Digital Collections Users' Group Meeting: July 20, 2011

Members present: Laurie Sauer (chair, Knox College), Ellen Corrigan (Eastern Illinois University), Christopher Day (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Eben English (Loyola University), Ginger Frere (Newberry Library), Peter Hepburn (University of Illinois at Chicago), Julia Thompson (Western Illinois University)

Members absent: David Levinson (Lake Forest College), Meg Miner (Illinois Wesleyan University)

CARLI Staff present: Jessica Gibson (DCUG liaison), Amy Maroso (DCUG liaison)

1. Laurie was confirmed as minutes taker.
2. Welcomed new member Julia Thompson and returning member Ellen Corrigan.
3. Ellen moved to approve the May meeting minutes; Ginger seconded. Motion was approved. Eben moved to approve the June meeting minutes; Ginger seconded. Motion was approved.

Project Team reports

1. Assessment - Eben summarized the work this team has been doing over the past year: trying to get a better idea of digitization practices in CARLI libraries; gauging impact of DCUG programming and information dissemination. Analysis of the survey results from the April 2011 survey to CARLI membership is ongoing and a final report is forthcoming.

2. Documentation & Standards - This group has not met since the last DCUG meeting. Laurie explained past year’s projects: reinvent the CARLI public wiki space for Digital Projects/CONTENTdm; revise existing documentation.

3. Usability – This group has not met since the last DCUG meeting. Peter reported that the survey on CARLI collections home page is still underway and the group hopes to get more feedback. The main questions are: who’s using the collections and what is the nature of the use. This is the first step in more usability testing to come.

4. Digital Preservation joint subcommittee -There was no July meeting. Laurie explained the task of this joint task force (with CARLI Preservation Committee) is to educate and inform CARLI members about digital preservation. The task force is putting together a digital preservation forum to be held in the spring of 2012.

Copyright workshop planning

1. "Life Cycle of a Digital Project" sessions discussion (see the DCUG wiki for details)

   Discussed the need to develop a schedule for the series and decided this would best be done at the August in-person meeting. We need to keep in mind that CARLI needs several weeks lead time to contact speakers and work with them on getting Adobe Connect set up. The CARLI staff (not DCUG) needs to manage speaker fees and/or honoraria if applicable.

   1. Laurie reported on a new direction for the selection for digitization topic. She has developed a set of questions related to the intrinsic value of collections and has contacted a few libraries in the hopes of developing a panel of speakers on the topic. Peter suggested we may also want to look at how libraries are seeking different audiences by digitizing materials and also if libraries are digitizing for commercial reasons or on a cost-recovery basis.

   2. Peter is still working on getting another speaker for the “generating buy-in or getting funding” topic. Ideally, he would like to have two speakers in one webinar, presenting two different approaches to the topic.

   3. Eben had one speaker for the planning/project management topic. He is looking at a one-hour webinar, possibly in October.

   4. Meg (reporting previously by email) has updated information on the wiki for her topic.

   5. Ginger is working on a literature review for the “promoting collections” topic. She thought about surveying CARLI members about how they promote their collections, but is concerned about over-surveying the membership. Instead, she is looking at CARLI digital collections usage stats to determine high use collections and will then ask those libraries directly how they go about promoting their high-use collections.

   6. Ellen is now looking at a new topic idea: grants and funding. She looked at CARLI digital collections to see if projects were funded with grants, and is particularly interested in non-LSTA grant funded project. She has put queries out to certain libraries to see if they could be potential speakers.

August in-person meeting

Will be held at Illinois Welesyan University on August 10, 2011, from 10:00am - 3:00pm.

1. Project teams: Think about current project teams: Do we want to keep going with these teams as they are? Form new teams? People should consider becoming project team leaders.
2. Current project team leaders should bring a list of unfinished business that needs to be carried over into the new year.
3. Brainstorm ideas for what we want to accomplish this coming year.
4. DCUG survey results discussion. Eben will send a link to the data ahead of time.