CCC Meeting: August 27, 2013

In-Person Meeting at CARLI Office

Members present: Howard Carter (Southern Illinois University Carbondale), Paul Go (Illinois Institute of Technology), Margaret Heller (Loyola University Chicago), 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: Benn Joseph (Northwestern University),

CARLI staff present: Amy Maroso and Elizabeth Clarage (CARLI staff liaisons). Susan Singleton (CARLI executive director) was present for a portion of the meeting.

1. Mary Rose designated to take minutes
2. Update from Susan Singleton
   • The Board of Trustees wants to digitize yearbooks or student newspaper for each member library if not already done. Yearbook projects will use the process already in place for the Book Digitization Initiative. Newspapers will be done by a vendor to be determined. The Created Content Committee will coordinate these projects. 
   • Minutes should be posted within 7-10 days. Liaisons & chairs should read minutes of other committee meetings.
   • In-person continuing education meetings need to be planned 4 months ahead; meetings requiring outside speakers or hotels need at least 6 months.
   • Committee guidelines require each committee to prepare one white paper each year, to communicate committee expertise to CARLI membership. This could be a best practices document or any brief informational document.
   • Annual meeting is November 1.
3. Last meetings minutes approved
4. Meeting schedule determined: Conference call last Tuesday of each month 10:00-11:00 a.m.

Discussion

Assessment Pre-Conference

Adam Strohm described an email all of the committee chairs received from David Stern, chair of the Public Services Committee. The email proposed that the committees prepare an IACRL pre-conference on assessment, as suggested by Susan Singleton. This is scheduled for late March in Oakbrook, Illinois. Proposal is due to IACRL by October 20. Discussion of ideas applicable to our group included: Assessment of use of collections, assessment of use of CONTENTdm, assessment of cost-effectiveness of digitization processes, a panel discussing use of Google Analytics at our institutions (maybe a Created Content Committee member on a panel with others using Google Analytics for other purposes). Adam will respond to Stern describing these ideas.

Ongoing/planned projects from last year

1. Featured image: Adam, Julia, and Anne volunteered to continue this project. Posting frequency will be two times per month. Mary will send information about instructions and new collections document to the list (sent August 28, 2013). Amy will get wiki logins for new members (done August 27, 2013).This discussion led to an idea for a new project to create a portal to non-CARLI digital collections somewhere on the CARLI website. Amy will see if CARLI will allow this.
2. Featured digitized book: This was a project from the Collections Working Group that is now the responsibility of the Created Content Committee. David volunteered to do this project. Posting frequency will be once a month. Elizabeth will update instructions and send them to the list.
3. Google Analytics for CARLI digital collections: Margaret and Howard volunteered to continue this project. The project created reports each quarter summarizing keywords and traffic sources each quarter with context. Mary/Amy will locate and distribute instructions (Adam sent this to the list August 28, 2013; Jessica Gibson sent the latest raw data ready for analysis to the list the same day). Margaret commented that OpenRefine will probably be a good tool for this.
4. Twitter: This project will be put on hold.  
5. Guidelines for Tumblr & Pinterest for sharing images: This project could be turned into a best practices white paper. Amy emailed links to examples created by Chris Day and Julia last year to the Committee during the meeting. The paper could address why it is important to de-silo content and discuss strategies, rather than present step-by-step how-to instructions. Julia will send her previous notes about this project to the group.
6. Featured collections: This planned project from last year was to find a way to feature collections & discuss collection-building and tools, including interviews with digital collection creators. The portal project discussed previously fulfills some of this project. Perhaps the portal could include links to tools like Omeka. The committee decided to replace this project with the portal project.

New projects

1. Yearbooks and newspaper projects described by Susan

Yearbook project: This will utilize the Book Digitization Initiative process with the Open Content Alliance (OCA) that is already in place. The Created Content Committee will not need to review proposals for acceptance: all projects will be accepted. Procedures have already been set up for the yearbooks that utilizes project data from the Book Digitization Initiative project. The contract with OCA runs July-June. If yearbooks don't use up the budget, additional proposals will need to be approved by March or April to ensure digitization will be finished in time. Elizabeth will email documentation for the yearbook project to the group.

Newspapers: After lengthy discussion and further clarification from Susan Singleton, a preliminary plan was developed, pending further information from vendors. CARLI will pay for vendor-supplied TIF and PDF files with basic OCR data for the entire run of student newspapers for each institution exercising this option. Institutions will have the option to purchase from the vendor additional services like article segmentation, quality-assurance of the OCR data, and/or building a CONTENTdm digital collection. Vendor-supplied CONTENTdm digital collections will be hosted on the CARLI CONTENTdm server. Sample vendors estimate the cost of building a digital collection = additional 25 cents per page. For the first step on this project, Amy and Elizabeth will work on getting a request for proposals (RFP) written.

The Committee decided to create a survey for institutions to select which materials they want digitized. If they choose yearbooks, they will be directed to a submittal form. If they choose newspapers, they will be asked for contact information for someone who can provide CARLI with information about the number of issues, pages, size, etc. of the newspapers. Amy and Elizabeth will start drafting the survey.

2. The Committee decided not to plan a forum, in favor of a series of small webcasts/podcasts related to web 2.0 applications and/or digital collection promotion and/or assessment. There were no action items for this project.

3. The Committee discussed how to facilitate conversations about resource-sharing or collaborative grant proposals. The CARLI Digital Collections Interest Group (carlidc-ig) email list could be used to alert members of grant opportunities and invite collaboration. A portal could provide a space for "want ads" posted by member institutions. There were no action items for this project.