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ALA

For those interested, here are the notes from the June 26, 2004 Statewide Digitization Project Discussion Group meeting.

Please contact Liz Bishoff (bishoffl@oclc.org) or Tom Clareson (claresont@oclc.org) if you have questions or comments.

Statewide Digitization Project Discussion Group
June 26, 2004
ALA Annual, Orlando, FL

Meeting Notes

Participating:
Nancy Allen, University of Denver/Collaborative Digitization Program (CDP)
Kenning Arlitsch, Univ. of Utah/Mountain West Digital Library
Brenda Bailey-Hainer, Colorado State Library/CDP
Liz Bishoff, OCLC Digital Collections & Metadata Services
Ruth Bogan, Rutgers University
Tracy Byerly, MLNC
Debbie Cardinal, WiLS
Randy Dykhuis, MLC
Claudia Frazer, Drake University
Per M. Hansen, Index Data
Cathy N. Hartman, University of North Texas
Dottie Hiebing, METRO
Susan Malbin, IMLS
Holly Mercer, University of Kansas
Rick Moul, PASCAL
Peggy Schaeffer, North Carolina State Library
Louise Svehla, Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive
Suzy Szasz Palmer, University of Louisville
Kayla Willey, Brigham Young University/Mountain West Digital Library

The meeting opened with each of the participants introducing themselves and
their institutions and/or projects.

IMLS National Leadership Grants Program Changes

Susan Malbin, Senior Program Officer, IMLS, explained the changes that IMLS
is making in their National Leadership Grant categories for FY2005.
Beginning with the 2005 grant cycle, there will be only three categories of
National Leadership Grants to libraries and museums. These categories are
1) Research and Demonstration; 2) Building Digital Resources (replacing the
Digitization and Preservation category; and 3) Advancing Learning
Communities. This last category includes projects that deal with learning
networks and services, current research, and learning technology.
Acceptable partnerships are no longer limited to partnering with the museum
community only. For example, a library may partner with a school or other
institution from the learning community to qualify for a grant. Deadlines
for the Advancing Learning Communities grant application submissions have
been moved up to February 1, 2005, in line with the deadlines for the first
two categories. Complete details of the grant program changes will be
announced on July 13, 2004.

Susan also put in a plug for being a grant application reviewer. Although
it is hard work, reviewers benefit by being able to see the range of
interesting projects under development, and also become better grant
proposal writers themselves.

Susan reminded the group to contact either Martha Crawley or herself as they
begin conceptualizing projects. Martha and Susan will be happy to vet the
project and direct people to the appropriate funding sources.

Contact information for Martha Crawley:
Phone: (202) 606-5513
E-mail: mcrawley@imls.gov <mailto:mcrawley@imls.gov>.

Contact information for Susan Malbin:
Phone: (202) 606-5389
E-mail: smalbin@imls.gov <mailto:smalbin@imls.gov>

Statewide Digitization Project Updates

Eight of the participants gave project updates.

Colorado: Brenda Bailey-Hainer reported on the Colorado Historic Newspaper
Collection. They are using Olive software to provide access to digitized
microfilm. OCLC Preservation Service is converting the microfilm to digital
format and creating the database. There are 39 newspapers in the project
now; more are being added each month.

The project originally started with a $120,000 LSTA grant; followed by an
IMLS grant in the amount of $250,000. Now that those grants have ended or
are almost at their end, the project is relying on donations for support.
To date they have received approximately $150,000 in donations from
libraries, museums and historical societies, who are finding grant money
themselves to make these donations. Project challenges have included image
quality problems, run size changes, the need to change the Web interface to
incorporate the volume of newspapers in the project, and the most recent
challenge of adding foreign language newspapers. Currently there are 60,000
pages in the collection. In July 2004 Brenda anticipates adding an
additional 20,000 pages.

The project started with the oldest newspapers, dating to 1859. For
copyright reasons, they have not digitized anything published beyond 1922.
Their goal was to get coverage throughout the state, rather than to focus on
the two largest newspapers.

Utah: Kayla Willey reported on the latest addition from Brigham Young
University to the Mountain West Digital Library project, which is a
collaboration with the National Library of Italy and the Vatican. They are
using magnetic resonance imaging to digitize a collection of papyrus scrolls
buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Although the scrolls were turned
to charcoal when the volcano erupted, the digital imaging reveals the Greek
characters on the scrolls. Three scrolls are finished, and more will be
added to the collection.

