-We discussed the fact that we might cancel the meeting on 10/24/03 (which is cancelled) because 3 of us can’t make it.
-We also discussed having special guests. We’re going to ask MSSA and Fred to come to our meeting at some point.
We did not have a computer (some kind of mix-up) so we continued our general discussion about digital collections/projects. Today we focused on disadvantages:
Comments made:
-Right now at Yale we have projects, not a program. There is no infrastructure for things like archiving and migration. In a program, if you have an idea, you know how to go about it. David made some analogies to microfilming programs.
-We discussed whether any projects are dealing with preservation of digital materials.
-Management of paper materials stops when the material is on the shelf. Digital projects require ongoing thinking and maintenance. Users can’t help tell you what needs maintenance in the same way they can with the paper collections.
-Digital losses: research data. Digitized photographs. Project Open Book (because migration was not part of the grant
-Costs of Digital collections are a big issue. YUL system doesn’t have a lot of extra money for a new program.
-Funding of projects covers costs of that project but we don’t exploit it to create efficiencies across projects
-Time
-Digital projects are just one more thing in people’s already full portfolios.
-Digital projects need to be institutionalized for both financial and time-management (responsibility) reasons.
-Training:
-Treat it like we do print, looking for where the differences lay and train on those differences. For instance: with metadata, look for where the rules are similar to cataloging books and proceed from there.
-The question is: where do we need new procedures?
-Faculty:
-We also discussed the challenges of engaging faculty. Perhaps showing them how we can help them with their own projects would make them more interested.
-Faculty has their own immediate needs/class needs. General consensus that they are not yet doing digital scholarship in the humanities, but in other areas there is more promise.
One common theme of the discussion: are we going to engage in a digital collections program and give it the resources it deserves, or not? There was a general consensus that the library can’t depend on grants, that it has to fund some aspects of collection conversion and digital collection creation in order to continue on any level.
We moved on to discussion of some sample digital collections Sandy brought to talk about. One project is Stanford’s digitization of GATT and WTO documents. This project brought up some other questions, such as “Why is Stanford doing this?” (They have taken it on as their responsibility since the WTO will not take care of this information, and they are using it to further their digital library development as well as make these resources more easily available to faculty) and “What makes Stanford different than us?” (presence of engineering/computer science departments that are interested in this kind of work, campus culture in Silicon Valley).
We also discussed how the development office of the library could help in raising money for digital collections and the challenges involved with that (not very attractive to our donors, who prefer books or collection endowments that can’t be used for electronic materials). We agreed that the new fundraising person should at least be aware of our issues.
We’ll meet again on Friday, October 31, 2003 at 11
am.
URLs of resources discussed or brought by Sandy to show what other libraries are doing:
GODORT bibliography of selection/funding/training for Digitization of Government Information (some very good citations in here that maybe we should read as a group)
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/GODORT/dgi/group1bibliography.html
CyberCemetery: documents from defunct US government agencies that used to be on the web
http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/default.html
GATT/WTO Digital Library Project Summary from Stanford
http://gatt-archive.stanford.edu/whitepaper.htm
http://gatt-archive.stanford.edu/
League of Nations Statistical and Disarmament Documents at Northwestern
http://www.library.northwestern.edu/govpub/collections/league/
comments to: Jen Weintraub