Digital Library Federation

Annual Report 2004–2005

 

Initiatives, Forums, Publications,

and the Activities of the Executive Director

 

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Submitted to the DLF Board of Trustees

October 2005

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For Further Information

Do please contact me to discuss any aspects of this Report or any other DLF topics, opportunities, concerns, or initiatives.  I would be pleased to set up phone calls with any of you or your staff at your convenience – simply contact me at 202-939-4762 / dseaman@clir.org, or via Christie Hartmann at 202-939-4750 / chartmann@clir.org

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

This year has seen a full complement of initiatives, two lively DLF Forums, new publications and initiatives, a Web site re-design, the governance and legal work to formalize the relationship between DLF and CLIR and to move to incorporation for DLF, a successful IMLS grant application, the launching of DLF Aquifer under Katherine Kott’s direction, and dozens of presentations, site visits to members, and meetings in the US, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and China. This activity promotes the work of DLF, builds partnerships, and gives us a presence in a number of related communities.

 

We also welcomed this year a new staff member, Christie Hartmann, DLF Administrative Associate, and saw the promotion of Barrie Howard to DLF Program Associate. I am very pleased with the manner in which we are working together to manage the logistics of a growing organization with increasing participation in meetings, initiatives, and Forums, and with rising expectations as we develop into a more visible player in the digital library environment. What follows are selected highlights and areas of activity from the past year.



 

THE DISTRIBUTED LIBRARY

 



DLF Aquifer: a distributed, open library of our digitized holdings continues to be a foundational desire for many in DLF, as a basis on which to build tools and services that promote better scholarship and teaching. Since January 2005, CLIR has contracted on DLF’s behalf to engage Katherine Kott (Stanford University) as the full-time director of DLF Aquifer, paid for from the DLF Capital Funds. Under Katherine’s coordination, committees in collections, metadata, technical architecture, implementation, and services are at work, using American cultural materials already digitized in our libraries, to improve discovery and re-use of what are now scattered and non-integrated collections [for a fuller DLF Aquifer report, please see Appendix I].



 

Shareable Metadata: A central challenge of our distributed library is the refinement of best practices for the creation of shareable, interoperable metadata – catalog records for digital objects that can be “exposed” to software that travels the Web and “harvests” records from many sites, bringing them back to a central point, aggregating them, and allowing one to provide discovery services to hundreds of sites from a single Web service point. The metadata gathered by this method provides greater precision than a Google-like search does, allowing for author, title, date, and subject queries, and – crucially, they tend to provide access to the so-called “dark Web” – publicly-available library, and museum content missed by Google and Yahoo! for various technical reasons.

 

Funded by a $292,000 national leadership grant from the IMLS (our first federal grant in our own right), DLF has gathered up the pioneers from the world of harvestable metadata and tasked them with providing us all with Best Practices Guidelines (work we are doing in consort with NSDL) on how to build harvestable records en masse that work easily in an interoperable manner, and that allow for richer library services to be built with them. (http://www.diglib.org/architectures/oai/imls2004/ )

 

This activity builds on past DLF investments in the development of the very successful Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and includes prototype portals for digital library objects with OAI records from DLF institutions. As part of this grant we are providing OAI training for DLF libraries, and have put into print and more widely circulated A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services, Martha Brogan’s December 2003 report on the OAI services landscape (www.diglib.org/pubs/brogan/). She will be issuing a revised version in 2006.

 

Paying attention to the needs of scholars: last year, DLF convened a group of scholars working on digital projects, editions, and archives as a planning and reaction panel for DLF activities. This year, as part of our IMLS-funded work (see above), we convened a similar group but focused the conversation more narrowly on the scholarly potential of services that use OAI harvestable metadata.

 

This type of formal feedback continues to pay dividends, as the scholars significantly informed our design decisions for the OAI-based DLF Portal, and reminded us firmly that the user often wanted to be able to download the metadata for a book or slide or manuscript once they had found it in a digital library, in order to build personal libraries or bibliographies of citations to online material. (http://www.diglib.org/architectures/oai/imls2004/OAISAP05.htm)



 

PRESERVATION AND PRODUCTION



 

Preservation-quality Digital Images

 

In 2005, DLF published in print the Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Archival Materials for Electronic Access: Creation of Production Master Files - Raster Images (see Publications below), a very highly-regarded report from the U.S. National Archives Digital Imaging Lab on the best practices for creating production master files for still images (images taken from photographs, book illustrations, slides, manuscripts, etc).

