Program Spotlight

Bridging the Digital Divide through a Museum-Library Collaboration

by Angela M. Larson, Evaluation Consultant, University of Alaska Museum of the North
& Terry Dickey, Coordinator of Museum Education, University of Alaska Museum of the North

In 2003 the University of Alaska Museum of the North (UA Museum) and the University of Alaska Fairbanks Rasmuson Library (Rasmuson Library) joined this growing group of museums and libraries with an online presence. Their partnership brings together library and museum objects in one online database - Alaska's Digital Archives (http://vilda.alaska.edu) and provides an online educational tool - LearnAlaska (www.learnalaska.org)- to view, sort, and display digital museum objects and historical images selected from the Archives. In creating this online presence, the UA Museum and Rasmuson Library have successfully integrated museum and library digital resources and avoided the philosophical divide that often separates libraries from museums (Dilevko and Gottlieb, 2004) by focusing on the use of effective collaboration strategies; building a flexible database design; and carefully considering copyright protection issues.

The UA Museum and Rasmuson Library's partnership incorporated several features of successful collaborations (Kala and Hawkins, 1998; IMLS, 2005). The most important of these was a clear definition of roles that reflected each partner's strength the Rasmuson Library provided user access to Alaska's Digital Archives without interpretation and the UA Museum provided interpretation and education through the LearnAlaska tour builder.

Alaska's Digital Archives was initiated in 1998 by the Rasmuson Library along with the Consortium Library at the University of Alaska Anchorage and the Alaska State Library in Juneau. Its focus was to provide resources, such as primary documents and historical photographs that illustrate Alaska's history and culture to the public. The Archives opened to the public in August 2004 with five additional contributing members, including the UA Museum. The Archives now offers fully searchable digital items featuring photographs, maps, documents, film clips, oral history recordings, and museum objects.

>LearnAlaska provides a unique learning opportunity for teachers and students to discover and share the culture, history and art of Alaska. The LearnAlaska Tour Builder-Editor enables students and teachers to build tours from their desktop. The Tour Viewer enables users to view and present tours they made, downloaded from the LearnAlaska site, or received from a friend. And an online catalogue of teacher-developed LearnAlaska tours and lesson plans provides teachers with additional resources to use in their classrooms. All of these facets rely on a key feature of LearnAlaska - the portability of its tours. The UA Museum achieved this portability by using Macromedia Flash© to operate, LearnAlaska. Macromedia Flash© enables users to develop "light weight" tours that do not require a lot of bandwidth and can easily be emailed even when they include videos and audio recordings.

Another important feature of the UA Museum's-Rasmuson Library partnership was a staff person shared by the UA Museum and the Rasmuson Library. This staff position was tasked with being a liaison between the partners and facilitating ongoing communication. According to Carone Sturm, the former project manager for Alaska's Digital Archives, "...somebody going back and forth like that was paramount. I would recommend that to anyone having collaboration like this."

This shared staff person was also one of the primary reasons that the Rasmuson Library and UA Museum easily merged their very different metadata schemes. As a result, Alaska's Digital Archives database easily maps between different controlled vocabularies and organizational data. Using Content DM, which incorporates Dublin Core Mapping to allow for interoperability, Alaska's Digital Archives allows each partner to personalize various field names. This feature, allows, for example, the UA Museum to sort its online images by title, while the Rasmuson Library sorts its images by collection name. An "other" category field provides links to websites or other interpretive resources, like LearnAlaska tours. Dozens of "other" fields significantly expand the amount of interpretive information the UA Museum can include in each object's metadata.

Copyright protection of the museum objects was one of the UA Museum's greatest concerns when it embarked upon its plan to publish museum objects online as part of Alaska's Digital Archives. To protect the copyright of its digital images, the UA Museum implemented several strategies. The first set of strategies dealt directly with the image itself: artists maintain usage rights to their images; permission language is included in metadata and on the image itself; and low resolution images, with high screen quality, but low printed quality, are included in the Archives.

