|
Harvard University
Report to the Digital Library Federation
October, 2004
A. Collections
Asian Art Images
A collaborative project between Harvard University Art Museums
(HUAM) and Fine Arts Library (FAL) to provide access to 3,600
Asian art images. All images were cataloged and digitized and
records and images were exported for display through VIA. Direct
digital photography of original artwork was used for HUAM
collections while FAL images were converted from transparencies,
glass plate, and film negatives. The project was completed in
March 2004. View the collection in VIA:
http://via.harvard.edu
Western China and Tibet: Hotspot of Diversity
This project integrates material from the collections of the
Arnold Arboretum, the Harvard Map Collection, the Botany
Libraries, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, the
Harvard-Yenching Institute and the Harvard University Herbaria to
provide online access to a selection of Harvard's historic and
contemporary ethnographic and natural history collections related
to western China and Tibet. Beginning in 1924 with the Arnold
Arboretum's Expedition to northwestern China and northeastern
Tibet led by Joseph F. Rock, the historic collections include
plant and bird specimens, as well as photographs of the region's
landscape, architecture and people. The Herbaria have been
collecting contemporary biological specimens from the same
region. By relating the historic and contemporary material from
various repositories, the project will provide students and
scholars with access to information about the area's natural and
ecological resources, as well as the social and cultural history
of the region. The project was completed in July 2003.
http://arboretum.harvard.edu/library/tibet/expeditions.html
Maya Archaeological Photographs from the Carnegie Institute
of Washington Collection, PhaseI
With sponsorship from Tozzer Library, Phase I of this project
will provide access through VIA to digital images of
approximately 10,000 Maya archaeological photographs selected
from the Carnegie Institute of Washington Collection in the
Photographic Archives of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and
Ethnology. Many of the buildings, monuments, and artifacts that
are recorded in the photographs no longer exist, are badly
damaged or are so difficult to access that they are unavailable
to researchers. The selected material represents all of the
images from the sites of Chichen Itza and Copan, two of the most
significant components of the collection. The digital images,
descriptive cataloging records and searching capabilities will
improve access to the photographs for government researchers
working on accurate restoration and reconstruction of the sites,
linguists needing undamaged scripts, archaeologists, historians,
publishers, and producers. Phase I was completed in July 2003.
Phase II will provide access to the remaining 30,000 images in
the collection. View the images in VIA:
http://via.harvard.edu
Biomedical Image Library (BIL)
The goal of the project, a collaboration between the Countway
Library and the Biomedical Imaging Laboratory at the Harvard
School of Public Health, is to develop a central catalog and
collection of biomedical images produced in support of basic
biomedical research. Biologists, medical scientists, and
clinicians will be able to use the Biomedical Image Library to
distribute their work to the community or to identify and
retrieve data for novel analysis. Moreover, educators and
students will find a ready collection of images to support
learning. The library also provides access to data such as stacks
of serial sections that cannot be published through traditional
means. The project was completed in July 2003. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:bioimlib
Harvard/Radcliffee Online Historical Reference Shelf (H/R
OHRS)
A joint venture of the Library Digital Initiative, the Harvard
University Archives, and the Radcliffe Archives. The project was
completed in September 2001. The new web site, located at
http://hul.harvard.edu/huarc/refshelf/ provides electronic access
to frequently consulted sources on the history of Harvard and
Radcliffe. To date, the Reference Shelf includes: o annual
reports of Harvard and Radcliffe presidents and treasurers from
1825 to 1995 o narrative histories o the current Harvard "Fact
Book" o founding documents of both institutions To accomplish
this, the Harvard College Library Digital Imaging Group has
scanned over 105,000 pages of text from the Harvard University
and Radcliffe Archives. The resulting digital images were sent to
a vendor for full-text conversion using OCR and structural
metadata was produced in XML (extensible mark-up language). All
of the digital files are located in the Digital Repository
Service (DRS). Using a set of HUL systems and services for
management and delivery of digital library materials, researchers
can now browse and search these resources online.
