Organization > Committees > Digital Initiatives Advisory Group > Projects
Projects
The Union Catalog for Art Images
"The Union Catalog for Art Images (UCAI) Project will create a prototype database using bibliographic metadata and thumbnail images submitted by three partner institutions: the University of California, San Diego, the Fine Arts Library at Harvard University, and the Ingalls Library of the Cleveland Museum of Art. As the core metadata set seeding an extensible union catalog, the UCAI prototype database will bring together approximately 500,000 records describing art works and other images that were created in different systems using different structural and semantic standards. The prototype database will contain records with maximum thematic coverage and minimum degree of overlap."
See: http://gort.ucsd.edu/ucai/
Computational Linguistics for Metadata Building
"The goal of the project Computational Linguistics for Metadata Building (CLiMB) is to explore and develop computer-assisted strategies for extracting item-level metadata -- i.e., cataloging suitable for use in large-scale digital library collection projects -- from the body of existing scholarly monographic literature relating to those collections. This effort is an attempt to address the problem presented by the often prohibitive expense of creating detailed subject cataloging for items in the collections being digitized. This is especially true for the many unique image-based research collections that would be of significant scholarly and instructional interest if they were made available as part of the evolving national and international digital library.
The techniques to be developed in the CLiMB project thus offer the promise not only of improving the creation of descriptive metadata, but also of increasing access. Such metadata will be extracted from text which is in some way associated with an image, either explicitly or by topic. We will collect this metadata to explore its use for image collections. We propose a thorough and ongoing assessment of the metadata and an evaluation of its use within existing platforms.
The Columbia University project team is composed of an interdisciplinary group of librarians and computational linguists as well as research-oriented 'use experts' such as art curators, reference staff and selected faculty."
See: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cria/climb/
Visual Image User Study
"A team at Penn State University has conducted an extensive assessment project to estimate needs for interdisciplinary image delivery at this large and complex university. The 30-month Visual Image User Study (VIUS) is completed and has produced interesting data on the needs and preferences of academic image users. The VIUS project has prototyped and evaluated two services: a conventional image database and a more experimental peer-to-peer file sharing system for a digital media files. Although this research was confined to users at Penn State, a rigorous approach to assessment was employed so the results might prove useful to other academic institutions and software developers. This work was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation."
See: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/vius/
UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Lab
"The UCLA Cultural VR Lab was founded in 1997 by Prof. Bernard Frischer in collaboration with Prof. Diane Favro of the UCLA Department of Architecture.
The mission of the Lab is two-fold: to create authenticated 3D computer models of culturally significant sites around the world and to research ways of utilizing computer models in teaching, research, and commerce.
Differentiating the Lab from a typical graphics company is its commitment to the highest possible scientific accuracy and its ability to create models authenticated by leading scholars and cultural authorities. The first step in modeling a site is creation of a small Scientific Committee of the world’s leading scholars on the site. Only when a Scientific Committee is satisfied that a model is as up-to-date and accurate as possible is it considered finished and ready for release."
See: http://www.cvrlab.org/index.html
