Vermont Cultural Heritage Digitization Center
at the University of Vermont
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Vermont Cultural Heritage Digitization Center will
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develop a pilot project to digitize selected collections of Vermont's unique
cultural materials,
create a model for collaborative contributions to the digital collection from statewide cultural institutions, and
provide training opportunities for K-16 teachers to explore integration of these
resources into their curricula and create learning modules suitable for use in a
variety of educational settings
While Vermont has changed greatly in the last thirty years, it remains one of the most
rural states in the union. The state's largest city, Burlington, contains only fifty thousand
people, and most residents live in communities of less than 2,500. Most towns struggle to
maintain their cultural and political history through historical societies and town libraries
that are locally run by volunteers. Lacking staff or facilities to adequately protect and
preserve their valuable and vulnerable holdings, and operating on limited hours, they
have difficulty sharing their collections with the public.
To rectify this situation, the aim of this initiative is to create a digital archive among
Vermont's existing cultural organizations. Such a program seeks to fulfill three pressing,
significantly felt needs among Vermont's schools, museums, libraries, and historical
societies:
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to provide the resources to preserve the rich heritage of Vermont by creating
digital surrogates of its cultural artifacts;
to make these surrogates instantly accessible not only to scholars but as
importantly to community residents and school children across the nation; and
to train a cadre of volunteers in the technologies necessary to ensure the
continuing capture of the future as it becomes our past.
As we venture into this arena, the University of Vermont (UVM) has already made the
significant strides necessary to make a large-scale project feasible.
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PROJECT NARRATIVE
1. Project Purpose
Problem
Cultural collections within the state of Vermont, from those housed at the University of
Vermont (UVM) to those found in the smallest historical societies, are valuable but
underused resources. Vermont remains one of the most rural states in the union. The
state's largest city, Burlington, contains only fifty thousand people, and most residents
live in communities of less than 2,500. Collections are scattered and are perceived as
inaccessible. Vermont students and residents lack access to the valuable pieces of art,
artifacts, and historical documents that could provide a better understanding and
appreciation of their history and culture. Vermont cultural institutions lack a communal
and cohesive model of how best to provide online access to those materials. Vermont
teachers are often unaware that collections exist, and have limited opportunities to learn
how these collections could be used to enhance their teaching.
Solution
By making cultural collections available online, students, teachers and community
members in all areas of the state will be able to use these collections to teach and learn
about Vermont history and culture. More importantly, by creating an expandable
resource model—a database of cultural artifacts—Vermont cultural institutions and
historical societies will be able to add their own information and collections.
This project would begin by selecting and creating items related to Vermont’s historical
and cultural heritage from the collections at the University of Vermont. Placed in a
database searchable and accessible via the web, these digital resources will be used by
schools, libraries and other researchers and institutions. A simple database, however, is
insufficient to ensure that the collections will be used or expanded. In order to continue to
be useful, the digital collection must be built on a model that allows for expansion, can
accept contributions from multiple organizations, can be maintained and translated across
future technological changes, and is designed to serve multiple audiences, from school
children to community members to scholars.
The Vermont Cultural Heritage Digitization Center (VCHDC) will be committed to
creating models for acquisition, conversion, storage, and maintenance of digital materials
and shall teach the use and nature of such models to interested and appropriate groups.
Specifically, the goals and purposes are to:


develop a pilot project to digitize selected collections of Vermont's unique
cultural materials,
create a model for collaborative contributions to the digital collection from statewide cultural institutions, and
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
provide training opportunities for K-16 teachers to explore integration of these
resources into their curricula and create learning modules suitable for use in a
variety of educational settings
Through the creation of this project the VCHDC will also:
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Explore and demonstrate ways in which technology can extend the traditional
boundaries of the education.
Develop and model new leadership in facilitating institution-wide and state-wide
coordination of the process of evaluating and acquiring emerging technologies
and applying them for educational and cultural heritage purposes.
