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Forwarded from the NINCH list.
Judy
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From: David Green, INTERNET:[log in to unmask]
TO: Multiple recipients of list, INTERNET:[log in to unmask]
DATE: 12/4/96 10:50 PM
RE: MEMBERS REPORT #9
===================================
FROM THE DIRECTORS DESK - 9
C O N T E N T S
DIGITAL LIBRARIES
1. National Digital Library Program
2. National Digital Library Federation
3. Digital Library Initiative
4. Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib)
5. G-7: Bibliotheca Universalis
6. Resources
In May, I had the first of two meetings with Deanna Marcum, President
of the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Council on
Library Services. The themes of our meeting were two of the most
compelling aspects of the work of these two organizations--that of the
preservation and archiving of *digital* resources and of digital
libraries.
In many ways the task of creating "digital libraries" is at the heart of
what NINCH's mission. Rather than a digital library, we are creating
interconnected, distributed "libraries" of material in many forms.
Whether we call these organized, indexed and catalogued collections of
resources libraries, databases or something else, our goal is that they
will be seamlessly interconnected and searchable.
In the meantime, there are a number of large-scale digital library
projects and consortia that have been established within the past year
or so and I thought I would take this opportunity to review what these
projects are, the stage of their development and indicate resources for
further information.
1. National Digital Library Program (NDLP)
Fist is the ambitious and productive five-year program announced by
the Library of Congress in 1994: the NDLP. Its goal is to digitize a core
of
selected primary materials from the Library's immense collections that
it would make accessible to a broad constituency of users--from
professionals and scholarly researchers to college students and
schoolchildren. The NDLP is a complement to other services that make
Library material available digitally to the public--THOMAS, providing
access to Congressional and legislative material, and CORE, a prototype
for accepting materials in digital form for copyright registration and
deposit.
This is a private-public program: $15 million requested from Congress
with $45 million to be raised from the private sector.
The NDLP <lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/ammemhome.html> is built on
the earlier pilot program, "American Memory" (1989-1994) in which
several collections of U.S. cultural material were digitized, with an
emphasis on a wide variety of formats (texts, prints, daguerreotypes,
motion pictures, recorded sound archives) in order to raise specific
format challenges. Towards the close of the project, the World Wide
Web erupted onto the scene and three collections of photographs were
made available to the public using this new medium. The title,
"American Memory" remains for the Web-accessible collections being
digitized under its successor program, the NDLP. Currently, 25
collections are available on the Web.
The groups of materials that have been digitized by the Library of
Congress fall into three classes: existing, integral archive collections;
collections brought together in a particular format (e.g. daguerreotypes);
and thematic anthologies specially created by scholars for digitizing
from many other collections in the Library.
Rather than remain an inert body of digital cultural resources,
American Memory has created a "Learning Page" that will help K-12
students and teachers find and use material related to the categories of
people, place, event, date and topic.
NDLP was designed to be a dynamic program: what is learned in the
process is incorporated in further directing the project. Among the
practical areas constantly under review are matters such as how to
tackle materials that are particularly difficult to digitize,
relationships
with and supervision of outside contractors and workflow planning.
The library is working particularly keenly on establishing a new
naming scheme for materials (working towards replacing the current
Uniform Resource Locator scheme, indicating where material is
located, with a more trustworthy Uniform Resource Name system) and
of developing increasingly sophisticated and specific search and
retrieval techniques.
With regard to the latter, currently "American Memory" resources that
have individual item-level bibliographic entries can be searched across
collections using the INQUERY search engine. However, records are
being encoded using SGML and the EAD DTD to prepare for more
sophisticated searches across finding aids as well.
The Library of Congress is also working to develop different interfaces
for different users, working with teachers to understand the kinds of
questions students actually ask of such material, and looking to
integrate thesauri into interfaces to make searches richer and more
rewarding.
NDLP staff emphasize the importance of cooperating with others in
learning how best to build a distributed architecture for digital
libraries,
with the belief that when the project concludes there will be no need
for a separate "American Memory" program: it should be part of an
increasingly integrated landscape of networked cultural resources.
