Final Reports on Two Information Fluency Projects

Hugh Blackmer
Science Librarian
Washington & Lee University

6 March 2003

I combine these two projects into a single Final Report because their process and products have been intertwined and have drawn on the talents and energies of the same core of people: Skip Williams and I have been involved in both projects, and we have consulted continuously with Mark Rush and John Blackburn, who are formally associated with the Spatial Data Library project.

In addition to important opportunities for contact and exchange with personnel from other ACS institutions, the important outcomes of the projects have been a number of prototypes, presentations, proposals for further development, and continuing investigation of a cluster of emerging technologies for data management and distribution, including the following:

• Digital South prototype

  An ArcIMS-based example of a digital library interface, in this instance providing geographic access to statewide data for Virginia House of Delegates, Congressional, and Senate districts, in zipped ESRI .shp file format. This is the "deliverable" of the Spatial Data Library project, completed in Summer 2002, and its importance is in clarifying practicality and workflow: we could with comparative ease extend the coverage to include all the states of the South, and use the basic datastructure and interface as the basis for a political geography module in a shared online library of GIS files. The original proposal is available, as is a separate summary report, which includes the results of a survey of ACS campus interest in participating in a Digital South initiative.

• Further work toward design of the Digital South includes Blackmer's Updating and Extending the Digital South Project (produced during Fall 2002), R.E. Lee Summer Project Proposal: The Civil War and the Digital South (funding from Washington & Lee), presentation to the GIS Symposium at Southwestern, 28 February 2003, and a proposal for NSF funding under the National Science Digital Library program, now under construction.

• Both Projects underwrote Blackmer and Williams' travels to three ACS campuses in Sping 2002 (enumerated in the interim report), Blackmer's sabbatical travel to New England liberal arts colleges in Fall 2002 (see a page of links to various summaries, and my report to the W&L Advisory Committee), and some of the expenses of travel to the recent GIS Symposium.

• A developing suite of ArcIMS prototypes can be seen at ims2.wlu.edu.

Both the general scope of the Digital South project and the details of execution have evolved as we have learned more about the practicalities of digital library development and explored the potentials of interconnecting software environments. We continue to work toward an integration of spatial and relational database applications, using Microsoft's .Net environmnet to link ESRI's suite of GIS software and a number of Microsoft desktop products. Parallel developments with personal digital library applications (Pirarucu) and image databases (MDID) are closely linked with the Digital South project.