Boston, Massachusetts
May 17-19, 1995
Winston Tabb, Associate Librarian for Collections Services
Library of Congress
I want to update you on progress we have made with the library portion of the National Digital Library since I last spoke to you in October. I also want to talk a little bit about some possibilities for collaboration on the international level, which I think will hold a great deal of interest for all ARL members.
First, on the National Digital Library itself, I am going to talk some about funding, staffing, and the selection for content. Probably the single most important thing that has happened since I last talked to you, in addition to the creation of the National Digital Library, was the meeting which was held at the Library of Congress last December, convened jointly by Dr. Billington and the newly elected Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. The Speaker has been extremely understanding and supportive of this national digital library effort. It was he who urged that we come up with a strong plan for the resources needed for the first phase of this project, and it was he who came forward and gave a challenge to the CEOs of the 30 organizations invited to this December meeting. His challenge: that he would endeavor to convince his colleagues to put up on behalf of the government a grant of $15 million, if the private sector would come up with $45 million, so that there would be a total of $60 million for the first phase of this process.
Thus far we have been quite successful in beginning to raise our part. We have promises of about $18.5 million, which is a very good sign that the private sector is interested in helping to advance this project. We also have signs of hope and reasons for optimism on the appropriations front. We have just finished our appropriations both in the House and the Senate, and both Chairs have gone on record as being supportive and intending to find additional monies. These are not replacement monies, but an additional $3 million for the Library.
Furthermore, our hearing before the Senate with Senator Mack just last Monday gave an opportunity for this message to be heard, not only by the library staff members who were there, but also by the public on C-Span. There is still a strong possibility that we will get, through the federal appropriation, roughly $3 million a year for the next five years as well as the matching funds from the public. If we are as successful as we hope to be in raising the $60 million, we will begin, roughly in 1998, to use up to $10 million to help other libraries digitize collections as part of the National Digital Library.
This is why it is very important that we advance our ideas about what the content of this library ought to be so that we will have a mechanism in place as soon as we collect the money. We can then actually begin furthering our goal of digitizing 5 million items by the year 2000. We are already beginning to hire staff for the National Digital Library at LC. We have identified 40-plus jobs that need to be filled, ranging from technicians to conservators to people working with copyright materials helping us with permissions, and over half of those jobs have already been advertised.
Finally, on the issue of collections, we still are very much focused on the National Digital Library efforts at LC with the historic Americana collections. This is one of the reasons why we found the Digital Preservation Consortium such an excellent match for us, because of their work on the Making of America series. We have done a lot of work internally and have now created a document called “Historical Collections from the Library of Congress,” which describes the core collections that we believe are primary candidates for digitization. Obviously, though, we can’t do all of the collection at once, and part of the collaboration needs to be the discussion about what ought to be done first.
I will be happy to send a copy of this document to anyone who wants it. We would very much like to have your comments about it. To get ready for the next level of discussion about the Federation members, our inclination at this point is to focus on presidential papers, our Lincoln collections among those. In making choices we not only think about the volume of what we have, but the research importance of it, and, to some degree, the popularity of it, because we are still trying to raise public money. This would lead us, for example, to initially choose Lincoln over Buchanan.
We would like very much not only to work on the Library of Congress collections, but also with a number of the other research libraries to continue the pace on the Bernstein multimedia project. We expect to see the second generation of that prototype at our meeting at ALA, and hope at that point to identify that archive’s core and begin to digitize.
I would now like to take a minute to talk about work on the international level. Last February, at the meeting of the G-7 in Brussels, there was a conference on the Information Society. At that meeting representatives from the seven nations approved 11 pilot projects to be collectively undertaken over a period of years, including an electronic libraries project about which little is known. We do have a short description essentially saying that it calls for a large distributed virtual collection of humankind’s knowledge available via public network.
The conveners of the first meeting are France and Japan, and that meeting has been scheduled for May 29th. The United States will be represented at that meeting by a member of the Library of Congress staff. We just received the agenda before I came here. As expected, it tells us almost nothing, except that they want to discuss the same things we do, selection and standards and so on. Last week we had a meeting, convened by Toni Carbo Bearman, at the Library of Congress with a number of people we thought would be able to contribute toward a brief to take forward on this. Paul Peters of CNI and Pam Andre of NAL were there, as were NLM representatives and others. We have a lot of questions about this all around, but we certainly want to be represented. The area where we think we may have the most results is in putting forward some pilot projects so we can actually begin to do some things, as opposed to just talking about the same old topics.
However, I do think this directly relates to ARL and its membership. First of all, we will be trying to promote the ARL German Project. It is one of the foreign acquisition projects where we have identified the need to get some of the German governmental entities and research libraries to work on digitizing some of their collections and making them available to us on a systematic basis so we don’t have to acquire them. We hope that the G-7 forum may be a way in which we can push this initiative better than we might have otherwise. We have also been working with the British Library on a joint exhibition for some time, and we want to do a digitized version of that. I think there are great opportunities for ARL to be involved not only in what we do in this country but also on an international level.
Thank you.