2006/2007 Award Winners (Tenth Annual Award)

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2007/2008 Award Winners (Eleventh Annual Award)

Climate Change Tutorial for 6-12th Grade and Post-Secondary Educators (Second Year)

2006/2007 Award Winners (Tenth Annual Award)

Library Floorplans 2.0: The Spatial Information Manager for the Library
Climate Change Tutorial for 6-12th Grade and Post-Secondary Educators

2005/2006 Award Winners (Ninth Annual Award)

Developing a Digital Repository Service for Datasets
Video in the Tufts Digital Repository

2004/2005 Award Winner (Eighth Annual Award)

Oral Histories in the Tufts Digital Library

2003/2004 Award Winners (Seventh Annual Award)

Research Paper Planner
A Digital Repository for Datasets
Education in Motion: A Large Scale Implementation of Video Distribution Technology at Tisch Library

2002/2003 Award Winner (Sixth Annual Award)

Digital Boston Geotechnical Database for Research, Teaching, and Technology Transfer in Education

2001/2002 Award Winner (Fifth Annual Award)

The Frederic Louis Ritter Collection: A Paradigm for Special Collections Access and Use

2000/2001 Award Winner (Fourth Annual Award)

Mystic Watershed Collaborative Clearinghouse: Information Retrieval, Integration, Analysis and GIS Training

1999/2000 Award Winner (Third Annual Award)

A Collaboration between Tisch Library and the Department of Child Development to create a prototype digital library project

1998/99 Award Winner (Second Annual Award)

An Electronic Bolles Archive on the History and Topography of London, Phase I

1997/98 Award Winners (First Annual Award)

Biologist's Guide to Library Resources
Digital Practicum: A Database and Website on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Richard III

2002/03 Award Winner

Digital Boston Geotechnical Database for Research, Teaching, and Technology Transfer in Education

Submitted to the Berger Family Technology Transfer Endowment by the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department (Laurie Baise and Lewis Edgers), the Geology Department (Anne Gardulski), Tisch Library (Wayne Powell), Digital Collections (Greg Colati), the GIS Center (Denise Castronovo), and Academic Technology

Preliminary Summary

This proposal seeks funding from the Berger Family Technology Transfer Endowment to develop a digital online database of geotechnical data in the Boston area for use in research and education at Tufts University. The project focus will be on the creation of a digital library resource as a part of Tufts Digital Library that can be navigated using technology for two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) visualization. This project will be accomplished by developing a geographical information system (GIS) and web interface for accessing geotechnical data and geologic and historic maps. In order to accomplish the educational objective of the project, the GIS will be developed in parallel with a set of teaching modules for undergraduate and graduate courses at Tufts. The project will represent collaboration between faculty in the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department and the Geology Department (GEO), and staff of Tisch Library, Digital collections, the GIS center, and Academic Technology.

Project Narrative

In the late 1980s, Prof. Edgers of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department led a group of students at Tufts University in a data collection project organized by the "Boring Data of Greater Boston Committee of The Boston Society of Civil Engineers Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers." This group gathered Cambridge boring data from consulting firms in the area, organized and located the borings, and then entered the subsurface data (manually). The effort included the development of a consistent format and resulted in a publication in the Boston Society of Civil Engineers Journal (BSCES, 1984). Our proposed project under the current Berger initiative is to continue this effort and bring it up to date with the technology available: GIS, digital data, 2D and 3D visualization.

The proposed project will explore the use of technology to provide a direct connection from accessing data in a digital archive to viewing and analyzing data with visualization software. The combination of data retrieval and data visualization will be a unique application of technology to enhance a library resource. By compiling the geotechnical data in a relational database, the information can be explored and queried for analysis in a GIS. The GIS then provides an environment for mapping and visualizing the information. The resulting educational and research tool will provide a direct and powerful interface for accessing and visualizing subsurface conditions beneath Boston.

The assembled geotechnical data will include stratigraphy (i.e. depth to bedrock, thickness of artificial fill, thickness of clay, etc.) and material properties. These geotechnical data are important for describing and understanding foundation conditions beneath structures and have had an important effect on the development of Boston. The inclusion of 2D maps of Boston in the GIS will provide geologic and historic context for the geotechnical data. In addition, the geotechnical data will supplement the geologic map coverage and provide research opportunities on improving the geologic map coverage of the region.

A set of teaching modules designed for students and researchers to highlight the advantage of digital data and visualization through GIS in engineering education and research will be developed using the data retrieval/visualization tool (GIS for geotechnical data). The teaching modules will direct the student to use the GIS tool to answer specific questions about the subsurface conditions in Boston and how those conditions affected the development and resulting infrastructure of Boston. The GIS for geotechnical data will provide a powerful educational tool for teaching important engineering skills to students within the context of geology and Boston history. By developing this resource in collaboration with Tisch Library staff (Wayne Powell), the library will be able to provide instruction on accessing and using the digital data for the Tufts community.

This project will build on previous initiatives by the library, the CEE department, and the Geology Department: 1) the Tufts Digital Library Collection - Boston Streets Project, 2) the compilation of geotechnical data published in the Boston Society of Civil Engineers Journal, 3) an on-going research project which is developing a database of geotechnical data for Boston to assess seismic hazard, and 4) on-going research mapping stratigraphy and sea level history in marsh deposits around Boston. In addition, the project aligns well with both the mission of the school of engineering to promote technology use across campus and the mission of the Berger Family Technology Transfer Endowment to "explore the world of information technology in order to improve [the library staff and faculty's] skills," to transfer these skills across campus and to apply the discoveries "to real issues within the University." Finally, this project will help establish collaborations between the CEE and Geology departments and the library that will continue in the future.

The project will be accomplished with the achievement of the following four goals:

  1. Gather relevant geotechnical, geological, and historic data for Boston and transform this data into digital formats.
  2. Build a database/GIS/web interface for visualization of the compiled data as a resource for inclusion in the digital library collection.
  3. Design a series of teaching modules for the Tufts community to be led by faculty and library staff.
  4. Develop a plan and consortium for extending this resource beyond geotechnical data for Boston and beyond the Tufts community.

Project Goals, Timeline and Milestones

The four goals of this project will be accomplished according to the work plan described below:

Goal one: Gather relevant geotechnical, geological, and historic data for Boston.
Timeline: January 2003 - December 2003
The CEE department will take the lead on organizing the data collection with the help of Tisch Library staff and the Geology department. Under the direction of Prof. Baise, the CEE department has already begun to develop a geotechnical database for greater Boston for research purposes. This existing database will be the starting point for data collection. A CEE graduate student and (CEE or Geology) undergraduate student will focus on finding additional public sources of geotechnical data and work with the library staff in choosing appropriate historic and geologic maps for the project. The library staff will also identify additional sources of geologic, historic, and geotechnical data for inclusion in this project. Digital collections will help provide guidelines and assistance for assembling and formatting the data according to digital library content standards as part of the digital library collection.

The source data for this project (publicly available geotechnical data, historic maps, and geologic maps) are summarized below:

  1. Publicly available geotechnical data (boring logs)
    1. Prof. Baise and students have developed a geotechnical database for the Boston/Cambridge area. This database has focused on the artificially filled areas of Boston including over 1000 boring logs along the margins of the Charles River. In addition, the Central Artery/Tunnel Project data have been collected and provide an additional 2000 boring logs along the alignment of the project. Figure 1 shows a location plan for the boring logs compiled in the existing database over an orthophotograph.
    2. As part of the proposed project, the database will be extended to include additional publicly available data. Possible sources include:
      1. United States Geologic Survey (Government Documents are stored in a repository at Tufts University)
      2. Massachusetts Highway Department
      3. Massachusetts Water Resources Authority
      4. Massachusetts Port Authority
      5. Other city and state agencies
  2. Historic maps compiled for an on-going Boston Streets Mapping project (Digital Collections)
    1. A compilation of Boston historic maps and eleven Boston City Directories is currently underway (funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Service and a private foundation in conjunction with the Bostonian Society). The maps have been digitized and geographically referenced so that they will easily fit into the GIS developed for this project. The proposed project would extract the relevant maps from this project in order to provide a historic and land-use context for the geotechnical data. This is especially relevant in Boston, since the Boston peninsula was extensively filled to create the Back Bay, the South End, etc. This filling has a significant impact on civil engineering projects in the area.
  3. Geologic maps for Boston
    1. The inclusion of existing geologic maps will provide the geologic context for the geotechnical data. The Geology Department is a depository for USGS maps. Map names and searchable data are now in a relational database; however, none of the maps is in digital format. Bedrock geologic and surficial geologic maps for the Boston Basin will be digitized and included in the proposed Website

Goal two: Build a GIS/web interface for visualization of the compiled data.
Timeline: Fall 2003 - Spring 2004
GIS
Working with the GIS center (Denise Castronovo), the graduate student research assistant and CEE faculty will develop an efficient GIS for the project. The GIS will provide the capability to examine the subsurface data visually in 2D and 3D. The GIS center currently has the program, ARCGIS, which will provide the base for the GIS. In addition, Environmental Visualization System or EVS, a commercially available software package, will be acquired and used for developing cross-sections and 3D subsurface maps. EVS can be used as an extension to ARCGIS, which will facilitate the integration of the software package. The GIS will be developed in parallel with the web interface to insure compatibility as discussed below. The Geology department will serve an advisory role in the development of the 2D and 3D visualization models, to ensure that the representations are geologically reasonable.

Web interface
Working with Tisch Library, Digital Collections, and/or Academic Technology and CEE faculty, a second graduate student research assistant will take the lead on the development of the web interface to make the GIS and geotechnical database accessible over the web for use by the Tufts community. ARCIMS will be used to publish the GIS developed for the project on the web. In addition, methods will be explored to incorporate the 2D and 3D visualization into the web interface. Because EVS can be used as an extension to ARCGIS, ARCIMS will be the primary resource for developing the web interface. The Geotechnical Database and Digital Collection will reside at the Digital Collections facility.

Academic Technology will be used as a consultant in this role as they have some in-house experience in this area. In addition, a proposal has been made to Academic Technology's Internal Grants Program that would augment the web interface development and further develop the visualization capabilities of the tool. The Academic Technology Internal Grant will focus on evaluating 2D and 3D visualization software for use in the classroom as well as on the web-interface.

Goal three: Design a series of teaching modules for the Tufts community.
Timeline: Fall 2003 - Spring 2004
The CEE faculty will take the lead working with the Geology department and Tisch Library to develop appropriate teaching modules. The teaching modules will be delivered in courses across the two departments with instruction by the faculty and Tisch library staff (Wayne Powell). At the completion of this task, Wayne Powell will be equipped to present 45 minute instructional sessions on the digital dataset to Tufts students and faculty across the campus, therefore providing a link to the greater Tufts community. In additional an effort will be made to work with Digital Collections in order to make connections to the Boston Streets project and other available historic data. The teaching modules would explore how subsurface conditions influenced the development of Boston, focusing on four important buildings (see Figure 1 for location of these sites):

  1. Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market - Faneuil Hall was constructed on the original Boston Peninsula, underlain by strong soils whereas Quincy market is on filled land.
  2. Boston Public Library - constructed on Back Bay fill and severely damaged by urban groundwater lowering.
  3. John Hancock Tower - Boston's tallest structure, whose construction affected adjacent structures.
  4. South Station - South Station offered one of the major challenges to the Central Artery construction because of the underground transportation and communication infrastructure.

The proposed Teaching Modules would develop the following skills:

  1. Accessing geotechnical data through the online GIS interface
  2. Geologic interpretation of subsurface data in the context of 2D geologic maps
  3. Visualization of subsurface data
    1. Interpreting and drawing cross-sections (2D)
    2. Developing 3D subsurface maps
  4. Understanding subsurface effects on Boston Development
    1. Relating historic maps and development to the subsurface conditions

The proposed Teaching Modules would be used in the following courses:

  1. Tufts University
    1. School of Engineering
      1. EN23: Building Big (first year students)
      2. CEE42: Introduction to Geotechnical Engineering (junior students)
      3. CEE81 Civil Engineering Capstone (seniors)
      4. CEE146 Foundation Engineering (seniors and graduate students)
      5. CEE193A: Engineering Geology and CEE142: Shear Strength and Consolidation (seniors and graduate students)
    2. School of Arts and Sciences
      1. GEO 115: Glacial and Quaternary Geology
      2. GEO 35 and GEO 36: Sedimentology and Stratigraphy
      3. GEO192: Selected Topics in GIS

Goal four: Develop a plan and consortium for building on this resource.
Timeline: Spring 2004
In order to continue this project, we will explore expanding the GIS beyond geotechnical subsurface conditions to include additional layers that can be easily accessed and displayed for other civil and environmental engineering, geology, and planning uses.

Specifically we will explore the feasibility of additional data layers and potential funding possibilities:

  1. Urban Infrastructure (Roads, subways, utilities)
    1. The addition of urban infrastructure would extend this GIS to be a useful emergency-planning tool. A similar project in Manhattan provided a necessary resource in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks. The GIS was used to quickly assess the damage to buildings and infrastructure in the area surrounding the World Trade Center. A National Science Foundation Request for Proposals has recently been released in this area. We will respond to that RFP as a continuation of this project.
  2. Environmental Engineering and Watershed management
    1. The addition of environmental/water engineering information to the existing database will extend the use to environmental engineers and environmental planners. Several colleagues in CEE work in this area and will be approached for future collaboration. This possibility will be explored.
  3. Geologic Mapping
    1. This digital resource will provide an excellent resource for researchers to develop geologic maps of the region. Geologic mapping for Boston is currently very limited and as a result of the extensive urbanization difficult to accomplish without subsurface explorations; therefore, the compilation and visualization provided by this project will stimulate and lead to the production of needed geologic maps. Further funding and collaborations in geologic mapping will be explored.
  4. Extension of teaching Modules to K-12
    1. Working with the Center for Engineering Education Outreach, we will explore funding opportunities that would extend this resource for use in elementary, middle school, and high school education. The National Science Digital Library will be a potential avenue for funding.

