Digital Libraries Working Group
ALA Annual Meeting
25 June 2005
Chicago, IL

Present:
Frances Allen, Dale Askey, Elizabeth Darocha Berenz (CRL), Sam Dunlap, Jeff Garrett (GNARP chair), Dick Hacken (DLWG coordinator), Tom Kilton, Eudora Loh (Director, ARL Global Resources Network), Jim Niessen, Beth Remak, Deborah Rose-Lefmann, Michael Seadle, James Simon (CRL), Barbara Walden.

Progress reports on digital projects:

Barbara Walden, with an online presentation, reported on the rapid progress of digitizing World War I materials at Wisconsin, and Dick Hacken reported how the Wisconsin holdings had been analyzed and separately recorded in the web portal World War I Primary Documents Archive.

A reminder was made of the massive journals project housed at the University of Regensburg, Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek - EZB and its potentials for scholarly use.

Helene Baumann’s translation work for the English-language thesaurus of African images on the Bildarchiv der deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft has been completed and submitted to Frankfurt. The website should reflect this thesaurus work in the next while.

Mention was made of the Argentinisches Tageblatt, in specific the historical issues now in possession of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin. The first step being sought is for microfilming through the LAMP project. Digitization may be a later priority.

Progress reports on portals & search engines:

Norbert Lossau (by e-mail in absentia) reported on the expanding search parameters and possibilities of BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) .

Reinhart Sonnenburg (by e-mail in absentia) reported on progress in weaving together GNARP's "Inventory of Digital Projects" at Dartmouth and reported that it is not yet “ready for prime time” – but will, when ready, be posted on the CRL/GNARP server.

Michael Seadle reported on potentials for GNARP's pilot project of an OAI harvester at Michigan State.

New Business:

The announcement was made of an exploratory meeting to be held later in the day with representatives of CRL and of ProQuest, along with interested German studies librarians, to discuss the potential of ProQuest taking on the digitization of CRL’s collection of 18th and 19th century German dissertations. German dissertations found at Yale and Berkeley might also be considered at some point, should the project materialize. Further details will be forthcoming.

Some further and final discussion points included the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’s provision of digital access to various databases for German scholars, the Google Print project & German challenges to it, RLG's recent Metadata Guidelines for description of unique cultural objects, and finally the practice of outsourcing digital conversion of documents (e.g. to India), as exemplified by University of Pennsylvania’s digitization of "Citation Classics."

The Digital Libraries Working Group will meet next in San Antonio, January 2006.

- Dick Hacken, DLWG Coordinator