Grants to fund digital library projects

Two new federal grants will fund digital library projects at Cornell

Cornell University Library has received two major grants for digital library projects from the federal government's Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

IMLS awarded Cornell $471,724 for a three-year project to collaborate with five other libraries and museums to develop and test the Global Performing Arts Database (GloPAD) and $281,449 for a two-year project to digitize early Western travel narratives from the library's John M. Echols Collection on Southeast Asia. IMLS is a federal grant-making agency that promotes leadership, innovation, and a lifetime of learning by supporting the nation's museums and libraries.

Global Performing Arts Database

Directed by Karen Brazell, Cornell's Goldwin Smith Graduate Professor of Japanese Literature and Theatre and professor of Asian studies, the GloPAD project is an outgrowth of Cornell's role in an international consortium of individuals and institutions committed to using digital technologies to create multimedia information resources for the study of the performing arts.

Associate University Librarian H. Thomas Hickerson will oversee the work of library staff from the division of Digital Library and Information Technologies and from Rare and Manuscript Collections in developing and maintaining the database. They will work with Brazell and her colleagues to test, evaluate and refine the current prototype metadata structure of GloPAD, which has been developed over the past three years, and to propose metadata standards to be used more widely in the field of performing arts. The five partner institutions on the project are the Museum of the City of New York, St. Petersburg (Russia) Museum of Theatre and Dance, San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum, Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre, and University of Washington Libraries.

As part of the GloPAD project, Cornell and the other institutions will digitize more than 2,000 items from their performing arts collections and create records based on the GloPAD metadata structure. They also will work together to design a series of tools -- including data entry templates, information managers, an online help system, and special user interface features -- that will be readily adaptable by museums, libraries and scholarly associations for use in developing their own digital performing arts resources.

For more information about the GloPAD project, visit www.glopad.org.

Images of Southeast Asia

Directed by Allen J. Riedy, curator of Cornell Library's renowned Echols Collection, the "Images of Southeast Asia" project represents the first large-scale initiative worldwide to create a digital collection of Southeast Asian library material. The resulting digital collection will comprise a significant representation of English language first-person accounts of life in Southeast Asia before 1927.

In collaboration with the library's divisions of Digital Library and Information Technologies and of Rare and Manuscript Collections, the full contents of 400 monographs and 150 periodical articles from the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society and Le Tour du Monde will be scanned and made available in a full-text database. The resulting digital collection will include some 140,000 pages of text and 10,000 illustrations taken from early Western travel narratives. A preliminary list of monograph titles to be digitized can be viewed at www.library.cornell.edu/Asia/guides/IMLS.html.

November 21, 2002