Some of the first old media to be transformed by digital technology does not occupy much discussion at THATCamps. (Neither film nor video have earned their own categories for our THATCamp posts.) The first THATCamp New Orleans features an intriguing number of distinguished filmmakers, documentary producers, and media scholars. One filmmaker was awarded a Guggenheim. Another serves as editor of Television and New Media. One worked as a producer for PBS’s Frontline. I hope we might have one session with such people and the archivists charged with the extremely difficult task of preserving film and video collections and making them available for present and future audiences. The WWII Museum is involved in a fascinating project funded by the IMLS using Annotator’s Workbench to encode their video oral histories. Another IMLS grant funded a planning project for the Louisiana State Archives and Louisiana Public Broadcasting to preserve and catalogue the state’s film and video resources. I know one person at UNO has been struggling with similar issues regarding digitized video storage. Anyone want to talk about some of these topics?

In the spirit of the very well received session proposal Tech Learning Modules Travers posted, I would like to propose this as a “session module,” one that might either be discussed on its own or fitted into another session. I want to discuss how best to engage undergraduate students in meaningful work with digital humanists working in libraries, museums, and archives. This might be a good forum through which to address what possibilities digital projects as engaged service learning offer both for undergraduate students and participating institutions. Greg Lambousy (Louisiana State Museum) and I have piloted one such digital partnership in one of my US survey history courses. One of the best examples I know of is László Fülöp’s UNO film students who learn documentary video production at UNO while producing PSAs for community non-profits.

I understand that Tulane, LSU, and USM offer a “best practices” approach for these sorts of partnerships, but I am interested in how these partnerships might work in the real world of public institutions whose interests are never well-served or properly funded. My best partnership experiences are with other public institutions, such as New Orleans Public Library and the LSM. We are the Coalition of the Unwillingly Underfunded.

As internal access to collections increases through collection management systems and as online publishing formats multiply, how do we work together within organizations to effectively “curate” content? What does it mean to curate?  How can different departments within organizations work together to bring material to the public? This may be the “looking-in” version of Michael’s proposal!

It’s everywhere. Every library or museum of a certain size seems to have digital collections in it. You can’t escape it. It’s CONTENTdm!

But is that a bad thing?

In this session, I’d like to talk/share/commiserate with other CONTENTdm users on some of the challenges and opportunities offered by the new version, particularly in regards to digital humanities projects and supporting those who are doing them. I’m still a relative newcomer to the software, and I’m excited by some of the things I see other users doing with it, but I’m frustrated, too, by some of my day-to-day problems with it. I imagine others feel the same.

I’m also intrigued by the software’s roots at the University of Washington circa 1999 and how it became the proprietary commercial juggernaut that it is today. I wonder what will become of tools like Omeka, DSpace, Fedora, and others that some of us depend on today in fourteen years’ time.