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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