Last Full Day in the Classroom
Wednesday morning Dr. Joyce Chen took us under the hood to teach us how the many impressive digital archives projects with which she is connected came about, starting at the very beginning with some questions that not all project planners take time to ask, but should: Why digitize our collection?; What should we digitize?; and How should we do it? The rest of her lecture focused largely on the third question, the possible answers to which are many in number and highly technical in nature. In fact, she didn't get through all of her material and has only one more hour in which to do so. I hope that she will be able to give a thorough presentation of her university's X-System, which is a home-grown digital archive platform.
Jennifer Ward, the head of web services at UW Libraries, spoke to us about the impact of technology libraries. She had given us a creative pre-Institute assignment, in which she established a del.icio.us account for all of us the share and instructed each of us to use it to tag ten resources that would be useful to our patrons. During her session she showed the tag cloud that resulted from our joint effort and how to bundle tags and other functions. She had even pre-tagged the sites she would show us during the session in the same account, which will be useful for future reference, as will the various resources we tagged as part of the assignment.
Unfortunately Professor Madeline Dong of UW's history department lectured in Chinese from notes, without PowerPoint, so I was unable to follow in any meaningful way. Her topic was trends in the study of Chinese history in North America, and she spoke about Andrew Wilson's book Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age as one example.
Thursday we tour Microsoft, including its library!