Project Deliverables

  1. Digital library resource for Boston geotechnical data
  2. On-line GIS Website
  3. Teaching modules for undergraduate and graduate courses as well as instruction at Tisch Library for using the digital data resource
  4. Proposal to another funding agency to continue and extend the project

Project Participants

Civil and Environmental Engineering Department
Laurie Baise, Assistant Professor
Lewis Edgers, Professor
Graduate Student Research Assistant (for GIS development and data collection)
Graduate Student Research Assistant (for Web-interface development)

Geology Department
Anne Gardulski, Associate Professor
Undergraduate Research Assistant

Tisch Library
Wayne Powell

Digital Collections and Archives
Greg Colati, Director

GIS Center
Denise Castronovo

Academic Technology
Available on a consultant level


Figure 1. Location Plan of Project with currently available data plotted. The four proposed sites for the teaching modules are also shown.

Berger Technology Grant Proposal

    

Digital Boston Geotechnical Database for Research, Teaching, and Technology Transfer

Budget

      
       

Staff

Role

Months

Amount
       

Faculty Time

      

Laurie Baise

Management

  

$3,000.00

Lewis Edgers

Management

  

$2,000.00

Anne Gardulski

Geology Course oversight

  

$1,000.00
       

Student Assistants

      

Graduate Research Assistant

Data collection - GIS

9

$13,500.00

Graduate Research Assistant

Web interface

9

$13,500.00

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Data Collection - Maps

9

$2,700.00
       

Consultation

      

Tisch Library Miscellaneous (Wayne Powell)

    

$3,000.00

Academic Technology Consultation

    

$3,000.00

GIS Consultation

    

$2,000.00
       

Materials

      

Map Digitization

    

$2,000.00

Miscellaneous supplies

    

$300.00

Text/Image Content Digitization

    

$1,000.00

Storage Space at Digital Collections

    

$3,000.00
       
       

Total

    

$50,000.00

Budget Justification

Faculty Time:
Laurie Baise
Responsibilities: Oversee project management. Hire and manage graduate research assistants. Oversee GIS and web interface development. Interface with Academic Technology and the GIS Center. Develop teaching module for CEE193A - Engineering Geology and CEE142 - Shear Strength and Consolidation.
Compensation: $3000 Stipend

Lewis Edgers
Responsibilities: Oversee project management. Specifically oversee geotechnical data collection. Develop teaching module for EN23 - Building Big and CEE42 - Introduction to Geotechnical Engineering.
Compensation: $2000 Stipend

Anne Gardulski
Responsibilities: Responsible for collection of geologic maps for project area (with the help of undergraduate research assistant). Hire and manage undergraduate research assistant. Develop teaching modules for GEO 115 - Glacial and Quaternary Geology,
Compensation: $1000 Stipend

Student Assistants:
Graduate Research Assistant (GIS)
Responsibilities: Collect geotechnical data and build database. Interface with Digital Collections on appropriate digital data format. Working closely with CEE faculty, develop GIS for project including the 2D and 3D visualization using the EVS software (interface with GIS center and academic technology as necessary). Assist faculty in teaching module development.
Compensation: $1500/month stipend for nine months (20 hours/week)

Graduate Research Assistant (Web interface)
Responsibilities: Working closely with CEE faculty, develop Web interface for project. Interface with Academic Technology and GIS center staff as necessary.
Compensation: $1500/month stipend for nine months (20 hours/week)

Undergraduate Research Assistant
Responsibilities: Working closely with GEO faculty, collect geologic maps for project area.
Compensation: $300/month stipend for nine months (5-10 hours/week)

Consultation:
Tisch Library Staff
Wayne Powell will assist in the data collection and in developing teaching modules. The result of Wayne Powell's participation in the teaching module development will be that he can provide a 45 minute demonstration of accessing the digital data resource that can supplement class time. Wayne Powell will therefore provide a link between the digital resource and other Tufts faculty.
Requested Amount: $3000 to be used at Tisch Library's discretion (hire student assistants or library staff stipend).

Academic Technology Consultation
Academic Technology will be available on a consultation basis to help with the design of the web interface.
Requested Amount: $3000. In addition, an Academic Technology internal grant has been applied for and if granted will include $30,000 worth of matching funds to further develop the visualization aspect of the project, the teaching modules, and the web interface.

GIS Center Consultation
Denise Castronovo will be available on a consultation basis to help with the design of the GIS for this project.
Requested Amount: $2000

Materials:
Map Digitization
Maps will be digitized at approximately $200 per map. The digitization will be coordinated by Digital Collections.
Requested Amount: $2000 (digitization of 10 maps)

Miscellaneous Supplies
Certain supplies may need to be purchased over the course of the project such as: maps from the United States Geologic Survey, office supplies (including ink for printers), etc.
Requested Amount: $300

Text/Image Content Digitization
Supplemental text or images will be digitized as needed.
Requested Amount: $1000

Storage Space at Digital Collections
The digital collection will reside at Digital Collections; therefore, we will need to pay a rent for the use of 100 gigabytes of disk storage at the data depository.
Requested Amount: $3000 (100 gigabytes of disk storage)

2001/02 Award Winner

The Frederic Louis Ritter Collection: A Paradigm for Special Collections Access and Use

Submitted By Michael J. Rogan, Music Librarian, Tisch Library;
Jane Bernstein, Austin Fletcher Professor of Music, Department of Music;
Gregory Colati, Director, Digital Collections and Archives and University Archivist;
Thomas Cox, Web Designer, Library Information Technology Support, Tisch Library.

SUMMARY

This proposal seeks to make a significant special collection at Tufts, the Fr�d�ric Louis Ritter Collection, more readily available, more widely known, and used by not only scholars but students as well. This can be accomplished by creating a new model for using special collections outside of the reading room through digital scanning, enhancing the content of special collections through web publishing of supporting material, and developing curricular resources from special collections material through an integrated Website

HISTORY OF THE RITTER COLLECTION

The Frédéric Louis Ritter Collection was purchased at auction by trustee Albert Metcalf, and donated to Tufts University to support the teaching of music (a professorship of music having been proposed and funded by Metcalf in 1895). The entire Metcalf Musical Library was presented in a series of gifts from that year, completed by 1901, and eventually totaled about 2500 scores, books, periodicals, and pamphlets about music. It was stipulated that it be kept from mingling with the College's other holdings, and was housed for many years in the Music Department under the care of Professor Leo Rich Lewis, first professor of the History and Theory of Music at Tufts, and head of the Music Department for fifty years.

Frédéric Louis Ritter was a noted scholar, composer, and conductor. Born and educated in Strasbourg, he emigrated to the United States at the age of 23, first settling in Cincinnati ("where he was conspicuous for his activity in the advancement of taste and culture"--W.S.B. Mathews), and later moving to New York. He was made the first Professor of Music at Vassar College in 1867, where he served until his death in 1891. Throughout his life here, he made significant contributions to the study of and appreciation for Art music in America. His personal library displays the intellectual curiosity of a scholar and the passion of a collector, and contains many important works from the 16th to the 19th centuries, and covers all areas of musical interest: history, biography, theory, composition, and performance.

In the third quarter of the 20th century, the collection was transferred to Special Collections, where it is now housed. It remains the single largest named special collection held by Tufts. Its many years of use and the variable conditions under which it has been housed during the last 100 years have left many items in the collection in fragile condition. Furthermore, it has never been cataloged, and the complete contents of the entire collection remain a mystery to most of the Tufts musical community. Indeed, the very existence of the collection is virtually unknown outside of Tufts.

Intrepid users of the collection over the decades have devised their own means of understanding and locating items within the collection. The auction catalog from the sale of the collection exists, but offers no detail, merely providing short forms of author, title and publication. Professor Leo Lewis devised a card catalog to an accession number system for the collection when it was still housed in the Music Department. Music Librarian Brenda Goldman inventoried the collection in the 1970s, noting which titles were missing and which titles were eligible to be included in the international bibliography RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales). In the 1980s Austin Fletcher Professor of Music Jane Bernstein had graduate students go through the collection and complete data register sheets to capture such information as date of composition and correct mistakes found in the auction catalog. In 2000, Archivist Greg Colati had the auction catalog transcribed into an Excel spreadsheet so that it could be electronically searchable. A consultant, John Shepard (Head of Music Special Collections, New York Public Library of the Performing Arts), hired to evaluate the collection in November of 2001, annotated and corrected that Excel spreadsheet. However, none of these attempts were designed for the public; furthermore, their data has never been collocated and their insights remain isolated from one another. The treasures of the Ritter Collection remain hidden from the larger musicological community and untapped by the Tufts curricula in music and the liberal arts.

PROJECT NARRATIVE

Our goal is to demonstrate how technology can allow special collections material to be used in new and exciting ways to enhance undergraduate education and even secondary school curricula. Unique, fragile, and rare materials have historically been locked away, reserved for the elite scholar. We desire to show how to reach undergraduate and secondary education environments with original source material accompanied with the means to understand and utilize that source material.

Since it remains uncataloged, a single, universal method of identifying the content of the Ritter Collection is clearly needed. Phase I of our proposal is to build that means, using the sources of information created by the past experts of the collection. Data from the Lewis card file, the Bernstein register sheets, the Goldman annotations to the auction catalog, and that catalog itself (in its modified and expanded Excel incarnation) will be transcribed into a web-mounted searchable SGML-based finding aid. While this is not the equivalent of full MARC cataloging into a national utility (such as OCLC or RLIN, see "Planning for the Future" below), it would provide an accurate index to the contents of the collection fully available to the public for the first time in its century of residence at Tufts.

Phase II of the project will use specific items from the collection to educate the musical community at Tufts and the greater Boston metropolitan area, and to begin building a resource that would allow special collections and related contextual material to be regularly used--not just by scholars in a reading room, but by teachers at all levels who want to reach different populations through technology.

To accomplish this, we will need to develop content that explains and enhances original source material in the Ritter Collection. We propose to do this by asking a series of nationally-recognized music scholars in areas of study that are strongly represented in the Ritter Collection to identify an item or several related items that interest them by using the completed web Finding Aid, and inviting them to give a colloquium here at Tufts about their subject using the Ritter material. All content they develop will become part of the Ritter Website

The selected items will be scanned and linked to the Finding Aid. What we propose will expand upon the scanning and markup skills (of text and of images) that have been developed through earlier Berger proposals. The scanning and markup of musical score is an area new to us at Tufts, and a subject of growing interest in the greater scholarly community. The complex relationships of highly symbolic music notation and their graphical representation across pages throughout a score--and even between scores--presents many interesting challenges to the library and archives staff who want to make this material available for scholarly study. Having musical score not only available digitally but also marked up for retrieval of musical content presents new opportunities to researchers and theorists, comparable to the early days of text OCR for literary scholars. We intend to seek out musicologists and theorists who are eager to take advantage of this opportunity, and not only for their own research, but additionally as a means of conveying their discoveries to students.

Scanning and markup of special collections material creates only the core of a Ritter Collection Website The scanned material will be available to the scholars as they prepare their colloquium papers, and will function as a resource during each colloquium presentation. But beyond this core, each scholar's research will be published on the Ritter Website, and linked to the scanned material. Any additional contextual information either created or identified, such as digital audio files of musical performances, or other editions of selected scores or treatises that are available via the web (such as through Gallica, the online image repository of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France), will also be linked to the Ritter Website By developing web publishing skills for newly created material, we in the library and archives will be deepening and expanding our support of very traditional functions of the University, but in a new technological environment.

The colloquia will be open to students and faculty not only at Tufts but also throughout the region. The invited scholars will be promoting the use of the Ritter Collection by highlighting some of its treasures, demonstrating new research and teaching methods using technology, and providing a model for Tufts graduate students who will be encouraged to develop new expectations for the use of special collections. We recognize that we will need to carefully select the faculty to be invited to meet our high expectations, but remain confident that we can attract partners seeking to share their expertise and teach through technology to different populations.

This project is in perfect harmony with the goals of the Berger Family Technology Transfer Endowment. Particularly relevant are the following goals, articulated in the Call for Proposals:

We feel we are moving, with Berger support, to a higher level of understanding of the uses of technology, and keeping Tufts apace with the greater digital community as described in a report prepared by members of the Digital Library Forum and distributed by the IMLS at http://webwise.mse.jhu.edu/IMLS-Framework.html:

A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections.

This Framework is intended for two audiences: first, for people who are working in the context of projects and want to develop good digital collections; and second, for funding organizations and agencies that want to encourage the creation of good digital collections.

The use of the word good in this context requires some explanation. In the early days of digitization for the Web, projects could be justified as vehicles for the development of methods and technologies, as experiments in technical or organizational innovation, or simply as learning experiences. A collection could be good if it provided proof of concept, even if it disappeared at the end of the project period. As the environment matured, the focus of collection building shifted towards the more utilitarian goal of making relevant content available digitally to some community of users. The bar of goodness was accordingly raised to include levels of usability, accessibility and fitness for use appropriate to the anticipated user group. We have now entered a third stage, where even serving information effectively to a known constituency is not sufficient. In today's digital environment, the context of content is a vast international network of digital materials and services. Objects, metadata and collections should be viewed not only within the context of the projects that created them but as building blocks that others can reuse, repackage, and build services upon. Indicators of goodness correspondingly must now also emphasize factors contributing to interoperability, reusability, persistence, verification and documentation. At the same time attention must be focused on mechanisms for respecting copyright and intellectual property law.

PROJECT GOALS, TIMELINE, AND MILESTONES

Goal One: Create a Finding Aid to the Frédéric Louis Ritter Collection, incorporating all known sources of existing data.

