We jumped a bit ahead of ourselves in the sense that this morning's conversation revolved primarily around needs but, in the course of this conversation, we said some important things about who we are and what we do.

QUESTIONS

What are the questions that are important for visual studies? We don't always know in advance what our questions are. We want to accommodate serendipity, finding something we're not necessarily looking for.....as with card catalogues and stack browsing. We felt that the responses to the questionnaires did not actually get at interrogation. We found it difficult to generalize about the questions we ask many times we discover the questions in conversation with the object of study. It's an iterative process and we sometimes discover the questions as we get into the material and get to know the tools better.

MESL

Because several people in our group had participated in the Museum Educational Site Licensing project (MESL), we asked what it was about that project that made it work. Our responses: it provided "raw" material; the images were searchable; individual faculty could assemble the material as they wished; it was truly collaborative on many levels, with the collaboration producing a decidedly different result than if any of us had worked on our own. MESL, nonetheless, provided art historical information to art historians. If we were building the next-generation database, we would want to ask how this would scale up to other disciplines.

CRITICAL MASS, "ARCHIVING" & PRESERVATION

One of the ways we work (ideally) is in proximity to large amounts of raw material: Janet Murray's archive model. However, to make everything an archive, we need an entity to take these things and maintain them and bring them up into the current technology (each organization needs a digital preservation officer).

FEEDBACK LOOP

Many felt that the current linear "delivery and reception" model is inadequate, in part because it factors out the role of creation and in part because it fails to accommodate feedback. We need a way for users to give back into the system and to contribute to it. How to get our questions and comments heard more interactive information lines/exchanges.

RELATIONSHIP TO OUR MATERIAL

We need to be able to look at the material in new ways: we want to be able to search in new ways AND keep the old ways too.

We articulated at least three kinds of things related to what we do that could be delivered:

1. finding aids or information about what's held;
2. the things themselves, that is some surrogate of the "primary source" and/or the visual object of research; and
3. functionality, the ability to search and manipulate.

Questions about clarifying audience and use were on everyone's list.

We agreed that we want new technologies to do something for us beyond what we can already do in more conventional media. We do not wish simply, in other words, to replicate slide technology in a new form.

In response to the question, "what do we want?" there was substantial agreement on the sorts of things we'd like to see:

sourced, high quality content

a large database of visual materials

the ability to search (by visual as well as textual characteristics) and to browse

the ability to sort material (like a light table)

the ability to manipulate the images once we have them, as well as to zoom and pan, etc.

the theme of standards was mentioned by many people; standards in this conversation had to do with replicability, duration, authority, and mechanisms for evaluation.

more time and funding...both to do projects and to learn the technology: we need to become familiar with what's possible and what's already "there."

more opportunities for collaboration.

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