Missouri: Tracy Byerly provided an update on the Virtually Missouri
program. They are updating their collections inventory database to reflect
what the program participants have and where they are in the digitization
process. After four years of offering training, they are scaling back these
offerings, as the majority of those who needed the training have received
it. The Missouri Digitization conference will be on hiatus for 2005 because
after four years, there is not as much demand for information. They plan to
hold the next conference in 2006. The Virtually Missouri website is being
redesigned in 2005, and they are using DLXS software for the metadata
database, which is their newest effort.

New Jersey: Ruth Bogan described the New Jersey Digital Highway and Digital
Repository system, which provides for mass storage of files on the back end,
with Fedora on top. They are building front-end forms for metadata
creation. These forms are simple on top, but support complex metadata.
They are talking with OCLC Office of Research about beta-testing the OCLC
FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) schema. Their system uses
all open-source software and is being developed from the ground up. The New
Jersey State Library provides training and public relations for the NJ
Digital Highway.

North Carolina: Peggy Schaeffer explained the work the North Carolina ECHO
(Exploring Cultural Heritage Online) has been doing to survey what is
available to digitize within the state. To date they have surveyed 78 of
the 100 counties, which are primarily rural, ferreting out all the varied
treasures held by libraries and cultural heritage institutions. For their
project, they first reached out to the legislature and to scholars, rather
than the cultural heritage institutions. The legislative support has been a
key factor in finding funding for this program. NC ECHO has is a metadata
coordinator who spends her time traveling throughout the state to help
institutions learn how to create good metadata for their digital objects.

Utah: Kenning Arlitsch gave an additional update on the Mountain West
Digital Library. The digital library has four digitization centers in Utah,
two in Nevada, all using CONTENTdm software. The University of Utah has a
multi-site server for harvesting. There are approximately 250,000 objects
in the collection, as well as two newspapers at BYU and 24-25 newspaper
titles at the University of Utah, representing over 24,000 pages. The
newspaper digitization was funded by two LSTA grants and an IMLS grant,
along with a grant from a grass-roots organization. The plan is to
aggregate metadata with BYU, offering the newspapers as a separate search so
as not to overwhelm the systems or users.

Illinois: Louise Svehla spoke about the Upper Mississippi Valley Digital
Image Archive's focus on cataloging standards. After a year of cataloging
images alone, Louise is now training others to help. This is one-on-one
training with a 100-page manual. The training is very successful. They
have an Illinois State Library LSTA grant proposal submitted, and there is
still six months remaining on their current LSTA grant. The next focus will
be on building in sustainability for the program.

Texas: Cathy Hartman talked about the University of North Texas project,
which is now piloting with holders of private collections and museums to
ingest Texas history. Like New Jersey, their system is built using
open-source software. They are currently getting their organizational
systems in place.

National Conference for Statewide/Regional Digitization Projects

Liz Bishoff led a discussion on the topic of a national conference for
statewide digitization project planners. Bishoff indicated that OCLC is
willing to serve the host site. The group was overwhelmingly in favor of
such a conference.

The following we suggestions for topics for the seminar:

- Day-long leadership seminar (Brenda Bailey-Hainer)
- Long-term storage of archival files (Kenning Arlitsch)
- Products and services for collaborative projects
- Suggestions for working across state collaboratives
- Preservation metadata and archiving solutions
o This raised the question of whether
participants would need education on digital archiving before the
conference. One suggestion was to provide resources for reading before the
conference so that everyone would be up to speed on the topic
- Sustainability issues, especially business models for
funding and staffing, along with funding sources for generating revenues
- Components of other statewide virtual libraries, both in
terms of sustainability and technology
- Architectures to pull in scattered projects for federated
searching in a decentralized system
- Collective advocacy with vendors
- Marketing communications plans
- Shaping collaborative best practices (i.e., sharing good
plans and advocacy efforts, providing a clearinghouse for surveys and
manuals)
- Working effectively with the K-12 community

Liz asked for volunteers to serve on a planning committee. Nancy Allen,
Claudia Frazer, and Debbie Cardinal volunteered.

Information and Education Needs for Statewide Digitization Projects

The final agenda item concerned the information and education needs for
statewide digitization projects. The following needs were mentioned:

- Information on the new OCLC initiative to develop a web tool
for controlled vocabularies
- Information on digital copyright, including explanations of
the fair use policy and a discussion of digital rights
- Sharing best practices beyond metadata
- Project organization, planning and management, both at a
very basic level and also for those managing projects across multiple
institutions
- Finding good evaluation tools and ways to conduct
larger-scale outcomes evaluations
- Quality control throughout the life of a project
Training on how to help non-catalogers create good metadata