TIMELINE MILESTONES
prior to July 1, 2002 Identify and collect all known data sources on the Ritter Collection; check data for accuracy; include OCLC holdings (or non-holdings) for each item (OCLC searching will be required to obtain this data); identify data fields necessary for the Finding Aid; build SGML template to hold data; identify student(s) to be hired to input data.
July 1-August 15, 2002 Input data and test searchability of Finding Aid; create a Ritter Collection homepage; mount Finding Aid to Ritter Collection Website We will add colloquium papers and other content as they become available throughout the following year.

Goal Two: Develop support knowledge to create a Ritter Collection Website through a training workshop with existing experts.

Summer 2002 Invite speakers from Johns Hopkins University to offer a training workshop (preceding the Colloquium Series to be offered later in the Fall) which discusses Music on the web and also demonstrates the software they have under development for score markup. Sharing their expertise with the Berger team about the technological issues of mounting scores on the web may offer advantages for future collaboration.
Summer 2002 Identify issues involved with publishing scholarly work of colloquium papers on the web, and develop necessary release forms, copyright transfer documents, and management procedures.
September 2002 Hold training workshop, open to anyone interested from around the region, followed by a day of open discussion about technological and administrative issues of digital music collections.

Goal Three: Invite 5 scholars to present papers at a Tufts Colloquium Series on the Ritter Collection, helping them select material from the Ritter Collection using the Finding Aid, and preparing that material for their use by digitization.

July 1-August 15, 2002 While the Finding Aid is being compiled, work with music faculty to identify strengths of the Ritter Collection and specific "treasures" of interest to the scholarly community; identify notable scholars in these areas of strength who also have a proven interest in teaching through technology.
from August 15 through September 2002 Issue invitations to scholars to participate in the Tufts Colloquium Series and contribute additional content to the Ritter Collection Website; schedule events - at least one colloquium but preferably two in the Fall semester, three in the Spring semester.
Fall 2002 Advertise Colloquium series throughout the region and in the national professional literature for musicology and music librarianship [AMS Bulletin, MLA Newsletter, "Notes for Notes" column of Notes, Fontes Artis Musicae, others to be identified within specific subject fields]; plan a Tisch Library exhibit to highlight the Ritter Collection and the Colloquium series, using selected items from the collection.
Fall 2002-Spring 2003 Scan and markup materials from Ritter Collection selected by scholars; link additional resources identified by scholars, Tufts faculty and librarians that are related to original source materials.

Goal Four: Secure further funding to support the Ritter Collection.

Fall 2002 Meet with representatives from appropriate funding agencies, such as NEH and IMLS, to float possibilities of grants for preservation and access, and further development of the Ritter Collection Website; determine priority of needs for the Collection, based on reports from conservation consultant (Deborah Wender, November 2000) and content consultant (John Shepard, forthcoming Spring 2002), as well as needs of the Music Department and Tufts musical community.
Spring 2002 Draft proposal to best agency, and review with agency.

PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE

The electronic documents created for this project will be permanently housed in the DCA repository, where they can be accessed by either the DCA generic interface, or the Ritter Collection Website The Ritter Collection Website will be overseen and maintained by the Music Librarian with support from LITS, with input from the Music Department and from the Tisch Web Editorial Board. The Web site is a resource for future researchers in the Ritter Collection, as well as a potential publisher of their findings. Past research, in the form of graduate student papers written under the direction of Professor Jane Bernstein about documents from the Ritter collection, should be vetted by a committee of music faculty and the music librarian, authors' permissions sought, and included on the Web site

Future funding for the Ritter Collection is necessary, in particular, to catalog the collection--or at least the significant portions of the collection--using US MARC and rare book and music cataloging principles, so that it may be represented in the cataloging utilities OCLC and RLIN. OCLC searching included in this proposal will help in identifying Ritter materials that are unique or very rare in the OCLC database, which can be noted to strengthen subsequent grant proposals.

It is possible that OCLC searching will identify some exact matches for individual items in the Ritter Collection, although it is more likely that OCLC records will be found that relate to a different edition, state, or issue of a published item in the collection--bibliographic distinctions of some significance to music scholars. Such "hits" will be reviewed by the music librarian and by cataloging department librarians to determine the preciseness of the match and the quality of the bibliographic record. As appropriate, Tufts' holdings will be added to OCLC and the corresponding record downloaded into our local online catalog. Some funding is being reserved for a cataloger with specialization in rare music materials to consult and provide cataloging service in the process, if needed. (Note that Tufts currently does not have a music cataloger on staff, and ships current music cataloging to a contracted vendor. Special collections material should not be similarly shipped, and will need to be dealt with entirely on site. Therefore we are requesting funds to bring a music cataloger on contract (possibly from another BLC library) to Tufts to assist with Ritter materials--although since OCLC searching has not yet been done, we do not know if this will be necessary, and if it does become necessary, how much material will require attention. We will prioritize as needed, and batch workflow as much as possible.)

Funding should also be sought to stabilize the physical condition of the collection, because parts of the collection are quite fragile. This Berger proposal grant, if funded, will allow future granting agencies to witness the value of the Ritter collection, not only to its curricular use here at Tufts, but to the scholarly musical community at large, and allow them to measure Tufts' commitment to the collection.

PROJECT DELIVERABLES

PARTICIPANTS

Michael J. Rogan, Music Librarian, Tisch Library; Project Leader.
B.A., College of William & Mary, 1981. M.A., M.L.S., Columbia University, 1986, 1987.
Appointed 1999.
Responsible for oversight of project, quarterly reporting, heading up Finding Aid development and data verification, student worker supervision.

Gregory Colati, Director, Digital Collections and Archives.
B.A. Colby College, 1978. M.A., Trinity College, 1979. M.L.S., Simmons College, 1991
Appointed 1997.
Responsible for oversight of scanning and digitizing Ritter collection materials, coordinates Finding Aid development with Thomas Cox and Michael Rogan.

Jane Bernstein, Austin Fletcher Professor of Music.
B.A., City College of New York, 1967. M.Mus., University of Massachusetts, 1968. Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, 1974.
Appointed 1976.
Responsible for Colloquium series administration.

Thomas Cox, Web Developer, Library Information Technology Support, Tisch Library.
B.S., Towson State University; M.M, New England Conservatory.
Appointed 2001.
Responsible for Website design and development, coordinates Finding Aid development with Gregory Colati and Michael Rogan.

2000/01 Award Winner

Mystic Watershed Collaborative Clearinghouse: Information Retrieval, Integration, Analysis and GIS Training

A Project of Tisch Library, the Tufts GIS Center, and Tufts Institute of the Environment

Submitted to the Berger Family Technology Transfer Endowment by Gregory Colati, University Archivist and Head of Special Collections; Regina Raboin, Librarian, Tisch Library; Edward Oberholtzer, Librarian, Tisch Library; and Molly Anderson, GIS Center Director, Associate Director of TIE, and Research Associate Professor, Department of Urban and Environmental Policy

SUMMARY

Tufts has contributed to solving environmental and social problems in the Mystic watershed for several decades through faculty research and reports, student projects, and collaboration with community-based organizations working on watershed issues. Increasing attention from state and federal agencies on water quality in the Mystic River and growing community concerns about the relationship between water quality and quality of life raise the importance and demand for the body of work completed or underway by Tufts faculty, staff and students. However, managing the information that has been generated, integrating it with other available data, and displaying or disseminating it in meaningful ways to different audiences are major challenges. A web-based information management system is a logical part of the infrastructure needed to handle Mystic watershed information, given the tremendous surge in use of the internet for retrieving information over the past decade. A Geographic Information System (GIS) is the ideal tool, as part of the overall information management system, for the integration, analysis and display of place-based information.

With a grant from the Berger Family Endowment, we would like to develop an interactive Website to consolidate and make accessible the wealth of information available on the Mystic watershed. The core collections we will use are Tufts faculty and student projects and Mystic River Watershed Association documents in the University Archives. A simple Website for the Mystic Watershed Collaborative has been developed already by TIE staff (http://www.tufts.edu/tie/mwc), which we will supplement with these two core collections. In addition, we will incorporate a GIS interface to allow users to access and display related data on water quality, environmental quality, demographic characteristics, and other factors relevant to understanding the changing environment and population in the Mystic watershed.

Using the interactive website as a model, we would like to design and conduct a series of workshops for Tufts librarians, staff, faculty and students to teach them how to:

We also will design and conduct an overlapping series of workshops for community partners, faculty and students who are interested primarily in the Mystic watershed, and who want to learn how to use the Website we have developed to its full potential.

NARRATIVE

On March 29, 2000, Tufts President DiBiaggio joined Grace Perez (Executive Director, Mystic River Watershed Association), Mindy Lubber (then Director, US Environmental Protection Agency Region 1), Dorothy Kelly-Gay (Mayor, City of Somerville), and Robert Durand (Secretary, Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs) in a joint commitment to improve environmental quality in our watershed. This was the official launch of the Mystic Watershed Collaborative (MWC), with the mission of helping to restore the Mystic River to fishable and swimmable condition by 2010.

This partnership formalizes a long-term relationship that has existed between individual Tufts researchers or students and community-based organizations working on environmental issues in the Mystic watershed. For example, Tufts faculty and students designed and helped conduct the epidemiological studies in the 1980s documenting the correlation between children's diseases and contaminated wells in Woburn, leading ultimately to the infamous "Civil Action". Other faculty members have monitored water quality and stability of flow, and designed modules on water quality for use by local high school science teachers. Graduate student teams have considered the plight of the alewife as it struggles to migrate upstream through deteriorating dams, contentious land-use disputes between developers and citizens who want to preserve open space, and antiquated sewer systems that allow raw sewage to spew onto city streets and into streams during storms. Students in several departments have completed projects using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to analyze, map and display different kinds of spatial data in the watershed. Undergraduate students have organized or participated in numerous river clean-ups. At least 15 faculty members from different disciplines have expressed interest in service learning projects focused on Mystic watershed problems.

While individual projects have been quite valuable, Tufts faculty, staff, student and alumni projects in the watershed have been fragmented and uncoordinated with other efforts at local and state levels. Faculty and students are enthusiastic about designing research and service projects in the watershed, but they need a comprehensive orientation to work that has been done already or is being done now. Otherwise, they are left without a clear understanding of actions needed and may feel frustrated and without direction. People who want to contribute to work in the Mystic also need a comprehensive overview of previous and ongoing projects. Frequently those in one School or department are unaware that others, in another part of Tufts, are working on a similar issue. For example, we discovered last year that interns from the Department of Education were working with some of the same science teachers with whom a faculty member in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering was designing classroom curriculum. The lack of communication about past and present work may lead to redundancy of effort and, at worst, situations in which faculty and students work at cross-purposes with our community-based partner, the Mystic River Watershed Association (MRWA).

A single clearinghouse for information related to Tufts projects in the Mystic watershed is needed to make reports and data accessible to students, faculty, local schoolteachers, and community organization members. This would increase the efficiency and efficacy of work that various divisions of Tufts are doing in the watershed by raising awareness of the our partnership with the MRWA, clarifying the objectives of the Mystic Watershed Collaborative and ways that the MRWA has proposed we work on those objectives, making gaps in data and services apparent, and increasing awareness among people working on related projects. A simple GIS interface for this clearinghouse would allow users to map selected layers of data from the watershed, thereby helping them understand the interrelationships of environmental quality, socioeconomic inequity, and public health.

The first phase of our proposed project (summer and fall 2001) will be devoted primarily to developing this clearinghouse in the form of an interactive website, and developing content to be stored in the Tufts data repository. After creating the website, with input from anticipated users, we will evaluate it with different kinds of users and make revisions as needed. During the second phase of the project (summer 2001-spring 2002) the main emphasis will be on designing and conducting workshops for library staff, faculty, students and Tufts staff who are interested in creating a similar integrated compilation of place-based information, in using the Mystic Watershed Collaborative clearinghouse to its full capacity, or in learning how to incorporate library research methods and GIS into their courses and research sessions. We plan to use the Mystic Watershed Collaborative Clearinghouse as the focal point, and demonstrate more general concepts by describing how we approached challenges we encountered in developing the website.

The tentative workshop sequence we propose is:

We anticipate that these topics will be valuable to students, staff and faculty working in many different disciplines, as well as community-based partners interested in GIS. The workshops could be adapted after development for future use in various departments or Schools. For example, presentations could be designed for Masters of Public Health students on the collection of information about the spread of West Nile Virus in New England, digitization and georeferencing of data, and its analysis and display with GIS. Or presentations might be designed for Fletcher students on ways that natural disasters interact with environmental problems, demographic trends, and agricultural production levels in the Sub-Saharan region.

We envision a similar format for each workshop: a) introduction and overview of the session and its learning objectives; b) presentation or demonstration of the relevant material or process from the MWC Clearinghouse project; c) completion of an exercise by small groups, using the concepts or skills introduced in the demonstration; and d) recapitulation of the main concepts. The information presented in each workshop would be summarized in a handout for future reference.

This project seems to be especially appropriate for a Berger Family Endowment grant. It will facilitate technology transfer of GIS, a valuable, relatively new tool for dealing with place-based data. GIS has become essential for research and information management in fields that compare data in different geographic areas, or correlate different kinds of data in a single area. Consequently, the demand for GIS instruction at Tufts is rising sharply and now exceeds the availability of classes and workshops. The single course in GIS offered this semester was filled immediately, and the instructor added another entire section for students who preregistered. Using the MWC Clearinghouse as the focal point for GIS instruction would provide practical, easy-to-grasp applications of the technology to issues on which people in many departments and disciplines at Tufts are working.

