This year’s seminar Digitizing Rare Books and Manuscripts and Creating Digital Libraries

“The world is changing and we all—students, teachers, as well as Library Directors—need to keep up with those changes”, says Chet Grycz, seminar leader for Digitizing Rare Books and Manuscripts and Creating Digital Libraries, in a discussion as to how this year’s seminar is different from the last two versions of it and how the instructor updates seminar information, case-studies and examples or articles he recommends to students. In its approach to digitization as process and digitization as strategic step for providing widespread access to information, the seminar manages to involve students in the topic from the perspective of decision-makers who need to develop strategic thinking. It manages, at the same time to provide a rich overview of technical details involved in the process of digitization and publishing of digital materials – from data-capture, to post- processing, storage and e-publishing. One of the class exercises required students, for example, to put on the shirt of a Library Director who needs to make real decisions about developing a digital collection.
As I am writing now, students are receiving feedback on their contributions to a different class activity, in the context of intellectual propriety management, the topic of this last seminar afternoon. Students had to think of the detailed steps to be taken by a team working at a distance to develop the, by-now, famous video "A Fair(y) Use Tale", which summarizes the main exceptions to copyright law by using short clips from Disney animation movies (see it in YouTube). This exercise made it pretty obvious that a strategic as well as an in- detail approach is needed to managing even a seemingly simple activity such as the collaborative development of a video. Students did an excellent job at identifying the main conceptual steps, but fell short of thinking of step-by-step technical aspects including such things as deciding, at a distance, on file formats or transmitting detailed database information as to exact clips to be used. Earlier today the seminar approached issues in the appropriate taxonomizing of digital information to provide easy and fast access. “A picture is worth 1,000 words.. but it takes 1,000 words to find one picture", is the tagline used by Chet to underline the importance of using the appropriate metadata sets for providing paths of access to digital materials. An extensive approach to digitization and the use of digital materials is provided in the book Digital Heritage: Applying Digital Imaging to Cultural Heritage by MacDonald, Lindsay (ed.); Chet’s contribution to the book is its second chapter, entitled "Digitizing Rare Books and Manuscripts".