Present: Micah Altman (Harvard), Caroline Arms (Library of Congress), Priscilla Caplan (Florida State University), Tim Cole (University of Illinois), Dale Flecker (Harvard), Ira Fuchs (Mellon), Daniel Greenstein (DLF), Martin Halbert (Emory), Ted Hanss (Internet2), Tom Hickerson (Cornell), Thom Hickey (OCLC), Jim Lloyd (University of Tennessee), John Ockerbloom (University of Pennsylvania), John Perkins (CIMI), Tom Peters (Committee on Institutional Cooperation, CIC), John Price-Wilkin (University of Michigan), Thornton Staples (University of Virginia), Donald Waters (Mellon)
Apologies: Kris Brancolini (University of Indiana)
1.1. There are compelling incentives for libraries to offer metadata to harvesting services. Participants agreed that the activity promises exposure for library collections and will help harvesting services illuminate the "hidden web" to the advantage of scholars.
1.2. Metadata harvesting services have potential scholarly and cultural value. Agreement here as well particularly in the following generic types of harvesting services:
1.3. Harvesting services can be selective about the metadata they expose, but a testbed should not be so selective
1.3.1. We discussed the relative merits of harvesting services that expose metadata attached to or pointing at digital information objects vs. those that included metadata referring to books, artifacts, and other non-digital objects. We did not see any reason at this stage to restrict our exploration to one or other type of service.
1.3.2. We discussed the relative merits and difficulties involved with harvesting services that expose metadata and refer to objects that have no rights restrictions vs. those that deal with metadata and/or referred objects that have some rights restrictions. We did not see any reason at this stage to restrict our exploration of one or other type of service.
1.4. The meaning of Dublin Core. We had questions about whether we need to be more prescriptive about how metadata suppliers use Dublin Core. We agreed the testbed would "create a market in good and bad metadata practices" and consequently that it will be desirable at this early stage to encourage metadata suppliers to expose DC metadata in their own image (unconstrained by guidelines that may be imposed at this time).
1.5. The role of research libraries as harvesting services. We disagreed about whether research libraries had a role as harvesting services. Some felt harvesting services needed to come from the likes of OCLC, RLG, or commercial third parties. Others felt that libraries have a role in prototyping such services in the hopes that prototypes will find their own organizational legs and sustaining business models or at a minimum encourage third party suppliers into the game. I hope we can agree to disagree on this point and to encourage those who want to step forward and offer the innovation we require.
1.6. Open source is valuable. Ready consensus that any tools, prototypes, etc. should be developed along Open Source lines and could be registered e.g. at OCLC
1.7. OAI conformant servers in a box could be important. Tools are good where they help to lower the barriers for those who want to make item-level metadata available for harvesting.
1.8. [Some] testbeds might be mounted for specified duration and on a limited-access basis. This might help us gain metadata contributions involving metadata with access restrictions and/or metadata referring to objects that have access restrictions
1.9. The special case of EADs. It might be appropriate to sponsor some research into some very specific topics: how EADs are being developed and applied with a view to recommending "good practices" that could support their representation in Dublin Core and their exposure to harvesting services; how search facilities are currently being used (e.g. to guide our deliberations about fielded vs google-style searching).