Assigned Reading 5 Imaging Pittsburgh

I found this article to be very interesting--it even got me to thinking about my area of interest.  It was interesting to read about this grant project that linked 3 different institutions together.  Also some of the issues, problems and solutions that they had to work out in order to make this project go.  It was interesting in the fact, that as of the date of the article, they were still working out ways to make the website better.

Points that i found the most interesting was the plan that the groups had to work as a collaborative group in order to design their Web gateway for public access.  As with any group, there were the problems of communication--either being too busy or just knowing what they were doing.

Selection--using guidelines to help each institute choose which images to select for digitization.

Metadata--having to agree what is in the interest of the project vs. the interest of the institute.  Controlling the data to be used in a wide vs. local needs.

Workflow--getting an agreement within the institutes to not only look at their practices and methods of curating but also looking and idea exchanging to come up with better and new ideas.

Web site challenges--to develop copyright and permission statements.  To develop an email response for the answering of technical problems and content questions.  Also continue to work with creative ideas to users explore the site.

This is like any other project--the more people that are involved, the more the participants have to listen, give their expertise and be willing to compromise in order to have the best project that can be developed.