Digital Libraries Working Group
ALA Midwinter Meeting
16 January 2005
Boston, MA

Present:

Reinhart Sonnenburg, Elizabeth Darocha, Sam Dunlap, Richard Hacken, Jeff Garrett, Helene Baumann, Frances Ott Allen, Tom Mann, Michael Seadle (recording), Dale Askey.

Those present introduced themselves.

Encouraging and Supporting Digitization Projects

• Yale German dissertations – digitizing these has been pushed to the back burner until a clear funding mechanism appears. Proquest may have an interest.
• WW1 materials at Wisconsin – they may be working on this.
• Baden-Wurttemberg (Stuttgart and Konstanz) with Northwestern did not get DLI2 funding, but the German part has gone forward anyway.
• The Argentinisches Tageblatt paper backfile was sold to the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin by its owners. Peter Altekruger wants to apply for funding from LAMP. However, last Irene Munster at Duke heard, the boxes had not left Argentina (some government snafu). Helene and Irene are working towards identifying and preserving German Nazi primary source materials becoming available in Argentina. Elizabeth will see whether there are comparable materials at CRL.
• Helene spoke about the Bildarchiv der deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft. It is an enormous resource, which has been digitized and is being cataloged. It is fully searchable. Helene has been translating the thesaurus into English, but it has not been loaded yet.
• Dick encouraged members to have their own institutions digitize locally-held German materials. He also presented information about the Brittle Books digitization project at BYU.

Locating and Displaying Digitized German Resources

• Reinhart presented about the Inventory of German Digital Projects at Dartmouth. This is still a work in progress, using the SSG categories. He is emphasizing major collections. He is finding it easier to arrange resources by "type" such as dissertations or periodicals rather than SSG subject categories (only Literature and History are functional). This also partly duplicates WESS materials. CRL will link to it from the GNARP page.
• Michael presented about the OAI harvester. Input from members about topics and especially lists of keywords that might be harvested to build sets on interesting topics.New Business
• Jeff reported on the EZB: 7000 free Internet Journals, which are 99% research quality. Dale will talk with Evelinde Hutzler about using it for federated searching? Northwestern is thinking about creating a separate database for free web resources.
• Vascoda is available on the portal.
• The Google factor was discussed.
• Sam asked about a tour of CRL at ALA Annual.
• Klaus Kempf will be invited to speak to the DLWG.
• GNARP will not be requesting an extension of the DigiZeitschriften trial.