Our proposed activities go beyond simple training in GIS. They place the use of GIS within the broader context of information retrieval, storage in standardized formats, compatibility, and dissemination. Anyone who deals regularly with the internet or with GIS needs to be able to assess whether the information he or she retrieves is comprehensive and of high quality. The availability of powerful new information technology can encourage "shortcuts", such as an internet search for a topic with a single search engine, rather than a comprehensive search for all relevant references. Creating digital content according to library standards ensures the continued accessibility of this information for the foreseeable future. And checking for the internal compatibility and adequate representation of different kinds of information is essential for sound analysis and interpretation.

Contemporary technology for information dissemination requires that people with this responsibility know how to create appropriate Website interfaces for different audiences, and have a repertoire of tools to display that information. Building the MWC Clearinghouse and transferring the lessons learned in the process will help others to acquire those tools. Additional points of intersection between the proposed project and the Berger Endowment's priorities are that the MWC Clearinghouse would allow the library to make valuable information in the MRWA archives, which have not yet been processed, available within and beyond Tufts. It would increase productivity by improving interdepartmental communication and access to prior projects. Finally, it would add value to secondary education and partnerships between Tufts departments and secondary school teachers who are incorporating watershed issues into their curricula.

PROJECT GOALS, TARGET DATES, OBJECTIVES, and MILESTONES

GOAL 1: Create a comprehensive Website clearinghouse for the Mystic Watershed Collaborative, in a form usable to prospective audiences.

Objective 1.1 Collect all past and present work by Tufts faculty and students related to the Mystic River and environmental quality in the Mystic watershed (reports, data, student projects, etc.). Identify federal or state reports, databases, and materials in the MRWA archives housed at Tufts that are useful to understand Tufts faculty and student projects and place them in their historical regulatory, scientific and social context.

Target Dates: January 2001 - June 2001

Milestones:

a) Undergraduate student assistants from ES-27 begin collecting relevant reports, student projects, and data during the Spring 2001 semester. They work with Professor David Gute, Molly Anderson, faculty advisors, state agency contacts identified by members of the MWC Steering Committee, MRWA staff members, Regina Raboin, Ed Oberholtzer, and Wayne Powell to ensure that their collection is comprehensive.
b) Student assistants consult with Johanna Meyer about the compatibility of geospatial coordinates in the data they retrieve, and work with her to address incompatibilities.
c) MRWA staff work with Greg Colati, Sheri Kelley, and the MRWA Archives Student Assistant to identify material in their files to be archived.
d) Molly, Greg and the MRWA staff recruit a MRWA Archives Student Assistant to begin working when classes end.

Objective 1.2 Refine the site-map of the Mystic Watershed Collaborative Website developed by the Tufts Institute of the Environment to include maps, data, metadata, and textual documents which address specific information needs of students, faculty, and community-based watershed advocates.

Target Dates: March 2001 - May 2001

Milestones:

a) The Clearinghouse Team reviews the current Website and plans needed modifications, which they communicate to ES-27 student assistants.
b) Student assistants interview potential faculty, student, and community-based users of the Clearinghouse to identify their specific information needs.
c) Students revise the site-map based on the their findings and the decisions of the Clearinghouse Team, and present it to the Mystic Watershed Collaborative Steering Committee for review, and to V.Y. Chow and Jake Sterling for identification of changes which would improve its functionality.

Objective 1.3 Digitize and catalog selected material according to library standards.

Target Dates: June 2001 - August 2001

Milestones:

a) The MRWA Archives Student Assistant stores materials to be archived in the Tufts digital repository.
b) The MRWA Archives Assistant catalogs the Clearinghouse Website and all archived materials to be accessible through the Tisch Library catalog, using standardized vocabulary to allow searching for specific information, addition of new materials in the future, linkages with other keyword-coded collections, and relatively easy transitions to new technology as it is developed.
c) The MRWA Archives Student Assistant works with MRWA staff and Archives staff to select a subset of the archived and active materials to digitize for the MWC Clearinghouse, scans these selected materials with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and edits the files for accuracy.
d) The MRWA Archives Student Assistant works with MRWA staff on other projects to free their time for consulting on this project, and to familiarize him/herself with the work of the Association and the MWC.

GOAL 2: Build a simple Geographic Information Systems (GIS) interface for the Clearinghouse, capable of integrating spatial information from various sources.

Objective 2.1 Revise the MWC Web site to include reports and data.

Target Dates: April- August 2001

Milestones:

a) Greg Colati and Sheri Kelley develop a letter requesting permission to serve archived materials, old projects, and current projects and reports to the Website
b) The MRWA Archives Student Assistant distributes the letter and tracks responses.
c) V.Y. Chow works with Jake Sterling and student assistants to revise the Website based on the new site-map and test it on different platforms, with advice from the Clearinghouse Team and advisors on the interface.
d) Johanna Meyer advises V.Y. on building links that will be compatible with the GIS interface.

Objective 2.2 Incorporate the interface into the existing MWC Website

Target Dates: June 2001 - August 2001

Milestones:

a) Johanna Meyer investigates options that meet any restrictions of the ArcIMS piece of the Tufts ArcView GIS license and allow rapid uploading of GIS software to different web platforms.
b) Johanna and the GIS Student Assistant modify products of past student projects as needed to be suitable for serving to the Website, and guide students developing current projects to make static maps and documentation of the purpose and results of their projects.
c) Regina Raboin and Ed Oberholtzer advise on the information design of the GIS interface.
c) Johanna and V.Y. add the GIS interface to the MWC Website, test it on different platforms, and correct problems.

Objective 2.3 Evaluate the Web site with users.

Target Dates: August - October 2001

Milestones:

a) The Clearinghouse Team develops a list of possible Website evaluators, with input from the MWC Steering Committee, and a set of evaluation questions.
b) The MRWA Archives Student Assistant and the GIS Student Assistant interview users and compile results for the Clearinghouse Team.
c) V.Y. Chow makes changes in the Website recommended by the Clearinghouse Team.

GOAL 3: Design and conduct a series of workshops to teach users how to incorporate GIS into their information literacy sessions, courses, research and workshops; find and compile comprehensive, spatially-referenced information sets; and create and use a web-based GIS interface that can integrate and display geo-spatial information.

Objective 3.1 Design and publicize workshops.

Target Dates: Summer - Fall 2001

Milestones

a) Regina Raboin and Johanna Meyer design the workshop series, and circulate the learning objectives and outline to members of the Clearinghouse Team for review.
b) Regina and Johanna draft a summary description of the proposed workshops incorporating suggestions from the Clearinghouse Team; circulate it to staff, Tufts faculty and students, and community-based partners in the Mystic Watershed Collaborative identified by the Clearinghouse Team; and schedule the workshops based on feedback received.
c) Tisch Library, TIE and the GIS Center publicize the workshops (as a series, and also highlighting each workshop for targeted audiences).

Objective 3.2 Conduct and evaluate the workshops, attracting at least 10 participants to each from the combined target audiences.

Target Dates: Fall 2001 - Summer 2002

Milestones:

a) Johanna Meyer, Regina Raboin, Sheri Kelley, and the GIS Student Assistant conduct the workshop series.
b) Attendees at workshops complete short surveys at the end of each session. Among the questions asked will be whether the Mystic Watershed Collaborative Clearinghouse was helpful to participants in making concepts and processes more concrete.
c) The MRWA Archives Student Assistant and the GIS Student Assistant analyze the questionnaires and compile results for the Clearinghouse Team.
d) The Clearinghouse Team meets on a quarterly basis at minimum for the duration of the project to make internal assessments of the value of the workshops, identify prospective audiences, and modifications which would make them more useful to certain audiences.

GOAL 4: Draft policy and procedures to ensure awareness of GIS services, and coordination of the delivery of those services between Tisch Library staff and GIS Center staff.

Objective 4.1 Encourage participation in the training workshops of Library staff who will be expected to know about GIS, and ensure that workshops are relevant to their needs.

Target Dates: Fall 2001 - Summer 2002

Milestones:

a) Greg Colati and Sheri Kelley, in consultation with Regina Raboin, Ed Oberholtzer, and Jo-Ann Michalak, draft a list of library staff-members from across the campuses who need to know about GIS, and the kinds of information they need (ranging from awareness of its capacities and location of the GIS Center to ability to use ArcView software with some proficiency).
b) Greg and Sheri Kelley contact these staff members to ascertain their interest and specific needs.
c) If needed, Clearinghouse Team devises incentives to encourage attendance at the workshops.

Objective 4.2 Observe where gaps in communication seem to occur on a regular basis, and address these with formal procedures.

Target Dates: March 2001 - June 2002

Milestones:

a) Molly Anderson collects complaints and suggestions for improved procedures from Website users and members of the Clearinghouse Team.
b) Clearinghouse Team members discuss potential policy and procedures to improve communication and service delivery.
c) Molly Anderson drafts text for review by the Clearinghouse Team members and appropriate administrators (e.g., Director of Tisch Library, V.P. for Information Technology, Director of University Technology Services).

CLEARINGHOUSE TEAM (boldface indicates new temporary positions created for the duration of this project)

GIS Center Staff:

Johanna Meyer (GIS Center Coordinator)
GIS Student Assistant (to be hired)

Tisch Library Staff:

Regina Raboin (Librarian)
Ed Oberholtzer (Librarian)
Wayne Powell (Librarian)
Reference Desk Assistant (to be hired)

University Archives Staff:

Greg Colati (University Archivist and Head of Special Collections)
Sheri Kelley (Assistant Librarian)
MRWA Archives Student Assistant (to be hired)

Tufts Institute of the Environment Staff:

Molly Anderson (Associate Director)
V.Y. Chow (Program Coordinator)

Mystic River Watershed Association Staff:

Grace Perez (Executive Director)
Lisa Brukilacchio (MRWA Board Member and MWC Steering Committee member)

PROJECT ADVISORS

Mystic Watershed Collaborative Steering Committee Advisors:

Janet Kovner (MRWA Outreach Coordinator)
Bill Maher (Woburn Conservation Commissioner)
Bret Kricun (student, Biology Department, Tufts University)
Susan Loucks (Chelsea Creek Action Group)
Molly Mead (Director, UCCPS, Tufts University)
Stephanie Gros (Massachusetts Community Water Watch)
Dale Bryan (River Institute Coordinator, Tufts University)

Arts, Sciences, & Engineering Faculty:

John Durant and Paul Kirshen (Dept. of Civil and Env. Engineering and MWC Steering Committee members)
David Gute (Dept. of Civil and Env. Engineering)
Kent Portney (Political Science)
Linda Garant (Education and Mathematics)
Linda Beardsley (Education)

WORKPLAN SUMMARY

2001

January - March (not supported directly through the Berger Fund)

April - May

June - August

September - December

2002

January - May

June

1999/00 Award Winner

A Collaboration between Tisch Library and the Department of Child Development to create a prototype digital project

REQUEST

We respectfully request from the Berger Family Technology Transfer Endowment a commitment of $50,000 to support the development of an innovative new internet service, which will constitute a prototype digital library project, and to cultivate library resources needed to create this and related digital library projects. The proposed service, the Child & Family News (CFN) WebGuide, will be an on-line rating and review guide for students, faculty and the public at large seeking information about children and families. The WebGuide will be fashioned after the highly successful Tufts University Nutrition Navigator. Both sites are intended to solve two major problems experienced by web users: how to quickly find information best suited to their needs and whether to trust the information they find. Because of the large and expanding volume of information on the internet, the time is right for the development of services such as the WebGuide and for the training of library staff to work together with faculty involved in this and related internet-based services.

OVERVIEW OF THE CFN WEBGUIDE

The WebGuide will be an additional feature of CFN, an innovative on-line feature news service developed by faculty at Tufts University (see Appendix A for a copy of our homepage). Under the direction of Dr. Fred Rothbaum and Ms. Nancy Martland from Child Development, and Dr. Larry Brown from Nutrition, CFN's primary goal has been to increase the public's interest in and awareness of children's issues by providing high quality, pertinent and newsworthy information to journalists. The service makes available relevant research, names of experts, information about solution-oriented programs and other information necessary to providing the public a context for understanding the news. There is no other internet-based service that provides these kinds of resources. (For a brief description of the Child Development Dept. and CFN, see Appendix B).

The WebGuide is a key step in adapting CFN to the needs of students, faculty and the general public. It will integrate several previously segregated bodies of research in child development. Traditionally, students identify a topic and search for it on various databases, each of which is focused on a particular discipline (psychology, education, advocacy, sociology, anthropology, criminology, health sciences, etc.) and a specific type of source (websites, books, magazines and newspapers, etc.). Because child and family issues are interdisciplinary, our goal is to identify and incorporate numerous websites from each of several disciplines. WebGuide users will be encouraged to search for books, scholarly publications, newspaper and magazine articles, and other sources. In addition, the WebGuide users will be directed to websites that describe intervention programs and agencies that provide services related to the issues being researched. Students are often interested in the applied dimensions of an issue but lack the resources and theoretical understanding to research them; CFN makes this possible. The internet is ideal for making links between disciplines, between sources, and between basic and applied knowledge.

The creation, maintenance and everyday use of the WebGuide will afford new opportunities for students and faculty to forge relationships with library staff. Library staff involved in this project will: (a) help faculty and students identify and evaluate relevant sites and organize those sites into meaningful topic areas; (b) develop a broader, more scientific understanding of organizational structures that will be needed in the next millennium; and (c) offer assistance to other faculty engaged in the selection, evaluation, cataloging and design of sites pertaining to their disciplines.

MATCH OF WEBGUIDE GOALS WITH BERGER GOALS/SELECTION CRITERIA

Goals of the WebGuide are to:

THE WEBGUIDE'S AUDIENCE

Originally, CFN's primary audience was journalists and, through them, the general public. With the aide of the WebGuide, CFN will make students its primary audience, while at the same time continuing to serve journalists. There are many similarities between the two groups. The topics of interest to students are based in large part on those that have been identified by journalists. Both journalists and students need assistance in gathering specialized information from the web, in obtaining material from different disciplines and sources, and in integrating information about basic research with practical application. Both audiences also have in common an interest in summaries of research findings, names of experts in the field, and brief stories that can be expanded to full-length articles and papers.