Foster dialogue among museum archivists, librarians, preservationists, cultural
historians, and social scientists about the practicalities and possibilities of
preserving and promoting our cultural heritage through digitization.
Images from the proposed pilot projects will comprise the initial Vermont Cultural
History Digital Collection. They will be retrievable as a cohesive collection and
catalogued so as to capture their shared themes and to serve inter-disciplinary purposes.
The goal of the Digital Collection is to organize cultural information in systematic and
hierarchical ways with an eye toward inter-related, cross-purpose, and end-user
applications.
Outcomes
With this project, a selection of 300 items would be chosen from the repositories of the
University of Vermont. Related to the history and culture of Vermont, digital surrogates
will be created and made available via the searchable, web-accessible database. These
items will then be introduced to students, teachers, and researchers as they explore the
history and culture of Vermont. Equally importantly, online guides to using the resources
will be developed, and workshops will be offered throughout the state to educate and
train both those who wish to utilize this resource and those who will be adding to it.
As a result, this project will define Vermont's practices for encapsulating the
administrative and structural metadata along with the digitized version of the primary
resource to create an archival digital library of Vermont's objects. It will also test enduser acceptance of the methods, especially the interpretative, curricular materials, and
scholarly materials developed by the Center.
Through teacher workshops hosted by the Center, university faculty and K-12 teachers
will learn to use the collections in their curricula. In accordance with the Standards for
Vermont Educators (Appendix A), teachers will increase their knowledge of technology
through the use of digital collections. Workshops will focus on how to integrate these
resources into the curricula, using the Vermont Framework of Standards and Learning
Opportunities, a tool which provides structure from which standards-based district,
school, and classroom curriculum are developed, organized, implemented, and assessed
(Appendix B). (See also: The Collections in Education. Sample Uses. Appendix C)
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2. Innovation
Consensus does not exist on standards and requisite metadata elements nor on intellectual
property rights, licensing arrangements, and requirements for authentication. In addition,
we recognize that large-scale digitization efforts that convert cultural, scientific, and legal
documents and artifacts and produce large-scale databases and digital archives are costly
to initiate and maintain. But like other public goods, once the expert staff, necessary
hardware, and technical infrastructure are in place, expertise, protocol, and equipment
can be shared by many agencies or projects at negligible additional cost and with no
reduction in quality or quantity.
As we venture into this arena, the University of Vermont has already made significant
strides in securing the collaboration of the critical constituencies necessary to make a
large-scale project feasible. In this way we seek to pool and share the resources, technical
expertise and experience both within the University of Vermont and among the emerging
leaders in digitization technology, such as Cornell, the Smithsonian, Library of Congress,
Making of America Project, and the Colorado Digitization Project.
As the state's land grant university, the model we create will demonstrate innovative uses
of digital network technologies in underserved communities around the state of Vermont,
and their application for educational purposes.
An important component of this project is the development of a number of models of
collaboration and management that will link the activities and direction of the VCHDC
with initiatives campus-wide, state-wide, and nationally. This implies the development of
a flexible management model that represents faculty, museum, library, preservationist,
public interest, and computing technology interests that can collaborate in the acquisition
and evaluation of emerging technologies.
To encourage cooperation and collaboration, the VCHDC will apply and extend models
of collaborative learning and management drawn from the experience of successful UVM
digitization projects such as the Perkins Geology Museum Digital Image Archive
(Appendix D), faculty development programs such as the UVM Center for Teaching and
Learning (Appendix E), and programs for professional and pre-service teachers such as
the UVM PT3 program, funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Preparing
Tomorrow's Teachers to use Technology initiative (Appendix F).
3. Community Involvement
By offering local organizations the opportunity to learn about and develop digital
imaging projects through the VCHDC and by helping to establish common standards and
procedures, the University of Vermont can serve as one important resource in preserving
the state's cultural history. Vermont is an ideal size to create models for such
collaboration because of the relatively small number of cultural institutions and
established connections among many of them. As Vermont's land grant university with a
well-respected Extension Program, the VCHDC will be poised to help citizens
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throughout the state to not only articulate what is important to them about their
communities but to project those images to the rest of the world.
