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Digitization In the Real World...Now Available

It's been about a year in the making, and we're excited to announce that METRO's collection of digitization case studies from small to medium-sized collections is now available! Clocking in at about 34 chapters and 590 pages, we hope this book will serve as a useful and comprehensive guide for information professionals as they plan and implement a wide range of digitization projects of their own. Read the complete press release for the book after the preview, and please consider picking up a copy!

METRO Symposium Searches the Future of Digital Practice

The following guest post from Tom Clareson, Senior Consultant for New Initiatives at Lyrasis, is a more detailed summary of the Digital Dilemmas Symposium held last month here in New York City.

Digital Dilemmas, a symposium hosted by the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) on April 16, 2009 at the Baruch College Manhattan Campus, promised attendees to explore the challenges, opportunities, and solutions available in the digital world. With a stellar cast of speakers assembled by Emerging Technologies Manager Jason Kucsma, the session went much further, exploring the best and newest practices in the digital world.

One of the leading figures in the digital world, Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, led off the day’s presentations with a talk focusing on “Scholarship in the Digital Environment and the Implications for Library Strategies.” In this introductory keynote, Lynch “took the blinders off” the audience, making us realize the broader context of digital practice – the communities being served, and the importance of people in building the cyberinfrastructure for digital delivery. He spoke about “marquee” digital infrastructure projects, but said that these sweeping technological changes were being seen in smaller settings as well.

While many of the most-heralded digital projects are in the sciences, Lynch noted that “the Humanities are producing arresting, creative and spectacular digital projects” as well, noting the visualization work that is bringing ancient buildings and cities to life through 3-D approaches.

The cultural heritage community must know a good deal about many subjects in order to develop coherent, cohesive digital projects, Lynch said, but he noted that “the global audience often knows more than we do,” being able to fill in missing information in our databases, metadata, and presentations.

Lynch and all of the speakers noted that researchers and investigators need assistance from cultural  heritage curators to think of the digital lifecycle from creation to presentation to maintenance and finally preservation. If librarians and museum professionals can “be there at the start of data creation and maintenance,” it will help us -- and our audiences -- develop better digital projects and programs with longer lifespans. Lynch noted that, in staffing for digital activity, we should even “consider transitioning more resources to digital practices, even over some traditional activities.” He closed his comments with the suggestion that, just as academic libraries do for faculty and researchers, public libraries can play a leading role in developing digital projects which serve genealogists, the general public, and others.

Evan Owens, Chief Technology Officer for Portico, continued widening the audience’s view of the library’s role in digitization. We are not just working in the technical realm, he noted, but “ensuring the long-term viability of digital projects includes working with the physical, logical, and conceptual layers.” While we are working with all of these elements in our digital collections, we must become more nimble, because “digital content has lifecycles, and they are getting faster,” in terms of the need to create, present, and preserve them. This is particularly a challenge in dealing with continuously-updated content, where we must be vigilant in our version control and long-term maintenance.

Owens asked the group, even if they were just beginning digital projects, to document their current practices so that they can know what standards and methods they were using when certain items were created. He closed his comments by noting that digital practice is going through “maturity and growing pains” because it is such a relatively new area of library practice. In comparing digital preservation to traditional preservation, he said the state of today’s digital materials is as “brittle and fragile” as some of the decaying paper documents we are trying to preserve.

All of the presentations throughout the day engaged the audience to a great degree. In some cases, the questions from and discussion with the audience took the lion’s share of the presenter’s time. Roger Schonfeld, Research Manager at Ithaka, gave a presentation from some survey results on “The Strategic Implications of Faculty Attitudes on the Shift to an Electronic Environment.” He noted trends in a series of surveys which have been held in 2000, 2003, 2006, and will be done in 2009, which show perceptions of faculty and researchers on the need for the brick and mortar library versus the need for its services. While areas such as the sciences and economics show a drop in some types of library usage, Schonfeld suggested that we can provide “intellectual value adds” to become part of the solution to these researchers’ need for new methods of information access and sharing.

Patricia Aufderheide, Director of the Center for Social Media at American University, entertained the audience after lunch with her opening video on “remix culture." But she was serious in her suggestion that we can learn good practices for fair use and intellectual rights of materials through looking at other communities of practice including documentary film makers, film and video studies departments, and media literacy programs. In the creation of new digital works which may utilize ideas from or portions of prior works, the questions are those of how much transformation was done from the original, and appropriateness of use of the original material. Noting that the audience felt concerns about copyright issues in their digital practices, Aufderheide suggested that we should address these intellectual property rights issues at the association or community levels such as the American Library Association.

The closing speaker, Dan Cohen, Director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, utilized new media throughout his presentation to make a point about “the Everywhere Library.” Starting off by challenging the audience and a virtual audience on Twitter to determine the origin of an artifact which he showed in his presentation, Cohen spoke of new media experiments with Twitter “reference work,” “crowdsourcing” to research information, and spoke of the variety of digital research tools becoming larger, as is the researcher community. In this environment, libraries cannot be islands, we must combine with other libraries and content providers to offer a wider variety of services, and a wider spectrum of methods to access those services.

