Howard Besser
Howard Besser (howard@nyu.edu) is Professor of Cinema Studies and
Director of New York University's Moving
Image Archiving & Preservation Program (MIAP), as well as
Senior
Scientist
for Digital Library Initiatives for NYU's Library. In addition to
teaching MIAP courses, he teaches a regular Cinema Studies course on New
Media, Installation Art, and the Future of Cinema. His
current research projects involve preserving digital public
televsion, preserving
and providing digital access to dance performance, preserving
difficult electronic works, issues around copyright and fair use,
Do-It-Yourself media, and the changing nature of media with the advent
of digital delivery systems.
In 2003, he
retired from his position as Professor at UCLA's
School of Education and Information Studies where he taught, did
research, and supervised projects, but he remains a Professor Emeritas
at UCLA. His four main interest areas have been
Image and Multimedia Databases (particularly in cultural institutions),
the social and cultural effects of information technology, digital
library
issues (particularly around standards, longevity, and intellectual
property),
and the development of new ways to teach with technology (including
web-based
instruction and distance learning). He is particularly interested
in design issues and the use of critical theory perspectives.
Dr Besser has been on the faculty of UC Berkeley's School
of Information Management & Systems, had a long-term
affiliation
with the
Berkeley Multimedia Research
Center, and is still on the Advisory Board for the UCB Art
Technology, & Culture lecture series. From 1994-96 he was on
the
faculty of the University of Michigan's School
of Information where he headed a committee developing a curriculum
in multimedia and digital publishing. He has also been an Assistant
Professor
at the University of Pittsburgh.
Howard is also actively involved with museums and the art community.
He was one of the founders and served on the Management Committee of
the
Museum
Educational Site Licensing Project, and directed a Mellon-sponsored
study
of image distribution from museums to universities. For several
years
he was in charge of long-range information planning for the Canadian
Centre for Architecture in Montréal, and for many years he
headed
information technology for Berkeley's University Art Museum. His most
recent
work in this area involves examinining issues of organization, access,
and longevity for new media art in collaboration with the Electronic
Café International and a group
of museums with electronic art collections.
He travels
a lot, speaks frequently at professional conferences, gives workshops
on
Image Databases or on Metadata about half a dozen times a year, and
consults
for libraries, museums, and other institutions. For several years he
served
as co-chair of the American Library Association's Technology
& the Arts Interest Group (co-sponsored by the Association of
College
& Research Libraries and the Library Information Technology
Association).
Social Effects of New Information Technology
Versions of some of his papers and talks on the social effects of new
information
resources:
Cultural Heritage Institutions
The
Changing Role of Photographic Collections With the Advent of
Digitization,
draft of chapter that appeared in Katherine Jones-Garmil (ed.), The
Wired
Museum: Emerging Technology and Changing Paradigms, Washington:
American Association of Museums, 1996
The
Transformation of the Museum and the Way it's Perceived, draft of
chapter
that appeared in Katherine Jones-Garmil (ed.), The Wired Museum:
Emerging
Technology and Changing Paradigms, Washington: American
Association
of Museums, 1996
The
Changing
Role of Photographic Collections With the Advent of Digitization
Discussion
Paper for Working Group for Digital Image in Curatorial Practice,
George
Eastman House, June 4, 1994; (get complete
conference proceedings)
The
Information Highway must be a Two-Way Street: The Arts and Humanities
Communities
Cannot be merely Consumers Presentation to the Convergence
Conference:
Arts and Humanities and the NII, Oct, 1994
The Shape of the 21st Century
Library
in Milton Wolf et. al. (eds.), Information Imagineering: Meeting at
the Interface, Chicago: American Library Association, pages 133-146
Policy
maintains websites on Intellectual
Property
in the
Digital Age, Information
Commons, and on Public
Domain and Public Spaces -- including links to articles he has
written,
important papers, guidelines, and recent news articles
his paper on Commodification
of Culture Harms Creators, prepared Oct 2001 for American Library
Association
Wye River retreat on Information Commons, and published in The Information
Commons, Technology, and the Future of Libraries, Issue #1, June
2002
The
Next Digital Divides in Teaching to Change LA 1:2, Spring
2001
Was on the National Research Council/National Academy of
Sciences'
Panel
on Intellectual Property Rights and the Emerging Information
Infrastructure
that authored The
Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age
(National
Academy of Sciences Press, 2000)
Consumers & Public
Older Activities
Teaching with Technology
For many years Howard has been actively involved in developing and
testing
new methods for using technology to teach. Some of those efforts
have focused on Distance-Independent Learning. Howard edited a Perspectives
issue on distance education for the Journal of the American
Society
for Information Science which appeared in Nov of 1996. In Winter
1995
he taught a course on the Impact
of Multimedia and Networks in which students in both Ann Arbor and
Berkeley used a wide variety of technologies to interact with one
another
both in class as well as to collaborate on projects. In 1999 he
co-taught
a class with half the students in Berkeley and the other half at
UCLA.
And in 2001 he recorded a continuing education lecture on Distance
Learning
for an American Society for Information Science & Technology
continuing
education experiment.
Since Spring 1994 Howard has been using the Internet as the key
delivery
system for instructional support, placing curricular materials on the
WorldWide
Web, having students engage in online discussion groups, and making
students
read the online work of previous students and incorporate this work
into
their own Web pages and online discussions. From 1997-99 he
taught
a course in Good Web Design and directed a grant
project that hired students from his department to develop
well-designed
online web-based delivery systems for course materials for large
undergraduate
classes on the UC Berkeley campus.
