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Digital collections help globalize Wisconsin Idea
By Michael Worringer
Library Communications
Posted 11/6/2006
A 15-year-old home-schooled boy. College students in Illinois. The nephew of Bangladesh’s president.
This peculiar list of people has a common trait. They are all Wisconsin Idea recipients thanks to the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections.
In the mid- to late-1990s, the university’s digital collections began on a small scale. Initially, librarians were digitizing an assortment of collections for specific, targeted audiences.
“Digital libraries were a very new idea,” says UWDCC Head Peter Gorman. “At that time everybody that was doing this kind of work was doing it very much on a project-by-project basis – ‘Let’s take this book or this group of images and put it on the Web.’”
Today, however, it is quite different. Now the UWDCC is thinking big, satisfying the needs of a remarkably wide array of users who are accessing large but well-defined sets of content. These “umbrella projects,” such as the State of Wisconsin Collection and Ecology and Natural Resources, became necessary to provide the organization that keeps users from drowning in the UW System’s burgeoning ocean of digital material.
“We’ve gone from early exploration through high-impact projects to growing large collections,” Gorman says. “It’s a maturing that’s happened throughout the digital library world.”
During the maturation process of the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center, which officially was founded in 2000 as a system-wide initiative, the librarians have distinguished themselves in the world of digital libraries through their steady commitment to the Wisconsin Idea, the concept that the work done at the university level provides benefits for the state and beyond. In fact, one of the first online collections, the Wisconsin Electronic Reader – a compilation of mostly first-hand accounts from important events in the state’s history that was completed in 1998 in conjunction with the Wisconsin sesquicentennial – is still heavily used by schools around the state today.
Gorman is often surprised at the diverse populations, both in the state and beyond, that use the collections.
“That’s one of the greatest satisfactions of the job: to see uses of the material that we never dreamed of or to see that some fairly obscure things are finding audiences that we didn't know were out there.”
Audiences like a 15-year-old home-schooled Wisconsin student who used a UWDCC project – developed in conjunction with the University of Iceland to aid UW–Madison’s Department of Scandinavian Studies – to teach himself Icelandic; university classrooms in Illinois that are using the online text and audio of a UW professor’s modern translations of “Beowulf;” or even Shanawaz Kha, the nephew of Iajuddin Ahmed, a UW–Madison alum and current president of Bangladesh, who found his uncle’s picture while searching the collections.
“It’s great to see that even things that we think of primarily as local resources are truly global resources,” Gorman says. “Certainly we hoped that use of the digital collections would grow. It’s very gratifying to see those hopes fulfilled so dramatically.”
“The kind of interdisciplinary work that you can do in the online environment is really exciting,” Gorman says. “Things that are physically separated in the analog world we can bring together. People can discover relationships in a variety of content.”
University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center Head Peter Gorman, an accomplished musician, says he likes to search the Wisconsin Folksong Collection to find ideas for songs for his old-time music band, Slippery Lick.
“Something that is of research value to someone may be of recreational value to somebody else,” Gorman says. “My interests involve listening to polkas or some of the field recordings to get ideas for tunes to learn to play. For someone else, it’s a valuable ethnographic collection for research.”
Much like music tastes, digital collections are in a state of continual evolution. Gorman says he cannot predict the future of online collections, but he said he believes the biggest continuing challenge will revolve around how to get more content available to users more easily. Gorman thinks libraries are up to the task.
“It’s a great time to be a librarian,” Gorman says. “As a service organization, we’ve been able to adapt very readily to the information age. It’s a very natural transformation of what libraries have always been about: providing access to materials, helping users find materials, and taking care of the research and instructional needs of the university, and by extension, the state. I think libraries are more relevant than ever in the information age.”