0.12 The evia digital archive project: challenges and solutions  (Page 9/10)

However, by rejecting this plan, we had to find alternative methods to support the project. We have taken a multiple-pronged approach to this challenge. Since our costs primarily fall into the areas of software development, collection development/preservation, and publishing, we have established infrastructure support and collaborative relationships, and have pursued alternative grant funding to address these areas.

Grants

We are relying on new grant projects to extend software development for the EVIA Project and to build new collections. We have already had several successful grant collaborations that not only have the advantage of giving a new project a head start on systems development, but also allow the EVIA Project to extend its capabilities. Key examples include:

1. Project CAMVA (Central and Mesoamerican Video Archive) enabled us to build multi-lingual menu configurations into the applications
2. Project CLAMA (Cultural and Linguistic Archive of Mesoamerica) is going to provide for extending the capabilities of our systems to audio files as well as still images.
3. The Ethnomusicology Multimedia Project is a collaboration with several university presses to build a marketing and media delivery system that will also create an online version of our Annotation software and extend our capabilities to audio as well as video.
4. Kelley Direct has been a partnership with Indiana University’s School of Business in which we provided them with a video annotation and delivery system. It also enabled us to refine some of our controlled vocabulary functionality.
5. The AHEYM Project (The Archive of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memory) will add eight hundred hours of ethnographic video to the EVIA Collection

In addition, we have several pending proposals that will add to our collections or allow us to extend the capabilities of our existing software.

Infrastructure

The multiple dimensions of our project—archiving, software development, and scholarly publishing—have significant infrastructure demands. The most important step we have taken has been to build the project into cyberinfrastructure efforts at Indiana University. By carefully laying the groundwork over the course of several years and building partnerships between our Digital Library Program, University Information Technology Services, and various academic departments on campus, the staff of the EVIA project was instrumental in establishing Indiana University’s Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH) in 2008. The Institute is funded through our Office for the Vice Provost for Research and now provides a home base for many of the staff that began on the EVIA Digital Archive Project. The Institute has taken video to be one of its primary areas of development within the digital arts and humanities and is actively pursuing a variety of grants to fund new software development and collections. The institute provides a physical space and an administrative home for the project to work from. This arrangement also serves IDAH well because it provides it with a stable of programmers experienced with media project development in conjunction with digital library best practices.