VRA SESSION 7: “Collaborations Lead to Success—Integrating Technology and Sharing a Resource, the MDID” by Christina B. Updike

My paper will describe how I as the visual resources professional, met the challenge of facilitating the integration of new technology into the teaching of art and art history at my institution. The focus will be on the collaborations used in finding a solution to a problem, the system that resulted from the project, and the ongoing challenges to providing the support. Whereas many of you will not be designing systems, the collaborations can be relevant to anyone who is implementing technology at their institution. In my 27 years of experience as a professional, I have learned that visibility and collaboration are two important keys to success as a professional and in responding to change.

My position as Visual Resources Specialist is to administer and manage the Visual Resources Center in the School of Art and Art History for James Madison University, a job that involves policymaking and implementation of procedures to facilitate the instruction of art and culture in accordance with the University's mission and goals. Focussing on the VR collection as a campus and community resource has naturally increased my position’s visibility and allowed me to develop and advance professionally. When I entered the profession, the slide collection at JMU numbered 20,000 and the department had 14 full-time faculty with 45 undergraduate art majors. The collection now numbers ca. 90,000 slides, houses multitudes of materials in multimedia formats and a growing digital image database, all of which benefit the department’s 35 full-time faculty, 15 part-time faculty, 8 graduate teaching assistants and 600 undergraduate majors and 18 graduate students. The more I have collaborated with others, including my faculty colleagues, or worked on teams beyond the confines of the VR Center, the more my visibility and status as a professional has been raised. I can confidently answer, yes, to the question “Do people you work with view you as a professional?”

Changes on the JMU campus that have affected the demand for visual resources and impacted my day-to-day job duties have been:

1. In the fall of 1998, we were informed that our survey art history courses would became part of a new university-wide General Education curriculum cluster. This required the School to expand the offering of art history survey course sections from six to fourteen per semester. At the same time the art historians decided to change to a new survey textbook, requiring the VRC to provide many new images for teaching and student study.

2. That same year, the School of Art and Art History began offering a Master of Arts degree in art history, in addition to the Master of Fine Arts degree in studio art. This resulted in more curriculum expansion as well as art history faculty, from three to five full-time art historians, and added five adjuncts.

3. Traditional visual technologies no longer meet the rising expectations of a computer-literate campus community that expects 24 hours per day/7 days a week availability of instructional resources, not just in the classroom, but also for web-based instruction and study, both on and off campus.

4. Budget shortfalls and staffing inadequacies made the task of supplying the necessary slides nearly impossible.

I asked myself the question, “What do you do when you are alone and faced with a daunting problem?” The answer is to seek help from others to find solutions, share resources, and combine expertise; in other words, to collaborate, collaborate, and collaborate again in order to fill the need. Since the School had access to two technology classrooms where we were using CD-ROMs and the Internet, digital technology was the best way to meet the increased teaching and study needs of the larger number of students and faculty.

After researching and not finding an affordable commercial system, many campus groups worked together to create a digital image database teaching and learning system, which we named the Madison Digital Image Database (MDID). It is an online image database and multimedia instructional system designed to create and show Internet-based lectures using digitized images. The system permits instructors to generate, remotely, “slide shows,” which can be annotated, placed online for student study and classroom projection, or archived for testing or future use. Why did we get so excited about it? Though many image databases provide flexible faculty and student access to online images those systems generally do not provide a tool via which faculty can teach and students can learn. The MDID brings the digital image and data library into the teaching and learning process, in and outside the classroom. The positive impact this has had on student learning and interest in art history has been assessed each semester and is documented.

There were six groups participating in the project. Our first priority was to seek funding through an internal grant program entitled mGrants. I, along with the art history area coordinator and the Dean of General Education, submitted the description of our project to create a digital image database with 2,000 images to support the expanded curriculum. The initial mGrant of $45,000 was awarded in December 1997 by the Center for Instructional Technology. The grant specified that art history faculty and myself would select the content for the database from the faculty’s personal collections, and selections from the fine arts slide collection.

Upon receiving the mGrant, collaboration continued with the CIT staff. The CIT Director formed the creation team. The members included the senior programmer as project leader, an instructional technologist for the assessment component, the art history area coordinator for content advice, the graphic designer for image manipulation, and myself, the visual resources specialist, for data and image verification. Faculty began teaching with the new system in the fall of 1998. Ongoing collaboration occurs each semester, by assessing the users to gather data regarding teaching, learning, and redesign feedback. In fall 2001, we assessed 657 student users and 10 teaching faculty. The survey instrument was created in cooperation with the Office of Student Assessment and I coordinate its dissemination. Training on the system for new faculty and outside faculty users is coordinated with the instructional technologists each semester. I am responsible for securing the appropriate copyright permissions and copyright education for the faculty as well as the CIT staff. The MDID has an authentication component, an accounts management system, and is further password protected with a student password that is changed every semester.

To meet the increased demand for digital images, a funding source outside of the School of Art and Art History was sought for the purchase of licensed image databases. I first identified the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) database as a University resource and approached the Libraries and Educational Technologies Division for the funding. I met with the Dean of Libraries, an Associate Dean (who is also the chair of the Intellectual Properties Committee), and the Division of Academic Affairs lawyer to emphasize that University-wide digital image collection development is the best method of acquiring images with copyright permission attached. In spring of 2000, the request was approved, and the library acquisition team comprised of the Head of Technical Services, the Collection Development Librarian, and the Automation Librarian secured the AMICO license. Acquiring high-resolution images with cataloging data for inclusion in the MDID was part of the license agreement for AMICO’s then 48,000-image database. The CIT received seven tapes with 40 gigs of information per tape, which were uncompressed, converted to jpeg and sized to fit the new ImageViewer software. The cataloging data was mapped to interface with two web applications that were created by the CIT programming staff to allow faculty to query and choose AMICO images to add to the system. An administrator interface allows me to verify and edit the text data before sending the image to the MDID. Licensing digital images from commercial or non-profit sources is the most efficient way to add content to the database, so my ongoing collaborations with the library provides a mechanism for the School to acquire additional funding for database growth.

