Digital Pioneers

Interview date: February 8, 2010 Medford, Massachusetts and Centennial, Colorado Summary: Crane sees a lot of things that can now be done via the World Wide Web, but if the boundaries are pushed, problems arise and you run in to things that cannot be done generically. Crane thinks that the people in Google are inexorably [...]

Interview Date: March 4, 2010 Denver, Colorado Summary: In the late 1980s Besser and the Pacific Film Archive were way ahead in terms of technology and challenges. The hardest thing at that time was the fact that people did not have the software on their own machines to run the programs that could allow search [...]

Interview date: March 4, 2010 Summary: Ray, coming from an archiving background, first faced the challenge of gaining more knowledge about libraries. She had to develop the knowhow to make decisions that would allow The Institute of Museum and Library Sources (IMLS)  to achieve their goals. The IMLS is the first and only funding agency [...]

Interview date: November 30, 2009 Summary: For Allen, there were more challenges than anything. Allen found money, collaboration, technology, and standards to be the most difficult tests. In the late 90’s, there were no standards. There were metadata standards in the library world, but no Dublin Core based metadata finding aids, no best practices. And [...]

Interview date: February 11, 2010 Summary: The biggest challenge the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) faced was the initial start of the project. Everyone was staffed up and given their own unique task, so there was no consensus at the beginning. Howe saw a separation that existed because each individual still thought of the project [...]

Interview date: December 3, 2009 Summary: The big issues that Bishoff saw present themselves were when the CDP brought museums, libraries, and archives together. The problem was that a common vocabulary did not exist. Each institution had the shared goal of increasing access to collections, but how to go about it was the challenge. A [...]

Interview date: November 4, 2009 Summary: For Choudhury, it was the technology that presented itself as the greatest challenge. At the time, the technology was not mature in any way. There were pieces of software that were expected to fit together, but then people began to realize that the output of one software did not [...]

Interview date: January 28, 2010 Summary: Staples found the main challenge to be that no one really knew what they were doing. There were no rules or examples to go by. Staples and his colleagues were making it all up from scratch and starting anew. Staples was working with very good people, well known in [...]