New Report: The Impact of Digitizing Special Collections on Teaching and Scholarship, by Merrilee Proffitt and Jennifer Schaffner

DUBLIN, Ohio, USA, 18 July 2008-Subtitled, "Reflections on a Symposium about Digitization and the Humanities," the report consists of an overview and interpretation of perspecives provided at the RLG Programs symposium that was held in Philadelphia at the Chemical Heritage Foundation on 4 June 2008.

 

DLF Fall Forum 2008: Providence, Rhode Island
1:00 p.m., Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 -
1:00 p.m., Friday, November 14th, 2008

 

 

Persistence of Memory:
Sustaining Digital Collections
December 9-10, 2008
Chicago, Illinois

 

 

At a glance

* Makes your library's electronic serials collection more visible and increases its usage since the service makes it easier for library users and staff to find and use the full-text electronic serials in your library collection.
* Keeps your electronic serials holdings up to date in WorldCat in a cost-effective, simple and efficient way.

 

RLG Programs releases "Seeking Sustainability," a casual report on RLG's exploration of ways to make access to digitized special collections self-supporting

DigCCurr 2009:
Digital Curation Practice, Promise and Prospects

April 1-3, 2009
Chapel Hill, NC USA

Important dates:
September 30, 2008
Proposals due for contributed papers, panels and posters

 

Seeking Sustainability: "a casual report about RLG's exploration of ways to make access to digitized special collections self-supporting, prepared by RLG Program Officer, Ricky Erway.

The report begins with an overview of RLG Cultural Materials and Trove.net (two services RLG offered prior to the RLG/OCLC combination) and discusses why they were curtailed. The findings regarding sustainability are based on RLG's experiences with subscription access, image licensing, and relevant advertising, as well as attempts at sponsorship and content licensing with other Web portals. The report captures a moment in time, but should be of interest to anyone pondering the question of how to provide access to and sustain library, archive and museum resources.

This report is part of an ongoing series of papers from OCLC Programs and Research to promote evidence-based practices that are likely to have an impact on research institutions and the communities they serve."

 

July 9th 2008 - Bucknell University - Lewisburg, Pennsylvania

 

March 14, 2008
Google Unveils Tools to Integrate Its Digitized Books Into Campus Library Catalogs

"This week Google unveiled a set of software protocols that allow libraries to essentially merge Goolge's collection with their own."

 

From ALCTS ANO:

"The Electronic Resources Interest Group now has a blog. The ERIG blog was developed and is maintained by Jennifer Lang. Announcements and updates to upcoming programs and speakers' presentation slides will be posted to the blog."

 

MetaArchive/LOCKSS Distributed Preservation Networks Workshop

Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL)
June 20, 2008 - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Omni William Penn Hotel

This all-day workshop will provide information and training for institutions seeking to build or join LOCKSS-based distributed digital preservation networks. Please consider attending if you are interested in learning more about the technical logistics and operational considerations of hosting or participating in a Private LOCKSS Network for distributed preservation.

 

Short definition:

"Digital preservation combines policies, strategies and actions that ensure access to digital content over time."

This opinion piece urges moving forward more quickly on digitization of special collections. The authors suggest that we move to an access (rather than preservation ) model; that we incorporate digization as part of processing a collection; that we scan the 'tip of the iceberg' and follow-up with further scanning when usage patterns develop; that we focus on quantity over quality; and that we expose our collections in the common search tools.

Lorcan Dempsey's posting summarizing "Shifting Gears: Gearing Up to Get Into the Flow"

 

Abstract
The Google Books Project has drawn a great deal of attention, offering the prospect of the library of the future and rendering many other library and digitizing projects apparently superfluous. To grasp the value of Google's endeavor, we need among other things, to assess its quality. On such a vast and undocumented project, the task is challenging. In this essay, I attempt an initial assessment in two steps. First, I argue that most quality assurance on the Web is provided either through innovation or through "inheritance." In the later case, Web sites rely heavily on institutional authority and quality assurance techniques that antedate the Web, assuming that they will carry across unproblematically into the digital world. I suggest that quality assurance in the Google's Book Search and Google Books Library Project primarily comes through inheritance, drawing on the reputation of the libraries, and before them publishers involved. Then I chose one book to sample the Google's Project, Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. This book proved a difficult challenge for Project Gutenberg, but more surprisingly, it evidently challenged Google's approach, suggesting that quality is not automatically inherited. In conclusion, I suggest that a strain of romanticism may limit Google's ability to deal with that very awkward object, the book.

NISO E-Resource Management Forum: The What, Why, and How for Managing E-Resources

September 24-25, 2007
Magnolia Hotel
Denver, CO

"dLIST, an open access archive for the Information Sciences, is supported by the School of Information Resources and Library Science and Learning Technologies Center, University of Arizona."

"July 17, 2007 ­ HP and MIT Libraries today announced the formation of the DSpace Foundation, a non-profit organization that will provide support to the growing community of organizations that use DSpace, an open source software solution for accessing, managing and preserving scholarly works in a digital archive. "

"In May 2006, the University of Washington Libraries began integrating their digital collections into the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Why? Students often start their research outside of the library's Web site, so it made sense to put links in one of the top Web reference resources to lead students back to resources available to them in the library."

