The digitization of text, images, and music has become an integral part of research and teaching at Princeton. Services to support these efforts continue to be developed to respond to an ever increasing need to convert traditional materials to digital versions that can be used in popular campus delivery systems such as Blackboard, Almagest, etc. The Princeton University Library’s Electronic Course Reserves (E-reserves), the Online Audio Reserves Project, and the Language Resource, Educational Technologies, and New Media Centers all offer services to Princeton faculty interested in working in this format.
Electronic Course Reserves (E-reserves)
Since the fall of 1998, first in a pilot project and then as a full service in 2001, staff members from both Firestone Library and all the branch libraries have used flatbed scanners to digitize course reserves reading material chosen by those faculty who elect to use the E-Reserves service and system. The service has grown from an initial 10 courses with about 50 readings to last year’s total of 495 courses and 15,063 readings
The Electronic Course Reserves makes reserve materials available 24 hours, 7 days a week anywhere in the world and expands the kinds of materials instructors can currently place on reserve. Students can gain access to the digitized material through the Blackboard Course Management System. Students can view and print or save for later use the course materials that instructors make available. The current system includes sample exams, lecture notes, journal articles, book chapters, images, course syllabi, and assignments. Note that E-reserves does not make available entire copies of books.
Online Audio Reserves Project
The Music Library has been digitizing music selections from various media and makes these materials available in an Audio Reserves system similar to the Library’s E-reserves system. This project has been a joint Library/OIT project since its inception in 2000. Last academic year Audio Reserves served 72 courses with 6,487 selections online.
If you want to make audio files assigned in your music class accessible to your students through your Backboard site, please contact the Mendel Music Library at 609.258.4251 or e-mail pmatthew@Princeton.EDU. The links will be created for you and access will be restricted to your students.
Digitized film
The University has also been digitizing film materials to make them available in electronic form. Since 1998, the Language Resource Center (LRC) has been running a digital Video-on-Demand server that faculty members can use to make films and other video materials available to students in their courses. Since that time, there has been steady growth in the use of this facility. In the spring, 2004 semester, 75 classes used the server (up from 26 the previous spring) to access 301 titles (up from 104 titles the previous spring).
If you want to make films assigned in your class accessible to your students on the Video-on-Demand server through your Backboard site, please contact Marianne Crusius of the Language Resource Center 609-258-2114 or e-mail crusius@Princeton.EDU. The links will be created for you and access will be restricted to your students.
Digitized slides
OIT’s New Media Center (NMC) provides a multimedia laboratory for the Princeton academic community. Their cutting edge digital media technology includes a batch slide feeder that can scan up to fifty mounted 35 millimeter slides at a time. Each slide takes about four to five minutes to digitize).
Finally, the Educational Technologies Center has been digitizing and/or storing digital images of art slides, video segments, animations, sound, and text in a multimedia database called Almagest.
Such material is entered, edited, and displayed online using a web browser. It can be used to deliver slide and media presentations in any classroom equipped with an internet connection and a digital projector. Almagest materials are also available for study and review by students. Contact almagest@princeton.edu for more information on setting up an Almagest project.
Of note, it is now possible to integrate Almagest projects within a Blackboard site.
From your course or organization control panel, select any content area (such as “Course Materials “). From the dropdown box at top right, select Almagest Lecture, then click Go. (If you want files to be accessible from a particular folder within that content area, first click on the name of that folder.)
The “Add Almagest Lecture” page that is called up will show you the lectures associated with your course. Either click on a specific lecture from the dropdown box, or turn on the radio button next to All Lectures if you prefer to place just one link for Almagest in your course site.
Posted by Lorene Lavora
