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Digital
scholarship gets boost from Mellon Foundation grant
Staff
Report
The
Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH)
has received a $1 million grant from The
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support scholarly research
based on digital primary resources.
The
project will address new technical, procedural and social issues
that arise when scholars and libraries jointly create, maintain
and edit electronic data, said IATH director John Unsworth. The
institute will work in partnership with the University Library
in a three-year project supporting scholarly use of digital images,
texts, maps, models and other materials. Some of these materials
already reside in library collections, but others will be developed
and added to library collections, along with the electronic publications
resulting from research.
"We
are very pleased to have their support in turning our attention
to the next generation of digital library issues -- the issues
that will inevitably arise once scholars everywhere begin using
digital primary resources in the way that scholars at the University
already do," Unsworth said.
Among key issues scholars and librarians face are how to handle
changes in updated and revised electronic materials and how to
devise new classification schemes when needed for new types of
digital research, Unsworth said.
Since
its inception in 1992, IATH has focused intensive support and
advanced computer resources on long-term humanities research projects
proposed by faculty at U.Va. and elsewhere. To date, IATH has
supported more than 40 fellows in a range of disciplines, including
architectural history, religious studies, medieval and 19th-century
British literature, classical history, music, film and history
of science.
The
University Library has been a leader in developing and adopting
electronic resources, and in promoting faculty and student use
of those resources. Library specialists, IATH's staff and fellows
work closely on electronic text, geospatial information, digital
images, and digital video and audio. Most recently, the library
has established a Digital Library Research and Development Group,
charged with long-range planning of digital library systems and
procedures.
"The
job of building and maintaining a library collection really changes
when scholars develop their research and teaching publications
online," said Thornton Staples, director of the digital research
group. "Not only are they building thematic research collections
that include an assortment of media, but in many cases they need
to comment on, edit, or annotate primary resources held separately
in the digital library. This means that the library must provide
the technical expertise and infrastructure to keep track of all
of these pieces, their provenance, and their relations to one
another. This grant will allow IATH and the library to collaborate
in experimenting with new technical solutions and to develop and
test the policies and procedures that will be required to manage
a research library in the next century."
Previous
support by the Mellon Foundation to digital research at U.Va.
includes major grants to the University Library for its Early
American Fiction digitization project, an extensive World Wide
Web archive.
See
the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities is on
the Web at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/
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