Digital Pioneers

Interview date: February 8, 2010 Medford, Massachusetts and Centennial, Colorado Summary: Crane’s involvement with digitizing goes back to 1982, when he was a graduate student and had access to the first chunks of electronic texts and magnetic tape. Crane remembers something like 60 megabytes of classical Greek texts that were typed in and available for [...]

Interview Date: March 4, 2010 Summary: Besser is a Professor of Cinema Studies and Director of the Moving Image Archive and Preservation Masters Degree (MD) program at NYU. Besser has a zero percent time appointment as Senior Scientist for Digital Initiatives at NYU’s Libraries, working on projects with the Dean of Libraries. Besser has several [...]

Interview date: March 4, 2010 Summary: Ray began as a special collections librarian and became involved with archives early on in her career, working at the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio where she was head of special collections. Ray moved to Washington, D.C. in 1988 and began working at the National Archives, [...]

Interview date: November 4, 2009 Summary: Choudhury, coming from an engineering background in to the library world, has faced some difficult moments. He describes it overall as being both a challenge and a rich, rewarding experience. Choudhury began assuming all libraries had a Research and Development (R&D) group. But then, as he began visiting other [...]

Interview date: January 28, 2010 Summary: Thorny Staples is Director of Community Strategies and Alliances for Dura-space Inc. a private nonprofit. He is also director of the Fedora Project, a repository management system first created at Cornell University. The Fedora Project is dedicated to making open source software that contributes to being able to make [...]

Interview date: November 30, 2009 Summary: Allen really started getting involved in cultural digitization in 1998, when she attended a retreat with the Colorado Regional Library System of directors centered around LSTA funds. Allen was on the steering committee and helped to define the priorities needed to be established by the Library. Nancy Bowles, the [...]

Interview date: December 3, 2009 Summary: Bishoff, a librarian by trade, is now in her 40th year of experience. Bishoff worked for 10 years at the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) where she was involved in some early digitization projects. In the late 1980s, Bishoff worked with the Library of Congress where she started experimenting [...]

Interview date: February 11, 2010 Summary: Kaye Howe became the Core Integration Director of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) upon its creation in 2001. The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) where Howe was then working received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to start the National Science and Digital Library (NSDL). [...]