Indiana University
Report to the Digital Library Federation
Fall, 2003
Table Of Contents
I. Collections and services
II. Projects and Programs
III. Specific digital library challenges
IV. Digital library publications, policies, working papers, and other documents
A. Collections
U.S. Steel Photograph Collection
The IU Digital Library Program received a grant from the Indiana State Library through federal Library Services and Technology Act funding to digitize and offer on the Web the 2,200 photographs in the U.S. Steel Photograph Collection in the Calumet Regional Archive at IU Northwest. Launched in February 2002, a Web site with photographs and accompanying text materials and teacher guides is now available.
http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/steel/
The Swinburne Project
Algernon Charles Swinburne is a major Victorian writer and cultural figure. The vast majority of his writings, however, are out of print. The Swinburne Project provides a searchable electronic edition of Swinburne's works, encoded in XML using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) XML Document Type Definition (DTD). The project was released to the public in 2002 and has since been regularly cited in online reference works and discussion groups devoted to Victorian studies. A number of important volumes are currently available and new titles continue to be added to the collection.
http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/swinburne/
Russian Periodical Index Digital Project
A three-year, United States Department of Education Title VI Technology Program grant to the IU Digital Library Program provides for the digitizing and Web publication of a portion of the Letopis' Zhurnal'nykh Statei, a serial publication that indexes Soviet periodicals from 1926 to the present. This resource will provide access to the periodical literature for 1956-1975, a key time in modern Russian history. Nearly the entire twenty years, including over three million citations, became publicly available in March 2003. Following extensive usability testing the site was revised; the final version of the site will be available in September 2003.
http://algernon.dlib.indiana.edu:9090/letopis2/index.jsp
B. Services
Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)
The DLP is actively engaged in the development of services using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to make information about digital library collections better available to the users who might make use of them. In 2002, the DLP set up an OAI-PMH data provider to allow other sites on the Internet to harvest metadata records from the Frank M. Hohenberger Photograph and DeVincent Sheet Music Collections in the Lilly Library at IU Bloomington and the U.S. Steel Photograph Collection in the Calumet Regional Archives at IU Northwest. In addition, the DLP worked with the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at IU Bloomington to implement an OAI-PMH data provider for metadata records from the Digital Library of the Commons.
In March 2002, the Digital Library began work with UCLA and Johns Hopkins University to create a metadata harvester for sheet music collections using OAI-PMH. Harvested metadata about sheet music in participating collections is hosted by the UCLA Digital Library Program. The service has been available in test mode since December 2002. The official launch, following extensive usability testing and revision, will occur in August 2003. Currently, the Sheet Music Consortium offers nearly 100,000 records for sheet music from five libraries.
http://digital.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic/
Encoded Archival Description (EAD)
Finding Aids at Indiana University. In July 2003, the Digital Library Program made available a searchable collection of EAD finding aids from the Lilly Library and the Indiana University Archives. Currently, over 100 finding aids are available, with more to be added in the future. In addition, other archives and libraries at Indiana University will contribute finding aids in the future.
http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/web/f/findaid
II. Projects and programs
A. Projects
New Projects begun in 2002/2003:
Ethnomusicological Video for Instruction and Analysis (EVIA) Digital Archive
The EVIA Digital Archive project is a joint effort of Indiana University and the University of Michigan to establish a digital archive of ethnomusicological video for use by scholars and instructors. Currently in a development phase funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Indiana University, and the University of Michigan, the archive is being designed by experts in the fields of ethnomusicology, archiving, video, intellectual property, and digital technology. The Digital Library Program is providing technical support for the project at Indiana University and will sustain the repository after the project ends in 2005.
http://www.indiana.edu/~eviada/
Film Literature Index
Begun in July 2002, a two-year, United States National Endowment for the Humanities grant to the IU Digital Library Program provides for the conversion and Web publication of the Film Literature Index, published in print by the Film and Television Documentation Center at the State University of New York - Albany. Film Literature Index is a quarterly subject/author index that provides the most comprehensive survey available of the entire spectrum of current international periodical literature about film and television/video. It is currently only available in print form. This project will make past and future Film Literature Index issues available and searchable via the Web.
http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/fli/proposal.html
Gennett Recording Studios Digital Archive
In July 2003, we received an LSTA grant to catalog, digitize, and provide public access to 325 sound recordings from the Gennett Recording Studios. The virtual collection will include sound recordings from the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University and the Starr-Gennett Archive in Richmond, Indiana (http://starrgennett.org/ ). The sound recordings will be accessible via the Variations system at IU and the web.
