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The First Six Years:
What Has the DLF Done?

The Digital Library Federation (DLF) is a consortium of research libraries pioneering in the development of digital collections and services. The DLF coordinates research and development, identifies standards and "best practices," and provides capital for the development of tools and services that digital libraries need but cannot individually afford. Since its founding in 1995, the DLF has provided leadership in libraries' efforts to create digital collections of quality, preserve them long-term, enhance their accessibility, and evaluate their use. Here are highlights:

Creating Digital Collections of Quality

  • Three reports commissioned by the DLF are providing guidance in developing useful and sustainable digital collections, drawing upon the experience of leading research libraries in digitizing collections, acquiring commercial content, and establishing gateways to Internet resources in the public domain.
  • Five guides to various aspects of planning and carrying out digitization projects have been produced by the DLF in collaboration with the Research Libraries Group (RLG).
  • Because libraries need guidance in developing digital images that reliably reproduce originals, attain a basic level of quality, and can be shared between operating programs, the DLF has drafted benchmark specifications for digitally reproducing printed books and serial publications, is sponsoring work to make digital reproductions of images in pictorial collections consistent in quality and easily distributed, and has helped foster work on a draft standard for technical metadata used in digitizing still images.
  • Following work in the Text Encoding Initiative, the DLF has supported the development of and endorsed implementation guidelines and best practices now widely used in the U.S. and Europe for encoding electronic text for searching and other functions.
  • The DLF has developed a functional specification and a business case for a searchable, accessible registry of digitally reformatted book and serial publications to help libraries avoid costly duplication in digitization, and guide their patrons to electronically accessible resources.
  • To enable small as well as large libraries to undertake digital projects economically, the DLF also is promoting technical work on a shared digitization service.
  • Libraries and publishers in the U.S. and abroad are adopting "Liblicense," a model endorsed by the DLF for use by libraries in licensing electronic publications.
  • A DLF report on a survey of its member institutions documents how digital libraries are now evolving, organizing, and financing themselves.

Managing Collections Long-term

  • To forestall the loss of scholarly information being published in electronic journals, the DLF joined others in helping libraries and publishers agree on minimum requirements for archiving their contents, and is facilitating a Mellon-funded program in which seven research libraries are experimentally planning approaches to e-journal preservation.
  • The DLF is promoting technical work to enable libraries to use a common architecture for digital repositories.
  • Building on DLF-supported work on mechanisms for describing digital objects, a DLF group has developed a Metadata Encoding and Transmission Scheme ("METS"), which provides a fundamental building block for distributed digital library services.
  • The Library of Congress has asked the DLF for expert assistance in developing its new National Digital Information Preservation Program.

Enhancing and Managing Access to Digital Resources

  • Work on portal services that enable researchers to find relevant Web resources more easily and extensively is advancing with the help of DLF investments in the Open Archives Initiative, which has developed a network protocol now under evaluation or in use by RLG, OCLC, NSF, and others here and abroad.
  • ArtSTOR, a service that will develop, store, and distribute digital images for the study of art, architecture, and related fields is developing in part from a prototype image-distribution service created in a DLF initiative, the Academic Information Cooperative. ArtSTOR also is making use of a DLF-produced functional specification and market assessment for a tool for visual-resource cataloging.
  • Under DLF auspices, four organizations developed a protocol that enables an information provider to verify that a user with a digital certificate has authority to use a resource.
  • The DLF is promoting technical work to enable libraries more easily to take advantage of open-source software, to enable researchers to search online finding aids more easily by overcoming variations in the ways in which such aids are created and defined, and to improve electronic links that take readers from journal citations to the documents cited.

Evaluating Use

  • To help libraries plan services, the DLF has published studies of how social science data managers, humanities scholars, other faculty, and students find and use information.
  • With others, the DLF is developing methods for assessing quality in libraries' digital references services, and will produce a guide to collecting and reporting evaluation data.
  • A DLF Distinguished Fellow is surveying DLF member institutions to find out how they are assessing the use and usefulness of their online collections.

To help others learn about such work, the DLF conducts forum meetings, publishes reports, announces developments to an e-mail list, and maintains a Web site that includes a newsletter.

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