With the added digital resources, a new demand for more wired classrooms arose. Teams were formed of art historians, CIT staff and myself to demonstrate the MDID to administrators to emphasize the need for more and better-equipped technology classrooms. These demonstrations were given to the Dean of the College, the Vice President for Academic Affairs, the Board of Visitors, the President of the University, our State Congressman and the Director and technicians of Media Resources. As a result, funding was received for upgrades to the equipment and for adding two more technology classrooms to our building. My position’s increased visibility among high-level University administrators was an added benefit.

The Offices of Computing Support, which are separate from the CIT, are responsible for installing and maintaining the MDID software in all of the technology classrooms. Coordinating services with OCS is necessary to ensure that the data transfer of images is smooth and reliable. Communicating our School’s needs for caching images, and coordinating our software needs with overnight computer back-ups and clean-up procedures for the technology classrooms is a vital collaboration to ensure the effective use of the ImageViewer teaching system. Quick data transfer of the digital image files and sufficient caching at the technology classroom computers, both MAC and PC, enable instructors to download their prepared lectures in a timely, reliable manner for class use. Building faculty confidence in the new technology with this reliability factor has resulted in the increased usage of digital, rather than analog images. At this time, I would like to demonstrate several components of the system that show the original design and then the redesign features that were suggested by the programmers and the users, which illustrates how collaboration works to achieve a goal. (Demonstrate ImageViewer, Slideshow Builder and Slideshow Viewer)

Collaborating with faculty and staff colleagues to share our project and findings via conference presentations and journal articles is important. As a result of this sharing, Department Chairs and Instructional Technology Directors within our region have contacted us seeking advice and expressing interest in obtaining our system, so that the wheel does not have to be reinvented. Those requests led to collaboration with the CIT Director to determine who owned the intellectual property of our system, and who else might be able to license it. We met with the University lawyer and the Associate Dean of Libraries to write an IP Disclosure Statement and License. This past summer, our negotiations to secure a commercial business partner through the State of Virginia’s Request for Proposal process were not successful. However, as JMU was committed to sharing the system, members of the upper administration, the CIT and the School made the decision to make the system available as a free download. To be useful, a version that includes 90 images was created. I secured the copyright permissions from the donors, which included faculty, staff, alumni and one commercial source, Davis Art Slides. On October 10, 2001, JMU released the MDID to the world-wide community. Since that date, more than 150 universities and colleges, foundations, nonprofit organizations, corporations, government offices, and individuals have downloaded the application for a variety of educational purposes. A comprehensive informational Web site was created that outlines the application’s features, documents the current technical infrastructure needed to use it, and includes the download license. Although no technical support is provided on the MDID, a users’ listserve has been developed to foster a community through which users can acquire support. JMU is working on more flexible options for licensing, as our focus turns to the pursuit of grants and partnerships, in recognition of the varying needs of other organizations.

What are some of the lessons I learned in this process? Education about technology and its integration into the teaching and learning process is critical for all project stakeholders. There is a technology learning curve for faculty and a content learning curve for technology developers. Design of instructional systems involves not only instructional designers and faculty, but also providers and supporters of the institution’s technological infrastructure – from technical trainers to network designers to audiovisual specialists. With the MDID, involvement of technology classroom managers and audiovisual specialists came later. Inclusion of all potential stakeholders at the onset of the project would have provided a smoother road for ongoing development.

What are the keys to success? Ongoing, regular communication with all project participants through focus groups and meetings. As more faculty and students use the system, more changes seem indicated. Moreover, instructional design is a dynamic process that requires regular evaluation of project objectives and redesign of the instructional product. Faculty suggest content to add to the system and where possible the integration of content from licensed, commercial and non-profit image libraries provides the most efficient means of development. Ongoing collaboration must occur with classroom media services and computing support to ensure appropriate infrastructure for the system. And this last one is definitely not least, accuracy of images and data is crucial to the impact on teaching and learning.

I am still the one-person administrator of the Visual Resources Center at JMU, but I now have a greater impact across the campus and beyond. Others seek me out for my knowledge and skills. Last year I was asked to serve on a search committee in the CIT for a new Instructional Technologist, because the Director felt I would share an interest in the professional who was hired. I was also a co-investigator of another internal technology grant with a new art historian to add 1,000 non-Western images to the MDID. And recently, I was invited to Marshall University to serve as a consultant in assessing their visual resources collection needs and advising on implementing new technology in preparation for their NASAD accreditation visit.

In conclusion, from the beginning of my career, my attendance and participation in departmental meetings gave me the opportunity to learn collaboration techniques and to have a respected voice in decisions regarding visual resources. The idea of collaboration beyond just my department began with my professional activities, such as taking status surveys, reading journal articles about best practices in the field of visual resources, and attending and participating in conferences. By keeping current in the profession, I gained the knowledge and skills vital to meeting the demands and challenges of an ever-changing field. Continuing education regarding new technologies, funding issues, standards, trends in the field and future changes has enabled me to coordinate the described initiatives of the last four years to meet the demands of fulfilling the visual resources mission at JMU.

I’ll now post a slide with contact information and will entertain any questions. Thank you.