Digital Collections Users' Group Meeting: August 10, 2011

Ames Library, Illinois Wesleyan University

Members present: Ellen Corrigan (Eastern Illinois University), Chris Day (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Eben English (Loyola University Chicago), Ginger Frere (Newberry Library), Peter Hepburn (University of Illinois at Chicago), David Levinson (Lake Forest College; by phone), Meg Miner (Illinois Wesleyan University), Laurie Sauer (Chair, Knox College), Julia Thompson (Western Illinois University)

Members absent: None

CARLI Staff Liaisons present: Jessica Gibson, Amy Maroso

Ellen volunteered to take minutes.

Attendees introduced themselves.

Minutes from the July 20 meeting will be approved by email.

"Life cycle of a digital project" series:

1. Members agreed to a schedule of one program per month for ease of scheduling and other arrangements. Tentative schedule: The Digital Preservation Joint Subcommittee is also planning a program for Spring.
   The series was renamed "Anatomy of a Digital Project."
   1. Copyright kickoff – Sept. 28
   2. Effective Project Management for Digitization Projects (Eben) – mid-Oct.
   3. Contracting with Vendors for Digitization Services (Meg) – mid-Nov. or early Dec.
   4. Connecting Your Digital Collections to the Curricula at Your Institution (Peter) – early Dec. or mid-Nov.
   5. Digitization for Access and Discovery: Thematic Digital Collections (Laurie) – late Jan.
   6. Promoting collections (Ginger) – Feb./Mar./Apr.
   7. Grants/funding (Ellen) – Feb./Mar./Apr. This topic was expanded to an all-day, in-person program to include partnerships, and possibly an informal "temperature-taking" exercise moderated by DCUG members.

Subcommittee reports

1. Assessment - Eben reported that the 2010-2011 charge was completed with a statistical analysis of the survey results. The work of this team has been reconceptualized as Communications and Outreach. Amy will send out the program evaluation form, to be customized by this group prior to the next DCUG meeting. Chris also indicated that he would like to reestablish the Featured Image project on the CARLI Blog. 2011-2012 members: Eben (chair), David, Chris.

2. Documentation & Standards - Laurie reported that the group revised the "Best Practices for Descriptive Metadata" document and began work on rewriting "Digitization Best Practices for Images and Text" as two distinct documents. The creation of tutorials was tabled due to lack of access to screencasting software at the time. Jessica mentioned that the I-Share Instruction Team uses Wink for this purpose and has created some documentation on using it. 2011-2012 members: Ellen (chair), Eben, Meg, Peter.

3. Usability – Peter reported that the preliminary survey linked from CARLI Digital Collections pages has received few responses and the efforts of this group would be better expended on education issues than on an interface evaluation. Jessica discussed setting up a separate Google Analytics data collection for digital collections. 2011-2012 members: Chris (chair), Ginger, Julia, Laurie.

4. Digital Preservation joint subcommittee – Laurie reported that the joint subcommittee with the Preservation Working Group is focusing on presenting its Spring forum. 2011-2012 members: Laurie (chair), David, Meg, Peter.

Other Business

Eben presented the assessment survey results. The survey received a 40% response rate (54 of 134 institutions). Results were reviewed, with particular attention to library size. Eben indicated he would like to create a summary document to put on the DCUG wiki along with his PPT analysis and the raw survey results.

DCUG will continue to meet by conference call on the third Wednesday of the month, 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. Next meeting: September 21. Project teams will meet using Adobe Connect, meetings TBD.