Created Content Committee meeting: July 30, 2013

Conference Call

Members present: Howard Carter (Southern Illinois University Carbondale), Paul Go (Illinois Institute of Technology), Margaret Heller (Loyola University Chicago), Benn Joseph (Northwestern University), David Levinson (Lake Forest College), Mary Rose (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), Anne Shelley (Illinois State University), Adam Strohm, Chair (Newberry Library), Julia Thompson (Western Illinois University).
Members absent: None.

CARLI staff present: Amy Maroso and Elizabeth Clarage (CARLI staff liaisons).

1. Confirmed Benn Joseph as minutes taker.
2. Welcome to the inaugural meeting of the Created Content Committee, from Amy as CARLI staff liaison and Adam as chair.
3. Greetings and introductions of each committee member, alphabetically by first name.

Review of DCUG’s activities in 2012-2013

There are ideas still hanging out there and things that became more full-fledged proposals over the course of the year.  DCUG learned pretty early on in the year that it was going to be ending and would be transformed into a different group, so a lot of ideas just became proposals to be passed on to the next group of members rather than given sustained work.  In terms of last year’s projects: 

1. Featured Image: posting of the Featured Image was done mostly by Mary and Ellen Corrigan (past committee member), who would write a bit of background and description of the image, which was thought to be nicer than just digging around in institutions’ digitized collections randomly.  This project was easy enough thing to do once it had gained some momentum, but it might be good to have a rotation so all the work does not fall on one or two people’s shoulders.  That could be assigned as ongoing.
2. Google Analytics: Chris, Mary, and Adam worked on creating Google Analytics reports for CARLI Digital Collections, which are posted to the CARLI website.  The group tried to add some more qualitative assessments or statistics as the year progressed and ended up with a format that the DCUG liked fairly well.  The idea was to provide something that is helpful for people, rather than flood them with data.
3. Twitter account: The DCUG Twitter account got some use over the past year, with Benn as the primary tweeter.  It was mostly used to announce new CARLI digital collections, along with the Featured Image.  Is there any more content that we want to get out there?
4. Flickr/Tumblr/Pinterest: Julia and Chris worked on a web 2.0 proposal with these sites, and created some documentation for a possible webinar.  If we want to move forward there’s a structure there that can be reused.
5. Featured Collections: This project was worked on a bit after being spawned at the in-person meeting of DCUG last August (2012).  It was bounced back and forth on who the audience would be, and ended up as a vague proposal.  However, it could form the basis of a webinar or webinar series.  Adam will look into this.
6. Reviews of the digital imaging best practices documents were reviewed, and the best practices guide to video digitization was posted to the CARLI website.

General Discussions

Adam asked for thoughts on what to tackle over the course of the next year from committee members, and added that Susan Singleton may also have some ideas.  Each member should think about what they and their institution would find useful and beneficial that CARLI could help them accomplish.  For example, the collection development policy for CARLI digital collections has not been updated since it was first created; maybe that would be useful to revisit.  We should each think about these projects and other potential projects and come up with what we want to accomplish.  It’s easy to plan these projects based on what is ‘doable,’ but the group should not be trying to work in a vacuum.  Adam also pointed out that, in the past, there have been more defined subcommittees within the larger DCUG to work on individual projects.  Last year that didn’t really happen, and the result is that some projects tend to languish because people get busy and don’t always have enough time for everything.  We may want to revisit the subcommittee structure for the upcoming year.

The first in-person meeting of the newly inaugurated Created Content Committee will be Tuesday, August 27th at 10:30am.  Susan Singleton (CARLI Executive Director) will meet with group and will give some direction.  This in-person meeting is a good time to knock ideas around, so hopefully a lot of good material should come out of that, and we’ll know what we should decide to set in motion.  David Levinson asked if the charge of Created Content could be summarized. Has everyone seen the charge for the committee?  Amy Maroso quickly responded by sending a link to the group discussion list.  Amy also mentioned that the annual report from last DCUG would be a useful thing for new members to review.  Mary Rose mentioned that she went to the NEDCC Digital Directions conference recently, and noticed that there are a number of grant opportunities for inter-institutional collaborations.  Adam agreed this was a good thing to consider looking into at the upcoming in-person meeting, and put on the list of options.

Howard Carter asked what the name change meant of the group really meant—what sort of content?  Digital stuff in general?  Datasets?  In the past, the group’s charge only involved digitization and the use of digitized resources at CARLI member libraries, but maybe it was time to explore changing the scope of the meaning to include datasets, born-digital content, etc. Adam said name charge just referred to digital resources, but it would be a possibility to expand that meaning beyond just digitized versions of our institution’s holdings.  Elizabeth said the idea was to move all of CARLI’s work with digital projects into one group (including Book Digitization Initiative), so that group could see the big picture.