Using Rich-Media in Digitization Education: GLIFOS-media toolset projects at the School of Information

This presentation will examine the use of the GLIFOS-media toolset in 3 classes at the School of Information at The University of Texas, "Creating and Using Digital Media Collections", "Advanced Digitization: Creating Sustainable Collections" and "Understanding and Serving Users". Each of these courses involves students working with digitized materials to create rich-media access copies of the materials using XML-based tools created by GLIFOS.

An ongoing problem for both tenured and tenure-track faculty at the School of Information is not only staying current with digital library technologies, but trying to teach and implement them in the classroom. As part of an IMLS-funded digitization curriculum, Dr. Grete Pasch and Quinn Stewart co-developed the "Creating and Using Digital Media Collections" course in the spring semester of 2006. This course utilized the Glifos-media toolset in creating an indexed, synchronized, searchable collection of 14 historic kinescope films from the Harry Ransom Center of "The Mike Wallace Interview" from 1957-58. Students of Dr. Gary Geisler did further work on the collection in spring 2007 and 2008, with the assistance of Quinn Stewart.

Positive feedback from students, and successful interaction with the software developers led to the inclusion of the "Texas Legacy Project" in spring 2007. This project is a collection of over 200 video oral history interviews with Texas conservationists, maintained by the Conservation History Association of Texas. Students indexed the content and synchronized the transcript with the video for 12 of those interviews, using the gmCreator rich-media creation tool. They then created full-size access versions of the interviews, each with a table of contents, synchronized transcript, annotation page, and search page.

Based upon student and end-user feedback, and experience gained using this "co-instructor" model with 10-15 students, Stewart approached Dr. Phil Doty and Dr. Luis Francisco-Revilla about incorporating the Texas Legacy Project into the core course "Understanding and Serving Users". Using a tutorial-based teaching method, Stewart guided 54 students through preparing approximately 75 hours of video content for public use using the GLIFOS-media toolset. The Information Technology Lab in the School was setup to support the students in the two classes, and a workflow to handle the student-generated files was created. Output from the two classes was cataloged into GLIFOS-media library, the rich media digital library component of the GLIFOS-media toolset. Students could then search both within each interview, as well as across all of the interviewers. The gmCreator tool was also used to add geographic information to each of these interviews, allowing the viewer to simultaneously view the rich media presentation as well as geographic information using Google Earth.

The same tutorial-based teaching method was used in the "Advanced Digitization: Creating Sustainable Collections" course taught by Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa. The video digitization portion of this course involved digitizing Umatic videotapes from the UT Ex-Students Association Distinguished Alumni Awards ceremonies for inclusion into the GLIFOS-media library at the School of Information.