DPIP Priorities: Needs, Challenges, Issues

Collaboration: Division of labor between Library and ITS

Martha Smalley, Karen Reardon (site visit text by FMM)

December 7, 2005

Issues

Scenario: A Yale faculty member decides that she wants to switch from showing her personal slides with a slide projector in class to using PowerPoint. How does she go about making this happen?

Some possible paths:

1. Faculty member recognizes that she needs to get her slides digitized, so goes to www.yale.edu, chooses Academics → Academic Computing → Computing & Communications Resources → Audio Visual → Digital Imaging Services

2. OR: Faculty member chooses Academics → Academic Computing → Computing & Communications Resources →Faculty Support Program (which says “FASIT should be your single point of contact for all questions related to technology services on campus.”)→ AM&T Instructional Technology Group

3. OR: Faculty member consults with her Departmental Technology Consultant (DTC), as listed on the FASIT page

4. OR: Faculty member goes to Yale Info portal and puts “digitizing slides” in the search box → first result is http://www.library.yale.edu/libraries/digcoll.html → not clear how she can get her own slides digitized unless she’s participating in an Electronic Library Initiatives project.

5. OR: the list of possibilities could go on….

There is no one clear portal for Yale faculty members who want to create digital resources. This in itself may not be the Library’s problem, but if a faculty member’s digital resources would be a valuable addition to the University’s permanent collections, then the Library’s role in the situation becomes more pertinent.

Back in 2002, the Divinity Library wanted to migrate a digital collection created from faculty slides/images, which it had been hosting on an outdated in-house server, to a more modern delivery system. This evoked some exchanges with Library and ITS about the appropriate place to host such a collection. In part of this exchange, Martha Smalley wrote to Phil Long: “My perception of the situation right now is that there are "Library digital projects" (e.g., Luna) and "ITS digital projects" (e.g., CMI projects, web sites created by faculty in classes.yale.edu), but if a faculty member wants to create a digital project that has both current curriculum use, and long term value that makes it valuable enough to be kept as one of Yale's collections (i.e., in the Library where collections are preserved), it is not clear how to proceed.” Phil replied: “I completely concur with your overall goal that it should be possible to meld the strengths of the ITS and Library approach. We've spent some time within ITS talking about how projects that come to us as "one off" can be managed so that excepts can appropriately migrate to Library partnership when the faculty member figures out that is appropriate.”

Three years later, there is still no clear point of intersection between Yale Library and ITS services for creating and maintaining digital resources for the long term. The current “most probable” paths for a faculty member outlined above differ quite significantly from the situation at Cornell, where the first paragraph on DCAPS website says: “Want to transfer a large archive onto the World Wide Web or just allow students to access a few slides? Digital Consulting and Production Services at Cornell University Library - DCAPS - will answer your questions, analyze your options, and help you meet your goals.”

The DPIP goal encompassed by "H2:Collaboration" would be to investigate the proper roles for the Library and ITS in the arena of creating, maintaining, and preserving digital resources and to recommend the support infrastructure / communication channels that need to be established to meet these goals.

Site Visits

The visit to Cornell confirmed the observation above that DCAPS goes a long way toward achieving the “single point of contact” objective. Members of the DCAPS virtual team have a high level of commitment to the principle of referring inquiries to the most appropriate person or unit, whether in the library or outside. The relationship between the library and CIT benefits from a jointly sponsored Cornell Teaching and Learning Consortium that holds technology expos for faculty. Three years of discussion have brought them to a place where they have mapped services and are almost ready to publish a web site that tells Cornell constituents where to go for which service. Digitization for course support and e-reserves is done almost entirely by instructional support staff at CIT or by staff in circulation units or academic departments.

Harvard’s Library Digital Initiative achieves a high level of coordination through its internal grant program, which distributes up to $1M per year to projects conducted by units dispersed throughout the Harvard campus. Participants in the grant program benefit from LDI consulting services and must adhere to centrally formulated standards and practices. As at Cornell, digitization for class web pages is done outside of the LDI structure.