We’re excited to roll the project out in the winter semester, but until then, you can read our White Paper to learn about what motivated the project, how it was conceived, and some lessons learned along the way.

WSULS Digital Learning and Development Environment White Paper

Stay tuned for future faculty workshop dates later in the Fall ‘09 semester and instructional videos–they’ll be announced here.

VRC Faculty Workshop Slides

VRC Faculty Workshop Handout

The introduction to the VRC workshop for faculty will be offered on two dates: Wednesday, 19th from 12:30-1:50 pm and Tuesday, August 25th from 1:00 – 2:00 pm in Lab A on the first floor of the Undergraduate Library. The workshop will include learning how to create, manage, and copy media groups; Export image files and presentations to PowerPoint; How to use Flickr to supplement presentations; Professors will be provided an extra lesson how to use VRC to aid in teaching and learning.

For more information please call the TRC at (313)-577-1980 and direct all calls to Jon McGlone. To register for the workshops send an e-mail to jwmcglone@wayne.edu indicating which day you would like to attend along with your name, contact information, and department.

Student walk-in workshops are in the works but will be provided at a later date in the fall semester. They will not be required to register for the workshop and location may change from the faculty workshop. Students, keep an eye out for emails and notices on Pipeline and your classroom Blackboard messages from professors on when the student workshops will be available.

For those not able to make the workshops, the Technology Resource Center will be developing instructional videos to provide a step – by – step process on how to interact with the Luna software and make use of the tools available. The videos will not be available until about early – mid fall semester.

Visual Resources Information Page
Visual Resources Collection

For those of you who read on-the-go, some of these titles are compatible with mobile devices.

Major contributors this year include: Project Gutenberg, E-books About Everything, Internet Archive, and World Public Library amongst many others.

Go now, download, and read!

With the new title field, you’ll notice that some records contain two titles: Historical Title and Title.  You may ask, well, what’s the difference? Here’s our explanation.

There are two title fields, Historical Title and Title.  Historical Title is the name given to the photograph by the Detroit News Photographer who took the photo(s).  This field, while historically significant and interesting, is riddled with problems when it comes to searching because a lack of consistency.  The photographers did not use an authority list, so photographs that are similar, such as three pictures of cars, might be labeled totally different.  One might be simply “Autos” while another might be the model and brand, while another might be “Street Scenes.”  The NEW title field is original metadata added by a metadata librarian, that looks to give some consistency back to the titles and also add titles to records that never had one.  Once we’ve reached a significant number or records with this new field, users will have the ability to browse by title.

3-Easy Steps: Accessing Your Flickr Account in Luna

1) After logging in or creating an account,  under the “Explore” tab, select “External Media Search”

2) Under the username search field, simply enter your Flickr account username and select search…easy.

3) Find the images you’d like to incorporate into your presentations, and add them to your default media group by clicking the icon in the upper-left corner.

Alternatively, you can use the username search to find the collections of participants in the Flickr Commons, a collection of unknown or out of copyright images from libraries and archives across the world.

• Added pages that highlight both past and current projects, past project pages include project information that might be helpful for those pursuing similar types of projects.
• Developed a list of web-resources for the library community and those interested in digital projects covering topics like copyright, metadata, imaging, and preservation.  This list will continue to grow and you can keep in touch with it by subscription.
• We’re working on developing tutorials for our Visual Resources Collection.
• Obviously, we’ve added a Digital Collections Blog that will serve as a place to get news and updates, tips, and read about interesting items in our digital collections from a number of librarian’s that work with the collections.  Subscribe or bookmark us to stay in touch with what we’re doing and perhaps pick up a thing or two that will help your research.

We welcome feedback and input on what you’d like to see here in the future.  Just send a note to Jon McGlone.

• Improved relevancy ranking for searches
• Bookmarking, commenting, and downloading tools for every record
• Improved image navigation tools (zooming, panning, image sizes)

About DLXS:

The Digital Library eXtension Service (DLXS) is a digital library system designed to help educational and non-profit institutions mount a variety of types of digital library collections. Since 1996, the University of Michigan Library has worked to serve a growing need for institutions like Michigan to put digital library collections online. more @ http://dlxs.org

Copyists from the Detroit Music Project, taken on 8/4/1938. Photo courtesy Walter P. Reuther Archives

Interested in graphic design, fonts and typography? Unique Michigan histories? We’ve just added a new collection, WPA Music Manuscripts, a digitization and access project that digitized and cataloged detailed and ornate hand-copied music manuscripts produced by Michigan men and women under the WPA during the Great Depression.  The collection and accompanying resources highlight the people and work that were a part of the Music Copying Project, supported by the Federal Music Project and WPA.  The Federal Music Project employed men and women to copy music for WPA orchestras, bands, and choruses to perform.  The collection is currently housed at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s archives.

WPA Music Manuscripts is a collaboration between WSU Music Department, Art and Art History Department, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and the Library System.

This collection is an outgrowth of a project to digitize, catalog and make available portions of the Art and Art History Department’s analog slide library.  These efforts by the Art and Art History department have increased access to the collection along with preserving the slide library in digital format.  Most importantly, the Visual Resources Collection contains over 100,000 images from other resources: licensed images from Scholars Resource and AMICA, Art Images for College Teaching, and faculty slide collections housed in the Art and Art History Department.

But what can you do with these images?  The Visual Resources Collection is powered by the latest web-version of Luna, which provides a host of viewing tools, image management, and presentation tools that allow you to embed images in Blackboard and search for images in Flickr.

The collection is available to all WSU faculty and students.  We’re planning to add flash tutorials in the future and the OTL is creating training workshops for Luna, so stay tuned for more.  In the meantime, create an account and start exploring the endless possibilities with the Visual Resources Collection!