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Mississippi Digital Consortium participants will develop a statewide knowledge infrastructure through its training module. Steering Committee members will produce an inclusive, sustainable program that addresses the specific needs of Mississippi institutions. Program designers will consider the unique and varied resources available in the state, best practices for digitization, logistics, and other essentials for implementation.

The program will offer training opportunities for members of the Steering Committee and designated individuals from participating institution. Consortium leaders may wish to include institutions not currently participating in the Mississippi Digital Library with a view toward future collaboration. Library Science students are another potential audience.

USM Libraries' Special Collections Digital Program personnel have established an informed knowledge base, created standards and procedures, faced unpredicted challenges, and helped lead the first home-grown, primary source-specific digitization workshop in Mississippi. USM personnel are prepared to coordinate training for a statewide digitization initiative through a multi-faceted approach:

Group Learning

Offer a workshop series with half or full-day sessions which provide general and project-specific information with opportunities for questions and discussion. An overview session and a session on selection will be arranged as soon as possible after project inception, and other workshops will follow on approximately a quarterly basis. Ideally, workshop venues will be rotated throughout the participating institutions. Some training components may be outsourced through OCLC, SOLINET, SAA, or other established organizations. Sample workshops include:

• Orientation : overview of the grant project, future training opportunities, digitization of original materials, EAD finding aid conversion, and discussion of workflow. Primarily for Steering Committee members, key grant personnel, and any staff designated by repository leaders.
• Selection : guide to criteria for selection and discussion of specific materials from Mississippi collections and their potential for digitization. Primarily for grant staff participating in or concerned with selection for the grant.
• Capture : guide to capture standards and procedures for images and electronic texts, hands-on practice with equipment and software, guidance in choosing equipment and software, capture workflow, and documentation of capture procedure. Primarily for grant staff participating in or concerned with capture for the grant.
• Metadata : comparison of different metadata schema, focus on Dublin Core, use of controlled vocabularies (specifically the civil rights thesaurus being developed in the current grant project), Dublin Core/MARC crosswalks. Primarily for grant staff participating in or concerned with metadata for the grant.
• IP/Privacy Resolution : examples of specific IP/privacy issues and how they can be resolved, discussion of participant cases, standards and procedures for IP/Privacy resolution. Primarily for grant staff participating in or concerned with IP/Privacy Resolution for the grant.
• Finding aids and EAD : basics of EAD, intellectual framework of finding aids and finding aid standardization, hands-on practice with EAD encoding. Primarily for grant staff participating in or concerned with EAD conversion for the grant.

Individual Instruction

Trainers travel to project sites and provide one-on-one hands-on sessions for project personnel. Individuals may also visit the primary digitization facility (USM) for guided learning.

Dissemination and Communication

Project leaders will make available online manuals, FAQs and tutorials. They will also establish a consortium listserv for dynamic communication, distance learning, and group trouble-shooting.