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Teaching with Digital Collections in the

Undergraduate Curriculum

Marianne Colgrove, Deputy CTO

Dena Hutto, Director of Reference & Instruction, Library

Reed College

Image licensed from Saskia, Ltd. through Scholar’s Resource

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About the Digital Assets Management Project

• Collaboration between IT, the library, and the visual resources collection

• 3-year funding with grants from Keck and Booth-Ferris

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Goals of the Project

• Initial focus: Teaching with digital images in the arts & humanities

• Long-term goal: Teaching with digital materials across the curriculum

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The Humanities Challenge

• “Hum 110” is required of all first-year students

• Team-taught by faculty from art history, classics, history, literature, philosophy, political science, religion

• Our challenge: to support image use for both expert and non-expert faculty as well as students

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Content for Teaching

• Licensed image collections: Saskia & Archivision

• Collections from legacy system

• Copystand images on request

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Who Can Use the Images?

• Goal is to create collections for college students, faculty, and staff

• Most collections will not be public

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Ideal Terms for Image Usage

• Images can be added directly to the system• Images can be accessed by students, faculty,

and staff, on or off campus• Images can be displayed in the classroom• Images can be reproduced in course

assignments and undergraduate theses

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What about Copystand Images?

• Images should be acquired from museum or vendor when possible

• Educational uses only; images cannot be shared outside the institution

• For use in theses, student should permission from the copyright holder

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Usage Guidelines

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Collections for Teaching

• Digital collections based on real-world collections have the “collection definition” issue settled for them

• What defines a “teaching collection”? The course? The professor? The academic program?

• How do we maintain flexibility to create or change parameters of teaching collections as the curriculum changes?

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A Metadata-Defined Collection

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Metadata to Enhance Findability

• Most images came with metadata, but it was inconsistent

• Expert faculty, non-expert faculty, and students need to be able to find images in different ways

• Some metadata depends on what the image is; some depends on how the image is used in teaching

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Findability Solutions for Hum

• “Scrubbed” art-related metadata to meet accepted art standards

• Worked with faculty partners to create customized list for classics & humanities-related local standards

• Employed faculty-selected students to implement metadata standards

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Faculty Input

• Copious high-quality content

• Reliable searching (good data)

• A “garden path” to course content

• Web interfaces for quick browsing

• Flexible in-class tools

• Student access outside of class

• How to analyze visual resources

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Presentation Tools and Interfaces

• CONTENTdm basic interface:– Searching and browsing– Clickable thumbnail grid– Image viewer– Cross-linked metadata– Simple “My Favorites” tool– Slideshow

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Opportunities for customization

• Modify PHP templates for viewers

• Custom Queries & Results (CQR)

• API for custom PHP interfaces (read only)

• SQL on the side

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Browsing interface

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Images for lectures

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Lecture thumbnails

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Browse by Era

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Era: Imperial Christian Rome

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Roman Mosaic

Image licensed from Saskia, Ltd. through Scholar’s Resource

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Find by Artifact Type

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Mosaic Results

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Mosaics in My Workspace

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How to Read Vases Study Guide

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Faculty & student feedback• Faculty survey

• Student focus groups

"I think it is fantastic--far and away the best visual materials we have had"

"I feel confident about my actual ability to use the system…I've also found that its ease of use has encouraged me just to browse the slides more…I am, in short, quite happy with the system."

"Excellent easy access for showing students images in class, for which I'm very grateful."

"The zoom feature is really helpful for viewing details in class...it's also nice when there are multiple shots of something in the database, like the Primaporta, so you can see all different angles."

"The lecture image sets in CONTENTdm were linked from the online course syllabus. I liked how handy it was to access the images outside of class."

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Challenges

• More images, all the time • Light box interface for sorting images and

browsing in conference• Large images that automatically fill the whole

screen• Big, beautiful side-by-side slide shows that

can advance separately• Hide/show tools and data at will• Is the ideal out there?