ITG

American Indian Studies Resources Portal

Professor Alyssa Mt. Pleasant,  Assistant Professor in American Studies and History, approached ITG with a project  to increase general awareness of American Indian collections at Yale. This project would provide a single aggregation of available materials to expedite and streamline access to American Indian Studies materials at Yale which would reduce the number of steps it takes to find the materials. A partnership between Collections Librarians - Beinecke, BAC, Peabody and Divinity - instructional technologists and the support of an Instructional Innovation Intern has produced  a web portal that affords a single point of entry to the various American Indian collections at Yale University, a database that allows for annotation and uploading of objects to the collection and a wiki as a repository for student papers.

The intern provided assistance in the following areas:

• identifying collections and digital objects that will be included in the database
• identifying contacts at relevant collections and working to get objects digitized
• adding objects to the collections database
• writing sample annotations and descriptions for the database
• helping to design the site (choosing images, color palette and arrangement of elements on the page).

http://aisresources.commons.yale.edu/

Pulp and Paper Mill Virtual Field Trip

Reid Lifset, Associate Director, Industrial Environmental Management Program and Matthew Eckelman,  Doctoral Candidate, Engineering & Applied Science initiated the Elihu Paper Co. project in Second Life with the help of the Instructional Technology Group based on their desire to take their students on a virtual field trip of a pulp and paper mill in their course “Greening Business Operations.” The actual building of the 3D object in Second Life was outsourced to the New Media Consortium.

Interns provided the following support:

• Providing  schematics to the NMC for the building. The interns went on a field trip to a paper and a pulp mill to take pictures and understand the process.
• Creating a custom orientation to the site on the Eli Island
• Creating 20 avatars with male and female skins with logins and passwords so students wouldn't have to create avatars to view the site.
• Projecting url and web pages on prims that print out to notecards
• Creating kiosks that provide notecards to users.
• Creating an orientation to second life session where an avatar leads users through the basics of second life.

http://wordpress.commons.yale.edu/pulpandpaper/field-trip/

Silk Road Image Gallery

The Yale Silk Road Database presents over 3,500 images of major sites in the Silk Road region taken during multi-university faculty site seminars led by Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, Professor, History of Art under the auspices of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University. In close partnership with Visual Resource Collection Asian specialist, Christine Corrigan and interns from ITG this resource was used in a History of Art Seminar in Fall 08. Prof. Yiengpruksawan was interested in providing the students with a cataloged image gallery that allowed for faceted searching and a way for students to see the images in their geographical context.

Interns assisted in the following ways:

• geo-tagging images  with gps coordinates
• resizing and renaming image files for use on the web
• cataloging images according to folder structure set up by faculty member
• researching and creating a web design using an existing tool (Exhibit) that had  google map capabilities
• customizing a dynamic web page that delivers the galleries