CUNY Academic Commons

Notes from Archives/Libraries/Technology Brainstorming Session, Monday February 25, 2013

Brainstormers:

Cynthia, Tom, Tahir, Luke, Chloe, Greg, Matthew, Marco

Image of chicken scratches:

Models for Getting Content to the Site

• RSS feeds from other sites w/CUNY or without 
  • this would be an automated process, with curatorial oversite confined to the establishment of feeds and outreach with the original site. Use case: a course or a series of courses does research that produces digital materials that can be stored on the site, and representatives from the CUNY DHP relay to the faculty members technical instructions to insure what’s produced meets technical and metadata standards set by CUNY DHP.

• Publicly submitted content via front end, from non-logged in visitors
  • digital  submissions would be entered into a queue that would then be curated by CUNY DHP
  • process required for interfacing with constituencies who desired to contribute material that was not in digital form. The key word in our discussion was “facilitate,” though it’s not clear whether that means provide them with a scanner and some advisement, or a more formal process that’s designed by CUNY DHP for bulk digitizing of materials.

• Active outreach to libraries & archives/museums/individuals
  • CUNY DHP reaches out to existing organizations, inside of CUNY and out, which may have holdings relevant to the project. First step is an index of such organizations; subsequent steps require conversations about curation, about digitization processes and standards, and intellectual property implications of shifting/expanding where a collection lives. 

• Linking to existing digital archives elsewhere.

Potential Tools/Ideas 

• Document cloud
• Omeka
• http://ds106.us (cMOOC that suggests ideas for building a curricular network and for aggregation processes)
• FeedWordPress: WordPress plugin that powers complex syndication processes

Open and Related Questions

• How to hack into existing libraries/archives: play advisory role (help them find resources for digitizing/copyright of material?
• Taxonomy/Tagging: public vs. curated?
• Rights/Copyright
• Extent, nature of CUNY DHP  assistance and guidance to contrubtors (tech/copyrt/site help)
• Necessity of campus listing of archives/libraries holdings on CUNY [Matthew will begin compiling list]
• Newspapers, faculty & student governance, DSC & OpenCUNY (Gregory), institutional research, CUNYTV, PSC, Tammy Gold (Hunter)