The WebGuide is well suited to the needs of students, 85% of whom use the web for academic/learning purposes At least several times a week (Lubans, 1998, unpublished manuscript, Duke Univ. Library). The WebGuide will also be a valuable tool for faculty and the general public. CFN can play a very positive role in encouraging the use of quality internet-based information about children by users at various levels of expertise.

DEVELOPING THE WEBGUIDE: HOW WILL BERGER FUNDS BE USED?

Partnership between Child Development Department and Tisch Library

We plan to collaborate with Tisch library to expand the CFN "Related Sites" page, (see sidebar of current website: www.tufts.edu/cfn) into the WebGuide--the most comprehensive, useful and informative collection of newsworthy sites about child and family issues on the internet. To maximize value for users with varied interests, the WebGuide will be organized into categories by student-type (high school, undergraduate, graduate) and topic area (violence, health, family, education and poverty). Other groups, such as journalists, parents, and educators, will also be identified. Descriptions and evaluations of the indexed sites will be provided. Tisch library staff will be responsible for identifying, cataloging and evaluating the websites, and developing and presenting workshops to disseminate their new expertise to other Tufts faculty, using the CFN WebGuide as a prototype for other departments that wish to create their own digital resources.

Partnering with the School of Nutrition

The model for the WebGuide is Nutrition Navigator, an extremely successful web-based project run by the Tufts School of Nutrition. Like the proposed CFN WebGuide, Nutrition Navigator provides a comprehensive list of relevant websites, including brief (approximately 20 word) descriptions of each site and a rating of the site based on its content (accuracy, depth, and recency) and usability. Also like the proposed CFN WebGuide, Nutrition Navigator serves different audiences, including students, journalists, educators, parents, and children. Since we are collaborating with the School of Nutrition in this project, we will be able to benefit from their vast expertise in the development of such a site. For example, we will need to classify sites into different types (research, advice, chat room) and, rather than reinventing the wheel, we will rely on decisions already made in creating Nutrition Navigator. (For further discussion of the partnership with the School of Nutrition, see Appendix E).

PROJECT OUTCOMES

Child Development Involvement

This project has great potential for disseminating child development information, for increasing Tisch library staff expertise with digital information, and for bringing this technology to other Tufts departments. With regard to dissemination, there is presently no research tool (i.e., indexing system, search engine, etc.) focused on the myriad, and rapidly increasing, scholarly-oriented websites that are primarily concerned with children and families. We will be concentrating our efforts on reliable sites that have presented their findings in a user-friendly, accessible manner, and particularly those sites that address practical implications or otherwise help transcend the basic-applied research barrier. Such information would be particularly useful to students at all levels of study, from primary and grade school (i.e., they would benefit from the sites for children), to high school, college and graduate students who tend to be especially interested in the application of knowledge.

A major reason to develop the WebGuide is to increase students' understanding of research. In part, this will be accomplished by involving students in the creation of the WebGuide. The Department of Child Development has already established a course, CD143CFN: Child and Family News, in which faculty teach students how to conduct literature searches involving multiple sources, how to contact relevant experts, and how to obtain both basic research and applied (program-based) knowledge about timely issues (i.e., those that are likely to appear in the media). Students= course work, which in the past has contributed to CFN's InfoBank and Story Starter sites (see www.tufts.edu/cfn) , will in the future contribute to the WebGuide. Tisch library staff, who have previously participated in the instruction of this course, will be more involved in training students in the future.

Tisch Library Involvement

As mentioned above, there are several ways in which this project will involve and benefit Tisch library staff. Members of Tisch Library staff with whom we will collaborate have skills involving: (a) searching for and finding relevant sites; (b) cataloging the sites we find into categories that are meaningful to the public, especially to students; (c) applying metatags to our categories so that other search engines are likely to find our site; and (d) evaluating the sites in terms of a number of dimensions, such as user-friendliness and quality of research. In assisting in this project, the library staff believe that they will need to hone those skills and develop new ones. Moreover, the staff wants to learn about the new software we will purchase. If they are going to assist other faculty in developing search engines and webguides, they need to be aware of the newest, most sophisticated software available.

Since one goal of this grant is for librarians to share the knowledge they obtain with the Tufts community, some of the funds will be earmarked for the establishment of workshops. These workshops will be open to all faculty and staff and will enable them to develop tools--search engines, cataloging skills, evaluation abilities--relevant to their own disciplines and their own needs. Faculty are increasingly concerned about their students reliance on websites and would welcome materials that teaches students how to evaluate and cite websites These generic materials will be given to faculty to distribute to students--e.g., as part of course information. Faculty can tailor these materials to their discipline, working with colleagues from the library.

With regard to increasing library staff expertise, this project will serve as a model of how to develop similar sites in other disciplines. Just as we will rely on Nutrition Navigator in deciding what features to include in our Website, in the future, faculty who want to develop sites may obtain guidance from those library staff who participated in the development of the WebGuide. For example, Lisa Freeman in the Vet School has plans to develop a site similar to Nutrition Navigator. To assist Lisa and other Tufts faculty, the library staff will write a manual describing the process involved in Website development, including simple how-to instructions. The manual will describe technical aspects of the Website development, prepared by staff from Academic Technology at Tufts. Library staff will distribute this manual when presenting workshops to Tufts faculty and staff and when making presentations at national conferences.

Academic Technology (AT) Involvement

By involving AT staff in the creation of the WebGuide, this project will provide a valuable opportunity for them to hone their skills at Website development and to showcase their design abilities. In addition, as Tufts forges ahead with its Digital Library Initiative, the collaboration between AT and Tisch will be critical. Developing relationships by working on a small version of the larger Digital Library Initiative will prove invaluable in laying the groundwork for partnering on these larger projects in the near future.

In summary, the major deliverables to result from this grant are:

OTHER FUNDING SUPPORT

Tufts University has provided funds, space and limited faculty release time for CFN in its nascent stage. During the past year, the Kellogg Foundation provided funding ($15,000). Presently we are seeking support from a variety of funding sources including corporations, foundations and the federal government (e.g., National Science Foundation and the Department of Education).

We are requesting $50,000 from the Berger Foundation. Over the next five years, we hope to secure approximately $500,000 from a variety of funders (an average of $100,000 per year). This will enable us to fulfill our long-term vision of becoming the single most relied upon internet resource (i.e., portal) for information about children and families.

TIMELINE (approximate)

Jan-Mar
Assemble comprehensive list of potentially relevant websites (Tisch); purchase and begin to employ software (AT); develop Web site evaluation criteria (CD); design Website (CD,AT)

Apr-Jun
Create first (pilot) version of WebGuide (AT); initial review all websites to be added to WebGuide (CD); write brief summaries of websites (CD); begin cataloging/metatagging (Tisch)

Jul-Sep
Final evaluation of all websites (CD); write first draft of description of process involved in developing the WebGuide (Tisch); finish cataloging/metatagging (Tisch)

Oct-Dec
Place all summaries and evaluations of websites on the WebGuide (AT); develop search engine (AT); prepare conference presentations (Tisch, CD); final draft of description of process involved in developing the WebGuide (Tisch); design workshops for faculty and students (Tisch)

Appendices

Appendix A: Home page of CFN (www.tufts.edu/cfn)
Appendix B: Background (Child Development Dept. and CFN)
Appendix C: The CFN service: How does it work?
Appendix D: What New England journalists are saying about CFN
Appendix E. Partnering with the School of Nutrition
Appendix F: Proposed allocation of Berger funds
Appendix G: News article about CFN

Appendix B

BACKGROUND

The Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development

The Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development is situated within the School of Arts, Sciences, & Engineering. Its diverse faculty includes almost thirty full and part-time members, who direct innovative teaching and research programs serving over 1,300 students. Although today its members come from a variety of disciplines (for example, psychology, education, law and public policy), its history is rooted in the early childhood movement of the first part of the 20th century. At that time, Abigail Eliot and Elizabeth Pearson, an educator and a philanthropist, established the Ruggles Street Nursery School in Boston to serve children of poverty. The Ruggles Street School developed into the Nursery Training School of Boston, one of the first such training programs in the country. In 1954, the Training School became affiliated with Tufts University and, in 1964, it was absorbed into Tufts and became the Eliot-Pearson Department.

The Department is characterized by a unique emphasis on the application of child development research and theory in all fields that affect children's lives. It is committed to preparing highly competent professionals equipped to work with children in a variety of settings including classrooms, clinics, hospitals, media and the court system. The Department's facilities include the Tufts Educational Day Care Center, the Eliot-Pearson Children's School, the Evelyn Pitcher Curriculum Laboratory, and two major applied research centers: the Center for Applied Child Development and the Center for Reading and Language Research.

Because the Child Development Department is committed to the integration of basic research and its practical application, all members of the faculty are engaged in the CFN project. Moreover, CFN is a university-wide project with collaborators based at several schools, including one science director at the School of Nutrition. Interdisciplinary scholarship, coupled with a long-time commitment to university-community partnerships, is a hallmark of Tufts.

Child & Family News (CFN)

The history of CFN. In a 1994 study, Dale Kunkel of the University of California, Santa Barbara, reported that 48% of media stories relating to children depicted them as either victims or perpetrators of violent acts. He found that coverage is usually sensational or superficial and does not reflect the everyday experiences of real children. In contrast, media coverage of the expanding, creative and multidimensional solutions to family- and child-related problems is alarmingly absent. This distortion of everyday life is even more apparent in coverage of minority populations.

At a 1995 conference sponsored by the Casey Journalism Center, leading child development professionals expressed a desire to work with journalists to: help frame stories that are proactive, give a broader understanding of the experiences of children within their social and environmental context, and offer possible solutions to problems and controversies.

In 1996, Tufts Child Development faculty members surveyed a group of journalists from across the country who focus on child and family issues. Many of the respondents indicated that they were already using the internet to search for stories and would use the CFN service.

Based on the journalists' feedback, the faculty launched an internet-based service that includes a series of personal accounts of children and families involved in community-based programs, as well as relevant references and names of pertinent practitioners and researchers who could be consulted as experts. All of the journalists with whom the faculty consulted expressed a desire to receive monthly e-mail updates of the service.

Typically, journalists limit themselves to consulting a small number of "known" child development experts. In contrast, CFN offers access to a wide range of researchers and practitioners. CFN works with these experts to make their ideas more accessible to the public. We believe that the time is right for this effort to bridge the gap between the interests of the public and the important research findings and expertise of academia.

Beginning in the Spring, 1998 we piloted the CFN service, which at the time was named Children and Media Education Outreach (CAMEO). In the Spring, 1999, we officially unveiled the CFN service (please visit us at www.tufts.edu/cfn), and invited journalists in the New England area to become subscribing members. As of September, 1999, there are over 40 subscribing journalists, who receive regular E-mail updates of information posted on our Website Our contacts with journalists and our experiences with the internet have convinced us that the information we are providing would also be of great interest to students, so we are widening our constituency. At the same time, we have come to realize that the greatest service we can provide is to help others make sense of the enormous, and exponentially expanding, number of websites containing information about children and families. Our discussions with the developers of Tufts University's Nutrition Navigator site, and our familiarity with child development sites, has convinced us that we should develop a Website modeled after Navigator but focused on children and families.

The WebGuide will continue to be one of several services offered by CFN. Our major other service is the InfoBank, a compilation of experts, programs that serve children, background information, research findings, and references (websites, books, articles, etc.)--all of which are organized into topics that correspond to common news stories (e.g., school violence, child care). As we develop the WebGuide, we will re-organize the InfoBank by separating out the websites from other references (currently they are intermingled), suggesting keywords that viewers might use to search for other websites, and providing a link to the WebGuide search engine. In this way we will increase the likelihood of greater cross-utilization of our services.

CFN's goals

The major goals of the CFN service are:

Appendix C

THE CFN SERVICE: HOW DOES IT WORK?

As depicted in the flow chart (see Figure 1), the CFN website (www.tufts.edu/cfn) serves as both a repository and distribution hub for stories pertaining to children in five topic areas: families, health, education, violence and poverty. CFN staff (faculty and students at Tufts; please see Website: www.tufts.edu/cfn, for brief biographical sketches of key CFN personnel) solicit stories from professionals who work directly with children. These contributors, often directors of agencies, provide original stories about children and families and the programs that serve them.

CFN staff then review the stories, selecting those related to predictable news events, and for which appropriate context can be provided: background information, references to relevant policies and research, names of experts who are willing to consult with journalists. Selected stories are then posted on the CFN web site.

Since journalists prefer to do their own interviewing and background research, we provide only an outline, not a fully written story ("Story Starters"). Journalists may browse our story starters directly on the site, or may register for a regular, automatic e-mail update of new material. In our initial phase of operation, there has been no fee for this service. Funding permitting, our intent is to maintain CFN as a free service for working journalists.

Immediately after the Littleton, Colorado, school shooting tragedy, an example of how CFN works occurred. As journalists were scrambling to obtain information about research relevant to school violence, gather names of experts and solution-oriented programs, and collect other information that CFN provides, we received several inquiries. Our efforts were directly responsible for several stories about the Lesson One Foundation, a violence prevention program in the Boston area (e.g., coverage in the Providence Journal and Boston Herald).

This experience illustrates the importance of responding to the immediate needs of journalists covering breaking news stories. While we believe we are most useful to journalists working on second day coverage and feature news stories (which involve less time pressure), we realize that our best opportunities to reach journalists occur at times of breaking news. We will continue to capitalize on those opportunities as a way to increase awareness among journalists that our site is an ongoing resource for coverage of children and families.