CBML (Comic Book Markup Language)
LETRS (Library Electronic Text Resource Service) leads the development of CBML, an XML vocabulary for encoding comic books and graphic novels. CBML will facilitate the preservation, study, and analysis of these cultural artifacts, which are becoming ever more frequent objects of study in a variety of disciplines, including history, literary, and cultural studies. CBML was unveiled for the public in December 2002 at the annual XML Conference and Exposition. As part of the CBML development effort, Indiana University became a member organization of OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (http://www.oasis-open.org/), an international, not-for-profit standards organization and potential venue of for the further development of CBML as an official standard.
Board of Trustees Minutes
The minutes of meetings of the Board of Trustees are being digitized, encoded using the TEI, and made fully searchable. The Board of Trustees minutes stretch back to the late 19th century and provide a unique history of Indiana University. Begun in fall 2002, this project is a collaboration of the Digital Library Program, University Archives, and the Board of Trustees.
http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/web/i/iubot
Projects in progress 2003:
Variations2 Digital Music Library
Work continues on the initiative to support research and development in digital libraries for music. This initiative is funded by the National Science Foundation's Digital Library Initiatives Phase 2 (DLI2) program. Building upon VARIATIONS, the project aims to establish a digital music library testbed system containing music in a variety of formats, involving research and development in the areas of system architecture, metadata standards, component-based application architecture, usability, intellectual property rights, and network services. In the first half of 2003, major development was completed on version 2.0 of the Variations2 software system, adding features to support synchronized playback and display of streaming audio and musical score images. We also created a Timeliner tool to enable the creation of musical form diagrams in conjunction with sound recordings in the digital library. The system has been tested in several classes at IU and also at a number of remote sites in the US, UK, and Japan. Cooperative cataloging using Variations2's descriptive and structural metadata schema was explored through work with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
http://variations2.indiana.edu/
Wright American Fiction 1851-1875
This is a cooperative project among nine CIC libraries, providing access to a collection of almost 3,000 works of American fiction published between 1851-1875. We launched the first release of the online collection in January 2002, and as of December 2002 we now have all of the works available. We continue to work to make the collection completely edited and encoded.
http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/web/w/wright2/
Charles W. Cushman Collection
Originally funded by a two-year grant (2000-2002) to IU from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the grant has been extended for a third year. The grant is to digitize and publish on the Web the 15,000 slides comprising the Cushman Collection in the University Archives in Bloomington. The work of the past year has focused upon adding subject headings to each image and developing the user interface. We also sent 250 slides that had experienced color degradation (red-shifting) to a lab in Switzerland for experimental color correction. The results were outstanding and will be featured on the project web site. The collection has become a testbed for developing a university-wide repository for photographs from departments and other organizational units, in addition to Digital Library Program projects. The project will be launched officially in September 2003.
http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/cushman
B. Programs
IU Forum on Digital Libraries
In April 2002 we held the first university-wide "IU Forum on Digital Libraries," at the Indiana Memorial Union, a day-long event showcasing 15 digital library projects from Bloomington and other campuses. The goal of this event was to share information about digital library research throughout the university and foster the development of creative partnerships.
http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/dlforum
Digital Library Program Forum
In March 2003 the Digital Library Program offered two 3-hour sessions providing an overview of DLP initiatives and recent accomplishments. We discussed how to work with the DLP to plan and manage a digital project. The target audience was librarians and professional staff. As a result of these events, we will schedule follow-up workshops and more specialized learning opportunities for librarians and information technologists. We have begun scheduling a series of brown bag discussions, with the School of Library and Information Science, for fall 2003.
http://dlib.indiana.edu/forum2003/
Specific Digital Library Challenges
Encouraging the use of standards and best practices.
