The challenge in designing these World Wide Web-based collections is to maintain their immediate usefulness to specific courses or a particular curriculum, while ensuring their lasting value to a larger community of scholars as research collections. The TTI is experimenting with a number of solutions, all of which involve a combination of creative web design with the database functionality of indexing, searching and retrieval. The TTI supports innovative uses of technology in the service of teaching at the University of Virginia. Chosen through a yearly proposal process, ten to twelve faculty members per year participate as Fellows of this program, which offers both equipment and one year of intensive support for instructional technology projects in which science, engineering and humanities disciplines are represented. Somewhat surprisingly, the program has proven particularly popular with humanities faculty, intensely interested in enriching and enlivening their lectures with materials traditionally difficult to access or manage.
Faculty bring to the project of archive-building a clear notion of their pedagogic goals.
The collections must make or reinforce course-related points. Faculty control of the media objects that comprise the collection. Most documentation resides in the heads of the collection owners. The design of each site is a labor-intensive venture which is driven by a single faculty member's unique vision of how to give most eloquent voice to the source materials. This final design always seeks to overcome the perceived restraints imposed by the conventional media and the traditional modes of presentation and expression.