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The Illinois Heritage Association is a publicly supported charitable organization under 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code and is partially supported by tax-exempt contributions. Annual membership dues in the IHA include $12 for subscription to the IHA newsletter and technical insert, issued six times per year.
Visit the Global Cultural Memory Website, which was developed by the University of Illinois Library using images from Champaign County. This searchable database was constructed as a model for integrating access to the collections of many cultural heritage institutions, including museums, community groups, schools, historical societies, archives and libraries. The Illinois Heritage Association was a major contributor to the project, providing many historical photographs of Champaign County as well as accompanying text from A Commemorative History of Champaign County, Illinois: 1833-1983. Champaign County Cultural Memory is part of the Global Cultural Memory project, funded by the Getty Information Institute. The web site is a model for a future virtual distributed repository to which institutions would contribute multimedia information from their collections, such as curatorial records, oral histories, and educational program materials. It is one of several projects under development by the Digital Imaging & Media Technology Initiative, which is exploring collaborative approaches to providing widespread searching access to digital repositories of arts and humanities resources to promote the use and preservation of these collections. For a list of other projects, visit http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects.
The Illinois Heritage Association is a partner with the University of
Illinois Library and the Illinois State Library in
Basics
and Beyond, a project funded by the Institute
of Museum and Library Services that offers digitization training through
the Illinois Digitization Institute at the University of Illinois. The workshops
were offered
to museums and libraries during 2004 and 2005. The training opportunities
are being continued in 2006 through support from the Illinois State Library. There are three workshop tracks.
Track One is a series of two-day workshops offered at the Illinois State
Library in Springfield.
It is designed to help people decide if digitization is right for them. Track
Two is a series of three-week on-line courses with more in-depth information
about digitization projects. Track Three is similar to Track Two, but in addition
to the three-week on-line course, participants come to the Illinois State
Library for two-days of hands-on experience with experts.
For more information about the courses and a listing of those scheduled to
date, visit http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/IDI/Index.HTM.
For an extensive collection of web resources for researchers, volunteers,
and staff of local historical organizations and museums, visit the Indiana
Historical Society Local History Web Resources.
CONFERENCE REPORT
Web Wise 2005: Teaching and Learning
with Digital Resources
The 2005 Web Wise conference,
cosponsored by the Institute of Museum
and Library Services and the University
of Chicago, was held February
17-18, at the Hyatt Regency in
Washington, D.C. The meeting was
preceded by a reception on Wednesday
evening, February 16, at the
Dirksen Senate Office Building, where
new library commissioners for
the IMLS board were inducted. Supreme
Court Justice Sandra Day
O'Connor administered the oath of
office.
Thursday began with a keynote address
by David Rumsey, Cartography
Associates, entitled "Open
Content: How Online Digital Libraries and
Resources Will Provide Access to
Cultural Information in the 21st
Century." This address was one of
the highlights of the conference. He
struck a responsive chord with the
audience in Washington by opening
his illustrated talk with an image of
an 1882 drawing of the Grand
Canyon by William Henry Holmes, who was
later head of the Smithsonian
Institution. Rumsey has a personal
collection of over 150,000 maps and
is interested in ways that the public
can access digital information.
He is digitizing and making his
collection freely available, with the
goal of creating a free online map
library. He is working with
several other repositories.
Rumsey noted that much current access
to information is through
Google, and that there is a need for
more interoperability and linking
of information. In addition to image
databases, there is a need for
text and audio. Technology makes it
possible to do more online than
one could do in person. To enrich the
information in maps, Rumsey uses
several types of software including
Luna Insight, Java, GIS, and
Collections Ticker. With these he can
zoom in, create overlays,
compare time periods, document change
over time, paste together
images, combine map images with text
and objects, and make the
information available in several
languages. He has an interest in
gaming technology and demonstrated how
it can be utilized to take a
flat map, expand it into
three-dimensional images, and then allow the
viewer to make a virtual fly-through.
His Web page, available through
Google, gets 5,000 to 7,000 hits per
day. He closed by saying that the
important factor is how to search.
