Digital Libraries Working Group
ALA Annual Meeting
27 June 2004
Orlando, FL

I. Present:

Dick Hacken, coordinator; Helene Baumann, Laura Dale Bischof, Sam Dunlap, Jeff Garrett, Tom Kilton, Eudora Loh, Michael Seadle.

II. Report on the March Bibliothekskongress in Leipzig (Michael Seadle):

The US Embassy sponsored Michael to represent libraries on a library-archives-museum panel about digital archiving (Karl-Ernst Lupprian and Prof. Regine Scheffel were the other panel members). The session was very well attended and the panel agreed that international collaborations and standards are needed. There was also good attendance at the GRP meeting. Elmar Mittler reported that ProPrint and is looking for North American partners (ProPrint is a print-on-demand service). MSU is considering implementing this software. Other interested parties can contact Michael Seadle or Elmar (we will need to advertise this). For those who want more information, Elmar has published an article about Proprint in Library Hi Tech Vol 22, No. 2, which should be available online in July 2004. Dr. Michael Höppner also made a short presentation about the digital collection in Bielefeld. Reimer Eck would like an invitation to speak at a future ALA Midwinter or Annual about the American literature collection in Goettingen.

III. Progress reports and discussion:

A. Encouraging and supporting digitization projects

1. Yale German dissertations: Elmar had suggested that Dale look into whether these may already have been, or will be, digitized in Germany. Dick will follow up with Dale Askey at Yale.

2. World War I materials : at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Barbara Walden will keep us informed.

3. "Content Enrichment Services for Online Catalogs” (TOCs for monographs, loaded with the catalog records.) This is really a Bibliographic Control WG project. Northwestern did not receive NSF funding for this, ending their interest, but Konstanz and Stuttgart are proceeding. The German project covers both current and retrospective materials. Important will be AACR2 compatibility and suitability to load into OCLC as a record upgrade. Dora mentions a Latin American TOC project spearheaded by an Argentinian vendor. Jeff thought Bernie Reilly might be interested for this as part of a TICFIA grant proposal, but Dora expressed doubts. Dick Hacken will follow up by contacting the Germans involved in the project (via Frank Scholze) and will encourage the BCWG to get behind the project.

4. Bildarchiv der deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft: Helene distributed a one-page handout and reported on her Coutts Nijhoff project, which entails translating the archive’s thesaurus into English and writing an article introducing the archive, and possibly similar ones like it, to the English-speaking scholarly community. The project originated with the German Resources Project -- Jeff was approached by Berndt Dugall, the library director of the Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt, where the archive is housed. Providing access to the digital archive and others like it is of high interest to this working group. Helene will continue to keep the group informed and occasionally may request advice. The website of the archive is at:
http://www.stub.bildarchiv-dkg.uni-frankfurt.de.

5. Others? The cooperative Emblem Project at Wolfenbuettel and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was mentioned, as was the Decorative Bindings project at Alabama. This prompted a discussion of the DLWG “Clearing House,” which has not been updated in years. It was suggested we move the contents of the clearing house to the Cooperative Projects listing on the DLWG Internet Gateway being prepared by Reinhart Sonnenburg (see III.B.2 below).

B. Locating and displaying digitized German resources

1. GRP-specific OAI harvester (Michigan State): Michael demonstrated this intriguing new software, which picks up documents on the standard and deep web that are OAI-compliant. He will conduct a pilot project using German Dissertations and the Bildarchiv der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft. Jeff suggests we have two presenters on OAI Harvester in Boston or Chicago: Michael Seadle and someone from the Latin American project.

2. Traditional Internet gateway to German Studies resources (Dartmouth: for early version, see http://www.dartmouth.edu/~grp/). We are encouraged to review this and submit suggestions to Reinhart.

IV. Other initiatives (New Business)

1. Possible collaboration with Latin American Resources Project? (e.g., Argentinisches Tageblatt digitization) Funding is not yet secure. We are in contact with Irene Münster, the Latin American librarian at Duke, to identify suitable journals, serials or other German collections in Argentina and other Latin America.

2. Other?

Meeting adjourned at 3:30PM.

Minutes by Helene Baumann. Please address corrections to her.