Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors
Column written by Jamie Rogers, Assistant Director of Digital Collections at Florida International University and John Nemmers, Associate Chair, Special and Area Studies Collections at the University of Florida Smathers Libraries

During the last two decades digitization initiatives in libraries, museums, and archives worldwide have sprung up en masse. Today, as new digital collections are created, and older collections mature, questions about discovery and use become increasingly important. It is no longer enough to merely create digital archives as passive databases of content. The stewards of these digital archives are now looking at new ways for patrons to find and interact with collections. Trends in federal funding for digital projects also point to this paradigm shift.

Starting in 2012, the University of Florida (UF) and Florida International University (FIU) launched two very similar initiatives to provide new modes of access to existing collections, including spatial and temporal searching capabilities. Both of these projects, UF’s Unearthing St. Augustine’s Colonial Heritage, and FIU’s Coral Gables – Virtual History, were built upon existing local partnerships and a common software platform with the intent of engaging the local communities and serving a broad audience with cross-discipline content.

Coral Gables – Virtual History is a suite of digital library tools that allow patrons to discover the city through a collection of thousands of digital artifacts and virtual tours.  Patrons may use a Google Maps interface to navigate to any point in the city at a selected time period (e.g. the Biltmore Hotel from the 1920s to 1940s), and experience the city as it was, through a wide variety of cultural and historical materials. The collection currently hosts over 10,000 digitized and rectified maps, architectural drawings, property parcels, photographs, documents, books, and ephemera. These materials have been spatially registered to their relevant locations and time. A series of historic maps have also been digitized and may be overlaid on a Google Maps interface. The transparency of the maps can be adjusted to see the changes in landscape that have taken place over time (http://maps.fiu.edu/cgm/cgmCollections.htm).

Coral Gables Virtual History – Users may search and browse with facets on the left side of the screen. On the right, a map displays points associated with the digitized materials. As users select a point on the map, the list on the left updates to display materials related to that location.

Coral Gables Virtual History – On the right side of the screen, users may select from a list of historic maps to overlay on the Google Map interface. Users may also adjust the transparency of the overlaid maps.

The second part of this project is a system that allows patrons to explore the landmarks of the city through a virtual tour, which includes an audio narration and 3D simulations providing the façade of historic buildings and landscape (http://maps.fiu.edu/cgm/cgmTour.html).

Coral Gables Virtual History – The virtual tour provides images and information about each landmark on the left side of the screen. Landmarks may be added to a queue to generate a tour of the city. When the tour is activated, an audio narration will play at each landmark while the tour route is traced on the map and 3D images of the landmarks are displayed in Google Earth.

Currently, Coral Gables – Virtual History is beginning the second round of funding and Phase II of a six-year cycle funded by the City of Coral Gables. During this phase, the team plans to expand system functionality to include bicycle and pedestrian routes for the virtual tour and crowdsourcing capabilities. Phase II will also include an animated 3D display of development of the city over time and the incorporation of property records and drawings in the collection. All of the new tools will be created with a responsive, mobile friendly design, with the exception of the 3D display.

This project was made possible through a number of partnerships including the FIU Digital Collections Center, FIU Geographic Information Systems Department, FIU Department of Landscape Architecture, the UF Digital Collections and an Advisory Board consisting of museum professionals, archivists, library professionals, GIS experts, architects, and city officials.

The Unearthing St. Augustine’s Colonial Heritage (http://ufdc.ufl.edu/usach) project at UF is a 3-year project (2012-15) to create an interactive digital collection of over 10,000 architectural drawings, photographs, maps and documents relating to colonial St. Augustine. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the project will be completed in summer 2015 coinciding with the 450th anniversary of the founding of the city. As the oldest continually inhabited colonial settlement in the continental U.S., St. Augustine includes dozens of buildings and sites dating from the colonial era.

For several years, UF has been scanning its numerous holdings relating to the city’s architectural heritage and making these resources available in the UF Digital Collections (http://ufdc.ufl.edu). The current project brings together primary resources in history, architecture, historic preservation, archaeology, anthropology and geography, dating from the 16th century to the present. In addition to the UF George A. Smathers Libraries, partners include the City of St. Augustine Archaeology program, the St. Augustine Historical Society and FIU, which is providing programming and systems support for the project. The project advisory board includes archivists, historians, librarians, GIS experts, architects, archaeologists and city officials.

As with the Coral Gables project, the St. Augustine website will provide searching and browsing functionality in a Google Maps interface, with the ability to select a specific structure and view all associated digital objects. The site also will allow users to limit search results to specific time periods (e.g., Spanish or British Colonial). Historic maps will be overlaid on the Google map, and by adjusting the transparency researchers will be able to compare features over time.

Future activities will focus on St. Augustine’s non-colonial periods (e.g., Gilded Age development), using crowdsourcing to generate descriptive content or geospatial metadata, and historical tour features. Both UF and FIU will continue to advance these digital projects and explore improved ways for researchers to discover and interact with resources. These projects can serve as models for other cities or regions interested in access systems with geographical and/or temporal technologies.