Support for end users
The Vermont Cultural Heritage Digitization Center will bring scholars from a variety of
disciplines together to create scholarly collections. The Center will foster dialogue among
museum archivists, librarians, preservationists, cultural historians, and historians about
the scholarship of cultural heritage projects. Through these dialogues we will develop
guidelines for the intellectual content of collections, their usefulness to researchers and
their applicability to electronic applications. In addition, the Center will encourage
scholarly participation in national dialogue concerning peer review and scholarly
assessment of interdisciplinary and joint-authored digital projects. Once established, the
VCHDC will sponsor research and hold symposia on issues pertaining to the standards of
scholarly work in the field.
While the work for building the model for the collection will be done by the grant
recipients, and informed through the above-mentioned dialogues, additional meetings
with teachers will shape the end-user design. Workshops with teachers will then be
offered to put the collection into use. Sessions with teachers to assess how well the
collection and sites fit their needs, as well as discussions for improvement will follow.
Further support for use of the site will be provided by web guides and ongoing dialogue.
4. Evaluation and Dissemination
Does access to digital surrogates of relatively inaccessible cultural materials provide an
adequate experience to enhance appreciation for and learning about Vermont culture and
history? Can an expandable model be designed that allows for contributions from
multiple organizations while maintaining a cohesive structure for the collection? How
will creation of learning materials based on these digital collections impact education?
Can integration of digital materials into the curricula improve teaching? Answers to these
questions will be determined through ongoing evaluation.
Evaluation of the success of the project will be conducted through quantitative and
qualitative measures. Base level data regarding access of the digital collection will be
collected from the moment the site is online using standard web tools. This data will
include number of visits to each resource so that patterns of frequency can be analyzed to
determine which resources are most compelling. Internet addresses of visitors will be
collected and analyzed to determine whether they are from in-state or out of state, from
educational institutions or individuals.
Qualitative data will be collected at several points during the project. A preliminary
survey of key stakeholders including University of Vermont Special Collections, Fleming
Museum, the Center for Research on Vermont, teachers of Vermont History, and selected
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K-12 educators will determine which materials would be most useful to include in the
collection. Additional collection development input will be collected from site visitors via
web interface.
Teachers involved in using the collections will be surveyed at several points during the
project to determine 1) their expectations for how they will use the materials and
expected outcomes of that use, 2) their actual use of the materials and how the design of
the collection might be adjusted to make that use easier, and 3) their students use of the
collections, especially how they have used the collections to present and demonstrate
their ideas in assignments.
Dissemination
Project development and progress will be shared through conference and workshop
presentations for Museum, Library, and Computing professionals. Possible venues
include the Museum Computer Network (MCN), Digital Resources in the Humanities,
and the annual meeting of the Association for Humanities Computing/Association for
Literary and Linguistic Computing (ACH/ALLC).
The website that is the entry point to the collections will also host information about how
the collections were developed, technical details for how the model is structured, and
guides for its use.
5. Project Feasibility
Technical Approach
One of the first parts of the process will be to continue current assessment of best
practices and standards for digitizing, metadata structures, copyright issues, and
collection policies. Recommendations for minimum standards will then be developed,
along with guidelines for applying those standards. To enhance inter-operability with
other digitization efforts, the project will use established practices and standards where
they exist.
Although there is no one standard for capture and storage of digital surrogates, a number
of best practices are being developed that balance long-term preservation needs with
current technical limitations. At a minimum, this project will follow the Technical
Recommendations for Digital Imaging Projects from the Image Quality Working Groupof Archives Committee, a joint Libraries/AcIS committee (Appendix G). The National
Digital Library Federation, a program of the Council on Library and Information
Resources (Appendix H), provides resources related to standards for structure and
administrative metadata which will be consulted and adapted as appropriate for this
project.
