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CARLI Digital Collections User Group Minutes
July 25, 2007
CARLI offices, Champaign, IL
DRAFT minutes 7-26-07
Members present: Sue Wilson (chair, Illinois Wesleyan University), Kate James (Illinois State University), Betsy Kruger (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign), Michel Nguessan (Governors State University), Claire Stewart (Northwestern University), Kerri Willette (School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
CARLI staff present: Amy Maroso, Jessica Gibson
Via conference phone: Howard Carter (Southern Illinois University Carbondale), Ellen Starkman (University of Illinois at Chicago), Elizabeth Clarage (CARLI staff)
Introductions
Betsy Kruger is a new member of the committee, this is her first meeting.
Approval of minutes
Revised May 17 minutes were approved. Minutes from June 12 meeting haven't yet been received, we will review these and approve via email after the meeting.
Review of action items from June 12 meeting
The revised Collection Development Policy, approved by the CARLI Board, has now been posted to CARLI site, sent to the CARLIdc-ig email list, and a notice about it was included in the 7/9/07 CARLI newsletter.
The rights statement and cataloging recommendation were in a draft document Jessica sent to DCUG on 7/16/07. They've been posted to the CARLI web site but not yet announced to a CARLIdc-ig email list. Amy reported on a Western States CONTENTdm users group, where she received some feedback to her presentation about CARLI’s CONTENTdm implementation. She would like to follow up on the suggestions that we map the Collection field to Electronic Publisher, rather than to Contributor, before an announcement about these two recommendations is shared with CARLI members.
Amy reported some other news from the Western States meeting: an upcoming release of CONTENTdm will have a number of improvements to PDF handling, including: making them searchable within CONTENTdm, with search results taking the user to a specific page; real thumbnails for PDFs instead of generic icons; automatic conversion to a compound object upon ingest. These improvements and other enhancements that will specifically benefit PDF users are expected in version 4.3, predicted for release in late Fall/Winter. CONTENTdm generally has a new release about once a year. Amy also reported that someone at the user group meeting has developed a tool to extract CONTENTdm content and format it for the ARTstor offline image viewer (CDM2OIV).
The group reviewed the Saskia press release, template, and information sheet prepared by Amy Maroso and Jessica Gibson, and discussed some minor changes. The Press Release will go up on the CARLI site and into an upcoming CARLI newsletter. The customizable template and information sheets can be sent directly to key contacts at individual libraries, with a prefacing note to please forward to the person responsible for supporting faculty using images in teaching, or the art or visual resources collections. CARLI lists or groups to target: public services, digital collections interest group, metadata interest group, I-Share liaisons, and possibly CARLI Announce, depending on rules for posting. Jessica and Amy will follow up about CARLI Announce.
Survey results discussion
The group reviewed the results of the survey and discussed responses to a number of questions. Some highlights and key points:
- There is a lot of variety in the collections being digitized.
- Many institutions are working with home-grown digital library management systems, and many struggle to find a way to move content between systems
- Modest to strong amount of interest in audio and bound item digitization
- Most are not storing their archival images in a manner considered ideal: among other things there is a fair amount of CD storage. Survey respondents acknowledge that this is an area of concern.
- 40% of respondents indicate they do not have funding for digitization projects
- Metadata training stands out: this is one that respondents indicate they really need.
Betsy reported a bit about book scanning activity at UIUC. UIUC has two of the Open Content Alliance Scribe scanning stations on site. They have scanning procedures pretty well down and are synchronizing metadata and links between OCLC, Illinois Harvest, and I-Share/OPAC. They will have the scanning station for at least one more year. Next week they will be taking a small collection of books from UIC. There may be some additional capacity, or the ability to put on an additional shift, so that perhaps some CARLI materials could be scanned. The group postponed further discussion until Susan Singleton’s arrival around lunchtime.
The group held some discussion about how to address training needs and digitization questions raised in the survey. Suggestions included:
- Revise digitization recommendations/CONTENTdm documentation so that we are more explicit about not loading full resolution TIFs to CARLI servers.
