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MMS: Suggests oral histories - they are typically under used due to the audio format
BA: Suggest folk lore materials
RS: The MD Arts Council transferred to the State Archives their collection of radio recordings, folklore, oral histories; they are on reel to reel with no available equipment to transfer.
JLV: UMCP's former audiovisual archivist set up an audio transfer lab but the current staff isn't familiar with using the equipment. Can we collect a listing of MHCC members that have the equipment to digitize specific formats (maps, audio, etc)?
RS: Has digitized cassette tapes.
BA: Folklore may be more engaging that the Civil War and include more organizations
KC: Charley Camp, MICA professor, specializes in folklore. This topic would also be a service to research community by making unavailable collections available.
SB: What would be our desired outcome? Information on the wiki? A traveling exhibit?
JLV: Current context would be online but we could expand to other outlets, maybe educational programming. Oral history has some limitations (use agreements, etc). This project would show collaboration within state organizations; funding sources are interested in collaborative projects and would be a good basis for a joint grant.
MMS: The Grammy Foundation has grants for sound collections (http://www.grammy.com/GRAMMY_Foundation/Grants/)
BO: Also suggest IMLS for collaborations
BA: Could seek out start up grants to build a focus, to ground and expand a project. Coupling organizations with fewer resources, leveraged with those with more - this was a founding principle for the MHCC.
MS: Suggests pulling existing digital collections to a create a larger project, or pull single items from different organizations - versus starting from scratch.
JLV: We need a framework. 1)What do people want? 2) How do we best provide information? 3) What levels of interpretation and/or interaction do we want? Then we can develop a prototype of what we want as an end product.
AT: Suggests a digital images clearinghouse or central module that points to existing collections.
DE: NEH is funding the digitization of newspapers.
JLV: Newspapers could be a straightforward project. Many MD publications are available in Googlebooks and the Internet Archive; they are available but how do we draw them together or instruct researchers how to use and find them? How or should we represent that these books are available online in our own catalogs? KR and AT suggest using the Maryland History and Culture Bibliography infrastructure, linking from the Bibliography out to the digital copies of the publications. JLV notes that users of the Bibliography have expressed frustration that it is a static document and does not link to materials or catalog. This may be a starting point.
KC: Questions how organizations handle maintaining copyright over the bibliographies that they produce, so that someone else does not take that content and publish it for profit.
MMS: Suggests Creative Commons license (http://creativecommons.org/)
JLV: This is also a problem with web harvesting - many websites do not specify copyrights or include use statements.
VI. Strategies for advocacy (Doug McElrath)
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