University of Michigan

Report to the Digital Library Federation
Fall, 2003

Table Of Contents

I. Collections, services, and systems

II. Projects and programs

III. Specific digital library challenges

IV. Digital library publications, policies, working papers, and other documents

I. Collections, services, and systems

A. Collections

Collection and Related Photographs Focusing on America’s Age of Imperialism Now Publicly Available.

Drawn from the University of Michigan Library’s Southeast Asia collection, The United States and Its Territories, 1898 – 1930: The Age of Imperialism comprises the full text of monographs and government documents published in the United States, Spain, and the Philippines between 1870 and 1920. The primary focus of the material is the Spanish-American war and subsequent American governance (approximately 1898-1930). The text collection is complemented by digitized images from key photograph collections drawn from the Special Collections Library. Support for the conversion of these collections is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. When complete (by January 2004), this collection will contain more than 3,500 texts and over 1,385 photographic images.

http://www.hti.umich.edu/p/philamer/

Text Creation Partnership Focuses on Evans Early American Imprints

The University of Michigan, NewsBank/Readex Co., and the American Antiquarian Society are cooperating in a Text Creation Partnership to create 6,000 accurately keyed and fully searchable SGML/XML text editions from among the 40,000 titles available in the Evans Early American Imprints Collection. Evans is the most significant collection of titles relating to the history of seventeenth and eighteenth century America, and the Text Creation Partnership seeks to create enduring digital text editions of the most frequently studied works. NewsBank/Readex is producing digital page images and searchable OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for the overall collection. The standards-based editions created and owned by the Text Creation Partnership will link directly to the corresponding Newsbank/Readex page images and will provide a research and instructional tool of enduring scholarly and instructional value. Nine texts are currently available in demonstration, with additional texts to be digitized during Fall 2003.

http://www.hti.umich.edu/e/evansdemo/

Scholarly Publishing Office Continues Support for ACLS History E-Book Project

The University Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO) continues to provide conversion and hosting services for the American Council of Learned Societies’ History E-Book Project. The five-year project – a collaboration between ACLS, 8 learned societies, and several university presses – aims to assist scholars in the electronic publishing of high-quality works in history, to explore the intellectual possibilities of new technologies, and to help assure the continued viability of the history writing in today's changing publishing environment. The project’s website was launched in September 2002 with 500 titles (originally made available in print) in the field of history. An additional 275 previously-published titles will be added in September 2003, along with several of 85 “born digital” titles. The project is made possible through funding provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

http://www.historyebook.org/

New Publications by the Scholarly Publishing Office

Three original volumes are scheduled for publication by SPO in August 2003. The volumes include: The Language of the Garo, by Robbins Burling; Algorithmic Composition: A Gentle Introduction to Music Composition Using Common LISP and Common Music, by Mary Simoni; and, Digital Libraries: A Vision For The 21st Century, edited by Patricia Hodges et al. Each volume is available free online. Digital Libraries, a festschrift in honor of Wendy Pradt Lougee, is also available for purchase in print format. In addition, SPO has recently published the annual proceedings of the International Associate of the Computer Music Conference.

http://spo.umdl.umich.edu/

EEBO-TCP Continues to Expand

1500 texts have been added to the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership, bringing to the total number of available texts to 3800. The mission of the EEBO-TCP is to provide digital texts for a significant body of early English-language books. 70 partners are currently participating. As the collection has grown over the past six months, usage has nearly doubled and users appear to be performing more sophisticated searches (i.e., proximity searches vs. simple word searches). A browsable author’s index has been launched and strategies have been employed to process materials more quickly. As EEBO-TCP plans for continued growth, a task force meeting of early English scholars was held in July to discuss how materials might be selected for the partnership in the future.

http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/e/eebo/

Miscellaneous Collections

Several small collections comprising hundreds of additional volumes have been released in the last several months by the Digital Library Production Service. They include:

Dental Cosmos – 45 volumes (approximately 36,000 images) focusing on dental science.
http://www.hti.umich.edu/d/dencos

New York City – 156 volumes focusing on New York City have been added to the Making of America collection.
http://moa.umdl.umich.edu

National Council on Social Welfare Proceedings (1874 – 1982) – Annual proceedings, including cumulative indexes for parts of the collection.
http://www.hti.umich.edu/n/ncosw/

UMTRI Reports – 1557 technical reports from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, formerly the Highway Safety Institute. The topical focus of the collection is highway safety.
http://www.hti.umich.edu/u/umtri

U-M Business School Working Papers – 21 texts published by the University of Michigan Business School.
http://www.hti.umich.edu/b/busadwp/

B. Services

Michigan to Launch Pilot Print on Demand Service.