- Write some case studies about how libraries are doing digitization projects. Step by step documentation, descriptions of workflow, best practices documents would all be useful. There is a template for case studies on the DCUG wiki.
- Follow up with the CARLI Board about our recommendation to explore shared archival image/large file storage.
- DCUG should compile imaging vendor recommendations and keep it up to date as a CARLI resource. Betsy volunteered to follow up with those respondents who said they were willing to share their recommendations.
- Publicize availability of CARLI awards for digitization projects
- CARLI could sponsor a grantwriting workshop, and hire a consultant to offer the training. Amy also alerted the group that Alyce Scott from the Illinois State Library is planning a grantwriting road show this year for people who are applying for LSTA grants. CARLI may be able to sponsor one of her presentations.
- CARLI could host a three-day hands on workshop on doing digitization projects. This was generally considered quite a difficult thing to do, logistically.
- Match CARLI institutions starting out in digitization with others who have some specific experience (mentoring)
- Host partial day site visits to willing CARLI institutions, hold a few each year, perhaps in conjunction with other CARLI meetings, such as the Forum DCUG plans to organize, so that practitioners can show their facilities, equipment and procedures to other members.
- Digitization readiness site survey (like a preservation site survey): a consultant could visit for a day, talk about the specific digitization project being contemplated, offer some targeted feedback about likely duration of project, possible time commitment for metadata. Finding consultants and supporting something like this might be an issue.
Susan Singleton, CARLI Executive Director, joined the group after lunch
Susan reported that last Friday, the CARLI board met. One thing they made changes was in what used to be the CCMP. They've taken $100,000 and would like to use it to digitize bound materials, but want to keep the competitive aspect of past CCMP grant programs. Libraries will be given some guidance about proposals this fall, and then grants will be accepted with scanning to start in July 2008. The money would either be used to get another Scribe scanning station or a shift on the UIUC station. Intention is to take a thematic approach so that CARLI comes out of this with a discrete collection. There may also be separate programs members could apply to to get money to do metadata. The money for digitization will go directly to the Internet Archive. There's no implementation plan yet, obviously one problem that may arise is a library that has a large, uncataloged collection. An implementation committee will be formed, largely from the collections group, that will probably include Betsy and perhaps another DCUG rep, to help with the logistics and scheduling. This program will do approximately 3,000 volumes in one year (it's actually a page count, rather than volumes, but this is an estimate). Would be nice if it were possible for CARLI to continue this kind of activity in future. Once the images are created, they will go to the Internet Archive, where they are publicly available. The library can download a copy (can be archival images, access derivatives, PDF all color, PDF b/w, XML files, DejaVu, flipbook, OCR) to host locally, load to CONTENTdm, etc.
The CARLI project would only accept out of copyright/pre-1923, however if a library has secured the rights to post-1923 content, those can be included. Legal counsel at UIUC has given the library permission to digitize post-1923 if they search the renewal database (using the current version up on Stanford), and can't find proof of renewal. UIUC is also getting equipment to do digitization from microfilm, which does about 3 rolls an hour. Scanner belongs to OCA but UIUC pays the wages of the staff performing scanning. If CARLI libraries have film that they have the rights to scan, UIUC is open to offering scanning services on cost recovery plus overhead basis.
Collections working group will come up with a theme for the bound materials digitization. Will have at least one statewide meeting about what this would mean. In the meantime, the Illinois State Library isn't reducing any of the money going into its digitization grants.
Other CARLI collections programs will also continue; $70,000 will continue to fund collaborative projects, and those will still be available to CARLI members. CARLI doesn't have anyone on staff they can assign to writing large (national funders) digitization grants.
DCUG talked with Susan about the idea of CARLI sponsoring a grant-writing workshop: Susan doesn’t anticipate any problem with this idea. CARLI has a Program Planning Committee (a committee of the board) that takes requests for programs from other committees and members. We should probably gather some information to include in our proposal for the program. Would also be useful to have a comprehensive and currently updated list of organizations that provide grant funding. We could add this to the list of resources off of the web site. CARLI program planning committee will ask why this is a CARLI thing, and whether it is being covered by other groups, including the library systems, already.