Following the keynote speech, there was
a forty-five minute break,
during which there were several project
demonstrations, a traditional
feature of Web Wise. These included
collaborative projects among
schools and libraries in Montana; an
online educational project of the
Whitney Museum of American Art; and a
digital costume project
sponsored by Wayne State University and
nearby museums. The National
Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan,
distributed CDs of its wireless
guided tours. The IMLS Digital
Collections Registry, a collections
registry of images from more than 136
IMLS projects funded since 1988
through its National Leadership Grants
program, was demonstrated by
representatives from the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
This registry is available through the
IMLS Web site and will soon
offer item-level searching capability.
During the last hour Thursday
morning, presenters talked about
ways to use digital resources for
effective teaching and learning.
David Leakes, from Syracuse University,
made several good points about
working with teachers. He emphasized
that you must have lesson plans
for teachers. The teachers may use them
for starting points to create
their own plans, but without them, they
will not be interested in your
digital project. He also emphasized
that the lesson plans must be
correlated with specific grade levels.
He noted that there is more
information available on the Internet
for teachers in science subjects
than in language arts, so there is a
bigger opportunity for project
development there. There is a need
beyond just making information
available. The challenge is to help
make sense of it. Teachers are
faced with a flood of information and
they don't have time to make
sense of it. Libraries and museums can
help them easily access
information. Leakes warned that it is
important to be aware of the
standards, which are locally controlled
and vary widely from place to
place.
Nena Bloom from the Colorado
Digitization Program (now Collaborative
Digitization Program, CDP) gave some
tips on how CDP uses primary
source materials to assist teachers,
utilizing photos, documents, maps, and
newspapers. There are training sessions
for teachers. Master teachers can train
other teachers. There is a need to
develop skills in analyzing documents. Primary
sources
can be used to help teachers present more than one point of view. The
information must be keyed to content
the teachers have to cover.
Teachers want models, even if they
later modify them. Lesson plans can
be put on a Web site. Teachers want
strategies to cope with situations
such as having only one computer in a
classroom. The speaker noted
that libraries are reluctant to provide
interpretation but will need
to do more. Currently, textbooks are
the number one influence in the
classroom, but there are many ways to
learn. Museums and libraries
need to become an essential part of the
system. The most important
tool in this endeavor is an educator's
advisory group.
Following lunch, presenters talked
about educational opportunities for
learners of all ages. An Ag Econ
Challenge Game at the National
Steinbeck Center was described. The
students can plant, hire workers,
harvest, pay bills, and essentially run
a business by making decisions
and following the progress of a lettuce
crop.
At the Frist Center, Nashville, and the
Nashville Public Library,
adult English-language learners attend
eight sessions where they learn
art terms, see narrative art, and
complete an art project. They learn
computer skills and write personal
narratives.
In the Columbia River Basin Ethnic
History Project (Vancouver, Washington),
students learn about diverse cultures
that populate the area, and through
computer access and directed
discussions they gain an understanding of some of
the challenges the immigrants have
faced.
During the conference breakout
session--an opportunity to visit
individual computer
stations--outstanding projects were demonstrated.
At Winterthur, staff members are using
radiography to teach students
about the conservation of objects. At
the State Historical Society of
Wisconsin, over 150 narratives about
exploration are the basis for
full-text stories, accompanied by
instructional guides for 40,000
teachers. In Connecticut, a house
museum focuses on a hero of the
American Revolution and puts its museum
in the context of larger
events through digital images and
interactive videos. A special
project at Syracuse University uses
multimedia and Web-based teaching
to assist in developing literacy skills
for elementary and
middle-school students. At Drayton
Hall, teachers, students, and
researchers can make use of rich
historical resources that have been
digitized.
Nuala Koetter described the University
of Illinois's "Teaching with
Digital Content" project, which
brought together libraries, museums,
and school districts, using digitized
collections to meet educational
goals. The IHA served as a co-principal
investigator in this project.
When the sessions resumed, three more
projects were presented in some
depth. "Re-Presenting Race in the
Digital Age" encouraged students to
explore race and identity in art
projects they created about
themselves.
Librarians from the Folger Library at
the University of Maine gave a
riveting demonstration of how
technology could help students learn
about music and have fun at the same
time. A special software package
with audio enables a student to play
along, change the tempo,
eliminate instruments, and change
octaves on a musical score in an
interactive educational lesson. This
was the most interesting project
of the conference.
Speakers for the final project for the
day described how they utilized
technology to present the different
viewpoints of five different
groups at a historical event. Visitors
could isolate different
participants on all sides of the famous
1704 raid by the French and
Indians on the English settlement at
Deerfield, Massachusetts, and
follow what happened to them. They
could use interactive maps, zoom
technology, and rollovers to retrieve
information that interested
them. The Web site also serves as a
model for others wanting to
present a controversial story with
multiple points of view.
