CHICO
Cultural Heritage Initiative for Community Outreach
Aired November 20 and 21, 1999
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This is Internet On The Air. I’m Joan Silvi. In our increasingly
networked, global society, what will happen to the history, artifacts, and knowledge that
belong to one particular culture? Details in a moment.
Funding Credit: Internet On The Air is a production of the University of Michigan School
of Information and Michigan radio, made possible by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg
Foundation.
For centuries, museums have collected and preserved artifacts of cultures. In fact,
they’ve collected so many artifacts that typically only one to three percent of a
museum’s collection is on display at any time. The CHICO project, Cultural Heritage
Initiative for Community Outreach, uses technology to make museum collections more
accessible to the public.
Olivia Frost, Associate Dean at the University of Michigan School of Information, formed
CHICO as a way to broaden audiences for museums and other cultural repositories. She says
emerging digital technologies make it possible for people to organize images and sound in
creative and innovative ways. The Internet can make these multimedia resources available
to audiences worldwide.
The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Thousands of people visit the CHICO Web
site each week, from students to scholars to curious visitors. According to Frost, nothing
can ever replace the experience of seeing the dance, hearing the instrument, or viewing
the painting, but CHICO can use the Internet to provide context for cultural events and
artifacts and show images and objects that people would otherwise never see.
Some of CHICO’s many projects include photographs from the Harlem Renaissance,
Mummies of Ancient Egypt, and Masks of the Yup’ik Eskimo people.
To learn more about CHICO, cultural heritage on the Internet, and digital multimedia,
visit our Web site at www.iota.org. For Internet On The Air, I’m Joan Silvi.
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The Interview
IOTA interviewed C. Olivia Frost in October 1999.
How did you first got interested in
cultural heritage preservation issues?
Well, I came to the school with a background in librarianship, and my specialty was in
what we then called cataloging and classification and which is now more broadly termed
organization of information. My special interest was in non-book materials - film strips,
slides, images, sound, and so forth, and since 1974 I have taught a course in the
organization of non-book materials. With the emergence of digital technologies making it
possible for people to organize images and sound and other kinds of multimedia in a more
creative and innovative way, my attention turned to organization of non-book information
on the Web, most specifically on images.
I received a grant from the Department of Education to do a study developing a browsing
scheme for images on the Internet. For that project we used images primarily from art
history, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art provided about 1200 images, which we
then digitized or were already digitized. So I spent several years working on this project
to take the content of museum, and we had other museums as well which were involved in the
project
I began to see in addition to the research questions I was studying for the research
part of the project which dealt with browsing mechanisms for images and how to evaluate
different systems etc., I began to see the potential for the museums and other
repositories of culture to really broaden their audiences through such vehicles as the Web
or primarily that vehicle.
And after the research project was complete I then looked at other possibilities for
exploring that and that’s how CHICO was initiated - just an idea that came to me...
How did CHICO develop, and what have
some of your projects been?
The idea for CHICO came - it was 1995 and the Web had just begun to emerge as a force
with the potential to broaden the audience of all kinds of material, not just museums and
cultural repositories. We were seeing the impact of the Web on the way scholars did their
research, as in our UARC project at the School of Information. Now we began to see, for
example, how high school and middle school kids when they had access to scientific
information, how teaching and learning could change. I thought why not cultural heritage
materials? Because no doubt there are audiences for some of that content that’s
really untapped,.. The CHICO project began at that time in 1995, with the support of our
Kellogg grant, and it’s taken off from there.
It started out with the Stearns collection which is... here at the University.
It’s a collection of instruments housed at the School of Music... The hours of access
are limited; they don’t have the staff to keep it open for long hours, and most
people are not familiar with the content beyond the field. So what we did was take that
content and not only add images of the instruments, but add sound and organized it so you
could access it by geography, by name, and so forth. We developed what we called the
Instrument Encyclopedia, which grew out of that collection at the Stearns Museum.
And again the idea was to broaden the reach of cultural heritage. Our focus has been on
general audiences as opposed to scholarly audiences and Laos focus on multi-cultural. Not
exclusively, but primarily that has been our focus. With the Stearns collection and the
music encyclopedia we had a significant collection of southeast Asian instruments and
African instruments, and we used that as an entree to the culture itself... We had
something on the gamelan in Indonesia and Malaysia, and then the content we provided was
not just on the instrument, but who are the people who use this instrument, and what is
the culture? What does it convey? What is the importance to that culture...
That’s been a theme throughout the various projects we’ve had, so we look not
only at the instance of the image or sound, but also context. That’s where we see the
power of technology to do things that were not feasible before... Our emphasis has been
not to use technology as a replacement for the actual experience, because nothing can
replace hearing the instrument or seeing the dance, seeing that actual painting, but to
use technology to do the things it does best - which is to provide context.
With the Internet you can click on the instrument and find out more about that
instrument, provide that context that is not so easy to provide otherwise. You can also
enable people to talk about what they’ve seen, so we’ve used the technology to
facilitate discussions from student to student, or student to teacher, or student to
creator to provide the context, to enable the cross-communication and also to give it the
wider audience. People.... roam the Web looking for one thing, and they then come upon
something else they hadn’t realized was there, and that’s helped broaden the
reach of our material.
We focus on multi-cultural, black American, American Indian, Hispanic, etc, some of the
cultures that are less well known to people in the United States. And in general with a
museum, something like 1 to 3 percent of its collection is on display so you can’t
possibly see all the museum has to offer. So this is one way of getting the content out to
the public, even when it’s not on display.
