Nancy Gwinn (Smithsonian Institution)
Bill Gosling (University of Michigan)
The two facilitators started the discussion by describing how the digitizing projects in each of their organizations are organized, Michigan being an example of a large operation and the Smithsonian a quite small one.
Bill Gosling started by describing the structure Michigan has put in place to deal with large-scale digitizing. There are now 30 production staff; some projects are done in-house and some are contracted out. Preservation staff are responsible for collation, preparation of physical pieces, and quality control. There is also a Scholarly Publishing Office with a 5 member team devoted to helping faculty with born-digital journals and with converting print titles to electronic form. This unit is also responsible for coordinating the ACLS digital monographs project. Michigan now considers digital conversion as the preferred method for preservation reformatting. They are working with a print-on-demand vendor to produce single acid-free copies from the digital files to return to the stacks. They are also exploring the possibility of becoming a "publisher" in making additional copies of these books available. The digital production capabilities have been made possible through a combination of base funding, reallocation, and grants. Michigan is still doing some microfilming, particularly when there is opportunity to participate in a grant-funded project, such as through the CIC. Michigan considers the use file as the master archival file. There is a back-up file made, but the active online file is the most likely to be maintained and migrated. Bill cited the heavy use of the Making of America files. There are 6,000 titles online with about one-half to a million uses (i.e., actual downloads) a month. Half of the uses are from on-campus.
Nancy Gwinn then described the program at the Smithsonian Libraries. They decided to start their project in-house under the purview of the Preservation Department. Filmers were retrained to do preparation and scanning. They now have 4,000 images up. Nancy indicated that they were about to separate the digitizing operation from preservation. It has begun to overshadow other preservation activities and to muddy staff obligations. The focus has been more on information technology. As to the use of the digitized images, Nancy noted that the average amount of time per user ranged from 8 1/2 minute to 20 minute sessions. Over the course of a year, the average session per user was 15 minutes. She stated that they were slowly adding in context for the digitized images
Subsequent discussion covered a number of topics. Some participants pointed out the need to distinguish between digitizing collections and digitizing resources for teaching and learning, e.g., exams, reserves, syllabi. For example, Penn State provides a facility to work with faculty to put materials up for teaching. Boston College does digitizing on demand for ILL and for faculty. These materials may not need the high resolution used for preservation-quality imaging.
Where digitization units reported within the library varied among libraries. While the Smithsonian program started in the Preservation unit and is moving to IT, McGill started in the Special Collections department and has now moved it to IT. The operation was very successful, but took resources away from the day-to-day digitization (exams, reserves) that was necessary. The New York Public Library resisted integrating the digitizing program into preservation. The Trustees did not want this activity to undermine traditional preservation functions, so a separate unit was created.
Questions were raised about how to integrate the "Digital Library" into the "Library." For example, how is metadata creation and tagging integrated into the cataloging process? Penn State retrained their catalogers; Iowa hired one specialist; the New York Public Library created a whole new separate unit for metadata, establishing a specialist track aimed at persons with a subject masters or a language specialty. This unit is now being integrated with technical services.
Participants also addressed questions of staffing. Penn Stated reported retraining of existing staff and using lots of students. NLM uses a combination of in-house and contract staff. NYPL determined that filmers needed extensive retraining for digital operations and developed a new career path for filmers.
George Washington reported that while it did some local digitization, the files were put onto a central consortia site. They are now moving to having all of their digital projects done centrally by the consortia. They are, however, as a result of a major donor, focusing on digitizing a significant collection in-house. Berkeley noted that it had depended on the California Digital Library for much of its digitization. Local projects were done on a grant-to-grant basis. Recently, however, recurring funds were used to set up their own digital production facility ($200K was used with $100K from the collections budget). NLM reported that they were now digitizing some collections for their Profiles in Science project which would be mounted on other institutions' sites.
A question was raised about the relationship of faculty to digitizing activity. Yale reported that currently it digitized what faculty want. The new director is interested in encouraging the faculty to work more closely with librarians to develop collections of digitized resources. Washington University has provided grants to faculty interested in developing digital projects. The library provides extensive staff support and agrees to host and archive the resources. Three grants have been given thus far.
ARL libraries are actively engaged in digitizing collections for a variety of purposes from providing access to reserve materials, to developing digital libraries of special collections, to preserving brittle books. The recent ARL SPEC Kit 262 [View PDF] reporting the results of the survey of Preservation and Digitization in ARL Libraries conducted by the ARL Preservation Committee concludes that it is too soon to identify best practices in the area of digitization and preservation. The libraries that provided documentation presented a wide variety of strategies for organizing, staffing, and funding digitization and preservation programs. The community is still grappling with issues of purpose, selection, and use.
Libraries all over the world are also digitizing and wrestling with these same issues. As a part of the discussion, Nancy Gwinn will share the results of an IFLA survey she conducted this past summer on managing digital library programs. The questions included in the survey were:
Why does your library produce digital library products?
What collection materials is your library digitizing?
How are the digitized items selected?
How is the work organized at your library?
How is your program funded?
Who is using your digitized materials?
Are your preservation and digitizing activities related? If you don't have additional funding, what are you NOT doing in order to do this work?
Based on the results of the survey, Nancy led a four-hour discussion session at IFLA. There was a great deal of diversity in both the responses and the discussion, with respondents including national libraries, university libraries, a couple of public libraries and consortia. Except for the few libraries that are well-funded, all reported struggling with these issues.
Due to the limited time of the concurrent session, today's discussion will focus on the following questions:
Who is digitizing materials from their own library's collections and why?
How are materials being selected?
Who is using the digital collections and for what?
How do you measure/evaluate use?