http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:hronhirf
The Hedda Morrison Photographs of China
A project to provide access through VIA to a photographic
collection from Harvard Yenching Library. Nearly 4,800
photographs made by German photographer Hedda Morrison were
cataloged and digitized for teaching and research in the areas of
East Asian studies, history, architecture, fine arts, sociology,
religion and pop culture. Taken between 1933 and 1946, the
collection documents the architecture, streetscapes, clothing,
religious practices and crafts that in many cases have all but
disappeared from modern China. The project was completed in April
2001.
http://hcl.harvard.edu/harvard-yenching/morrison/
Nineteenth-Century American Trade Cards
A project to catalog, digitize, and display through VIA 1,000
advertising trade cards selected from the Historical Collections
at the Baker Library. The project was completed in September
2000. As an indicator of consumer habits, social values, and
marketing techniques, trade cards are of interest to scholars of
business history, American studies, graphic design and printing
history, and social and cultural history. Trade cards play a
unique role in American social and cultural history. More
infomation, including a selection of trade cards from the project
and searching strategies for the collection, can be found at the
Historical Collections of Baker Library web site.
http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/19th_century_tcard/
Harvard Daguerreotypes
In 1995, the Harvard University Library Preservation Center
received a grant from the National Historical Publications and
Records Commission to address the preservation and access needs
of Harvard's daguerreotypes. These daguerreotypes offer primary
evidence of early uses of photography as a tool for scientific
methodology as well as artistic expression in mid-nineteenth
century America. 795 daguerreotypes have been photographed to
35mm color slide film; the slides were then used as
photointermediates to produce continuous-tone microfilm and Kodak
Photo CD digital images.
http://preserve.harvard.edu/news/hybrid/nhprcdags.html
The Nuremberg Trials Project
The Nuremberg Trials Project provides access to digitized
documents from the Harvard Law School Library relating to the
trial of military and political leaders of Nazi Germany before
the International Military Tribunal (IMT) and to the trials of
other accused war criminals before the US Nuremberg Military
Tribunals (NMT).
http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/php/docs_swi.php?DI=1&text=overview
Loeb Design Library Electronic Finding Aids
In Phase I, the Frances Loeb Library of the Harvard Design
School configured their database to enable the export of data as
EAD formatted finding aids to OASIS and created and contributed
10 finding aids. In Phase II, 3 additional collections were
processed, and finding aids for those collections were created
and added to OASIS.
http://oasis.harvard.edu/des.html
Schlesinger Library Electronic Finding Aids
Schlesinger Library (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study)
The library investigated, evaluated, and selected an EAD (Encoded
Archival Description) markup methodology and then converted and
contributed 235 finding aids to OASIS.
http://oasis.harvard.edu/sch.html
The Mercator Globes at Harvard Map Collection
This Harvard Map Collection exhibition offers a unique way of
viewing two famous globes published in the 16th century by Gerard
Mercator. This online exhibit allows the user to view the
Terrestrial Globe and the Celestial Globe using an online tool,
the Globe Navigator, which can provide a close-up view of any
desired location on the surface of the globes. Any of 50
different constellations from the Celestial Globe and selected
images from the Terrestrial Globe are accessible to view in
greater detail.
http://hcl.harvard.edu/mercatorglobes/
B. Services
Harvard Libraries Web Site
The "Harvard Libraries" site is a comprehensive web interface
and research portal that presents a single, organized view of
web-accessible resources available to the Harvard community. The
site also serves as an electronic gateway to Harvard's union
catalogs and to comprehensive information about Harvard's
libraries. In the past year, a series of enhancements were made
to assist faculty and students in finding and using the more than
6,000 e-resources now available from the portal. 4,269,955 user
sessions on commercial electronic resources were logged through
the web site in FY2004.
http://lib.harvard.edu
C. Systems
Digital Infrastructure Tools
Three new infrastructure tools were developed this year to
assist library staff who interact with Harvard University Library
(HUL) systems and services in the creation of metadata, the
deposit of digital objects to the Digital Repository Service
(DRS), and the management of commercially-licensed electronic
resources.