CFN'S RECENT PROGRESS

To date, we have accomplished several initial goals. These include:

In 1998, we invited a group of leading Northeast-area journalists and editors on the "kids
beat" -- representing major newspapers, television outlets, the Associated Press, National Public Radio, and other media organizations -- to serve as consultants to CFN. We asked them to inform us of the kinds of material that they would find most helpful from CFN. All twelve of the journalists we approached expressed their support for the CFN concept by agreeing to help, despite the absence of remuneration. The consultants provided feedback about a pilot set of stories released in March, 1998, and about a more polished set of stories released in April, 1999. The feedback from the journalists (see Appendix D) was uniformly positive.

Appendix E

PARTNERING WITH THE SCHOOL OF NUTRITION

A partnership with the School of Nutrition makes sense because we have already forged an alliance with Larry Brown from Nutrition. Larry has been a major supporter of CFN, offering ideas for stories on Nutrition and leads for obtaining grants. Dean Hastings, who is also very enthusiastic about this project, has introduced us to the faculty and staff managers of Nutrition Navigator. Working on a Berger grant will help foster an emerging relationship between faculty in both Child Development and Nutrition.

The project will benefit Nutrition Navigator as well as CFN. The managers of the Nutrition Navigator Website have informed us that the technology they relied upon in creating the Website has progressed very rapidly; as a result, the software we will use for searching the internet and for tracking users is considerably more sophisticated than that currently used by Navigator. If Tufts purchases state-of-the-art software and develops the expertise to use it, the managers of Navigator will be able to update and improve their site as well. Moreover, there are aspects of the CFN site, such as the way in which web information is integrated with other research information, that may be of interest to the managers of Nutrition Navigator. Because of the similarity in the structure of the two sites, and the overlap in the content of our topics, both CFN and Nutrition Navigator may benefit in unexpected ways from our collaboration.

Appendix F

PROPOSED ALLOCATION OF BERGER FUNDS

Most of the funds obtained from the Berger grant will pay for library staff, Eliot-Pearson faculty, and staff at Academic Technology (AT), who will work in tandem to develop the WebGuide.

At Tisch library, three staff members with relevant expertise have already been identified as the personnel most likely to oversee the library's involvement: Lyn Condron, who is Head of Cataloging and the Web Manager; Ed Oberholtzer, the Social Sciences Bibliographer, who selects books, materials (including websites) and research tools; and Laurie Sabol, the Library Instruction Coordinator, who is responsible for library instruction and references. These Tisch library staff members, and persons working with them, will be primarily responsible for identifying, cataloging, meta-tagging and evaluating possible sites, and informing managers of databases and relevant library staff throughout the country (particularly librarians in the Consortium) about the WebGuide. Although these staff members already possess considerable skill relevant to Web site use and development, they have not had the kind of opportunity to apply their knowledge on a large scale that this project provides. They believe that the experience they gain applying their knowledge and honing their skills will enable them to assist faculty and staff seeking in other departments to design similar projects.

Fred Rothbaum, a Professor in Child Development, and Nancy Martland, the Director of CFN and an instructor in the Department, will closely supervise undergraduate and graduate students who will screen the sites, rate and evaluate those that are ultimately selected, and integrate the WebGuide with other services already provided by CFN.

In Academic Technology, Ranjani Saigal and her staff, who played a central role in the design and development of the CFN Website, will be responsible for the technical aspects of the Web Guide (assisting in designing key features and writing the html code).

Despite this division of responsibility, most of the above tasks will be worked on jointly by all three groups. Responsibility for certain tasks, such as developing a plan to keep the site current/up to date, may be shared equally by all of them. To facilitate communication, there will be a weekly meeting of key staff from each group.

The grant funds several presentations to disseminate Berger activities and accomplishments:

  1. At Tufts, Tisch staff will design and deliver a workshop for faculty who are interested in developing a webguide of their own. The workshop will have as its theme how to develop and apply evaluation criteria to websites
  2. In the Boston area, Tisch staff will offer to the Boston Library Consortium Program and Staff Development Committee a presentation for their First Tuesday program.
  3. Nationally, Tisch staff will propose to deliver a paper or make a presentation at the Association of College and Research Libraries, 2001 Conference.
  4. Child Development Department staff will present issues pertaining to development of the WebGuide criteria to SRCD, a national conference of child development scholars. Funding for preparing the presentations and for travel to the national conferences are included in the budget.

1998/99 Award Winner

The Electronic Bolles Archive on the History and Topography of London: Phase I

Gregory Colati, University Archivist
Gregory Crane, Classics
Carol Flynn, English
Rob Jacob, Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Holly Taylor, Psychology

Edwin Bolles assembled a substantial focused collection of materials -- 35 "full-size" and 320 more specialized maps, 400 books (284 linear feet of shelf space) and 1,000 pamphlets and a print "hypertext" linking Walter Thornbury's 3,000 page Old and new London, a narrative of its history, its people, and its places (London, New York, Cassell, Peter & Galpin [1872]) to c. 4,000 background images that all illustrate the history and topography of Victorian London, easily the most important city of its time. These materials include not only conventional print sources but many pieces that are unique or quite rare: folio descriptions of the city from limited print runs while the contemporary 19th century maps not only come in various shapes and formats but capture a precious (and now largely forgotten) record of how the British represented this city. The Bolles collection has long been one of the outstanding holdings in the university's special collections. Classes and scholars have been able to consult the maps and books in the Tufts libraries, but traditional access is problematic. Like many archival materials, the Bolles collection includes materials are not only irreplaceable but fragile -- many of the maps are in very delicate condition and can stand only limited direct handling. And even more than many archival materials, the Bolles collection would be, in some ways, more useful if published electronically than they are in print. Certainly, the collection, once digitized and published electronically, both on the Web and on CD ROM, would reach a much larger audience than it can in the Tisch vault. Even more intriguing, the digitized maps, linked to each other, to illustrations of the locations as they appeared at the time or at present and to relevant source texts would allow students of various levels to ask questions and explore problems not currently feasible.

We propose to begin the long term project of converting the print materials into the Electronic Bolles Collection. Our goal is to enter such information as can readily (and reasonably) be placed on line in a short period of time (e.g., scanning simple images and tagging some key texts) while making progress on more challenging problems (e.g., sophisticated ways to tag and manage the Bolles maps, entering the entire library of rare source materials). Digitizing the entire Bolles archive is a major endeavor that will require a number of years. The first year will allow us to provide both useful materials that can be published on-line. In subsequent years, we will focus on digitizing the rest of the collection, in particular the book and pamphlet collection. Our work in this first year lays the foundation for the much larger task that awaits (and has awaited Tufts in the three quarters of a century since we acquired this material).

Problems of Geography: Geographic Information Systems and Historical Worlds

Many of those attempting to study aspects of the past must explore the geography and topography of their periods. Using records to plot the varying mortality across the city during outbreaks of plague can, for example, uncover patterns of habitation, drainage and general social class. We propose to focus on the problem of reconstructing the London which authors ranging from Dickens to Arthur Conan Doyle imagined in their writings.

Many nineteenth century literary texts assume a intimate knowledge of the geography and material culture of Victorian England. Consider, for example, the following passages which open different chapters of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist:

The offense had been committed within the district and, indeed, in the immediate neighborhood of a very notorious metropolitan police office. The crowd had only the satisfaction of accompanying Oliver through two or three streets and down a place called Mutton Hill, when he was led beneath a low archway and up a dirt court into the dispensary of summary justice.
In the obscure parlour of a low public house in the filthiest part of Little Saffron Hill, a dark and gloomy den where a flaring gaslight burnt all day in the wintertime and where no ray of light ever shone in the summer, there sat, brooding over a little pewter measure and a small glass, strongly impregnated with the smell of liquor, a man in velveteen coat, drab shorts, half boots and stockings...

In each of the above passages a particular place in greater London not only locates the action but also, by its general character, sets the tone for the events which transpire. In each case, Dickens plays his imagined London off against the London which he shared with millions of contemporaries. The language alludes to a material culture shared by his "ideal" audience. The "dirt court" and especially the "flaring gaslight," "little pewter measure," and particular articles of clothing probe the reader for recognition to help bring these scenes to light. The particular locations -- "Mutton Hill" and "Little Saffron Hill" -- are geographic spaces with their own histories and associations.

Elsewhere we have routes through more elaborate geographic spaces. Thus, when the criminal Bill Sikes, having just murdered his companion Nancy, flees the city:

He went through Islington; strode up the hill at Highgate on which stands the stone in honour of Whittington; turned down to Highgate Hill, unsteady of purpose, and uncertain where to go; struck off to the right again, almost as soon as he began to descend it; and, taking the footpath across the fields, skirted Caen Wood and so came out to Hampstead Heath. Traversing the hollow by the Vale of Health, he mounted the opposite bank and, crossing the road which joins the villages of Hampstead and Highgate, made along the remaining portion of the heath to the fields at North End, in one of which he laid himself down under a hedge and slept.

This passage evokes a London sprawling in every direction -- the metropolis of the greatest empire in human history -- but still limited in scope. He rapidly finds himself in footpaths and heaths where the modern city has already absorbed the open space.

The Bolles Collection and the World of Victorian London

The Bolles collection contains a number of resources that can serve, not only singly but especially when electronically linked together, to help those living in the twenty first century reimagine the recently industrialized London of the nineteenth. In this first year, we can lay solid foundations for the comprehensive publication of the existing Bolles materials, placing on-line a number of tractable materials, developing samples of more ambitious work that can be done in the future and assessing the impact that an automatic Geographic Information System would have on how modern readers imagine Victorian London.

Maps of London from 1762 through 1895: Bolles collected maps of various kinds, each of which sheds its own distinct light on the period. Tourist maps, with popular sites or historical scenes, capture the (often very different) ways in which Victorians imagined London, past and present. The range of maps allows us to trace the expansion of the city over this century of explosive growth. Furthermore, rapid juxtaposition of comparable maps will not only allow us to trace consistent development but also find inconsistencies of these maps (e.g., the fact that a railroad or new building will appear quickly on some maps while others remain somewhat out of date), thus casting a window onto the quality of geographic data in the best surveyed space on earth.

The Bolles collection contains c. 80 "Tallis maps," a rough forerunner of modern yellow pages. These record the commercial occupants of each address, street by street, allowing us to track clusters of similar vocation (e.g., chandlers, butchers, tanners) and thus to explore patterns of specialization and decentralization within the city. Moreover, these Tallis maps include engravings of the facades of buildings, thus representing what someone would see on either side as s/he moved down the street.

First Year Goals:

  1. We will scan in as many maps as possible, storing them at the highest possible resolution as simple images. A general map of London scanned at 72dpi may not include enough detail to be very useful. The archival scanned image -- which, at 600 dpi, could exceed 100 mbytes per map -- is far too big to download. We will need to develop or ideally reuse a simple system whereby users with standard systems attached to moderate speed Web connections can navigate through high resolution images.
  2. We will correlate each scanned map with a single modern "base map" of London. Inevitably, the maps that we scan will differ slightly in scale, projection or orientation. Placed one on top of the other, they will not quite line up. We will use a modern map as a "base map," then line up each 19th century map according to a number of fixed points (e.g., we will be able to correlate the top of the dome of St Paul's, the northwest corner of the Tower, the intersection of London bridge and the city at the seaward corner etc. on each map). This will allow users to flip through one map after the other, browsing the different representations of the city in a way not currently feasible.
  3. We will begin work on integrating the Tallis maps into a 3D browsing environment so that we can see how effective this data would be in developing virtual tours of the period.

Images of London and of British life: The Bolles Collection includes thousands of contemporary images illustrating the environs and, equally important, society of Victorian London. Illustrations include not only engravings, some early color prints of water colours, and other representations of well known buildings and places but, equally important, scenes from daily life: an attendant at a homeless shelter reading the Bible to the occupants before they drift off to sleep, a half dozen men working in a distillery, wading waste deep in a huge vat full of malt, which they stir with oars, an opium den in which men and women both languidly recline with pipes in hand. These images include not only large scale social formations but also countless details (e.g., articles of clothing like Bill Sikes' "velveteen coat" or "flaring gas lamps").

Almost a century ago, Bolles arranged roughly 4,000 images into a paper hypertext. As if anticipating the conventions of Web publication, he underlined passages in a 3,000 page history and description of the city of London and its immediate environs. Each "link" indicates that Bolles had pasted one or more illustration relevant to the underlined phrase. These illustrations include not only drawings but illustrated newspaper, magazine and book articles about people, places, customs and other realia.

First Year Goals:

  1. We will enter the 3,000 page description of London and its environments, creating links between the topics described and our base map of London. The reader should be able to select a region of London and then find out what the 3,000 page description has to say about this area. Likewise, anyone reading a section of this description should be able to plot the section being described on a map. The text will be tagged according to the TEI Guidelines and stored as SGML text.
  2. We will scan in all 4,000 images that Bolles linked to the text. We will also begin the much larger task of scanning in relevant images from the 400 books on London's history and topography in the Bolles collection.
  3. Many images of contemporary London are available on the Web and we therefore can rely on existing materials to illustrate the present appearances of many locations. We have therefore budgeted for a modest photo expedition to collect images specifically for the Bolles archive. Because the Perseus Project maintains a professional digital photographer and owns the necessary equipment, we can accomplish a great deal for modest amounts. Maria Daniels, image curator for the project, will supervise not only digital photography but the creation of Quicktime VR panoramas and other visualization tools.