To extend the usability of its millions of pages of digital content, Michigan is launching a pilot print on demand service. The fee-based service allows users to request a printed version of a volume from Michigan’s digital collections. Currently, requests are processed by the University Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office and provided unbound or tape bound. Commercially prepared hard bound reprints will be available in available Fall 2003.

C. Systems

DLXS Releases Version 10

The University Library released version 10 of DLXS tools and products in February 2003. The newest release includes updates and fixes to the XPAT search engine and a significant re-architecture of the DLXS Text Class to enable more robust sorting of search results. Release 11, scheduled for September, will introduce a number of significant enhancements (e.g., XSLT-based filtering, Unicode enhancement) prioritized in recent DLXS balloting.
http://www.dlxs.org/

II. Projects and programs

A. Projects

New projects:

LLMC-Digital Underway

The University Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office and the Digital Library Production Service are collaborating with the Law Library Microform Consortium to create LLMC-Digital, an online archive of the organizations multi-million page microform collection. The University Library will provide hosting, development, and OCR services for this long-term project to make these valuable materials more accessible to the legal community. Work began in earnest in Spring 2003 and is expected to last nearly 10 years.

Projects in progress 2003:

OAIster Development Completed; Moves to Production

Development work on Michigan’s Mellon-funded OAIster Project concluded in January 2003, with OAIster moving to a production-level service sustained at Michigan. The goal of OAIster is to create a collection of freely available, difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources that are searchable by anyone. OAIster contains nearly 1.5 million records submitted by hundreds of institutions.
http://www.oaister.org/

Mathematics Project Nears Completion

The NSF-funded collaboration between the University of Michigan and Cornell University is nearing completion. Along with the State and University Library Goettingen, the institutions have made available a significant body of mathematical monographs with access provided through a distributed full text search protocol. The virtual collection, comprising over 2,000 volumes and nearly 600,000 pages, resides at the three separate institutions and is provided through an interface to three entirely different software systems. The protocol for the distributed search – dubbed CGM for “Cornell, Goettingen, Michigan,” is consistent with OAI, borrows from DIENST, and includes mechanisms for full-text searching.
http://matilde.emeraldinsight.com/vl=13837913/cl=35/nw=1/rpsv/cgi-bin/linker?ini=emerald&reqidx=/cw/mcb/07378831/v21n2/s7/p170

http://www.library.cornell.edu/mathbooks/workdocs.htm

http://www.library.cornell.edu/mathbooks/workdocs.htm (protocol & project information)
http://www.hti.umich.edu/u/umhistmath/ (mathematics collection)

B. Programs

DLS Becomes LIT

Michigan’s Digital Library Services division has been renamed Library Information Technology (LIT). The new name, effective Spring 2003, more accurately reflects the full incorporation of Michigan’s digital library efforts into the mainstream services and functions of the University Library. LIT includes 4 main units: the Digital Library Production Service, Library Web Services, Library Management Systems, and Desktop Support Services. John Price Wilkin, former head of the Digital Library Production Service, serves as Associate University Librarian for Library Information Technology.

III. Specific Digital Library Challenges

Integration of Digital Reformatting into Routine Workflows

With digital conversion as Michigan's preferred reformatting method, Library staff have been challenged to refine and modify a number of procedures and practices. Challenges include developing communications mechanisms between a number of working groups and units (subject specialists, preservation, serials and monograph cataloging, digitization staff), streamlining digitization and related workflows, and re-thinking how materials are described in the online environment (are volumes treated as individual items, as part of a "collection," or both?).

IV. Digital library publications, policies, working papers, and other documents

Digital Libraries: A Vision For The 21st Century. A Festschrift for Wendy Pradt Lougee on the occasion of her departure from the University of Michigan. Edited by: Patricia Hodges, Maria Bonn, Mark Sandler, and John Price Wilkin. [forthcoming, August 2003]

Bonn, Maria. “A case study in library-based scholarly publishing; the University of Michigan, University Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office.” The New review of Information Networking. Volume 8, 2002. p.55-68.

Hagedorn, K. “OAIster: A "No Dead Ends" OAI Service Provider” Library Hi Tech 21:2 (2003) pp. 170-181. [subscription required]