Introduction to DigiDocs
Howard Besser (chair)
Dave Hessler
Dave Rodgers
Margaret Taylor
Maria Bonn
Pat Misterovich
Nigel Kerr
Martha Pinto
This is a draft document attempting to outline the Digidocs curriculum. The committee sees Digidocs as one of a number of specialty areas within the new School (see diagram below). All students within the School would take a School Core course. Students within Digidoc would also take a (probably half-term) Digidocs core, as well as at least one half-term Survey course covering one of the three Digidoc areas.
In the following pages the committee has outlined various competencies and where they should fall. The committee has identified competencies for the School core, for the Digidoc core, and for each of the three basic curricular emphasis areas within Digidocs.
The three emphasis areas within Digidoc are: Collections and Access Support, Digital Publishing and Marketing, and Design and Technical Development of Digital Documents.
SILS Core Competencies Important to DIGIDOCS:
The DIGIDOC concentration will assume that certain concepts will have been introduced and certain skills developed in either the SILS Boot Camp or in the combination of courses that make up the SILS Core. We anticipate that by the time students begin their DIGIDOC concentration, they will have some experience and knowledge of the following:
- Basic technical knowledge
- File sharing
- Principles of local networking
- Familiarity with various subject access schemes (pre and post-coordinate)
- Assignment of subject terms
- Classification
- Use of retrieval tools
- Web search engines
- Other net search tools
- Searching automated databases
- Use of navigational tools
- HTML authoring
- Understanding the technological underpinnings and infrastructure and how they got there
- Project management
- Group work skills
- Diffusion of innnovations -- process of adoption (including politics)
- Social Implications
This diagram represents a few of the areas in which a digidocs student might train and how that training might fit into existing areas of the School and University.
DIGIDOC Core Competencies:
All students who complete the DIGIDOCS concentration will acquire the following competencies. These competencies build upon concepts introduced in the SILS Core as well as areas specific to DIGIDOCS. We can expect over time, that a number of items in the DIGIDOC core will migrate into the SILS core and that the DIGIDOCS core will be regularly revised, both to assure its timeliness and to avoid undue overlap with the SILS Core.
- Basic technical knowledge
- Understand file sizes and their implications
- File formats
- Storage options -- physical media, compression, encoding
- Differences in sound, motion, and color quality
- Principles of local networking/bandwidth
- Familiarity with various subject access schemes (pre- and post-coordinate)
- Specific problems raised by images and multimedia in classification and assignment of subject terms
- Harvesters and gatherers
- Use of retrieval tools
- Search engines and implications for multimedia access and display
- Familiarity with types of user interfaces and ability to evaluate their effectiveness
- Understanding, evaluating, and selecting the most appropriate digital documents
- Ability to identify key elements of visual design
- Ability to identify key elements of conceptual structure
- Ability to make comparative judgments about quality of design
- Ability to design a visually appealing document
- Layout skills
- Familiarity with typefaces and fonts
- Understanding long-term usability issues of digital documents
- Conservation and preservation
- Migrating to new media
- Long-term maintenance of access software
- Principles of linking and referring to documents
- Standards and implications of URL, URN, URC
- Familiarity with the use and implication of structured text
- Proficiency in at least one structured text language (SGML DTD)
- Knowledge of principles and legal issues of rights management for Digital documents (from user standpoint)
- Knowledge of varieties of user capabilities/access issues and how to deal with this variety
- Ability to select appropriate technology for the task at hand
- HCI
- Installed base of technology
- Emerging technology
- Writing, editing, expository skills for digital documents
- Professional development
- Familiarity with resources for ongoing current awareness
- Ability to envision when digital documents might be useful to multiple users/departments, and to create and design these accordingly
- Basic HCI
- Social implications
- History of the media
- Social and leadership role of the information professional
- Ethics of digital documents
- Attribution
- Forgery
- Censorship
- Access impediments
- Physical
- Technical
- Economic
- Rights
The above diagram reflects a few possible tracks within digidocs and the skills that would be acquired within these tracks.
Collections and Access Support
Emphasis on:
- Navigation
- Use and evaluation
Students who specialize in Collections and Access Support will be trained to organize, manage, and provide access to collections of digital documents for repositories such as libraries, museums, and archives. At the basic level, graduates will be able to assist and train end users in retrieving and using digital documents. At a more advanced level, graduates in this specialization will be proficient in evaluating, selecting and organizing large numbers of digital documents into coherent collections and to assist in selecting or designing user interfaces to provide full access to these collections.
