The
Plantations Online project is enhancing the interaction of people, plants, and the natural
environment and offers unlimited education and research possibilities.
-Donald Rakow, Director,
Cornell Plantations
The beauty of mobile technology is that it engages users when they are ready to learn.
-Robert Rieger,
Educational Projects Manager, CIDC
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Conduct Applied Research
Into The Cultural And Scientific Utility of Digital Collections
Interfacing with Cornell teaching and research faculty across the disciplines, CIDC is
a fertile environment for developing digital collections and a natural laboratory for
testing and evaluating their use. CIDC is exploring how digital materials can be used to
their fullest potential. Collections that enable users to compare and analyze, and to
interact with the medium beyond viewing and browsing, dramatically enhance how this
resource is used as well as improve the quality of research and education.
Bringing the outdoors online, CIDC and the Interactive Media Group are working with the
Cornell Plantations to create a computerized inventory of 3,000 gorge-carved acres across
central New York. Access to taxonomic and historical data on the Plantations' holdings, as
well as to databases compiled by botanical gardens around the world brings the natural
world to scientists and nature lovers alike. For those on the Plantations' grounds,
hand-held computers will connect electronically accessed data to real-time field research.
A website and an onsite interactive kiosk will provide users with fingertip access to the
collections at all times.
The Making of America I (MOA1)
project was a pioneering collaboration between Cornell and the University
of Michigan to digitize a broad spectrum of popular nineteenth century
serials and monographs. For
several years,
Cornell has provided access to the volumes via its prototype digital
library. Several tests
conducted in 1999
proved that it was technically and economically feasible using optical
character recognition software to convert to machine-readable form the
full text of some 900,000 pages of journals.
Former CIDC staff member David Ruddy encoded the machine-readable texts in
SGML. It is now possible to conduct a search at the MOA web site http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa
for any word or phrase in the text of an MOA journal and connect immediately to the image of the page
containing that text.
Making of America II
CIDC continued its involvement in
the Making of America II (MOA2) project.
MOA2, with funding from the Digital Library Federation and the
National Endowment for the Humanities, is attempting to develop standards
for the encoding of intellectual, structural, and administrative data
about primary resources housed in research libraries.
Centered at the University of California at Berkeley, other
participants include Stanford University, Pennsylvania State University,
and the New York Public Library. During this past year, digital conversion
of Cornell holdings for use in the testbed of data and images was
completed, and work on completing the MOA2 database was begun.
The material will be sent to Berkeley to build a common interface
among the different collections. CIDC
also organized a session on this important project at the annual meeting
of the Society of American Archivists at which Peter Hirtle spoke.
Artview
Questioning, challenging, and discussing ideas are the lifeblood of learning. The
Interactive Media Group at Cornell went beyond scanning and storing images to create an
interactive multimedia learning environment. Students and instructors in different
locations can view art or other digital images and communicate with each other.
Discussions can be saved and reviewed later. The project is helping CIDC evaluate the
strength and limitations of such a learning environment. Its applicability extends beyond
arts education to many disciplines.
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