Or in the case of some of our other projects where the content is so fragile, it has
limited access, such as with the Harlem Renaissance project we had photographs from the
Harlem Renaissance that were housed in the Schomburg Center for Black Culture. People can
only see those photographs under limited circumstances, like in an archive where you have
to wear gloves or make an appointment with the archivist, and access is pretty limited. So
we’ve made it possible for more people to see that content.
What are the benefits for the contributors
and the audience?
If we take the example of a museums and their work being made more widely available to
audiences, including K-12 audiences, then obviously for the K-12 teachers and students,
they get to see resources that otherwise wouldn’t be readily available to them. They
can’t go to the place where the collection is housed, or if they can it’s only a
one time experience, it gives them the opportunity to see the cultural artifact, to learn
about it, to study it.
If they’re going to the museum, and we do encourage that, they can get more out of
the experience, and after they return to the classroom they can follow that course of
study to learn more about the culture. We’ve seen the Yup’ik masks and pictures
of the Harlem Renaissance, now what can we learn about the community that created that, or
the historical forces that drove that particular artistic genre? So there’s obvious
benefits for the students and teachers.
As far as the cultural repositories are concerned, it gives them a wider base of
support. Museums are recognizing these days their main role is not just to keep the
artifacts safe over time and make sure they’re well preserved, and that they have
this conservators function. At the same time they’ve got to broaden their audience
base, they have to depend on new audiences in addition to the audience they have. They
want more and more young people to be exposed to what they see and more general not just
scholars or people in that specialization.
So it’s in that museum’s self interest to broaden that base of support. Most
museums... have an educational arm that provides classes or tours, that kind of thing.
This is another way of enhancing that.... they still want to reach out beyond the people
who are able to take advantage of the tours on site...
In the case of the Schomburg, they’re a research center for the study of black
culture... They have to protect their rare and precious photographs.... and at the same
time their mission is to spread black culture... In the case of digital technologies you
can serve both purposes.
What are the benefits to the
culture you're studying?
For one, it gives the people who are a part of that culture a chance to learn more
about their own culture, because sometimes especially the children in the culture may know
less about their heritage than their elders do, and it’s important to pass on the
traditions - for the kids in Harlem to know about the major cultural force that Harlem was
in the 1920s and 30s.
It’s important for Yup’ik kids to know about that artistic and cultural
tardiness of the Yup’ik masks. So it’s important to the people within the
culture to help preserve the culture, and through a medium that’s accessible to more
and more people.
And also it's important for people outside the culture to learn about other cultures so
that cross-cultural exchange to take place.
Is it difficult to balance serving the
audience, the cultural repositories, and the culture itself?
Sometimes there are tensions, For example, we pay very careful attention to accuracy,
and not only in terms of factual accounts and presenting the culture, but also to make
sure this is they way the group itself wants to be presented. When we work with American
Indian groups or Hispanic or whatever the case may be, we have scholars in the field -
that’s where we bring in the academic scholarly presence. Not for them as audiences,
but to have them use research they’ve done to review and validate what we have done
so we know it's factually correct.
And also when we have the cultural groups themselves view the materials to make sure
that we haven’t inadvertently projected any ... misleading images... We’re not
content experts. We don’t pretend to know about the Harlem Renaissance or the Yup'ik
masks or salsa music. We go to the people who know that, and we go to the groups who
represent those communities and ask them for their input....
So we’re very careful about that. We certainly wouldn’t want to send in
anything that didn’t accurately represent the group... If it came to those two
criteria, we would want to make sure we’ve done it right
What has the response been?
I think people respond on the whole very favorably... but we were surprised recently at
the thousands of people each week who visit the site. There are many different people, as
one would expect for a collection that’s accessible on the Net. We hear from
scholars, and sometimes scholars point out things we have that are incorrect... They keep
us on our toes... Sometimes we hear from school children who say, 'I’m doing a
project on this topic, and I really like what you’ve done,' We hear from parents who
say, 'This has been very helpful to my child,' We hear from the groups that we represent
saying, 'I’m so glad to see my Hispanic heritage represented here.' So it's on the
whole favorable, but people do point out things that need to be corrected...
What's CHICO working on right now?
This semester we have a project that we are very excited about and our partners are
very excited about. The project as a whole is called the Community Arts Project, and what
we’re doing is working with two local community arts groups. One is the Wild Swan
Theatre, which produces theatre for kids and also has an education arm, in which they
provide instructional materials for teachers who bring their classes to see these plays...
And we have another partner, the University Musical Society, which has performances over
the year, almost 200 performances of various kinds, and also has a youth education
division, and also works with teachers.
So we have this network of teachers and network of students, and local community arts
groups that put on performances. We’re helping them build Web accessible materials so
the kids and teachers can research the content of what they’re going to see. The
content for the Musical Society will focus on two performances: One on West African dance,
and the other one is also a West African musical performance.... With Center for African
and African-American Studies we’re building up a resource of materials on West
African dance that can be used to enhance the appreciation of that performance.
For the Wild Swan Theatre, they’re doing a performance of Native American tales
called Rainbow Crow, and another one on immigrants coming to America and the different
cultures they represent. We’re centering around those topics. This brings in the
outreach to youth, the building on actual physical experiences to motivate further study
on a topic, using the Web to get contextual information to further study, and bringing
together the community arts groups, School of Information students, and scholars.
Please direct questions or comments to iota.webmaster@umich.edu.
Last Updated November 12, 1999
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