Project Suggestion: Museum

Title: Digital library from VT Museum of Natural History

Number of people: 5 projects, each with 2-3 people
Goal: To help serve the public and campus with digital information related to Virginia Tech's Museum of Natural History.
Contact information: Llyn Sharp, llyn@vt.edu, Assistant Director, Virginia Tech Museum of Natural History, 428 North Main Street, 231-4080 (and others mentioned below)
Required background: interest in or experience with museums
Description: Several years ago, Instructional Technology developed a brief web site called Muse-it. These projects will extend work carried out in subsequent years by project groups in CS4624, UH3004, CS6604, and Scouts working on an Eagle project (led by Paul Fox, pfox@video.dlib.vt.edu). There are 5 independent efforts, each of which may proceed:
1. The Museum Web Minerals project is based on a need to make the vast collection of relics and items of interest of the Virginia Tech Museum of Natural History easily accessible to large numbers of people. Despite possessing a very impressive compilation of objects, limited floor space and hours of operation prevent public access to a majority of the Museum's artifacts.
  The Museum Web Minerals projects from spring (e.g., the MINER system) and fall (which focused on capture) were first steps towards making these items widely available to the general public using VR technology and the World Wide Web. This project focused on just one area of the museum (i.e., the museum's mineral collection) while laying the groundwork for future projects. To enable public access to the museum's collection of minerals, a web page was designed to allow users to access the minerals online. Software was prototyped, and could be extended and refined. Most important, though, is to capture virtual reality type representations in large numbers.
  The plan is as follows: Each mineral in the online collection will possess a rotatable image of the mineral along with accompanying information about the mineral similar to an encyclopedia article and links to further information of interest. Such features as a glossary/index and searching capabilities will aid the ease of use of the overall collection. The exact number of minerals to be included in the original online collection will be determined through discussion early in the semester.
  The following students worked on this project in Honors 3004 in Fall 2000 and can help a new group get started:
  - Corinne McDaris, cmcdaris@vt.edu
  - Kristin Dacey, kdacey@mail.vt.edu
  - Alan Puddy, apuddy@vt.edu
  - Shane Kost, shkost@vt.edu
  The following students (in the Wed morning discussion session) will work on this project in Spring 2001:
  - Sean Cooper, secooper@vt.edu
  - Frederic Hayoz, fhayoz@vt.edu
  The following students (in the Wed afternoon discussion session) will work on this project in Spring 2001:
  - Alba Santo, alsanto@vt.edu
  - Holly Mickelson, darkhorse@vt.edu
  - Zemen Adane, zadane@vt.edu
  - Kaiyan Xiao, kxiao@vt.edu
  - Ting Chen, jichen11@vt.edu
2. Rare, threatened, and endangered birds (RT&E)
  There are over 100 specimens in the collection in the RT&E category. Building upon the lessons learned by the Eagle Scout project of Fall 2000, that will complete by Spring, similar methods can be applied to this important and interesting collection. Work involves taking multiple photos (with controlled lighting and distances) of specimens, entering information about them into a database, and allowing access through the Imagebase system of Virginia Tech Libraries. The software and connection through XML with the Library was developed by a CS6604 group in Fall 2000:
  - Aniket Sule, asule@vt.edu
  - Balaprasuna Chennupati, bchennup@vt.edu, "Prasuna"
  - Ameya Datey, adatey@vt.edu
  - Supriya Angle, sangle@vt.edu
  The following students will work on this project in Spring 2001:
  - Michael Anderson (miander2@vt.edu)
  - Rick Altmann (raltmann@vt.edu)
3. Cold Fusion
  An early version of software to help the museum was built on a Cold Fusion server. Now nobody knows how to use, fix, or extend it. If anyone in CS4624 can help figure out what was done and convert it to something understood by more (e.g., Access), this will rescue the Museum from loss of all the work involved.
  Working on this are: John Boyd (Joboyd4@vt.edu), Rene Mouynes (rmouynes@vt.edu), James Morrison (jmorrison@vt.edu)
4. Extending efforts related to the Massey Herbarium
  There are 6 PhotoCDs filled with specimen images related to the Herbarium created by Llyn Sharp. There also are hundreds of images from the field showing specimens in the wild, prepared by Professor Duncan Porter. Work is needed to:
  - put the PhotoCD images on the Web with descriptive information
  - put the field images on the Web with descriptive information
  - develop a database/Web tool for Professor Porter so he can add information about specimens and their images
  Students working on this are: Kevin Mescher (kmescher@vt.edu), Derek Keatley (dkeatley@vt.edu), Kajal Kamdar (kkamdar@vt.edu), Chris Powell (cpowell@vt.edu), John Titus (jtitus@vt.edu)
5. Connect with UDLA
  The Mexican funding agency CONACyT will support Dr. Alfredo Sanchez from University of the Americas, Puebla, Mexico, alfredo@mail.udlap.mx, to work with us (involving Ryan Richardson, wiricha2@csgrad.cs.vt.edu) on digital library technology. Dr. Sanchez has done extensive work with a floristic digital library and will allow us to use his software. That could be connected with the Herbarium information discussed above. Of particular interest are information visualization tools. See online articles: AGS, MiBiblio, Mutant, and floristic digital library.