Presentations
Monday Speakers:
Michael Lesk, Professor of Library and Information Science at Rutgers University
"Expanding Data Collections: It's Not Just Book Scanning Any More"
Links:
http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~lesk/lesk-08/lesk-eva07.pdf
http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~lesk/lesk-08/lesk-commons.pdf
http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~lesk/lesk-08/rand-feb09.pdf
John Greenleigh, Flipside Studios
Workshop Track 1: QTVR photography
Susan Jane Williams
Workshop Track 2: Data Strategies
Jon Chenette, Dean of Faculty and Professor of Music, Vassar College
"Ants and Elephants: Institutional Support for Learning from the QTVR Source"
Tuesday Panel:
Adrienne Witzel, The eAnthro projects (eSkeletons, eForensics, eLucy, eFossils), UTexas at Austin
The eAnthro Projects are a set of web-based educational resources that focus on primate comparative osteology, including modern and fossil hominins. One of these sites, eSkeletons, enables visitors to view human and non-human primates bones, including skeletons of primates that are rare or endangered. eLucy is dedicated to sharing information about Lucy, a 3.2 million year old Australopithecus afarensis fossil specimen that is currently on tour in the United States; while eFossils (in development) focuses on the species identified within the human family tree and major paleoanthropological field sites. Both eLucy and eFossils offer visitors the oppotunity to closely exmaine fossil hominin specimens that might otherwise be unavailable for study. Lessons about human evolution and human origins are available for educators, as well as supplemental activitivies such as lifesize printouts, flashcards, and crosswords. All the eAnthro websites offer a unique set of digitized versions of fossils and/or skeletons in 2-D and 3-D color images and animations.
Links:
eSkeletons.org
eLucy.org
eFossils.org
eForensics.info
Charlotte Jirousek, Cornell Costume and Textile Collection, Associate Professor and Curator, Cornell University
Charlotte Jirousek is curator of the Cornell Costume and Textile Collection, which is housed in the Department of Fiber Science and Apparel Design at Cornell University. Beginning in 1990, the Cornell Collection began to digitize its catalog, and by 1996 put the catalog online with open access, the first Costume Collection in the country to do so. The Collection’s site has gradually grown to serve educational and research purposes for Cornell students and researchers, as well as researchers from elsewhere.
Hod Lipson, KMODDL, Associate Prof. of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering and Computing & Information Science, Cornell University
3D-printable teaching models:
Kinematic Models for Design Digital Library
3D Printing technology allows desktop fabrication of arbitrarily shaped structures, layer by layer, directly from electronic blueprints. While this technology has been around for over two decades, it is only recently that cost, reliability, and ease of use offers the potential of crossing from industrial applications to home and classroom use. In particular, new developments in multi-material printing may allow these compact “fabbers” to move from printing passive parts to fabricating integrated, active systems ready to use right out of the printer. If broadly accepted, this technology can profoundly change the way we design, make, and consume products. What effect could this technology have in the classroom? We have initiated an open wiki-style website (3Dprintables.org) that houses an archive of printable models for education. Teaching models were chosen as the initial focus for this effort for two key reasons. First, quality educational models are difficult for teachers to obtain due to high prices, limited availability, and limited customization options. Second, many studies have demonstrated that learning is enhanced when students interact with physical models. Such models are also indispensible tools for teaching the visually impaired and those with spatial reasoning difficulties. The website contains models relevant to mechanical engineering, aerospace, biochemistry, mathematics, anatomy, and archaeology (e.g. proteins, airfoils, kinematics models, cuneiform tablets). These models are intended to serve as "seeds" to encourage educators to further develop and share printable models and the associated curricular materials.
Links:
http://www.3Dprintables.org
http://www.kmoddl.org
http://www.mae.cornell.edu/ccsl/papers/SFF08_Knapp.pdf
Holly Hummel and Arden Kirkland, Vassar College
The Vassar College Costume Collection (VCCC) is a collection of original historic clothing, dating from the 1850's to the present. The collection is maintained by Holly Hummel (of the Vassar Drama Department) and Arden Kirkland (VC '93), with the help of numerous Vassar students and alumni. Although most items have been donated over the years, by alumnae and their families, to be used as costumes in theatrical productions, these objects have been kept separate from the theatrical costume stock in order to conserve them for research purposes. The collection is a wonderful resource for students of many different disciplines. The study of these actual historical objects as primary sources of information is not only informative to students of theatrical costume design and fashion history, but potentially informs almost all other disciplines studied at Vassar. Although often taken for granted, the wearing of clothing is an aspect of daily life that influences, and is influenced by, many factors, and provides constant opportunities to compare and contrast over time and across cultures. The collection has already been a resource not only to the Drama Department, but also to the departments of Art History, History, Victorian Studies, American Culture, French, English, and Women’s Studies. As most donated items come from Vassar alums or other members of the Vassar community, they also provide an opportunity to use the resources of Special Collections at the Vassar Library to make connections between the clothing and photographs, letters, journals, etc.
A Filemaker database of the collection, developed by Arden Kirkland, presents a way to combine images and text and give researchers access to the objects in the collection even when the physical handling of fragile objects must be limited. Virtual access can not replace actual physical handling of the objects, but can provide a way of narrowing down the choice of which objects to work with hands-on. The database has already been used extensively for faculty research and student independent study, including:
- accurate reproductions constructed for Drama Department productions
- comparison projects, using powerpoint to compare 2 costumes from different time periods
- virtual exhibitions, in powerpoint or blog form, combining infinitely different groups of objects to explore different themes and disciplines
Kathi Martin, Director, Digital Museum Project and Associate Professor of Design, College of Media Arts & Design,(CoMAD), Drexel University
The Drexel Digital Museum Project: Historic Costume Collection, http://digimuse.cis.drexel.edu , is a standards based, best practices archive for the Drexel Historic Costume Collection , one of the finest private collections of historic costume in the United States. The website is internationally recognized as a quality online resource for education and research (see link to Intute: Best of the Web). The goals of the project are to conserve the holdings of the Collection by creating high quality digital surrogates for them and to create access to the Collection by anyone with an internet connection. The project incorporates the technical protocols and standards being developed and promoted by the Open Archives Initiative, http://www.openarchives.org/ , and the image standards of the Museum Online Archive California, http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/moac/ .
Links:
http://digimuse.cis.drexel.edu
http://www.rjta.org/download.php?paper=1&paper_id=06_3_11
Discussion