JHOVE (JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment)
In FY 2004, The Office for Information Systems (OIS) in
collaboration with JSTOR and funded in part by a grant from the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, developed JHOVE (pronounced "jove"),
an extensible framework for format-specific identification,
validation, and characterization. Identification is the process
of determining the format in which a given digital object is
encoded ("I have a digital object; what format is it?");
validation is the process of determining whether a formatted
object is encoded correctly ("I have an object that purports to
be of format F; is it?"); and characterization is the process of
determining the salient technical properties of a formatted
object ("I have an object of format F; what are its pertinent
characteristics?").
JHOVE, can be used to determine the format in which a digital
object has been encoded and whether a formatted object has been
encoded properly. It can also extract the internal technical
properties of a digital object. JHOVE currently works with the
majority of the data formats supported by DRS. In the future it
will be enhanced to provide complete coverage of all
DRS-supported formats, to ensure that objects submitted for
deposit are consistent with externally supplied technical
metadata, and to accept only objects that are correctly encoded
with respect to their format into the repository.
JHOVE is made freely available to the public under an Open
Source license, and is being used internationally by major
national, academic, and research libraries and archives, other
library-related organizations, and repository projects such as
Cambridge University (UK), INEC Group (Russia), OCLC, Oracle
Corporation, Leiden University (Netherlands), Metropolis
Informatics SA (Greece), Library of Congress, National library of
New Zealand, Access Computing Limited (Hong Kong) and Alaska
Department of Natural Resources. The Fall 2003 DLF Forum slide
presentation on JHOVE is available at:
http://www.diglib.org/forums/fall2003/fallforum03.htm#p2
http://hul.harvard.edu/jhove/
Harvard E-Resource Management System (ERM)
The phenomenal growth of electronic
resources purchased and licensed centrally by the Harvard
libraries has led to the local development this year of a
much-needed system for the management and fiscal control of these
resources. Phase 1 of the system was completed in June 2004 and
includes the following features:
-
a data model which supports individual
resources, packages, and interfaces at the appropriate
level
- tables for shared data, such as vendor
contact information, which can be entered and maintained in one
place for all related resources
- the ability to view all resources connected
to a particular vendor's package or interface
- the ability to electronically maintain
license data including terms, conditions and renewal information;
and administrative data, such as user names and passwords
the integration of information on trial resources with production
resources
- a separate librarian's view of relevant
information for remote access to the system
- improvements to troubleshooting and
problem-solving
- improvements to reporting including
management information
See Section II. Projects for more information about
Harvard's work on electronic resource management.
DMART (DRS METS Archive Tool)
DMART is a software tool used for automating the creation of
complex audio packages for deposit in DRS. In order to facilitate
future preservation efforts, an audio object is stored in DRS as
a package of individual files, including one or more
high-resolution uncompressed AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format)
archival and production masters; lower-resolution compressed
RealAudio delivery files; miscellaneous files produced as a
byproduct of audio processing; a SMIL (Synchronous Multimedia
Integration Language) file, used to "stitch together" segments of
audio from various files into a coherent unit; and metadata files
documenting the technical properties of all of the audio material
and the workflow processes used to produce that material; and an
XML-encoded description file that provides pointers to the
individual components of the package. DMART (DRS METS Archive
Tool) is used for the automated creation of this complicated
audio package. DMART is a Java-based tool that is made freely
available to the public under an Open Source license. The audio
metadata used by DRS, and understood by DMART, is in the process
of being formalized into an international standard by the Audio
Engineering Society (AES) with input from Harvard staff at the
Loeb Music Library and OIS.
http://hul.harvard.edu/ois/systems/drs/dmart/current/
Catalogs and Discovery Systems
HOLLIS (Harvard Online Library Information System)
Harvard's HOLLIS Catalog is a database containing over 9
million records for books, journals, electronic resources,
manuscripts, government documents, maps, microforms, music
scores, sound recordings, visual materials, and data files owned
by the University and its libraries. In FY2004, the system
provided access to 2,211 items on e-reserves for 176 courses and
over 2,706,000 keyword searches were logged.
