an opportunity to talk to a group that will be needing their services in the future OR who might refer a potential client. Very sad.

It was also sad that some vendors were unknown entities in their community. This occurred in California where one student talked to local libraries and museums about digitization vendors in the region, but they knew of none. The student did finally find a couple of vendors, who were missing out on a market that needed them.

For now, who knows what adventures this class will bring. Hopefully the adventures will be fun.

By the way, I'm again using the book by NEDCC entitled HANDBOOK FOR DIGITAL PROJECTS: A Management Tool for Preservation and Access, which is available only online. I'll be supplementing that will a wide variety of readings from reputable sources found on the Internet and in article databases like OCLC FirstSearch.

David Weinberger's presentation

I have now listened to David Weinberger's presentation -- part of the series on "The Digital Future" -- twice. Yes, it is that good. Weinberger talks at great length about knowledge. In the beginning, knowledge was something that was shared by everyone. Everyone was knowledgeable in something. Over the years, however, philosophers began to "bottle" knowledge and categorize it. Knowledge was no longer something that everyone had some of, but was something that belonged to experts and was found in specific places. He notes, though, that the Internet has changed that.

With the Internet, we now see knowledge being shared in personal ways through e-mail, online forums and blogs. In other words, people are making what they know available by self-publishing. That knowledge may not be lofty, but may be very useful. He talks about reading product reviews written by real people who had used the products.

We need more people to create blogs, not so much on personal topics, but on those professional and business topics. We need people to share their experiences and give lessons learned. For example, wouldn't it be wonderful if a digitization project published a daily or weekly blog that chronicled the project's progress as well as successes and failures? Imagine the lessons that could be learned. What digitization project would take on this challenge? Will any? Doing so could allow a project to teach us in real-time what to do (or not to do), rather than waiting for the project to do a presentation or publish an article. It would be very helpful. And it would make David Weinberger very happy.

Wikipedia entries on digitization

The Internet allows individual people to contribute to the world's knowledge bank. Wikipedia is a site that allows people to contribute through original text or by adding or modifying text. It is self described as a free content encyclopedia written collaboratively by contributors from around the world." Wikipedia contains only a few pages of information on digitization. Not enough to do the subject justice. Those of us involved in digitization should take it upon ourselves to contribute.

Those few pages in wikipedia that relate to digitization are:

• Digitizing, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitizing
• Digital asset management system, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_asset_management_system
• Content management system, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system

By the way, once you're in wikipedia, you may never leave! There are many topics covered and it's fun just to wander and read what knowledge others are leaving for us.

The Digital Future: A Library of Congress Series

The Library of Congress is hosting a series of seven discussions on "The Digital Future." The series is being televised on C-SPAN and programs will be available on the C-SPAN web site. The first discussion aired on Nov. 15 and had David Weinberger, former senior internet adviser to the Howard Dean campaign, discussing how Weblogs work and their value in gathering knowledge.

The next program will be on Monday, Dec. 13, 2004 (with Brewster Kahle). The last discussion will be on Monday, March 28, 2005. Please note that during the live discussions, people can submit questions via e-mail.

National Digital Newspaper Program to digitize 30 million newspaper pages

The National Digital Newspaper Program, an initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress, plans on digitizing 30 million newspaper pages originally printed between 1836 and 1922. The digitized content is planned to be available by 2006. Currently these newspapers are available in microfirm. Digitizing and placing them on the Internet would give people much better access to this slice of history.

This time period (1836 - 1922) was selected because, newspapers prior to 1836 will not be digitized because the typefaces are difficult for optical scanners to read. Newspapers published after 1923 are covered by copyright restrictions.

For more information read this article in the San Jose Mercury News.