Last week, I attended a Symposium on Teaching with Digital Collections in the Liberal Arts Curriculum at Reed College. The program consisted of a day and a half filled with presentations by librarians and faculty who are building and teaching with digital assets, primarily images, at various liberal arts colleges in the U.S.

Key takeaways:

• Building effective digital collections requires investment of considerable time, planning, and other resources. Most of the institutions represented at the symposium have staff who focus primarily on digital asset management, and many have used grant funding to get started and/or expand their infrastructure and build collections.
• Partnering with “early adopter” teaching faculty is a good way to get started with building digital collections. This can give the project a clear focus and help keep it manageable. It can also help with selection of content that will be used and creation of high quality metadata.
• Most of the presenters at the symposium use ContentDM to manage their digital collections. ContentDM has not completely met their needs, however. Reed, for example, has built a number of extensions to improve the faculty/end-user interface and functionality. Lewis and Clark College has built an interesting site using Flickr for storage, but they also utilized some custom programming for their accessCeramics collection.

Links to interesting sites discussed at the symposium:

• Claremont Libraries Digital Collections (CCDL)
• Reed College Digital Collections
• Lafayette College Digital Collections
  
• Art Images for College Teaching (AICT)
• accessCeramics