A Library of books on the history and topography of London: The 3,000 PAGE HISTORY, which Bolles converted into a "paper hypertext," is the obvious starting point for our work, but all 400 books in the Bolles collection should all ultimately be placed on-line as an integrated library on 19th century London. The combined text and illustrations are often invaluable. Inns of Court not only contain illustrations but also describe in detail the ritualized life within this central, but eccentric, microcosm. Progressive books such as Ragged London (1861), London Labour and London Poor (1861) and The Seven Curses of London (1869) provide a contemporary perspective on the problems of class and poverty (and provides an extraordinary companion to the world described by Dickens). A thirteen part 1872 Harper's Weekly supplement about London includes not only engravings by Gustave Dore but also a range of brief textual articles as well, allowing us to see how London was converted into textual spectacle for the American imagination.

First Year Goals:

  1. To do an initial survey of the collection: We need a basic inventory of the materials, including an estimate of the total volume in terms of pages, megabytes of textual data, and number (as well as overall "square footage") of images. This will provide the necessary foundation for plans to digitize the collection as a whole.
  2. To enter some of the more interesting materials: We will select a small number of materials to be fully digitized.

The Bolles Collection as an integrated whole: The Bolles collection consists of a set of thematically related, but physically separate, print materials. The collection allows individual researchers to do research both by studying individual and by making connections between documents. In an electronic environment, we can not only automate but can transform this process. Not only will readers be able to call up books, illustrations and maps by "call number," but we will be able to generate automatic hyperlinks that connect subsets of individual documents together. Thus, phrases such as "Mutton Hill" and "Little Saffron Hill" will be automatically tagged as toponyms. Clicking on these phrases would allow readers to locate these places on the map, view a list of illustrations, find sections in Bolles works with these phrases in their titles or search the full Bolles collection (including both narrative text and headers).

First Year Goals:

  1. We will begin developing a master list of toponyms. The basic data structure would simply list NAME (e.g., "St Paul's") and GEOGRAPHIC LOCATION (e.g., a coordinate). We can build up the list of toponyms by entering indices and lists in the Bolles collection. The coordinate scheme is more complex: while we can treat every object as a point for crude work, such an approach is problematic for coding the Thames or streets, and even individual buildings should ideally be represented as polygons. On the other hand, our resources are limited and we will need a simple system on which to build. Ideally, we will be able to use an existing Geographic database of London as our base data set, but we need to evaluate what exists. Since our maps will include buildings and even streets that no long exist, we will in any event have to create "overlays" that modify the content of any database on contemporary London.
  2. While our emphasis will be on creating the underlying infrastructure for studying the history and topography of London, we also need to explore and to demonstrate the actual ways in which such a system will be used. To do this, we will develop cross references between an initial set of on-line literary texts and the Bolles materials: at present we plan to work on at least one novel by Dickens (probably Oliver Twist), several Sherlock Holmes stories, and selected poems that reference Victorian London. The questions that we raise as we annotate these texts will help us from the start determine the structure of the on-line Bolles collection. These texts will then, when published on the Web, allow people to see how they might use the Bolles materials themselves. Our goal will be to make the electronic Bolles collection become a primary reference source, to which many other documents will have links: we hope to see editions of other nineteenth century novels posted on other sites that also have links to the Bolles archive.

The Electronic Bolles Collection, Teaching and Research

The Bolles collection promises to provide new teaching and research opportunities for an unusually wide range of Tufts faculty.

Gregory Crane, Professor of Classics and Winnick Family Professor of Technology and Entrepreneurship, has a long standing interest in the design of digital libraries for the humanities in general and in the application of GIS in particular. His Perseus Project will provide much of the technical infrastructure for the Electronic Bolles Collection. The problems of representing Victorian London reflect and extension of, and grow naturally out of, projects on historically situated texts ranging from Thucydides and Caesar up through Francis de la Barca Calderon's 1846 Life in Mexico.

Carol Flynn, Professor of English, teaches courses that explore the relationship between the city of London and English literature of the 18th and 19th centuries. She is teaching an interdisciplinary course. "Comparative Perspectives on the Early Modern City: ENgland and Japan" with Professor Gary Leup of the History Department. This course, which compares the uses of urban space in 18th century London and Edo, will benefit greatly from an electronic version of the Bolles collection. She is also writing a book on representations of eighteenth-century London and the construction of early modern urban space.

Rob Jacob, Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, works on computer human interaction. The EBC will provide him with an opportunity to study the problems of relating rich and complex data together in a seamless fashion. Professor Jacob will contribute to the initial design of the interface. The EBC will in turn provide him with a topic for his own research and for subsequent grant proposals to external agencies.

Holly Taylor, Assistant Professor of Psychology, does research in the areas of text comprehension and spatial cognition. The EBC will provide her with an environment in which she will be able to study the effect of linking geographic information to literary texts and of different interfaces into the geographic data. The EBC will provide her with a powerful Tufts project on which to base grant applications to external agencies such as the National Science Foundation.

Technology Transfer

This project will transfer technology in two basic ways.

  1. The Special Collections department will learn how to create TEI conformant SGML Facsimile editions of its materials. In addition, they will also learn how to utilize geographic information systems technology in general and the GIS lab in Tisch in particular.
  2. The participants in this project will run a series of workshops/presentations on various aspects of the project. This will include technical issues (e.g. particulars of scanning and formatting) and broader topics (e.g., how the Bolles Electronic Archive supports teaching and research in many disciplines, that include humanities, social sciences and engineering.) These workshops will be aimed at the library staff, the Tufts community and interested members of the Boston Library Consortium.

1997/98 Awards

Digital Practicum: A Database and Website on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Richard III

Gregory Crane, Department of Classics
Kevin Dunn, Department of English
Laura Walters, Head of Collections, Tisch Library

We have worked with Tisch library staff to develop this proposal for a collaborative project that brings librarians together with two core departments within the humanities, Classics and English. This project will build on existing strengths -- the presence at Tufts University of the Perseus Project and its on-going expansion into Roman and Renaissance English materials -- and will contribute to the foundation of a new university effort, a Center for Humanities and Technology. The outcomes of this work will combine tangible results -- a nascent Website on two plays of Shakespeare widely read at both the secondary school and college level -- while at the same time providing Tufts librarians with new skills and opening up new possibilities for further projects in the future. Support from the Berger Endowment will allow us to capitalize on work already done, strengthen the case for other major proposals now under consideration, and strengthen the ability of faculty and librarians to develop new projects in the future.

I. Background and Rationale

The technical background of this project goes back to 1982, when Professor Crane first began developing full-text retrieval software for a major full text database. In 1985, he founded the Perseus Project, now one of the oldest digital library projects in existence. Research and Development at Perseus have always moved in two complementary tracks. First, Perseus has always been concerned with fundamental issues raised by electronic publication: it is clearly not enough simply to transfer our print journals and monographs to electronic form. We need to rethink the way we write and compose our ideas if we are to take full advantage of the new possibilities (and minimize the limitations) of electronic media. Two of Perseus's most recently funded initiatives point in this direction. This year Perseus is beginning a three year FIPSE (Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education) Funded Project (the second FIPSE Grant that Perseus has received) to develop exemplary new publications and editorial processes in the humanities. In December, we hosted an NSF sponsored workshop on electronic publication in the History of Science, with a mandate to help both historians of science and the NSF (National Science Foundation) better understand how to use the technology for research and publication.

In the humanities, however, standards are hard to evaluate without large bodies of data: to determine whether the structures that we have developed are effective, we need to test them with substantial bodies of data. Perseus therefore chose to concentrate initially on one interdisciplinary, but coherent, domain, Ancient Greek culture. After spending a decade developing a core of materials on Ancient Greece, Perseus began to expand into contiguous areas, beginning with the History of Science and Roman Civilization. Perseus has now begun moving into the English Renaissance, developing cross-departmental ties with the Department of English and beginning to develop an interdisciplinary foundation for a Center for Humanities and Technology. Grants from the Arts and Sciences Research Fund and from the Provost's office allowed us to develop an electronic critical edition of the works of Christopher Marlowe. This is accessible on the World Wide Web, but it is not simply a Website with HTML texts. All the documents in the edition are encoded in Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) in conformance with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines. All texts are accessible by standard citation schemes, more than twenty different editions have been collated and each edition can be generated dynamically. Although still under development, the Marlowe site constitutes a major new edition and contribution to scholarship.

In the past six months, activity in English Renaissance at the Perseus Project has accelerated. On July 1, Professor Crane submitted a $1,500,000 proposal to the NEH Access and Preservation Program to begin work on a major library of Renaissance Source Materials. Professor Crane and Hilary Binda, a PhD candidate in English, just completed a course called "Literary Texts on the Web," focusing on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. On October 1, Professor Dunn submitted a $500,000 proposal to the Teaching with Technology program at NEH. This proposal would support a series of seminars for secondary school teachers and college instructors and the development of a linked series of Websites on English Renaissance Literature. The work proposed here, if supported, will be reported to the NEH and may well enhance the projects in place. Furthermore, the continual development of a digital library and the technology outreach to secondary schools that these projects would facilitate will contribute to our on-going initiative to establish at Tufts a multipurpose Center for Humanities and Technology.

This proposed digital practicum for librarians would certainly enhance future proposals to NEH and other funding agencies and would help us begin to address a competitive disadvantage that we have faced. Professor Dunn's proposal went head to head against a very similar proposal from an English Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The Penn professor had been able to collaborate with a librarian and her proposal contained links to work that professor and librarian had done last spring. We are eager to pursue the project outlined here because we see it as a first step towards ever more productive faculty/library collaborations. In the humanities such collaborations are essential if we are to remain competitive with our peer institutions and to continue increasing our stature. The librarians who participate in the seminar we are proposing would play a vital role in the growth of the Center for Humanities and Technology (CHT), part of whose role it would be to coordinate such collaborations involving the electronic medium.

This project certainly comes at a key time for the nascent CHT. This center, endorsed as a university priority last spring, has awaited the arrival of a Vice President for Information Technology. With Bruce Metz in place, we can begin concrete planning for this center this spring. By pursuing this project, with its seminar for librarians, we will be able to determine much more effectively the role(s) that Tisch Library and its staff can play in this new Center. We believe that the library can play a strategic role here and are delighted to help our colleagues in the library begin expanding their skills.

Although we are faculty and not librarians, we see tremendous potential for the library as well. For instance, Tisch Library now has a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Lab. Although funded by grants for Environmental research, this laboratory lays the basis for core technology on which we will rely in explicating literary texts such as Julius Caesar and Richard III (where the relationship of the play and the many historical places that it cites is very hard to manage). In the seminar that we are proposing, a segment will be devoted to GIS. Each participant will leave the seminar with some hands-on experience with the systems in place at Tisch and will be in a much better position to help librarians, faculty, and students understand how they too can take advantage of GIS in their work.

II. Proposed Project

The seminar for librarians would cover a broad range of issues at the intersection of library science, electronic publication and scholarship in the Humanities. The outcome of the seminar would be multifold: librarians would learn a variety of new technologies that would expand their skills significantly, and, with a substantial amount of guidance and assistance from the Perseus Project, they would construct two Websites on Shakespeare, thereby contributing to the growing library of Renaissance materials already complete or underway at the Perseus Project: specifically, our site on Julius Caesar, started during the fall as part of the course Literary Texts on the Web, and our electronic edition of the complete works of Christopher Marlowe.

The Caesar and Marlowe sites include multiple versions of the primary texts and links between these and some of their source materials; the Marlowe site provides not only both versions of Doctor Faustus but the English Faust Book, the major source for the play, with links between all three texts. In addition, the Caesar site includes the parts of Sir Thomas North's Renaissance translation of Plutarch that are relevant to Shakespeare, a growing range of Greek and Roman materials about the historical Shakespeare -- including the complete Plutarch, Cicero's Orations and Letters, and other materials being prepared for the Roman Perseus. These two sites will provide the model upon which seminar participants will build as they work on expanding the Shakespeare site. The physical product will consist of TEI conformant SGML text (see below for further discussion) that serves as the basis for an interactive HTML WWW site. The resulting experiences, written guidelines, and exemplary materials will in turn help us teach similar courses, whether as part of the regular curriculum or as part of an externally funded initiative.

The seminar will be structured so that librarians can pursue their own interests, whether they be focused on the Renaissance, contemporary electronic technologies, or both. The seminar would begin with a month of 2 hour long seminars each week that would familiarize participants with the basic technologies they will use as the course progresses. During this introductory period, in addition to putting the text of JC/RIII on line, librarians will define focused and related projects they are interested in pursuing further (and that would add to the value of the sites) with the help of the instructor, Hilary Binda, and the Perseus Project Staff. They will then work on these projects with individualized assistance before reconvening in May for a final few weeks of classes. At this time each project will be gathered together, with the help of the instructor, as part of two sites, one on Julius Caesar and the other on Richard III.

For librarians participating in this seminar, the strategic issues are straightforward in outline, if complex:

What follows is a more detailed discussion of some of the major technological issues to be addressed in the seminar as well as some proposed individual projects that would add significantly to the value of the site as a whole.

The central technology that the seminar will cover, after a basic but practical overview of Hypertext Mark-Up Language (HTML), will be the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines for encoding documents in Standard Generalized Mark Up Language (SGML). TEI-SGML is a complex set of specifications, but it provides the best way currently available to represent electronic documents in a system independent, generic fashion so that they will be useful long after all existing systems and application software. The Perseus Project has been committed to SGML for more than a decade -- Professor Crane was on the NEH panel that recommended funding for the TEI almost a decade ago and he invested major amounts of staff time to creating SGML texts and in contributing to the development of TEI. [The benefits have already been tremendous: Perseus was able to convert its digital library from stand-alone CD ROM to the Web in large measure because its data was stored in generalized formats such as TEI conformant SGML.] No library system in the Boston area has yet emerged, as far as we know, as a center for expertise in TEI conformant SGML. This is an extremely valuable niche waiting to be filled. We hope that this proposed seminar will give Tisch and its librarians an opportunity to consider how they might be able to establish themselves as a center of this expertise and thus to attract major support in a variety of ways over the coming years.

