Support for non-Arts faculty, including maps and text

The scope of the Visual Resources Collection is based around the visual arts, providing teaching materials primarily for faculty of the History of Art department and of the Art and Architecture schools. For faculty outside this area, there is no clear path or coordinated effort to help faculty understand their options for service, which include:

$1,000 allotted per academic year in support of image digitization to each member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences through AM&T- Media Services.

Support for setting up and managing personal digital image collections through ITG.

Some of the questions that exist concerning support for non-arts faculty to be addressed by DPIP include:

How will the creation of digital assets and metadata be funded and who will
provide the digital service?
Once the assets are created where will the images be stored and how will they be
displayed?
Who will provide the ongoing support for tool(s) that are used?
What are the technologies and systems needed to allow non-image assets, like maps and texts, to be delivered electronically?

Immediate service for faculty

A variety of factors currently contributes to a sense of immediacy among faculty members to convert to teaching with digital materials: demands from students, changing technology available in classrooms, etc. Faculty are demanding large quantities of digital images with little advance notice. Requests for bulk processing of personal image collections are currently being met by ITG, but nowhere within the library system. Again resultantly, individual collections are being created to meet these short term needs. Students’ study and research needs have gone by the wayside as faculty seek to build their teaching collections with immediate needs in mind.

Some of the questions for DPIP to consider regarding faculty demands for immediate turn-around:

· Who will provide the digitizing service?

· What is an appropriate time-frame?

· Would each faculty member or department have a quota of images?

Bringing in external collections

With personal collections being created to meet short-term needs, one of DPIP’s goals should be to develop standards by which the library will accept personal collections for long-term access and preservation. One of the foremost challenges is that faculty organize these collections with their own idiosyncratic schemes and data, which may not be appropriate for general use. Images associated with the data are also of varying file types and resolution. DPIP’s goal should be to develop and communicate minimal standards for metadata and image quality as well as provide centralized support for faculty wishing to move their collections into an institutional environment.

The central questions concerning this topic are:

Where will the assets be coming from and will we determine minimum quality
requirements for the images?
Will we require a full set of metadata before being brought in?
Will we require any quality control on metadata elements?