 

In doing so, we realized to our surprise that there was no authoritative guide to best practices for preservation-quality digital images, and although the work above went some way towards that, its focus was on creating master images for various print and electronic re-uses. In April 2005, we convened a team from NARA, the Library of Congress, Kodak, the Swiss Institute of Technology, Harvard, and elsewhere, who will build on this initial report to give us a statement of the best we collectively know now about preservation-quality digital images, and the information about them you need to record for the long term.

 



METADATA AND MANAGEMENT

 



Electronic Resources Management Initiative (ERMI)

 

At present we all spend far too much time and money re-typing license terms into our management systems, and the licenses come to us in a variety of shapes and forms. The problem gets worse and worse as we license more journals, reference works, and primary materials.

 

DLF’s ERMI team has created and widely disseminated a common, sharable, XML “database record” for expressing the content of license agreements, related administrative information, and internal processes associated with collections of licensed electronic resources. The publication of their DLF report in August 2004 received a very positive reception. There is clearly now a willingness from the publishers to deliver their licenses to us in a common XML record format, and already the library software vendors are providing easy mechanisms to load these records into our library management systems. (http://www.diglib.org/standards/dlf-erm02.htm)

 

Starting in Fall 2005, DLF is co-sponsoring with the NISO standards body and a publishing standards organization, EDItEUR, the next round of implementation and “real-world” formalization and testing to move us to a much more efficient license expression workflow from publisher to aggregator or library.



 

A Study of the Interoperation of Learning Management and Library Information Systems

 

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded this DLF study group last year to examine the interaction of digital libraries and learning management (courseware) systems. The Report from this group came out in July 2004, and has helped us all to think through the challenges of this space. Learning management systems are increasingly ubiquitous in higher education, and there is an explosion of internet-accessible collections of digital resources relevant to the teachers and students. As these sites are increasingly produced through formal learning management systems, the issue of the interactions of such systems with external repositories and discovery systems becomes important.

 



LIBRARY SERVICES FRAMEWORK

The DLF Steering Committee established the DLF Abstract Service Framework Working Group in November 2004 to develop a shared understanding and vocabulary for how the research library and its services are organized in an increasingly networked environment.

A working group comprising Peter Brantley (CDL), Lorcan Dempsey (OCLC), Dale Flecker (Harvard), Brian Lavoie (OCLC), Krisellen Maloney (University of Arizona), Andy Powell (JISC/UKOLN, University of Bath), and MacKenzie Smith (MIT) worked swiftly over the spring and produced a white paper in time for the Spring 2005 DLF Steering Committee Meeting. From that Report:

“A Service Framework is a tool with which a community collectively organizes its attention. Typically it provides a pattern which can organize discussion, design or resources. Here, we want to use it as a tool to organize our collective attention to library services in a changing environment. It is a tool for library directors who are thinking about resource allocation and strategic direction. It is a tool for library staff who are building systems and services. It is a tool for funding bodies and other library organizations who are prioritizing funding allocations. It is a tool for related communities who wish to understand the touching points between their environment and the library environment. ” ( http://www.diglib.org/architectures/serviceframe/dlfserviceframe1.htm)

To drive this work forward we are planning a stakeholders’ meeting in the fall, and currently advertising for a DLF Distinguished Fellow to work full-time on this for a year (2005-2006), and to provide the time and focus needed to give us a common framework.



FORUMS & FORUM FELLOWSHIPS



 

The recent 2003-2004 Governance Study underscored the high degree to which DLF members and allies value the semi-annual DLF Forums, which was reinforced by a formal survey of attendees to the Spring 2005 Forum [see Appendix II], conducted at the urging of the DLF Executive Committee.

 

The Forum has become the engine that drives many DLF initiatives – the place where teams of librarians meet in person, where they report on initiatives, and where new ideas for work are spawned. This year we met in Baltimore and San Diego and saw an average of 200 attendees, including guest attendees and speakers from outside DLF. Meetings for projects are now routinely added onto either end of the 2-day event, and the DLF Developers’ Forum, currently under the guidance of MacKenzie Smith (MIT) and Peter Brantley (CDL) continues to draw significant attendance and generate lively discussion.