Friday morning began with a keynote
address by Susan Sclafani,
Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of
Education. She began her talk,
entitled "Preparing America's
Future," by saying that the No Child
Left Behind legislation has
dramatically changed education in the last
four years.
While most in the audience would agree with this
statement, not everyone was as
enthusiastic about it as she was. She
listed the key principles of No Child
Left Behind.
She told the audience that there is new
data on those children who are
not doing well. One conclusion is that
reading skills are extremely
important for future success. In spite
of the fact that teachers and
parents like small class size, the
speaker maintained that data
indicate that this factor does not
increase learning. She noted that
the fastest-growing jobs require some
education beyond high school,
and that many American students fall
into "below basic" category,
especially in science and math.
Remediation is the fastest-growing
coursework in college.
At the same time, many students know
more about technology than do
their teachers. The setup of schools is
antiquated and textbooks are
outdated. Museums and libraries must
become the place where kids go.
They are community resources that can
contribute to all-day learning,
instead of focusing on simply the 8:00
to 3:00 school day. Students
need to be asked to do more. She
believes that educators are the ones
who are limiting our students. She
described some schools with
innovative approaches to learning and
concluded by saying that
students can begin college work before
leaving high school.
Among the questions and comments
following Sclafani's address was the
comment that it is the innovative
schools that have difficulty with
the tests.
Ken Kay, chairman of Infotech
Strategies, spoke about teaching and
learning in
the twenty-first century. He compared the skill needs of
twentieth and the twenty-first
centuries and noted that in today's
world a worker will probably have ten
to fifteen jobs during his or
her career. This requires that people
develop new learning skills.
Critical thinking, problem solving, and
communicating skills are more
important than content. The Partnership
for 21st Century Skills
(www.21centuryskills.org) has
established models to promote analytical
thinking and self-directed learning.
Kay also mentioned the
Business-Higher Education Forum (www.BHEF.com),
a nonprofit
organization of leaders from business,
colleges and universities,
museums, and foundations.
The BHEF issues initiatives and
publications and makes policy
recommendations. Kay emphasized that
twenty-first-century objectives need to
be built into library and
museum objectives. Self-directed
learning is at the core of library
and museum missions. These
organizations should be leaders on
twenty-first-century skills and should
involve all community
stakeholders in an integrated effort to
redesign education.
The final speaker, John Lewis Needham,
spoke about Google and new
content initiatives. Google's goal is
to organize the world's
information and to make it universally
accessible. Needham spoke about
Google Scholar (a new beta service)
that allows specific searches of
scholarly literature. It is subject
based and will allow researchers
to locate information on specialized
subjects. Google Print, which was
introduced last fall, will allow users
to search excerpts of texts
online. Some feel this will lend
credibility to the source because of
the respect that exists for published
books. Google has several
partners in digitizing articles,
papers, abstracts, and books in these
new programs.
The conference ended with its customary
"On My Mind" panel, followed
by questions and comments from the
audience. Joyce Ray, associate
deputy for library services at IMLS,
moderated. She started the
discussion by stating that the diverse
audience of learners demands
"re-purposability." There is
a need to train teachers to use
resources. There is also a need for
effective assessment tools. The
speakers emphasized the importance of
public-private partnerships.
They noted the educational potential of
television but warned that we
have let it get away from us. They
suggested that there needs to be a
conversation about how to use
technology. The process of learning
needs to be more fun. There is a
potential for a more interactive
environment and for personalized
attention. As at the beginning of the
conference, the model of gaming was
cited as an example of what is
possible. Finally, it was noted that
museum and libraries have people
on staff who understand subject matter
and who know how to manage
information. These individuals can take
more risks than teachers can.
They can encourage conversation and
integrated thinking. They have
"neat stuff," and they have a
tradition of creativity and
collaboration.
There were numerous handouts in the
conference, which have been added
to the IHA library. For more
information on any aspect of the
conference, contact the IHA office
(217) 359-5600 or by e-mail at
plmxiha@prairienet.org.
We thank Prairienet for giving us
the opportunity to provide this information.
Thank you and others for visiting our pages. Please visit again soon. Our URL is: http://illinoisheritage.prairienet.org
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