Initiative to Improve Teaching, Research, and Service First Year Report, University of Tennessee Libraries

May 31, 2002

In the Benchmarks section of the Digital Library Center (DLC) proposal in March of 2001, we said we would do three things:

Get one major grant within two years Mount at least one nationally recognized digital collection within three years Raise an endowment and initiate cost recovery programs within five years In the ten months since the grant became available we have accomplished the first of these, are well on the way to accomplishing the second, and have begun the third. Because we were successful in attracting funding for a major federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services in November of 2001, we will be able to meet both of the first two goals. The grant was to mount a digital collection of original documents, images, and small printed pieces from six repositories in Tennessee concerning the period from statehood in 1796 until the end of the Jacksonian Period in 1850, and to present it in a user friendly way to K-12 teachers and students. This is a two-year project ($240,000) to create what the granting agency considers to be a nationally significant digital collection.

Possibilities exist for the creation of two more collections if funding becomes available. In February of 2002 the Digital Library Center has partnered with the McClung Museum on campus and the museums at the Universities of Kentucky and Alabama and applied for another IMLS grant to mount and provide access to a collection of photographs of TVA archaeological sites taken by WPA workers in the 1930s before the flooding caused by TVA dam construction. These photographs are held by the three museums for TVA. We proposed to select the most informative 1500 of these, present them as one digital collection, and provide access to them using the DLC's Xpat search engine. And in April of 2002 the DLC partnered with the Food Safety Center for Excellence to submit a proposal to the National Science Foundation's National Science Digital Library program. This proposal would create a nationally significant collection of 2000 items concerning food safety and present them to five audiences, grades K-5, 6-8, 9-12, 13-16, and the general public, each having its own customized learning space.

We have begun work on the third goal. Members of the DLC Steering Committee wrote talking papers in each of their specialties and combined them as one for the use of campus Development. Then in May of 2002 the DLC partnered with staff from campus IT and the Innovative Computer Lab to submit a cooperative agreement proposal to IMLS to create a registry and repository of Open Archives Initiative compliant metadata on all the digital objects created by IMLS digital projects from 1998 onward. This would be a five-year project to work directly with the funding agency.

The DLC is providing research and development opportunities for expanding digital collections and services. We are developing and testing procedures for selection of resources to digitize, methods for scanning, and optimal ways of recording data about digital objects. We are learning to communicate about complex technical concepts with "owners" of material to be digitized in order to create maximum access to the content. Librarians and support staff in virtually every functional area of the library are involved. A Metadata Librarian was appointed in 2001 for project implementation, in collaboration with our Digital Initiatives Librarian. Three FTE support staff and a graduate student programmer are now dedicated to DLC projects. Activities of the DLC in 2001-2002 included:

Since submitting the proposal, staff of the DLC have spoken at two national meetings, submitted three federal grant proposals totaling 1.75 million, attended workshops on XML and EAD, and attended meetings of the Digital Library Federation. The events of the last ten months have put UT's digital library program well on the way to becoming one of the better programs in the country.

UT funding has contributed to the purchase of hardware, software, training, and programming expertise. Without the special infusion of funds, we would not have been able to make the significant progress described in this report. Given continued support, UT's digital library program will be an asset for local teaching and research, as well as a significant resource for the entire state.