"Announcing a new mailing list for the Electronic Resources Management Interest Group (ERMIG). This mailing list gives the IG a space to continue discussions between conferences and to conduct the business of the IG.

The purpose of the LITA/ALCTS Electronic Resources Management Interest Group is to promote and enable the exchange of information and discussion among librarians, publishers, electronic resource management system vendors and related service organizations concerning issues related to the
management of electronic resources. The group will assist in developing appropriate and responsive systems and standards by fostering open and collaborative discussions and implementation issues."

"DLF and OCLC announce the second release of the "Registry of Digital Masters Record Creation Guidelines," available from
http://purl.org/dlf/rdm200705. Created by a DLF/OCLC working group, the guidelines are to be used when creating metadata for born digital or to be digitized materials that have been digitized according to standards and best practices with the intention of including the metadata in the Registry of Digital Masters. The Registry is available through OCLC
WorldCat. "

PennSound is an ongoing project, committed to producing new audio recordings and preserving existing audio archives. PennSound is a project of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing.

"The Visual Resources Association announces that the release version of VRA Core 4.0 is now available. Core 4.0 Beta was released in December of 2005. After testing and input from the cultural heritage community, improvements were made that resulted in the release version found at http://www.vraweb.org/projects/vracore4/

For those who have already begun using Core 4.0 in its beta version, the Core 4.0 website contains a document entitled "Explanation of changes between VRA Core 4.0 beta version and VRA Core 4.0 release version"

VRA Core was developed and is maintained by the Data Standards Committee of the Visual Resources Association."

Roy Tennant sampled 856 fields in MARC records to see whether there is a reliable method of determining the availability of the full text access based on the coding the the 856.  His results show wide variablity in the coding, and he argues for one consistant method to code for full text.

"In January of 2007, the Digitization Policy Task Force of ALA's Office for Information Technology Policy introduced the draft Principles for Digitized Content. This document is presented to the community for discussion and revision. Its goal is to succinctly voice the primary policy areas that can guide libraries as they make decisions regarding digitization. This blog is an online area for your comments on the Principles."

Managing the Intangible: Creating, Storing and Retrieving Digital Surrogates of Historical Materials

Dates: Monday, April 30 and Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Times: Program Schedule
9:00 am to 5:00 pm each day
5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
Reception on Monday, April 30

Location:
UMUC Inn and Conference Center
3501 University Boulevard, East
Adelphi, Maryland 20783

Registry of projects using MODS

"NISO's Shared E-Resource Understanding (SERU) Working Group has posted its first public draft best practices document on its Web site. This document, "The SERU Approach to E-Resource Subscriptions: Framework for Development and Use of SERU," presents a shared set of understandings to which publishers and libraries can point when negotiating the sale of electronic content. The framework offers publishers and libraries a solution to the often-burdensome process of bilateral negotiation of a formal license agreement by allowing the sale of e-resources without licenses if both parties feel their perception of risk has been adequately addressed by current law and developing norms of behavior."

The name of the listserv is DIGIPRES. For purposes of clarity, a working definition of digital preservation is included in this invitation.

**Digital preservation combines policies, strategies and actions that ensure access to information in digital formats over time.**

The unmoderated listserv shall have the following characteristics:

* cultural organization [mainly library but also archives and museums] centered
* not TOO technical but technical topics could certainly be covered
* not focused on any single digital preservation initiative but touching on them all
* Questions from practitioners could be asked and answered, such as:

* At your digital repository, how do you ...[whatever]?
* Which metadata schema do you use for your institutional repository?
* When you buy electronic books, do you attempt to guarantee long term access to the files in your license agreements?

Verde, the Ex Libris electronic management system

SFX, the link server from Ex Libris, delivers powerful linking services in the scholarly information environment. SFX is also a key component in the management of electronic resources in a library.

"In Google's Broad Wake: Taking Responsibility for Shaping the Global Digital Library," by Richard K. Johnson, brings together a number of articulations of core library interests in digitization partnerships, identifies six key interests against which potential agreements should be evaluated, and urges libraries and their institutions to "make full use of whatever leverage they have to ensure the global digital library is open and dynamic."

"The Library of Congress, as part of the PREMIS maintenance activity, commissioned Karen Coyle to provide this study to assist the newly established PREMIS Editorial Committee, in consultation with the PREMIS Implementers Group, with its first revision of the data dictionary and schemas.  The intention is to improve the specification so that institutions trying to assess their rights to preserve materials in digital formats will be able to provide enough information in their digital repositories to make such assessments about their materials over time. In this study Karen Coyle reviews the landscape of digital rights, analyzes various preservation rights scenarios and the sorts of preservation actions that digital repositories might take, relates copyright law to preservation actions, and provides recommendations for revision where the data dictionary needs expansion."

ALCTS has established a new blog.   The primary focus appears to be discussion of "controversial statementsts", which will also be the focus of the 2007 Midiwnter Forum "Definitely Digital: an Exploration of the Future of Knowledge on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of ALCTS."