DIGITAL IMAGING IN THE YALE ARTS LIBRARY

PROJECT OVERVIEW AND PROGRESS TO DATE

Between February 2000 and today, much has changed in the landscape of the digital imaging efforts – initially known as Imaging America – led by the Yale University Arts Library. At its outset, Imaging America was conceived as a multi-institutional enterprise, focused on collaborative digital image collection building and the use of those images in the classroom to support teaching and learning in American Studies. To that end, Yale outlined the following goals:

  • create over the next three academic years (1999/2000 through 2001/2002) an authoritative, coherent and sustainable library of no fewer than 50,000 digital images of cultural heritage materials to support teaching, learning, and research in American Studies;
  • make the Imaging America digital library available, in the first instance, to faculty and students in Yale’s preeminent, interdisciplinary American Studies program, as well as to Yale’s partner institutions for local applications in support of education and scholarship; and
  • aggressively foster and facilitate the use of the Imaging America digital library throughout the fabric of teaching and learning at Yale, with a special programmatic focus on classroom use.

Despite the changes described below, the Yale Library has made notable progress in a number of areas supporting use of digital images in the classroom. They illustrate well the growing use of digital images in teaching and learning.

Luna Insight software

Yale (through its Arts Library, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Library Systems Office, and central Information Technology Services) continues to work closely with Luna Imaging and the multi-institutional Luna User Group to develop and refine the Insight software for classroom use. Yale led the way in the creation of that user group and hosted its first meeting in October 1999. The Library continues to be an active member, with staff serving as major participants at semi-annual meetings and delivering presentations on topics such as authentication, interoperability, and the Open Archives Initiative. Yale staff, faculty, and students have played a significant role in developing and testing many of the advanced features which were not present in the Luna product when Yale purchased it two years ago, especially the classroom presentation module, cross-collection searching, and elements of the user interface design. This year the outstanding quality and reputation of the Insight software has resulted in adoption of Luna Insight by Stanford, RLG, and ArtSTOR, and endorsement by Sun MicroSystems.

The Library is looking forward to introducing the many sophisticated features of Insight version 3 to the Yale community this year and to the incorporation of several additional collections into the system over the next two years (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Art Gallery, Walpole prints and drawings, multimedia collections for selected academic departments, and external resources such as ArtSTOR, for example). These advances will enhance the teaching experience and will greatly expand the image and multimedia resources available to faculty and students for classroom, study, and research use.

Digital imaging

The Library has made steady progress in creating a digital image library, with the curriculum driving additions to the collection. This process includes some conversion of existing analog slides as well as creation of new digital material and purchases from vendors. To date, more than 15,000 images have been created or licensed from vendors for teaching and learning purposes. Images are added every week for course support. With external financial support, the Arts Library worked in partnership with the Yale University Art Gallery to help with the conversion (including data entry and standardization) to electronic form of the gallery's catalog records describing its collections of American paintings, prints, photographs, sculpture, furniture, silver, and other objects. The Visual Resources Collection will help process and create the necessary derivatives and link so that the Gallery’s digital images can be viewed through Insight.

Course support

Through the combined efforts of the Visual Resources Curator, the Instructional Services Librarian (a position created in the fall of 1999), and other staff, a significant number of Yale faculty have begun to use the digital image library for teaching and learning. During the 2000-2001 academic year, course support (i.e., the creation and use of “reserve” digital image groups for student review and study outside the classroom) was provided for some 20 courses, ultimately making this exciting new service available to nearly 750 students. Six instructors—Mary Miller, History of Art; Michael Denning, American Studies and English; Diana Paulin, African American Studies; John Darnell, Near Eastern Languages and Civilization (Egyptology); Charles Baraw, English; and Hazel Carby, African American Studies—taught with digital images to some degree.

This fall 12 Yale faculty members are using the digital image library, for both classroom teaching and course reserves, but particularly availing themselves of the reserve opportunities. The majority of those faculty (10 of 12) teach in the History of Art program. They are:

History of Art:

Mimi Yiengpruksawan: Arts of the Silk Road

Ned Cooke: American Material Life (17th C.)

Maria Georgopoulou: Art of Byzantium

Mary Miller: Maya Art and Architecture

Mary Miller and Jaime Lara: Mexican Art of the 16th C.

Christine Mehring: Modern in the Making

Alex Nemerov: American Art, 1825-1910

Christy Anderson: Renaissance Architecture

Anne Dunlop: Gender Issues in Italian Renaissance Art

Kellie Jones: Latin American Artists

Other departments:

Jaime Lara: (Divinity School) Iconography of Christian Art

John Darnell (Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, Egyptology); Conflicts that Shaped Pharaonic Egypt

Instruction and Assessment

With the increased use of digital images in the classroom, a key component of the implementation involves formal instruction programs geared to both faculty and students in the use of this software. This level of investment in instruction is particularly important as this represents a cultural shift in the delivery of images.

Data from a survey conducted in the spring of 2001 of several hundred undergraduate Insight users suggests that these students felt Insight had enhanced their classroom experience. Most students indicated that they would like to see Insight used as a study tool in their other courses. No fewer than 279 "saved image groups" incorporating 4,591 images were created by faculty in the 2000-2001 academic year in support of 20 courses. This reflects our keen interest in enabling faculty and teaching fellows to manage their own image reserves to an increasing extent, using an image database as their point of departure. Other preliminary discussions with students and faculty have been held to begin to better document the interest and usefulness expressed in the undergraduate survey and to help the library assess the long-term impact of this technology on teaching and learning.

CHANGES IN THE LAST YEAR

To date, faculty and student response has been overwhelmingly positive. That said, a number of fundamental changes in the way Yale is approaching the digital imaging program have occurred in the last 12 months that affect the direction of what began as Imaging America. First, we concluded that the proposed consortial model for collection development would not work because of the need to reach consensus on editorial principles. Institutions, inevitably following their own imperatives, continued to build independent image collections, and simply placing these collections together would not create a coherent digital library. Also, the Library was unsuccessful in its efforts to secure additional, significant funding for large-scale digitization and for the creation of the infrastructure needed to make the digital image library available to a large number of simultaneous users. It is expected that the ArtSTOR initiative being developed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will address many of those infrastructure issues.

While no project of this scale turns on any one person, the Library’s digital efforts experienced a significant loss this summer with the resignation of Arts Librarian and principal investigator for the project, Max Marmor. Yale’s loss is an important gain for ArtSTOR, where Mr. Marmor is responsible for collection development. Further, Mellon recruited Emerson Morgan, who was managing the production aspects of digitizing images here, for a position at ArtSTOR. Replacements for both positions are being actively recruited, but these vacancies have slowed progress on addressing some of the Library’s digital imaginggoals.

The developments described earlier in this report are evidence of a thriving digital image program and have contributed in large measure to improved methods of teaching and learning. The progress made in the last year will set the stage for the new programmatic initiatives under the leadership of new University Librarian Alice Prochaska. Her extensive experiencein the digital imaging arena at the British Library, her vision, the work to date, and the support of groups outside the University position Yale to make significant advances in the collaborations between the Library and the faculty and the creation of curriculum-driven, inter-disciplinary digital image collection.

AP/CVC

Rev. 10/30/01

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