All of the librarians will derive extended, shared, hands-on experience with core technologies such as SGML and GIS. These technologies will enable us to help readers look at the text in ways not readily practicable in print publication. We will use simple, but thorough tagging to let users make new connections within the text and without: e.g.

By way of developing this technical expertise, seminar participants will work collaboratively developing a Website, using the information-rich Variorum editions of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Richard III as their starting points and enriching these texts with additional materials that will prove interesting and useful for a wide internet audience. At a strategic level, our task is straightforward. The Variorum editions of Shakespeare are classic scholarly tools that have traditionally enjoyed a very limited audience. They are big, bulky and hard to use in print form, but their traditional usage belies their potential. The Variorum editions on which we propose to work summarize what critics have said about these plays over the course of three centuries (c. 1600-1900). In modern parlance, the Variorum editions of Shakespeare are "threaded discussions" that extend over an immense period of time and that have been carefully sifted and edited. Readers of the Shakespearean plays can thus listen in on a highly refined conversation, little touched by modern jargon, among major intellects.

The content of the Variorum editions has enormous potential utility not only for scholars but also for the vast number of high school students who plough through the plays in high school and college but who cannot readily see the many ways in which these plays can be read. The Variorum editions allow anyone to see what people have thought about broad issues (e.g., the character of Brutus or the culpability of Richard III) or individual scenes (does Richard's seduction of Lady Anne work? have audiences found Brutus's funeral oration compelling or dry?). Simply by placing the Variorum editions in an electronic environment, we believe that we can fundamentally redefine the relationship between their content and the wider world. While the Modern Language Association heroically makes copies of the Variorum editions available at $50 each (many academic publishers would charge $200-$300 instead), we also know that few college libraries and virtually no public or school libraries will have these books. A substantial and growing percentage of schools, offices and homes will have access to these materials if they are on the Web. By placing these Variorum editions on the Web, publishing them through lists, and linking them to the successful Perseus WWW site, we can reach a whole new audience: our experiences with classical Greek materials (with a much more specialized audience) suggest that new readers will include high school students in rural and urban schools, office workers during their lunch breaks, general readers of diverse ages in private homes and other non-traditional groups (e.g., active duty officers on far flung military bases).

In addition to putting these Variorum editions on-line, librarians will add projects if they so choose that will both allow them to enhance their own skills and enrich the growing site. The possibilities for individual projects are, of course, endless. What follows is a list of projects that we would like to see developed in time as part of our growing Renaissance site on Shakespearean Drama:

The format of the seminar we are proposing will be "hands-on," and will include both presentations and actual work in an electronic classroom (ideally, the library's MARC lab, if scheduling permits).

The seminar will consist of three main phases:

  1. Five weekly two-hour workshops in which all seminars receive an overview of the technology and in which they work jointly on the TEI conformant tagging of the Variorum JC and RIII as a group project. Peter Donaldson from MIT will be invited to discuss the work of his project hyper-linking texts to various video productions of Shakespeare; Neel Smith from Holy Cross will give a presentation on the uses of GIS and of ArcView within the study of the humanities, including literature, archaeology and the history of science.
  2. At the end of the initial five weeks, participants will design their own projects, whether individually or in small teams. This phase will last five to six weeks, with occasional group meetings and discussions taking place via a seminar listserv. Hilary Binda will work closely within individuals and teams as they do their work.
  3. The seminar will convene for a final two group sessions, during which participants will present their work and combine their projects into a single site.

Performance Measures

The Variorum Shakespeare editions do not reach a mass audience -- new editions are purchased by libraries and sell c. 1,000 copies. Our hypothesis is that this limited audience reflects more on the fact that the Vairorum editions are large and, though inexpensive as scholarly publications (c. $50), are too expensive to compete with small, inexpensive paperback editions. The Web-Variorum editions will, we hope, find their way into a much wider audience and will be assigned in classes at both K-12 and the college level.

The Web access logs that we maintain allow us to track such gross patterns of usage fairly well. We can keep track of how many users read how many pages of text, how often the on-line notes are consulted, where users come from (e.g., what percentage of hits come from *.edu sites vs. *.us sites, etc.). Our experience with the Web based Perseus makes it clear that it will take a year or so for usage to build -- much of the traffic on the Perseus site comes from links embedded in syllabi or surveys of classics materials on the Web. Nevertheless, analysis of use from June to December should allow us to see how usage is developing.

The individual/group projects developed by the seminar participants are more difficult to assess, since they will address a wider range of problems and technologies. Projects that explore less familiar technology may require more work and deliver more tangible results than technically less challenging work. Seminar participants will outline and share each others goals before they work and then evaluate their experiences after they have completed their work.

A Biologist's Guide to Library Resources

A Proposal submitted to the Berger Family Technology Transfer Endowment by the Department of Biology and the Tisch Library Reference Department

Project Co-Coordinators:

Sara M. Lewis, Department of Biology, Dana Labs (X3548: slewis1@tufts.edu) Regina Raboin, Reference Department, Tisch Library (X4221: RRaboin@infonet.tufts.edu)

BACKGROUND

The Biology Department has made an active commitment to educational technology as a vital component of enhancing the undergraduate learning environment at Tufts. As part of this commitment, we are seeking effective ways to integrate information literacy into the curriculum in both introductory and advanced biology courses. In the past several years, it has become increasingly important for biology students to be able to efficiently search and retrieve information from electronic databases, as well as to evaluate critically the resources they find for relevance and accuracy. However, in most courses little attention is given to effectively teaching students these key library research skills. We recognize that developing library research skills is a life-long endeavor, and the goal of this project will be to provide Tufts Biology students with a solid foundation on which they can continue to build these skills.

We already have begun efforts to integrate information literacy into the Biology curriculum through an exciting collaboration between Biology faculty member Colin Orians and several staff from the Reference Department of Tisch Library. During the 1996-7 academic year, this group produced an enormously successful on-line tutorial that teaches computer-based library research skills to freshman and sophomore students enrolled in our Introductory Biology course (>300 students per year). This course now includes a lab session devoted specifically to introducing students to library information resources, then guiding them through a web-based tutorial to find and access relevant primary, secondary, and web resources.

A brief history of our attempts to integrate library instruction into Introductory Biology is relevant here. During the first year of the new Introductory Biology lab (Biology 14: spring 1996), Colin Orians and librarian Laurie Sabol worked together to design a lab unit that would introduce students to library resources. Because of the large class enrollment, it was logistically impossible to run these sessions at the library; instead, reference librarians came to the classroom every day for a week to give two-hour presentations to each lab section (five sections with 32 students in each). These presentations included lectures, demonstrations, and an opportunity for students to do hands-on exploration. After evaluating students' responses, however, we were greatly dismayed to find that this lecture-demonstration approach to learning about library resources was very poorly received by students (see Figure 1, 1996 evaluations). We recognized that a different approach would be required, particularly since class size would be expanded to 11 sections in following years. We speculated that a web-based approach to introducing library skills to biology students might improve student satisfaction as well as learning. Laurie Sabol recruited several other library staff (Mark Humphrey, Jean McManus, and Regina Raboin), and Colin Orians to design and implement a Website that allows students to explore the library's resources at their own pace (http://www.tufts.edu/as/biology/classes/library/). This site includes a tutorial in which students are required to explore a biological topic of their own choosing using the research strategies and sources that they have learned about using the Web site As part of the lab exercise, each student is required to complete a worksheet identifying appropriate references for their chosen topic, and later to write and submit a short paper based on their library research. Although it took several months of concerted collaborative effort to design and implement, the Website earned much higher rankings in student evaluations than did the previous year's lecture- demonstration approach. Some student comments included:

"Since my interest is in the field of research, knowing how to use such resources is essential to my career."
"It forced me to learn more efficient ways to gather, interpret and discuss the information and results."
"One has the immediate opportunity to follow up on a suggestion and reinforce the indicated skill."

Clearly the web-based tutorial provides a markedly improved tool for teaching students how to find and access information. This experience now places us in an excellent position to improve and expand on this approach.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

This proposal to the Berger Family Technology Transfer Endowment would allow a team of Biology department faculty, Tisch librarians, and Information Technology Services (ITS) staff to expand and diversify this biology guide to library resources to provide an essential tool for numerous intermediate-level biology courses both here at Tufts and at other academic institutions. We propose to develop a new Website, called A Biologist's Guide to Library Resources, that would be based on substantive modification and expansion of the existing Biology 14 Website This Biologist's Guide would begin by providing a general introduction to biology-relevant library resources. Students enrolled in more advanced biology courses would then follow one of three newly-developed tutorials, each specifically designed to cover one of three major disciplinary subdivisions within biology: ecology & evolution, physiology & cell biology, and biochemistry & molecular biology. The design and writing of each discipline- specific tutorial would be done by teams of Biology faculty, reference staff, and student programmers working in collaboration. These discipline-specific tutorials would emphasize:

  1. advanced search strategies with links to databases
  2. descriptions and links to discipline- specific online journals
  3. links to discipline-specific web resources.

The two central goals of The Biologist's Guide are teaching students how to develop and hone effective search strategies to identify relevant sources, and teaching students how to critically evaluate these sources.

Each faculty member teaching intermediate-level Biology courses starting in Spring 1999 (including Human Genetics, Population and Community Ecology, Evolutionary Ecology, Environmental Biology, Conservation Biology, Immunology, and Neurobiology) would incorporate a Library Resources session into each class syllabus. During this session, students would first be introduced to the Biologist's Guide by a reference librarian, and then would begin a guided tutorial to learn advanced search strategies for electronic databases, learn about and access links to discipline-specific online journals, and explore an annotated guide to discipline- specific web resources. Faculty will develop specific course-related assignments to be completed by students, such as submitting a research worksheet and short research paper based on resources identified through the tutorial. In addition to using the Biologist's Guide in these academic year courses, we will encourage use of this resource in Tufts summer school courses, which include high-school students. We anticipate that once this guide becomes available, it will be used by both high school and college students at many other institutions.

EVALUATION

Evaluation of A Biologist's Guide to Library Resources will be accomplished by developing separate student and faculty evaluation forms to be used in all participating Biology courses. The existing Biology 14 evaluation form will be used as a model and modified as needed. The project team will meet to review these evaluations, and will discuss possible revisions and improvements based on both student and faculty evaluations.

OUTREACH TO LIBRARY STAFF AND OTHER FACULTY

To accomplish the Berger Fund goal of improving understanding and use of technology for all library staff, we plan to organize and sponsor two workshops. These half- day workshops will be held in the Electronic Resource Center, and will be open to Tisch library staff and interested Arts & Science faculty. The first workshop, scheduled for May 1998, will focus on Intelligent Website Design, and will be structured to introduce all participants to basic design principles, and allow our project team to focus their design planning. The second workshop, scheduled for October 1998, will focus on Advanced Web Searching Strategies, and is intended to provide training for both library staff and faculty in this area. Speakers for each topic will drawn from local experts and Tufts faculty. We anticipate that these workshops will not only contribute directly to the planning and implementation of A Biologist's Guide to Library Resources, but will also contribute to an understanding of these two crucial aspects of information technology to a much broader audience of library staff and A&S faculty.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

A Biologist's Guide to Library Resources would facilitate information technology transfer among library staff, faculty, and students in several innovative ways. First, these web-based tutorials would enhance the teaching role of the library while more efficiently using reference staff time. Second, project collaborations and workshops will facilitate understanding and use of information technology by library staff and faculty. Finally, this project would tremendously benefit Tufts students enrolled in a wide range of Biology courses by providing a well-organized, constantly accessible tutorial that teaches and develops library research skills for the information age.

When completed we anticipate that A Biologist's Guide to Library Resources will be of broad interest to Tisch Library staff and A&S faculty, as well as to librarians and faculty at other schools within the University. To publicize the project and discuss the technology involved, we plan a presentation in Spring 1999 that will discuss project planning and implementation, demonstrate the finished project, and present summaries of faculty and student evaluation data at the Tufts Center for Teaching and Advising (CENTA).

TIMELINE

We intend to begin planning and design work during late spring 1998, with the majority of HTML writing, editing, and revision taking place during summer 1998. During this time, we plan to hold weekly meetings to discuss site design and construction issues. We would like to begin using A Biologist's Guide to Library Resources in courses to be taught during Spring and Fall 1999.

PROJECT PERSONNEL

This project is designed as a collaboration between library staff and faculty, who will share responsibility for Website design and project supervision. The project team will also include two programmers with expertise in both HTML and Website design, and who will be responsible for all HTML coding. During summer 1998 weekly meetings will be held to discuss design planning, construction issues, Website evaluation, and revision.

Library:

Regina Raboin, Reference Librarian/Reference Collection Coordinator; project co- ordination; instructional design and supervision of coding; research and writing on library research strategies.
Laurie Sabol, Coordinator of Library Instruction/Faculty Outreach; consulting on library research strategies and sources.

Biology:

Sara M. Lewis, Associate Professor; project co-ordination & supervision of coding, general design consulting.

Ecology & Evolution Section
Colin Orians, Assistant Professor; tutorial design and writing.
Michael Reed, Assistant Professor: conservation biology Website identification and evaluation.

Physiology & Cell Biology Section
Eli Siegel, Professor; tutorial design, microbiology and human genetics Website evaluation.
Barry Trimmer, Associate Professor; tutorial design and neurobiology Website evaluation.

Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Section
Juliet Fuhrman, Associate Professor; tutorial design and writing, immunology & molecular biology Website evaluation.
Ross Feldberg, Associate Professor; tutorial design and writing, molecular modelling Website evaluation.

DELIVERABLES

At the completion of this project, deliverables will include Web site, links, and class assignments illustrating diverse ways to integrate A Biologist's Guide to Library Resources into courses.

Now at Tisch

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