Cultural Materials Initiative
This activity is now closed. The information on this page is provided for historical purposes only.
Objective: RLG's Cultural
Materials Initiative helped to provide greater access to primary
sources
and cultural materials. The initiative produced policies that
protect participants' rights and interests; tools and practices for
creating, describing, and using electronic surrogates of
cultural materials; and business models that combine appropriate use
with financial return.
Overview: One outgrowth of
this initiative was the development of RLG Cultural Materials, a rich
multimedia collection of digitized manuscripts and images from leading
institutions such as the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian
Institution. This database gave users a means of
searching rare and varied collections that were otherwise unavailable
to
museum or library visitors.
Trove.net®, a free image locating and licensing
site created by RLG, was another outgrowth of this initiative.
The project was spearheaded by the Cultural
Materials
Alliance.
Descriptive Metadata Guidelines
This set of guidelines was designed to help contributors
to RLG Cultural Materials, but benefits a broad audience with its clear
overview of the daunting concepts and acronyms in the field of
descriptive metadata. The guidelines can be used to created or review
local best
practice in describing collections of unique cultural
objects—regardless of the specific
metadata standards you use.
Using Digital Images: Instructional Technology Report
This February 2005 report discusses the use of digital
images in the classroom and how faculty
make use of image databases like RLG Cultural Materials. It is the
final report from work done in
2003-2004 by an RLG Cultural Materials Alliance working group. The
group had been formed to
investigate how image databases and instructional technology can be
made to work together
seamlessly to support faculty in the classroom. Participants spanned
nine diverse RLG member campuses
and brought together visual resource specialists, librarians, and
experts from instructional
technology units.
Findings are based on surveys of humanities faculty at
the University of Southern California,
University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University. Appendices
include the interview
discussion guide and interview notes.
The concept
RLG's Cultural Materials Initiative was launched
with
the goal of building an aggregated cultural heritage resource. The
viability of the database came from integrating many types of
resources across multiple types of institutions and from the savings
associated with a centralized approach to handling certain functions,
such as user authorization and rights management. RLG's Cultural
Materials Initiative produced a resource that was fundamentally
different from Web portals. Portals are general-purpose resource
discovery tools that allow users to locate Web resources (usually at
the collection level). RLG Cultural Materials allowed users to:
- Focus on information specifically about cultural
heritage, at both collection and item level.
- Easily search across and within multiple
collections,
revealing contextual links that would not otherwise be discovered.
- Locate information that is not currently
available on
the Web, or is available but widely dispersed, difficult to locate, and
not delivered in consistent ways.
- Browse large result sets using multimedia
microsurrogates for the cultural materials.
- License information for use in certain
applications.
The initiative built on RLG's long-standing interest
in
supporting greater access for archives, special collections, art and
architecture collections, and other rare or unique research materials.
Conditions of
contribution to RLG Cultural Materials
Participants were expected to contribute sufficient
high-quality information to give the pooled resource the "critical
mass" of content that made it a useful, economically viable,
world-class resource. Content had to reside at RLG to enable
consistency
across collections.
Collections contributed to RLG Cultural Materials
could
be
made freely available in other ways. Some institutions chose to offer
a view of their own materials, while at the same time RLG Cultural
Materials provided value-added access to an integrated view of all the
materials.
One of the defining characteristics of the alliance
was
that
participants reached agreement on a set of common terms and
conditions under which content can be distributed. The operating
circumstances are designed by and for alliance participants. The
database focused on delivering alliance participants' content under
these terms and conditions.
Intended audience
Anyone looking for cultural materials. The primary
audience was students, faculty, and others at colleges, universities,
and other research institutions who could use it as part of
their ongoing studies and research. Under development was a service in
which, under terms agreed to by the alliance participants,
others—such as publishers, writers looking for images to
illustrate their books, copywriters needing images for advertising
campaigns, and software developers wanting to include cultural
materials in educational packages—could all find value in the
resource. The policy group aimed determine how to provide a
free, public version of the integrated materials, which would offer
pay-per-view for higher-quality images and functionality targeted for
new types of uses.
Funding
RLG funded the operational development. A grant from
the
Ford Foundation helped to defray some of the initial costs in bringing
together alliance participants. In September 2001 and May 2002, RLG
received grants from two foundations towards further infrastructure and
alliance development. Revenue from academic subscriptions
defrayed costs for development and maintenance. The policy advisory
group was to determine the appropriate business model for sharing
revenue
from future markets.
Alliance members already digitizing their resources
were expected to continue to fund these activities. In addition, RLG
awarded grants to fund participants' prospective conversion and
digitization efforts in the history of science and technology, and
actively sought further external funding for other coordinated
digitization work.
Participation in the alliance was free for RLG
members.
Contributors, like all other higher-education/research institutions,
could subscribe to RLG Cultural Materials for their
communities.
Founding goals
Cultural materials include published and unpublished
texts,
images of many types, artifacts and other objects. Improving access to
this range of "documents" is essential to the advancement of research
and learning, especially as the definition of "data" expands in many
disciplines. Better access is equally important to the sustained health
of libraries, archives, museums and other cultural repositories.
- Although historians, cultural anthropologists,
folklorists,
historical archaeologists, historic preservationists, and a host of
other researchers rely on cultural resources, there is currently no
adequate capability for searching across the significant collections
that reside in dispersed institutions around the world.
- Only a small amount of this kind of information
is
currently
available in electronic form and building a sufficiently large resource
to support this kind of inquiry is an imperative for many institutions.
- Teaching increasingly demands access to a large
corpus of
surrogates for cultural materials.
- Repositories increasingly seek revenue associated
with the
off-site use of collection surrogates.
An alliance of RLG member institutions will
address the issues
described above collaboratively. RLG and this set of members will:
- develop a collective digital resource of cultural
materials
that will provide electronic access to a critical mass of cultural
research resources,
- establish appropriate means to protect
institutional
rights and interests while sharing their collective resources broadly,
- develop and implement the infrastructure to
enable
integrated, international discovery and use of these materials,
- identify best practices and encourage consistent
practice
and behavior in making these cultural heritage materials accessible,
and
- determine and collect fees appropriate for the
use of
this
resource and determine a business model that will return revenue from
certain uses to alliance members.
This will be a multiyear program and will
consolidate
recent
progress in digital collection development and metadata practices.
Participants will leverage institutional capabilities along with the
RLG infrastructure and distribution capabilities to provide access to a
critical mass of unique and rare materials.
Participants will ensure that the initiative is responsive to the
variety of institutional imperatives, market opportunities, and needs
of the research community. At the same time, the initiative will
provide a collaborative approach to protecting and managing the rights
that are the responsibility of custodial institutions.
Achieving integrated, enhanced access to cultural
heritage
research resources depends on the combined efforts of RLG
members
and allies. The outcomes that are expected within the Cultural
Materials Initiative are consistent with the mission, the history, and
the operating capabilities of RLG:
- practical development of solutions that are
common to
many institutions and best solved through collaboration,
- high-quality service and reliable data that meet
the
expectations of researchers,
- an operating commitment to long-term maintenance,
scalability, and sustainability in service of the research community,
- product and software development expertise,
dedicated
effort from experienced personnel, and an effective set of
collaborative working group processes.
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