Article submitted by Jesse Vestermark, Architecture and Environmental Design Librarian, California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo

Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors

Editor’s note: The article which follows discusses a challenging situation for faculty in the design disciplines and librarians alike: how to gear students in large introductory classes up for doing college-level research during a brief, one-time library instruction session. Our colleague Jesse Vestermark shares some strategies for maximizing the impact of these “one-shot” scenarios.  

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have received a lot of attention in the last few years, but what about large, in-person “one-shot” sessions?  These are instructional scenarios where a professional–in our case, librarian–is given the one-time opportunity to address a large introductory course.  Obviously, the larger the course, the more students a librarian can reach in one fell swoop, so there is much to be gained by carefully planning for the greatest impact.

As the librarian for the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, I have become something of a trial-by-fire veteran of this scenario, co-designing the course’s research assignments for our pass/fail Introduction to Environmental Design (EDES 101) course, which has ballooned from 300 students in 2011 to over 400 last fall.  Each year a different professor has taught the course and driven the assignment’s primary content, while I steered it in a direction that would provide a foundation for research fundamentals.

The first year, we devised what was easily the most complicated assignment, yet ironically towards the simplest end: to find a single book in the library on the topic of their interest.  However, for fear of bottlenecking on certain topics, authors, architects or books, the professor suggested a clever matrix puzzle for groups of 5 to solve by limiting their topic to a combination of discipline and first initial.

Example of a completed matrix puzzle using randomly chosen initials. Concept by Thomas Jones.

Once they identified a book on their topic, they weren’t required to check it out–simply photograph it sitting in the stacks. This made for an easy deliverable, but explaining the concept behind the matrix and shepherding 300 students into groups of five required a lot of work for the simple outcome of familiarizing them with the library’s organization.

In 2012, we went interactive, focused more on critical thinking, and expanded my participation to two class meetings, giving us the opportunity to expand in depth.  The first time I addressed the students, we covered the nuts and bolts of our discovery system–the recent makeover of our catalog that allowed them to find books and articles.  They were again allowed to pick their topic, but instead of a photo of a single book in the stacks, the professor had them find and cite nine sources:  three books, three articles, and three websites.

The instructor had also required the students to purchase remote voting devices commonly called “clickers” to allow the students to weigh in, multiple-choice-style, on class topics.  For the second session, students were asked use the clickers to rate various types of sources or source characteristics on a “spectrum of reliability” both in their own experience and along with a librarian/professor “live” discussion of academic resources such as trade articles, peer-reviewed articles and architecture firm websites.  This was a crucial step towards imparting the lifelong skill of critically evaluating information sources.

Visual representation of the results of the “spectrum of reliability” interactive exercise.

Last year, with a third completely different assignment, we were able to ramp up the depth of real-world source evaluation even as I was again limited to one class visit.  This time, students were asked to role-play and engage as a team in local mock-planning projects, representing either the city, the public, expert consultants or the design team.  I took the opportunity to focus most of the hour on explaining the clues, characteristics of and differences between the range of reliable sources their role-playing might lead them to encounter, including academic, professional, government documents as well as free information found via search engines. For example, the city might look at the general plans of other, similar cities, consultants may study more of the peer-reviewed literature, the public might start with free, web-based information and the design team may look at a little of everything.   I incorporated diagrams and images to illustrate universal concepts such as “stakes” and “biases” as they relate to the professions.  To illustrate stakes, I compiled the images on an “information timeline” using photos to illustrate that immediate Google results are adequate for settling pop culture debates but as the responsibilities and consequences of one’s professional life increase, so should the quality of the resources one consults.  For biases, I used the classic blind men and the elephant story.

Digitized version of original woodcut print “Blind Monks Examining an Elephant” by Hanabusa Itch_ available from the Library of Congress with “no known restrictions on publication in the U.S.”

We even examined the fine print of Wikipedia’s “Identifying reliable sources” page, which generalizes that the higher the degree of scrutiny, the more reliable a source is likely to be.

Instead of having the students use clickers to vote on the relative reliability of potential sources, I used mobile polling software, PollEverywhere, for which our library subscribes to a single higher-ed account that allows up to 400 respondents and instructor moderation.  Using PollEverywhere, I essentially gave them a three-question pretest and posttest assessment on appropriate source choices for different research scenarios.  I gave the students one of ten source choices, and the scenarios varied from seeking an at-a-glance overview on a topic to needing information that had been reviewed by experts.  The results suggest they listened and took my professional advice to heart.  For example, when asked the “best place to get detailed information that has been subject to expert editorial review” and given ten options, only about 35% of the 243 respondents chose “peer-reviewed publications” the first time around.  When asked the same question at the end of the class, exactly two-thirds of the 159 respondents chose “peer-reviewed publications.”

PRE-LECTURE:

POST-LECTURE:

Note from the reduced number of respondents that I found that when you request voluntary participation, their interest in voting wanes over the course of an early-morning hour.

Some of the keys to success in the evolution of these collaborative lessons were pretty straightforward, but not necessarily easy to execute with little face-to-face time and lots of students.  My primary advice is to plan ahead, collaborate, simplify, be flexible, interact with the audience, visualize, and practicalize.  I would also encourage a combination of humor, passion and variety while maintaining your professionality.  We all have strengths and weaknesses on those fronts, but above all, I’ve found that if I treat the material with earnestness, the students respond in kind.