In addition to the research tools and researcher community becoming larger, Cohen feels that the “abundance” of digital information resources is starting to make some type of scholarship difficult. He introduced Zotero software as a way to help scholars organize and share personal collections. At the end of Cohen’s presentation, the audience’s heads were spinning from the variety of tools and approaches for working with digital collections!

The audience left this excellent symposium with a number of “springboard ideas” to utilize back at their own institutions:

• Know your primary audience, but new or enthusiastic audiences may also be interested in and able to help you with your digital projects by supplying information and metadata from their realm of knowledge. We also must think of new ways to aid all of these burgeoning researchers.
• Surveys, focus groups, and outreach efforts are an excellent way to learn more about our audiences and their needs.
• An important role for cultural heritage professionals is to assist researchers and investigators in handling data sharing and lifecycle issues.
• We must “look up and look out,” as Evans noted, to see the best practices of other communities – whether these are activities in digital creation, digital preservation, or copyright.
• While the technology of digitization is important, we need to also pay attention to the social aspects and possibilities of working with worldwide partners in the digital environments.
• Finally, to echo one of the audience members during a discussion period, we need to “be a part of the solution” to digital dilemmas by working with our constituents and communities in the digital world.

METRO Holds First President's Forum on Digital Preservation

With the tremendous amount of digital information resources being used and created in libraries today, it's understandable that digital preservation has become the elephant in the room. Where can we turn for existing digital preservation models? What kind of obstacles can we anticipate as we think about developing institutional policy on digital preservation? What roles can collaboration play in digital preservation initiatives? These were some of the main issues addressed at The Metropolitan New York Library Council's first President's Forum moderated by James Neal, Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University. Lars Meyer (Emory University Libraries) kicked off the forum discussing preliminary findings of research he has been conducting as Visiting Program Officer at Association of Research Libraries -- which will be released in 2009 by ARL. June Besek (Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts) addressed some of the challenges presented by pending legislation (Section 108, Orphan Works Bill) and the recent Google Books settlement with publishers. Eileen Fenton (Portico) concluded the afternoon with a discussion of collaborative models for digital preservation initiatives; including cross-institutional initiatives (LOCKSS) and third-party projects like Portico.

The forum, spearheaded by METRO's Board President Heike Kordish, is designed to specifically address policies and decision-making surrounding major issues of institutional policy. The inaugural forum drew over 45 attendees from libraries throughout the region. The Forum also featured a collection of online resources for further reading on digital preservation concerns that can be accessed here.  

Recent Ithaka Study on Scholarly Communcation

An ARL-commissioned study run by Ithaka was recently published identifying new models for scholarly communication. In addition to identifying digital resources on which scholars are relying, the study shows that significant changes are occurring in the way scholars approach their communicative practices. Naturally, libraries will need to address and adapt such changes. The full report may be read here.

From the executive summary:

The final report identifies eight principal types of digital scholarly resources:

• E-only journals
• Reviews
• Preprints and working papers
• Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and annotated  content
• Data
• Blogs
• Discussion forums
• Professional and scholarly hubs

This report profiles each of these eight types of resources, including discussion of how and why the faculty members reported using the resources for their work, how content is selected for the site, and what sustainability strategies the resources are employing. Each section draws from the in-depth interviews to provide illustrative anecdotes and highlight representa­tive examples. Among the findings of this study were:

• While some disciplines seem to lend themselves  to certain formats of digital resource more than others, examples of innovative resources can be found across the humanities, social sciences, and scientific/technical/medical subject areas.
• Traditions of scholarly culture relating to estab­lishing scholarly legitimacy through credential­ing, peer review, and citation metrics exert a powerful force on these innovative online proj­ects. Almost every resource suggested by the interviewed scholars incorporates peer review or editorial oversight. Though some born-digital journals are beginning to experiment with open peer review, the examples we observed were still in early stages.
• Many digital publications are directed at small,  niche audiences. There appears to be a very long tail in the field of digital scholarly re­sources with many tightly-focused publications directed at narrow audiences and capable of running on relatively small budgets.
• Some of the resources with greatest impact  are those that have been around a long while. Given the importance of longevity in establish­ing scholarly reputation, the necessity of build­ing an audience to attract high-quality content, and the time it takes to fine-tune a digital re­source, even excellent new digital publications may need years to establish their place in their scholarly community.
• Innovations relating to multimedia content and  Web 2.0 functionality appear in some cases to blur the lines between resource types. We observed “video articles,” peer-reviewed reader commentary, and medieval illuminated texts coded as data – all evidence of the creative for­mat mash-ups that challenge us to re-think the definitions of traditional content categories.
• Projects of all sizes are still seeking paths to  sustainability. For open access sites – the vast majority of the resources studied here – the challenges can be great, since subscription fees are not an option. Nearly all of the publications that emerged in our survey are experimenting to find economic models that will support their work.