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".

ITSME slideshow (repost from slideshare)

From: itsmesrl,
4 days ago

Itsme A New Workstation To Exploit The Potential Of The Cyberspace 02

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2.0 operating)

ITSME, a collaboration-friendly workstation

On Wednesday, December 3, 2008, the TEC-CH programme jointly hosted a seminar with the Institute for Communication Technologies (ICT), featuring Prof. Giorgio De Michelis from the University of Milano - Bicocca. He presented a new open source initiative to develop an operating system that maximises the benefits of cyberspace, and that is sensitive to the context and interrelations of various items instead of the simple categorisations of folders and file formats. In the new interface, workstation content will be referred to as "venues" for contexts and "stories" for various formats of files. 

Considering current leanings towards open-source platforms, including big companies such as IBM and Symbian Foundation, the ITSME project presents much potential and possibilities than ever before. It is currently in the beginning of its development stage: while it may possibly be the solution for the dispersion of information and the inadequacy of file systems, its actual results remains interesting and yet to be evaluated. 

Seminar Libraries Archives and Museums in the digital realm

It has been great to have with us for the last three days prof. Wendy Duff, professor at the University of Toronto, where she teaches classes in records management, electronic records management and archival description. At TEC-CH, mrs. Duff has taught a seminar with the theme Libraries Archives and Museums in the digital realm.

Further readings for prof. Slavko Milekic's seminar

Here are some further readings for the seminar "Alternative interfaces for cultural heritage information" held this week at TEC-CH by prof. Slavko Milekic.
Here you find a list of publications. Recommended papers:
- intention-based interface using gaze-tracking,
- tangible interfaces .
- magic and multimedia.
More info about KiddyFace, the child-friendly tangible interface.

TEC-CH seminar: Museums and the Social Web

The seminar Museums and the Social Web, going on for the last three days, is a new-comer in the TEC-CH study plan. It is held by Jim Spadaccini, creative director of Ideum and former Director of Interactive Media at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

Check the Museums and the Social Web blog

Above, Nely Nasir, Salma Abu-Shakra and Zhang Zhang, presenting their concept proposal for integrating social networking tools in a traditional web 1.0 website - Muzium Negara Malaysia.

TEC-CH seminar: Cataloguing of CH Objects

Third and last day of the seminar taught by Susan Chun, The Cataloguing of Cultural Heritage Objects: History, Problems and New Trends. Here are some of Susan's favorite RSS feeds that she shared with the class:
BoingBoing
MetaFilter
Lawrence Lessig's Blog
Creative Commons Web site
One Laptop Per Child News
Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog
Plasticbag.org
Wired News
Download Squad
Research Buzz
Engadget
NTEN: Nonprofit Technology Network
The Googlization of Everything
Indexed

End Semester: seminar on digitizing printed books

The summer semester ended on Thursday, with a seminar held by J. C. Grycz, curator of books at The Internet Archive and founder of the non-profit organization Libraries without Walls (if you browse through the site, you may want to check the digital illustrated editions of Alice in Wonderland). The seminar introduced issues related to the selection, digital capture, storage and online presentation of printed materials made available in digital form.

If you are interested in digitization, a book recommended by J. C. Grycz is Digital Heritage. Applying Digital Imaging to Cultural Heritage, edited by Lindsay MacDonald.

TEC-CH Seminar: Inhabiting the Cultural Imaginary

Sarah Kenderdine, Special Projects manager at The Victoria Museum in Melbourne, Australia, will start on Friday a seminar with the theme "Inhabiting the Cultural Imaginary". This is the second seminar held by Sarah for TEC-CH students, enriched this year with fresh new projects and resources. The book "Theorezing Digital Cultural Heritage", edited by Sarah Kenderdine and Fiona Cameron, still in the making last summer, has recently been published.

And one of the most interesting projects, PLACE-Hampi (Stage 1), has been concluded - last year Sarah had just come back from southern India, where she captured the data for the panoramas. PLACE-Hampi is a virtual heritage installation made of high-resolution panoramic images augmented with stereo animations of Hindu mythological scenes. To learn more..

TEC-CH Seminar: Museum Anthropology

Tomorrow, May 30, starts a three-days seminar held by guest-speaker Paolo Campione. Prof. Campione has a wide experience as anthropologist, he has conducted fieldwork in New Guinea, Bali and, most recently, northern Laos; in Italy, has studied the popular arts of traditional communities in Sardegna and the Alps. He teaches Cultural Anthropology at the University of Insubria and from 2005 he is curator of the Museo delle Culture, in Lugano.

The seminar is themed on Museum Anthropology, encompassing the history of the anthropological museum, issues in the interpretation of cultural objects, complexity of giving meaning, classification and display of ethnographic objects, with rich examples drawn from the Museo delle Culture in Lugano and the exhibitions which have been designed with the collaboration of prof. Campione. A special section is dedicated to the interpretation of Indian works of art and of distinctive objects from Melanesia and Polynesia, with examples from the museum collection.

All lectures will be held at Museo delle Culture in Lugano, in Via Cortivo 24/28.