The Task Force met on February 4, 2005 in the Byrd Seminar Room of the Mary and David Harrison Institute for American History, Literature, and Culture and the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA.
In efforts to continue to promote the project to various constituencies of users the current VHP Brochure needs updating to include new participants, recent awards and resources.
Continuing VIVA support for the database and necessary funds to support tools including critical EAD development tools (including scripts to translate to MARC from EAD and to EAD from MARC and a style sheet to facilitate direct printing of EAD finding aids from the database) is being investigated to determine potential costs and will be presented to the Steering Committee at its June retreat.
The Task Force received a report on Report on University of Virginia's plan for EAD finding aids and the digital library from Bradley Daigle and the Fedora initiative. UVA is working towards proof of concept and adapting EAD to work with digital surrogates and linking to objects. They hope to develop a flexible model adaptable to standards like METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard).
The work Jamestown Bibliography originally compiled by Del Moore for the Colonial National Historical Park's Jamestown Assessment Project has been completed and the document is now available on the Web at http://spec.lib.vt.edu/viva/Jamestownbibliographyviva.pdf. It is a 343 page .pdf with links. Work on conversion to an xml document and linking by VHP members from the document directly to items in the collections is nearly complete. Special recognition and thanks was to extended to Susan Riggs for her leadership of the project, to Colonial National Historical Park for making the bibliography available, thanks to all the institutions in Virginia who examined their collections for archival material relating to Jamestown, to Ute Schechter who input the records for those additional holdings, to Jodi Koste who helped write introductory words to explain what the VHP Taskforce was adding to the original bibliography, and to Gail McMillan who put the file on the Virginia Tech server.
Discussion of the digitization project "The Struggle for Freedom in Virginia" continued from the last meeting, reviewing input from the survey of teachers (K-12 to college/university level) on what would benefit their work.
The meeting was followed by a tour of the the Mary and David Harrison Institute for American History, Literature, and Culture and the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library led by Edward Gaynor.
The next Virginia Heritage meeting will be held on March 25, 2005 at the University of Virginia. It will be a directed meeting on standards, EAD, metadata, reviewing issues such as using METS wrappers for digital objects and how various standards initiatives relate to projects in digitization. The central question will be "What does EAD mean to the digitization of objects." The Task Force will also review VIVA's role in this programming, what the infrastructure should be and do for institutions, including support for guides, scripts for crosswalks between data formats (MARC/EAD) and the levels of commitment by Directors to the integrations of various initiatives underway.
John G. Jaffe
Director of Libraries & Integrated Learning Resources
Sweet Briar College VOICE: 434 381 6139
Sweet Briar, VA 24595 FAX: 434 381 6173
E-MAIL: jgjaffe@sbc.edu
http://spec.lib.vt.edu/viva/VHP/minutes/20050303.html
Created 03/30/05 by Mark B. Gerus