Digital Pioneers

Interview date: February 8, 2010 Medford, Massachusetts and Centennial, Colorado Summary: From the start, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae designed all the data with concern for preservation and sustainability. The first data discs didn’t look very good and Crane and his colleagues knew it shouldn’t be made into their archival medium. In the 1980’s, it took [...]

Interview Date: March 4, 2010 Denver, Colorado Summary: Initially, the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESLP) set the standards for what images everyone would contribute (namely, the museums and the Library of Congress). The project looked at every Kodak on the market at the time, taking an image and compressing it. Using the lossless jpeg [...]

Interview date: March 4, 2010 Summary: Ray has seen the IMLS struggle with how much it can take on in a single project.  Ray found the best thing to do when narrowing a project is to ask people who the audience is.  When writing content , one has to try and show the audience that [...]

Interview date: December 3, 2009 Summary: Bishoff believes having an institutional affiliation is very critical to the success of an organization. In the development of the collaborative, having a solid foundation, a home, is very important. Bishoff and Allen, two of the major leaders of the CDP, helped come up with that solid foundation and [...]

Interview date: February 11, 2010 Summary: Howe wishes it was human nature to understand, accept and go along with change, though she acknowledges that it is just not part of human nature. Howe sees that there is certain rhythm to things…but not one that can actually be followed. Howe believes there has to be a [...]

Interview date: January 28, 2010 Summary: Looking back, Staples thinks the process worked seemingly well. They were making stuff up and no real mistakes to be made. The way IATH (Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities) was set up was that faculty would apply and propose a project. There was then a committee of [...]

Interview date: November 30, 2009 Summary: The biggest problem Allen saw that the CDP had was that they didn’t tackle the problem of sustainability. Digital collaboratives cannot always plan on getting grants. This is kind of a no brainer, something everyone would know…but the CDP had been so successful, receiving well over $2.6 million dollars [...]

Interview date: November 4, 2009 Summary: What would Choudhury do differently if he could go back in time? For Choudhury, there are lots of things he would have done, but the most important would be to engage the scholars earlier on in the process. Choudhury and colleagues underestimated how much scholars may have helped. They [...]