The Forum Fellowships for Librarians New to the Profession have met with great success, attracting new library staff to the Forums, and exposing them to the range of issues and contacts they will find there. Recipients this year came from the University of Minnesota, Cornell University, Emory University, North Carolina State University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Tennessee, Dartmouth College, and the California Digital Library. The Forum programs can be seen at http://www.diglib.org/forums.htm.



PUBLICATIONS



 

OAI Scholars' Advisory Panel Report. Prepared by David Seaman (June 2005) http://www.diglib.org/architectures/oai/imls2004/OAISAP05.htm [Electronic only]

 

DLF Aquifer: Tapping New Sources for Scholarship by Katherine Kott. CLIR IssuesNumber 45, May/June 2005. http://www.clir.org/pubs/issues/issues45.html#dlf [Print and electronic]

 

 

DLF Service Framework for Digital Libraries: A progress report.

Prepared by Lorcan Dempsey and Brian Lavoie (May 2005) http://www.diglib.org/architectures/serviceframe/dlfserviceframe1.htm [Electronic only]

 

Scholars’ Panel Explores Digital Scholarship Needs by David Seaman

CLIR Issues Number 43 (January/February 2005) http://www.clir.org/pubs/issues/issues43.html#panel [Print and electronic]

 

Electronic Records Archives (ERA) Update from NARA (December 2004). http://www.diglib.org/preserve/ERA2004.htm [Electronic only]

 

Fall 2004 and Spring 2005 DLF Newsletters, from Indiana University, The New York Public Library, North Carolina State University, Stanford, California Digital Library, Carnegie Mellon, Emory, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, MIT, NYU, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, and Yale. Michael Pelikan (Penn State) continues to do a fine job as editor for the newsletters, which inform us all of what individual member institutions are doing, and which provide the source for our growing Collections Registry. http://www.diglib.org/pubs/newsletter.htm [Electronic only]

 

Electronic Resource Management: Report of the DLF Electronic Resource Management Initiative. Timothy D. Jewell, Ivy Anderson, Adam Chandler, Sharon E. Farb, Kimberly Parker, Angela Riggio, and Nathan D. M. Robertson. (August 2004) http://www.diglib.org/pubs/dlfermi0408/ [Print and electronic]

Digital Library Content and Course Management Systems: Issues of Interoperation.
Report of a study group co-chaired by Dale Flecker, Associate Director for Planning & Systems, Harvard University Library, and Neil McLean, Director, IMS Australia. (July 2004) http://www.diglib.org/pubs/cmsdl0407/ [Electronic only]

Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Archival Materials for Electronic Access: Creation of Production Master Files - Raster Images. Steven Puglia, Jeffrey A. Reed, Erin Rhodes, and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. (June 2004) http://www.archives.gov/research/arc/techguide-raster-june2004.pdf [Print and electronic]

 

DLF Scholars’ Panel. Prepared by David Seaman. http://www.diglib.org/use/scholars0406/ [Electronic only]



 

GOVERNANCE



 

Working with the DLF Governance Committee, Executive Committee, Nancy Davenport and colleagues at CLIR, and Sam Black of Squire, Sanders, and Dempsey, LLC, I took DLF through the process of incorporation and application for not-for-profit status this year, with all the attendant documentation, revision of bylaws, setting up of bank and investment accounts, changes in office routines, and formalizing of relationships that this entailed. The process represented a significant (but one-time) investment of my time, and of my staff’s time, which inevitably left other projects and other people sometimes neglected (we like to think we minimized this), but it was a timely move for us as an organization, and provides a firm footing for the future.



 

COMMUNICATIONS



 

Communications within projects, within the DLF membership, and out to the larger digital library world continue to be a priority and a struggle – they take time that is scarce in a small staff. We have made considerable progress this year, however, with work still to do.