Howard helped found the Museum
Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL) as a way to provide
digital
images for instruction. Recently he has been examining the new
instructional
strategies being developed to teach with these images. At Michigan Dr.
Besser also worked both to develop new curriculum that relied
extensively
on technology, and he worked on design of instructional technology labs
to support extensive teaching with technology. Under a grant from the
Kellogg
Foundation to the University of Michigan to
revamp curriculum, Howard chaired a subcommittee
that examined
the creation and design of digital documents, and another committee
that was designing a new Information Studies Media Lab.
Examples of Howard's innovative teaching include exercises
incorporating repurposed images to teach important properties being
raised by the WorldWide Web. He also regularly uses online
papers and projects from previous student work as starting material
for subsequent classes. In 1995 he was named Outstanding Teacher
of the Year by the American Society for Information Science.
21st Century Literacies
Howard's Distance Learning papers, journal articles, etc.
- Special
Issue
on Distance-Independent
Education , Journal of the American Society of Information
Science
47(11), Nov 1996 (official
table of contents)
- Issues
and Challenges for the Distance-Independent Environment, Journal
of the American Society of Information Science 47(11), Nov 1996 online
access restricted to users within the UCLA domain
- The
Impact of Distance-Independent Education, Journal of the
American
Society of Information Science 47(11), Nov 1996 online access
restricted
to users within the UCLA domain (co-authored with Maria Bonn)
- Interactive Distance-Independent Education: Challenges to
Traditional
Academic Roles, Journal of Education for Library and
Information
Science 38 (1), Winter 1997, pages 35-42 (co-authored with Maria
Bonn)
- Multimedia and Networks Teach about Museums: Issues in
Maintaining a
WWW Site to Facilitate Distance Learning, in David Bearman (ed.), Multimedia
Computing and Museums (Selected Papers from the Third International
Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums), Pittsburgh:
Archives
& Museum Informatics, 1995, pages 124-140
- Distance
Learning
in the Humanities & Social Sciences: Doing it, Supporting it, and
Looking
at its Impact, Howard Besser's lecture to Advanced Information
Technologies
Group and Digital Library Research Program, University of Illinois,
February
10, 1997 (Real
Audio)
- Howard's
older
Distance
Education links
Curricular Support Material on the Web
Misc
Digital Libraries, Standards, Metadata,
&
Longevity Activities
Howard is involved in a variety of activities around Digital Libraries,
Standards, and Longevity. He was a member of the group
that created the Dublin Core metadata standard (1995), and was the
lead convenor for the 3rd
major Dublin Core meeting (1996). He was part of a small team
that designed the first set of standards for Structural and
Administrative
metadata (originally called Making
of America 2, now called the Metadata
Encoding and Transmission Standard). Howard was part of a
small
committee that initiated the National Information Standards
Organization's
efforts to create a standard for Technical
Metadata for Image files (Howard's
opening presentation | Howard's
meeting summary). He was a US representatives to the Metadata
Working Group of the National Science Foundation/European Community
sponsored Digital
Library Collaboratory (an 18-month effort to harmonize
divergent
Digital Library research and practice from country to country, as well
as to create an internationally accepted future research agenda)
(1998-99).
And he was a member of the Actors
and Roles Working Group of the US National Science Foundation and
the
European Community's DELOS, creating a "Reference Models for Digital
Libraries:
Actors and Roles" (2001-2003).
Since 1998 Howard has been a member of the California Digital
Library's
Technical
Architecture and Standards Committee, which has written extensive
digital
library standards. He supplements his standards development work
with extensive instructional and advocacy activities, including scores
of talks, workshops, and mini-courses for academic and professional
societies
both in the US and abroad.
Produced a variety of online and print documents that serve as both
conceptual and pragmatic guidelines for groups involved in creating
interoperable
digital collections.
- Co-author of The
Virtual Museum: The Next Generation (with Steve Dietz, Kati Geber,
and Ann Borda), Ottawa: Canadian Heritage Information Network, 2004
- Author of Best
Practices for Image Capture (focused on scanning and administrative
metadata) for the California Digital Library (7/99) (later
version)
- Co-author of Making
of
America
II White Paper, and participant in the MOA2 project to define
structural
and administrative metadata standards for digital representations of
photographs,
photo albums, diaries, letterbooks, and other archival materials
(Sponsored
by the Digital
Library
Federation)
- Maintains a list of current
important standards activities
- Participated in the development of the Dublin
Core, the metadata standard to describe Network Objects (first
meeting
sponsored by NCSA and OCLC)
- Produced a document on Standards
for Images (an effort that is being coordinated with both the
Coalition
for Networked Information and the Computerized Interchange of Museum
Information)
Longevity
- Maintains a set of links
to resources on Digital Longevity (including several articles he's
written on subtopics like preserving electronic art, and longevity of
moving
image material)
- Participant in Time
& Bits, a small meeting on longevity of digital information
organized
by the Getty Information and Conservation Institutes in association
with
Stuart Brand
- Co-author (with Peter Lyman) of a paper on issues
of longevity of digital information as part of the Time & Bits
Meeting
- Was a member of the task
force
examining
the archiving of digital information (sponsored by the Commission
on
Preservation & Access and the Research Libraries Group)
- Member of the UC Systemwide Operations & Planning Group's Digital
Preservation and Archiving Planning Committee
Multimedia Databases
Here are some of his current and recent multimedia database activities:
Irv
Besser dies 5/7/97
Howard's T-Shirt image
database
1996 Ann
Arbor T-Shirt Exhibtion
Rants
on current events (including the Unabom)
Anarchist links