http://holliscatalog.harvard.edu
VIA (Visual Information Access)
VIA is Harvard's web-based union catalog of visual resources
in art, architecture, and material culture. VIA records include
descriptive information about slides, photographs, drawings,
paintings, objects, and other artifacts held by the university's
libraries, museums, and archives. Many records include thumbnails
and links to digital images.A new release of VIA was made
available to the public on June 15, 2004. With an improved
interface design, the new version of VIA includes options for
viewing search results as a grid of thumbnail-sized images or as
a partial grid of thumbnails alongside a pane for previewing each
record. Users can now create multiple named portfolios, or sets
of saved records, for export to personal databases and course
tools. The catalog also features improved browsing and the
addition of cross-references for the names of people, places, and
organizations. As a result of conversion projects, the new VIA
contains over 240,000 records and more digital images of the
slides, photographs, drawings, paintings, objects, and other
artifacts held by the university's libraries, museums, and
archives.
http://via.harvard.edu
OLIVIA
OLIVIA is a visual resources cataloging system for the
creation of descriptive metadata that will be exported to VIA for
public access. In FY 2004, 65 catalogers worked in OLIVIA.
http://hul.harvard.edu/ois/systems/olivia
OASIS
OASIS is Harvard's online catalog of electronic finding aids,
which provide detailed information about the University's
archival and manuscript collections. OASIS contributors are
increasingly providing links within electronic finding aids to
digital content such as correspondence, audio recordings,
photographs, and other images. 18 repositories have contributed
over 2,000 finding aids to OASIS.
http://oasis.harvard.edu
Harvard Geospatial Library (HGL)
HGL is both a discovery tool and a data-mining environment for
geospatial data sets. Unique to the digital library world, HGL
provides researchers with detailed information about geospatial
data and with the tools necessary to capture and deliver subsets
of the data into their research environments. In FY2004, the
interface was reprogrammed to improve stability, scalability and
access speeds and to add new new user features including
additional base maps and keyword indices. The system contains
4,231 data layers and logged 250,971 requests in FY2004.
http://hgl.harvard.edu
TED (Templated Database Service)
(TED) A centrally supported web-based database, TED can be
customized for collections or catalogs that do not fit within the
scope of existing library catalogs at Harvard. TED offers
collection managers an opportunity to create specialized
databases that will be supported and upgraded along with other
centralized systems such as VIA and OASIS. In FY2004, two new
databases were added in: the Milman Parry Collection of Oral
Literature and the MCZ Ernst Mayr Library collection, Jaques
Burkhardt and the Thayer Expedition to Brazil (1865-1866).
http://hul.harvard.edu/ois/systems/ted
Full-Text Search Service (FTS)
FTS is a discovery tool that provides researchers with the
ability to search full text associated with scanned images.
http://hul.harvard.edu/ois/systems/#fts
Find It @ Harvard
Find It @ Harvard is Harvard's implementation of SFX, a
research tool from Ex Libris. The tool uses resource-linking
technology based on the OpenURL standard to allow users of
external research databases to link directly from an article
citation or abstract to the full text of an article (if available
to Harvard users) or to local holdings in the HOLLIS catalog.
During this past academic year, use of the tool averaged close to
3,000 hits per day. Several additional sources, including
MathSciNet and SilverPlatter, were activated during the year.
Version 2 of Find It @ Harvard was implemented in May and
included enhancements such as full Unicode compliance, loading of
CONSER records in the database, a redesigned KnowledgeBase and
Find It @ Harvard Administration Center, and upgrades to EJ2, the
supplementary list of e-journals.
http://lib.harvard.edu/find_it/find_it_message.html
Harvard Cross-Catalog Search
The Harvard Cross-Catalog Search is a high-level resource
discovery tool which allows the user to search simultaneously
across five of Harvard's catalogs, including HOLLIS, Baker, VIA,
OASIS, and HGL. During FY2004, use of the cross-catalog search
averaged 400 sessions and 1050 per month.
