Digital Collections Users' Group Meeting: February 15, 2012

Members present: Ellen Corrigan (Eastern Illinois University), Chris Day (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Eben English (Loyola University Chicago), David Levinson (Lake Forest College), Meg Miner (Illinois Wesleyan University), Laurie Sauer (Chair, Knox College), Julia Thompson (Western Illinois University)

Members absent: Ginger Frere (Newberry Library), Peter Hepburn (University of Illinois at Chicago)

CARLI Staff Liaisons present:
Jessican Gibson and Amy Maroso

Confirmed David as minutes taker.

Minutes from the January meeting were approved.

Subcommittee reports

1. Communication & Outeach (Eben) - Met after full DCUG meeting on 1/18. Image of the Week is being posted regularly. Institutions are thrilled to have their images promoted. Tweets are now being sent to the Twitter feed. The group is trying to figure a way to increase the frequency of those. The DCUG meetup in Chicago is being rescheduled for the 2nd or 3rd week of February, most likely the 21st. A guide to promoting collections is being built on the DCUG wiki.

2. Documentation & Standards (Ellen) - Eben submitted an IACRL poster proposal using data from the Survey of Digitization Practices completed in 2011. Waiting for IACRL approval. Customization guidelines for the CONTENTdm collection home pages: Ellen started looking through CARLI collections and other CONTENTdm sites to see what other libraries are doing. The committee is working on a document for libraries outlining options they have for customizations. 3D objects: The group is gathering resources on the digitizing of 3D objects.

3. Usability (Chris) – Continuing to examine Google Analytics. Two summaries are to be posted on the wiki: keywords and traffic sources, as well as posting a longer list of the keywords that people can analyze on their own. Regarding the "by topic" list on main page of the CARLI Digital Collections site: it's being analyzed, new terms to add and changes to existing terms are being studied. Question: is Google crawling into the collection? Answer: traffic is going into individual items in the collection. Keyword traffic sources show how people are getting into the collections.

4. Digital Preservation (Laurie) - Discussed other educational opportunities for CARLI members to learn about digital preservation. In particular, the Library of Congress has a new initiative on digital preservation. Free webinars are appearing out of this already, details of which have been posted on the CARLI blog. We are developing more ways to educate members on digital preservation.

"Anatomy of a Digital Project" series

1. Lightweight Project Management webinar: survey results and comments indicated generally positive reactions. Responses to "What could have been improved" were consistent, indicating that participants wanted more practical examples. Demos of actual uses and processes seem to be what people really want, with more real world examples on how to do it. Maybe the next round of webinars would be case studies about what does work and what doesn't work, with more tool-sharing.

2. Digitization for Access and Discovery (Feb. 21 at 2:00 pm) - Registration is up to 35. Registration closes on Friday.

3. Promoting collections (Wed. Mar 28 at 10:00 am)- Frere does not yet have a description for this but will have this written soon.

4. Digital Preservation (April 10, all day, in-person at the I Hotel in Champaign) - Everything on schedule.

5. Grants/funding - Early June webinar planning underway.

6. Connecting Your Digital Collections to the Curricula at Your Institution - Planning underway.

New Business

None.

Conference Reporting

1. IACRL poster session. Ellen is also doing a session at IACRL.
2. David mentioned courses at Rare Books School at the University of Virginia, including XML in Action: Creating Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Texts (June 4-8), Digitizing the Historical Record (June 11-15), and Born-Digital Materials: Theory & Practice (July 2-6).
3. The Northeast Document Conservation Center's Digital Directions conference is New Foundations: Creation, Curation, Use and will be held in Boston June 13-15.