In July, the Library announced its first ever competition. With a $2
million grant from Ameritech, the Library will make awards of
between $50,000 and $75,000 for twelve-to-eighteen month digital
projects involving primary materials "significant for education and
research in United States history and culture for the period 1850-1920."
These materials will augment the American Memory project both in
terms of material and in terms of filling out the concept of the NDLP as
a distributed collection of converted library materials and digital
originals to which many American institutions will contribute.
Deanna Marcum heads the panel evaluating the proposals. Results will
be announced in March 1997.
2. National Digital Library Federation (NDLF)
One of the consortia that the Library of Congress works with is the
National Digital Library Federation (lcweb.loc.gov/loc/ndlf).
Established in May 1995, the NDLF comprises 15
(lcweb.loc.gov/loc/ndlf/agree.html) of the largest research libraries
committed to establishing a governance structure and an infrastructure
for incorporating local digital library initiatives into a larger whole.
NDLF came about as an answer to the question whether individual
institutions could afford the investment and organizational
transformations necessary to meet the demands of a digital age.
Engaging major research libraries collectively in the process of
developing digital products and providing digital services will
strengthen their position as participants in the larger information
infrastructure. Even simply within the scholarly community, research
libraries will need to work with academic institutions, publishers,
scholarly organizations and others. However, the Federation can be
instrumental in leading the way in planning the necessary
infrastructure.
The Federation comprises a policy board and a planning task force,
which issued its report in June 1996. The policy board is currently
following the report's recommendations and is expecting to appoint a
program officer by April 1997.
The report emphasized the need to develop common standards,
protocols and practices between research libraries before they can
meaningfully extend access to their resources. It identified three key
areas for work: discovery and retrieval; intellectual property rights and
economic models; and the archiving of digital information.
For discovery and retrieval, the report proposes a three-part course:
building pilot gateways on its web site to digital collections; adding
Internet searching tools; and building cross-collection searching ability
by agreeing to the use of a minimal core of metadata elements--such as
the Dublin Core.
On intellectual property rights, the report recommends the adoption of
a rights policy by the Federation and individual institutions, which
would maximize scholarly access to digital objects, minimize inter-
institutional charges for such access, preserve fair-use practices and
encourage participation in groups creating rights-management
technologies. The Report calls for recognition of the connection
between intellectual property rights and the economics of creating,
supporting and preserving digital material.
On archiving digital material, the report recommended three courses
of action: i) to develop legal foundations for digital archiving (to
determine who has the rights and responsibilities to digitally archive
material) and to have the Federation help define the "fail-safe"
mechanism (enabling a certified archive to "exercise an aggressive
rescue function" to save culturally significant digital information) as
discussed in "Preserving Digital Information" (the report of the Task
Force on Archiving of Digital Information, created by the Commission
on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group); ii) to
include as part of core metadata, information on the level of
committment to digital archiving by an institution providing given
digital information; and iii) by assisting institutions migrate digital
materials through developing guidelines and best practices.
As part of its task, the National Digital Library Federation recognizes
the need to sponsor testbed digital projects, both to seriously build
digital collections and to engage libraries in collaborative activity.
Some
multi-institutional projects between Federation members are already
in place, including the "Making of America Project"
(http://library.cit.cornell.edu/MOA/moa-mission.html), currently
being undertaken by Cornell and Michigan.
3. Digital Library Initiative
The major multi-institutional research project in this area is the Digital
Library Initiative (DLI), which comprises six comparatively
independent testbed projects undertaken by six research libraries:
Carnegie Mellon; Stanford; University of California, Berkeley;
University of California, Santa Barbara; University of Illinois, Urbana-
Champaign; and the University of Michigan.
DLI is a four-year, $24 million project jointly funded by the National
Science Foundation (NSF), the Advanced Research Projects Agency
(ARPA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) for the period September 1994 through August 1998. The
Initiative's focus is "to dramatically advance the means to collect,
store,
and organize information in digital forms, and make it available for
searching, retrieval, and processing via communication networks."
The emphasis here is on deep technical research, rather than on the
social, organizational and infrastructure issues facing the NDLF.
