Publications and Presentations
CNI Presentation

Visit the Rice Only Section of the Site for Information on accessing the archive (viewable only from a connection to the Rice network).

1. The platform through which the archive will be provided.  Does the technology work?  How can it be improved to satisfy the needs of faculty members with respect to their own research and with respect to in class of and out of class activities for their students?   In order to satisfy institutional goals with respect to teaching and learning, what technologies need to be in place and what sorts of investments need to be made in hardware, software, and staff support.

2. Integration of these resources.  What steps need to be taken in order to integrate the use of this new category of material into those materials already in us by faculty members in their courses and research programs?  How can the presence of a “discovery tool” for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute archive become natural part of the arsenal of discovery tools available on a given campus to support scholarship, teaching, and learning?

3. Usability.  How do faculty manage this material in their personal work environments.  Faculty members and those who support their work are accustomed to managing print materials effectively and, increasingly, to adapting themselves to the management of images.  How will they manage their instructional strategies when digital video becomes one of the formats in which they present materials to students, both in the classroom and in the library?

4. Instructional Toolkit.  What tools need to be offered to faculty members and their students in order to ensure integration and usability?  Can these tools be crafted in such a way as to make them applicable beyond the specific context of the Institute archive.

5. Intellectual Property.  The USC Shoah Foundation Institute owns the copyrights to all the interviews in its collection, and it is prepared to offer the three universities a broad license that will permit them to use the archive for research and instructional purposes on the three campuses and over their networks.  These materials present nearly unique issues of privacy and security that provide an opportunity to teach students about the issues such a collection raises in an electronic environment.  Undergraduate students, of course, know a good deal about these issues with respect to non-scholarly materials like popular music, and they know how to circumvent the rules of intellectual property law as well.  This archive, raising as it does a unique set of problems, also offers an important opportunity both for the universities to teach their students and for the Institute to understand what sorts of safeguards need to be in place to protect its collection.
   
   Simultaneously, the presence of so extensive an archive of such sensitive material raises questions that can only be answered in the context of their actual use.  What impact are privacy and security concerns likely to have on the way in which these interviews are used in college classrooms?  To the extent that intellectual property rules must be enforced in the use of the testimonies, how should such enforcement proceed?  What resources ought to be devoted to it?  Is the presence of this kind of material in college libraries and classrooms a “teachable moment” in which a genuine opportunity can be created for students to learn something about intellectual property and why, especially in the electronic environment, it is so important?

6. Impact on Pedagogy.  What kinds of intellectual problems can be addressed using the testimonies in the archive that could not be addressed with other kinds of materials?  To what extent, does the use of digital video alter teaching strategies and class assignments?  How does the deeply emotional and sensitive nature of this collection affect student learning? 

7. Impact on Structures of Support.  What structures need to be in place in the library, in information services, in individual departments, in classrooms, and in dormitories to maximize the impact of these materials on teaching and learning?  Since the provision of these materials relies upon technology, appropriate support not merely for the technology but for its effective use in classroom and office are likely to be required.  What shape will such structures take?  How will they be managed?