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."

 

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.

"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."

"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."