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The Burlington Agenda: Research Issues in Intellectual Access to Electronically
Published Historical Documents, a report on a meeting funded by the University of
Vermont and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC)
points out the limitations of today’s search engines in providing intellectual access to the
contents of electronically published historical documents (Appendix I). In an effort to
address these limitations, this project will also rely on the standards developed by the
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and Model Editions Partnership (MEP) to encode
documents.
Within the context of the project itself, procedural standards will be developed for digital
capture, encoding, cataloguing and documentation of the process to ensure that
participants within UVM and partners from other institutions can create inter-operable
collections.
Applicant Qualifications
The University of Vermont has already developed projects that explore the capture,
access, navigation and use of digital facsimiles created from primary source materials. At
the Bailey Howe Library, The George Perkins Marsh Online Research Center (Appendix
I) includes over 650 fully-searchable documents in facsimiles and transcriptions with
annotations and biographical information about the principals. As one of the first to
recognize and describe in detail the significance of human action in transforming the
natural world, Marsh's work is the subject of worldwide research, and scholars worldwide
have accessed this collection.
Special Collections is creating a database of the Wilbur Collection of Electronic
Vermontiana (Appendix J) which includes images of Vermont's cultural and natural
history and has begun to digitize its Finding Aids, or inventories, of its manuscript
holdings. The Library has additional plans. It recently proposed the establishment of the
Vermont Congressional Online Research Center as a model interactive web resource for
congressional and political papers and other artifacts that are placed with the University,
including pertinent photographs, video/audio materials, and oral history transcripts.
The Robert Hull Fleming Museum (Appendix K) has recently completed the first phase
of a data entry project that will enable it to make all 20,000 of its collection records
available online. In the last year the Fleming Museum has unveiled three new cyber
galleries. These include: Heritage of the Brush; Dragon, Silk, and Jade (cultural artifacts
including clothing, ceramics, and ivory carvings); and the Vermont landscape paintings
of Charles Louis Heyde.
Nancy Gallagher, author of Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the
Green Mountain State, has been funded by a grant from The Web Project of the Vermont
Institute for Science, Math and Technology to produce The Eugenics Collection. Selected
from UVM's Special Collections, and a variety of state repositories, the 200+ documents
detail the growth of the eugenics movement in Vermont and its impact on Vermont's
social policies (Appendix L). The collection will be available through UVM's Electronic
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Text server. Other collections at the Etext server include digital images backed by
searchable texts of Godey's Lady's Book, the popular 19th century women's magazine,
and The History Review, winner of the Phi Alpha Theta award for student produced
history journals.
UVM Technology Infrastructure
The hardware infrastructure required to create and serve a large digital archive is not
trivial. UVM is uniquely positioned within the state to undertake this kind of project. Its
server system, affectionately known as Zoo, is a large cluster of UNIX servers, primarily
IBM RS/6000 and Sun Enterprise multiprocessor systems. Zoo uses the Distributed File
System (DFS) technology to distribute our central file system to all the machines in the
cluster. Data is archived nightly to a 10TB (terabyte) automated tape library.
The image-intensive materials envisioned as the VCHDC collection, along with the
processing power needed to serve them to the online world, can be supported by the
current UVM infrastructure with some provision. In order to ensure that the materials
created by the VCHDC are available at any time, are reasonably quick and easy to access,
and are archived both for expected occasional hardware failure and for long-term archival
purposes, the VCHDC will contribute to increasing the capacity of the UVM system. As
part of matching funds, additional processing power will be added to current servers and
tape storage will be increased. Redundancy or mirroring, that is keeping dual copies of
the archive available transparently in case one drive fails, will also be provided.
VCHDC will encourage the use of educationally priced or open source software for
image capture, manipulation, metadata creation, serving, indexing, and searching. It is
committed to using and supporting standards that are non-proprietary and provide the
best promise for ensuring longevity and portability to the next generation of computing
and network devices.
