Projects

• Ongoing projects
  • Utopia
  • MESL
  • Fuertes
  • Ezra Cornell Papers
• New projects
• Museum On-line
• Plantations
• IMAG/CU
• Death of the Father

Reports

• Democratizing Access to Scholarly Material
• MESL Technical Report

Maintenance of Ongoing Projects

At the moment CIDC's activities include the maintenance of existing databases. The Utopia Project is currently being used in the classroom. The MESL Project, which is also being used in the classroom, will continue for one more year. The L.A. Fuertes and Ezra Cornell Papers Projects are challenging staff on the best ways to provide digital access to manuscript materials.

New Projects

1. The Museum Online project is working with the Johnson Museum of Art to create digital surrogates for 85% of the holdings in the museum, both images and objects. The main project goal is to broaden access to collections both throughout the campus and publicly in addition to making classroom use more feasible.
2. IMAG/CU, a shared university image catalog that incorporates collections from the Johnson Art Museum, the Rare and Manuscripts Collection, the History of Art Slide Collection, and the Architecture, Art and Planning Slide Collection.
3. During the next two years, staff of the Institute and the Interactive Media Group will assist the Cornell Plantations in the systematic employment of digital technology to integrate taxonomic and historical data with real-time field study, and in the creation of the Plantations WWW site.
4. Death of the Father, an international anthropological project studying the closure of political authority in the 20th century, or in simpler terms, what happens to a culture after the death of an authority figure such as Stalin? Led by Assistant Professor John Borneman of the Department of Anthropology, with faculty participation from all over the world.

In addition to these projects, the CIDC is also involved in an initiative with the Museum Digital Licensing Collective, a project to develop a nation-wide collection of digital images based on museum holdings that could operate in a not-for-profit as well as profit manner. The University Library at the University of California at Berkeley and the Cornell University Library are lead participants in developing plans for supporting the technical infrastructure of the database.