 

Our Web site – our public face and often the first place members go to catch up on an initiative, has completed its re-design, both aesthetic and organizational, and has been converted to XML to aid future migration and design changes. The DLF Publications Program has been streamlined by Barrie Howard, both in its management and its metadata: ISBN and Library of Congress cataloging is now routine; the core publication files are being converted to TEI (a form of XML common in our libraries) by a graduate student at UVa for easy conversion to Web site files, PDF, and other e-book formats; the Newsletters now have an XML template to ease their publication (and creation, we hope); the DLF Collections Registry is undergoing a major overhaul for completeness and consistency (making use of our graduate student); we have subscribed to SurveyMonkey for online surveying, and to BaseCamp for online project management, both of which are proving to be simple yet effective tools; we own our own listserv software, which makes it easier to create discussion and distribution lists for initiatives and for the Steering Committee, and we are closing in on a complete database of individuals who are active in DLF initiatives, to be used as an internal guide and to generate a report for each DLF director on his or her DLF staff activities. Quarterly reports were a goal too this past year; they fell by the wayside under the pressure of governance and grant administration, but I am committed to timely quarterly updates from this point onwards.

 

We benefit from CLIR’s publications and promotional expertise for things we publish jointly, but too often feel a real shortcoming in our ability to promote our initiatives, reports, and publications, to conduct excellent outreach to our members, and to maintain a lively and frequently refreshed online presence. As we grow in size and activity we would be well-served by adding a publications, promotion, and outreach position to our small central staff.



 

NON-US MEMBERSHIP IN DLF



 

This year saw us welcome our thirty-fourth member and our second from outside the US (following the British Library) with the election of the Egyptian Bibliotheca Alexandrina to DLF. And the UK funding agency JISC became our fifth ally this year, joining CNI, OCLC, RLG, and LANL.

 

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR’S ACTIVITIES

JULY 2004–JULY 2005

 



Below are selected events and presentations, in addition to the day-to-day conference calls, coordination, and development of initiatives, governance and financial duties, and communication and publication efforts. Most striking this year was to see the impressive national digital preservation and cultural heritage efforts underway, with real clarity of purpose, in Australia and New Zealand, and to be genuinely surprised at how fast the Chinese libraries are moving to develop Chinese cultural materials online, to embrace standards familiar to us such as OAI and METS, and to begin to move out from searching and browsing to ambitions to federate content and deliver knowledge not information to library users (all familiar from our DLF efforts).



 

JULY 2004

 

04/07/06: Presentation: “Institutional Repositories: An Overview.” JISC Program Meeting. Brighton, England.

 

04/07/08 – 04/07/10: Attended JISC/CNI Joint conference. Brighton, England.

 

04/07/12: Yale site visit and update: meetings with Alice Prochaska, Meg Bellinger, Jeff

Barnett, Dan Chudnov, Fred Martz, Audrey Novak, Sandra Peterson, Ann Green, and

Julie Linden. Discussed implementing Endeavor's Voyager integrated library management system; DODL; American Studies Digital Imaging Project; Virtual Reference Pilot Project; Shoah Foundation video delivery.

 

04/07/13: The Economic Growth Center Digital Library External Review Committee. Sterling Memorial Library, Yale. [Judy Russell, U.S. Government Printing Office; Mary Vardigan, ICPSR; Steve Puglia, NARA; Mark Maynard, Yale Roper Center; David Seaman, DLF; Dan Hazen, Harvard University].

 

04/07/14: Met in Washington DC with Sarah Porter, incoming Head of Development, JISC.

 

04/07/21: Met in Washington DC with Liz Bischoff (OCLC)

 

04/07/23: Met in Charlottesville, VA, with the scholars from the Virtual Jamestown Board, to follow up on 2004 Scholars Panel discussions

 

AUGUST 2004

 

04/08/05: Attended DODL meeting, Stanford University, Stanford, CA – now renamed DLF Aquifer. Work with Eric Celeste (Minnesota) on Aquifer Web page, wiki, and communications plan (see www.diglib.org/aquifer/). Work with Michael Keller and Dan Greenstein on the job description and vetting of candidates for the DLF Aquifer Director’s position.

 

04/08/16: CLIR annual report—Digital Libraries section:

http://www.clir.org/pubs/annual/annrpt2003/03annrep.pdf

 

04/08/20: Planning session for CLIR/DLF “Managing Digital Assets” meeting in Charleston, SC, February 2005.

 

04/08/30: Wrote and distributed to Aquifer group A Quicki Guide to Wiki as part of the Aquifer communications investigation. http://www.diglib.org/pubs/execsumm/wikiexecsumm.htm

 

SEPTEMBER 2004

 

04/09/01: Welcomed David Ferriero (NYPL) to DLF – set up visit to brief him on DLF in person in October.