To further increase copyright protection, LearnAlaska creates a link to images in Alaska's Digital Archives without taking the image from the Archives. While this feature requires users to maintain an Internet connection to view and edit their LearnAlaska tours, it provides the additional protection from copyright infringements that the UA Museum required. When a user clicks on an image included in LearnAlaska it immediately links back to Alaska's Digital Archives and the image's metadata. In this way the metadata accompanies and is attached to the object at all times, allowing the UA Museum to update and correct information in the metadata on an ongoing basis. "Artists like that their information is always there. We can promote these good practices...we can go change the metadata and next time [a user makes a] presentation it is [using] correct information" (Roger Topp, Education Technology and New Media Projects Producer).

Artists have been overwhelming positive about the UA Museum's protection of copyright. Kesler Woodward, an Alaskan artist wrote: "Your treatment of the whole copyright-of-images and standards-of-use issue as it pertains to the artists is the best model I've ever seen, and these documents will be extremely helpful models for the people at the [United States] Park Service whom I've been working with to run the Artist-in-Residence program at Denali National Park." Your copyright Release Form "was the best model of its kind among the many of these sorts of things I've signed for museums and other organizations over the last several years."

As a result of this journey, students, teachers, and the public now have online access to almost 1,000 previously inaccessible, culturally significant UA Museum resources and multimedia materials. In addition to digital photographs of UA Museum objects, such as Sydney Laurence's 1919 oil painting, Mt. McKinley, the UA Museum has included multimedia materials that provide contextual meaning to Alaska Native objects included in the UA Museum's Ethnology collection of basketry, beadwork, ivory carvings, masks, dolls, and gear used in subsistence activities. Short video clips of Alaska Native subsistence activities, such as preparing and cleaning seal gut, help students and the public understand how the Museum's ethnology objects, such as drums, parkas, and windows were crafted from animal gut. Computer animations demonstrate the use of the fish wheel and the toggling harpoon head, both of which continue to be important Alaska Native subsistence tools.

These resources evoke Alaska's history, culture, and spirit and connect students to their community elders and to Alaska's landscapes, plants and animals, and contemporary social, political, and economic environments (Topp and Din, 2005). For instance, in one Alaskan village school, students connected to their community elders when they found a 1910 photo of two Athabascan women building a birch-bark canoe. The same photo hangs in their school and the students were able to tell UA Museum staff the names of the women photographed. In another rural Alaskan school a student project brought a mother and daughter together as they researched their Inupiat heritage and found long lost photos of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends included in Alaska's Digital Archives. Other Alaskan students used Alaska's Digital Archives to uncover Alaska's pivotal role during World War II - one not generally covered in U.S. history books.

Both the Rasmuson Library and the UA Museum have received direct benefit from their discipline-based collaboration (IMLS, 2005). The UA Museum was able to publish digital images of its objects and link UA Museum objects to Rasmuson Library's primary documents and photos. The Rasmuson Library was able to add additional materials to Alaska's Digital Archives, particularly multimedia materials. But, more importantly, Alaska's students and teachers can combine their own LearnAlaska narratives with the vast resources of Alaska's Digital Archives to learn about their state's history and culture. "Right now texts do not, or rarely, mention Alaska. We hope to use UA Museum objects to interpret the natural and cultural history of Alaska and to supplement any books that may be published because a history book still can't encompass all" (Terry Dickey, Coordinator of Museum Education).

References:

Dilevko, Juris and Lisa Gottlief. 2004. The Evolution of Library and Museum Partnerships: Historical Antecedents, Contemporary Manifestations, and Future Directions. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

IMLS. 2005. Charting the landscape, mapping new paths: Museum, libraries, and K-12 learning.

Kala, Lisa and Isabel Hawkings. 1998. UC Berkley Interactive University Project: Final evaluation report.

Topp, Roger and Herminia Wei-Hsin Din. 2005. Modular small-scale media: achieving community curation throughout rural Alaska. Paper presented at ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 Conference. Retrieved November 20, 2005 from http://www.uaf.edu/museum/educate/molinet/docs/siggraph05_paper.pdf.

Angela M. Larson is an independent evaluation consultant with Goldstream Grant Writing and Evaluation. She provided evaluation of the grants that funded this project.

For more information, contact Terry Dickey, Coordinator of Museum Education, University of Alaska Museum of the North at fntpd@uaf.edu or by phone at 907.474-6950.

LearnAlaska was funded by U.S. Department of Commerce, Technology Opportunities Program Institute of Museum & Library Services, Community Learning Grant, with additional support from State Farm Insurance Company and the Alaska State Library Association Interlibrary Cooperation Grant.