http://crosscatalog.harvard.edu
Delivery Service Systems
Harvard University Library offers a number of format-specific
delivery services developed to enable the delivery of digital
objects stored in DRS to web browsers. These services
include:
- Image Delivery Service (IDS) for delivery of still and
dynamic image files. IDS has been enhanced to provide the ability
to zoom, pan, and rotate images including those accessed through
HUL union catalogs such as VIA and OASIS. This enhancement is
predicated on the use of JPEG 2000, a new ISO standard format
that permits both lossless and lossy wavelet-based compression,
and the dynamic generation of sub regions of image data at
various resolutions. IDS now includes a JPEG 2000 server that can
dynamically manipulate a JPEG 2000 image and send the
appropriately processed image to a user's browser in the form a
JPEG image, which can be rendered natively by all common web
browsers. The new dynamic behaviors -- zoom, pan, rotate -- are
only applicable to images stored as JPEG 2000 objects in DRS;
TIFF, JPEG, GIF, and PhotoCD objects cannot take advantage of
these features. In the future OIS will be offering a conversion
service that will automate the creation of JPEG 2000 objects from
existing image formats.
http://hul.harvard.edu/ois/systems/ids/index.html
- Page Delivery Service (PDS) for delivery of scanned
page images within the context of logical navigation-in other
words, PDS mimics the page-turning functionality of a book.
http://hul.harvard.edu/ois/systems/pds/
- Streaming Delivery Service (SDS) delivers streamed
media to web browsers. Note: SDS currently delivers audio files,
but it is capable of delivering video as well.
- Asynchronous Delivery Service (ADS) allows users to
request large objects or sets of objects from DRS for downloading
upon e-mail notification. Note: This service is primarily used to
deliver large image files.
Storage and Management Systems
Digital Repository Service (DRS)
DRS is an integrated set of services to manage, maintain,
preserve, and deliver Harvard's digital materials. In FY 2003,
LDI upgraded the system to support audio files and established
processes and procedures for auditing all copies of each digital
object stored. Note: As a utility, DRS is not visible to
researchers and most curators.
http://hul.harvard.edu/ois/systems/drs
Name Resolution Service (NRS)
Harvard's NRS assigns persistent identifiers to digital
objects. Persistent identifiers provide curators and researchers
with confidence that the URL they cite will always work. In
FY2004, NRS was enhanced to accommodate new parameters that
enable dynamic delivery in IDS.
http://hul.harvard.edu/ois/systems/nrs
Access Management Service (AMS)
AMS provides secured access to Harvard's licensed or
copyrighted materials. Using the University Personal
Identification Number (PIN) and Directory Services, AMS protects
the electronic assets of the University from unlawful access and
also restricts access to the Harvard community as required by
curators.
A. Projects
New Project Announcements
AIHT (Archive Ingestion and Handling Test)
The Harvard University Library Office for Information Systems
(HUL-OIS) is participating in a test of repository object
ingestion and handling organized by the Library of Congress as
part of its National Digital Information Infrastructure
Preservation Program (NDIIPP). The NDIIPP initiative proposes a
decentralized preservation environment in which there will be a
free flow of digital collections between institutions and
organizations as necessary to provide appropriate preservation
services. The purpose of AIHT is to test the viability of
large-scale transfers of digital material between repositories
utilizing radically different technological infrastructures
without compromising the bit-level integrity of the data. The
corpus used for the test is a collection of approximately 57,000
files (13 TB) in more than 100 different data formats. This data
was delivered with minimal accompanying metadata limited to a
file count and individual file checksums. In Phase I of the test
in FY2004, this material was transferred from its hard disk
distribution media, staged on a Windows host for verification of
the collection manifest and virus checking, and placed on a Unix
host for subsequent processing by JHOVE, which will be used to
extract technical metadata before deposit into DRS. Phase II of
AIHT will entail exporting a copying of the test collection from
DRS to the other three institutions participating in the test and
in turn receiving exports from them. All of the various copies of
the collection data -- on the original hard disk, deposited in
DRS with enriched metadata, and received from the three test
partners -- should be kept bit-for-bit identical to one another.
Phase III will test transformations of TIFF and JPEG images to
the JPEG 2000 format. DRS policy and operational workflows employ
a strong gatekeeper function under which material is accepted
only from known, pre-vetted organizational units and only if the
material meets established standards for acceptable quality. AIHT
provides a valuable opportunity to learn the types of
difficulties likely to be encountered with large-scale deposits
of digital material of unknown provenance.
