University Times

A pin from the 1920s embossed with Josef Stalin’s head. A view of the Vezelay Benedictine Abby in Burgundy. The text of a speech delivered by former Pennsylvania Gov. Richard Thornburg. This is only a sampling of some from the online digital collections being created at Pitt.

Faculty are working with library curators to create web sites with their own cache of images, texts and audio and video streams.

Many of these large collections are mounted and hosted by the University Library System’s Digital Research Library (DRL) with some help and referrals from Pitt’s Center for Instructional Development and Distance Education.

According to DRL head Ed Galloway: “We’re building and hosting image collections, then we encourage faulty to use the collections in creative and innovative ways in class. Essentially we give faculty the tools to search, to view, to compare images.”

The digital library currently has four online image collections generated by faculty and their research (two are complete and on-line and two are in progress) and funded mostly by the library itself.

The number of projects will most likely continue to increase, according to Rush Miller, director of the University Library System. The DRL currently has 34 total image collections online.

“Since we created our Digital Research Library six years ago, we have had as a major goal to build expertise and infrastructure to allow us to mount digital content created by our faculty for their use in teaching and research, and to make that content available to their faculty colleagues around the world,” Miller said.

Major faculty projects include Vezelay Benedictine Abbey and Visuals for Foreign Language Instruction, both of which are online at http://images.library.pitt.edu/.

Other DRL image collections recently available online include:

-The George Washington Manuscripts at Pitt includes nine actual letters from Washington.

-The Jack. B. Yeats Broadsheets Collection, 1902-03 features the work of William Butler Yeats younger brother.

Web sites in progress at DRL are:

-“Stalinka” is devoted to a visual history of Josef Stalin, coordinated by professor of Slavic languages and literatures Helena Goscilo.

– Galloway is working with Allison Stones, professor of history of art and architecture, on an image collection of the Cathedral of Chartres, France. They already have completed the smaller image collection on Vezelay Benedictine Abbey in Burgundy, which the University of Leeds, England, plans to use in a class.

-The Thornburg collection entails mounting and describing thousands of speeches, news releases, plus scads of photos, audiovisual materials, transcripts and other materials. Completion is expected in spring 2005.

-The library is in the process of digitizing 37 books from Pitt’s East Asian Library under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Typical classroom use of an image collection works like this:

Students enrolled in an art history class are assigned to compare and contrast two sculptures in Vezelay. They first either go to their CourseWeb site or directly to the library’s web site, click a link and are immersed in the Vezelay collection, made up of some 94 images – photographs taken by Allison Stones. The library mounted the photos and information, installed search-engine software on the site and gave it a home in Pitt’s digital library.

“It’s up to the instructors to dive into those collections and extract relevant pieces for that day’s lecture and course assignment,” Galloway said.

The process of preparing a couple hundred images of a French cathedral or Josef Stalin to accommodate a Google-like search engine is complex and time consuming.

“Metadata creation,” which is the categorization, labeling and decision-making for the function of information, is the tough part, Galloway said. Labeling each image or sound bite with accurate information is the most consuming part of mounting an educational web site, he said.

One thousand images means 1,000 descriptions – which contains words that tag images for recall later.

“It takes time, effort and money,” said Stones of the web site building process. “We could do more if we had more research assistants to scan and tag. It digs holes in personal research time. I think it should be better supported. But working with Ed has been super.” Stones is working with Galloway on a new collection of about 1,500 slides of the Chartres Cathedral outside of Paris, which is renowned for its architecture, sculptures and stained glass.

The project entailed hiring a research assistant to write descriptions of the slides, titles, dates — filling in about 20 fields. The fields become tags that identify the images for different searches.

“Allison came up the fields, using standard descriptive elements of art and architecture,” Galloway said. Stones then gives the database to Galloway and he imports the descriptive fields into the library’s system, indexes the fields and scans the images, which are loaded into the system as high-resolution images.

“You can zoom in on details in photographs. When Allison wants to zoom into a window pane, she can highlight it and talk about it.”

Goscilo’s site devoted to the images of Stalin will offer scholars the opportunity to study the historical and cultural aspects of his leadership. And Goscilo says she believes strongly in the power of images to teach: “Our culture is becoming increasingly more visual.”

She is working with Susan Corbesero, a history instructor who teaches a course about Stalin.

For Goscilo, the time needed to build the web site goes beyond scanning images; she also spends a lot of time securing the rights to use the images. “I go to Russia all the time and contract to buy the rights to photographs, posters, paintings, objects such a pins, plates, embroidery – all with Stalin’s face,” she said.

And there’s much to choose from, Goscilo said. For example, there are at least 200 portraits alone of Stalin available.

So far, she’s secured the rights for about 200 photos, 150 pieces of artwork, 150 posters and other media.

And many of the depictions of Stalin invite scholarship, Goscilo said. “In the 1930s, Stalin dressed very sloppily. His mustache was messy. But after World War II, he looks sanctified, there’s the iconography like that of a saint. No book provides these kinds of visuals.”

Creating more image collections for scholarship is a challenge for Pitt’s library system, according to ULS’s Miller. “We stand ready to work with any faculty member or group of faculty members to assist them in professionally creating digital content to be utilized and shared in the academy.”

-Mary Ann Thomas