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Library
Digitization Projects
The Heard Library has several digital collections
and other on-going digital projects at various stages of development.
Our earliest project began about 1996 with the purchase of SiteSearch
as the key software system to store images. We are now in the process
of making a transition to new software. Other campus projects have
close ties with the Heard Library. See below for short descriptions
and urls of an alphabetical sampling of Heard Library and related
digital projects.
Art and Art History Department Slide Library Digital Project
Staff in the Art and Art History Department’s
slide library has begun converting over 140 thousand slides to
digital images. The physical condition of the slides vary, so
color correction and image enhancement is a necessary part of
the process. In addition to the actual scanning, the project also
includes a large metadata component as well as managing complex
copyright issues. The metadata information includes image source
and copyright information, and detailed description of the object,
the artist(s), the medium, the date created, where it was created,
and how it relates to other objects. Slide library staff are currently
using a web-based digital image management program developed in-house.
This program allows professors to organize images into classroom
lectures and students to review these lectures online.
A day-by-day chronology of the life of Charles
Baudelaire. The electronic edition of Une Micro-Histoire (the
print version was published by the Vanderbilt University Press
in 1987) serves as an example of how technology can be used in
scholarly work. Although the content of this electronic work is
based on the earlier print edition, the new version offers improvements
in expanded content, wider access, and in the retrieval of information.
Electronic Reserves Service at Vanderbilt
The Electronic Reserves service was initiated in
1999 to provide digital copies of supplementary course "reserve"
materials to students over the campus network and the Internet.
Currently, seven of eight divisional libraries make some portion
of their reserve materials available to students via the E- Reserves
system, known as ERes. The service typically receives between
3,000-4,000 course page hits per month. So far in September there
have been 4222 course page hits on over 300 active courses. A
recent development has been the Music Library streaming audio
reserve files via the ERes system.
Electronic Theses and Dissertations Project
The Electronic Theses and Dissertations Project
started in the summer of 1999 and involves the submission of electronic
theses and dissertations from students in Biochemistry, Electrical
Engineering, English, French & Italian, and Physics &
Astronomy. Electronic submission of theses and dissertations is
voluntary. The project is a joint effort of the Jean and Alexander
Heard Library, the Graduate School, and the Graduate Faculty.
21 ETD's are currently on the server, 14 of which have been submitted
in the past year.
ETANA (Electronic Tools and Ancient Near Eastern Archives)
ETANA is envisioned to include the permanent archiving,
dissemination, and generation of both front- and back-end stages
of scholarly knowledge (such as archaeological excavation reports,
editions of ancient and modern texts, core early monographs, dictionaries,
journals, and reports in the public domain). It will be a portal
to ancient Near Eastern web resources, an electronic commons where
scholars in the field can share data and images, and eventually
an electronic publishing effort for "born digital" publications.
ETANA will also collect and/or develop software required for the
production of the Internet site in core areas identified by the
project's planning committees.
The Rosenzweig papers include manuscripts, correspondence
and ephemera. The focal point of the Rosenzweig papers is the
manuscripts of Rosenzweig's masterwork, Der Stern der Erlosung.
Also in the Rosenzweig papers is correspondence between Rosenzweig
and Martin Buber regarding their collaborative work on Die Schrift,
their translation of the Hebrew Bible into German, which Buber
completed after Rosenzweig's death.
The Gilbert Sigaux Collection contains the papers,
books, and periodicals from French theatre scholar Gilbert Sigaux's
personal library. The heart of his collection covers modern French
theatre. The papers include approximately 75,000 items pertaining
to the theatre world: its authors, directors, actors, theaters,
and productions. Items such as press clippings, journal articles,
manuscripts, programs, personal and professional correspondence
and notes are included in these papers. This project was put on
hold before the entire collection was digitized due to copyright
concerns.
The Milan Group – originally called the Milan
Group in Early United States History – was founded in 1980
by a small group of European and United States historians who
had participated in a conference on radicalism in American history
held in Milan, Italy, in 1979 (perhaps the only international
conference ever held on this theme). The group had noted with
concern the lack of scholarly interest in the period of U.S. history
between the American Revolution and the Civil War, a period critical
to the development of a national self-image – or images.
In 1986, the Milan Group began publication of its
Quaderno series based on material from its symposia. Five volumes
are now in print and a sixth is in preparation: it will be based
on the 1996 symposium, “Historiography: Practitioners and
Public.” Based on the interest of a faculty member in the
Vanderbilt Department of History and the library's history bibliographer,
all available volumes have been now been made available on a website
hosted by the Heard Library,
University Photo Archives
Special Collections and University Archives has
begun a massive project to digitize the 200,000+ photographs in
the University Photograph Collection. Over 1,500 images have been
scanned, and metadata is being assembled to aid in locating these
images. One important goal of this digital project is to provide
better access to this archival collection. We may possibly add
another 20,000 "born digital" images to this collection
annually from the University's Creative Services department as
they take photographs for campus publications.
The Television News Archive collection at Vanderbilt
University, part of the Heard Library, is the world's most extensive
and complete archive of television news. The collection holds
more than 30,000 individual network evening news broadcasts and
more than 9,000 hours of special news-related programming, including
Nightline since 1989. These special reports and periodic news
broadcasts cover presidential press conferences, political campaign
coverage, and national and international events such as the Watergate
hearings, the plight of American hostages in Iran, and the Persian
Gulf War. The library is in the planning stage of digitizing this
collection. The Library of Congress as part of the NDIIPP project
will host the MPEG2 files, as a preservation copy.
Oral history interviews offer insights about events,
motivations, and memories that other sources do not provide. Vanderbilt
University is now following the national trend of adding a systematic
oral history component to its institutional history holdings in
the University Archives, part of the library system. Over seventy-five
interviews with nearly fifty former administrators, faculty, staff,
and students give alumni, students, and researchers a window to
the recent past of Vanderbilt University, and serve as well to
publicize the rich heritage of the institution to the community
and to potential students. Many of the key persons involved in
the life of the university since World War II have been able and
willing to participate in building an oral history holdings in
the archives. The knowledge, perspective, and experience of these
men and women has been captured and preserved for future generations
of the Vanderbilt University family via archived tapes and transcripts.
This Internet Web site supports these interviews, enabling alumni,
researchers, and others to use Vanderbilt's oral history holdings
from remote locations.
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