Some departments and individuals have received grants to do small digital projects. Because the amounts of money are small and the staff is inexperienced, they often ignore standards and best practices. Once the project has ended sustainability becomes an issue. Often the project manager contacts the Digital Library Program about taking over support for the project. How do we encourage people to consult with us before beginning a project? How do we promote the use of standards and best practices for projects that we are not currently supporting? This was one of the goals of our forum this past spring, but we must do more.
Continuing education for Digital Library Program staff.
We employ highly knowledgeable and skilled staff. However, new staff may need specific additional education or training. All staff requires continuing education, including updates on current technologies and information about emerging technologies. What is the best way to provide this education and training? We hope to work with our School of Library and Information Science and our School of Informatics, both of which are Digital Library Program partners, to address this challenge.
Implementation of standard delivery services.
Currently, we have a number of different user interfaces, metadata approaches, and technical backends in place to handle search, browse, and viewing services for digital collections. This makes local cross-collection searching, even among similar collection types (such as historical photographs), difficult to implement. We expect to work this year on defining a number of delivery services, based on shared content and metadata characteristics and user needs, and then beginning to implement these services by acquiring or building the necessary software. What are the appropriate categories of content for these services? Should we take a buy or build approach, or mix and match? How will they integrate with a future digital library object repository?
Collection maintenance once a digitization project has formally ended.
Once a collection project has been "completed," the work is not really over. Descriptive metadata corrections must be made based on newly revealed information; individual items may need to be re-digitized due to future discovery of quality problems; contextual web site information must be updated; delivery applications must be modified to accommodate hardware and software upgrades; content must be migrated to new storage systems. How can we organize Digital Library Program and other library staff to continue maintaining digital collections? How can we build our applications to easily accommodate these maintenance requirements?
IV. Digital library publications, policies, working papers, and other documents
Cantara, Linda, Michelle Dalmau, and Jenn Riley. "The Charles W. Cushman Collection: Enhancing Visual Resource Discovery Through Descriptive Metadata Based on Subjective Image Analysis." Web X: A Decade of the World Wide Web. The Joint International Conference of the Association for Computers and the Humanities/Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ACH/ALLC), University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, 29 May - 2 June, 2003. Full paper submitted for publication in conference proceedings, forthcoming.
Dalmau, Michelle, and Jenn Riley. "Cushman Exposed! Exploiting Controlled Vocabularies to Enhance Browsing and Searching of an Online Photograph Collection." Digital Library Federation Spring Forum 2003. Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers, New York. 15 May 2003.
Riley, Jenn. "Data Mapping: OAI Sheet Music Harvester". TRUE/FALSE: Facsimiles, Fakes, Forgeries and Issues of Authenticity in Special Collections. The 44th Annual RBMS Preconference, Toronto, Canada, 17-20 June, 2003.
Riley, Jenn and Ichiro Fujinaga. "Digital Imaging of Musical Scores". 3rd International Conference on Music Information Retrieval. IRCAM - Centre Pompidou, Paris. 14 October, 2002.
Walsh, John A. "CBML: Comic Book Markup Language." XML Conference and Exposition 2002. Baltimore Convention Center, Baltimore, MD. 8-13 December 2002.
Walsh, John A. "Free the Data: Accessibility, Format, and Transformation Issues Related to XML-Based Humanities Resources." Digital Resources in the Humanities (DRH) 2002. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. 9 September 2002.
Walsh, John A. "Pop Goes the TEI: TEI Markup Applied to Comic Books and Graphic Novels." Digital Resources for the Humanities (DRH) 2003. University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, England, UK. 31 August - 3 September 2003.
Walsh, John A. "'Unicode Ate My Brain,' or The Trials and Tribulations of Implementing a Unicode-Dependent Digital Library Project." Digital Library Federation Fall Forum 2002. Hilton Seattle, Seattle. 4-6 November 2002.
Walsh, John A. "XML and Comics: Comic Book Markup Language (CBML)." Comic Arts Conference / Comic-Con International. San Diego Convention Center, San Diego. 17-20 July 2003.
Please send comments or suggestions.
Last updated: December 14, 2003
© 2003, Digital library Federation, Council on Library and Information Resources
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