The EVIA Digital Archive Project: A Collaborative Framework for Research, Archiving, Publishing, and Access

  • Alan Burdette, Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music, United States
  • This presentation will demonstrate how effective collaboration is creating a platform that joins the needs of institutions, archives, scholars, publishers and users into a mutual enterprise. Beginning with an overview of the project, this presentation will then describe the benefits and the challenges of this kind of collaborative work. The EVIA Digital Archive project is a joint effort of Indiana University and the University of Michigan and is funded by the Mellon Foundation. Since its inception in 2001 with a core group of ethnomusicologists, the project has been building a digital preservation and access system for ethnographic field video. In addition to digital preservation of important source documents, the project brings scholars together to create detailed, peer-reviewed annotations of the subject matter. These annotations are created within a METS/MODS compatible framework that will allow scene level searching through a standard online library catalog. Delivery of streamed video copies is accompanied by peer-reviewed scholarly annotation. Software development of the project has created tools for scholars, librarians, technologists, and end-users. From the earliest planning stages, the project brought together scholars, technologists, archivists, librarians, legal experts, and administrators, and has kept them in dialog as the project develops. As the project moves into its seventh year, it has become part of a larger support infrastructure for digital arts and humanities at Indiana University and this is requiring collaboration on an even larger scale.