 

04/09/07: Keynote presentation: Lianza – New Zealand Library Association, Auckland: “Mass, Malleability, and the Collaboration Imperative: Trends for the Digital Library.” [To be given again at the Australian National University, as the 2004 James Bennett lecture in early November. Previous lecturers include our own Michael Keller and Lynne Brindley.]

 

04/09/08: Led the New Zealand IT Special Interest Group Workshop on discussion of repositories and harvestable metadata

 

04/09/08: Attended Matapihi launch – NZ art collection online, Auckland Art Gallery. Part of a grander NZ Online national ambition, including recent NZ$24 million government contract to NZ National Library for a national repository.

 

04/09/09: Meeting with University of Auckland librarian Janet Copsey and Brian Flaherty, Digital Services Manager: discussed Auckland’s plans for an institutional repository for faculty publications.

 

04/09/10: Meeting with New Zealand National Librarian Penny Carnaby; presentation to New Zealand National Library digital team.

 

04/09/14: presentation in Washington DC to visiting librarians from Serbia and Montenegro

 

04/09/22: DLF update for CLIR staff (lunchtime session, provided periodically, to keep CLIR staff informed about DLF initiatives)

 

04/09/23: DLF wins $292,000 IMLS National Leadership Grant for OAI Best Practices work.

 

 

OCTOBER 2004

 

04/10/02: keynote – “Connections and Missing Links: digital preservation, open access, and the new scholarly communications.” Symposium on Open Access and Digital Preservation, Emory University, Atlanta, GA

 

04/10/08: keynote – “Nimble libraries and mutable books.” Duodecimo Mense, or another Twelve Months into the Digital Universe. The Second Annual Readex Digital Institute. Chester, Vermont. 8th October, 2004.

 

04/10/13: Interviews for DLF Administrative Associate position (three candidates)

 

04/10/14: keynote – “Mass, Malleability, and the Collaboration Imperative: Trends for the Digital Library.” ACCESS 2004: Beyond Buzzwords Conference: October 14–16, 2004. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

 

04/10/21: site visit: Carol Mandel, NYU.

 

04/10/21: site visit: David Ferriero, NYPL.

 

04/10/25 - 04/10/28: DLF Fall Forum, Baltimore.

 

04/10/28: Thomson Gale’s Library Strategic Planning Board meeting, St. Amelia Island, Florida.

 

04/10/29: CLIR Board Meeting, Washington, DC.

 

04/10/06: Interviews for DLF Program Associate position (two candidates)

 

NOVEMBER 2004

 

04/11/15: DLF Executive Committee meeting

 

04/11/16: DLF Fall Steering Committee meeting

 

04/11/08: “Mass, Malleability, and the Collaboration Imperative: Trends for the Digital Library.” The 2004 James Bennett Lecture. The Australian National University, Canberra.

 

04/11/08: Meeting with Jan Fullerton, National Librarian of Australia, and Warwick Cathro, Deputy Librarian, about DLF membership.

 

04/11/08: “The Whys, Whats, Hows, and For Whoms of Web Archiving: Lessons from the Digital Library Research Agenda.”International Web Archiving Conference. The National Library of Australia, Canberra.

 

04/11/30: Site visit, new ally JISC: Meeting with Sarah Porter, Norman Wiseman, Stuart Dempster, and Malcolm Parkes of JISC re: opportunities to work together.

 

DECEMBER 2004

 

04/12/01: Attended London Online conference. Met with Digital Curation Centre staff; SUNCAT staff; met with Mike Keller and Herman Pabbruwe – Treasurer of the CLIR Board – to discuss CLIR/DLF relationship. Met with Gale president Gordon McComber and others to discuss digital library needs.

 

04/12/02: “Electronic Resource Management Initiative.” Electronic Communication of Licence Terms meeting—Kensington Town Hall, London.

 

December 2004. Submitted manuscript for “The Migrated Library: Distributed, Malleable, Enmeshed, Immediate.” Migrations in Society, Culture, and the Library Proceedings of the ACRL Western European Studies Section Conference, Paris, France, March 22–26, 2004. (ALA Publications, forthcoming 2005).

