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What is a digital registry and why is it needed?
Early digitization efforts focused on special collections – unique materials.  But now digitization of books and serials, mass-produced materials held by many organizations, is becoming common.  Ejournals, ebooks, and other born digital materials are also being acquired and used by many libraries. The digital registry concept was intended to help libraries avoid duplicating each other’s digitization and digital archiving efforts.
The Digital Registry was defined to make it possible to determine
What specific items have been, or are planned to be, digitized with a commitment to sustainability What archival holdings of born-digital materials exist and who is committing to their preservation
Where these holdings can be accessed
The technical specifications and management practices being used to sustain these digital objects
 
The scope of the registry includes “faithful” reproductions of books and serials, and born digital items.  All items included in the registry are to be of traditional bibliographic entities.
 
The Registry is intended to serve two main purposes – facilitate coordination among agencies that preserve and maintain digital materials for the long term, and increase exposure of digital content.
The registry should provide an ability for libraries and other organizations to easily use it to  coordinate digitization efforts by identifying items already digitized and discovering what items are in line for digitization, reducing redundant digitization efforts and providing cost savings.
Libraries and other organizations will also be able to coordinate efforts to preserve born digital material by seeing what libraries are committing to preserve specific born digital items and what preservation actions have been taken.
In addition, Registry records will eventually be available for extraction and re-use, such as incorporation in local catalogs and inclusion in topical portal services, exposing these materials for greater use.
Organizations that want to use the registry should be aware of the criteria, for including digital material in the registry. Material must be digitized according to documented standards and best practices;
Must reside in professionally-managed storage
the organization must have an intent to preserve the digital material for the long term (decades or centuries – people will, we hope, come to rely on this, so it represents a long-term commitment ); and there must be a use copy of the digital resource available to the general public, though the use copy need not be free.
A registry record contains information about the digital master and the use copy.
OCLC implemented the Digital Registry using existing WorldCat functionality and current MARC fields.  This implementation strategy allows contribution to and use of the registry to be aligned with regular library workflows. The DLF/OCLC working group created Guidelines for using the Digital Registry with existing OCLC and MARC functionality. The Guidelines will be available on the DLF website shortly.
In phase one, any library can follow the Guidelines and contribute and update records via Connexion, or contribute, but not update them, via special batch processing coordinated with OCLC.
 
Members of the working group will begin applying the guidelines to some of their projects – two workflows will be presented today by Rebecca Guenther, LC, and Erika Linke, Carnegie Mellon.  As the registry grows with records from LC, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard University, and others, a broader adoption of the guidelines is expected for other projects. It’s also fair to say we expect the guidelines to evolve based on everyone’s experience using them in Phase 1, both people creating the records and people using the records.
Not all functional requirements for the Registry were implemented in Phase 1. Outstanding requirements include making the registry visible as an entity and to a wider community; enabling the bulk harvesting or extraction or records for other applications; improving batch processing to allow updates; and improving displays where an item has been digitized more than once, in different ways or to different extents.
If you are interested in more information about the registry for a digital project at your institution or about the guidelines, please see me (Robin) after the session, or contact Susan Westberg at OCLC.