Digital Libraries Working Group
ALA Annual Meeting
24 June 2006
New Orleans, LA

Present: Erika Banski (U. Alberta), Sam Dunlap (UCSD), Jeff Garrett (Northwestern U.), Richard Hacken (BYU), Sebastian Hierl (Harvard U.), Jim Niessen (Rutgers U.), Deborah Rose-Lefmann (Northwestern U.), Michael Seadle (Michigan State University), James Simon (CRL), Reinhart Sonnenburg (Dartmouth U.), Barbara Walden (U. Wisconsin-Madison)
Guests: Evelinde Hutzler (Regensburg), Ann Marie Austenfeld (), Rachel Brekhus (U. Missouri)

I. Informative Announcements & Introductions

A. GNARP 6th Scientific Symposium Frankfurt (October 5-7, 2006) – jointly planned with the University of Frankfurt. See http://www.crl.edu/grn/gnarp/frankfurt2006.pdf for more details. This will be a great opportunity to meet one-on-one with our colleagues in Germany. Of note to this group is the sessions on Digitization of electronic journals (DigiZeitschriften, JSTOR, ProQuest) and print and digital repositories (Portico, LOCKSS, etc., and efforts in Germany).

B. Leipziger Kongress für Information und Bibliothek 2007 (Mar 19-22, 2007). Every 3 years, the Bibliothekartag and the Bibliothek & Information Deutschland host a combined meeting at the time of the Leipziger Buchmesse. Presentation deadline is at the end of June. The theme is "information and ethics." For more information, see http://www.bideutschland.de/index2.html

C. Belser CD-ROMs: Sebastian Hierl inquired whether GNARP was interested in a project to convert PDF e-books on CD-ROM to an online database. Belser Wissenschaftlicher Dienst offers a collection of Proletarische Frauenbewegung and 18/19th century women's literature in German, French, and English (useful for literature studies, women's studies, socio-historical studies and more). The materials are part of the Corvey collection, one of the largest collections of Romantic-era popular literature. The collections are currently only available on microform and as individual pdf files. Assembling and opening the pdf files to full text searching through an online database would finally make these unique resouces accessible.

There were general questions about the nature of the texts, file size, quality, and the proposed agreement with Belser. Also of concern was the lack of permission to load MARC records. General interest was expressed, subject to the details and desires of the publisher. Possible partnership with CIFNAL?

D. Klapp update – there are plans to provide an online version of the Bibliographie der franz. Literaturwissenschaft and Klostermann continues to make progress, but a specific launch date has not yet been announced. Vittorio Klostermann will be in touch with new developments.

II. Digital Projects or potential digital projects

A. Report on progress of CRL/ProQuest toward pilot digitization of 19th c. German dissertations (Hierl). Sebastian made the initial selection of dissertations from a list of available dissertations from CRL. The 100 selected titles related to a theme (18c.German philosophy). The titles relate mainly to Kant (~80 titles), others on Wolff, Leibniz and Thomasius. These are mostly in German, some in Latin.

These are a potentially saleable item – one of the most attractive topics in the corpus. Is there interest or potential for GNARP involvement?

The access and business model or approach has yet to be formulated. Some participants related that a separate database may not garner significant market interest, even among the "usual players." These individuals believed if they are integrated within a larger project (e.g., ProQuest's digital dissertations), it may be a worthy pursuit (and there is likely interest in a wider subject selection within this model).

Others expressed a preference for open access, particularly given that the materials are out of copyright. Would a broader open access program be of interest to GNARP? UC-San Diego, for example, has strengths in philosophy and expressed interest in cooperating with CRL.

B. Other projects?

1. Digital Archiving. CRL has investigated the use of "Archive-It" for Web harvesting. Two efforts underway may serve as models: LANIC and the University of Texas are harvesting Latin American government documents, and LARRP may assist with the assessment and discovery of resources within the crawl. RLG recently offered shared credits for institutions wishing to participate in Web archiving. CRL's assessment of the capabilities of Archive-It and a presentation on the LANIC project can be found at: http://www.crl.edu/grn/workshop.asp.