 

JANUARY 2005

 

05/01/10: “The Digital Library Federation: Mapping our Digital Future.” How Will I Get What I Need to Know When I Need It? Information Access for the Future. Transportation Research Board 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington Hilton

 

January 2005: Managing Digital Assets: Reading List, compiled by David Seaman http://www.clir.org/activities/registration/feb05_biblio.html

 

FEBRUARY 2005

 

05/02/04: “Content: or, a Tale of Mass and Malleability.”Managing Digital Assets: A Primer for Library and Information Technology Administrators. DLF/CLIR joint workshop, underwritten by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Charleston, February 4-6, 2005 http://www.clir.org/activities/registration/feb05_managing.html

 

05/02/14: Attended IMLS outcome-based evaluation training as PI on IMLS grant.

 

05/02/22: Meet with Edie Rasmussen's University of British Columbia library school class on digital imaging.

 

05/02/23: Lecture—“Mass, malleability, and the collaboration imperative: trends for the 21st-century library.” Library School, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC; repeated later that day at Simon Fraser University.

 

05/02/28: Attended DLF Aquifer meeting – Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

 

MARCH 2005

05/03/05: Attended Jefferson Retirement Series Editing Project Board Meeting, Monticello, VA.

 

05/03/16: film interview for American Distance Education Consortium program on digital libraries as part of their IDEAL Distance Learning project. [ADEC's IDEAL activities focus on developing quality online and distance education.]

 

05/03/17: Attended CLIR planning retreat

 

05/03/18: Attended Bibliographical Society of Virginia Board meeting, UVA.

 

05/03/19: Attended US China Library meeting, Shanghai Public Library, at the invitation of Jim Neal.

 

APRIL 2005

 

05/04/02: Presentation and Panel member: Publishing the eighteenth century. American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) annual meeting, Las Vegas.

05/04/04: CNI Task Force Meeting, Washington DC           

 

05/04/05: Met with Duane Webster (ARL) and Susan Perry (CLIR) to discuss converting the DLF/CLIR Managing Digital Assets Workshop for ARL directors. It will be held in October 2005.

 

05/04/12 – 05/04/15: DLF Forum, San Diego [see Appendix for survey results]

 

05/04/23 – 05/04/24: Preservation Imaging stakeholders’ meeting, NARA, Washington DC. Chaired by NARA’s Stephen Puglia and attended by NARA, Library of Congress, Kodak, the Swiss Institute of Technology, Harvard, and others.     

 

05/04/18: Moderated “Developments: New Forms of Digital Content” section of Transforming Libraries, Sixth Annual CLIR Sponsors’ Symposium, Washington, DC http://www.clir.org/activities/registration/apr05spon_symp.html

 

05/04/29: Attended CLIR Board meeting.

 

MAY 2005

 

05/05/09: Met with Richard Ekman and staff at the Council for Independent Colleges (Washington DC) to discuss a digital library project

 

05/05/18 – 05/05/19: Keynote: Digital Rights Expression: A NISO Pre-Standards Workshop, Denver, Colorado.

 

05/05/19: DLF Executive Committee meeting, Washington, DC

 

05/05/20: DLF Steering Committee meeting, Washington, DC

 

JUNE 2005

 

05/06/07 – 05/06/08 Attended JCDL conference, Denver, CO. Met with Ian Witten (Greenstone) and attended an Aquifer lunchtime meeting.

 

05/06/13: Met with Katherine Kott in Washington, DC to discuss Aquifer Integration and Initiatives      

 

05/06/16–05/06/17: Attended ACH/ALLC conference, Victoria, Canada. Held meeting of TEI in Libraries group, to kick off a new round of work on the DLF’s TEI in Libraries Guidelines, under the direction of Matt Gibson, UVA.

 

05/06/20 – 05/06/21 OAI Scholars’ Advisory Panel Meeting, Washington DC

 

05/06/21: Spoke to CLIR’s Postdoctoral Fellows in Scholarly Information Resources

 

05/06/27: ALA Chicago. Meetings with Tim Jewell (Washington) and the ERMI initiative members; meetings with publishers and software vendors about an Institution Registry [stakeholders’ meeting co-sponsored by DLF and CrossRef upcoming Fall 2005].

 

05/06/28: Aquifer meeting, Wyndham O'Hare Hotel.