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/about/pr_060904.html
Electronic Resource Management: Verde
Harvard has been working closely with MIT and with Ex Libris
staff on the development of Verde, a commercial e-resource
management system to be offered by Ex Libris. This work has been
largely influenced by Harvard's participation in a related
project, the Digital Library Federation's Electronic Resource
Management Initiative (See "Update on Existing Projects"
below).
Update on Existing Projects
Electronic Resource Management Initiative (DLF
ERMI)
Harvard's participation in the DLF ERMI continued for a second
year, with documents due for publication in the fall of 2004. The
DLF ERMI project has sought to analyze and describe the
functional requirements, workflows and data structures required
to integrated electronic resources into a library's online
systems and operations. The project's work has been widely
discussed within library circles and is responsible for the
emerging development in 2004 of new online systems devoted to
electronic resource management by all of the major library system
vendors currently active in the marketplace, including Ex
Libris.
PREMIS (Preservation Metadata Implementation
Strategies)
Effective preservation of a digital object requires a
fault-tolerant storage mechanism to maintain the bit-level
integrity of the object and appropriate descriptive,
administrative, and technical metadata necessary for proper
interpretation, and possible manipulation, of the information
content of the object. Robin Wendler, the LDI Metadata Analyst at
Harvard University is an active participant of the PREMIS working
group charged with preparing recommendations and best practices
for preservation metadata. This group's work is a follow-up to
the 2002 OCLC/RLG white paper A Metadata Framework to Support the
Preservation of Digital Objects. The working group has developed
a data model for high-level entities capturing the properties of
objects, events, agents, rights and permissions, and the
relationships between these entities, and is working towards
detailed descriptions of the specific preservation properties
encapsulated by these entities.
http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/pmwg/
PDF/A
Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) has become the de-facto
standard for web-based delivery of electronic documents. The
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has
initiated an effort to create an standard for an archival profile
of PDF that is amendable for long-term preservation. This
standard, PDF/A, is intended to provide an unambiguous definition
of the requirements necessary for the reliable and predictable
future rendering of archived PDF documents. The second draft of
the PDF/A standard was released in May 2004 and is currently
undergoing a comment period by experts from the constituent
national bodies of ISO. Stephen Abrams, the LDI Digital Library
Program Manager at Harvard University, is the project leader and
document editor for the ISO PDF/A joint working group. http://www.aiim.org/standards.asp?ID=25013
GDFR (Global Digital Format Registry)
Almost all aspects of digital repository operation are
dependent upon intimate knowledge of the data formats in which
the repository's objects are encoded. Without such knowledge,
these objects are merely opaque sequences of uninterpretable
bits. Dale Flecker, Associate Director for Planning and Systems,
Harvard University Library and Stephen Abrams, LDI Digital
Library Program Manager, Harvard University Library, have been
leaders in the DLF-sponsored effort to establish a Global Digital
Format Registry (GDFR) that will be a sustainable resource for
authoritative information about data formats for the digital
library and preservation community.
http://hul.harvard.edu/gdfr/
RLG/NARA Task Group on Digital Repository
Certification
In FY2004, the RLG/NARA Task Group on Digital Repository
Certification continued its charge to recommend a certification
process and requirements by which a repository intending to serve
as a permanent archive of digital materials can be judged to be
"trustworthy." The criteria for trustworthiness include both
technical and organizational metrics. The intent of certification
is to assure those depositing in a repository that it can be
trusted with valuable digital resources. It is expected that even
repositories that do not go through a formal process of
certification will find the criteria useful for self
evaluation.
http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=580
LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe)
LOCKSS is a system that makes use of redundant, distributed
harvesting and persistent storage of web-accessible e-journals.