Barbara Walden expressed interest in collecting Web-based information from smaller radical political groups and other "at-risk" materials.

NDIIPP activities related to digital archives may also inform GNARP activities. The University of Illinois is seeing if others are interested in testing the harvesting and archiving software. NDIIPP has also provided funding for LOCKSS and CLOCKSS projects.

Also related are the electronic exchange agreements with Germany being established by Don Panzera at the Library of Congress. This model fits more with the LOCKSS and Portico efforts (published materials such as journals, documents, rather than Web sites). Discussions will continue.

2. Videoconferencing: Michael Seadle inquired whether videoconferencing may facilitate our collaboration with our German partners. A number of institutions in US are set up to do this. It is a good way for smaller groups to discuss particular aspects of collaboration. Evelinde Hutzler stated that this may be of interest in Germany, but most institutions do not have a lot of experience with this up to now.

3. Newspaper Digitization: James Simon reported on recent activities in newspaper digitization. The Center and affiliated partners are seeking general proposals from a range of commercial and non-commercial organizations to participate the in digitization of the collective corpus of foreign newspapers. Initial efforts will focus on Latin America, but all world regions will be covered as appropriate.

Members discussed efforts (or lack thereof) underway to digitize retrospective news holdings in Germany. There appears to be no serious activity – Halle has done a small regional project, Saur has explored a small pilot. The ANNO project in Austria does not cover Germany.

There is a general assumption that Europe has digital activities well underway. However, this is not always the case - 19th and early 20th century materials are not well represented in digital efforts. There are comparatively few projects focused on mounting materials in the public domain. Germany may be a candidate to consider in future news digitization efforts.

III. Portals and Search engines

A. Inventory of Digital Projects (Sonnenburg). The online gateway has been in development for a long time, and ongoing maintenance is an issue. GNARP supports a 'gated' Wiki approach to editing, but Dartmouth cannot currently support this. CRL does not have a Wiki server available, and Dick Hacken will explore interest at Brigham Young

Does the GNARP inventory duplicate activities currently undertaken in Germany or by WESS? Perhaps not completely. Dick Hacken has spoken with a representative from the Zentrales Verzeichnis Digitalisierter Drucke, and there is not too much overlap at present. They are willing to supply us with datasets, if we can make use of them. However, the scope of our project goes beyond the imprints of ZVDD, and may be more analogous with what Vascoda is doing. As all three projects, ZVDD, Vascoda, and our own, are in preliminary stages, there is still much work, and inquiry into collaboration, to be done.

B. OAIS project at Michigan State University (Seadle). The OAI portal <http://oais.lib.msu.edu> searches OAI-enabled databases and repositories. The harvester contains a much larger set of materials. Compared to the University of Michigan's OAIster project, that limits results to those that link to online materials, MSU does not. Developments underway include social bookmarking.

This is not officially a GNARP project, but might be useful for members. DigiZeitschriften, for example, is interested in exposing its metadata to OAI. Is there a possibility of providing access to a limited set of data pertinent to GNARP? Perhaps, but the intellectual and technical work need to be considered carefully. We would need to define the set of criteria that matches our interest.

IV. New Business

A. Datenbank-Informationssystem (DBIS) (Hutzlerr). Regensburg and 90 other libraries participate in cooperative description and access to online databases. The DBIS link to both freely available as well as restricted databases. The descriptions (in German only) provide detailed information on contents, as well as access terms (similar to EZB, records indicate whether open access, or if via subscription, whether one's institution has access to it). Currently there are around 5,000 databases in the system (1771 of which are freely available).

V. Wrap up and Action items

Dick Hacken thanked the working group for their work and turned over the position of Chair to Sebastian Hierl.

Submitted by James Simon 6/26/06