In addition to the expected benefits derived from planning an archive of this type at an
institution that is already well equipped to handle it, UVM offers another benefit as an
Internet II university. This high speed, broadband network ties together top research
universities for the purpose of collaborating on high-end research projects. The potential
exists, therefore, to develop computing-intensive educational research projects with the
image-rich collections of the VCHDC at the core.
Implementation
The project will be completed in three overlapping stages of approximately six months
each. The initial stage will include both 1) the exploration and development of the best
practices and standards that will be used to build the technological infrastructure of the
collections, and 2) choosing, through collaboration with scholars, educators, and
Vermont’s cultural heritage organizations such as the Vermont Historical Society and the
Vermont Humanities Council, which items should comprise the initial collection.
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In the second phase we will build the digital collections and, more importantly, build the
model that will allow the collections to be expanded to include contributions from other
organizations.
The third phase will involve working with teachers to integrate use of the collections into
their teaching. It will also include modification of the project based on teacher feedback.
The University is very aware of the issues related to archiving digital materials.
Developing University policies regarding long term preservation of digital collections
will be a key component of this project. In addition, funding to expand the collections
will be sought from sources relating to digital library initiatives as well as integration of
technology and education.
6. Project Budget
See attached
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Appendices
A. Standards for Vermont Educators
B. Vermont Framework of Standards and Learning Opportunities
C. The Collections in Education. Sample Uses.
D. Perkins Geology Museum Digital Image Archive
E. UVM Center for Teaching and Learning
F. UVM PT3 Program
G. Digital Imaging Projects from the Image Quality Working Group- of Archives
Committee, a joint Libraries/AcIS committee (Appendix G).
H. The National Digital Library Federation
I. The Burlington Agenda: Research Issues in Intellectual Access to Electronically
Published Historical Documents
J. The Wilbur Collection of Electronic Vermontiana
K. The Robert Hull Fleming Museum
L. The Eugenics Collection
M. Biographical Sketches of Team Members
N. Budget Narrative
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APPENDICES
Appendix :
The Collections in Education. Sample Use.
The VCHDC along with the Center for Teaching and Learning will assist educators in
the design and implementation of assignments that utilize the Vermont Cultural History
Collection. Below are just three samples.
A Sample University-Level Assignment:
The exercise above is designed with several pedagogical intentions. The first is push the
student to use the technical skills they will have acquired during the course relative to the
use of databases and the making of digital presentations. The second is to encourage them
to consider the different properties of each form of presentation relative to the intention
of the author. A digital movie, for example, is a linear, unchangeable experience for the
viewer, and allows the maker to fully meter and control the content. A website, on the
other hand, is interactive, and the designer must take this factor into account while trying
to assemble a persuasive message. The third purpose is to press the pupil to penetrate the
Vermont Cultural History Collection database and become exposed to the fact that
history and culture are local, as well as remote, phenomena, and surround us in the
present while also existing in other places and times. The final educational goal is
conceptual. The camera image has had an aura of objectivity since the invention of the
photograph but history is full of instances where this presumed factuality has been used
to persuasively advance false content. This phenomenon can only increase with the
additional manipulation allowed by the digital tool. By putting the student in the position
of creating a "true" and "false" version of an entity's history, this assignment will teach an
invaluable lesson about the mutable nature of media and communication.
The assignment assumes access to the cluster of digitized text and images proposed
elsewhere in this document and would be given to the students after they had learned
about the contents of this database and about techniques in its use. The task is designed as
a final project and assumes familiarity with the technical and conceptual properties of
media and with methods of digital presentation.
