Minutes for January 26, 2006
Present: Tom Bolze, Daniel Lovins (chair), Youn Noh (recording), Britta Santamauro, Becky Slitt. Meeting began at 2:30 p.m. in Room 411.
Note: Action items in boldface green
GLBTQ book jackets project
Tom brought sample book jackets for the group. He reported on his meeting with Acquisitions staff and identified issues that need to be resolved.
Collection development issues: The book jackets are from orders from select GLBTQ publishers. They were set aside by Marcia Romanansky. The number of images that would be created is unknown, perhaps 10-20. Tom has had difficulty identifying which book jackets to include. For some, relevance to the project might not be apparent because they express GLBTQ themes obliquely.
Copyright issues: Britta brought a book for Tom, Instructional Technology and Media for Learning. It provides information on copyright issues for online resources. Some of the book jackets might be under copyright.
Yiddish pamphlet project
Daniel received a CD of images from Rebekah. The CD was produced by Luna. It contains JPEG images generated from the TIFFs created in the Beinecke Digital Production Unit. Metadata needs to be created for the images. At our next meeting, we will investigate tools (e.g., oXygen), metadata formats (e.g., MODS), and related resources (e.g., DLF Aquifer MODS Implementation Guidelines).
Discussion of Karen Calhoun's presentation at the PCC Participants Meeting, ALA Midwinter Conference
Daniel summarized her presentation. Calhoun argued that research libraries have made more progress than is commonly recognized. Catalog departments in particular have achieved economies of scale through cooperative agreements and resource sharing. At the same time, the increasingly networked environment of the World Wide Web has created unprecedented competition for catalogers. Google, Amazon, Yahoo, for example, have implemented knowledge management tools that appear more advanced that what libraries are offering. Traditional cataloging in an OPAC doesn't scale up, and users are increasingly turning elsewhere to find what they need. (Calhoun cited extremely low statistics on OPAC use. Several in the group questioned their accuracy.) The OPAC is a diminishing portion of the researcher's infosphere. Calhoun argued that catalogers should be more involved in managing the Web. She also suggested that catalogers are well-equipped to survive in a more disintermediated library environment. After all, it is they who created the self-service OPAC, allowing users to bypass library staff, and go straight to the stacks with call number in hand. So we have long been champions of "user empowerment" and should not be afraid to employ new technologies that make users even more self-sufficient. Calhoun also compared the integration of electronic resources within a single institution to the broadcasting and integration of electronic resources (or related metadata) among multiple institutions. By way of illustration, Daniel opened the Web site for Penn/Cambridge Genizah Fragment project , showing how the union database of all digitized fragments provides a virtual collection more useful than any single institution could have done on its own. Calhoun suggested that while internal integration may be getting more institutional attention and funding at the moment, this kind of external integration may actually be more important to our users.
Meeting adjourned at 3:45 p.m.