HUL-OIS cooperated in the development of LOCKSS by being a
beta-tester. In FY2004, OIS began participating with a 13 member
consortium of academic and research libraries that is conducting
a test of the LOCKSS system to collect and store a number of
born-digital e-journals in the humanities. This will require the
creation of a LOCKSS "plug-in" module for the following journals:
Applied Semiotics/Sémiotique Appliquée, Journal of
Religion and Society, Lodestar Quarterly, Paumanok Review, and
World Haiku Review. Once created, these plug-ins will be made
available to the other participants of the test; HUL-OIS will, in
turn, receive the plug-ins created by other institutions. By
working with actual e-journal data this test will provide
valuable empirical data on the cost in time and human and machine
resources necessary to use LOCKSS as an archiving vehicle. http://lockss.stanford.edu/humanities.htm
B. Programs
The Library Digital Initiative (LDI)
Harvard University launched the LDI in July 1998 to develop
the University's capacity to manage digital information by
creating a robust technical infrastructure for the acquisition,
organization, delivery, and archiving of digital library
materials; by providing a team of specialists to advise
librarians and others in the University community on key issues
in the digital environment; by providing librarians and staff
with experience in digital library projects; and by enriching the
Harvard University Library system with a significant set of
digital resources. Now in its seventh year, LDI is making it
easier for Harvard's libraries to maintain their collections and
services in the digital era, without each library having to
individually acquire the expertise and systems needed to support
digital resources. The development of the collections, systems
and services documented in this report were funded by LDI.
http://hul.harvard.edu/ldi
The Digital Acquisitions Program
Initiated as part of LDI, the Digital Acquisitions Program
supports the shared purchase and licensing of commercially
available digital resources for Harvard's libraries. Program
services include the organization of prospective and ongoing
product evaluation, license negotiation, access implementation
and administration, and vendor relationship management.
Consulting assistance is also offered to libraries that negotiate
license agreements for their local collections. Program staff are
also involved in assisting libraries with collection decisions
involving print resources, such as canceling unneeded duplicate
print journal subscriptions in order to control acquisitions
costs.
Harvard libraries continued to acquire digital resources at a
steady pace during FY 2004. Approximately 830 new resources -
including 730 e-journals and 100 databases - were licensed and
made available to the Harvard community through the Harvard
Libraries web site.
http://hul.harvard.edu/digacq/
LDI Internal Challenge Grant Program
Managers and staff throughout Harvard’s libraries,
archives, museums and special collections have participated in
LDI through the Internal Challenge Grant Program. They have
assisted LDI by prioritizing, testing and demonstrating new
systems and services while contributing valuable online content
for research and education. Projects have had a range of goals
including basic digital conversion of a single collection; the
creation of a virtual collection by digitizing related material
from multiple repositories; and the development of new delivery
systems for natively digital material. Many projects have focused
on providing access to previously inaccessible collections and
making them available online for use by students and scholars at
Harvard and around the world. Over the last six years 39 projects
were funded through the grant program and over 200 Harvard staff
members gained experience working with digital projects. In FY
2004, four projects were completed and six were newly funded.
Completed projects are reported in Section I.A.Collections
of this report. Beginning in fiscal year 2005, LDI will focus
project work in five initiative areas: integration projects,
priority digital resources, archiving born-digital material,
digital preservation, and assessment and measurement.
http://hul.harvard.edu/ldi/html/funded_projects.html
Open Collections Program (OCP)
With an initial grant from the William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation, the OCP was established in the Fall of 2002. The goal
of the Open Collections Program (OCP) is to increase the
availability and use of Harvard's extraordinary textual and
visual historical resources for teaching, learning, and research
by selecting resources from the Harvard Libraries in broad topic
areas, putting them in digital format, and providing access to
them through the web and the Harvard library catalogs. In FY 2004
the Program made significant progress toward creating
comprehensive subject-based collections that contain freely
accessible, high-quality digital resources.Production began this
year in OCP's first open collection, Women Working,
1870-1930.
http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/
Women Working, 1870-1930
This collection explores women's roles in the US economy
between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Working
conditions, conditions in the home, costs of living, recreation,
health and hygiene, conduct of life, policies and regulations
governing the workplace, and social issues are all well
documented. Working within the topic as defined by Harvard's
faculty and library committees, the Open Collections Program
selected materials for Women Working from across Harvard's
libraries, archives, and museums to begin the creation of a deep,
subject-based digital resource. From the 6,000 books, serials and
pamphlets reviewed, 2,250 were selected for digitization during
the year. This collection now includes over 2,000 published
works, several thousand pages of unpublished manuscripts and over
1,000 photographs.
