Rotch Library Image Use Cases
Case 1: Summary:
A faculty member in CAVS (Center for Advanced Visual Studies) requests that student projects for a course taught once per year, Give Me Shelter, Conditions of Living in Unstable Times.(4.381/4.366) be made available in Dome. The course is an advanced visual design studio. As part of the requirements for the course, the students design and build structures that address a design problem. They also document their projects using a variety of file formats available to them, including videos, images, PDF and Powerpoint. Any given project could have a project proposal (text or PDF file, which could contain images), project presentation (text and/or Powerpoint which includes images, video), final project documentation (text, PDF file, video, images, etc.) The CAVS professor assumed that the projects could be loaded into the Stellar course management system alongside the other documents she makes available to the students for the course. She then learned that Stellar does not archive files past the current semester in a way that would facilitate future access. Her investigation then led her to consider how Dome, as an institutional repository dedicated to preserving resources for long-term storage and access, could fit her needs.
*Challenges and issues:
- Dome currently accepts specific file formats, TIFF and JPG; however Dome is built on the D-Space platform, which accepts PDF and other file formats.
- Copyright for this type of student-generated creative content. Do the students hold CR for their work? What about parts of the project where images are incorporated for which they have not gotten permission?
- Cataloging: the projects are more like publications (author, title, date, etc.) which include images
Case 2: Summary:
A librarian has been working with scholars around the world to accept donated images of historical and contemporary sites of Hyderabad,India. Working together, RVC staff and the librarian created metadata for each of the approximately 1400 high resolution images*.* It is expected that additional images will be donated. Each donor who contributed photography for which they own the copyright submitted a signed release giving MIT Libraries and the ArchNet Digital Library permission to publish the images online in a digital repository, accessible worldwide. The images have been described with item-level cataloging and all currently reside in Dome, for easy access to the MIT community.
*Challenges and issues:
- Dome allows access only to MIT; this is due to the fact that MIT does not have permissions to publish all of the content in Dome; a significant portion of the images in Dome have copyright; the Fair Use clause of the copyright Act allows for the MIT Libraries to create copies for educational purposes, made available in a secure environment to the MIT community. The donating scholars expect to have full access to the images of Hyderabad.
- The ArchNet Digital Library could be the vehicle for delivering the 1400 images to audiences outside of MIT. It would take programming staff to assist with the import of the images and metadata.