Appendix I

DLF Aquifer Report

Katherine Kott

 

DLF Aquifer is an initiative of the Digital Library Federation that springs from and supports the DLF mission to “enable new research and scholarship” through collaboration, aggregating digital collections, developing technical standards and promoting best practices. Envisioned as a means of leveraging digital library content, and beginning with a significant, well-bounded collection of digital content in the area of American culture and life, DLF Aquifer will create a test-bed of tools for selecting, collecting and providing access to quality digital content. Grounded in the thinking that libraries add value through the organization of information, DLF Aquifer offers opportunities for collaboration among libraries and with partners building repositories, content management systems, course management systems, and other solutions that support the scholarly process. Future broader scale collaborations can be modeled on the DLF Aquifer experience.

 

DLF Aquifer activities and accomplishments are outlined in the following chronology. The project has progressed from planning to implementation during this period.

Focus has been to define the initiative more clearly, to design services that could be mounted quickly, by building on existing DLF initiatives, to seek funding and to plan for future phases.

 

January 1, 2005

Aquifer director begins

February 28, 2005

Aquifer Prototype Group holds final meeting, approves new organizational structure, reviews draft business plan

May 20, 2005

DLF Steering Committee approves business plan

June 28, 2005

Working groups meet to define implementation plan

September 2, 2005

Collection subset selected for prototype harvesting

September 26, 2005

Draft DLF Aquifer MODS profile completed

September 28, 2005

Metadata harvesting host identified

 

The Aquifer director’s activities for the January–October period included:

o       organizing formal meetings in February and June 2005

o       visiting participant libraries

o       drafting and finalizing the business plan

o       formulating a draft budget and budget process

o       communicating about the initiative through the DLF Web site, a CLIR News article and presentations at the Coalition for Networked Information, DLF spring forum, Association of Jewish Libraries, UC Berkeley School of Information Management & Systems and at participant libraries

o       researching funding possibilities and communicating with possible funding sources and with other parties with common or synergistic interests

o       managing the project schedule

o       setting project policies with the Aquifer implementation board

 

 

DLF Aquifer participant library staff members, in their active engagement in the collections, metadata, technology/architecture and services working groups have:

 

The following DLF Aquifer participant library staff members have served on working groups. Input from additional staff members has been sought for specific tasks such as choosing test-bed collections and designing services.

 

Aquifer Implementation Group (planning and policy): Katherine Kott, DLF Aquifer director, Chair. Michael Keller, Stanford, Dan Greenstein, CDL, Martha Sites, Virginia, Winston Tabb, Johns Hopkins, Jon Dunn, Indiana, Sarah Shreeves, Illinois, Martin Halbert, Emory, David Seaman, DLF, ex officio

 

Metadata Working Group:

Sarah Shreeves, Illinois, Chair, Jenn Riley, Indiana, David Reynolds, Johns Hopkins, Liz Milewicz, Emory, Gary Shawver, NYU, Bill Landis, CDL                                         

 

Technology Working Group:

Jon Dunn, Indiana, Chair, Cory Snavely, Michigan, Eric Celeste, Minnesota, Jerry Persons, Stanford, Tim Cole, Illinois, Thornton Staples, Virginia, Anthony Smith, Tennessee, Chih-Mei Lin, NYU

 

Services Working Group:

Martin Halbert, Emory, Chair            , Beth Sandore, Illinois, Michael Furlough, Virginia, John Walsh, Indiana, John Butler, Minnesota, Laine Farley, CDL

 

Collections Working Group:

Winston Tabb, Johns Hopkins, Chair, Perry Willett, Michigan, Robin Chandler, CDL, Linda Matthews, Emory, Ben Stone, Stanford, Leslie Johnston, Virginia, Linda Phillips, Tennessee, Mark Dimunation, Library of Congress

Appendix II

 

DLF Spring Forum 2005

Meeting Evaluation Results

 

This survey – our first formal one for a DLF Forum – helps underscore the value of this event to its participants, and gives us clear guidance on what elements ed protecting and what need improvement. The DLF staff and the Forum Program Committee conduct a post-mortem after each event looking for ways to improve next time; already out of this survey has come the addition of a “first-time attendees” orientation session for the Fall 2005 event (borrowing an idea from CNI task force meetings), in recognition of the needs of the increasing number of newcomers attending the Forums.

 

Results from first time attendees: Total feedback - 21

 

Do you plan to attend a DLF forum again?

                Yes – 21

                No – 0

 

How satisfied were you with this meeting in general?

                5 – 5

                4 – 12

                3 – 4

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

 

How satisfied were you with the mix of topics covered in the sessions?

