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Solutions
Digital content is springing up everywhere. Everyone has a simple solution for creating digital libraries. And it is easy to scan thousands of pages or to create digital resources, but sooner or later the questions of scale, sustainability, reliability, support for other users, and assurance of authentic copy rise to the surface. The convenience of plug-and-run devices gives way to serious discussions of the need to learn about such things as metadata, digital object identifiers, Z39.50, GIS, the licensing landscape, "freedom, privacy and the network," legal issues in the digital environment, markup languages, intelligent systems for indexing and retrieval, knowledge access structures, cross-catalog searching, linked catalogs, keyword, online thesauri, and the like.
So, in a field of doubts, how can we make progress? In the United States, in contrast to some European countries, there is no national library charged with responsibility for solving these issues for the nation. Instead we have a flourishing mix of talents at work in academic institutions, not-for-profit enterprises, commercial businesses, and consortia: for example, the Coalition for Networked Information, the Online Computer Library Center, the Association of Research Libraries, the Research Libraries Group, the Digital Library Federation, and numerous individual libraries.
Association of Research Libraries
The ARL is host to SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), which intends to stimulate digital publishing in the sciences, reduce the cost of information access and use, expand the dissemination of research, and support practice and teaching. It is especially looking to stimulate and accelerate the creation of new nonprofit information communities in key fields in science, technology, and medicine. SPARC recently announced awards for three new
projects:
- Columbia University's Columbia Earthscape, an online resource in earth sciences to be managed by the Electronic Publishing Initiative at the university and involving the university press and the library, will include reports of research projects and conference proceedings as well as curricular materials and will link to data sets, computer models, and an online journal.
- The University of California Digital Library's eScholarship will support innovations in scholarly communication by providing an infrastructure for experimentation. It will include an e-print database system, support new and linked digital journals, and integrate digital publishing and access.
- MIT's CogNET, an Internet Gateway to the Cognitive and Brain Sciences, will be managed by the MIT Press with ties to the Institute's Digital Project Lab and the Libraries. CogNET will integrate a range of online utilities in a customized workspace, delivering access to the very best, most accurate, and most timely technical information in contemporary cognitive and brain research.
Research Libraries Group
With an increasing number of museums and special collections libraries in the
membership of RLG, there is a growing need to deal with digital collections of
cultural objects. There is a sense among members that the time is now to define
ways of developing richer, more robust repositories of digital content to support
the way that people want to access many of the outstanding, yet often small,
collections or to bring together what are now disparate pieces into virtual
collections of significance. This will require considerable attention not only to
search structures, metadata, linkages, and user interfaces but also to the aspects
of developing sites responsible for the long-term storage and dissemination of
digital material.
Digital Library Federation
The DLF, within the Council on Library and Information Resources, began as a consortium of fifteen research institutions. It has grown to twenty-three and has alliances with CNI, NARA, OCLC, and RLG. The participants share a common goal: to create a system of independent, distributed repositories of digital works. The priorities of the DLF are to focus on materials that are "born digital," to integrate digital materials into the fabric of academic life, to stimulate the development of core digital library infrastructure, and to develop the organizational support needed for the management of digital libraries. The following are among the focus areas within the DLF:
- Social sciences data: finding strategies to address the dual challenge of
preserving digital data, the challenge to maintain the tools to read the data
files while also preserving the codebooks needed to interpret the data
output
- Visual resource imaging: documenting the science of imaging as an
assurance of quality and reliability
- Authorization systems: developing a prototype system among several
institutions, with an emphasis on a shared protocol and the expectation of
producing a statement on an authentication and authorization architecture
- Reference linking; distributed finding aids; metadata; technical
architecture of digital libraries; standardized means of maintaining
persistent links between citations and the digital objects they refer to; and
researchers' tools for migrating digital materials
Individual Libraries
At many institutions, a "digital library" is based within the library but maintains close ties to the academic computing organization. Some libraries, like that at the University of California, have taken a bold, defining step. UC has made its digital library the tenth library in the UC system.
At Cornell, computer scientists and librarians are collaborating to develop a working prototype of a digital library system with built-in mechanisms to preserve documents, protect intellectual property rights, and permit interconnections with other digital library systems worldwide. The challenges the group faces are summed up in the acronym coined for the project: PRISM, which stands for preservation, reliability, interoperability, security, and
metadata.
Harvard has chosen not to create a separate entity but instead intends to
integrate digital as one more evolutionary stage in its libraries. It has established the Library Digital Initiative, a five-year specially funded program to support digital acquisitions, cataloging, collection management, reference, and preservation among its nearly one hundred libraries. It intends to develop the university's capacity to manage digital information by
- creating the technical infrastructure to acquire, organize, deliver, and
archive digital library materials,
- establishing a team of specialists to advise librarians and others at the
university on key issues,
- providing librarians and staff with experience in a wide range of
technologies and digital materials, and
- enriching the Harvard University Library collections with a significant
set of digital resources.
Among the initiative's recent developments are several Web-based union
catalogs:
- VIA (Visual Information Access), a catalog that can describe prints, photographs, drawings, and paintings held by libraries, museums, and archives
- OASIS (Online Archives Search Information System), a catalog of finding aids that provide access to archival collections
- Geodesy, a catalog that provides access to geospatial data
Major areas of development include the following: a digital repository for long-term management and access to digital objects of all types (text, image, sound, multimedia); naming services to provide digital objects with persistent, location-independent identifiers; metadata; and reformatting services.
Harvard's Library Digital Initiative includes an internal challenge-grant
program to stimulate projects and to serve as a catalyst for infrastructure development. One project just now getting under way involves the Harvard Business School, which holds a large collection of advertising trade cards. From 1876 to the end of the century, these three-by-five-inch cards, printed on both sides, were the chief medium of advertising for merchants and manufacturers. Harvard Business School currently plans to digitize a sizable number of these cards and to create a database. A wonderful reference for those who need to know about products and marketing in the late nineteenth century, these cards can be approached as research materials in a variety of ways-as industrial products, cultural artifacts, or works of commercial art. Though housed in a business library, they have been used by scholars from the fields of cultural anthropology, ethnic and gender studies, industrial archaeology, sociology, fine
and decorative arts, and engineering.
Another Harvard project involves using digital information as a preservation strategy by creating surrogates for user access when the physical form of the original makes it difficult to use. In one case, the libraries are building a virtual collection of daguerreotypes. Hundreds of daguerreotypes were housed in fourteen different repositories; content encompassed the history of medicine, science, and anthropology as well as institutional history. The Harvard class portrait of 1852 includes eighty-five daguerreotypes fitted into a wooden cabinet, a rather unwieldy item for research. But in digital form, these are much easier to work with and will help to protect the originals as well.
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