Throughout the projects there is also is a concern with scalability: how
particular research results can be applied on a massive scale.
The research challenge, as seen by the three sponsors, was not so much
that of how to connect everything and everyone in a network, but how
to achieve "an economically feasible capability to digitize massive
corpora of extant and new information from heterogeneous and
distributed sources; then store, search, process and retrieve information
from them in a user friendly way."
The particular configuration of the sponsors (NSF, ARPA and NASA)
points to the need in such a project for a combination of basic research,
advanced development and applications ability and experience with
the working relationships between industry and academic institutions.
A summary of the projects is as follows:
Carnegie Mellon University
Project: Full-content search and retrieval of video
http://fuzine.mt.cs.cmu.edu/im/informedia.html
Stanford University
Project: Interoperation mechanisms among heterogeneous services
http://Walrus.Stanford.edu/diglib/
University of California at Berkeley
Project: Work-centered digital information services
http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/
University of California at Santa Barbara
Project: Spatially-referenced map information
http://alexandria.sdc.ucsb.edu/
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Project: Federating repositories of scientific literature
http://www.grainger.uiuc.edu/dli
University of Michigan
Project: Intelligent agents for information location
http://http2.sils.umich.edu/UMDL/HomePage.html
For a more thorough account of the DLI, see the special issue of
"Computer" magazine for May 1996, available at
www.computer.org/pubs/computer/dli. The July/August issue of D-
Lib Magazine was partly dedicated to the half-way point assessment of
the DLI: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july96/07contents.html.
4. Electronic Libraries Programme
Less grandiose, but perhaps more all-embracing, than the DLI is the
British "Electronic Libraries Programme", or eLIB. This comparatively
open, three-year, 15 million initiative is run by the UK's Higher
Education Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). Initially 30
various eLIB projects were approved in 1995; currently some 60 projects
are being funded under the following categories: Access to Network
Resources; Digitization; Electronic Document Delivery; Electronic
Journals; Electronic Short Loan; Images; On Demand Publishing; Pre-
Prints; Quality Assurance; Supporting Studies; Training and
Awareness. Information on particular projects can be found at
www.ukoln.ac.uk/elib/projects.html.
Projects of particular interest to the cultural community include
ADAM, an Art, Design, Architecture and Media information gateway
(adam.ac.uk/ADAM/ADAMSummary.html); SOSIG, a Social Science
Information Gateway (sosig.ac.uk/); the Internet Library of Early
Journals (www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/); DIAD, Digitization in Art and
Design--a CD-ROM journal project (www.lond-
inst.ac.uk/projects/diad/); and PATRON, Performing Arts Teaching
Resources On-line
(www.surrey.ac.uk/Library/research/PATRON.html)
The bi-monthly publication, ARIADNE, an eLIB project itself, is
designed to keep everyone updated on UK digital library
developments: www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/about/.
5. G-7 Electronic Libraries
Mention should be made here of the G-7 Program on the Global
Information Society. The G-7 nations (the U.S., Canada, Britain, France,
Germany, Italy and Japan) have initiated eleven pilot projects
(www.ispo.cec.be/g7/projidx.html) in areas ranging from maritime
information systems to global healthcare applications to show how
international cooperation will be essential enabling true global
information access. For the cultural community, the two projects of
interest are those on Electronic Museums and Galleries, and Electronic
Libraries.
The Electronic Libraries project is to build a prototype global library:
Bibliotheca Universalis (www.ispo.cec.be/g7/projects/g7pr4.html). The
Library of Congress is the representative.
6. Resources
*IFLA: Digital Libraries: Resources & Projects: www.nlc-
bnc.ca/ifla/II/diglib.htm
*Library of Congress: Digital Library Resources and Projects:
lcweb.loc.gov/loc/ndlf/digital.html
*D-Lib Magazine--The Magazine of Digital Library Research:
www.dlib.org
--
David Green
Executive Director
National Initiative for a Networked
Cultural Heritage (NINCH)
21 Dupont Circle, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036
(202) 296-5346
Internet: [log in to unmask]