                5 – 5

                4 – 11

                3 – 3

                2 – 2

                1 – 0

 

How satisfied were you with the quality of the presentations?

                5 – 4

                4 – 13

                3 – 3

                2 – 1

                1 – 0

 

How satisfied were you with the opportunities to interact informally with colleagues at this Forum?

                5 – 10

                4 – 8

                3 – 3

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

 

How important is this meeting, mingling, and discussion time to you?

                5 – 11

                4 – 9

                3 – 1

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

 

How satisfied were you with the meeting logistics?

                5 – 14

                4 – 5

                3 – 0

                2 – 2

                1 – 0

 

How satisfied were you with the break food, reception, etc?

                5 – 13

                4 – 8

                3 – 0

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

 

If you took part in a pre- or post-conference meeting, how satisfied were you with the arrangements?

                5 – 3

                4 – 1

                3 – 0

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

                n/a – 17

 

How important in the DLF Forum to your digital library work?

                5 – 5

                4 – 7

                3 – 6

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

                n/a – 3

 

Were DLF staff members responsive to your queries and needs?

                5 – 16

                4 – 2

                3 – 1

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

                n/a – 2

 

Comments:

 

Results from returning attendees (less than 4 Forums): Total feedback - 18

 

Do you plan to attend a DLF forum again?

                Yes – 18

                No – 0

 

How satisfied were you with this meeting in general?

                5 – 5

                4 – 11

                3 – 2

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

 

How satisfied were you with the mix of topics covered in the sessions?

                5 – 5

                4 – 9

                3 – 4

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

 

How satisfied were you with the quality of the presentations?

                5 – 3

                4 – 15

                3 – 0

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

 

How satisfied were you with the opportunities to interact informally with colleagues at this Forum?

                5 – 13

                4 – 4

                3 – 1

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

 

How important is this meeting, mingling, and discussion time to you?

                5 – 13

                4 – 4

                3 – 1

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

 

How satisfied were you with the meeting logistics?

                5 – 12

                4 – 3

                3 – 3

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

 

How satisfied were you with the break food, reception, etc?

                5 – 12

                4 – 4

                3 – 1

                2 – 1

                1 – 0

 

If you took part in a pre- or post-conference meeting, how satisfied were you with the arrangements?

                5 – 5

                4 – 3

                3 – 0

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

                n/a – 10

 

How important in the DLF Forum to your digital library work?

                5 – 7

                4 – 5

                3 – 6

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

               

Were DLF staff members responsive to your queries and needs?

                5 – 12

                4 – 3

                3 – 1

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

                n/a – 2

 

Comments:

Need – tutorial type sessions; everyone does not know all concepts (OAI, METS, MODS) I could have used an OAI tutorial.

Results from returning attendees (over 4 Forums): Total feedback - 25

 

Do you plan to attend a DLF forum again?

                Yes – 25

                No – 0

 

How satisfied were you with this meeting in general?

                5 – 2

                4 – 20

                3 – 2

                2 – 1

                1 – 0

 

How satisfied were you with the mix of topics covered in the sessions?

                5 – 2

                4 – 11

                3 – 11

                2 – 1

                1 – 0

 

How satisfied were you with the quality of the presentations?

                5 – 2

                4 – 15

                3 – 7

                2 – 1

                1 – 0

 

How satisfied were you with the opportunities to interact informally with colleagues at this Forum?

                5 – 14

                4 – 11

                3 – 0

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

 

How important is this meeting, mingling, and discussion time to you?

                5 – 14

                4 – 8

                3 – 3

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

 

 

How satisfied were you with the meeting logistics?

                5 – 12

                4 – 12

                3 – 1

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

 

 

How satisfied were you with the break food, reception, etc?

                5 – 11

                4 – 9

                3 – 3

                2 – 2

                1 – 0

 

If you took part in a pre- or post-conference meeting, how satisfied were you with the arrangements?

                5 – 9

                4 – 3

                3 – 0

                2 – 1

                1 – 0

                n/a – 13

 

How important in the DLF Forum to your digital library work?

                5 – 12

                4 – 10

                3 – 2

                2 – 1

                1 – 0

 

Were DLF staff members responsive to your queries and needs?

                5 – 16

                4 – 3

                3 – 0

                2 – 0

                1 – 0

                n/a – 6

 

Comments: