Volunteer & Practicum Opportunities
About the Project/Program
Volunteer Voices (www.volunteervoices.org) is a statewide digitization program that provides online access to sources that document Tennessee‘s rich history and culture. This program involves the collaborative efforts of Tennessee archives, historical societies, libraries, museums, and schools.
The initial Volunteer Voices digitization project, “The Growth of Democracy in Tennessee” , will build a collection of 10,000 historically significant photographs, letters, artifacts, and other items from across the state. This project is funded by a three-year grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Institutions involved
The initial Volunteer Voices project has 10 partner institutions, including:
University of Tennessee; Middle Tennessee State University; Knox County Public Library System; East Tennessee Historical Society; Tennessee State Library and Archives; Memphis Public Library and Information Center; University of Memphis; Tennessee State University; Vanderbilt University Library; and Brentwood Public Library.
Each of these partners has agreed to work closely with each other on the grant project and will be hosting various activities throughout the 3-year project.
Involvement with Volunteer Voices is not limited to these institutions. We are encouraging all interested libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, and cultural institutions to become involved. We have established three regional digitization centers across the state meant to allow regional institutions to bring their materials in to be processed. We are hoping that other institutions will create more of these digitization centers to help smaller entities with more limited resources.
Volunteer & Practicum Opportunities (not exhaustive)
- Work at an institution across the state to help them select and digitize their own materials
- Assist with training sessions across the state
- Teacher Training Workshops (2006, 2007, and 2008)
- Location: Knoxville, Nashville, Memphis
- Audience: 15 teachers for each region over 3 years (45 each year)
- Purpose: train teachers to use the Volunteer Voices digital library, create lesson plans and web quests for teachers to use, encourage teachers to incorporate primary sources in their history curriculum, etc.
- Digitization and Metadata Training
- Location: (first session in Knoxville, February 2007), other locations TBD
- Audience: librarians, archivists, museum curators, etc
- Purpose: train information professionals to scan and create metadata (using MODS) to process their own collections and give them tools to train others in their institution or region
- Digitization Blitzes
- Location: (first session to occur at TLA 2007 Conference, Chattanooga), others TBD
- Audience: TLA Attendees
- Purpose: provide hands-on instruction, digitize materials brought to the conference, have demonstrations of the Volunteer Voices Digital Library site, showcase the digital library, encourage greater participation
- Teacher Training Workshops (2006, 2007, and 2008)
- Process materials (digitize, create metadata, create derivatives)
- Work with one of the 3 regional Digitization and Content Specialists
- Work with partner institutions or one of your own selection
- Harvest digital content from statewide institutions to include
- Metadata: Create crosswalks for various metadata schemes into MODS
- Digital Preservation
- Work with the UT Digital Library Center on the DAITSS digital preservation system
- Explore best practices for digital preservation and create recommendations for Volunteer Voices
- Sustainability
- Work with Project Manager and Volunteer Voices team to develop sustainability protocols and plans
- Investigate business models and government funding to help sustain the statewide digital library
- Develop best practices for institutions to continue contributing to Volunteer Voices - (harvesting, FTP, admin log, etc)
- Develop solutions for empowering institutions to continue contributing digital content in the future, write grants for small institutions to purchase equipment
- Work with Volunteer Voices to develop plan and mechanism for charging customers who wish to purchase high-quality prints of images contained in Volunteer Voices
- Work on advertising, fundraising, etc for Volunteer Voices
- Lobbying for state funding
Other volunteer and practicum opportunities exist, please feel free to contact the Project Manager, Tiffani Conner tconner2@utk.edu with your ideas