Digital Library announces internal grants

Like many universities, KU has extensive museum and library collections, but visitors have to come to campus to see them.

In a move that will revolutionize the role of the libraries and museums, KU is beginning to digitize the collections so they will be accessible through the Web.

Beth Forrest Warner, director of the KU Digital Library Initiatives, recently announced the recipients of KU’s first internal grants program to support the creation or conversion of digital scholarly content for the Digital Library.

The new projects include online archiving of archaeological artifacts and photographs, recordings of an endangered language, Nigerian publications, 19th-century ocean expedition data, museum specimens and Kansas wildflowers.

Approximately $50,000 is provided for the grants program, which is funded primarily through student tuition enhancement funds. The program will increase the amount and scope of KU’s online scholarly information.

“The internal grants program is designed to assist faculty in creating online scholarly content that is unique to KU and to promote its use in teaching and research,” Warner said. “The program is one of three major initiatives of the Digital Library Initiatives and will help demonstrate and make more accessible the variety of research at KU.”

Warner said the six recipients were selected from a pool of 18 applications.

The successful projects demonstrated innovative approaches to presenting unique content, were likely to generate new uses of existing resources and were likely to be used across the academic community.

Digital Library Initiatives Internal Grant Recipients

Kansas City Hopewell Digitization Project
Mary J. Adair, Jeannette Blackmar and Scott Schackelford, Museum of Anthropology
Jack L. Hofman and Darcy F. Morey, Department of Anthropology
This project will support the digitization of archaeological artifacts and photographs from the Kansas City Hopewell collection. The term Kansas City Hopewell refers to a cultural expression that flourished from approximately 100 B.C. to A.D. 700 in the general vicinity of present-day metropolitan Kansas City. The KU Museum of Anthropology holds the largest and most significant collection of materials associated with this culture. Approximately 2,600 items will be digitized.

Digitization and Annotation of Endangered-language Data: the Papuan Ipili Language
Arienne M. Dwyer, Department of Anthropology
Frances Ingemann, Department of Linguistics (Emeritus)
Recorded largely during the 1960’s on reel-to-reel tape, these materials document Ipili, a minority language spoken in the highlands of western Papua New Guinea. The language itself is now becoming endangered due to outside influences. Collection materials to be digitized include reel-to-reel audio tapes, linguistic metadata, transcriptions and translations of the recordings, field notes and sketches, and photographic slides.

Stations of the Challenger Expedition Online
Daphne Fautin, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Robert Buddemeier, Kansas Geological Survey
Richard Clement, Spencer Research Library
This project will digitize data from the expedition of the ship H.M.S. Challenger, which brought into existence modern oceanography. More than 100 scientists identified specimens collected at 504 numbered sampling stations. The resulting inventories of species comprise most of the 49-volume Report of the Scientific Results of the Exploring Voyage of the H.M.S. Challenger during the Years 1873-76. The biological specimens were collected from stations, and data about these stations will be digitized and location charts will be scanned and linked to collection sample data.

Critical Knowledge: Digitizing Museum Specimens for Education and Research
Roger L. Kaesler and Alice Hart, Natural History Museum & Biodiversity Research Center
Through this project, virtual specimens of invertebrate fossils will be created so that they may be introduced into classrooms and teaching laboratories at KU and around the world. The images of these fossils will facilitate the development of new approaches to the history of biodiversity and the evolution of organisms faced with changing environments. This project will make this kind of images and information available for the first time on the Internet.

Establishment of the KBS Kansas Wildflowers Database and Related Online Information Resources
Edward Martinko, Theresa Crooks, Berry Clemens and Jennifer Delisle, Kansas Biological Survey
The project will focus on creating the Kansas Wildflowers Database and will establish the Kansas Flora and Fauna Collection, a core collection in the proposed Kansas Natural Sciences Digital Library (KNSDL). The database will be a searchable archive of color photographs and 35mm slides of Kansas wildflowers. This collection will be used to create an online Kansas Wildflowers Field Guide and a Lawrence Wildflowers guide and activities module.

Voices from the Bookstalls of an African Market: Digitizing Onitsha Market Literature
Elizabeth MacGonagle, History/African & American Studies
Ken Lohrentz, Libraries
The project will digitize engaging and amusing Nigerian publications, known as Onitsha market literature, that are in the Spencer Research Library collections at KU. This popular literature was published by local presses in the lively market town of Onitsha, an important commercial center in the Igbo-speaking region of Nigeria. The works, written in English, reflect the social ferment surrounding life in Onitsha a well as the wider West African creative scene.

To learn more about the KU Digital Library Initiatives, visit www.diglib.ku.edu.

Provided by Allison Rose Lopez for The Digital Library Initiatives, a division of KU Information Services