Realizing the full potential of emerging technologies to both improve access to rare collections and to enhance research and teaching requires the development of new cooperative models on a global scale.

-H. Thomas Hickerson, Director, CIDC

Cooperate Internationally In The Development Of Digital Resources

CIDC is exploring a new frontier where traditional boundaries and barriers have dissolved. Museums and galleries without walls have emerged as global resources. Creating digital collections and connecting people to them requires collaboration at every stage-from vision to reality. Successful cooperation requires the support of national and international organizations as well as individual scholars, libraries, and museums.

SagaNet

CIDC continued to provide support to the SagaNet project, an international collaboration between Cornell University and the National and University Library of Iceland. SagaNet is intended to provide digital access to the central corpus of the Icelandic Saga literature. During the year, functioning SagaNet servers were installed in both Iceland and Ithaca. The underlying operating system for the project was changed, and entirely new equipment was purchased and installed. The images and accompanying metadata for items digitized at Cornell was sent to Iceland. 

Frick Project

Cornell University and the Frick Art Reference Library have engaged in a collaborative project to explore the creation of compatible databases of digital images from the study collections of the two institutions. CIDC was actively involved in the planning phase of this project, including identifying media types and formats, determining the scanning requirements of the materials, scanning a sample of images, choosing appropriate and compatible database fields, creating a test database, and estimating costs. With the planning phase now complete, the actual processing of the approximately 10,000 architectural photographs from the historic Andrew Dickson White collection and 15,000 images of art from the Frick's Anonymous American School collection has been turned over to the respective curatorial units.

GloPAC, the Global Performing Arts Consortium

In 1998 CIDC, in conjunction with Karen Brazell, a faculty member in the East Asian Studies Program, the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theater in New York City, and Ann Ferguson, the Burgunder Curator for Shaw and Theater Arts in the Cornell Library, began a project to explore how one can document theatrical performance.  As part of this investigation, CIDC developed a Web-accessible prototype database containing digitized slides and documents, and information about those documents. This initial testbed focused on Japanese Noh Theater and has been used in classroom instruction by Professor Brazell.

The success of these initial investigations led to the development this past year of a much broader initiative.  GloPAC, short for Global Performing Arts Consortium, is a group of organizations and individuals committed to providing interactive, multimedia and multilingual tools to enable people everywhere to explore the diversity and depth of the world's performing arts.  To accomplish this goal, CIDC is creating digital Performing Arts Databases (PADs).  Currently two PADs are under construction: a global database (GPAD) and a Japanese database (JPAD). The databases include images, sound and video clips with detailed descriptions in standardized formats to enable effective cross-cultural searching.  Funding is being sought now to further the work in metadata definition and database development.

Global Digital Museum

Interaction among institutions, organizations, and users around the world distinguishes this project. The British Museum in London and the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan, were among the institutions that contributed materials. IBM-Japan supplied technical skills. One search command provides easy access to the entire site. Game playing, live discussions, and online guest book comments confirm that communication in the global village is possible.

Death of the Father

This international anthropological project is a study of the closure of political authority in the 20th century and consists of a Website, databases of research materials, an audio-visual essay, and a book. Six anthropologists, led by Cornell professor John Borneman, take up the end of an authority crisis that spanned most of this century, 1917-1991, and that crystallized around four state political forms: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the State Socialist regimes of East Germany, Yugoslavia, Romania, and the Soviet Union. The Website for this international collaborative investigation of the societal effects of patriarchal dictatorships was initially developed by CIDC staff member Noni Korf Vidal and is maintained by CIDC. Since going “live,” it has won a number of awards, including the Internet Scout Outstanding Resource Award.