Question about long-term large sized digital storage: the more Susan finds out about this, the less she wants CARLI to be involved. The constant upkeep for real digital archiving is significant. It would be much more appealing for CARLI to negotiate reduced member fees for such a service? That is much more appealing, as long as a member library won’t get a better deal negotiating on their own.
CARLI board also recently had a strategic planning session. In general, they would like to see a lot more emphasis on innovation, piloting things in one or two libraries, with the understanding that things might not work and it could be dropped. One example is the new front ends to OPACs (faceted searching, etc.). Helps to be able to test these things so that we know before they buy whether or not it will work with Voyager, for example. There are some open source solutions for this kind of thing, and CARLI may participate in things like the Extensible Catalog project. Susan sees the increased CARLI staff time going to innovative services like this.
Susan offered her feedback on some the DCUG thoughts about a Forum: thought that this might be a valuable program for CARLI members. Topics like metadata, project planning, and collection analysis might be particularly valuable. If the Forum uses staff in the state, CARLI pay for lunch and we don’t need to go through the Program Planning Committee. If we wanted to bring in outside speakers, would have to go through the committee.
Susan left the meeting and DCUG continued with its agenda.
Updates
Jessica sent an announcement to the list about the upgrade to CONTENTdm version 4.2, which is scheduled to take place on July 31st.
Jessica gave an update on statistics. CARLI will write some custom scripts to read the apache logs and count:
- Hits on collection home pages (not the big CARLI dig. coll page). Generated monthly
- Individual item hits: number of times a user hits an individual image. generated monthly.
- On campus vs. off campus: each collection listed with a number of on-campus vs. off-campus users. Based on reverse DNS lookup.
- Individual SASKIA analysis: per institution usage stats including an on-campus vs. off-campus access.
CARLI has saved all of the logs, and will be able to go back and generate statistics retrospectively.
CARLI CONTENTdm server is now harvestible, and Illinois Harvest is harvesting it.
It is also searchable through WebFeat. Third party Z server hasn’t yet been installed, though this might be a feature coming out in version 4.3 of CONTENTdm.
We might consider being a little more stringent in our metadata requirements, in order to avoid problems later on. Mountain West digital libraries metadata standards are CONTENTdm-specific. The Standards subcommittee should look closely at our metadata recommendations, and make recommendations to be reviewed by the entire group. We should also look at how to introduce more structure into collections, and reflect on the OhioLINK paper Sue shared.
Subcommittees
There are currently three standing sub-committees:
- Standards
- Webinar/tutorials
- Interface
We’re taking a fresh start with the subcommittees.
Webinar/tutorials group will wait until the next version of CONTENTdm (4.2) is released to start working on tutorials again. Camtasia is very time intensive, and it would be good to have others reviewing and reading the scripts. Michel has an expert staff person on his staff; he will join the committee and enlist his staff person for the committee.
Need a new chair for the standards committee. Claire will do this.
Interface committee: looking at the CONTENTdm interface, at what other schools have done, etc. Betsy will join this as well.
NEW COMMITTEE ROSTER:
Standards: Kerri, Michel, Claire, Kate, Amy. Betsy will join.
Webinar/Tutorials: Kerri, Jessica, Amy, Ellen, Michel
Interface: Sue, Howard, Jessica, Betsy
Kate will intern with the Interface committee. They may need to have some face-to-face meetings.
Forum
Tentatively planned for February 2008, we will discuss on our next conference call.
Recap of next steps/assignments
SASKIA press releases: Amy and Jessica will work on getting these out.
Sue will look into vendors and costs for large-scale electronic storage.
Kerri and Sue will follow up about the grant writing idea: Kerri will look into likely costs; Sue will look at the form on the CARLI site for the program planning committee.
Betsy will follow up on the vendors list, with the info from the survey from Amy.
List of grant funding agencies: Claire will work on compiling this from lists from others
Next meeting
August 15, 2007, 9am, phone conference. Expect the conference to be no longer than 1 hour.
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