Minutes, 10.31.03

CDC Digital Collections Task Force

This meeting featured a visit by Rich Szary and Stephen Yearl from Manuscripts and Archives. They discussed the digital collections they’ve created.

All the collections are created from tools that work together. MSSA uses different descriptive formats that provide more flexibility for their material. Orbis is not enough for them and the Library Systems office concentrates its development efforts on Orbis.

Currently: interested in working on consolidation and integration of disparate databases that have been developed over the years.

3 kinds of databases/collections:

- user access to information

- management of holdings (Orbis is not enough)

- born digital material

They spent some time discussing their electronic records initiative, using LiveLink and Fedora. LiveLink will manage the records as they are created or sent to the archive and Fedora will preserve them, using preservation metadata. Fedora can also be used for many other digital library functions such as controlling actions of digital objects, and maybe be useful in a digital repository environment. Audrey Novak is working with them too, to learn about what the library can use Fedora for.

Records management may in the future need a business plan because funding is only good for a year or so. However, chargebacks may not work because people aren’t that interested in this problem…we are.

Fedora’s web page is at: www.fedora.info

We also talked a lot about consolidating databases and Stephen had a nice statement which I will put down for the future: “Do what you like on your own database but in public dress up as a standard”.

MSSA chooses local solutions only for specific things, such as searching materials across all their collections. They are doing this by working on exposing harvesting metadata, such as OAI metadata for the Holocaust Testimonies database. The cross-collection search would work on all the harvested metadata, rather than native searches of each database. They are also working on how their databases talk to each other how their databases talk to each other.

Basically, they are looking at different ways they can provide access to the same material and provide context for it, even context from outside the university.

They are getting 4,000 finding aids digitized and marked up which has been a learning experience for both MSSA and the vendor. They have also developed a more comprehensive search of their finding aids and other databases.

The image database is a front end to a whole process of patrons ordering images and staff digitizing them. The selection is mostly use-based though some collections have been entirely digitized when there was funding.

Finally, we learned about the Shoah Pilot project which is providing digitized holocaust testimonies for classroom use via Internet 2 from the Shoah Foundation in California. There will also be a robotic videotape copier/scanner visiting the library in the winter.

We asked MSSA about the impact of what they are doing for use in Metalib or Encompass (cross database searching). That is one area we will probably keep in touch with them about.