"Select a subject from the Vermont Cultural Heritage Digitization Center that interests
you. This topic may be an era, a location, an individual, a structure, an event, a social or
cultural movement, the work of an artist, or any entity for which you feel you can create a
history. Using images and information from the database, generate two such histories for
your chosen subject, one of which you consider truthful and one of which you consider
patently false. Present these versions in what you consider the most appropriate digital
form: PowerPoint, website, or movie. Each history should be as persuasive as possible, to
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the point where members of the audience not familiar with the subject may not know
which is closer to actual fact. You may wish to research examples of how others have
used media to manipulate history, such as Michael Lesy's book, Wisconsin Death Trip,
Nazi propaganda films, or political television commercials."
A Sample K-12 Application
A sixth-grader being introduced to the impact of the Industrial Revolution on Vermont
life could take a multi-sensory, interactive journey back in time to learn about working
conditions of children in the early 20th-century and about how Louis Hine used
photography to promote social change.
She might virtually accompany Hine first into the mills where he photographed girls,
boys, and women at work, then venture out into Vermont's public arena with him where
he lobbied for the enactment of better child labor laws. By clicking on details of a Hine
photograph, say, of boys in a woolen mill, the student could examine a larger image of
the machinery, while hearing it hum in the background and learning about its function.
Alternatively, she could explore the raw materials depicted, perhaps taking a virtual field
trip tracking the wool's journey from sheep farm to market to mill to general store to the
home of a typical turn-of-the-century Vermonter. Guided questions on a pop-up menu
would capture the student's observations about the scene: How old do the laborers appear
to be? What kind of work are they doing? What do you notice about the factory
environment?
The student could also be recruited to embark on a real-life quest for descendents of the
mill workers in her 21st-century town. Her own written responses and research findings-e.g., scanned photographs and digitally recorded oral histories--could be posted to a
dynamically-created archive and thus shared with classmates for further discussion. On
each screen she would also find inviting interdisciplinary links to related topics that she
could peruse at her own pace. These subjects for further exploration might include the
economic impact of textile mills, child labor, and the urban centers that lured farmers
away from their rural enterprises; the Winooski River as power source, ecosystem, and
recreational destination; the evolution of child labor laws and textile production
technology; adaptive reuse of historic mill buildings; and so on. Another hands-on
activity might allow her to collect images and people along her journey for later creation
of historical scrapbooks or timelines. Again, these could be shared via the students' own
online archive.
Community Involvement Exercise
As geographer Pierce Lewis pointed out in his Axioms for Reading the Landscape: "The
man-made landscape -- the ordinary run-of-the-mill things that humans have created and
put upon the earth -- provides strong evidence of the kind of people we are, and were, and
are in the process of becoming."
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Recognizing that many in Vermont and elsewhere in the world hold a special love and
fascination with the history of this small state's communities and its rural landscape and
share a commitment to the preservation of the character of this place, an important goal
of the Vermont Cultural Heritage Digitization Center is to provide the public with an
opportunity to gain a richer understanding of how the Vermont of today is the product of
its evolving cultural history. To help develop this understanding, citizens, public servants
and scholars will be offered fresh perspectives as they may ask:
1. Why do Vermont places look the way they do?
2. What specific features contribute to the character these places?
3. What can we learn about the history of these places from the record of inhabitation left
on the land?
4. What can we learn about ourselves and our present culture from how we treat the land
today?
5. How can these discoveries help us plan for the future?
BUDGET NARRATIVE
APPENDICES
Biographical sketched of team members
Mara R. Saule is dean of University Libraries and Information Technology, responsible
for institution-wide information technology coordination, as well as management of the
Bailey/Howe and Dana Medical Libraries. Saule has recently served as principal
investigator on a U.S. Department of Education Technology Innovation Challenge Grant
(2000-2002).
Hope Greenberg is Humanities Computing Specialist in the Division of Computing and
Information Technology. She has initiated and developed electronic text and digital
image collections for UVM, and has taught widely in the areas of integrating technology
and education.
Margaret Tamulonis is Digitization Project Manager at the Fleming Museum and has
been working with the Fleming for over 3 years. She was Collections Manager and
Registrar at The New York Historical Society and is experienced in working with
collections management software and digital imaging projects.
Christopher Burns is
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