http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww
Integration with Educational Technology
During the past several years under the auspices of the
Library Digital Initiative (LDI), the Harvard libraries have been
developing a rich collection of high-quality commercial and local
digital library content to support research and teaching. At the
same time, the ongoing development and enhancement of the Harvard
course management platform, instructional tools, and portal
software by the Office of the Provost and by the Instructional
Computing Group (ICG) in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has
been significant. Going forward, an important goal for the
Harvard libraries is continued collaboration with these groups on
a number of initiatives to integrate library resources more fully
into the course management sites and portal environments on
campus.
Beginning in fiscal year 2005, one of the focused areas of LDI
project work will be integration projects predominantly oriented
towards integrating library digital resources and services with
Harvard's central academic computing initiatives. The intent of
this initiative is to encourage the use of library materials by
presenting them conveniently and prominently in the web
environments used by Harvard's students and faculty.
Work has already begun in this area. During FY 2003, a new
facility in VIA, the image collection catalog, allowed
instructors to use export images for use in a course tool for
creating slide shows. In FY2004, a new tool was added to the
Instructors' Toolkit so that a HOLLIS Catalog search box enabling
direct searching in the OPAC could be added to course website
pages. Another larger shared project currently underway is the
development of a Reading List Tool, incorporating reserves, for
both the instructor and the library to facilitate the compilation
and display of course reading lists on course web sites. A
prototype of the Reading List Tool is planned to be available for
Spring 2005.
The topic of integration between library digital content and
instructional technology platforms is receiving widespread
attention outside of Harvard in both the digital library and
educational technology arenas. There is concern in the library
domain especially that libraries and their high-quality digital
content are largely missing thus far from established course
management sites. In order to further progress in this area, the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided support for an ad hoc group
of digital librarians, course management system developers, and
publishers to meet and discuss some useful next steps to increase
the integration of existing digital resources into the working
environments of instructors in higher education. This group was
co-chaired by Dale Flecker and issued a paper in July 2004
entitled Digital Library Content and Course Management Systems:
Issues of Interoperation (http://www.diglib.org/pubs/cmsdl0407)
The report strongly recommends that the Mellon Foundation pursue
an initiative to support meaningful demonstration projects in
this area.
- Chapman, Stephen. "Techniques for Creating
Sustainable Digital Collections." Library Technology Reports.
Vol. 40, No. 5, September/October 2004.
www.techsource.ala.org
- Jewell, Timothy D. and Anderson, Ivy et al.
"Electronic Resource Management The Report of the DLF Initiative"
DLF August 2004.
http://www.diglib.org/pubs/dlfermi0408/
- Flecker, Dale. "Digital Library Content and Course Management
Systems: Issues of Interoperation Report of a study group." DLF,
July, 2004.
http://www.diglib.org/pubs/cmsdl0407/
-
Kriegsman, Sue and Lee Mandell. "Digital
Archiving without Preservation is Just Storage: Education is the
First Step to Achieving Preservation Goals" IS&T's 2004
Archiving Conference San Antonio, Texas; April 20, 2004; p.
32-35; ISBN / ISSN: 0-89208-251-8.
http://www.imaging.org/store/epub.cfm?abstrid=30283
Additional digital library information, documentation and
publications are linked from the following web sites:
- The Library Digital Initiative (LDI) site focuses on
information about the initiative including technical
developments, advisory services, and the grant program. http://hul.harvard.edu/ldi
- The Office for Information Systems site contains information
about available Harvard University Library systems and services,
including resources for the staff at Harvard's libraries,
museums, and archives and for information technology offices
using LDI systems and services. http://hul.harvard.edu/ois
-
The Library Preservation at Harvard site is a collaborative
effort of the Weissman Preservation Center in the Harvard
University Library and the Preservation & Imaging Department
in the Harvard College Library Harvard. The site includes
information about preservation and imaging services for both
traditional and digital materials. http://preserve.harvard.edu
return to top >>
|
