Digital Collections Users' Group Meeting: May 16, 2012

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

Members absent: Eben English (Loyola University Chicago), Ginger Frere (Newberry Library

CARLI Staff Liaisons present: Jessican Gibson and Amy Maroso

1. Confirmed Julia as minutes taker.
2. Minutes from the April meeting were approved with corrections.

Subcommittee reports

1. Communication & Outeach (Chris) - Met after last DCUG meeting. The featured image has continued on a biweekly basis. The committee continues to work on glossary of promotion or marketing methods strategies on the DCUG wiki. The group is hoping to for this to be done by the end of June to share during summer or fall. They are planning a second digital project managers' meet-up in Chicago for the beginning of June. A new document on promoting digital collections is in progress.

2. Documentation & Standards (Peter) - The group met earlier in the week. They are working toward guide for 3-D digitization. The complete document will be available for committee review before the June meeting. The group discussed a guide to customizing collection home pages for collections in CARLI Digital Collections. They had been considering getting detailed customization code from CARLI members but agreed that it would be difficult and put a lot of pressure on the committee and CARLI staff to help people with customizations, so they decided to not include any specific examples but to encourage CARLI members to contact one another for assistance in customization.

3. Usability (Chris) – Met on May 3. The group is wrapping up projects from the current year. Changes made to the CARLI Digital Collections topic list have been made on the site. The group's work on Google Analytics continues. Currently data from three quarters are available and will be posted soon on CARLI website. Once they are posted we will announce them through email lists and the CARLI blog. The group will continue to work on internal instructions for how to create the data summaries. These instructions will be on DCUG wiki for future use.

4. Digital Preservation (Laurie) - Met on May 7. They are continuing to discuss other ways to educate CARLI members about digital preservation. The group talked about evaluations from the April 10th forum, which were positive overall. They are going to concentrate next on seeing if they can bring someone from the Library of Congress digital preservation outreach and education department to Illinois to do a workshop. It is not clear what they offer but the group is looking into possibilities of the program that started last year.

"Anatomy of a Digital Project" series

​Peter was encouraged by the questions at the end of the May 15th webinar, reading positive interest. This concluded the set of webinars for the 2011-2012 year.

New Business

Laurie sent out a draft of the annual report and has one change in the In Progress work section. Minor changes were made and the final report will be sent to the CARLI Board of Directors.