More advanced work on basic competencies:
- Design and administration of navigational tools
- Design and administration of retrieval tools
- Web search engines
- Other net search tools
- Searching automated databases
- Design and administration of user interfaces
- Effectiveness of the various subject access schemes (pre- and post-coordinate)
- Assignment of subject terms
- Classification
- Harvesters and gatherers
- Evaluation of digital documents for inclusion and integration in a particular collection, judging elements such as visual design and conceptual structure
Competencies within this area of specialization:
- Understanding how to manage a collection of digital documents
- Where to put them
- Physical description/cataloging to include various attributes
- How to provide access to them
- Integrate them with non-digital documents?
- Infrastructure needed
- Long-term management
- Familiarity with issues and methods of selection and acquisition of digital material
- Evaluation
- Sources
- Required infrastructure
- Advanced understanding of long-term usability issues
- Conservation and preservation
- Migrating to new media
- Long-term maintenance of access software
- Advanced knowledge of principles of rights management
- Familiarity with resources for ongoing current awareness and what is necessary to provide these to a large body of users
- Detailed knowledge of standards
- Hypertext linking
- Advanced html authoring of a large number of inter-related documents
- Knowledge of authoring tools such as Authorware, Director
- Understanding inter- and intradocument structuring and referencing, or how large numbers of documents are stored and related (nk)
- Knowledge of presentation software
- Powerpoint
- Standalone interactive development tools such as Toolbook, SuperCard
- In-house publishing skills
- PageMaker or other desktop publishing
- Document format to document format translation
Digital Publishing and Marketing
Emphasis on:
Graduates with an emphasis in Digital Publishing and Marketing will be trained in the production and marketing of digital documents. They will be familiar with all aspects of converting a document into a form that can be distributed. Students in this concentration will be especially versed in project management skills, the legal issues around digital document production, and the distribution process and issues.
More advanced work on basic competencies:
- Knowledge of standards and their implications
- Writing and editing for structure/design (different user levels, languages)
- Editorial skills
- Evaluating digital documents
- Acquisition
- Familiarity with repurposing and its implications in marketing to multiple audiences
- Advanced project management
- Legal issues
- Copyright and trademark
- Rights and agreements
- Contracts and negotiations
Competencies within this area of specialization:
- Basic marketing knowledge
- Abiltity to define products and markets
- Knowledge of pricing structures
- Knowledge of statistics
- Knowledge of distribution systems
- Basic publishing knowledge
- Understand history of publishing industry and related industries (film, TV, music, online)
- General principles of editing
- General principles of management
- Digital information marketing
- Ability to integrate marketing information into the design process
- Understanding of information econonomics
- Pricing
- Industry forecasting
- Understanding of information reproduction and distribution systems
- Duplication
- Delivery methods
- Online
- CD-ROM, Disk, etc.
- Distribution mechanisms
- Retail outlets
- Mail order
- On-line
- Educational, government market
- Advertising in a distributed digital world
- Digital publishing
- Management skills
- Managing in a networked environment
- Digital document development skills
- Document management
- Understand the basic tools of digital document creation
- Text graphics, and multimedia creation tools
- Distribution methods (networked, CD-ROM, etc.)
- Communication, interaction tools
Design and Technical Development of Digital Documents
Emphasis on:
- Mapping
- Creating and implementing design
Students with an emphasis on Design and Technical Development of Digital Documents will acquire an advanced understanding of the hands-on skills necessary for the creation of digital documents. Graduates from this concentration will have familiarity with the current tools for producing digital documents. In addition, they will have studied the theoretical underpinnings of the technical and aesthetic aspects of creating these documents.
More advanced work on basic competencies:
- Knowledge of principles of intellectual property
- Legal issues surrounding incorporation of pre-existing material
- Humans appearing onscreen (talent contracts, releases, etc.)
- Establishing intellectual property rights
- Advanced layout and typography skills
- Ability to design interfaces
Competencies within this area of specialization:
- Knowledge of graphics software
- Photoshop
- Paint/Draw programs
- Ability to scan and digitize various media
- Video
- Slides
- Photos (negatives, prints)
- Flat images
- OCR
- Knowledge of some programming/scripting languages
- Unix
- Tcl/Tk (various platforms, a windowing and visual widget toolbox and interpreter)
- Perl/SNOBOL/sed/awk
- Various "Visual " programming languages well suited to development of interfaces, (Visual Basic, C++, etc...)
- Various methods for recognizing textual structure of files and translating to other structures, i.e., FastTag
- Advanced capability to map documents to user capabilities
- Understanding of various compression schemes
- The implications of repurposing in document design
- Knowledge of multimedia authoring systems
- Authorware
- Director
- Astound
- Editing environments for structured documents (SOftQuad editors, emacs.)
- Ability to master CD-ROMs
- Familiarity with 3-D and virtual reality tools
- CAD/CAM systems
- QTVR
- VRML
- Video toaster
