Digital Libraries Working Group
ALA Midwinter
21 January 2006
San Antonio, TX

Present:

Frances Ott Allen, Elizabeth Darocha Berenz (CRL), Sam Dunlap, Jeff Garrett (GNARP chair), Dick Hacken (DLWG coordinator), Sebastian Hierl, Jim Niessen, Deborah Rose-Lefmann, Michael Seadle, James Simon (CRL), Sheila Smyth, Reinhart Sonnenburg, Brian Vetruba.

Announcements:

A new Global Resources Newsletter is appearing this week. The feature
articles are on GNARP initiatives, including one article on the activities of this working group.

Elections will be held in May, pursuant to GNARP bylaws. Any members of the group interested in greater participation are encouraged to nominate themselves (or others) as coordinator of the working group.

Progress reports on digital projects:

A report was given on a pilot project for German dissertations involving the holdings of CRL (contact person - Melissa Trevvett) and the digitization efforts of ProQuest (contact person - Austin McLean). This will be a potentially three-part project: (1) CRL will send about 10 dissertations of various types to ProQuest to give a sense of the technical issues ProQuest would face in digitizing the dissertations. (2) Once ProQuest has digested these, then conversations among GNARP, CRL, and ProQuest will follow with a projected outcome of a selection of around 100 dissertations from the CRL collections to be digitized and made available only to CRL members through ProQuest. This would be the pilot project to determine interest in such a collection. (3) If there is further interest, new discussions would begin about digitizing a larger set to offer through ProQuest.

A short report was given about a project to analyze and catalog individual titles from Sophie: A Digital Library of Works by German-Speaking Women so that its records will appear in the bibliographic utilities. This would be good to coordinate with the Bibliographic Control Working Group.

Progress reports on portals & search engines:

Reinhart Sonnenburg reported on progress with the GNARP "Inventory of Digital Projects" at Dartmouth. The decision was made to turn this into a Wiki, so that members of the DLWG could make online contributions in an easy manner, thereby helping Reinhart with the compilation. Attention was also given to a German project called Zentrales Verzeichnis Digitalisierter Drucke. Dick Hacken will investigate the scope of the newly inaugurated ZVDD – and the possibilities for collaboration – at the Dresden meetings in March.

Michael Seadle reported on GNARP's pilot project of an OAI harvester at Michigan State and of a possible link between it and the Dartmouth inventory to make possible both focused keyword searching and more general browsing.

New Business:

The Digital Libraries Working Group will meet next in New Orleans, June 2006.

- Dick Hacken, DLWG Coordinator